Thursday THREATCON – 9 October 2014

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 Ben Affleck’s full-frontal nude scene in Gone Girl, our Threatcon Color-Code is NETWORK CENSOR BLACK

• Remember last year when a powerful Alabama Republican got a secret court to brutally beat and arrest a blogger, turning Roger Shuler into the Western hemisphere’s only imprisoned journalist? Encouraged by the fact that no one did anything to stop that travesty, and worried by a grand jury investigation into their dark money schemes, Alabama Republicans seem to have adopted libel suits as their strategy for dealing with pesky bloggers who investigate them. State Senator Bryan Taylor (R-Prattville) is suing the Alabama Political Reporter website, claiming that writer Bill Britt ruined his chance to chair the Alabama Ethics Commission by reporting on his lack of ethics
• The oceans are warming and acidifying at an alarming rate
• Cost of living: middle class income may have finally returned to 1995 levels, but the price of a movie ticket has not
• That international racists convention did not go so well last weekend in Hungary
• Oin Oakstar, a witness in the murder trial of ‘Minuteman’ border militia leader Shawna Forde, has been found dead under an Everett, Washington overpass
• Georgia ‘sovereign citizen’ Chadrus Brown was given four consecutive life sentences for raping a 9-year old girl
• Federal authorities are investigating the Aryan Brotherhood after a series of violent racial crimes in Mississippi
• ‘Traditionalist Youth Network,’ a white nationalist group, has filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit against Maryland’s ban on assault weapons
• The ongoing saga of Colorado City, where cult leader Warren Jeffs’s polygamous, child-raping church of Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints still thrives and regularly intimidates non-members, has now reached a crisis point as businesses and a fire station on the Utah side have received eviction notices 
• Your US RDA of outrage porn: Rush Limbaugh says that President Obama is giving Americans Ebola as revenge for slavery

• Baton Rouge police officer Michael Elsbury has resigned after his racist text messages came to light, but the NAACP still wants answers about his arrest record — which is understandable, given that he said “I wish someone would pull a Ferguson on them and take them out. I hate looking at those African monkeys at work … I enjoy arresting those thugs with their saggy pants”
• Christopher Noone, the Massachusetts ‘sovereign citizen’ who was arrested for driving without a license again less than an hour after paying a stiff fine for the same charge, was back in court Tuesday demanding a jury trial. The judge refused
• The next Cliven Bundy? Clark County, Washington has finally succeeded in auctioning off 4.7 acres that had belonged to anti-government ‘sovereign citizen’ activist David Darby, who has lost the land due to nonpayment of taxes. The county has one more week to issue a deed, but Darby says he won’t be leaving the property. Expect that he will try to rally people to his side and confront the new owner, as well as any deputies who arrive to remove him
• Charleston, West Virginia prosecutors are reviewing all pending cases involving police lieutenant Shawn Williams, who was suspended last month after a video emerged of his daughter dancing to a Ku Klux Klan song with his encouragement
• Another libertarian talking point goes KABOOM: the rich actually give less to charity than the rest of us, and what they do give does not help the least of us very much
• Las Vegas could start issuing licenses for gay marriages today
• Guess who’s defending the Koch brothers now? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
• Percentage of Republicans who say the minimum wage is not enough to live on: 69. Percentage who support raising the minimum wage: 37. Via Harper’s
• What would happen if male sexuality was treated like female sexuality? For starters, we would tell boys that their penises grow smaller with each partner
• Why is Senator David Vitter (R-Diaperland) holding up funding to fight Ebola? Because Obama’s plan “focuses on Africa,” which is where all but one of the thousands of victims in the current outbreak have died

• The great, national charter school ripoff is finally receiving widespread attention: they’re actually worse than the schools they replace
• Florida Governor Rick Scott is hearing from evangelicals who consider climate change a pro-life issue
• Yet another study of “stop and frisk” policies shows extreme racial disparities in their application
• Amazing: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thinks that $7.25 an hour is a living wage
• Alabama is breaking new ground in the area of ridiculous abortion laws by giving fetuses their own lawyers
• All those attacks on the IRS are actually increasing the budget deficit
• Ever wonder why conservatives are so fascinated by Saul Alinsky? Here’s everything you need to know about that
• Take a good, long look at the kind of people who want to carry long rifles into grocery stores and you’ll notice they have a lot in common with ISIS
• The real class warfare: income inequality robs from the poor to give to the rich