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 untimely death of Robin Williams, our Threatcon Color Code is ORK MIST
- Could the deteriorating situation in Ferguson, Missouri have anything to do with the deliberate diminishing of what political power African Americans had gained since the Civil Rights Era? Black legislators have been systematically disempowered by Republican gerrymandering, and 95% of GOP-represented Congressional districts are majority-white. To make matters worse, black American economic gains have been completely wiped out, too. It’s impossible to explain this as anything other than a return to white supremacy, with Ferguson as the bleeding edge of what’s to come without a major course-correction
- Fun experiment: imagine how the Bundy Ranch standoff would have gone down if Cliven and his fellow ‘patriots’ had been black
- National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson doesn’t think it’s racist that he referred to a 9-year old black boy as a “primate”
- The Bureau of Land Management still has problems connecting with local law enforcement in Utah
- A study has found that white people are in favor of harsher laws if they think more black people will be arrested
- Steven Rosenfeld demolishes libertarian propaganda in the New York Times Magazine; so does Jonathan Chait
- The Koch brothers are trying to interest immigrants in their economic fairy tales. An attempt to indoctrinate the NAACP Convention last week failed. But their top-down, centralized efforts to remake America one town at a time are starting to have real effects in local elections across the country
- Four in ten Americans are still struggling with the impact of the recession
- Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) has been touting another bogus anti-Obamacare narrative
- We hope you enjoyed our exposé yesterday showing the tactics of Alabama anti-abortion crazies that federal judge Myron Thompson recently described when he struck down the state’s TRAP law. Here is a bonus video of a young woman, believed to be the daughter of a GOP state house candidate, pretending not to understand that she can’t park at the same business she’s protesting
[youtube]http://youtu.be/KT2QQcsICQY[/youtube]
- Rand Paul took off his libertarian mask the other day to announce that our civilization will collapse without personhood rights for fetuses, making him just another right wing culture warrior who’s actually less honest about it than most
- “Constitutional conservatism” is the new ideological undercurrent destroying America
- Guess who understood the income inequality of our era all the way back in the 19th Century? Karl Marx
- Tbogg wrote a delicious takedown of Breitbart.com’s David Shapiro
- It’s not enough to call them stupid: “young Earth” creationists are actually intelligent people who choose unscientific reasoning that reinforces their beliefs about themselves
- A member of the Aryan Brotherhood has pleaded guilty to attempted murder and racketeering conspiracy
- As we told you weeks ago, those people blocking the buses full of Central American children in Murrieta, CA are linked to various white nationalist groups — which explains why anyone who helps an immigrant receives threats of violence
- Conservative NRA supporter Frank Carroll says that Ted Nugent “has got to go” for expressing his “Neo-Ku Klux Klan views” while representing gun owners onstage
- Dallas police arrested ‘sovereign citizen’ Douglas Lee Leguin after a standoff with shots fired. Leguin told police that he intended to turn an unoccupied home into a sovereign nation with himself as king
- Guess what country is beating the US in renewable energy now? China
- Arch-homophobe Bryan Fischer is defending the attempted genocide of Yazidis by ISIS because he’s convinced they worship the devil. Meanwhile, his friends at the American Family Association are attacking Archie Comics for including a gay character
[youtube]http://youtu.be/Yz0OI2UUNpY[/youtube]
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ James McBride of Columbus, Ohio was convicted for selling $500,000 worth of fake diplomatic IDs
- The FBI office in San Antonio says that two-man teams of ‘sovereign citizens’ have been stalking down the home addresses of local law enforcement and other first responders
- Coming soon: chemtrails, the movie! Expect the smelliest craptacular since that SyFy “original” about Chupacabra
- Montana scientists concerned by climate change ask their state government: “If 97 doctors out of 100 said that tests confirm that you have treatable cancer, would you follow the advice of the three doctors who weren’t 100 percent sure and suggested doing nothing?”
- Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told an audience of Marines that “the world is exploding all over“
- McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara has received enthusiastic support on social media for his idea of forming a permanent “posse.” McLennan County famously includes the Branch Davidian compound where so much of modern ‘patriot’ militia organizing got its inspiration
- New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has criticized the newspaper for printing a politically-motivated, unverified accusation of plagiarism against historian Rick Perlstein
- While speaking to the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, Fox News contributor Bill Cowan went full birther moron
- Mississippi Tea Party Chairman Roy Nicholson opened a meeting this Monday with a prayer for God to carry out violence against the Republican Party. The meeting featured blogger Charles C. Johnson, whose story alleging vote buying by Thad Cochran’s campaign turns out to be a fabrication
- The Republican National Committee is trying to defund the College Board because its AP US History curriculum doesn’t whitewash the colonial period to their satisfaction
So I call BS on the recession being over. How is it over when nearly half the nation is barely getting by or worse that they were before the recession started? If you ask me we are in another DEPRESSION. The only people seemingly doing better than before are corporations and their CEO/board members.
The average middle class family prior to the “recession” could be a 1 income household and live in relative ease having the basics if not all of their wants. Now both parents (if there are two, which I will assume for this analogy) have to work or have to have multiple jobs (full AND part time jobs as part time is no longer a way to have a livable wage unless in multiples)in order to live the same kind of life-style pre-recession.
We also have a higher amount of food insecurity that we haven’t had since the Great Depression. This is why there are now more families than ever before are taking advantage of the welfare programs. It is not because of people being lazy. It is because people don’t have enough to get the necessities they could afford 8 years ago. And yet our government keeps slashing the benefits for the needy while giving themselves raises and saying ‘they were only lazy people and this will give them incentive to work’ and patting themselves on the back as they take their 5th paid vacation(paid by tax payers).
True story today. We went into a breakfast joint this morning. then while paying for a great meal delivered by people making 2.25 per hour, the manager cashier said that a law is going on the books that will deduct taxes from their meager tips on credit card charges, and that the waitresses will only get their tips weeks later, and only after the taxes for their tips were deducted.
She was a struggling mother of 4 who lost her healthcare with Carelink and ended up on Obamacare where she said she would have a huge deductible and pay close to 500.00 per month for healthcare that used to cost her 150.00 per month with Carelink. Her oldest children were now working as waitresses at the same food establishment she is working at, and who will now no doubt have very little money left over after getting tips, which they rely on to buy food and necessities, which will soon be slashed in half for taxes to the very politicians who claim they need that money to fund state government, which by the way is cash rich and denies healthcare exchanges in their state.
She said it would pay more to be on welfare than it would to work. She said that working should be something that is rewarded, but instead is punished, while going on welfare is the only thing that seems to be OK and would allow their family to survive.
Message here is welfare pays while work is punished, and all so politicians can say people want to be on welfare when in fact they would rather work..
What “law going on the books” is this person talking about? I’m quite familiar with the struggles of wait staff, and their biggest problem is that $2.25 an hour plus tips. It hasn’t been raised in 20 years, and it was half the minimum wage at that time. It needs to be $5 an hour.
Not sure what law she was referring to. But her boss told her that credit card tips were going to be delayed for weeks, and then taxes would be deducted from there or some such thing. We were on our way out when she started telling us about it, so not sure what she was told was fact or just some new thing she misunderstood. However you are correct as for what they make being terrible.
We got a great meal in a place we don’t even frequent, and I was literally shocked that the meal was fantastic and served very well by the staff who make literally nothing in wages, and only usually get a dollar or two in places like this for tips for each table served. Its not fair to them at all. However this doesn’t really speak to this Threatcon article, so sorry if I jacked it with side stuff. These articles are a dream come true, great writing and research too. Thank you so much for them.
Don’t apologize, I was genuinely curious. Sounds to me like another boss trying to blame their own corporate paperwork inadequacies on “the gummint.” I’ve heard this sort of thing before: a city department hired a (cheaper) immigrant over a local person and then blamed it on Affirmative Action, or a business owner raised his prices and blamed it on Obama.
I think the wage issue is the big one, and the Obamacare thing sounds utterly bogus. A good friend of mine recently went to the website for insurance and was stunned that everything his wingnut parents had told him about what he’d pay was a total lie.
I am curious what state this person is in. I did some research on
Alabama rates last year and to pay $500 a month she’d have to be making some really, really good tips.