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 repeated, strained, and utterly bogus efforts to tie the Black Lives Matter movement to the murder of a Harris County, TX sheriff’s deputy and label the equality movement a “hate group,” our Threatcon Color Code is WHITE LIES
- Speaking of police lives mattering: if the best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, then what’s the best defense for good guys with guns who shoot each other when they’re done entering your house by mistake, killing your dog, and shooting you? And if black lives seem to actually, empirically matter 21 times less to police than white lives, what are we to make of not-black Gilbert Flores being shot with his empty hands in the air during broad daylight, whereupon San Antonio police swear they saw him holding a knife? And if all police lives matter equally, what animus is implied by the curious fact that half the officers killed by gunfire in the line of duty are themselves black, when only 12% of police officers are black?
- By the end of 2015, fewer officers will have been shot and killed in the line of duty than almost any year on record. It sure would be nice if news readers and reporters would stick to data-driven observations instead of sensational race-baiting
- Former prison guard Nathan Ener is actually vowing to hunt down and kill Black Lives Matter activists
- Josh Duggar has not been seen at the ‘Christian rehab center‘ where he was supposedly being ‘treated’ for a ‘sex addiction.’ His whereabouts are unknown. My advice: check Arkansas and Illinois strip clubs, because Josh will be the disgusting gift that keeps on giving
- Liars For Jesus: video hit man David Daleiden’s fake nonprofit and violations of California law are being scrutinized in civil, and potentially even criminal, courts
- Are political scandals actually powerful teaching tools? The Museum of Political Corruption has announced a High School essay contest on the topic of “What is political corruption and why should we care?”
- Alabama Republican Governor Robert Bentley’s wife Diane has filed for divorce, sparking a series of rumors about Bentley’s alleged relationship to Rebekah Mason, his communications director, and whether a state trooper was employed to arrange their liaisons on taxpayer time. Now Terry Dunn, a member of the Republican State Executive Committee, is calling on him to resign. Alabama legislators are supposed to resolve a $200 million budget gap during a special session this month, and Bentley’s leadership is crucial to the outcome
- It’s about race until it isn’t: an unnamed 18 year-old Minnesota high school dropout and confederate flag enthusiast was trying to impress his 13 year-old girlfriend(!) with his hobby of racing through a black neighborhood with colors flying when he struck and injured a 4 year-old child. The man was subsequently assaulted by angry locals who had repeatedly begged him to slow down; he’s okay
- A satire is born: an anonymous comic genius is brilliantly portraying the person who sits next to Kim Davis, Kentucky’s homophobic county clerk. There is disagreement on whether Davis, who seems to be animated by her religious conversion following a messy personal life, can expect a sinecure in the wingnut welfare machine after she loses her job; I think the answer is yes, absolutely. Here is Davis’s sinister lawyer Mat Staver to deliver your US RDA of outrage porn:
- Insult to injury: remember when Shelby County, Alabama convinced the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act? Shelby County also tried, and thankfully failed, to foist the costs of their lawsuit on US taxpayers, too
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar called Donald Trump a bully, so of course Trump tried to bully him
- Alabama taxpayers are also on the hook for all those expensive legal fights against marriage equality
- Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Rick Brinkley has been indicted for trying to embezzle millions from the Better Business Bureau
- Is the GOP promoting Carly Fiorina to the ‘frontrunners debate’ in a desperate bid to challenge Trump?
- Three men in Georgia were sentenced for conspiring to attack the federal government with pipe bombs
- A planned confederate battle flag and secession rally on the old State House steps in Montgomery, Alabama drew a crowd of just thirty people
- As I keep telling you, the modern conservative movement is paranoia-driven, and its best barometers are ‘fringe’ figures like Glenn Beck. Just look at the rise of Ben Carson
- Florida Governor Rick Scott’s office scrubbed a press release of a statement exonerating Planned Parenthood
- Female students in Huntsville, Alabama are challenging the Grissom High School dress codes, which are enforced as a double-standard against girls. And it’s not like the kids are showing up to school topless, is it?
- A federal judge says that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal broke federal law when he excluded Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program
- Detective Raymond Mott, the Lake Arthur, Louisiana police detective who attended an anti-immigration rally as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, will either resign or be fired according to his department chief
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Brent Douglas Cole has been sentenced to nearly thirty years in prison for his 2014 shootout with Bureau of Land Management and California Highway Patrol officers
- The darkest money: the bankruptcy filing for Alpha Natural Resources, the nation’s second-largest coal producer, shows the company spent big political bucks on Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers’ ALEC bill mill, and the discredited climate change-denying Heartland Institute
- Speaking of Charles Koch: it’s true, he really does work hard to stifle the renewable energy business
- Americans don’t even know what being ‘middle class’ means anymore
- Dick Cheney opposes Obama’s nuclear deal because he worked so hard to advance Iran’s nuclear program as vice president
- Jeb Bush is vastly inflating his role in Ethiopian Jewish emigration programs
- How did Donald Trump get rich? He can’t help it, he was born that way
- Univision anchor Jorge Ramos went on The O’Reilly Factor and put up with Bill-O’s abuse for seven minutes so he could tell the biggest bully in news to stop pretending he’s not a partisan:
• All three of those DeKalb County police officers should be fired for incompetence.
• Nathan Ener is inciting violence and making what can credibly be interpreted as terrorist threats. I’m sure the Texas Department of Public Safety will be paying him a visit any minute now. Any minute …
• Right.
Well of course it applies to everyone, because it’s well known that high school boys routinely wear leggings, yoga pants, skirts, dresses, “clinging garments,” and shirts with straps narrower than three inches across. Sure.
Is it my imagination, or are things getting stupider?
–alopecia
It’s not your imagination, it’s the idiocracy.
I was afraid you were going to say that.
–alopecia