Moms for Liberty has had a rocky few weeks. First off, they were nearly wiped out in the November elections. Then a couple of weeks ago, this happened:

A Republican pastor who coordinates the faith-based outreach for the Philadelphia chapter of Moms for Liberty was convicted a decade ago of sexually abusing a teenage boy.

Phillip Fisher Jr., who leads the Center of Universal Divinity in Olney, helps connect the right-wing group with local faith leaders to boost membership, and other leaders say they’re shocked to learn he pleaded guilty in 2012 to a felony count of aggravated sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy when he was 25, reported The Philadelphia Inquirer.

There’s even a Lyndon LaRouche connection. But it gets better. You’ve probably heard about what went on in Florida —

Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler’s admission to having a sexual relationship with the woman accusing her husband of rape has sparked backlash online Saturday, with many labeling the Florida political leader a hypocrite.

A hypocite? You don’t say!

Christian Ziegler and his attorney have denied any wrongdoing on his part, but security footage obtained from the victim’s apartment has shown that he was at the building on the date of the alleged assault. Admissions to law enforcement from his wife have also complicated the matter.

As revealed in recently released court documents, Bridget Ziegler was interviewed by investigators in early November, confirming that she, her husband, and the victim had been friends and had engaged in a consensual sexual encounter roughly a year prior to the assault that the victim now alleges.

When this was first reported I decided to not comment on it until there was some corroboration. Well, there it is.

At the Miami Herald, Fabiola Santiago asks, If Moms for Liberty co-founder had sex with a woman, why is she targeting Florida’s gays? Well, one does wonder, doesn’t one?

The Zieglers were considered a quickly rising power couple — close collaborators of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and also supporters of ex-President Donald Trump. But while he talked tough and boisterously, she seemed to be the real the mover and shaker. The group she co-founded in the name of “parental rights” — credited with banning school books featuring gay characters and Blacks confronting discrimination in a predominantly white society — has spread nationwide at a vertiginous rate: 300 chapters in 48 states in two years. …

… DeSantis not only endorsed Bridget Ziegler’s school board candidacy, but he gave her a seat on the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board of Supervisors. This is the agency formed after the dispute with Disney World over its corporate criticism of the “Don’t Say Gay” law banning sexual-identity discussion in schools and following the termination of Disney’s Reedy Creek special taxing district operational agreement with the state.

It couldn’t get any better if I’d made it up. And be sure to visit Bridget Zeigler’s school board campaign website before it gets taken down. She won re-election to the Sarasota School Board in 2022. Now the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is calling for her to go away.

Imagine you are the child of a gay or lesbian couple, and that you are not permitted to acknowledge your family in school. It is cruel and serves no purpose other than cruelty.

Ziegler’s treatment of trans people is equally cruel.

Ziegler spearheaded the forced resignation of Brennan Asplen despite the former superintendent’s “highly effective” rating and excellent leadership of the schools through the pandemic. This wasted precious financial resources and time better spent on real issues. It did not benefit the school system.

As the School Board chair, Ziegler allowed commenters at board meetings to mock and target Tom Edwards, who is an effective leader, because he is gay.

It was unconscionable.

Unconscionable is kind of the point, I think. It gets you on Fox News.

While we’re in Florida, it seems the last refuge of failing Republican presidential candidates is to rip Obamacare. Now it’s Ron DeSantis.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law.

“Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.”

He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring.

Of course, he doesn’t have a proposal yet. He’s just reacting to Trump’s recent stupid remark about replacing Obamacare. The GOP had shut up about it in recent years. So we’ll see if DeSantis comes up with anything other than the Standard GOP Health Care Plan That Won’t Work.

So far today: George Santos has been expelled. An appeals court ruled that Trump can be sued for inciting the January 6 riot. And Sandra Day O’Connor died.

Yesterday we learned that Israel had been sitting on Hamas’s October 7 plan (although they didn’t know the date) for over a year but wasn’t taking it seriously. I liked this part:

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Sounds like.  If only a man had been the one to report this, huh? Maybe lives would have been saved. And I’m a bit surprised I haven’t heard anything about “October 7 Truth” claiming that Benjamin Netanyahu planned the whole thing so he could bomb Gaza. Give it time.

Anyway, today Israel predictably called off the “pause” and started bombing Gaza again.  Gotta move that story about the botched intelligence off the front page.

Yesterday an appeals court reinstated Judge Engoron’s gag order in the New York finance fraud trial. Trump responded by posting lies about Judge Engoron’s wife. She is not covered in the gag order, although she probably should be. I hope she’s keeping safe.

Oh, and this: “Donald Trump has shared a post on his Truth Social website, calling for Capitol Police officers who ‘beat the hell out of innocent J6 [January 6] protesters’ to face criminal charges.”

For fun: Yahoo News compares Melania Trump’s and Dr. Jill Biden’s White House Christmas decorations. The Biden theme is “definitely less ‘human sacrifice’ and more ‘holiday joy.'”

Liz Cheney’s book will be released December 5. Lots of advance copies are in circulation already, so quotes are turning up in the news. My favorite so far:

As the House went into lockdown on January 6, “Jim Jordan approached me,” Cheney writes, saying, “We need to get the ladies off the aisle,” and, extending his hand, told her, “Let me help you.” To which Cheney responded “Get away from me. You f—ing did this.”

More could yet happen today. We’ll see.

Update: Here we go.

A federal judge on Friday rejected claims by former President Donald J. Trump that he enjoyed absolute immunity from criminal charges accusing him of seeking to reverse the 2020 election, slapping down his argument that the indictment should be tossed out because it was based on actions he took while he was in office.

The ruling by the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, was her first denying one of Mr. Trump’s many motions to dismiss the election interference case, which is set to go trial in Federal District Court in Washington in about three months.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had expected the immunity motion to fail. They have been planning for weeks to use the defeat to begin a Hail Mary strategy to put off the impending trial. They intend to appeal Judge Chutkan’s ruling all the way to the Supreme Court if they can, hoping that even if they eventually lose, their challenges will eat up time and keep the case from going in front of a jury until after the 2024 election.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed their immunity claims in October in a set of breathtaking court papers that maintained he could not be held accountable for any official actions he took as president, even after a grand jury had returned a four-count criminal indictment against him.

I hadn’t realized she was still alive all this time. Thanks for Roe v. Wade; not so much for Bush v. Gore.

No comment.

Update: I got a kick out of the Rolling Stone headline:

First, business — I am starting another mini-fundraiser to keep me going a bit longer here. Still struggling, but I think 2024 could be a bit better. Here is the Go Fund Me link. The “donate” button at the top of the right-hand column is connected to PayPal.

Also, I have not heard from gulag and have not received any response from my emails to him. His last comment was November 13. All we can do is hope.

Now, politics. ABC News has a report on what Mike Pence told Jack Smith’s crew about January 6. There are no bombshells, but it’s an interesting read. Pence remains someone who is hard to pin down. Even now he seems to want to be known for his loyalty to Trump while at the same time he is (understandably) separating himself from Trump’s attempt at a coup. He blames Trump’s “outside” lawyers, like Giuliani and Powell, for misleading Trump about the election results. He still can’t admit to Trump’s craven dishonesty and inability to face facts he doesn’t like.

The Koch Network has endorsed Nikki Haley for the GOP presidential nomination. Now we’ll see if the Koch Network has any clout with the base; I’m guessing not. But this could help boost Haley’s campaign fundraising quite a bit. She seems to be the one the Old Guard and what’s left of the “normies” are rallying around, now that they’ve gotten to know Ron DeSantis. But see Paul Krugman, “Nikki Haley Is Coming for Your Retirement.” She wants to bleep up Social Security, basically.

Trump, meanwhile, finally has said something about policy. Which is that he wants to replace Obamacare. He said,

“The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives,” he wrote. “We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it. It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

He seems not to remember that the reason killing Obamacare failed to pass is that there was nothing to replace it. And as far as Republicans are concerned, there still isn’t. And there never will be. And the Biden campaign is already reminding everyone about preexisting conditions.

Here’s a sobering thought from David Kurtz at TPM:

By the time we sit down for turkey again next year, Donald Trump may be the president-elect for a second time. That persistent thought soured my holiday like spoiled deviled eggs. If this was the last Thanksgiving before the end of democracy as we know it, I hope you made it a good one.

In the last post I linked to Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair, Trump’s Attacks On Judge and Law Clerk Triggers “Hundreds” Of Threats: Report. David Kurtz adds,

Trump’s rhetorical attack on Thanksgiving came the day after a new revelation about the consequences of those kinds of attacks. The judge in the New York fraud case against him defended his gag order in a filing that revealed that he and his law clerk had received hundreds of credible threats in response to Trump’s attack. Among other things, the law clerk’s cell phone number and personal email address have been compromised.

