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 CNN’s terrible fact-checking during their wall-to-wall GOP debate coverage, our Threatcon Color Code is NEWS STUDIO BLUE
- Republican delirium: Carly Fiorina not only keeps referring to David Daleiden’s hoax Planned Parenthood videos as if they were real, but won’t stop insisting she’s seen things that aren’t even in them; Jeb Bush thinks that his brother “kept us safe” and so will his tax cuts; Ben Carson is running closest to Donald Trump because he’s just as extreme and delusional; Bobby Jindal thinks it’s great when Muslim kids get arrested for bringing clocks to school; Trump says he “loves” Pastor Robert Jeffress, who calls Catholicism a “tool of Satan;” what ties them all together is the fact that nearly half of GOP voters actually believe President Obama is Muslim
- Repeat after me: the rate of police officer killings is at an all-time low. Anyone who says otherwise might as well be claiming that Bigfoot is real
- The US Army’s Summer-long Jade Helm 15 exercise has finally ended, leaving democracy safe in Texas for now. Ironically, a new poll shows the American right wing is perfectly fine with a military coup as long as it puts conservatives in power
- ‘Liberty Counsel,’ the right wing agit-law shop advising Kim Davis, Kentucky’s most famous bigot, has a long history of coaxing clients to defy the law and get themselves arrested
- Tea parties are only getting more racist and extreme all the time, which may explain why the movement seems to be coalescing around Donald Trump
- Birds of a feather: lunatic radio host Alex Jones has been denounced as a “Zionist shill” by white supremacists after debating David Duke on his show
- Religion reporter Sarah Posner takes a long, hard look at the Duggar family’s creepy relationship to accused sexual harasser and abuser Bill Gothard
- ‘Veterans for a Strong America,’ the sketchy group which hosted Donald Trump’s fundraiser on the deck of the USS Iowa, lost their IRS nonprofit status in August
- The Edelman PR firm will no longer work with coal producers and climate change deniers
- Need a public defender? John Oliver says you’re screwed. Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert starts out his new show at the top of his form:
- As I have repeatedly predicted, the anti-abortion hardliners in the House of Representatives are doing their best to force another government shutdown over the fake Planned Parenthood videos regardless of what everyone else thinks
- Members of the Democratic National Committee are reportedly upset with Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leadership, which is not surprising given that she spent an entire month trying to kill Obama’s Iran deal before an utter lack of support forced her to back down
- On one hand, the ridiculous arrest of Ahmed Mohamed for bringing a clock to school is an object lesson in the disturbing nationwide trend of schools putting minority kids in jail while white kids get away with murder; on the other hand, it’s an example of the raging Islamophobia in Irving, Texas. To emphasize the point, here are seven other non-Muslim kids who didn’t get arrested for bringing clocks to school, and here is a white teenager who built an entire nuclear plant in his backyard
- North Carolina Republican state representative Michael Speciale denounced President Obama as “an Islamic son of a b***h” on Facebook
- The Dadeville, Alabama City Council apparently has nothing better to do with their time than ban saggy pants and short shorts because God told local notable Frank Goodman to solve the crisis of “bustling slack” on his behalf
- Colorado is the first state to see marijuana sales generate more tax revenue than alcohol. Also, contrary to the alarmist predictions of hippie-punching opponents of legalization, Colorado highway deaths are at a historic low
- The Ku Klux Klan has been weighing down their flyers in Cullman, Alabama with candy, which the Sheriff’s Department advises residents not to eat
- Remember when the irregularities and goofs of the 2000 elections led the whole country to install new voting technology because the salesmen said it was a silver bullet? Most of that equipment is now utterly obsolete and extremely vulnerable, meaning future election results will be just about as reliable as a Cold War automobile manufactured in Eastern Europe. Sleep tight!
- In his LinkedIn profile, former Koch Industries communications manager Richard Tucker brags about ghostwriting newspaper letters and op-eds for sitting congressmen
- An Albuquerque, New Mexico mother temporarily lost custody of her children because she didn’t want to attend religious instruction as mandated by a judge
- Could climate change cause another Holocaust? Looking at Syria, you might think it already is. Which is why it’s important that we start using the term ‘global warming’ again, as people take it much more seriously than ‘climate change’
- Depths of denial: remember ‘Sandy Hook truthers’? Now there are ‘Roanoke truthers‘
- Black pain matters: black children in emergency rooms for appendicitis were less likely to receive any pain medication for moderate pain, and less likely to receive opioids for severe pain, than white children
- Yesterday, Oklahoma was stayed from executing Richard Glossip at almost the last moment. His conviction is widely seen as a miscarriage of justice
- Trump: What’s the Deal?, a heretofore-unreleased 1991 documentary about the GOP frontrunner, reportedly puts his outspokenness in context as a desperate bid to remain relevant
- Anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat wants to force gays to submit to Jesus “through death and strong suppression“
- Graeme Phillip Harris was sentenced to six months in prison for hanging a noose and a confederate flag on a University of Mississippi statue of James Meredith, the African American man who integrated the campus in 1962. Austin Reed Edenfield was also scheduled to plead guilty, but his hearing was postponed
- Ramiro Serrata Jr. has pleaded guilty in a federal court to helping lure a gay African American man into an apartment where he helped assault the victim over three hours
- None of the claims that Stonewall, Mississippi police have made about the death of Jonathan Sanders, an African American man who was choked to death by a police officer while training his horse, make any sense
- Ben Carson leaves Donald Trump hanging like a chad:
• Charlie Pierce is right: the entire Republican Party is suffering from a prion disease which has destroyed its higher brain functions. Alas, there is a non-zero probability that one of these crazies will be elected President next year.
• I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV, but it seems to me that Liberty Counsel could face ethics charges, at the very least, for advising clients to violate the law and defy court orders.
• Nice little scam Mary Pepper has going. The Family Court judge who sent Holly Salzman to that mountebank should get a severe talking-to if not a pink slip.
• Roanoke truthers. *headdesk*
• Nothing about the story from Stonewall MS surprises me, and my lack of surprise horrifies me.
–alopecia