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 Donald Trump’s strong friendship with a Mussolini-admiring Italian fascist politician, our Threatcon Color Code is BLACKSHIRT
- Donald Trump’s foreign policy notions are dissonant when they aren’t disastrous. He may not be an international relations wonk, but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night
- Tim Robbins needs to stop tweeting made-up facts from the conspiracy fringe to delegitimize Hillary Clinton — and learn how exit polls work
- No, David Brock of Media Matters did not shut down pro-Bernie Sanders Facebook groups. It was a bug in the website’s code that also hit other pages. Some Sanders supporters wonder: why does Facebook use software this way at all? Their answer is that the people who work every day to keep the site free of snuff clips, child rape imagery, and other violent or abusive material all endure the same psychological trauma as a sex crimes investigator, so yeah, Facebook uses software
- It has been really illuminating to watch former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert get convicted and sentenced to prison for circumventing financial disclosure laws to cover up his career as a serial sexual predator. Tom DeLay, who smears gays as ‘pedophiles,’ was just one of Hastert’s former colleagues who hypocritically asked the court for leniency
- The November election is shaping up to be a very bad one for Republican senators — so bad that Russ Feingold might just win back his seat. GOP difficulties in controlling the Senate explain the enthusiasm on the right for doing away with the 17th Amendment
- Prosecutors for the state of Alabama have objected to yet another request for a trial continuance by House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who faces 23 corruption charges
- Contrary to the gloom-and-doom prognostications of the business lobby, the new $12.50/hour minimum wage in Seattle has not raised retail prices
- Elkhart, IN has boomed during the Obama-era economic recovery, reaching full employment. So why do the white, working-class residents cite worries about the future of their jobs while they vote for Donald Trump?
- Alabama state supreme court Chief Justice Roy ‘Ten Commandments’ Moore held a special meeting with Kim Davis’s lawyer yesterday to whine about how mean human rights organizations are being to him as he tries to defy the US Supreme Court. Meanwhile, his son Caleb was able to have drug charges dropped by participating in a pre-trial diversion program
- Sen. Ted Cruz is a terrible candidate with even more terrible friends, and this attempt to grab attention by naming Carly Fiorina as his running mate so far in advance of the convention will backfire just as Rachel Maddow suggests:
- Anti-gay activist Franklin Graham turns out to be good friends with legendary bigot Anita Bryant
- Oxford, AL will put trans persons in jail for six months if they try to pee in the ‘wrong’ bathroom
- Much to the chagrin of anti-trans activists, Patrick Allen Kelly of Athens, AL wasn’t wearing a dress when he lured a 3-year old child into a gas station restroom and requested oral gratification
- Dave and Hannah Edwards asked a school to welcome their transgender kindergartener — whereupon the other parents began to act like children, even bringing in hate groups to pile on against a five year-old child
- The California Medical Association is joining the ACLU in a lawsuit against Dignity Health, the country’s fifth-largest hospital chain, for enforcing religious directives from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that put patients experiencing miscarriage through unnecessary and dangerous delays in treatment. Such restrictions are a feature of forced-birth politics, not a bug
- At least nine people were arrested at Stone Mountain, GA last weekend while counter-protesting a white power rally; counter-demonstrators also outnumbered the neo-Nazis in Rome, GA; counter-protesters also turned out for a rally by Sons of Confederate Veterans on the Montgomery, AL state house steps, with one person on each side arrested
- With just days left in the state’s legislative session, the Alabama Senate has passed a bill to ban the most common second-trimester abortion procedure as “torture;” Oklahoma Republicans are trying to pass a bill that would criminalize abortion providers. Money quote from Rep. David Brumbaugh: “Everybody talks about this $1.3 billion deficit. If we take care of the morality, God will take care of the economy”
- The Texas foster care system is a nightmare of abuse and neglect. Not coincidentally, Texas Republicans have moved heaven and earth to shut down abortion providers in the state. Once again, the ‘right to life’ begins at conception and ends at birth
- A Battle Creek, MI substitute teacher has been fired for using the anatomical word ‘vagina’ to explain the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe to art students
- You know that Islamophobia has gotten out of hand when people are trying to prevent local Muslims from opening cemeteries to bury their dead
- Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith has resigned from the newspaper after editors nixed his stories about casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose family recently purchased the paper
- In his defense, lawyers for Ammon Bundy will try to argue that the federal government does not own Malheur National Wildlife Refuge; their tactic of crowdsourcing administrative harassment of police agencies has led to complaints with the state bar association. Meanwhile, we have the first pictures of Gold Butte, NV Native American sites desecrated by the Bundy cult and a disturbing account of the damage to Malheur that includes catastrophic abuse of toilets, cigarette butts and tobacco spit everywhere, and cleaning professionals grossed out by sinks clogged with spoiled food
- California State University, Fullerton organizers of a literary conference named for science fiction author Phillip K. Dick have disinvited white separatist publisher Greg Johnson
- Action film star-turned-right wing lunatic Chuck Norris has finally gone full conspiratard with his World Net Daily column on ‘chemtrails’
- A federal appeals court has dismissed an attempt to challenge science education standards by claiming that evolution is “a religion”
- Unearthed FBI documents show that during the 1960s, Louisiana Gov. John McKeithen arranged payments to quell KKK violence
- 50 year-old militia ‘patriot’ Wayne Howe was arrested for making terroristic threats against the Chillicothe, MO police department
- Racist skinhead and Stormfront’er Steve Smith, who boasts a record of violence against minorities, has been reelected to the Luzerne County, PA Republican Party committee
- White supremacists at Stormfront are fighting with Andrew Anglin, founder of The Daily Stormer website, over his misogyny against white women
- Donald Trump’s remark about Hillary Clinton “playing the woman card” has spawned some hilarious reactions. And we will need our sense of humor, because it was also a preview of the next six months from a man who thinks he shouldn’t change diapers
Be a card-carrying member of the female persuasion and get your #womancard Today! Amazing benefits included! pic.twitter.com/7ntpH91wau
— Terri – Web Designer (@SocialTerri) April 27, 2016
• The French daily Liberation headlined its article Donald Trump’s foreign-policy speech Donald Trump, «l’Amérique d’abord», les idées après (“America first”, ideas later). Sounds about right.
• Most economists don’t think raising the minimum wage has much effect on retail prices. That’s inconvenient for conservatives and business lobbyists, whose preferred economic narrative says giving any money to workers will lead to wrack and ruin, but reality usually is inconvenient for them.
• I only wonder why it took this long for the CMA to go after Dignity Health.
• Harper Creek Community Schools released a quote from their school handbook, indicating teachers are required to get advanced approval when discussing any form of reproductive health. Erm … Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings don’t fall under the heading of “reproductive health.” And, just for the record, some of her floral paintings have long been likened to images of female genitalia, so it’s not as if the teacher was saying something outlandish.
• Creationists simply will not give up the dream. Their arguments would be hilarious if fighting them weren’t costing boards of education and schools large legal fees.
–alopecia
I frequently cite school boards as an example of the critical elected offices that progressives fail to recognize even as the religious right targets such positions to destroy public education. The left has a serious myopia towards the top of the ticket, which is why you get tens of thousands of Berniacs forgetting to vote against Scott Walker’s “gays deserve AIDS” judge.