George Will laments that focus on rape has led to victimhood becoming a “coveted status.”
One minute you’re encouraging armed extremists to menace law enforcement officials with firearms, next you’re hearing that one of them ambushed and killed a couple cops on break eating a pizza. How could such a thing happen?
Thanks to everyone who’s signed up in our membership drive. It’s hugely important for the future of TPM. We need just one more big push for the first phase of our drive. We’re coming up on halfway to our sign-up goal for the six week drive. We’d love to get 1000 sign-ups by midnight tonight, the close of week one. Maybe you’ve been considering it or planning to. If so, can you take just a short moment now? Every sign up is a down payment on a better, richer site experience for you and the future and vitality of all of TPM. Just click here. And thank you.
Pro-Bundy, extreme pro-gun, anti-government, filled with conspiracies about rising totalitarianism in America, symbol of extreme fringes of the Tea Party movement. The whole enchilada. Meet the couple that allegedly ambushed those police officers yesterday in Las Vegas.
Initial reports out of yesterday’s police ambush in Las Vegas suggested that the alleged perpetrators – now identified as Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda Miller – were neo-nazis and/or white supremacists. But Sheriff’s Department officials now believe that the couple placed a swastika on one gunned down police officer’s body because they believed police were part of Nazi-like oppression.
The crooked bargain, in which Virginia State Sen. David Puckett (D) resigned in order to block Medicaid expansion allegedly in return for a state job and a judgeship for his daughter, seems to have fallen through. Medicaid’s toast. But everyone seems to be running for the hills. Puckett now says he doesn’t want the job. And the job doesn’t seem to want him either.
The level of apparent corruption here is as comic as it tragic for the Virginians who are now robbed of health care coverage.
Both weird and chilling. It seems the couple who killed the police officers in Las Vegas yesterday and the “sovereign citizen” guy who tried to storm a courthouse in Cumming, Georgia on Friday had the same plan: to take over a courthouse and start executing public officials or (possibly in the Georgia case) holding them hostage.
Yes, I’m asking you to become a member again. We’ve got less than three hours before the end of our first week of sign ups in our membership drive and we really, really want to get to 900 by the close of week one. I try to add some fun and rah-rah to the process. But it’s actually very important for the future of TPM. So if you enjoy the site, if you’re a daily reader, if you believe in what we do, can you give us just a moment and jump on board? Just click here. We thank you in advance.
Late Update – 10:43 PM: Just 13 more to go!
Here is part of a letter written in 1684 …
“I desire to take boldness to propose a request. A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the time of our wars, to sell them for slaves; but the nations, whither they went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or are born there. And Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston: he told me, they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it; but now it is in my heart to move your honour, so to meditate, that they may have leave to get home, either from thence hither, or from thence to England, and so to get home.”
This is the final portion of a letter written by John Eliot, who the Massachusetts Puritans somewhat grandiosely called “The Apostle to the Indians”, to Robert Boyle in November 1683. Boyle was one of the founders of modern chemistry and a pioneer of the scientific method. He also took an interest in the Native Americans of the English colonies. And here, in a final passage of the letter, Eliot reveals a nugget of information that was a matter of deep fascination for me when I was writing my dissertation in the 90s. New England was engulfed in a brutal, catastrophic war in 1676-77, one that led not only to massive loss of life on both sides but the death and expulsion of most of the Indian population within the core English area of settlement.
Where did Jerad Miller and his wife get their firearms? Jerad was a felon and thus not legally able to buy weapons. It turns out he was on Facebook in the lead up to the attack asking for help getting guns. From a Facebook post a month ago: “So, if anyone can send me a rifle to help stand against tyranny, let me know. Revolution is coming and we are not prepared! Help! … I want an AK so bad.” See more here.