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 continued efforts of Republican governors to shut down Planned Parenthood over broadly-debunked hoax videos, our Threatcon Color Code is INVISIBLE BRIDGE
- Last weekend, token brain surgeon and 2016 Republican presidential aspirant Ben Carson claimed that the legal fetal tissue donation scheme in which Planned Parenthood takes part has little or no impact on scientific or medical advances. Which is hysterically funny now, because it turns out that Carson has used fetal tissue in his own research — and his excuse for the hypocrisy is really, really lame
- Scientists (such as token brain surgeon Ben Carson) are now afraid to talk about their life-saving research because anti-abortion zealots are so violent
- Attempts to strip Planned Parenthood of state-level funding may be violations of federal law
- Planned Parenthood cuts in Texas will cut off breast and cervical cancer screenings for poor women because, y’know, life is so precious
- Bioethicists are denouncing the Planned Parenthood ‘sting’ videos as the same old anti-abortion arguments wrapped up in a fraudulent narrative
- Carly Fiorina wants to make women give birth to babies they don’t want, but they had better not ask for paid time off work afterwards
- Repeat after me: reducing abortion access does not reduce demand one little bit
- Alabama leads the country in criminalizing pregnancy to force birth
- Speaking of invisible bridges: historian and author Rick Perlstein has been assailed this week for declaring the POW/MIA flag to be “racist” in an essay which focused on the banner’s origins as a Nixon-era PR campaign intended to prolong hostilities with Vietnam. Joining Fox News in the outrage chorus: white supremacist website Stormfront (link rehosted). Perlstein has apologized for being “over the top” — a phrase born in the First World War, which is ironic, as tens of thousands of missing soldiers from that conflict have never been located or identified
- Arkansas state representative Justin Harris, who gave his adopted daughters to a child molester after exorcisms failed to remove her “demons,” was supposed to receive a ‘courage’ award at a Family Council Action Committee event headlined by Ted Cruz yesterday, but the presentation was postponed. Harris will still receive the prize at a later time
- North Carolina open carry supporter and ‘good guy with a gun’ Shawn Fuller, who has annoyed his neighbors for years with his full-throated ammosexuality, killed his sons and then failed in his ensuing suicide attempt
- Ecological debt: humans have used up a year’s worth of resources in just the first eight months of the year. This is actually more serious and hard to fix than a fiscal deficit
- The free market has spoken: despite $200 million in government subsidies, New Zealand coal producer Solid Energy is bankrupt due to falling prices (read: declining demand)
- Do black lives matter? Southern, rural black women and their families fare worse on all primary indicators: health, incomes, and outcomes
- Black Lives Matter activists blocking a highway experienced someone trying to run them over — and instead of charging the driver, the police charged the protesters
- Why do liberals lose elections? Because they suck at working together
- The continuing decline of Rush Limbaugh: he’s lost more stations because his brand is “toxic”
- Idiocracy: Indiana republicans have done such a good job of beating up on teachers that no one wants to work there anymore
- Donald Trump really is consuming all the oxygen in the Republican presidential race
- The current economic recovery is not floating all boats equally. Guess which demographics are being left high and dry
- Watch Colonel Ty Seidule, the head of the History department at West Point demolish the most common myth about the confederacy
6. What’s “barbaric,” @govsambrownback, is denying thousands access to birth control, STD testing & treatment, & cancer screenings. #ksleg
— PP Advocates Kansas (@PPKansas) August 12, 2015
- Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis is defying court orders to marry same-sex couples
- A gay high school basketball player was deleted from his yearbook
- Jeb Bush is demonstrably wrong about who negotiated America’s withdrawal from Iraq and wants to bring back torture because it worked so well
- War on drugs: Harris County, Texas sheriff’s deputies are conducting unconstitutional roadside cavity searches
- Armed Oath Keepers are playing private security for a welfare miner using public lands in Montana
- The white supremacist League of the South takes the prize for most active protest group in the era of confederate flag removal
- Democrat Taylor Bennett won a special election for a Republican-held Georgia state house seat — by running against the anti-gay ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’
