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 Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump on the day her son was arrested for domestic violence, our Threatcon Color Code is WASILLA ROUGE
- Michigan GOP hand John Truscott is leading the witch hunt for whoever used sidewalk chalk at a state house protest against the poisoning of Flint’s water supply
- Governor Rick Snyder is trying to get President Obama to change his mind about not sending federal disaster money, but Michigan GOP lawmaker Justin Amash thinks that any kind of federal disaster aid is unconstitutional
- Now everywhere can be Flint: Michigan is just a testing ground for emergency manager laws, a bad Republican idea that’s already spreading
- Anti-gay hate group leader Tony Perkins wrote part of Donald Trump’s “Two Corinthians” speech. Perkins also hilariously declared that Ronald Reagan would never have negotiated with Iran
- Creepy: in a meeting with a group of high school students during Planned Parenthood’s Teen Lobbying Day, Republican state representative Mary Dye asked her young constituents whether they were virgins
- Conspiratorial thinking is widespread in America and goes hand-in-hand with attitudes about guns
- Justice denied? The grand jury which looked into the shooting death of Tamir Rice never actually took a vote on charges against the police officer who killed him
- When the policy is the crime: the FBI can’t hire enough computer hackers because they all smoke pot
- Even if there had been no financial crisis or bank bailout in 2008, the Great Recession would still have happened the way it did
- Watch this ‘sovereign citizen’ try refusing to appear under his name and end up receiving a default judgement as a ‘no-show’ for his trouble:
- How deranged are the attacks on Planned Parenthood? Protests are still being held outside a location in the District of Columbia that the organization vacated months ago
- Pennsylvania state senator Larry Farnese has a new bill to punish harassment outside abortion clinics
- Most voters don’t even know that hundreds of new abortion restrictions have been passed in recent years
- Photographer Wendi Kent is crowdfunding her ongoing project ‘Faces of the Fight,’ which documents the disturbing behavior and confrontational attitudes of anti-choice protesters
- The Thomas More Society is standing up for the ‘personhood’ of frozen embryos by mucking around in peoples’ divorce cases
- Fossil fuel billionaire David Koch’s term on the board at the Natural History Museum has expired
- Why do evangelical voters like Donald Trump, even though he’s obviously not one of them? Because his insult-comic act is the most authentic show on the debate stage
- White supremacists and white nationalists are pleased with the way Trump gently disowned their robocalls in support of his candidacy
- When Republicans call President Obama ‘divisive,’ they are projecting their own hatred onto him
- If you enjoyed the Jade Helm exercise in goofball conspiracy nuttery, you’re gonna love UWEX 16
- John David Weissinger was sentenced to a year in prison for leaving voicemail death threats at two offices of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after a drunken, week-long Fox News bender
- Karl Rove is trying to help Bernie Sanders defeat Hillary Clinton to shore up his diminished credibility with billionaire donors
- Revolving door: half of retiring senators and about a third of retiring representatives end up registering as lobbyists
- Twenty years ago, the late paleoconservative racist Samuel Francis advised Pat Buchanan to run against the libertarians and conservatives who were destroying the American working and middle classes. His words then read like an outline of the Trump campaign today
- The Michael Bay film “13 Hours” doesn’t seem to be having the impact that Hillary Clinton’s detractors had hoped for, but the New York Times says that “Wiener,” a documentary about disgraced congressman Anthony Wiener and his Clinton-aide wife, just might
- Breitbart London hack James Delingpole has accused astronaut and climate scientist Piers Sellers of “exploiting” his terminal cancer to promote global warming “alarmism”
- Vanilla ISIS: after building a road on top of a Native American archaeological site, the armed occupiers at the Malheur wildlife refuge in Oregon uploaded a video that appears to show them rifling through Native American artifacts at the visitor center, heightening fears of severe damage
- In 1977, Neil Sigurd Wampler, now one of Ammon Bundy’s friends at Malheur, was convicted of murdering his father for insulting his girlfriend
- Dangerous delusion: the notion that Americans will ‘wake up’ and change everything if Donald Trump is elected president
• MIchigan’s Capitol Building is made of sandstone, so yes, the chalk could be difficult to remove from the stone (ZOMG, someone might have to use a brush!). That said, John Truscott is making an ass of himself with his theatrical overreaction.
• Conceptually, emergency manager laws make a sort of sense; practically, since the people actually appointed as emergency managers aren’t to run a lemonade stand, not so much. Further proof that there’s no bad idea Rs won’t cling to, no matter how badly the idea fails everywhere it’s tried.
• Sovereign citizens are dumber than sacks of rocks. That hearing officer showed far more restraint than I would have done.
• Again I say, I wish fetus fetishists would find another hobby.
• James Delingpole is a truly despicable human being.
–alopecia