Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at the Western Governors Association held this week in Colorado Springs talked about the couple who joined the militia in Nevada determined to defend scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and who this weekend killed two Las Vegas police officers as a chilling form of small-government protest. “It’s very important to bring lawbreakers to justice. There’s no question that my colleagues back here, the governors of Western states, do not want people riding roughshod over the landscape,” she said, according to the Washington Post. “[Bundy] put our people in grave danger by calling in armed civilians from around the country, and that’s not okay.”
Facebook material posted by the homicidal couple via Mother Jones.
Right-wing rhetoric and right-wing violence. This post is “going to raise some hackles.”
The killings are drawing a spotlight back to an (in)famous 2009 Department of Homeland Security report and the heated reaction it spurred: “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic And Political Climate Fueling Resurgence In Radicalization And Recruitment.”
Cord Jefferson is exhausted, and understandably so. He says we just need a boilerplate line of text to substitute occasionally for pieces on the racism beat: “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.”
The Catholic homes for unwed mothers in Ireland were as horrible as Sinead O’Connor led us to believe, of course. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon does the round up. A week ago came revelations that, over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers disposed of nearly 800 infant and toddler corpses on a septic tank site. Now comes news thousands of children in Catholic homes were used as vaccination guinea pigs.
Greg Sargent: Obamacare Medicaid expansion has become tough for Republican politicians to flat out oppose, at least individually and on the record. Has Colorado US Senate candidate Cory Gardner said yet whether he opposed the state expansion?
What was the Bowe Bergdahl experience like in Afghanistan? He is a mystifying figure and life in the remote outpost he shared with other soldiers and then apparently walked away from is equally hard to grasp. Luckily, there’s already a movie version, a documentary, that is, two documemtaries, actually. The New Yorker on “Restrepo” (2010) and its sequel “Korengal” (2014): “In 2007 and 2008, Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington spent fourteen months with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, in a similar outpost — this one in the Korengal Valley, in northeastern Pakistan. In 2007, the U.S. was convinced that having a presence in the valley was a strategic necessity. The Americans were intended to flush out Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, and to draw other fighters away from regions that were more likely to work with the U.S. In other words, the Americans were a kind of magnet.”
