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 Boston bombing conviction of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, our Threatcon Color Code is CELTIC JUSTICE
- President Obama’s call for a ban on ‘gay conversion therapy’ on minors will produce howls of outrage from the religious right, which is the actual point of doing it. Now that the shape of this social wedge-issue is changing, the wise Democrat will hammer it home consistently
- Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign rollout has been a complete disaster. If he can’t handle legitimate questions from a mere news anchor who isn’t Alex Jones, how is he going to stand up to Hillary Clinton in a general election? The Bush oppo ads are already writing themselves — which might be a good thing, since Paul would be the worst president for civil rights since the 19th Century
- If Jeb Bush wins the nomination, Hillary Clinton should say Michael Schiavo’s name as often as possible
- Limited marijuana legalization in western states is already having a huge, negative impact on Mexican drug cartels and reducing violence south of the border
- Leading conservatives are ready to shift from climate change denial to simply denying any change to deal with global warming. Expect defeatism and further denialism about the relative costs of inaction. Steeped as they are in decades of denialism, the conservative base will have a difficult time giving up on its conspiracy theories
- Pursuant to the previous point, the Koch brothers’ climate change-denying legislation mill ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) is threatening to sue organizations which describe its former climate change denial activities as “climate change denial”
- Just like Ferguson, Missouri, municipalities around the country have turned their poorest residents into cash machines through their criminal justice systems and even their animal control agencies
- This is what fake astroturf looks like: the Tea Party of Miami paid actors $75 to portray opponents of a critical land and water conservation program in the Everglades
- Crazy in America: Republican opposition to Medicaid enlargement has denied mental health services to half a million Americans
- Christian astronomer Hugh Ross debunks Pastor John Hagee’s ridiculous ‘Blood Moons’ theory — on Hagee’s own TV special
- No, American Jews aren’t leaving the Democratic Party
- Joe Arpaio, America’s douchebag sheriff, loves to say that his outdoor tent city jail saves money. But it has cost way more in lawsuits than it has saved in construction
- West Virginia has banned Tesla sales, which surely has nothing to do with the President of the state senate being a car dealer who resents electric charging stations
- Republicans have doubled-down on their poor-shaming lately, resulting in bizarre laws banning food stamp recipients from spending their benefits on cruise ships, etc. In addition to being the deranged stuff of urban legend, this is a double-standard that contrasts sharply with conservative religious values and speaks to the overweening influence of oligarchy in the party. But what’s kind of amazing is how the best debunkery of this trend has come from inside the Beltway
- A huge victory for Appalachia: Barclays Bank has stopped financing mountaintop removal mining activity
- The Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands has banned its employees from talking about climate change after Republican State Treasurer Matt Adamcyzk objected to the daughter of the founder of Earth Day addressing a Congressional committee on the topic
- The atomization of the body politic: more Americans claim to be independent of political parties than ever before, but there is a corresponding rise in political polarization. This is why I am skeptical of calls for an “independent” political movement
- Florida state senator Nancy Detert is tired of being targeted by Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity. At a hearing last week, she told representatives of the organization they were “for prosperity for yourself and not anyone else…you people serve absolutely no purpose“
- Jeb Bush’s son George is trying to privatize the Alamo
- Despite receiving a national storm of media criticism, Alabama Republican state senator Larry Stutts still plans to pursue the repeal of a law named for his dead patient
- Texas wants to punish judges who uphold a child’s right to abortion access; North Carolina state representative Pat McElraft wants to triple the length of the state’s mandatory waiting period to 72 hours in hopes of making sure “a few more little taxpayers” are born
- Kansas has banned the most common second trimester abortion procedure as “dismemberment”
- Anyone who wants to make hay over Rolling Stone‘s retraction of a campus fraternity rape story can go tell it to Judith Miller, the disgraced New York Times reporter who gave you “aluminum tubes” and other great Bush-Cheney hits
- In the marriage equality wars, a central Florida baker got death threats for refusing to decorate an anti-gay cake and the Colorado Civil Rights Division has determined that a Denver bakery did not discriminate against a ‘Christian’ who requested anti-gay messages
- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson may be Republican, but he admits that his party wants war with Iran
- Military suicide experts call Ted Nugent’s claim that President Obama is driving soldiers to suicide “distorted” and “ridiculous”
- Ten members of the Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Maysville, Kentucky; Klan fliers have turned up in Long Island, New York
- The Antidefamation League says that right wing terror attacks are approaching 1990s levels
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Tyre Wortham refuses to attend his trial for bank robbery or allow a public defender to represent him, but that doesn’t mean his trial is stopping
- A pair of Michigan school bus drivers and militia members have been charged with embezzling money to buy a machine gun and ammunition
- I can watch YouTube star Riyadh K troll the Westboro Baptist Church all day long: