Thursday THREATCON – 31 July 2014

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 Orlando Bloom’s failure to knock out Justin Bieber, our Threatcon Color Code is DOUCHEBAG BLUE

• We have been keeping close tabs on the militia movement’s response to this Summer’s immigration “crisis.” While it’s always good to see broader attention to groups like the Minutemen, I want to stress that the real threat they represent is not ugly armed scenes, but random violence and lawlessness within America’s borders. Federal authorities have already learned to defeat local bus blockades by altering their schedules and keeping arrangements private, while all of the various calls for armed protest at the border itself have fizzled. At the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, David Neiwert reminds us of two examples of the random violence problem who were directly connected to the Arizona paramilitary group in its first incarnation: Shawna Forde and Chris Simcox. This week, we uncovered an example of the lawlessness in con artist Paul Lemmen and his III Percenter associates
• As David Pakman explains in the video above, jobless claims are at their lowest level since 2006 — though the media isn’t talking about it for some reason
• America’s political “silly season” is trending hot. By now, you’ve probably heard that Westboro Baptists plan to picket technology companies in Sillicon Valley in August. The WBC is struggling to remain newsworthy in the wake of its founder’s death, and has in fact become a cause for creative counter-organizing
• The Anti-Defamation League also has a handy calendar of white power, militia, and sovereign citizen gatherings next month
• Not that it matters to Fox News, but those children coming from Central America are better vaccinated than Americans
• Oligarchy as a home state: the average American household has lost one-third of their wealth in the last decade; only the richest 1% have seen any gains. The American dream is dead and the pillow on its face bears the imprint of two hands: President Bush, through his tax cuts, and declining corporate taxes. Now House Republicans want to redistribute the Earned Income Credit by making rich kids worth more than poor kids
• Your US RDA of outrage porn: listen to Rep. Louie Gohmert willingly indulge a Sandy Hook “truther”

• At Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery reminds us that elections have consequences for the federal judiciary. The conservative movement has effectively politicized that judiciary by promoting ideologues whenever Republicans occupy the White House, then resisting as many judicial confirmations as they can, for long as possible, in the Senate whenever the president is a Democrat
• Can Democrats win by promising to show up for work? Chris Weigant has been a consistent and tireless chronicler of the do-nothing Congress
• CNN’s S.E. Cupp is utterly incoherent about her atheism
• Did Sarah Palin give a speech drunk? Here are the results-to-date of our totally-unscientific opinion poll, which closes Friday night:

• Hat tip to Tim Fenton for venturing into the “batshit collective” of Breitbart London, where he has found an MH17 shootdown conspiracy theorist
• The war between conservative “outside groups” and establishment Republicans has bled over into a war between grassroots conservatism and the Chamber of Commerce
• The ‘sovereign citizen’ movement has become the top perceived terrorist threat among law enforcement agencies
• An Atlanta sovereign citizen was sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison for illegal possession of a firearm. He was found living in a gated community in a house under foreclosure
• A Pennsylvania judge ordered ‘sovereign citizen’ Todd Detwiler released from a psychiatric hospital after previously finding him not competent to stand trial. He had been arrested driving a motorcycle with a handmade license plate, no helmet, and no driver’s license. Although it happened last year, the story was not reported until this week
• A Louisiana ‘sovereign citizen’ was arrested in Connecticut for traffic violations and outstanding warrants. Richard Moore told officers he had neither licence nor registration, but “the right to travel was afforded by the Constitution” — and then tried rolling up his window
• Creationist Ken Ham is selling junk bonds to finance his creationist museum in Kentucky
• Chris Hayes discussed the conservative circle of scam last night; here is his closing segment with Eric Boehlert of Media Matters

• Don’t be fooled, right wing talkers are still pushing to impeach President Obama. Republicans are extremely dissonant on this point; yesterday Steve King (R-Lala Land) told CNN that he both does and does not want to impeach the president
• North Carolina’s refusal to implement Medicaid expansion is starting to turn conservatives against the GOP
• Also in North Carolina, the Susan B. Anthony list is airing an ad that stars a Koch brothers operative
• Conservative blogger Charles Johnson is under investigation for allegedly paying for a false story about vote-buying in Mississippi’s US Senate primary runoff, which makes that race officially the weirdest of 2014. Six days past his self-imposed, informal deadline to file a challenge, tea party insurgent Chris McDaniel faces intense pressure to show evidence of his allegations
• A third of restaurant workers suffer from food insecurity
• Remember Mark Ames’s recent expose of the Koch brothers’ Reason magazine’s 1976 Holocaust denial issue? Pando Daily editorial director Paul Carr demolishes the magazine’s continued denials of the story
• Cook Political Report pronounces Louisiana’s Lenar Whitney, the “Palin of the South,” to be “the most frightening candidate I’ve met in seven years of interviewing congressional hopefuls”
• Harvey J. Kaye, the Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, writes that liberals and progressives must reclaim American exceptionalism
• Recently, I have noted various commentators saying that tea parties are the monster to K-Street’s Dr. Frankenstein. Let the record indicate that I have been using this exact metaphor since 2009
• Author Ron Johnson and David Pakman discuss the prevalence of psychopathy among CEOs and politicians

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