UPDATE: The US Supreme Court has overturned a 35-foot buffer zone that Massachusetts had enacted around abortion clinics in that state. Expect anti-choice extremists to try exploiting this decision with new tactics, not just by reasserting old ones. Remember, it was escalating tension that led to the creation of buffer zones in the first place.
This also seems like a good time to mention that SCOTUSBlog was recently denied a credential to cover the court.
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 recent onfield biting incidents, our Threatcon color-code this week is PEARLY WHITE
- Kudos to Right Wing Watch for catching Mississippi tea party candidate Chris McDaniel’s last-minute campaigning with arch-homophobe Bryan Fischer and Obama conspiracy nut Wayne Allen Root
- Reacting to Thad Cochran’s victory thanks to help from black voters, the man who built Red State wails: “I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes.” Indeed, Mr. Erickson. Indeed
- Sarah Despres, a former staffer for Representative Henry Waxman, recounted the anti-vax hearings in Congress fourteen years ago. Those anti-science hearings, which featured discredited hack Andrew Wakefield, have led to the return of Measles, a disease that was declared eradicated exactly fourteen years ago
- A ‘sovereign citizen’ couple has been in jail for a month after being arrested by police officer who noticed their license plate was just a piece of paper reading: “Non Resident 6-55-502. Privilege tax on nonresidents prohibited. Lienholder (my chattel)”
- A Newburgh, New York man was sentenced for identity theft last week after trying to defend himself with crackpot legal theories that are associated with the sovereign citizen ‘movement’
- David Neiwert interviewed the brother of Brent Douglass Cole, the sovereign citizen arrested after a shootout with officers from the California Highway Patrol and the US Bureau of Land Management. “He’s been up living life on his own for so long that he just doesn’t see it – that there’s rules that the rest of us follow for good reason”
- Someone has been circulating propaganda for the white supremacist organization Northwest Front on the Ft. Carson, Colorado US Army base
- Duck Dynasty cousin Zach Dasher seems half-serious about bringing his famous family out to campaign for him
- John Huppenthal, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been unmasked as a serial internet troll
- In last week’s Threatcon, I neglected to mention The Nation‘s expose of the Koch brothers’ exclusive gathering that brings billionaires together with Senators. I apologize for the error
- At Salon, Simon Malloy notes a shift in public attitudes towards poverty that spells doom for the austerity economics of Paul Ryan
- The Campbell, Wisconsin police chief is in trouble after spamming a tea party activist with unwanted communications from gay dating, porn, and healthcare sites. Tim Keleman says that his actions were revenge for someone hacking into his personal bank accounts as well as a department computer over a dispute about La Crosse Tea Party signs on a pedestrian Interstate overpass
- A Shorewood, Wisconsin man has been indicted on 13 counts of voter fraud. But you won’t hear anything about it from conservative blogs because Robert Monroe voted multiple times for Scott Walker
- Disgraced Navy chaplain and demonologist Gordon Klingenschmitt won the Republican nomination for Colorado’s House District 15 this week. If elected, expect him to offer imprecatory prayers against his political enemies from the floor of the legislature
- At DeSmogBlog, Graham Redfearn examines the financials for Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center, a so-called “luke warmist” organization that downplays the impacts of climate change
- At Daily Kos, Hunter reminds us that Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots once needed government assistance
- After an entire year of the tea party’s fake IRS scandal, Chuck Todd finally admits there are no actual victims
[youtube]http://youtu.be/-v67HwWkNbM[/youtube]
- If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein’s essay about the Democratic Party’s surrender on gun control, why not?