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 Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report, our Threatcon Color Code is INVISIBLE EMPIRE
- What’s the difference between Bull Connor’s police dogs and the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department’s K-9 units? Bull Connor and his dogs are all dead
Important to understand Ferguson Report not as an aberration, but how white supremacy actually works.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) March 4, 2015
Point of white supremacy is not to be mean to black people, it’s to take their stuff. It is not about bad manners. It’s about plunder. — Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) March 4, 2015
- White privilege is real
- The secret to Scott Walker’s political success? He follows the same old southern strategy — and worships Ronald Reagan to the point of creepiness
- Once again, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) wouldn’t recognize any gay conservative groups at their confab last weekend, but they did give a press pass to the infamous white supremacist internet radio show “Political Cesspool”
- Tea Party radio show host Andrea Shea King thinks members of the Congressional Black Caucus should be lynched in front of Congress for missing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dissonant speech
- This week, the Supreme Court heard a case by Arizona Republicans that could overturn independent redistricting commissions and encourage aggressive gerrymandering
- How does the District of Columbia save lots of money dealing with homeless addicts? By giving them housing first and helping them sober up later
- Unplanned pregnancies cost American taxpayers $21 billion a year
- Matthew Yglesias thinks that American democracy is doomed by ideological polarization
- Former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett calls Tea Party Republicans “rather stupid and not very well-read”
[youtube]http://youtu.be/65k0DWNKkcs[/youtube]
- The latest George W. Bush-era neoconservative artifact to turn up in Jeb Bush’s campaign is former Secretary of Homeland Security-turned-consultant Michel Chertoff
- In recent years, Michigan Republicans have divided the police and firefighter unions from the rest of the union movement by exempting them from so-called “right to work” legislation. But now state representative Gary Glenn is pushing a bill to extend the law to public safety employees as well
- State legislatures in deep capture to insurance lobbyists have systematically dismantled Workers Compensation benefits in the last decade. Predictably, this torn-up social contract hits the most severely-injured workers hardest
- President Obama is threatening to veto a bill that would help employers fight unionization efforts
- Education blogger Peter Greene succinctly disambiguates the real problems with Common Core from the conservative hysteria surrounding it
- For several months, I’ve been warning readers about so-called ‘religious liberty’ laws designed to uphold a ‘freedom to discriminate’ against LGBT Americans. This Monday, Georgia Republicans shoved such a bill through the Senate Judiciary Committee while Democrat Vincent Fort was in the restroom. Alabama Republicans appear ready to pass a bill that would not only let judges opt out of performing marriages for LGBTs, but also for anyone whose religion they don’t like
- Conservative columnist Cal Thomas thinks that gay marriage will bring the ‘End Times,’ by which he means that the time when his bigotry was respectable is at an end
- 2016 Republican presidential contender Bobby Jindal spoke to a group of right wing pastors in Greenville, South Carolina this week, but the event went uncovered because organizers for the American Renewal Project wouldn’t let reporters attend unless they agreed in advance to publish only those quotes Jindal wanted
- California ‘sovereign citizen’ Daniel Thomas Drum has been declared incompetent to stand trial. Drum was arrested in December for squatting in a Crestline vacation home
- The FBI’s recent raid on members of the Republic of Texas while they were conducting one of their illegal kangaroo courts has right wing activists and open-carry ammosexuals denouncing the ‘war on sovereign citizens’
- How oligarchy leads to environmental catastrophe: the sugar moguls of the Fanjul family are going to destroy the Everglades with their toxic effluent because Florida Governor Rick Scott refuses to enforce the will of the people
- Professor Roger J. Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado has spent years denying that he’s a climate change denier while minimizing the relationship between greenhouse gases and the costs of severe weather damage. Now his awkward ‘everyone does it’ defense of Dr. Wei-Hock Soon, the scientist whose research was recently exposed as paid industry propaganda, has itself been exposed as baseless — which is ironic, because Pielke is fending off Congressman Raul Grijalva’s investigation of his funding sources
- Jonathan Chait explains how the “reformers” of the GOP have defaulted back to the party’s usual agenda of upward wealth transfers
- In the last five years, the majority of American states have cut both their crime rates and their prison populations at the same time
- Charles Koch keeps trying to frame himself as a social liberal. Don’t be fooled!
- House Republicans are trying to protect bank overdraft practices on prepaid cards against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed new rules
- The single best explanation for the sharp increase in suicide among the middle-aged in America is financial distress caused by austerity policy
- More liberals definitely need to read this Asam Ahmad note about progressive infighting
- More American cities are using ‘at large’ voting to suppress Latino votes
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach claims that President Obama may try to stop all future prosecutions of African Americans
