Thursday THREATCON – Democratic Debate Edition

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 Democratic presidential debate this week, our Threatcon Color Code is BLUE SHIFT

• The obvious losers on Tuesday night were former governor Lincoln Chafee and confederate flag apologist Jim Webb, but I would also include Joe Biden, who could only throw a monkey wrench into the process at this point and thankfully seems to be shrinking back from the brink. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley was fairly weak overall, but had a strong closing and drew cheers with tough words on gun control. Hillary Clinton greatly exceeded expectations, which drew effusive praise from the pundit class, but supporters of Bernie Sanders complain that he had better snap polling and won the focus groups. What’s interesting about these unofficial rankings is how precisely they track the amount of time each candidate actually spoke:

• The Democratic debate highlighted a key difference with the GOP in that the candidates discussed substantive issues and there was relatively little hedging or ‘nuance.’ So much for Democrats being perceived as weak and politically correct, eh?
• Did you catch Anderson Cooper’s not-so-subtle red-baiting of Bernie Sanders? Contrast that with his burgeoning appeal in red states and to Fox News focus group viewers
• On the other hand, progressive Sanders partisans are rather quiet about his views on Edward Snowden. As his words are inoffensive to conservatives who consider the former national security contractor a traitor to the United States, Sanders’s statements show that he’s not some sort of righteous saint after all, but remains a Westphalian statist who is perfectly capable of Hillary-style political triangulation. In other words, no one in this Democratic field is about to overturn the world order
• Notice that Democrats aren’t running away from gun control anymore? That’s because many of their proposals, such as expanded background checks, have broad bipartisan public support
• Why did CNN give such short shrift to Latino and Black Lives Matter questioners?
• During the debate, Mike Huckabee tweeted a racist joke about not trusting North Koreans with his dog. Ironically, only a fool would trust Huckabee’s son David with their dog, either
• GOP frontrunners Donald Trump and Ben Carson are threatening to skip the next debate unless the format is changed. Specifically, they want it to be shorter and include opening and closing statements
• I’m going to say it out loud: Ben Carson is just lying about being in a Popeye’s restaurant during a robbery and needs to be called out for his fabrications. Seventh Day Adventists have already asked him to knock off the Muslim-bashing; don’t they also have some sort of ‘commandment’ about false witnesses?
• Abrahamic theists have more in common than they think. Watch this Islamophobe enter a mosque — and meet actual Muslims — for the first time in her paranoid, Fox News-driven life

• Guess which other American minority population suffers disproportionate police violence, usually without consequences to the perpetrators? Hint: they’ve been dying at the hands of white people since 1492, and libertarian hero Ayn Rand fully approved of their genocide
• Planned Parenthood will no longer accept $60 reimbursements for fetal tissue donations. While you might think this would pull the last prop out from under the contrived ‘baby parts for cash’ hoax, which has otherwise-reasonable persons actually believing that the family planning and health services provider wants to buy a $200,000 Lamborghini, you would be wrong
• Regional Planned Parenthood CEO Sarah Stoesz says that protesters have switched to calling her “whore” and “Jezebel,” confirming that forced-birth activism was never about anything more than controlling women’s bodies and especially their sex lives
• Planned Parenthood is a primary target of forced-birth activism, but independent clinics do most of the abortion procedures in America, and their troubles often fly under the public radar
• As forced-birth activists succeed in making it harder to obtain a safe, clinical abortion in America than at any time since Roe v Wade, ‘sovereign citizen’ Rick Van Thiel is an excellent example of the horrors that await desperate women in a post-Roe world of back alleys, grimy motels, and trailer parks
• US District Judge Mike Barrett has banned Ohio health officials from enforcing strict new abortion laws. Without the federal judiciary, knitting needles, coat hangers, and peritonitis would be back in vogue already
• During the Francis papacy, archconservative American Bishops have endangered the lives of women by inflicting their doctrines on Catholic hospitals and health systems. Now the ACLU is suing Trinity Health for denying emergency procedures that are mandated by law
• The high cost of low wages: Walmart, which is owned by the richest family in the country, costs taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance every year
• If the best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, then what’s the best defense against a toddler with a gun? Because so far this year, someone in America has been shot by a toddler every week
• Corroboration from another House Republican: Rep. Richard Hanna of New York admits to the Keeler in the Morning show that the Benghazi Committee exists to attack Hillary Clinton. Remember that she is due to testify before the committee prior to the next Democratic debate, giving her a second chance to outshine expectations by exposing Trey Gowdy

• The US Department of Justice has a new assistant attorney general position for dealing with domestic terrorism. Its first occupant is John Carlin, who seems to understand the problem very well, but also says that DoJ should focus on those willing to cross the line from hate speech to action rather than tar groups with a ‘terrorist’ label. This eminently-sensible policy will of course be mischaracterized and used to fire up the Alex Jones fever swamp regardless of what Carlin actually says
• Overton window: Tamika Pledger of Kansas City, Missouri has adopted ‘sovereign citizen’ tactics in her defense against vehicular manslaughter charges. This is another example of the racist white Posse Comitatus phenomenon crossing color lines at the fringe
• Rand Paul told a crowd at Drake University in Iowa that gay people should just stay in the closet if they don’t want to be fired. Liberty!
• Liars for Jesus: Liberty Counsel attorneys for homophobic Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis keep saying things that are just not believable
• It sounded like a good idea at the time: the mostly-white Georgetown, DC neighborhood started using a messaging platform to fight crime, but business employees just use it for racial and transgender profiling
• Thugs: fifteen confederate flag enthusiasts who harassed and threatened a black Georgia family holding a peaceful birthday party cookout in July have been indicted for threats and ‘gang activity’ 
• I will personally give Ted Cruz a cookie if he can show me a single example of Black Lives Matter activists actually “celebrating” the murder of police officers like he claims they do. I will also give him a glass of milk if he can distinguish his lies from the ones that Don Black, founder of the racist Stormfront website, tells about the BLM movement
• The Georgia chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans, a formerly-mainstream group now dominated by racist neoconfederates, is whining hard because a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial is being constructed on Stone Mountain, a historical site that is also held sacred by the Ku Klux Klan
• Running for mayor of Boise, Idaho, Judy Peavey-Derr referred to refugees resettled in the city as a “blight”
• The fashion-du-jour among American hate groups is ‘identitarianism,’ which touts anti-Muslim xenophobia and opposes multiculturalism
• Frequent Fox News guest commentator Wayne Simmons has been indicted for fraud. Federal law enforcement agents say that his on-air claims to have worked for the CIA were utterly false. As your US RDA of outrage porn, here is an example of the kind of nonsense Simmons has spewed into the brains of viewers: