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 sketchy death of Sandra Bland while in police custody over a missed turn signal, our Threatcon Color Code is BLINKER-FLUID RED
- In case you haven’t heard, there were serious discrepancies in the dash-camera video of Sandra Bland’s arrest, but now the corrected video has been released without glitches. Law enforcement apologists are trying to suggest that Bland was “argumentative and uncooperative,” which in this case translates to ‘uppity and black.’ (Isn’t it amazing how some people are all about FREEDUMB and LIBERTEEZ until a black person knows their Constitutional rights in the face of a control freak with a badge, whereupon they are all about some law and order?) Whether or not Ms. Bland committed suicide, which her family and friends dispute, her death certainly underlines the widespread problem of mysterious deaths in American jailhouses
- As excited as I am about Bernie Sanders, he does have flaws, and his more conspiracy-minded fans have visibly grappled with the incident in Arizona last week. Netroots Nation is a diverse community that brings together bloggers, policy wonks, organizers, activists, and all sorts of people who are extremely passionate about their issues. Over the years, Bill Clinton has dealt with protesters in the audience; so has Joe Biden; so has Nancy Pelosi; so has Valerie Jarrett; even Howard Dean, who is potentially the closest recent analogue to Sanders, can’t speak to Netroots without a bit of heckling. So no, Sanders fans, it wasn’t a plot against your candidate, it was just Netroots being Netroots
- On the other hand, #BlackLivesMatter is not actually in anybody’s pocket and all the Democratic candidates can still leverage the issue to reassemble the Obama coalition if they try
- Reading this Ezra Klein piece carefully, my takeaway is that President Obama has become more liberal but the Washington consensus has become more conservative. No matter which Democrat were to actually win the presidency, without a major pair of electoral coattails they will face this same problem of a Republican-controlled Congress bending the legislative trend line to the right
- Congressional Democrats trolled their Republican colleagues with a ‘compromise’ bill that would let them have the confederate flag in exchange for restoration of the Voting Rights Act. Dems enjoy a small lead in favorability nationwide
- Phillip Sims of Alabama was fired from his job after he refused to remove a confederate flag from his truck in the employee parking lot. What’s next, people getting fired for having a John Kerry bumper sticker on their car? Or for being gay? Or for wearing an orange shirt? Or for posting on Facebook? Or for no reason at all? Surely Mr. Sims is now ready to discuss the need for better worker protections, an end to “at-will” employment, anti-discrimination laws, and the important role of unions in upholding our rights at work? Surely? …Mr. Sims? Hello?
- American workers don’t know how bad they’ve got it. To really understand the great screwing-over of the middle and working class in this country over the last forty years, you need to live in another country for awhile
- Latent white supremacists are very sad at the tragic death of their dissonant black friend Anthony Hervey, who loved the confederate flag, and they’re not prepared to believe his death was an accident
- Pluto truthers are an actual thing, I am not even making this up
- The Klan rally last weekend in Columbia, SC did not go very well, especially when this tuba player showed up to troll them on the march:
- Major kudos to the Obama administration for finally cracking down on the
vulturespredatory lenders lined up outside the front gates of every US military installation. This has been such a readiness problem for decades now that all four services have specialized staff on every post to warn servicemen and women about it during their inprocessing, to help them avoid fraud and abuse, and to advise those who fall prey to the title loans and used car dealers - The latest Planned Parenthood ‘sting video’ is just as fake and fraudulent as the last one, but that isn’t stopping Sen. Thom Tillis (R-SC) from screwing veterans to get at the organization
- In concert with the previous point, Republican Senate leaders are now looking to pay for highways by screwing over the old and disabled. As a former transportation policy blogger, this is easily the worst funding idea I have ever heard
- Former soft-core porn star and current Cliven Bundy fan Michelle Fiore, who has said that cancer is a kind of fungus, owns a home healthcare business which is now being investigated for fraud
- If Obama’s secret plan is to take away all your guns, then he’s doing a really lousy job of it
- Christian conservatives are souring on Pope Francis
- David Salha of Michigan wants to turn his extensive property into a youth camp, but he’s run into problems with kooky neighbors who worry that it’s a terrorist training camp
- The god that failed: the Duggar family is very sad and confused that their show was cancelled. After all, they were so sure that their deity wanted them on television
- Another NRA talking point goes up in smoke: at least two victims of last week’s shooting at a Chattanooga military recruitment center did in fact shoot back. Also, Jeb Bush’s claim that a Clinton-era law banned guns at recruiting offices is patently false
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: Pastor John ‘Blood Moons’ Hagee indulges the Planned Parenthood smear videos by comparing the organization to Hitler’s Third Reich, which is hilarious to historians because Hitler actually banned abortion in Germany
- Last week, the Drury Inn of Montgomery, AL hosted Operation Save America, a gathering of right wing homophobes and anti-abortion extremists which we covered here at BU. This week, employees at a Des Moines, Iowa Drury Inn managed to get a transgender customer arrested on mere suspicion, with zero proof. Does this family-owned, Missouri-based hotel chain have a corporate bigotry problem? Rest assured that I will keep an eye on the issue
- North Dakota’s ‘fetal heartbeat’ law was one of the strictest in the country, but it was struck down by a federal court and now a court of appeals has upheld the decision
- Why is abortion unavailable in a whole region of Montana? Because violence and intimidation worked
- As the confederacy’s reputation suffers, so does the reputation of Ulysses S. Grant rise. I have read his autobiography, studied Shiloh battlefield firsthand, and rate him one of America’s best generals
- Last of the giants: American culture warriors are too invested in the bogeyman Iran to let it go. The people clamoring to kill the nuclear deal are the same alarmists who wanted to invade Iran before
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ news roundup: Dustin Lee Gunnels of Georgia was arrested during a traffic stop because he kept reaching for another of the six loaded guns in his car, but luckily white privilege prevented him from being gunned down in a hail of lead; Heidi Lynn Webster, wanted for contract fraud against the US Army, was also captured without incident
- Another libertarian idea explodes: the most common characteristic of successful entrepreneurs is access to capital, i.e. being born rich
- American courtrooms are not the bastions of fairness we imagine they are — for anybody
- The silly season is getting started: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum and George Pataki will all attend Frank Gaffney’s crank conspiracy conference
- For years now, I have been warning progressives against the creeping white supremacy and fascism within such ostensibly-leftist publications as CounterPunch.com that tout an alliance with nativist figures like Ron Paul. Now a quantitative analysis has hard numbers showing CP is a right wing reactionary propaganda site pretending otherwise
