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 Vin Diesel’s tree-planting rejoinder to the ALS ice bucket challenge, our Threatcon Color Code is GROOT GREEN
- The on-again, off-again Fox News love affair with Vladimir Putin is heating up once more. As alarm bells ring over Russian troops in Ukrainian territory, expect the conservative media world to become even more dissonant on this topic, as they actually yearn for the return of that ‘unitary executive‘ of the Bush years that they have since disowned, and see the confrontation as an opportune time to reintroduce it to us
- The Asian American Journalists Association has called on Fox News to apologize for Islamophobia
- The slow drip of details out of Wisconsin’s John Doe investigation, which is currently in legal limbo, keeps making Scott Walker look more and more guilty
- Remember Florida’s failed experiment with drug testing welfare recipients two years ago? Now a second state, Tennessee, has tried the same policy — and found exactly one drug user out of the 800 recipients they tested. This is what non-ideologues call “empirical evidence” that such programs are a useless waste of taxpayer dollars
- A Charles County, Maryland judge ordered his bailiff to use the shock device that was locked to the leg of 25-year old ‘sovereign citizen’ Delvon King because he wouldn’t stop citing his quack legal theories at length in court
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Alberto Gonzalez Marrufo was convicted Wednesday of fraud and theft for paying off his cars with fake checks. It didn’t help matters that he refused to recognize the court’s authority or even present a defense
- The prosecution rested Monday in the federal trial of two alleged neo-Nazis for the murders of two anti-racist skinheads on the outskirts of Las Vegas 16 years ago
- NBC News reports on the disturbing trend of local sheriffs who seem to buy into the propaganda of Oathkeepers and ‘patriot’ militias by refusing to enforce federal gun laws
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: race-baiting Fox News personalities accuse President Obama of race-baiting over the murder of a black youth in Ferguson, Missouri
[youtube]http://youtu.be/78qL5MliBn0[/youtube]
- CNN’s audio of the Michael Brown shooting has been authenticated, making public defense of the officer who killed him much more difficult
- According to a St. Louis group of public defenders, the Ferguson municipal court has engaged in “illegal and harmful practices” of charging high court fees to those least able to pay, issuing more than 30,000 nonpayment arrest warrants last year for a town of just 21,000 people. This is being compared to a latter-day debtor’s prison
- Public opinion about Ferguson divides on racial lines because we’re still only talking to people who look like us
- Breitbart.com goon Ben Shapiro’s comments on the funeral of Michael Brown were utterly repulsive
- For children, the mental and physical effects of having a parent in prison are pretty awful
- C-list comedian Rob Schneider has graduated from ranting about the president’s birth certificate to touting anti-vaccination quackery
- Republicans like to deny that their patriarchal agenda is a “war on women,” but according to a poll by outside groups Crossroads GPS and American Action Network, women do see the GOP as “intolerant” and “stuck in the past”
- Republicans Mitch McConnell, Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton, and Joni Ernst were all recorded praising the Koch brothers at their secretive conference. Hit with fresh allegations of bribery by his campaign manager, Senate Minority Leader McConnell, who told the audience how he plans to nix minimum wage increases and force a government shutdown, is in serious trouble against his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, while US Senate candidate Joni Ernst has rapidly earned Democratic scorn as “the next Sarah Palin“
- Gun assault injuries cost US taxpayers half a billion dollars a year
- None of the tactical equipment in Ferguson’s police department came through the Pentagon’s 1033 program, creating a mystery as to where it came from
- Jordan Lebeau of Boston.com deconstructs the New York Times profile of Michael Brown
- Writing for Larry Sabato’s website, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz doesn’t think libertarianism will win the youth vote for Republicans. Pollsters have been unable to locate a shared outlook among self-described libertarians
- Is it dangerous that the people making and serving our food can’t afford to eat? Forty percent of restaurant workers live at or below the poverty line
- We all saw Paul Ryan confronted by DREAMers — child immigrants who’ve grown up in the United States but lack citizenship. According to Jonathan Chait, they’ve completely destroyed the GOP’s immigration strategy
- Students at George Mason University are finally starting to question the huge sums their school takes in from the Charles Koch Foundation
- Did you hear about the hundreds of Californians who were killed in that 6.0 earthquake four days ago? No? That’s because California has building codes, zoning laws, and other BIG GOVERNMENT measures in place — unlike China, which is a libertarian’s paradise of non-regulation. Vox.com has made this nifty video to give us a side-by-side comparison of the results:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/MDHFJG1no6I[/youtube]