Yet, somehow, the gag orders keep getting lifted, and the courts are taking their sweet time deciding whether to reinstate them. It’s as if the ambulance picks up a guy having a heart attack and then stops for doughnuts on the way to the hospital. Does one of Trump’s targets have to get killed to light a fire under some people?

Last night I finished reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel. You. must. read. this. There was much I did not know, although little of it was surprising. The one element I didn’t expect is that this massive plot that originated with the Third Reich to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a pro-German fascist state, for which the Department of Justice had tons of evidence clearly showing even some members of Congress were in on it, all got swept under the rug and the evidence classified after the War. So the corrupt thugs who took Hitler’s money and did Hitler’s bidding even as U.S. troops were fighting in Europe all got off without penalties. Because people were ready to move on, or something.

What was fueling a lot of the pro-Hitler sentiment in the U.S. was, of course, racism and antisemitism. Lots of people were ready to sell out the Constitution and democracy so they could deport — or worse — nonwhite people and Jews. Some things don’t change.  And if they’d had Fox News back then, they might have succeeded.

(What screwed Hitler’s plans more than anything else was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which I understand he did not know about until it happened. For years he had spent considerable effort and money to ensure that the U.S. stayed out of his wars in Europe. December 7, 1941, swept all that away. Even then Hitler might not have declared war except that his invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled, and he persuaded himself that Japan would keep the United States busy in the Pacific, and that Japanese threats to Britain’s Asian colonies would weaken Britain.)

A lot of these American fascists were thugs who might as well have been wearing MAGA hats. They would have (and possibly did) murder their fellow Americans for the sake of the Cause. The rule of law meant nothing to them. And hardly anybody in the U.S. got the full story of the sedition, and now here we are again on the edge of a neo-fascist takeover.

Trump isn’t at all shy about letting the world know what he intends to do in a second term. See Donald Moynihan, Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’ at the New York Times. No paywall. If we as a nation survive this, no more moving on. There must be full public disclosure and justice this time.

Note: We haven’t heard from gulag in a few days. Yesterday I sent him an email and also an ecard (I will get a notice if it is opened), but I haven’t received a response. I will let you know if I do.

This is the sort of thing that depresses the hell out of me.

Voters rank “the economy” and “inflation” as their top concern in every major survey. And they consistently express more faith in Trump’s competence on those issues than Biden’s. In a Bloomberg–Morning Consult poll from last month, swing-state voters favored Trump over Biden on the economy by a 15-point margin and trusted the Republican more than the Democrat to best handle the cost of everyday goods and services by 12 points. Those results are in line with the findings of various other surveys of both battleground states and the nation as a whole.

Of course, here in Real World Land President Biden and his economic team have done a brilliant job lowering inflation while avoiding a recession. A whole lot of other industrialized democracies are suffering much more than we are. And (as Eric Levitz goes on to explain) Trump’s plans for a second term would make inflation worse.

Voters’ faith in Trump’s price-management bona fides may rest on nostalgia for the 2019 economy, antipathy for Biden, or the belief that The Apprentice was a documentary. One thing it most certainly does not rest on, however, is an accurate understanding of the Trump 2025 agenda’s macroeconomic implications.

That agenda includes imposing a 10 percent tariff on all foreign-made goods, enacting large deficit-financed tax cuts, and slashing America’s foreign-born labor force through mass deportations and immigration restriction. Taken together, this constitutes a recipe for a drastic increase in U.S. consumer prices.

Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work. In his first term he persisted in thinking that a tariff is somehow a tax imposed on the importing country rather than a tax on the imported goods that American consumers end up having to pay. One suspects that at least a few people have attempted to explain to him how tarriffs work, but he decided to trust his own “stable genius” rather than economists. And Trump is a bleeping moron.

I don’t think the American people have ever heard the story of what a terrible businessman Trump really is. That information was out there in 2016, but if you aren’t the sort of person who reads the long, investigative features in major newspapers  probably you wouldn’t have heard it. The truth is that his record as a businessman is awful. The real estate business he inherited from his father may have had some success after Trump took it over, although it’s hard to know now if any of that was real or just cooking the books. But it’s my understanding that every business venture Trump started himself ended up in bankruptcy court or just plain failed, or was shut down by a court because it was commiting fraud. If you know of an exception, do speak up. Were it not for tax and other fraud, being bailed out by The Apprentice, and probable money laundering for vaqious criminal entities he would have been wiped out long ago.

