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 hacking of celebrity iCloud nudes, our Threatcon Color Code is NIPPLE PINK
- It’s going to be really hard for ‘Gateway Pundit’ Jim Hoft (pictured above with arch-Islamophobe Pamela Geller) to claim he’s not racist now that he’s been caught multiple times plagiarizing from white supremacist blogs
- A victory against idiocracy: in his 400-page opinion finding the Texas public school funding system unconstitutional, Judge John Dietz wrote that ‘expert witness’ Joseph Bast of the Koch-backed, climate change-denying Heartland Institute is “not a credible witness“
- 2014 will be the year in which sketchy ‘dark money’ nonprofits dominate the electoral airwaves. There are nine big-money Senate races that will determine who controls Congress
- Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s revelation that she was harassed by a colleague brought out the worst media instincts on the topic of sexual harassment
- This week, Republican Senate candidates Cory Gardner and Thom Tillis have both tried to deflect attention to their extreme views on birth control with a talking point about making it available over the counter. This bait-and-switch might even sound good until you know the facts about the issue
- Speaking of Thom Tillis: he loves idiocracy. Not only does he want to eliminate the Department of Education, as Speaker of the state house he cut about $480 million from North Carolina’s education budget
- Newspapers across the state of Alabama are calling for US District Judge Mark Fuller to resign after he was arrested and charged with battering his spouse when she confronted him about an affair with a court clerk. Fuller’s corruption has been a long-running scandal in the state, but he has been protected by the powerful friends he won in state Republican politics by giving former Democratic Governor Don Seigelman an unusually harsh sentence
- The world is getting about 22% of its electricity from renewables now
- Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown of North Carolina were freed from death row after DNA evidence exonerated them. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has cited this case as justification for the death penalty, and the state GOP has used it for ads to attack Democrats as ‘soft on crime’ as recently as 2010
[youtube]http://youtu.be/f8IHIJrY2aE[/youtube]
- Republicans keep saying they can save billions by cutting fraud, waste, and abuse in the food stamp program, but new data show that there just isn’t as much wasted money in SNAP as the GOP say there is
- Mainstream Republicans are turning up in the new wave of so-called ‘common law grand juries,’ an invention of the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement
- Police in Oxford, Alabama have arrested 72 year-old Everett Leon Stout and are searching for his common-law wife Mariam Claire Schultz. The ‘sovereign citizen’ couple has been charged with filing $1.6 million in false liens and paying for an RV with a fraudulent check
- Clark County, Washington is preparing to auction off the property of ‘sovereign citizen’ and former militia leader David Darby for unpaid taxes
- After months of reports that armed ‘patriot militias’ were heading to the US-Mexico border, we’ve finally had a Border Patrol agent shoot at unknown armed civilians playing amateur watchman and a militia member point his gun at scientists studying bats. While the participants in these activities insist they have the support of the Border Patrol, they do not, and now they are once again discussing plans to shut down ports of entry on the border
- Disgraced former Navy chaplain and hate-prayer leader Gordon Klingenschmitt is all set to win public office in Colorado. The Colorado Springs Independent notes that outside the bubble of local politics, he has become an embarrassment to the Republican party
- Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who successfully campaigned to derail the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s by telling a whole lot of lies about it, says that women can avoid rape and sexual assault by getting married early and focusing on a homemaker’s career. She leaves the burka optional, of course
- Larry Pratt and his Gun Owners of America organization are backing a white supremacist’s case before the Supreme Court as he seeks to duck prison time for plotting an attack on the Mexican consulate in Minneapolis with homemade napalm and silencers
- Right wing media is losing its mind over an Indiana University study of how misinformation spreads online
- Better not exercise your First Amendment rights around Georgia Republicans or you might get manhandled:
- I’ve been waiting for years to see Joan Walsh of Salon.com admit that presidents aren’t magical Green Lantern superheroes
- Watchdog.org, a website associated with the Koch-backed Franklin Center, is one of the right wing websites pushing a really stupid new conspiracy theory about maps published by the Environmental Protection Agency
- Fast food workers are striking in more than 100 cities across the country, giving wingnuts everywhere a fresh chance to spout debunked talking points and ugly propaganda about minimum wage workers
- National Right To Life President Carol Tobias accidentally admits new abortion provider regulations are actually aimed at blocking abortion access
- For the last few weeks, we’ve been telling you about Alabama Christian Coalition President James Henderson and his creepy friends who seem to think they’re above the law because they think they have god on their side. In the latest turn, Henderson is suing the Huntsville, Alabama zoning board to stop the clinic from reopening
- Income inequality has reduced middle class incomes by at least $18,000 a year since 1979. The class war is over, and the rich have won
- Are economists biased in favor of management? A new research paper says yes
- Republican lunatic Jody Hice will probably be in Congress next year to run the country according to Pastor John Hagee’s “blood moons” prophecy
- The Koch brothers make a great deal of noise about how the rest of us shouldn’t accept government handouts, but Charles Koch personally created the Institute for Energy Research which exists to preserve fossil fuel subsidies that pad his bottom line. Also, his strategist Richard Fink is profiled in Politico