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 Amtrak disaster in Pennsylvania, our Threatcon Color Code is STOPLIGHT RED
- While I cannot improve on Rachel Maddow’s coverage last night, I want to reinforce her thesis: this week’s utterly-preventable Amtrak crash is an example of disastrous Republican transportation priorities, such as continuing opposition to President Obama’s proposals for Amtrak repairs. We seldom appreciate that this is a highly-developed culture war issue on the right, and incidents like this one are the intended outcome — features, not bugs. In recent years, the Jade Helm demographic has succeeded in passing actual state laws against an Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. Along with various sustainability, renewable energy, and modernization initiatives, these efforts target transit and rail for cuts according to a ridiculous ‘free market’ ideology cooked up in the Koch policy machine. Since 2009, Republican governors have killed almost all of Obama’s high speed rail projects while canceling upgrades to existing passenger and commuter rail systems. The Republican Congress has consistently tried to cap transportation spending, refused to raise the gas tax, and attempted to cut rail’s share of federal transportation spending. The conservative intelligentsia reflects these car-centric priorities by devaluing railroads as a socialist enterprise (whereas taxpayer-built highways are somehow not). America already has a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure gap, including badly-needed modernization of water and sanitation lines that are more than a century old in many American communities, but the Heritage Foundation denounces any spending on these concrete problems as ‘socialism.’ Now that the Republican governor of austerity-plagued Kansas is cutting the state highway budget, too, you can expect roads and bridges to be the next scenes of GOP-created infrastructure disasters and “shock doctrine” solutions. Rather than spend a penny of borrowed money on infrastructure upgrades when interest rates are at historical lows, conservatives would let a mythical ‘free market’ unicorn ‘creatively destroy’ the decrepit results of their deliberate squeeze on federal and state spending. The infrastructure built by America’s ‘greatest generation’ is being allowed to deteriorate through sheer criminal negligence — with privatization as the intended outcome
- Pursuant to the previous point, right wing blogs are working double overtime to infer or invent an explanation for the Pennsylvania Amtrak accident that absolves the GOP of its criminal negligence. Most of these efforts seem to be falling on the engineer. Regardless of human error, this crash absolutely would have been prevented by upgrades that have been delayed for years due to budget cuts and are already the standard in other countries
- If you like what Republicans have done for the American railroad, just wait til you see what they’re doing to higher education and have already done to our prisons
- A new study finds that climate denialists have succeeded in keeping climate scientists too busy to do any science
- Your ‘free market’ at work: every year, the coal industry uses creative accounting tricks and regulatory loopholes to cheat taxpayers out of billions in royalties
- The American safety net is more effective at reducing poverty than we previously knew. (This is also exactly why Republicans keep trying to shame poor people and cut their benefits)
- Mike Huckabee is defending his endorsement of a quack diabetes cure
- Did you know that anyone can become a police officer in Indiana and Arkansas without any formal training whatsoever? Low standards are how white supremacists get badges
- Karen Speitel has resigned from her California neighborhood council after posting her view that “illegals should have to work like slaves for free” on Facebook
- Anti-LGBT rhetoric on the ‘Christian right’ is growing more violent
- Lunatic torture advocate and former Congressmen Allen West thinks alcohol ordinances are ‘Sharia law‘
- Jeb Bush’s brother, who created ISIS, is also Jeb’s Middle East adviser. It only took Jeb five appearances to finally say he wouldn’t have made the same mistake, given what we know today
- 2016 GOP presidential aspirant and token brain surgeon Ben Carson doesn’t seem to understand his own tax plan or the American constitutional system of government
- Dear religious conservatives: please remember that every time you react to tragedy by invoking culture wars and saying your god “is love,” you create another atheist
- F is for Fascist: fresh off his party’s electoral victory, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron says the United Kingdom is “too tolerant” and ‘should not let people live their lives as they please just because they obey the law’
- See man defy Obamacare’s insurance mandate — because FREEDUMB! See man develop severe health problems — because FREEDUMB! See that same man whine about Obama now because his conservative state won’t accept Medicaid expansion. FREEEEEDUMMMB!
- Republican Wyoming state senators are trying to make it illegal for citizens to document pollution
- The never ending electoral shenanigans of Ohio Republicans: now they want to pass an unconstitutional poll tax
- Neither truth nor consequences: the execrable Lee Stranahan has been re-hired by Breitbart News
- Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, inveterate billionaire sponsor of right wing causes and politicians, has testified in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit alleging corporate ties to organized crime in Macau
- Larry Pratt, head of the extremist group Gun Owners of America, wants to tear up the voter registration cards of any new citizens
- Lawrence O’Donnell deconstructs Fox News ignoramus Greta van Susteren’s twisted attempt to blame the Jade Helm nontroversy on President Obama:
- When it comes to nuclear arms and disarmament, remember that the so-called ‘realists’ are actually “nuclear romantics” who treat The Bomb like a magic talisman against human nature
- Operation Rescue’s claim that a Nebraska woman suffered a botched abortion turns out to be a complete fabrication: she went to the clinic to escape domestic violence
- This is what forced-birth activists want for American girls: Paraguay’s health department is forcing a 10 year-old abuse victim to carry her rapist’s baby to term. Amnesty International calls it “tantamount to torture;” I call it “enslavement by fetus”
- As I have kept saying for two years now, almost all of the attention cast on the NSA over fears of government surveillance is completely misplaced. If you’re worried about federal authorities breaking rules and spying on activists in order to undermine democracy on behalf of corporate interests, look no farther than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you’re worried about all your movements being monitored, take it up with your boss, not the government
- Have you heard that FEMA has prepared for the New World Order by fitting railcars with shackles? The origins of this conspiracy hoax go back to the 1990s
- A California judge has ordered the Clovis Independent School District to teach kids facts and science about their bodies instead of ‘abstinence-only’ fairy tales
- Madison, Wisconsin ‘sovereign citizen’ Scott Bodley has been sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for his war against the IRS
- Underlining the racist origins of the ‘sovereign citizen’ phenomenon, Jeffrey Klinkel has been arrested for sending fake Anthrax letters to a Jewish community center and synagogue
- Underlining the banal criminality at the heart of ‘sovereign citizen’ activities, Bibb County, GA deputy Albert Gordon Murray was arrested last week for filing false liens and papers on a house he did not own — a scheme he pulled from the sovereign citizen handbook
- Integration theory in a nutshell: the human brain has a very strong racial bias, but we achieve empathy for people unlike ourselves by spending time with them
- The UN Human Rights Council has criticized the United States for police violence and racial discrimination
- What does it say about the Fox News audience that, after two bubble-headed anchors discussed a race theory class at Arizona State University, white supremacist and neo-Nazi hate groups started harassing the professor?
