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 prominent Republican meltdowns over a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism, our Threatcon Color Code is BOOSTER SHOT BLACK
- Everyone must stop referring to anti-vaccine ‘skepticism’ because it’s a slur on genuine skepticism. Vaccine denial is not a conservative issue, but it is a conservative problem
- Despite “clarifying” his dangerously unscientific anti-vax talking points with a statement acknowledging reality and a photo of himself getting a booster shot, Rand Paul will not escape his long history of pandering to the paranoid fringe, including anti-vaxxers, on Alex Jones’s show. Pulitzer prizewinning Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts, Jr. points out that other comments by Sen. Paul seem to indicate he doesn’t believe in mental illness, either
- Not only is Ted Cruz a dangerously deluded anti-vaxxer, he’s a raging drug policy hypocrite. Good luck winning the millennials with that
- The abysmal failure of ‘both sides do it’: Vox.com’s Sarah Kliff egregiously misrepresented then-candidate Obama’s words in 2008 to pretend that he was pandering to anti-vaxxers
- When does your right to ‘believe’ whatever you want and not suffer public anger end? When your ‘beliefs’ leave your body behind and spread around as highly contagious, deadly, and horrible diseases
- South Carolina Republican state representative Jonathon Hill tried screening potential state judges with an illegal and unconstitutional opinion survey. Tellingly, Hill seems to think that his god opposes equal pay for women doing equal work to a man
- Anti-government gun activists will reportedly try to get arrested at the Washington state Capitol in Olympia this weekend
- Like fellow veteran Jim Adams, I have become intolerant of Republicans thanking me for my service while they undermine our support systems
- Cosmopolitan writer Robin Marty attended March For Live in Washington, DC, providing an important parallax view. For instance, Marty saw abortion blogger Jill Stanek decide (and fail) to get arrested pushing Republicans to pass that recent forced-birth bill with the embarrassing rape exception
- Forced-birth activist Reverend James Henderson has resigned as executive director of the Alabama Christian Coalition to pursue a more lucrative role as head of a PAC called Pro-Life Alabama. After Alabama’s chapter of the already-diminished movement split from the national organization in 2006, Henderson was brought in to provide ‘clean hands’ because a messy Jack Abramoff spinoff-scandal embroiled the leadership in controversy. Henderson now seems to be highly focused on picking a fight that I think might just become the most interesting clinic battle in the country
- Get ready for “revenge laws” to become a thing. Some Republicans are reacting to marriage equality gains with bills to punish gays and civil servants who marry them. Many of these scorched-Earth efforts will focus on creating administrative or bureaucratic barriers
- Starting on Monday, Alabama will become an administrative battleground over marriage equality. Probate Judge James Hall of Lauderdale County has surprised and dismayed many of his supporters by joining Colbert County Probate Judge Daniel Rosser in declining to perform any marriages for any couples. Both men are hereby on notice that they are free to quit their elected offices at any time and surrender them to people who actually understand the Equal Protection Clause
- There is not enough facepalm for this much fail: when a Vermont TV station covered a student’s quest to have her state adopt a Latin motto, hundreds of nativist morons started protesting Latinos in the website comments
- Bill O’Reilly is the latest conservative to float a discredited ‘study’ that blames income inequality on immigrants. Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks has tried to blame the California measles outbreak on immigrants. This is why both of them are so popular with the kind of idiots who confuse ancient Latin with a modern nation-state in North America
- Remember that gun range owner who banned Muslims? Remember how she recently kicked out a Hindu man and his son saying “I don’t think you belong here“? Her business is booming thanks to the same demographic that confuses Latin with Latinos and Hindus with Muslims
- Some very Christian folks in Texas decided to show how much they love religious freedom by shouting down Muslims at the state Capitol
- Forty percent of Republican voters see Islam as inherently violent
- The Republican National Committee apparently did send people to Israel courtesy of the American Family Association, which can’t back away fast enough from Bryan Fischer or his weird gay-hating conspiracy theories. But Rachel Maddow noted a glaring cancellation last night:
- Republican math: Paul Ryan is dressing up a $100 billion deficit increase as a magic budget unicorn. Here is how he conducts Ways and Means Committee oversight meetings
- ‘Austrian school’ economist Friedrich Hayek was empirically, provably wrong in his most important long-term predictions
- Wall Street actually pays bankers to take jobs as government regulators — and wants to keep which ones a secret
- Obamacare costs much less than the Congressional Budget Office predicted it would
- John B. Judis is doubtful that long-predicted demographic shifts will actually lift Democrats. I share his skepticism, and for reasons he does not even cite, such as Republican gerrymandering
- By the time our 2016 presidential race is in full swing, Scott Walker will have left a giant, smoking crater where Wisconsin was
- The neoconfederate League of the South keeps putting up secessionist billboards in Arkansas and nothing happens. But guess what happened when an atheist group paid for ads in Mobile, Alabama
- Retired Manatee County, Florida sheriff’s deputy and self-proclaimed ‘sovereign citizen’ James Sims has been arrested for filing bogus liens on judges
- Three Colorado ‘sovereign citizens’ skipped their sentencing to play golf and predictably got arrested
