Thursday THREATCON – 4 December 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 the grand jury decision not to indict Eric Garner’s killer, our Threatcon Color Code is CHOKE HOLD BLUE

• If you’re looking to make a difference this giving season, Coal River Mountain Watch is raising $20,000 to buy their building. CRMW is one of the most important groups in the movement to end mountaintop removal mining and stop the annihilation of Appalachian wilderness by Big Coal. I’ve worked with them before and cannot recommend them highly enough
• The animating mythology of white privilege is a persecution narrative in which most whites actually believe that they suffer greater racial bias than blacks and don’t think police killings of black citizens raise any important questions of bias. Of course, black Americans hold exactly the opposite set of opinions. Postracial society, anyone? Anyone?
• White police officers in Cleveland, where 12 year-old Tamir Rice was recently shot to death, are suing the department for discrimination, claiming that they get in too much trouble for shooting unarmed black people. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has just released a report finding that Cleveland officers routinely use unjustified force against criminals and innocents alike
• This seems like a good time to note once again that American police officers are not selected for being smart
• Having just put Republicans in charge of Congress, half the public thinks it’s a bad thing that Republicans are taking charge of Congress. Maybe that’s because the very first Republican priority is to raise taxes on the poorest Americans?
• Say to yourself over and over again: there is nothing ‘pro-life’ about forced-birth activism. Forced-birth activists don’t care about real outcomes, just their grasp and control of someone else’s reproductive tract. By banning legal abortion, Senegal now suffers higher rates of illegal abortion and infanticide, the same as every country that has tried this sick social experiment at the behest of religiously-motivated control freaks
• Why are the Koch brothers, ALEC, and the GOP working overtime to get rid of competition from rooftop solar? Because it’s now competitive with grid electricity
• If the next president is a Republican, he will face a real dilemma regarding Obama’s executive order on immigration

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who argued part of the recent McCutcheon v FEC case before the Supreme Court, has basically admitted the conservative majority is just another political operation of the Republican Party
• The last remaining Southern Democrats are calling on the party to renew its commitment to economic populism
• Elizabeth Lauten, the GOP aide who resigned after writing that President Obama’s daughters lacked class, was not similarly attacked fourteen years ago when she was arrested for shoplifting
• Ira Hansen, the Nevada Republican who recently stepped down as speaker-elect of the state assembly, has a long family tradition of right wing extremist politics
• Comedian Chris Rock says that if Americans knew just how rich the rich people are, we would start rioting in the streets
• Missouri anti-gay pastor Earl Carter wants people to send him money so he can “terrorize this country in the name of the Lord“
• Lately, the state of Tennessee keeps hosting white supremacists in their state parks — and resisting the Southern Poverty Law Center’s open-records requests about it
• The so-called ‘Oath Keepers’ organization has been asked to leave Ferguson, Missouri
• Career token black conservative nut Ben Carson is blaming Ferguson on the women’s lib movement and insisting that America is like Nazi Germany against conservatives. Please, oh please, Republicans, you absolutely MUST run this moron for president in 2016
• Your US RDA of outrage porn: Rick Santorum claims that separation of church and state is a communist idea, and not an American one. Who knew that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other founding fathers were all commies?

• Bonnie Weinstein, wife of Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder Mikey Weinstein, has published a book about all the hate mail he gets from foul-mouthed, self-righteous Christians
• The white supremacists of Stormfront instantly tried to distance themselves from right wing shooter Larry Mcquilliams, who shot up Austin the other day. Despite his very clear purposes of racial and political terrorism, the media has yet to make a big deal about his attempted rampage or his motivations, proving that terrorism only gets noticed in America when committed by brown people with the wrong religious beliefs
• Duke mathematicians have tried 100 randomized redistricting plans and found they would reverse the effects of Republican gerrymandering, indicating just how deliberate and democracy-warping their vote-fixing system really is
• North Korea hacked Sony in revenge for the studio’s new comedy, in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play interview hosts recruited to assassinate Jim Jong Il. The resulting document dump reveals definite gender and racial bias in employee compensation at Sony
• A Santa Barbara jury found ‘sovereign citizens’ Tom Murphy and Jeff Lind guilty of filing a false lien against a North County judge last Friday
• MSNBC really, really needs to reconsider having Joe Scarborough on its morning show
• Guess who’s reinventing the for-profit education industry? Debt collectors
• Republicans are having trouble winning the love of Silicon Valley because of their deluded positions on net neutrality