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 astounding, even child-like honesty of tongue-tied incoming GOP Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, our Threatcon Color Code is BENGHAZI YELLOW
- Despite their earnest attempts to defame Planned Parenthood, Republicans are very confused that the organization isn’t becoming unpopular like they hoped it would. More importantly, the House hearing held on Tuesday was a huge disappointment to grassroots conservatives. The issue forms a deadly trap for the GOP: to please their base, the party would have to indulge Carly Fiorina-level fabrications that would undoubtedly earn embarrassing media scorn. On the other hand, the lame attack lines they tried on Tuesday are quite unsatisfying to culture warriors
- Troy Newman, the forced-birth activist who leads Operation Rescue and sits on the board of David Daleiden’s fraudulent Center for Medical Progress, was barred from entering Australia due to his calls for abortion providers to be executed. Meanwhile, Daleiden is doing his very best to get at least one abortion provider killed by telling Glenn Beck’s audience how “evil” they are — just like Bill O’Reilly and Dr. George Tiller. The FBI says there has been a surge of attacks on reproductive healthcare facilities since the CMP smear videos went live in July, including another possible arson last night; both men come from the ‘direct action’ movement and seem eager to whip up as much violence as possible
- The right wing argument that women will “just go somewhere else” if Planned Parenthood closes does not hold up under scrutiny
- Why do culture warriors target Planned Parenthood so much? Because they hate it when people have sex. These attacks are all about controlling the bodies of women, full stop
- Daleiden has admitted the ‘fetus on the table’ in his video was from a miscarriage, not an abortion
- Black lives matter: Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz was indicted Wednesday on two misdemeanor criminal counts, one of which is related to the April shooting death of Eric Harris by a half-trained reserve deputy who mistook his gun for his Taser
- Black homes matter: the New Orleans Greater Fair Housing Action Center conducted a ‘mystery shopper’ investigation this summer and found that 42 percent of landlords bent over backwards to help white testers with criminal records while disqualifying black testers for the exact same reasons
- Black votes matter: Alabama’s deep budget cuts to drivers license bureaus hit eight of the ten counties with the highest nonwhite populations. Combined with the state’s voter ID law, the situation screams for intervention by the US Department of Justice
- Black and brown car buyers matter: in the last five years, the country’s ninth largest auto lender charged Latino and African American car buyers an average of $200 more regardless of their credit ratings
- A new Pentagon memo says that the F-35 was only able to pass recent tests by the Marine Corps because they didn’t simulate real-world conditions. According to the author, there is still no evidence the F-35 “is operationally effective or suitable for use in any type of limited combat operation or that it is ready for real-world operational deployments.” This failing development program is “an obvious scam, the kind that doesn’t even show any respect for the suckers it’s robbing“
Don’t be fooled by buzz: the tech industry is actually pretty awful for the environment and human rights- Sweet Cakes by Melissa, the bakery which first refused to serve a lesbian couple, then doxed them and whipped their allies into a frenzy of hate, is pocketing all the money that fellow bigots gave and refusing to pay the judgment leveled against them
- Hillary Clinton is hinting that she will oppose the so-called ‘Cadillac tax’ in the Affordable Care Act. This would impact the law’s revenue system without actually improving care at all. As someone who once worked in an insurance call center, I can say with 100% certainty that these more-expensive plans offer only marginal benefits, such as slightly-better customer service, coverage of Botox injections, hair plugs, and injectable erectile dysfunction drugs
- Douchebags have no friends: the Republican Governors Association has stopped airing ads for Kentucky gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin. Sen. Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, says that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is “pretty much done for” among his colleagues
- Alabama schools don’t teach ‘sex education.’ Instead, they just teach girls to be ashamed of their bodies
- No longer content broadcasting her deluded conspiracy theory about Huma Abedin, former Congresswoman and full-time Islamophobe Michele Bachmann has a disgusting new smear about Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose drowned body shocked the world
- A new Bloomberg poll reveals that two-thirds of Americans support Roe v Wade — and nearly 4 in 5 want to reign in political spending
