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 the pending grand jury decision in Ferguson and a reactionary state government in Missouri, our Threatcon Color Code is TEAR GAS YELLOW
- Before the grand jury returns its verdict, you should definitely read this
- Did you hear that Glenn Beck is suffering from a terrible disease? Slate’s Brian Palmer asked a bunch of doctors about it, and they all say “adrenal fatigue” is a fake condition created by a quack
- The problem with the new Republican wave isn’t impeachment, it’s idiocracy
- Speaking of idiocracy, here’s the latest on those ridiculous textbooks that were approved by the culture warrior-dominated Texas State Board of Education
- Also, the new GOP House is the most actively anti-science ever
- Had enough of the failing Mary Landrieu approach? Unlike the ‘Blue Dogs’ being run out of Congress, Democrats who stuck to their rhetorical guns on economic issues won their races
- What’s the matter with West Virginia? It’s the ‘white flight’ from the Democratic Party because they won’t stick to their guns on economic issues or stand with the president
- It’s not just Kansas blowing holes in their state coffers: Alabama’s Governor Bentley has refused to accept Medicaid expansion money and now has no plan to fill the shortfall in the state Medicaid budget
- Guess which state faces the threat of a budget surplus? Hint: it’s run by a Democratic supermajority
- Watch the CEO of TransCanada admit the Keystone XL pipeline will only create about fifty permanent jobs:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/G_7rX-C2cS8[/youtube]
- The marketing plan for the Keystone XL pipeline involves demonizing opponents, lobbying reporters, creating astroturf groups, and posting lies on the internet
- Alberta, the center of dirty tar sands oil extraction for the Keystone pipeline, has experienced 90 pipeline leaks in the last four months. What could go wrong?
- Politifact looked at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s attack on the US-China climate deal and rated it “mostly false”
- Pennsylvania cop-killer and professional loser Eric Frein has apologized to his parents for being a bad son
- Now that fake libertarian Sen. Rand Paul has helped kill the NSA transparency bill for the foreseeable future, can we all just stop pretending that he’s some sort of freedom-messiah? Also, can we stop pretending that the NSA is a winning electoral issue, or that people who ‘stand with Rand’ are progressive at heart?
- Katha Pollitt speaks on the “shocking indifference” of forced-birth advocates “to anything that harms a pregnancy that isn’t the woman’s will. They don’t care about pollution, poverty. If it’s some social cause outside of you, they don’t care.” She is seconded by this Cosmopolitan article interviewing the so-called ‘sidewalk counselors’ outside the clinics
- The US Postal Service is fighting for its life against privatization efforts
- All the Republican intransigence in Washington is having the rhetorical effect of criminalizing liberalism
- CNN caught Republicans breaking the laws against campaign coordination with Twitter accounts
- David Pakman makes a very astute observation about post-election Ebola news coverage:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/3zj7Lh-K_lQ[/youtube]
- The New Jersey League of Municipalities featured a panel on ‘sovereign citizens’
- The National Organization for Marriage is collapsing into debt
- US Marshalls are looking for a convicted child molester who has reportedly adopted ‘sovereign citizen’ beliefs
- The only people white supremacist organizers hate more than other races is each other
- The Magnolia State Heritage Campaign is trying to establish Christianity as the state religion
- Wisconsin is supposedly the “gold standard” for reusing coal ash waste. So why is it in the drinking water?
- Devin Burghart dissects the campaign against Oregon’s immigration ballot issue
- Norman Lear reacts beautifully to the pathetic attempts of Breitbart.com to smear him
- None of the conservatives who’ve come out against net neutrality seems to understand anything about it
- Your US RDA of outrage porn: after telling Alan Colmes that elected politicians should have “a healthy fear” of being shot, Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt says that President Obama “wouldn’t mind seeing” a race war in America