Thursday THREATCON – 11 February 2016

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 peaceful end of the Malheur takeover, our Threatcon Color Code is MILITIA NUT BLUES

• Signatures needed: please sign this petition to publicly audit the National Rifle Association’s nonprofit organizations in order to determine whether they have been complicit in ‘patriot’ militia unrest
• Draft-dodging dirtbag and right wing rock star Ted Nugent is under fire for his anti-Semitic Facebook posts blaming gun control laws on a sinister Jewish conspiracy. The twist: gun owners and advocates are calling on the NRA leadership to distance their organization from its most famous board member
• We’re number one! We’re number one! Americans are 25 times as likely to be killed with a firearm than citizens of other developed countries
• The arrest of the final four holdouts at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge today, and the arrest of scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy last night, have brought a peaceful conclusion to the standoff, but federal agents are still arresting scattered participants who left earlier
• Bundy is pleading poverty and asking for a court-appointed attorney. So where did the extra cash from all those unpaid grazing fees go?
• Bundy’s son Ammon used misleading edits to create a propaganda video that accused BLM agents of starting wildfires
• Despite the good economy, evictions are still at a record high, especially for people of color. In New York City, the NYPD is using a ‘nuisance abatement’ law to force hundreds of families, only a handful of which are white, out of their homes without due process. So where are the militias? Why aren’t they protesting this clear violation of property rights?
• In the 1980s, whenever the government of Iran executed its enemies they would charge the family for the bullets. In 2015, Cleveland, Ohio is trying to make Tamir Rice’s family pay for the ambulance that was too late to save him. Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo is suing the family of a man he shot dead for “emotional distress” over the innocent bystander and mother of five that he also killed
• Segregation still exists, it’s just informal now
• The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams destroys the ridiculous ‘Black Panther’ controversy over Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show performance

• Someone left wire coathangers outside Women’s Health Specialists of Sacramento last Friday morning. Maybe it was one of the forced-birth activists now trying to redefine clinical abortion as the equivalent of ‘back alley’ abortions in the days before Roe v Wade. ‘Pro-life!’
• For those who’ve forgotten, one of the driving forces behind Roe v Wade was the measles virus, which caused microcephaly in babies and prompted afflicted mothers to seek abortion services. Now that the Zika virus is causing a similar controversy, Congressional Republicans are trying to minimize the condition and convince women to ‘choose life’ — but of course, they’re not proposing any new money for all the special needs children that they want to force upon unwilling mothers
• American Family Association talk radio gasbag Sandy Rios dismisses both the Zika virus and the Flint water crisis as problems worthy of attention
• The email trail shows that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s administration withheld Flint water testing results while deciding how to spin them
• In a 42-page ruling, US district court judge William Orrick has destroyed David Daleiden’s claims against the National Abortion Federation and exposed his slimy tactics in creating the ‘baby parts for cash’ hoax
• Ohio Governor John Kasich is about to sign a bill to eliminate state funding for Planned Parenthood. This was a priority of Kasich’s long before Daleiden’s fake videos, and it belies his carefully-crafted image as a ‘moderate’ Republican presidential candidate
• The Michigan state house will not be passing a law to make anal and oral sex illegal, after all
• Texas prosecutor Charles Sebesta has been disbarred for sending an innocent man to death row with false testimony and malice aforethought
• Although incarceration still falls disproportionately on minorities, the black incarceration rate is declining
• Lady Parts Justice League has made a video about the consequences of reduced abortion access:

https://youtu.be/3IVZNOlEMCI

• Jack Hitt and Kevin Baker are doing a seven-day series on the state of presidential campaigning in America. On Day One, they announced that we are witnessing a “mass-manic episode” of “magical thinking—even conspiracy-laden, totally batshit crazy thinking”
• Donald Trump Spokeswoman Katrina Pierson says that her candidate has “single-handedly brought back freedom of speech” by calling Ted Cruz a “pussy”
• Oops! Conservative Portsmouth, Canada Councillor Scott Harris tried to recruit colleagues to join him in a smear campaign against local domestic violence services and women’s rights campaigners, but accidentally forwarded it to some of his intended victims
• We’re suddenly hearing the word ‘superdelegates’ again, so it’s important to remember why they exist in the first place
• President Obama wants to do away with the federal tax exemption that allows NFL franchises to leave town and stick taxpayers with hundreds of millions in debt for stadiums, but don’t expect Republicans to agree
• So-called ‘sovereign citizens’ are even weirder than you knew
• The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a new report profiling six of the most important anti-gay bigotry groups masquerading as ‘religious freedom’ organizations
• After weeks of denial, Maine’s ‘sovereign citizen’ governor Paul LePage now admits he was making a comment about race when he said that heroin dealers come from out of state and “impregnate a white girl before they leave.” LePage is an excellent preview of what a Donald Trump presidency would look like
• Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann accuses President Obama of coordinating with the United Nations to bring Muslim invaders and Latino gangs into the United States so they can destroy Western civilization with “rape culture”