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 a certain Maryland city councilman’s poor understanding of the First Amendment, our Threatcon Color Code is KIRBY DELAUTER
- Guess — just guess — which right wing gasbag was the first to blame President Obama for the Charlie Hebdo attack, but of course had absolutely nothing to say about the bombing of an NAACP office
- Speaking of terror attacks that go completely unnoticed by the media, did you hear about the FBI charging three white, Christian men with planning a series of terrorist bombings and frauds on the government this Tuesday? No? Maybe they’re not brown or Muslim enough for the media to care about them, as only two local papers have even covered the story
- Guess what’s stimulating the economy? After years of austerity, government hiring is finally on the increase
- Guess which state is lagging the nation on jobs? Hint: it’s the one with the biggest budget and tax cuts
- Tbogg caught Breitbart.com writer Matthew Boyle’s delicious disappointment at the failure of this week’s half-hearted House Republican rebellion against Speaker John Boehner
- Steve Scalise is still House majority whip, but the scandal surrounding his remarks to an audience of David Duke’s white supremacists thirteen years ago will continue to hurt him — and the GOP’s race problem isn’t going anywhere
- It’s not clear that President Obama will close a nuclear deal with Iran, and even if he does you can be sure that Congressional Republicans will do their best to derail it
- According to a nonpartisan Government Accounting Office report (.PDF) that came out in December, the share of tuition costs covered by students is now higher than the share paid by states, completely reversing the entire history of higher education in America. If your conscious goal was to make education too expensive for middle, working class, and poor Americans, so they could never, ever be upwardly-mobile again, this is exactly the trend line you’d want to see:
- As if to underscore how little they care about the opinions of anyone under 30, Congressional Republicans have decided to die on the hill named ‘net neutrality’
- A million American adults will be cut off from SNAP (food stamps) in 2016 as state waivers expire
- GOP priorities: states have enacted 231 new abortion restrictions in the last four years. Congressional Republicans introduced a nationwide abortion ban on their very first day in power
- President Obama can boost wages and the economy this year by changing mandatory overtime rules
- Remember when racist homophobe and hatemonger Dave Agema embarrassed the Michigan GOP? Judging by the white supremacist articles he posts on Facebook, he has learned absolutely nothing a year later
- I’ve been warning you for months about Republican efforts to enshrine a ‘freedom to discriminate’ against LGBT citizens. One is underway right now in the Indiana legislature; another is happening in Virginia, and Jeb Bush is using all the dissonant ‘religious freedom’ talking points
- The Georgia KKK is still trying to take part in the state’s highway cleanup program
- What’s ahead for reproductive freedom in 2015? Amanda Marcotte tells us in this week’s RH Reality Check podcast
- Also on day one of the new Congress, Republicans took a shot at Social Security’s disability fund. Expect more attacks on the original ‘big government’ welfare program, including attempts to instigate or create the appearance of a crisis where none exists, because the disabled and elderly just have it too damn easy in this country
- Eighty percent white, eighty percent male, 92 percent Christian: your US Congress
- Demographic changes are making it even harder for the GOP to win the White House in 2016 by relying on white voters
- New IRS dark money rules probably won’t be ready for the 2016 elections
- Bigotry feeds tyranny: one of the most understated aspects of the Civil Rights Era is all the white-on-white crime that took place in an effort to shut down their participation
- Next time someone tells you that solar and wind power aren’t profitable without subsidies, inform them that coal gets plenty of cash assistance from the Department of the Interior
- Do black lives matter? Colorlines.com has nine charts that say ‘not yet’
- Arizona’s outgoing superintendent of public instruction chose to leave office accusing the Tuscon public school system of “illegally promoting ethnic solidarity” by teaching children (1) facts about the history of Mexico (2) hip-hop lyrics, including this song by Rage Against The Machine:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/APmUWC8S1_M[/youtube]
- Speaking of black lives mattering: seventeen year old Lennon Lacey of North Carolina may have been a victim of lynching for his affair with an older white woman
- Speaking of ‘freedom to hate:’ the religious right is losing its mind because Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed dismissed Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran after he self-published a homophobic, misogynist, and anti-Semitic book, then made firefighters read portions of it. This obviously violates Cochran’s ‘right’ to shove his disgusting bigotry down the throats of public employees
- Irony alert: Bill O’Reilly, noted exemplar of white privilege, accuses David Duke of “trying to promote the cause of white people“
- How did the NYPD come to see itself as separate and different from the community it protects?
- Which side are the ‘small government’ folks really on? Last weekend’s “Black Brunch” events, in which restaurant-goers were interrupted with the names of people killed by police, really annoyed conservatives
- Have you ever heard of Maj. Sherwood Moran? He was an American missionary in Japan who managed to extract tons of actionable intelligence from supposedly-hardened, suicidal, uncooperative Japanese soldiers without torturing any of them. Who knew that a conversational style beat waterboarding every time? Except for every professional military interrogator alive, who knew?!
- Conservative darling and token brain surgeon Ben Carson plagiarizes several internet sources in his latest ‘book’
- If you’re going to say “Je suis Charlie Hebdo,” you should probably know what it means
- We end on this James Rustad parody, Ted Cruz Without a Clue
[youtube]http://youtu.be/5XvMB6SBPgI[/youtube]