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 falsified training reports for 73 year-old Tulsa Reserve Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Bates, our Threatcon Color Code is TASER YELLOW
- Bates’s badge, and his apparently-accidental killing of an unarmed suspect, is an example of what happens when local political favoritism overwhelms common sense and puts dilettantes in uniforms. I have been trying to raise the alarm about this issue for years now. The problem invariably begins with the top cop in any given law enforcement agency; these arrangements always make a mockery of their training and vetting standards, harming police morale
- Intransigence evaded: Sen. Bob Corker’s bill changes absolutely nothing important about President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran; Benjamin Netanyahu’s biggest complaint is that Iran will actually adhere to it
- Professor and author Alice Dreger live-tweeted her son’s abstinence-only sex ‘education’ class, and it was as full of misinformation and sexual shaming as you probably expect
- Chris Weigant is correct: if Hillary Clinton wants to earn the enthusiasm of liberal blogs, she should brave the storm and show up for Netroots Nation
- When right wing laws collide: Joan Cheever of San Antonio, Texas will use that state’s ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ to try and overturn a local ordinance that prevents her from feeding the homeless
- Responsibility for California’s drought weighs heavily on the state’s agricultural sector, whose water use is being monitored for the very first time. As a result, expect more defensive articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal
- Twitter is going through several long-overdue changes to prevent abuse and harassment. They are also changing their permitted API call rate, causing high-frequency accounts to get locked up and shutting down some ‘team followback’ services such as Unite Blue. I’ve never been a fan of either technique, as they make the most genuine activism look artificial
- Black and Asian authors in the United Kingdom say they are increasingly forced to shoehorn their stories into acceptable stereotypes by an industry that has gone backwards on diversity
- Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin worries that right wing activists have permanently broken the Hugo awards for science fiction
- Watch this right wing Tea Party activist suddenly realize he might have to vote for a Democrat if he wants to keep his health insurance under the Affordable Care Act:
- Congressional Republicans are spending this week trying to kill the inheritance tax so that billionaire children never have to lift a finger in their lives
- Due to budget cuts at the IRS, you can get away with tax cheating as long as it’s not over $1 million
- Hate the way we pay taxes? Don’t blame the IRS, blame the tax filing industry. Intuit alone has shelled out millions of lobbying dollars in recent years to prevent the federal government from making tax filing easier
- If you think fast food workers deserve a raise, then you’ll be appalled at how little full-service restaurant workers make
- Oklahoma is copying Kansas’s “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban so it can be overturned in a federal court at taxpayer expense
- Garden City, Kansas police arrested medical marijuana user Shona Banda for the ‘crime’ of relieving her Crohn’s Disease after her son tried to correct classroom misinformation from a DARE officer
- Pamela Anderson has killed off whatever remained of PETA’s credibility by endorsing Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jailhouse cafeteria for serving vegetarian “slop”
- The true price of our “freedom:” gun violence costs every American $700 a year
- Last week, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility claimed that the Bureau of Land Management remains completely paralyzed by militia activity a year after the standoff at Bundy Ranch. This week, Bundy supporter Will Michael pleaded guilty to charges of threatening a BLM official. Rick Barclay, co-owner of the Oregon Sugar Pine Mine who recently called in the Oath Keepers to provide “security” in a dispute with the BLM, now regrets the decision: “We don’t need any more volunteers, we’re not under attack, this is not the Bundy Ranch…Please stop calling the BLM and threatening their personnel”
- ‘White privilege’ defined: watch these Arizona police display amazing restraint as a family of good, clean, Christian white folks punch, wrestle, and even shoot them
- In North Carolina, charter schools are just an excuse for white parents to resegregate their kids, and legislators ‘protect’ women by prohibiting medical students from learning how to give safe abortions
- How did this autistic 6th grader become a criminal for kicking a trash can? Virginia schools refer students to law enforcement at three times the national rate, and of course special needs and minority students bear the brunt of the trend
- SeaWorld tried hiring protesters to counter a demonstration outside its gates in Orlando. It didn’t go well
- Belief in a god can increase nonmoral risk-taking — and when consequences ensue, believers are likely to get mad at their god for failing to protect them
- 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio’s Southern Baptist megachurch inflicts a perfect storm of creationist nonsense, homophobia, and belief in demonic possession on its parishioners
- The clean energy tipping point is here: the world now adds more renewable energy capacity every year than oil, coal, and gas combined. This year will see the largest-ever wave of coal-fired electric plants shutting down. There will never be a better time to pass the ACHE Act and end mountaintop removal mining forever
- Two Nebraska ‘sovereign citizens’ were arrested for DUI in Belleview despite refusing to cooperate with traffic police
- At The Daily Beast, Brea Tremblay recalls her childhood experience with ‘sovereign citizen’ beliefs
- Deluded Idaho Republicans have killed a bill to make the state compliant with federal child support regulations after State Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll objected over a ridiculous conspiracy theory involving Sharia law
- Anti-gay hate group Family Research Council will host yet another Israel trip with prominent Republicans, including 2016 presidential candidates Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum