It’s Thursday Threatcon, your intelligence briefing on right wing activity. Below are the best reports, investigations, exposées, and debunkery of the wingnutosphere this week. Due to the sudden rash of NFL player domestic assaults, our Threatcon Color Code is BRUISER PURPLE
- Border militia groups claim they are trying to organize a human blockade at ports of entry on the Rio Grande this weekend. These plans have rarely materialized into concrete action, so while something may happen this weekend, don’t expect too much drama
- Besides partisan identification, gender and age cohort seem to account for most differences on climate change. In other words, the older you are the less you are likely to care about the future
- A year ago, the ACA was the top issue in Congress — but now it’s barely mentioned at all
- How can Democrats make Obamacare more popular? Don’t call it that
- Is your boss a thief? The Economic Policy Institute says that employer wage theft recoveries nationwide are triple the amount taken in robberies
- Martin Longman explains the difference between strategic policy and paranoid bigotry in about a hundred words
- Now that a constitutional amendment to counter Citizens United has failed in the Senate, the future of the issue rests with…Silicon Valley?
- Some people have seen ‘Atlas Shrugged: Part III’ so that you don’t have to — and it’s every bit as bad as you probably expected
- A Tennessee ballot measure stands to determine the future of abortion access in that state
- Occupy has abolished $4 million in student loan debt:
- The free market speaks, and it has nothing good to say about coal: Germans are getting 30% of their electricity from renewables, while Ontario is getting 35% of its power from renewables and is the first state to eliminate coal-fired electric plants
- How is Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) trying to get his party past their ‘war on women’? By holding an all-male fundraiser
- The thirteen states that raised their minimum wage in the last year are seeing more job growth, not less, which is exactly the opposite of what conservative economic orthodoxy predicts
- There has been lots of attention lately to the Koch brothers’ financial influence in higher education. Here’s an exhaustive list of colleges and universities they’ve funded
- Religious and non-religious people are equally-likely to misbehave, they just get over it differently
- Attacking the Koch brothers is a huge winner for Democrats. This has special bearing on Republican woes in Kansas
- It’s not just the patchoulli: humans are actually attracted to the body odor of those with similar political beliefs
- Harvard professor Larry Lessig’s plan to out-super PAC the super PACs is not off to a very good start
- VICE went undercover to show us the misleading practices and misinformation used by so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that enjoy government funding to try and trick women into not getting abortions
[youtube]http://youtu.be/g-ex4Q-z-is[/youtube]
- Americans are paying very regressive state and local taxes
- How can cities save trillions of dollars in the next 35 years? By shifting to public transportation
- To fight the ‘John Doe’ investigation into illegal campaign coordination in Wisconsin, the US Chamber of Commerce has been pushing a smear concocted by someone who once threatened the prosecutor and his family
- In the last year, the state of New Jersey has seen about 1,200 cases involving sovereign citizens
- A manhunt is under way for ‘sovereign citizen’ Eric Matthew Frein, who is wanted for killing one Pennsylvania state trooper and wounding a second
- American anti-LGBT activists who attended the World Congress of Families in Russia last week may have met with persons on the sanctions list there
- Another week, another batch of mysterious KKK flyers — this time, in Harrodsburg, Kentucky
- Racist skinhead Marcus Faella was found guilty of “teaching and conducting paramilitary training” in preparation for a race war
- Neo-Nazi William “Bill” White was found guilty of sending threats to Florida law enforcement officers
- Tough-love sheriff Joe Arpaio has been dropped from the federal program that gifts surplus military equipment to local law enforcement. Apparently, he’s missing some guns
