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 Josh Duggar’s Ashley Madison accounts being revealed by hackers, our Threatcon Color Code is BUBBLE BATH FOR 2
- While I enjoy a healthy serving of schadenfreude as much as anyone, I have to ask why the Ashley Madison hackers — who posted the personal info of millions of people for the whole world to see — are seen as less of a threat to our privacy than the NSA email metadata program that everyone was yelling and screaming about just five minutes ago. Surely the champions of personal liberty and freedom condemn this outrage with equal gusto? Surely the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eddie Snowden, WikiLeaks, and The Intercept are all over this issue? …Hello? …Guys?
- This report on the consolidation of fringe extremists with western legislators as managed by accused fraudster Ken Ivory is mandatory reading. Who would have thought the legacy of welfare rancher Cliven Bundy would be an increasingly-bold, increasingly-visible, armed criminal enterprise?
- Well-behaved black people seldom make history, and Black Lives Matter activists are having a positive effect on Bernie Sanders’s platform, even if the activists themselves are still unsure of the candidate himself. If you watched Melissa Harris-Perry fill in for Rachel Maddow on Monday night, you saw a decent clinic on the electoral importance of recreating the Obama coalition along with video of Hillary’s encounter with Black Lives Matter, which went surprisingly well. Democrats need more of this kind of ‘controversy,’ not less
- Police lives matter: according to a study of state-level statistics, higher gun ownership is related to higher officer shooting death rates
- The nativists and white supremacists of Breitbart News-world are celebrating a supposed victory over Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist, whose biological father may be white even though his siblings are black and he has lived his entire life as a black person. Don’t you love it when people who always deny police violence, and always smear the black victims of police violence, get in the business of policing everyone else’s race?
- As the data rolls in, it becomes more clear all the time that none of the Republican ACA nightmare scenarios is happening in the real world — and that Republicans have no serious plans to replace it
- Why do Americans pay more for worse public transportation than the rest of the developed world, even Canada? Because it’s seen as a welfare program instead of vital infrastructure — and that’s especially true at the redlines of American poverty. The American war on public transit began the moment Rosa Parks sat down
- The Air Force has understated the cost of its new Long Range Strike Bomber by a mere $25 billion, exceeding the limit at which the service promised to cancel the program. My considered opinion is that the plane is an expensive sop to the nuclear triad of the Cold War — an overpriced cruise missile platform that makes as much strategic sense as building the Navy a new fleet of WWII-era battleships
- To defend his state’s confederate statues, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal keeps citing a ‘Heritage Act’ that does not actually exist
- Two can play at the fraudulent editing game: who knew that so many forced-birth activists and politicians actually support Planned Parenthood?
- Dark money: the three operators of the global investment firm Susquehanna International Group seem to be behind a pair of Pennsylvania-based nonprofits that have funded a Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) super PAC and pushed education privatization schemes
- What do 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio share in common, other than the fact that they’re all losing to Donald Trump? Answer: none of them are American enough to satisfy the goofiest birthers on the right
- No matter which Democrat you choose in 2016, Congress is likely to stay Republican thanks to widespread polarization and deliberate gerrymandering
- The Southern Poverty Law Center has succeeded in persuading dozens of Alabama communities to revoke contracts with Judicial Correction Services, which stands accused of using aggressive and illegal tactics to collect probation fees
- If you’re looking for terrorists in Israel, try the Orthodox Jewish Derech Chaim organization
- Liars for Jesus: Steve Hotze, influential leader of the Conservative Republicans of Texas, is holding anti-gay rallies in which he distributes copies of Michael Swift’s 1987 satirical pamphlet “Gay Revolutionary” with all the humorous intentions carefully deleted so that he can pretend it’s a real manifesto of the ‘gay agenda.’ I first encountered this particular huckster act in 1988; the script hasn’t changed one bit
- Right wing Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson not only supports the old confederacy, but actually wants to bring back slavery for undocumented immigrants
- Conservative political attitudes may derive from an inability or unwillingness to deal with ambiguity
- Still incapable of finding real work, George Zimmerman is now selling confederate flag “art” to raise legal fees for himself and the owner of a Florida gun store who went “Muslim-free”
- The new Associated Press report being touted by enemies of the Iran nuclear deal has already been altered by deletions — and has several inconsistencies with the way IAEA does business
- Caught in a crowded field of candidates with few ways to grab attention, token brain surgeon Ben Carson says he wants to drone-bomb the Mexican border zone
- Steven Joshua Dinkle, 29 year-old former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan who just served a year in prison for a cross-burning, has been rearrested for probation violations
- Craig Cobb, the white supremacist neo-Nazi who tried to take over a North Dakota town two years ago and was later revealed to have African American ancestry, is trying again. This time, he wants to rename the town of Antler for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, a petition of no confidence for Grant County State’s Attorney Todd Schwarz, who chose to let Cobb escape prison time for menacing his former neighbors, has failed to gain enough signatures to remove him from office
- A former aide to Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, the Michigan Republican state representatives who allegedly carried on a torrid office affair that was exposed by Courser’s bizarre attempted cover-up with false gay rumors about himself, claims his job was “like working with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Courser took to Facebook to make sure we know who the real victim is here
- After a spate of Missouri state house scandals involving lawmakers sexually harassing interns, Rep. Nick King (R) wanted to make the interns wear burqas instead of, you know, telling his fellow old white men to quit harassing the young female interns. The Missouri House speaker has nixed King’s idea
- The trial of Glendon Scott Crawford, charged with a bizarre plot to kill Muslims with a radiation gun, began this week
- This weekend, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (get it? CCC=KKK) will hold its first meeting since Dylan Roof was inspired by their propaganda to murder nine people in a historically-black Charleston, SC church
- Members of the NAACP were booed, hissed, and denounced as racists by white parents for wanting to change the Effingham County, Georgia High School rebel mascot and confederate symbols into something less racist
- Why do so many people who fight to make abortion illegal also approve of violent child-rearing techniques? Because in their Iron Age belief-systems, children are considered property
- I have saved the best for last! NSFW warning for kids using foul language to make a point:
when did anyone in the world lie and tell you that the internet was private?? why d people expect privacy in public? I say dont do dirt wont be no dirt exposed. 🙂
Yes! This is where the bottom drops out of the whole ‘internet privacy’ topic: the web was never constructed to work that way, does not work that way, and can never be made to work that way.
https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1
“Never say anything over the telephone you don’t want your mother to hear at your trial.” – Lily Tomlin
And as long as I’m thinking about it, I’ll mention the NSA spying: They’re doing the same thing as these hackers, except they aren’t advertising what they find.
1) As someone who was exposed to—but luckily not compromised by—the Target hack a couple of years ago, I consider hackers a genuine threat. Companies have to take more affirmative steps to secure their websites, even if doing so means spending more to set up and maintain the sites; credit and debit card issuers have to become far more mindful of the security of their customers, and not just themselves; and ordinary people have to get over the mistaken notion that the internet is generally safe and secure.
2) Ed Kilgore has it right about the putzes at Dead Andy and their sudden fascination with what race Shaun King identifies as:
3) In my experience, ambiguity intolerance is more common among political conservatives. Interestingly, I’ve known some research scientists who were politically conservative, even though accepting—even embracing—ambiguity is in the job description, so there’s something more going on.
4) There are few things on Earth more terrifying than a noisy Christianist with children.
5) Funny video, but in real life, a true, dumb-as-dirt redneck would respond to that torrent of facts like a seven-year-old: Nyuh-uh!
–alopecia