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 rampant conspiracy theories of a military takeover being taken seriously by the Republican governor of Texas, our Threatcon Color Code is JADE HELM
- The chupacabra-like talk radio meme about the US military invading Texas under the guise of a standard training exercise became popular in that state because there’s so much anti-federal activity and secessionist thinking there. As Rachel Maddow explained last night, when mainstream Republicans choose to entertain this nonsense, they are responding to the new reality of the polarized conservative base, which no longer has any sort of filter against cockamamie fringe ideas. Which is scary, since Jade Helm isn’t even the most insane conspiracy theory being floated about Texas by an elected Republican these days
- JADE MINE: Armed, anti-environment ‘Oath Keepers’ have been occupying a small Oregon town for more than two weeks over a conspiracy theory involving the Bureau of Land Management, but for some reason no major media organization seems interested in capturing their hilariously-deluded reactions to random helicopter sightings
- JADE WOMB: as predicted by most observers, Colorado Republicans have killed the country’s most successful teen pregnancy prevention program because so many conservatives today are convinced that intrauterine devices (IUDs) are just little abortion factories. Ironically, this deranged measure will increase the number of actual, real, not-imaginary abortions in Colorado
- JADE CANDIDATE: 2016 Republican presidential candidate and token brain surgeon Ben Carson seems very confused by the American constitutional system when he talks about “judicial law”
- JADE ACORN: Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp exhibits a disturbing pattern of investigating minority voter registration volunteers — and the names of many 2014 registrants still haven’t appeared on the rolls
- JADE TWEETS: Did you hear that Hollywood A-list director Joss Whedon deleted his Twitter account because the horrible, angry feminists were mean to him? Misogyny took a big hit in its quest for acceptance this week when Whedon debunked that story himself
- JADE SURPLUS: How did North Carolina Republicans manage to avoid the expected budget meltdown their tax cuts were creating? By shifting the tax burden onto workers and small businesses, of course
- JADE HATRED: Four Germans were just arrested for plotting to attack prominent Muslims and mosques in that country. Bear this story in mind whenever birther nut and professional Islamophobe Pamela Geller validates her hate campaign against Muslims by referring to the failed attack on her ridiculous ‘cartoon’ contest in Garland, TX last weekend. Geller and her friend Robert Spencer head 17% of all the Islamophobia organizations in America
- JADE ARGUMENT: Sean Hannity brought Geller on his show to debate radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary, a framing which conveniently works for the benefit of hate groups by marginalizing the vast majority of both Christians and Muslims
- JADE BIGOT: California developer, skateboarder, and Christian shoe promoter Randall Herman’s new first person shooter game, Kill The Faggot, has been removed from the Steam downloadable game store for obvious reasons
- JADE LAWSUIT: Sylvia Driskell of Omaha, Nebraska is suing every gay person in the world on behalf of Jesus
- JADE RABBIT: DEA special agent Matt Fairbanks told a Utah senate committee that medical marijuana legalization will lead directly to attacks by drug-addicted bunnies
- JADE PROTEST: Radical forced-birth activist group Abolish Human Abortion has set out to close Mississippi’s last clinic using aggressive, know-nothing tactics that backfire on them with the community
- JADE ULTRASOUND: As expected, the Alabama House Health Committee voted yesterday to send three bills to the floor aimed at restricting reproductive freedom in the state, including legislation which would force pregnant women to undergo an invasive ultrasound procedure to detect any fetal heartbeat. The author of HB 491, a ‘conscience clause’ bill which duplicates and expands on existing federal law, defends the measure as a way to keep the evil Dr. Frankenstein out of his state
- JADE SATAN: A Missouri Satanist is challenging the state’s 72-hour waiting period for an abortion on religious liberty grounds
- JADE LATE-TERM: This account of one woman’s late-term abortion dispels many myths propagated by opponents of access — and shows how uncaring and cruel their efforts to stop such procedures really are
- JADE DISEASE: The Crane Independent School District in Texas has an abstinence-only sex ed program and the chlamydia outbreak to prove it
- JADE WAGES: Adjusting for inflation, California’s poorest workers make less now than they did in 1979. Meanwhile, yet another study finds that tax cuts for the rich do not boost the economy
- JADE COPS: Of America’s fifty largest cities, only one has a police department that reflects the diversity of the population it serves
- JADE OPPORTUNITY: Baltimore, Maryland is the single worst place in America to grow up poor and male; Washington, DC has the highest infant mortality rate of any capital city in the developed world. White Americans are finally starting to wake up to the sad reality that their society is not ‘post -racial’ at all
- JADE WORK: Republicans in twelve states are trying to attach a work requirement to the Medicaid expansion program under the Affordable Care Act. Among the reasons why this makes no sense except as political grandstanding: the majority of able-bodied people who qualify for Medicaid are already working
- JADE CLIMATE: In cutting NASA’s Earth science budget, congressional Republicans have gone from saying ‘I’m not a scientist’ to preventing actual scientists from doing science and trying to erase all the science from public policy
- JADE CARBON: Tesla’s Powerwall battery will revolutionize the electric grid and make 100% renewable energy possible. Solar power is already penetrating the Third World without a grid the same way cellphones have. The end of carbon-based civilization is not the future, it is happening right now, which is why Bank of America will no longer finance coal projects. We need this to happen because global carbon dioxide levels are higher than humans have ever known
- JADE POLLUTION: More than 90% of water wells tested within 1000 feet of Duke Energy coal ash impoundments fail state drinking water standards due to contamination
- JADE GUNS: Predictably, the NRA is freaking out over Oregon’s new Firearms Safety Act, which closes the biggest loophole in background checks
- JADE MILITIA: The US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against three members of the Hutaree Militia who claimed the FBI violated their civil rights by obtaining warrants to seize their weapons cache in 2010
- JADE RACISM: Based on internet search information and mortality statistics, here is a map of the most racist areas in the United States
- JADE TAXES: Polls show that Americans want income taxes to do a better job of redistributing wealth
- JADE OWNERSHIP: Colorado ‘sovereign citizen’ David Merrill claims to have legally acquired cultural landmark Bishop Castle from its eccentric, cancer-stricken owner, but the conservative PolitiChicks have serious doubts based on Merrill’s extensive record of abuse and fraud
- JADE UNIVERSITY: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wants to balance the state budget by breaking the state’s higher education establishment
- JADE ELECTION: While it’s gratifying to see Senator Bernie Sanders raising lots of money and volunteers to turn the Democratic 2016 presidential nomination process into an actual race — especially when Hillary Clinton’s donors are trying to hide in the dark — it’s worth noting that her poll numbers are still going up regardless. Given the enthusiastic reception that she just got from immigration activists, I’m keeping my expectations for Sanders low
Thanks, Matt, for those brilliant and astonishingly comprehensive summaries of the raging nuttiness infesting the laughable wackadoodle conservative lunatics. I started to write “lunatic fringe,” but the obvious prevalence of so much simultaneous nonsense suggests that it takes more than fringe element to keep this kind of rank nonsense going. As long as there are “true believers” whose criterion for belief consists of nothing more than a DESIRE to believe, we will continue to see this kind of pandemic paranoia running loose upon the land.