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 possible nuclear agreement with Iran, our Threatcon Color Code is JOHN BOLTON’S MUSTACHE
- Rapprochement with Iran, combined with a sea-change in the traditional American stance towards the Israeli peace process, portend a high tide of right wing apocalypse hysteria. During the 2016 presidential primary process, expect GOP candidates to fall all over each other in the struggle to be the most ardent advocate of Israeli apartheid, to make the loudest condemnations of Iran, etc.
- Direct flights and direct calls between Cuba and the United States have resumed after decades of sanctions
- As it becomes ever-clearer that Obamacare is not the disaster Republicans predicted, health insurance hypocrisies abound: Sen. Ted Cruz has leaped to the front of the Republican 2016 horse-race on the strength of his lies and obfuscations about putting his family on an Obamacare policy. Tennessee state senator Todd Gardenhire just denied 280,000 Americans health insurance by turning down Medicaid expansion, but he won’t give up his own taxpayer-subsidized insurance plan — and calls activists who ask him about it “assholes.” Meanwhile, as governors four GOP presidential hopefuls have applied for, and received, federal health care money under the law they criticize
- The indictment of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) should be a wake-up call about the dangers of dark money in politics. For while it is against the law for Menendez to lobby every department of the United States government on behalf of campaign contributor Salomon Melgen, it is perfectly legal for Melgen to spend unlimited, untraceable funds on nonprofit organizations that exist solely to support his friend’s reelection
- Kitchen nightmares: the Walkerton, Indiana pizzeria which became the state’s first business to declare itself off-limits to gay couples under the state’s controversial new ‘religious freedom’ act has already closed its doors because people were mean on the internet. Expect culture warriors to make the store owners into martyrs of intolerance through well-worn narratives of special pleading (see this mendacious WSJ piece, for example, or this Glen Beck clip)
- Indiana’s ‘religious freedom’ law is the latest example of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision encouraging reactionary homophobes to avenge themselves for the advance of marriage equality in federal courts. Judging by his defense of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush intends to run by appealing to those same extreme social conservatives. So does Rand Paul, even at the cost of alienating his ‘libertarian’ young Republican voters. GOP pollster Whit Ayres wants his party to adopt a “tone of inclusion and acceptance” if they are to have a hope of winning any voter under 30 next year
- Republican-created disease epidemics are a new thing: Gov. Pence has also tried closing down all the rural Planned Parenthood clinics in his state, creating a new HIV outbreak without preventing a single abortion. Now Texas Republicans want to redirect funding for HIV and STD prevention to ineffective ‘abstinence education’
- Former South Carolina GOP Chairman and full-time Twitter troll Todd Kincannon was arrested last week for threatening his wife, but claims he merely experienced an adverse reaction to a prescribed cough medicine. Kincannon has become infamous for racist, violent tweets, including many that approve of domestic abuse
- Conservative hoaxer James O’Keefe III has lost a libel suit against crime news website MainJustice for accurately reporting that he was arrested while attempting to wiretap then-Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Louisiana office in 2010
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: NYPD officer and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces member Patrick Cherry screams abuse at an Uber driver
- Science keeps exposing the conservative belief system: a study of attitudes survey data indicates that generous welfare benefits actually make people want to work more, not less
- Walmart workers are finally getting a raise, but it’s not enough to get them off public assistance. The same is true for McDonalds workers. Conservative economic arguments against a higher minimum wage make less sense all the time
- Talking to a reporter about the minimum wage can get you fired from your job — even if your boss is the one who introduced the reporter to you
- There are 61,000 structurally-deficient bridges in America, but the Republican-controlled Congress shows no sign of being able to pass any kind of long-term transportation bill before their May deadline
- Alabama Republican Governor Bill Bentley is asking the state’s Republican legislative supermajority to pass new taxes and close the state’s budget gap. Republican legislators are instead planning to eliminate the Department of Environmental Management altogether, take another large piece from the already-devastated budget for the Department of Mental Health, and make cuts to the court system so deep that Rich Hobson, director of the Administrative Office of Courts, says they would “end our branch” of government
- It’s not just homophobia: Indiana is also the first state to successfully prosecute a woman for feticide for allegedly self-aborting. Expect forced-birth advocates to duplicate the legislation elsewhere, criminalize miscarriage, and try to police pregnancies
- Freelance journalist Robin Marty writes about the courageous women behind Alabama Reproductive Rights Associates (ARRA). Regular readers will remember I described them as an “underground railroad” for reproductive freedom in Alabama
- Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s first campaign stop in the crucial state of New Hampshire was hosted by Jack Kimball, the Obama conspiracy nutter who was forced to resign as chair of the state party in 2011
- Ever wonder who writes the science headlines at Fox News? Hint: they’re not people with backgrounds in science
- This was completely predictable: Gordon Klingenschmitt, the recently-elected state representative for the conservative Christians of Colorado Springs, has been stripped of a committee post for making “insensitive” remarks about the grisly assault of a pregnant woman in Longmont
https://youtu.be/2nIeZurffic
- The continued decline of hate groups in America, after first rising in the immediate beginning of the Obama administration, has some people celebrating. I’m more pessimistic: the formal hate groups are only declining because their membership has moved into the informal anonymity of the internet
- Dallas mayoral candidate Richard Sheridan was arrested last week for spray painting “666” on locations that may have been meant to intimidate gay residents
- Paypal still won’t move to stop white supremacists and hate groups from using their service
- There is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ The very term is a dirty lie invented by the fossil fuel industry to gouge ratepayers and subsidize oil producers
- The North Carolina General Assembly has two bills in the pipeline that would aim to curb false filings by ‘sovereign citizens’
- Daniel Thomas Drum, the ‘sovereign citizen’ arrested squatting in a Crestline, CA vacation home last year, has been committed to the mental health system for three years so he can be restored to sanity for trial
- Welfare rancher Cliven Bundy showed up in Carson City, NV with supporters and militia goons to advocate for a bill denouncing federal control of public lands in the state. The bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore, is a longtime Bundy partisan who also believes that cancer is a fungus
- Bradenton, Florida African American restaurant owner Jim Copening says the Ku Klux Klan is making threats and possibly attacking his employees
- Montana militia ‘patriot’ and American Spring ‘activist’ William Krisstofer Wolf has been arrested for trying to buy an automatic, sawed-off shotgun from a federal agent in order “to clean house”
- How did corporations take over the First Amendment in the US Supreme Court? The story begins with Justice Lewis Powell and his infamous memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce
