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 Jeb Bush’s website fiascos, our Threatcon Color Code is FLORIDA ORANGE
- For months now, I have been warning readers that advances in marriage equality are spurring Republicans to punish LGBT Americans by (1) erecting administrative and bureaucratic barriers to same-sex couples, and (2) enshrining a “freedom to discriminate” in law. Senator Ted Cruz is pushing an example of the former in the so-called State Marriage Defense Act. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s removal of state anti-discrimination protections for LGBTs is an example of the latter. Florida state representative Frank Artiles’s transgender restroom bill is an example of both at once
- Guess who Alabama state supreme court Chief Justice Roy Moore has been pallin’ around with? None other than Michael Peroutka, the Anne Arundel, Maryland councilman and neoconfederate leader who once told a crowd of white supremacists to stand for the national anthem and then started singing “Dixie.” Guess who’s praising Moore for holding back marriage equality? The United Dixie White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
- Republican efforts to rewrite the history of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq have not stopped
- Barry Grissom, the top federal prosecutor in Kansas, says that Chris Kobach’s claims that he has ignored voter fraud referrals are pure fiction. Meanwhile, Kobach is one of the House Oversight Committee’s witnesses in an upcoming hearing where Republicans will try to portray President Obama’s immigration executive orders as a future source of voting fraud
- Examining FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s complete reversal on the net neutrality issue in the last year, Zephyr Teachout says that it’s an example of applied people power and uncompromising activism. I could buy that argument if not for the fact that uncompromising activism consistently failed on this issue for years before President Obama asked the FCC to come up with tough new rules to preserve the open internet last November. It’s odd that Obama got all the blame when net neutrality was on the ropes, but gets none of the credit when the issue turns
- Time Warner Cable enjoys 97% profit margins on their high speed internet service
- A 23-year experiment by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has observed ecosystem changes directly attributable to climate change. In related news, Australia’s hottest year on record — 2013 — would not have happened without climate change. In further related news, climate change is altering precipitation patterns in the Midwest
- Next time you encounter someone complaining about subsidies for renewable energy, tell them that rich nations provided nearly $15 billion in subsidies to export coal energy and coal mining technologies to poor countries from 2003-2013
- Generational theft: adjusted for inflation, the average millennial makes $2,000 less per year than what their parents earned at the same age. And without a drastic improvement in college completion rates, the next generation will see an unprecedented decline in the share of Americans with college degrees
- Would a universal basic income act as a social vaccine against poverty? Medium.com writer Scott Santens says yes
- At a committee hearing on vaccinations, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), an actual medical doctor, tried to blame the ongoing measles outbreak on undocumented immigrants
- Vaccinating teens against HPV doesn’t magically make them promiscuous or more prone to unsafe sex
- #BrownLivesMatter quote of the week: “I’m totally devastated that I might have made a big mistake.” Madison, Alabama resident Chirag Patel on his choice to live in that community, whose police force partially paralyzed his aged father for the crime of walking while brown
- What can a study of census data from 1880 to 1940 reveal about the rise of segregation that speaks to our time? “Levels of county segregation as far back as 1880 strongly correlate with economic mobility rates a century later”
- Is ending housing segregation a key to ending poverty? Chicago’s experiment in relocating African American families suggests the answer is yes
- The history of lynching in America is worse than we knew
- Republicans have been fabricating a crisis in Social Security since the new year began. Thom Hartmann is on top of the issue
- Remember ‘collateralized debt obligations’ nearly destroying the global economy in 2008? They’re back under a new name: ‘bespoke tranche opportunities‘
- Healthcare hypocrisy: six of the seven Republican state senators who stopped Tennesseeans from having expanded Medicaid coverage enjoy taxpayer-provided insurance plans themselves
- Stock buybacks are making shareholders wealthy, but they’re also killing wages and investment in the American economy
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: “Fox & Friends” reacting to the overwhelmingly-positive new jobs report as if it was bad news
- Even conservatives recognize that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has wrecked his state
- The King v Burwell lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act seems to be falling apart this week, but if it succeeds, the most likely people to lose insurance coverage are the employed, white southerners who elect Republicans
- Kansas House Bill 2234 would force state colleges to implement policies prohibiting professors from using their official titles while praising or criticizing public officials in letters to the editor
- American infrastructure spending is abysmal, but no increase in funding will be enough to overcome the poor spending priorities at state departments of transportation
- Corporations and business trade groups account for more than three quarters of the $266 million given to ballot measure groups nationwide last year — and the Koch brothers are well on their way to putting a billion dollars into elections next year
- In Colorado, anti-birth control Republicans are probably going to kill the country’s most successful effort to bring down teen pregnancy rates
- Yet another study indicates that minds can change on abortion if women just talk about their experiences
- Introduced in the wake of that Freedom Industries leak which poisoned the water in Charleston, West Virginia last year, new state Department of Environmental Protection safety rules will only affect 0.2% of storage tanks in the state if passed
- Paul Elam, a prominent leader of the so-called ‘men’s rights movement,’ is a deadbeat dad who sponges off the women in his life
- Don’t be fooled: the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers have embarked on a charm offensive, calling themselves social liberals, but they spend a thousand times as much on right wing culture wars as they do on reproductive freedom and marriage equality
- Orange County, Florida sheriff’s deputies killed ‘sovereign citizen’ Joseph Paffen after he ambushed an SUV carrying officers who were responding to a call about him
