Thursday THREATCON – New Year’s Edition

It’s Thursday Threatcon, your intelligence briefing on right wing activity. Below are the best reports, investigations, exposées, and debunkery of the wingnutosphere for the last two weeks, since we skipped Christmas. Due to the Steve Scalise-David Duke story, our Threatcon Color Code is KLAN ROBE WHITE

• As Mark Potok writes, Rep. Scalise’s claim that he didn’t know about the racist views of David Duke’s organization is simply not believable. House Republican leadership seems to hope the storm will simply abate, but Duke’s own statements, and the fact that his own people invited Scalise, are strong evidence that he knew exactly what he was doing and to whom he was speaking. Importantly, Duke and Scalise were both mainstream Louisiana Republicans at the time, while there are disturbing similarities between today’s GOP and Duke’s racist platform
• It’s not just Scalise: here are more examples of what mainstream Republicans have said about black people and slavery
• The South Carolina Tea Party has scrubbed white supremacist ‘Council of Conservative Citizens’ leader Roan Garcia Quintana from its website after an exposé revealed he was scheduled to speak to their Coalition Convention, but they still won’t answer questions about whether he’s scheduled to speak
• Remember when predatory lenders and Wall Street got together to make subprime gold that wrecked the economy? They’re doing it again with car title loans
• Step one: attack teachers and their jobs in the state legislature. Step two: cite the resulting “teacher shortage” to support charter schools. Step three: profit on the misery of students
• Wonkette says that conservatard blogger Charles C. Johnson has taken the aluminum crown for ‘stupidest man on the internet’ away from legendary nut Jim Hoft
• Ex-sheriff Richard Mack is taking his ‘Constitutional County Project‘ act to Navajo County, Arizona, where he hopes his followers can put him in power as dictator and cult leader beyond the reach of the federal government
• As I suggested weeks ago, the Ku Klux Klan is currently engaged in a major recruiting drive — one that targets military veterans
• The Klan is also buying outdoor advertisements in Arkansas
• Your US RDA of outrage porn: authoritarian Bill O’Reilly shows us how not-racist he is by telling black people they should wear t-shirts reading: “Don’t get pregnant at 14”

• Media Matters has compiled a list of the biggest immigration lies told by right wing sources this year
• Harsh immigration rules are just one reason why the United States is losing its edge as a destination for STEM (science, technology, math) graduates
• Chuck Todd admits the reason he never challenges right wing idiocy is that he would lose access to the powerful right wing idiots
• A Baltimore Fox affiliate has apologized for editing video to make it appear as if BlackLivesMatter protesters were chanting ‘kill a cop’
• Authoritarian astroturf: Alternet has emails and chat logs showing that NYPD union bosses, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republican activists instigated the ugly back-turning event at the funeral for two fallen officers last week as part of a campaign to discredit Mayor Bill de Blasio and the anti-police brutality movement
• Darrell Issa’s committee has finally admitted there was no ‘IRS scandal’ — in a news dump two days before Christmas
• Have you ever heard of Dauphin, Manitoba’s successful experiment in eliminating poverty with a minimum income? Of course you haven’t, because the results explode primary myths of capitalism
• A Dothan, Alabama ‘sovereign citizen‘ was shot by police and later died after an altercation at the local animal shelter, where he had tried to turn in a stray animal without presenting identification
• Eight ‘sovereign citizens’ have been arrested in Atlanta for stealing 27 houses with fake deeds
• Musician James Rustad sings his original composition, “GOP and the KKK, Leaders of the USA”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/bWECZJmd2MM[/youtube]

• The number of police killed in “ambush shootings” was sharply higher in 2014, yet for some reason stories about this matter all seem to concentrate on the most recent shooting in New York (by a black man) rather than Eric Frein (who is white) or the violent sovereign citizens who are most likely to murder police (but are almost all white)
• Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter who was let go for her fact-free anti-vaccination and Benghazi ‘reporting,’ is suing the Department of Justice for her FBI files with the help of Clinton-era right wing legal gadfly organization Judicial Watch to prove that sinister Obama goons have been hacking her computer
• The return of debtor’s prison: Texas is putting people in jail for failure to repay predatory loans
• Republicans have successfully retarded infrastructure spending and innovation for so long that we are beginning to fall behind other advanced countries
• Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the man who once insisted on installing a graven image of the Ten Commandments in the state supreme court building and has since been returned to office in the tea party wave, denounced the Huntsville City Council for allowing a diversity of faiths to open city council meetings instead of keeping it narrowed down to ‘real Christians’ like himself
• Truth through dissonance: despite a long career of lobbying for the right to own as many powerful assault rifles as he wants because it’s supposedly the only way to keep a tyrannical government in check, Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt reverted to his true racist authoritarian colors when right wing show host Stan Solomon said police ought to use violence against BlackLivesMatter protesters:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/ni_KZbcHCUQ[/youtube]