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 ongoing sit-in by House Democrats, our Threatcon Color Code is GUNMETAL GRAY

  • House Republicans adjourned in the early morning hours, but not before highlighting their intransigence on even the sanest, most popular gun measures. Speaker Paul Ryan played directly into Democrats’ hands by shutting down C-SPAN’s live feed only to have the sit-in continue covering itself live through the Periscope app on their smart phones. I am impatient with nagging objections from the Glenn Greenwalds and Alex Pareenes of the blogosphere: the quality of the bill at hand does not matter because it is not expected to pass, while questions over the constitutionality of the no-fly list remind me of those glib libertarians who object to drunk driving laws. What matters most today is that Democrats took a courageous stand on an issue where they had been too terrified to speak for more than 20 years
  • A man who claims to have been intimate with Orlando shooter Omar Matteen says the killer was motivated by a desire for revenge against gay Latinos, not religion
  • A huge win for reproductive rights: activists have delivered abortion pills to women in Northern Ireland using a drone. What a perfect time for Greenwald to denounce drones as evil tools of the state
  • At GQ magazine, Jason Zengerle has written a history of the torrid affair which discredited Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley. Money quote: “I was watching a woman who didn’t know how a bill becomes a law running the state”
  • Brent Scowcroft, a foreign policy dean who worked for George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, has endorsed Hillary Clinton over Trump, further reinforcing her general election campaign theme about his unfitness for office
  • Right wing blogs are circulating a vicious fake story about Syrian refugees supposedly raping a five year-old girl in Idaho
  • Why aren’t we hearing more about Michael Sandford, the 20-year old undocumented immigrant who wanted to assassinate Donald Trump? Is it because he’s white and British?
  • Oklahoma State Rep. Pat Ownbey wants a “final solution” for Islam, which he says is not a real religion
  • More Clinton fan fiction: former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne’s “tell-all” book about the Clintons contradicts his sworn deposition to prosecutor Kenneth Starr in 1998
  • Speaking as a student of the international system during my college days, the urge to break up the current nation-state system and its overlapping economic security arrangements is not about making the world better or more peaceful. It’s just the same bigoted and racist bullshit as always, and it never serves the cause of freedom or prosperity, just conspiracy nuts and fascist assholes. John Oliver deconstructs the Brexit proposal being considered today, which would boost reactionary right wing forces in Europe:

  • Too damn high: in 2014, eleven million Americans spent half their income on rent
  • Jonathan Rauch has written a political science article exploding the myth that political “elites” control the elections process in America. The age of extremist politicians and do-nothing gridlock has in fact been made possible by the almost-complete demolition of party power and the marginalization of parties as effective centers of political organization. Further atomization will only deepen the crisis of polarization
  • He’s back! The Indiana lawyer who brought you Citizens United is out to do the same for state political parties. And thanks to his success in empowering outside groups such as super PACs (see previous bullet item) against the parties, he actually has a centrist argument to make now. See how that works?
  • How should Hillary Clinton dress? Any way she goddamn pleases
  • How did 17 year-old Shania Clifford win the state high school masonry contest with perfectly-plumbed bricklaying, but still not qualify for the national SkillsUSA contest? Is it because she only counts as 70 cents of a person on the dollar when it comes to real-world employment? Also: why is a 14 year-old Michigan high school student being treated as a discipline problem for being raped in a stairwell?
  • Where was John Cramsey, the 50 year-old self-styled vigilante arrested in his tactical vehicle with guns and ammunition en route to ‘rescue’ a teenage girl, radicalized? Where was Howard Sparber, the 69 year-old Florida creep arrested for shooting up the home of a frightened neighbor who refused to have sex with him, radicalized? Where was Erick Shute, the Pennsylvania ‘sovereign citizen’ charged with killing three men over a pile of firewood, radicalized?
  • Since we’re now having a serious discussion about racial profiling in the presidential race, guess what almost every mass shooter has in common? Hints: it’s not race, religion, or politics, but has something in common with rape statistics
  • The real-life impact of laws that close abortion clinics? Women have later, more expensive abortions
  • Rep. Steve King’s bid to block the Harriet Tubman $20 bill reminds us that with his former co-conspitor Michele Bachmann out of Congress, he is in a perpetual race with their comedy third, Rep. Louie Gohmert, for dumbest person in Washington
  • Inspired by the example of Donald Trump, Tennessee independent Congressional candidate Rick Tyler’s “Make America White Again” slogan is a refreshingly honest call for a restoration of white supremacy, which is threatened as never before in America and correspondingly desperate to preserve its prerogatives and privileges
  • I keep saying there is no new Donald Trump for the general election; this is all the Donald Trump there is

Credit: David Horsey / Los Angeles Times
Credit: David Horsey / Los Angeles Times
One thought on “Thursday THREATCON – 23 June 2016”
  1. • Maybe the Ds have grown a spine when it comes to guns. Maybe.

    • I wish I were surprised that Righties believe absurd calumnies against Syrian refugees.

    • Gary Byrne … is a liar? Who could possibly have imagined such a thing (apart from everyone, that is)?

    • SkillsUSA Ohio needs to provide a full and complete explanation for Shania Jennings’s demotion, not just a hand-wave (in the passive voice, just to make it more insulting).

    • Rick Tyler is an attention-seeker. I recommend we all studiously ignore him.

    • Bill Donohue is an attention-seeker. I recommend we all studiously ignore him.

    • Bravo to Raúl Grijalva for arguing against Jason Chaffetz’s ridiculous bill.

    –alopecia

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