- Having dropped out of the presidential race, Scott Walker immediately got back to destroying Wisconsin
- David Brooks continues to be the worst pundit in American politics
- The discovery of water on Mars has the science-challenged Rush Limbaugh very confused:
- Bernie Sanders’s biggest problem in Iowa is Democrats who worry that he can’t win a general election
- Indiana Republican State House Majority Leader Rep. Jud McMillin has quit after a sexually-explicit video was sent from his phone, which he claims was stolen in Canada
- When you examine the arguments of those Twin Falls, Idaho residents who oppose a refugee resettlement program in their area, they all collapse under the weight of facts, and what you’re left with is just plain old religious bigotry
- If you only ever read or listen to right wing media, you’d never know that Thomas David Deegan of West Virginia was arrested for plotting to overthrow the state of West Virginia and suggesting that participants shoot police officers. Just imagine how much coverage this story would get at Breitbart News if Deegan had been on a conference call with Black Lives Matter activists instead of white ‘sovereign citizens‘
- ‘Sovereign citizen’ Kevin Francis Ramey doesn’t think the state of Alaska has the right to arrest him for unpaid child support — and asked the judge to deport him to heaven instead
- Held by the Family Research Council, the former employers of Josh Duggar, last weekend’s ‘Values Voter Summit’ in Washington, DC saw the Boy Scouts replaced by an anti-Semitic organization. The anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on the first day was only exceeded by the Muslim-bashing rhetoric of the second day. Is there anyone left who’s not sure whether the FRC is a hate group?
- White supremacists are so happy that John Boehner’s leaving
- The Islamophobic mayor of Irving, Texas is still justifying the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed because brown people with clocks make her pee her pants
- Polls show that Iowa Republicans, who will hold the nation’s first GOP primary, are staunchly bigoted people. This is what incipient fascism looks like
- Members of the KKK interviewed by the BBC said that Auschwitz was “a summer camp for Jews“
• “Historically, researchers have found that when Planned Parenthood clinics close, other clinics do not step up to fill the gap. Meanwhile, when there are fewer reproductive health clinics available, women get less reproductive health care — from birth control to cancer screenings to STD testing and treatment. Unintended pregnancies would likely increase, too.” in other news, water is wet and the surface of the sun is really hot.
• Anyone who says we live in a post-racial society is an idiot.
• The F-35 is a terrible aircraft, even worse than the V-22. At least the V-22 was an attempt to fill a niche; there’s no excuse for the F-35. Better we should ignore our sunk costs and abandon the program as quickly as possible.
• Michele Bachmann is a terrible person; Scott Walker is merely doing the bidding of his masters, Charles and David Koch; Driftglass has much to say about David Brooks, none of it good; and the world would be a better place had Rush Limbaugh decided to sell real estate for a living.
• Beth Van Duyne is a lunatic and a bigot, as is Heath Wester, president of the Texas Municipal Patrolman’s Association.
–alopecia
Agreed about the F-35. Why not just refit/upgrade existing craft like the F-16, F-18, and the A-10? A JSF sounded like a great idea, but the execution has been spotty to horrific at best, despite the amazing technologies of the F-35 (the “lift fan” and advanced avionics). What good will all of these billions put into the program matter if a not-so-advanced MiG-29 variant can shoot it out of the sky in a dogfight?
Granted, the F-35 looks cool and I admit to having “flown” it in flight sims and games like the Ace Combat series. But the actual craft itself has a lot of problems and needs to be seriously evaluated and scrapped if it does not match up.
(But I am still pissed that the RAH-66 Comanche was cancelled by that great friend of the military, Dick Cheney. That helicopter was ticking all the right boxes and worked, but….)
I haven’t followed the F-35 saga closely, but the program seems to have been snakebit from Day 1, largely because the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps almost instantly decided their missions were too different to use aircraft in the same configuration. The troubles really started when the people in charge of the JSF program at the Pentagon believed every claim Lockheed Martin made (think Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss at a car dealership).
Cancel F-35, upgrade the existing air fleet and learn from the mistakes made. (Since this is the DoD we’re talking about, the odds of any of those things happening are one in a very large number.)
–alopecia