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 Neil Patrick Harris’s hosting of the Oscars, our Threatcon Color-Code is FIFTY SHADES OF GAY
- How our media fails us at home: whereas Chuck Todd and the political chattering class have endlessly focused on whether Allison Lundergan Grimes voted for Obama in 2012, reporters have gotten so used to Republicans saying crazy things that their most lunatic remarks have become normalized and ignored. This is the intended effect of people like Michele Bachmann pulling the Overton window as far towards the wacky right as possible; conspiracy theories are killing our discourse
- Pursuant to the previous point, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has been tracking the memberships of national tea party factions since 2010, has a new report about the effects of racially-divisive rhetoric in North Carolina tea parties on Republican governance in that state
- Bruce Wilson’s report for the Center Against Religious Extremism on the ties between Vladimir Putin’s regime and American right wing religious organizers who promote sedition is also a must-read
- Judge Rudolph Randa, the Koch-linked federal judge who tried to shut down the Wisconsin John Doe investigation into illegal campaign coordination, has decided that corruption is free speech
- Not only did Texas women win a big victory for reproductive rights this week, but North Alabama’s lone clinic offering abortions has finally reopened in a new location
- Harvard researchers say that the frequency of mass shootings has tripled since 2011
- The nephew of Ebola virus victim Thomas Eric Duncan says that his uncle is dead because he was black and uninsured
- US Circuit Judge Richard Posner of Chicago has written a brilliant deconstruction of Wisconsin’s voter ID law
- Forget moderation: the Texas GOP is swinging to the extreme right on immigration in the final days before midterm elections
- Ebola scaremongering done right: Bob Cesca reads the front page headlines at Drudge Report to dramatic music. It starts at about the 11:35 mark
- How our media fails us abroad: Zaid Jilani tears apart US press coverage of Pakistani reaction to Malala Yousafzi’s Nobel Peace Prize
- Did you know that the Department of Justice has a Community Relations Service that secretly organizes peacemaking efforts in places like Ferguson, Missouri? Cue the right wing paranoid conspiracy theories in 5, 4, 3…
- Explicitly aimed at expanding Republican power, the Koch brothers’ super PAC is a big hit with right wing millionaire donors who aren’t afraid to let their names be known
- During the last week, Klan recruiting flyers have reportedly turned up in Hamilton, Ohio, East Texas, and Indiana
- Not only does the Christian right think Ebola is a sign of End Times, they’re eager to help apocalypse happen: at least one pro-life group is now organizing to stop Ebola vaccines over their opposition to stem cell research
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Cherron Phillips was sentenced to seven years in prison Tuesday for filing $100 billion in fraudulent liens against federal court officials
- Dark money groups that don’t disclose their donors are concentrating their money on a few key Senate races
- Everything economists ‘know’ about wage theory is wrong
- At least eight American police officers have been killed this year by ‘sovereign citizens,’ usually in ambush situations
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: leading Islamophobe and homophobe David Horowitz says “there’s no community more racist in America than the black community”
- Birther and former general(!) Jerry Boykin is being recognized and excluded these days for all the hate and ignorance he spews
- Wisconsin ‘sovereign citizen’ Michael Rinderele was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday for threatening and retaliating against court officials in New Jersey
- NASA confirms that September was the hottest month ever, and sea levels are rising faster than at any time in the last 6,000 years. NextGen Climate, the political group run by billionaire Tom Steyer, will have a “Stone Age Challenge” next week to shame climate skeptics
- No, President George W. Bush was not ‘right’ about Iraqi chemical weapons
- The GOP could have complete control of half the states in November
- How do you change someone’s mind about abortion? Tell them you had one
- Did you have a happy Columbus Day? Neither did Native Americans
- Two members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas were charged with murdering a fellow gang member
- David Neiwert recounts the sad career of Oin Oakstar, the key government witness against ‘Minuteman militia’ child-murderer Shawna Forde who was recently found dead under a highway overpass
- Black male youths are twenty-one times as likely to be killed by police than white male youths
I LOVED the audio of him reading Drudge Headlines. This is a MUST LISTEN!!!!! Great Threatcon.