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 New York Magazine cover of Bill Cosby’s alleged victims, our Threatcon Color Code is PUDDING POP BROWN
- David Daleiden appears to have committed fraud and used a real woman’s identity to make his fraudulent ‘sting videos,’ and California once again leads the way in transparency on a major right wing hoax aimed at getting graphic images on the air. The Republican bill to defund Planned Parenthood is plainly-coordinated pandering to some of the most violent psychopaths and creepy stalking weirdos in the forced-birth movement
- A new paper from the Harvard Shorenstein Center and based on interviews with GOP officeholders confirms that Republican politicians are being forced to adopt extreme positions by their right wing media
- Why are psychologists way more liberal than the general population? Because social science contradicts libertarian moral fables. This is exactly why Republicans despise the social sciences and consistently try to defund them
- Put this on a Post-It note: ultrasound pictures don’t change the minds of women who make up their minds to have abortions
- The Satanic Temple monument originally meant for Oklahoma was unveiled in Detroit, Michigan with a big ol’ gay kiss
- Oklahoma Republican Party Chairman Randy Brogdon wants his state to just start ignoring Roe v Wade
- Actual racist fascism: rapper Tiny Doo faces possible life imprisonment for the crime of releasing an album thanks to a zealous prosecutor with a novel theory
- Get ready for another round of ‘liberal media’-enabled Benghazi conspiracy theorists monopolizing your social media. Hollywood blockbuster director Michael Bay has a new film about “the ex-military elites who, without any support from the U.S. military, were charged with liberating the compound during the battle” premiering in January
- Year of the Woman, a heretofore-lost documentary about the amazing women who crashed the gates of the 1972 Democratic National Convention, is now available for your viewing pleasure
- As president, New Jersey’s bridge-closing governor Chris Christie promises to waste federal money trying to shut down legal marijuana
- I’ve already noted the phenomenon of white people parading in pickup trucks, waving confederate flags, and harassing black motorists to show how not-racist they are. One such horde in Georgia decided to interrupt a black child’s birthday party with threats and bigoted slurs on Saturday to show us all how hateful their heritage is
- Criminalizing the burning of confederate flags: Colorado Springs police arrested Black Lives Matter activist Patricia Cameron for fourth-degree arson…three weeks after her “crime.” Let’s hope she doesn’t die of a mysterious hanging in her cell! Matthew Becker of Pennsylvania was arrested for setting fire to a flag that was still attached to someone else’s truck, which is a serious no-no, people
- I’ve served under retired US Army General Russell Honore, who just displayed his own big brass ones by calling out American gun culture and its recruiter-station fairy tales. In the wake of accidental gunfire outside an Ohio recruiting office, the Pentagon has already asked ammosexuals to please stop trying to ‘help.’ Will they ever get the message?
- Sen. Ted Cruz keeps claiming sole credit for Purple Hearts that other senators actually worked very hard to award the Fort Hood victims of Nidal Hassan
- Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Charles Koch) and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-David Koch) are scheming to destroy the Veterans Administration on behalf of their billionaire sponsors. The Kochs have consistently sought to inflame the appointments scandal and exploit it for their agenda
- The New York Times‘s latest hit piece on Hillary has backfired spectacularly by calling attention to the paper’s longstanding bias against the Clintons
- Texas Governor Greg Abbott seems to be taking his marching orders from the Church of Scientology
- A Sioux Falls, South Dakota coffee shop owner says the crowd of angry people at his business has been hired by a title loan mogul who opposes his efforts to cap interest rates at 36 percent
- Why do National Review writers always denounce liberals and progressives as Nazis? Because of the magazine’s origin as an anti-Semitic publication and its constant support of fascists over the decades, of course. Why does molestation-apologist and Beyoncé-critic Mike Huckabee say that President Obama is “marching Israelis to the door of the oven“? Because he’s a Christofascist, of course. Thus endeth the day’s lesson in right wing psychological projection
- How did Richmond, California drastically reduce homicide rates? By identifying the most likely individuals to shoot someone or be shot, then offering them a program with a stipend to turn their lives around. A side effect: increased personal responsibility
- Repeat after me: Ohio Governor John Kasich is not a moderate on abortion
- An Alabama woman who had begun a legal fight to obtain an abortion while being held in the Lauderdale County lockup has changed her mind. While she is certainly free to choose whatever she wants, and even says she has not been coerced, I suspect the administrative opposition of Sheriff Rick Singleton and District Attorney Chris Connolly’s efforts to revoke her parental rights may have factored in her decision anyway, and I’ll wager that her fellow prisoners were not supportive, nor her family. Knowing both men personally and having watched them radicalized by tea party insanity, it is extremely disappointing, but not really a surprise, to see them descend into forced-birth activism in an effort to build up conservative credibility. That’s especially true for Connolly, who was a Democrat until this March
- The following video may be an accidentally-revealing classic
- Sovereign Governor: remember Maine’s amazing governor Paul LePage and his friends in the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement? As part of LePage’s kooky war on his constitutional veto powers, the Aroostook Watchmen are now submitting amicus briefs that claim the legislature is committing treason
- Congressional Republicans have left Washington upon passing yet another three-month fix to the Transportation Bill because all of their long-term funding ideas are idiotic. Here’s a crazy thought: just raise the stupid gas tax already
- Here’s how you level the field for domestic violence victims: give them lawyers, too, just like their abusers
- The Republican Party has lost popularity lately…with Republicans
- America is even less socially-mobile than you thought
- On behalf of its petrochemical members, ALEC, the Koch brothers’ bill mill which has produced climate change-denial legislation all over the country, is now indulging in bee extinction denial, too
- Need tips on how to survive the next theater shooting? Never fear, because Matthew Hagee, son of John “Blood Moons” Hagee, says “duck”
- Abortion foes organized an #UnplannedParenthood hashtag event (‘Twitter bomb’) to tell us entirely too much about their parents’ sex lives and decry Planned Parenthood taking part in a completely, totally, absolutely legal fetal tissue donations system that was originally set up by Congress. I had a few things to say about how ignorant and destructive (and Rand Paul-centric) this smear campaign is
- Bob Cesca is correct: Louis Gohmert really is the dumbest person in Congress now that Steve Stockman is no longer representing Texas, or Michele Bachmann Minnesota
- Watch these conservative activists in Iowa explain why they fear Iran (hint: they are profoundly ignorant about Iran — and the whole Middle East, for that matter)
Matt: Thank you for both covering and getting deserved national attention (via C&L) for the Lauderdale County Jane Doe story. It is very frustrating to watch the ideological nightmare known as the GOPTP blatantly exert control in Alabama. And way too many good people have, apparently, given up hope of seeing anything resembling a return to sanity.