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 annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, our Threatcon Color Code is BLOG BASH BROWN
- Bob Cesca takes a satirical look at the heroes of CPAC and their associated superpowers. Devin Burghart takes a serious look at the white nationalists attending the confab, but if you prefer your racists unfiltered there’s also a gathering of ‘academic racists’ at the National Press Club this weekend. Meanwhile, Betsy Rothstein wonders why conservatives pay real money to attend Ali Akbar’s BlogBash party at CPAC, but if you really want tickets Trey Labrador reports that Akbar accepts oral sex in lieu of money
- Ben Mathis-Lilley remembers at least 13 times that Barack Obama expressed his love of America in exactly the way Rudy Giuliani says he doesn’t
- In the wake of this week’s PPP poll which revealed that most Republican voters want to get rid of religious freedom in America, another poll shows that more than half of Republican voters also believe Barack Obama is secretly Muslim
- When David Corn reported that Bill O’Reilly had fabricated experiences in El Salvador and Argentina, Fox News and O’Reilly struck back with outraged denials at full volume. But now that Media Matters has documented O’Reilly’s bizarre lie about being present at the suicide of a marginal figure in the JFK assassination, both the channel and its primetime opinionator are suddenly very quiet
- Looking for evidence that libertarianism is a conservative con-job? Here’s a collection of 21 Rand Paul quotes
- Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has raised the minimum wage and hiked taxes on the rich. According to conservative economic theology, the state ought to collapse into a recession, but instead Dayton has presided over rapid job growth and an booming economy
- Nigerian yellowcake all over again? An Iranian dissident group has fabricated ‘proof’ of an Iranian secret facility by using a promo photo from an Iranian safe company
- Idaho state representative Christy Perry (R-Nampa) is totally pro-life until the baby is born, at which point she’s totally okay with parents letting their children die without medical assistance because of their religious beliefs
- The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has an exhaustive and depressingly-long list of recent campus racial incidents
- How much does Rudy Giuliani love America? So much that he took six draft deferments instead of going to Vietnam
[youtube]http://youtu.be/mrwrsAC3OJk[/youtube]
- The so-called ‘welfare reform’ of the Newt Gingrich congress hasn’t actually saved any money, but it does appear to have led to shorter lifespans for poor people
- Remember how when Justice Kennedy cast the deciding vote for Citizens United, he promised us the Supreme Court’s decision would “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption”? So much for that promise
- Wisconsin’s new ‘right to work’ bill is a word-for-word copy of the Koch brothers-backed American Legislative Exchange Council’s model bill
- Only one person in America has managed to hit the new campaign contribution ceiling for a political party: billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin
- Now that Walmart is raising wages to keep workers, there may be a lifting effect throughout the economy. Which is good, since the most important issue facing American families is their slipping and stagnating wages
- Pasco, Washington police are facing scrutiny after shooting an unarmed man who had his hands up, then claiming they couldn’t use a YouTube video of the shooting as evidence unless they seized the phone that shot the video
- ‘Men’s rights’ blogger Roosh Vörek wants to legalize rape on private property so that women can have “learning experiences”
- Many thanks to CNN for over-hyping the new DHS report on so-called ‘sovereign citizens,’ making my job that much harder
- In Chicago, Judge Richard Posner has reaffirmed his order that Hakeem El Bey refrain from wasting the court’s time with a ‘sovereign citizen’ defense in his fraud trial. The result makes for hilarious reading
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Donna Marie Kozak of Nebraska was sentenced to three years in prison and three years probation for tax evasion, filing a false claim, harassing IRS agents, and filing false liens against them
- The Duggar family has bred nineteen self-righteous morons, and the oldest of them is already using Facebook to tell us how much better she is at Christianity than the rest of us
- ‘Sanctity of Marriage Alabama’ held a rally on the state capitol steps with signs provided by the neoconfederate League of the South, which is providing financial and organizational support for Judge Roy Moore. Speaker John Eidsmoe has past ties to both the League and the racist Council of Conservative citizens (get it? CCC=KKK)
- The Maryland-Virginia chapter of the League of the South will hold a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April
- A new study of conspiracy theorists on Facebook finds that they don’t engage with pages that debunk them — and aggressively defend fake conspiracy pages designed to troll them
- Last week, KKK flyers turned up in Spokane Valley, Washington, and Fairfield County, South Carolina, while Klan graffiti was spraypainted on a home in Miami Gardens, Florida
- Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R-Cliven Bundy) thinks that cancer is just a kind of fungus
- Texas Republicans are pushing a bill to ban Agenda 21, the nonbinding UN sustainable development program, thus endorsing a conspiracy theory that Glenn Beck and the John Birch Society have injected into tea parties for years
- Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin) wants voters to watch what poor people buy with food stamps
- One of Texas Republican State Rep. Debbie Riddle’s two new anti-transgender bills would force business owners to police their customers’ restroom use