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 mysterious giant hole opening up in Siberia, our Threatcon Color Code is MORLOCK GREEN
- At Huffington Post yesterday, Christinia Wilkie and Joy Resmovits blew the lid off Charles Koch’s public school indoctrination program centered in Topeka, Kansas. Governor Sam Brownback has destroyed the Kansas state budget by putting the Kochs’ economic theology into practice and is now facing a revolt by state Republicans
- Speaking of Brownback: America’s worst governor brought anti-birth control activist Rick Santorum to stump for him in Kansas, but it didn’t go very well. In related news, millennials are completely turned off by the conservative obsession with other people’s reproductive systems
- It turns out that recent New York Times article attacking billionaire climate champion Tom Steyer’s past ties to coal projects was sourced from a blog linked to the Kochs
- Our own Karoli Kuns unearthed documents indicating that IRS employee Lois Lerner has been a target of right wing revenge all along
- Rep. Darrell Issa (R-IRS) has basically stopped letting witnesses speak
- John Huggins was denied bail in Utah yesterday. Charged with possession of an “unregistered destructive device,” prosecutors say Huggins had a complex plan to attack the local police station as well as local infrastructure in order to delay an emergency response and maximize casualties
- Mike Tipping, the Maine journalist who exposed Governor Paul LePage’s dealings with the ‘sovereign citizens’ of the Aroostook Watchmen talk radio show, reports that two of the four men on the show have been arrested and charged for driving without licenses
- Philadelphia ‘sovereign citizen’ Ishaq Ibrahim wants to defend himself separately from his alleged conspirators in a bank robbery
- Also in Philadelphia: Kevin Green was convicted for a home invasion robbery and faces life in prison after his ‘sovereign citizen’ arguments failed to persuade the jury
- A Seminole County, Florida ‘sovereign citizen’ was arrested for stealing $20,000 in copper from light poles outside a church despite his claim to immunity from the laws
- At Mother Jones, Chris Mooney talks about the revolution in our understanding of the biology of ideology over the last decade. Kevin Drum warns everyone to watch their tone for condescension while discussing the science of political opinion; I say that studies like the one Mooney talks about here are exactly why House Republicans keep cutting social science research
- Bob Cesca dissects Texas Governor Rick Perry’s machine-gun photo-op with Sean Hannity
- Disgraced Texas Republican Steve Stockman seems to have found a new career giving quotes to birther website World Net Daily
- Ezra Klein reports that 68% of Americans think elections are rigged for incumbents — and they’re basically right. At Slate, Ron Klain explains how redistricting reform can save our democracy
- Of America’s 29 Republican governors, 15 are climate science deniers. One of them, Rick Scott of Florida, has repeatedly replied “I’m not a scientist” when challenged on the issue. Now a group of ten prominent Florida scientists is making a public request to explain the science to him
- At Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson tracked a fabricated story passing from Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit blog, to the Drudge Report, to Fox News. Expect lots more of these wild accusations, conspiracy theories, and outright lunacy from the right RE: immigration
- The Gun Report blog carried an impressive stream of gun death news for over a year before it shut down. Jennifer Mascia talks about her mind-numbing work, and the patterns she discerned in the anecdotes, at Raw story
- As she was sentenced for her role in a three-state murder spree, Holly Ann Grigsby apologized…to her fellow white supremacists, for damaging the “reputation of a movement misunderstood”
- Remember Rick Santelli’s choreographed rant in 2009 which supposedly inspired the rise of a “tea party movement” that had actually been built for years by organizations linked to the Koch brothers? If you haven’t seen CNBC’s Steve Liesman telling the perpetually-wrong Santelli that there is “no piece of advice you’ve given that’s worked” while he babbles incoherently, you should watch it now:
- As I said last week, the bogus “American Spring” movement has morphed into an anti-immigration Summer of phantom rallies by national ‘patriot’ militias, Oathkeepers, and III-Percenters. At the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, David Neiwert reports that these demonstrations have all fizzled out or failed spectacularly. On the other hand, the ugly scenes in Murrieta, CA, Oracle, AZ, and Vassar, MI have all involved small crowds of local citizens responding to local leaders who pander to their ugliness
- The KKK is recruiting in South Carolina with bags of candy
- At The Nation, Ari Berman gives us ten reasons why North Carolina will determine the future of the Voting Rights Act
- Steve Benen notes that infamous red-baiter Joseph McCarthy has once again become a hero to Republicans
- The Center for American Progress calculates that we’ve missed out on $351 billion in economic activity over the last three years due to Republican austerity
- For reasons that should be obvious at the 1:18 mark, I cannot get enough of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s new parody of “Royals” by Lorde
[youtube]http://youtu.be/w-0TEJMJOhk[/youtube]