Wayne Barrett, author of the book “TRUMP: The Greatest Show on Earth: the Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention” will stop by on Monday May 23rd to chat with TPM senior editor Catherine Thompson about the updates to his book and the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump. Follow along with Catherine and Wayne’s chat and submit your own questions too.
In retrospect, Jeb Bush’s decision to go with “Jeb!” (exclamation point included) as his campaign slogan turned out to be perfect metaphor … no, not even a metaphor, simply a guide to his campaign: taking something fundamentally uninteresting and repeating it with escalating emphasis and frequency until it becomes interesting. Now apparently his campaign is considering a last ditch plan to add a second exclamation point. But is that going to work? I doubt it.
Hillary Clinton said that it is O.K. to ban Muslims from Israel by building a WALL, but not O.K. to do so in the U.S. We must be vigilant!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2016
Approximately 18% of Israeli citizens are Muslims.
In a surreal scene mixing elements of Stormfront, Aryan Nations and Waiting for Gufman, the son of Cliven Bundy, a hodgepodge of rightwing and anti-Islam activists and local Oregon militia members have occupied the sleepy visitors’ center at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon in an apparent bid to provoke a confrontation with federal law enforcement.
The center was closed for the weekend.
Statement released about a half hour ago …
Statement from Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward: “After the peaceful rally was completed today, a group of outside militants drove to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, where they seized and occupied the refuge headquarters. A collective effort from multiple agencies is currently working on a solution. For the time being please stay away from that area. More information will be provided as it becomes available. Please maintain a peaceful and united front and allow us to work through this situation.”
I confess: I’m kind of surprised. This situation in Oregon with these militia goofs occupying a federal building and threatening violence against federal law enforcement is usually the kind of story that we have mainly to ourselves here at TPM – maybe a bit of national coverage, a lot of local coverage and us. And we definitely do plan on being all over it. It’s exactly the kind of white privilege performance art we love as a news story, right in our bailiwick of the bleed-over between domestic extremism and conventional politics.
I wanted to add one other coverage point on this Oregon white militants situation. On the one hand, a major reason why we’ve always been so interested in these stories is just how outrageous they are and the fact that the federal government is increasingly wary or simply unwilling to enforce the law.
As I said earlier, this really amounts to white privilege performance art. We always want to avoid violence and bloodshed whenever possible. But we are also a republic. We have a rule of law. People aren’t allowed to take over government buildings, threaten federal officials with violence or keep demanding free handouts from the government (which is the underlying issue here) on the threat of violence. This is a mix of violent outlawery and domestic insurrection. And I think, if we think about it, we all know that it doesn’t get a very tough response because the country just takes it for granted that white people in the interior West just act weird and do stuff like this.
Good run-down here on the backgrounds on the main armed white militants occupying that wildlife refuge visitor center in Oregon.
It got sort of lost in the holiday rush. But I wanted to thank everyone. Because we made our goal of signing up 3,000 new subscribers in our 2015 Prime sign up drive. Nope. This isn’t another ask. So I’m not even including a link. I just wanted thank all of you, on behalf of our whole team. The final number was 3099 new members. It was important. I frankly didn’t this it was realistic. But we made it. So thank you.
Building a wall along the US-Mexico border to prevent evil Mexicans and other Spanish-speakers from illegally entering the United States and banning all Muslims from entering the US under any circumstances have been the two grand dreams of the Trump movement. But how to combine these two elements of Trumpism into a single, unified and coherent message? The Trump campaign finally seems to have pulled this off in its new ad in which he appears to pledge to stop Moroccan Muslims from illegally entering the coastal Spanish enclave of Melilla – one of the two last remnants of the Spanish imperial presence in North Africa.