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 yesterday’s Glenn Beck rally against the Iran nuclear nonproliferation deal, our Threatcon Color Code is GOING ROUGE
- While in one sense, GOP histrionics over the Iran deal are just pure political theater because they can’t actually do much to block it, and seem to be their own worst enemy on the issue, on another level their frantic reactions demonstrate an increasingly right-wing bent among the richest tranche of Jewish donors as well as the complete triumph of End Times paranoia within the party. Yesterday’s event in Washington, DC was covered in Sarah Palin’s sparkly fairy dust, a potent substance that makes wingnuts forget all of the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous wars. Ted Cruz attended while the news broke that Glenn Beck’s favorite homophobic pseudo-historian will run Cruz’s super PAC
- National Geographic has given up on their nonprofit status and become a Rupert Murdoch property
- Moments after Christofascist heroine Kim Davis was freed from jail, where she had been held for contempt of court, her lawyers vowed she would defy the terms of her release. At her triumphant press conference, Mike Huckabee admits his staffers blocked Ted Cruz from joining them on the stage. But Huckabee’s choice of entry music for Davis, ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ has been challenged by the musical group Survivor, who are considering a lawsuit. Davis also recieved an offer of bodyguard services from the Oath Keepers militia. If you are having trouble keeping up with Kim Davis’s marriages, here is a flow chart; if you don’t understand her belief system, here is an explanation
- Huckabee also had a chance to demonstrate that his views on religious freedom are nonsectarian, but refused to support Muslim flight attendant Charee Stanley, who was recently suspended for refusing to serve alcohol to passengers, thus confirming what we all already knew about his double standards
- Alabama’s legislature is holding a special session to deal with the state’s $200 million+ budget crisis. Among the items legislators have put on their agenda so far: taking the state out of the marriage license business to prevent county clerks from being jailed like Kim Davis; taxing the tips of strippers and burlesque performers; and prohibiting the sale of fetal tissues, which is a totally unnecessary bill given that state regulations already require complete disposal of all abortion products in such a way that they are rendered useless for research
- Like father, like son? Donald Trump’s dad was arrested for brawling with police at a Klan rally in 1927. And I can’t help but wonder: if Hilary Clinton’s security detail punched tea partiers in the face, would the resulting eruption of indignation be the size of Mt. Saint Helens, or Krakatoa?
- The Lake Arthur, Louisiana town council has voted unanimously to fire Detective Raymond Mott, who attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in North Carolina last year and posed for a photo doing a Hitler salute
- How good is Carly Fiorina? Her spam email fooled Breitbart News ‘investigative journalist’ Matthew Boyle into writing a whole article praising the site’s readers for putting her in the CNN GOP debate
- The city of Baltimore has decided that Freddie Gray’s black life mattered to the tune of $6.4 million
- I can’t wait to see Welcome to Leith, the new documentary about white supremacist Craig Cobb’s campaign to take over a small town in North Dakota. Cobb is currently trying again in the town of Antler, which he wants to rename for Donald Trump
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Rodger Dowdell proposed that Sarasota County, Florida institute a ‘people’s common law grand jury’ according to the classic Posse Comitatus template — and the County’s Charter Review Board vote was a tie
- Hilariously wrong: pundits who think that Donald Trump will force reform on the Republican Party
- Alabama Governor Robert Bentley has sealed his divorce proceedings because disclosure might tend to vindicate certain vilified liberal bloggers in the state
- Infamous Twitter troll and former South Carolina Republican Party executive director Todd Kincannon had his law license suspended two weeks ago. After he reportedly suffered some sort of episode during a long-expected misconduct hearing in August, Kincannon sent out disturbing images of himself with a gun to his head and was hospitalized. According to right wing FitsNews.com, he was released yesterday
- More Americans were killed by gunfire this Summer than on 9/11
- ‘Liberal media:’ Morning Joe had David Ignatius on last week to discuss the Hillary Clinton email ‘scandal,’ but managed to edit out all his debunking because narrative
- Breitbart News editor Brandon Darby gave the rest of the media even more reason to disregard his organization by whipping up a revenge mob on a random Twitter user who offended him
- ‘Picture yourself as a stereotype:’ an experiment shows that differences in test scores result from awareness of the stereotype
- Wichita State University mathematician Beth Clarkson is not optimistic about the chances of success in her lawsuit to obtain ballot records that can explain statistical anomalies she has noticed in the poll results. Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who chases down every available rumor of voting fraud, seems to have zero interest in uncovering election fraud, as he opposes her efforts
- Of all people, Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday blows Cheney’s mind with the inconvenient facts of Iranian centrifuges:
- Ohio Governor and 2016 GOP presidential contender John Kasich stands accused of falsifying, altering, and obfuscating for-profit charter school data to cover up the terrible, wasteful results of his policy
- Speaking of the charter school ripoff: it got nixed in Washington state by their supreme court, and here’s why you shouldn’t feel sorry for the operators who already started up schools and admitted students
- Harsh measures against recipients of public assistance do not limit fraud, waste, or abuse, but they do advance the interests of the rich and powerful
- In addition to Republican efforts to oppose international climate change mitigation and prevention efforts, the GOP is trying to gut the Endangered Species Act
- As if you needed another reason to hate the US Chamber of Commerce, now they’re suing to protect robocallers
- Those seemingly-reasonable abortion restrictions have actually forced women to cross state lines in order to access services, which is something the Supreme Court specifically cited in their Roe v Wade decision. That’s just one example of the huge and onerous changes conservative lawmakers have made to women’s reproductive rights that are rapidly taking us back to the days of coathanger abortions
- The arson at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington state — one which doesn’t even provide abortions — shows that forced-birth activism is transitioning to anti-contraception activism. Destruction of female autonomy has always been the underlying objective
- Michael Slager, the Charleston, South Carolina police officer who shot Walter Scott in the back, now says he feared the suspect was running towards a weapon — presumably one that was very far away, since he was in the middle of a grassy lot. Astoundingly, the ‘I was scared because he was black’ defense has worked for police officers many times before
- Marion County, Oregon Judge Vance Jay, already under fire for refusing to perform any weddings at all lest he be forced to preside over gay men kissing, is also under review by the state’s Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability for hanging a portrait of Adolf Hitler in the courthouse
- The White House YouTube channel responds to Dick Cheney:
What was the tune Lord Cornwallis had the band play while the British and Hessian troops marched out of Yorktown to surrender to Washington?
“THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN”
That seems to be what the John Birch Society is striving for. A world turned upside down and remade on the image of Koch, Walch and Oliver.
• Thanks for the link to hetheremme’s blog post. It explains Kim Davis better than anything else I’ve seen.
• Every so often, Chris Wallace actually commits an act of journalism. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s usually impressive when it does.
• There’s a reason Charlie Pierce routinely refers to “school reform” advocates as grifters.
• The anti-abortion movement has always been anti-contraception at its core. The public objections to Griswold v. Connecticut have centered on the “right to privacy” the Right hates so much, but the idea that people can have consequence-free sex is what really makes their blood boil. Anhedonic scolds, the lot of ’em.
–alopecia