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 Mike Huckabee’s moralizing over melodical matrons, our Threatcon Color Code is BEYONCE BLUE
- I want to welcome satirist and musician James Rustad to the site. Above is his new song about Sarah Palin’s empathy problem, “I Am Not Your Steppin’ Stool.” Please imagine me saying that in Ed Sullivan’s voice and give him a warm welcome
- As we learned this week, Islamophobia is on the rise in America and Europe. Left unsaid in most news coverage: up to 97% of all the world’s terrorism victims are Muslims themselves. Just as media has warped our perceptions of race and crime, we have been conditioned to believe in a completely incorrect picture of terrorism as an exclusively inter-religious form of violence, which plays out great for Fox News framing but actually harms American interests
- Speaking of media priorities: what would attending that photo-op in Paris have accomplished for Obama? It would please the Fourth Estate, of course, and we all know that’s the most important thing anyone can do. Of course, the trip would have cost millions and strained the Secret Service at the very moment it’s reorganizing, but what are those issues compared to a great picture for editors to put on a major news story?
- Rep. Terri Sewell (D?-AL) may hear from opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline at town halls this weekend
- Tamara Loertscher is challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s so-called “cocaine mom” law which the state used to put her in jail. She alleges that lockup officials punished her for not kneeling before Zod by making her miss prenatal care appointments
- How did Utah greatly reduce homelessness and taxpayer costs associated with it? By giving the homeless housing
- Gerald Bailey says he was forced out as Commissioner of Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement for not participating in Governor Scott’s reelection campaign. Scott says that Bailey “resigned,” but has yet to produce a letter of resignation
- America’s richest people truly believe that poor Americans have it easy. This is a sign of generational privilege on the rise, as most of America’s millionaires were born to advantage and few have ever been poor in their lives
[youtube]http://youtu.be/5yp5-hSwsnI[/youtube]
- He’s been censured, but why was flaming bigot and Michigan Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema ever allowed to attend the RNC’s meeting in San Diego this week? Because Republicans actually don’t care about their sectarian image problems. After all, there are so many other bigoted haters showing up to the confab
- Forget ‘progressive.’ The word ‘liberal’ is making a comeback, and that’s a good thing
- Speeches by American participants at the recent anti-gay bigotry conference held in Russia have gotten out. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, spoke to the new right wing strategy of asserting a ‘right to hate’
- If you’ve read Jonathan Chait’s essay on why he thinks history will be kind to President Obama, then you probably noticed he emphasized the effects of the Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street. Now that Republicans are in charge of Congress, one of their first priorities is to overturn Dodd-Frank, and Democrats are flipping to economic populism
- Speaking to the previous point: Dave Weigel reports on a focus group that found Elizabeth Warren is popular with conservatives
- This essay about “the plight of the bitter nerd” makes the origins of ‘Gamergate’ sound like a show summary of Big Bang Theory
- Ted Cruz, a climate change-denying purveyor of Laffer Curve prayer magic who wants to see more extremism in his party’s 2016 presidential nominees, is now in charge of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Prepare for an onslaught of idiocracy
- Watch 28 year-old self-described ‘sovereign citizen’ Ishaq Ibrahim of Philadelphia, on trial for bank robbery, proclaim his new name to local media: ‘Mr. sonstar’ (sic)
[youtube]http://youtu.be/WSzyZAj2v3o[/youtube]
- Why is Bob Beckel the resident ‘liberal’ on Fox? Because it helps the network to frame liberals as insane, racist morons
- Although the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition seems to have scrubbed one white supremacist from its upcoming meeting, a “sizable cast of racists and bigots” will be on hand to hobnob with members of Congress and potential presidential nominees
- A racist group calling itself the ‘White Genocide Project’ is raising money to put up deluded interstate highway billboards
- The Orlando Sentinel has a great interview with Marcus Faella, founder and former leader of the racist American Front, who is having a sad as his guns get taken away for a felony conviction last year
- ‘White pride’ is never not a racist concept. Cross-burning is more common than you think
- Creationist ‘tax protester’ Kent Hovind is probably going to be convicted of tax evasion
- The person who bought Oregon anti-government activist David Darby’s house in a forfeiture auction is asking a judge to order his eviction
- BONUS: watch this California man, who is breaking state law by selling ammunition in a mall parking lot, get indignant with a police officer who dares to ask him whether he has a business license — instead of, say, using an illegal choke-hold to murder him