Some of this collective ignorance among voters is the Fox News effect, but some of it is the collective failure of U.S. news media. Too many allegedly “mainstream” news outlets just plain shy away from telling the plain truth, either because of losing access to Republican sources, or losing viewers, or possibly losing advertisers, or whatever.

And year after year people complain that elections are covered as if they were a “horse race” — who is ahead in the polls, who is behind — while the stories of the candidates’ records and what they might do if elected go mostly untold (except in those really long newspaper stories that only us nerds read). And by golly, so far as we move into a presidential election year, they’re pretty much doing that again, with the additional focus on Joe Biden’s age without noting that Trump is only three years younger.

The Biden campaign, at least, is complaining about some of the coverage of Trump. Charlotte Klein writes for Vanity Fair:

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign accused the political press this past week of not shining “a bright enough light” on Donald Trump’s abortion record, taking specific aim at a New York Timespiece that described the former president—who has boasted about his Supreme Court picks overturning Roe v. Wade—as now “employing vagueness and trying to occupy a middle ground of sorts” on the issue. “It’s time to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House,” the campaign wrote. Biden campaign aides reiterated this critique on X. “Good to see folks have learned nothing from a decade of covering Donald Trump,” wrote deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty.

It’s a start.

In other news: X May Lose Up to $75 Million in Revenue as More Advertisers Pull Out. Comment on social media — “Elon has lost his wife, his kids, 40 billion dollars, and his space ship crashed. It’s like a genre of country music that doesn’t even exist yet.”

In actual sad news:  Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair, Trump’s Attacks On Judge and Law Clerk Triggers “Hundreds” Of Threats: Report. So maybe after a few people have been killed by Trump culties the gag order thing will be taken a bit more seriously.

I’m going to be away from the computer for a couple of days. Enjoy Thanksgiving!

Last night there was an apparent agreement between Israel and Hamas for a four-day cease fire and the release of some hostages, so that’s a bit of an improvement.

I’ve started reading Rachel Maddow’s new book, Prequel. Chapter 3 is about how the Third Reich looked to U.S. racial policies for guidance on singling out Jews for discrimination. The Reich actually sent lawyers to the U.S. to understand how we did it, considering our laws said all kinds of stuff about equal protection that obviously wan’t practiced. And, basically, the answer was that the white men who ran everything had many ingenious ways to rationalize that the equal protection clauses simply didn’t apply to nonwhites, because reasons.

So it was creepy when this happened yesterday.

A federal appeals court issued a ruling Monday that could gut the Voting Rights Act, saying only the federal government — not private citizens or civil rights groups — is allowed to sue under a key section of the landmark civil rights law. …

… The appellate court ruled that there is no “private right of action” for Section 2 of the law — which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race.

The court’s reasons for this make absolutely no sense to me. But this is exactly the kind of thing courts used to do back in the 1930s to effectively nullify any legal language about equal protection and nondiscrimination. And yeah, the judge who wrote the decision was a Trump appointee.

Adam Serwer wrote at The Atlantic,

The Constitution is supposed to forbid such discrimination, but that sounds simpler than it is. In practice, if you have enough judges or justices willing to find unconstitutional the laws adopted to enforce that right, or willing to rule in such a way that nullifies the ability of those laws to function, you can simply render the Fifteenth Amendment useless. This is what the Supreme Court did after Reconstruction, when Black people were still trying to assert their right to vote and the justices decided it was a right they could not or would not defend.

And that judicial nullification was still going on when Hitler’s lawyers came here to study our legal system.

The majority’s reasoning is simple, if absurd. Although acknowledging that “Congress had ‘clearly intended’ all along to allow private enforcement,” it argues that the text does not say so explicitly, therefore Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent, and decades of practice are irrelevant. The fact that this would allow lawmakers to discriminate against their Black constituents without interference from pesky civil-rights groups is an innocent coincidence. This interpretation of the law was teed up for the judges by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas in another 2021 voting-rights case in which the conservative-dominated high court weakened prohibitions against voting discrimination.

This decision will probably go to SCOTUS for review, I understand, but fat lot of good that is likely to do.

At Election Law Blog:

The majority reaches its decision with a wooden, textualist analysis. It reaches it decision despite recognizing that the Supreme Court and lower courts have for decades allowed such cases to be brought, assuming that Congress intended to allow such suits. And the majority acknowledges that the legislative history of the passage of Section 2 leaves no doubt: Congress intended to allow private plaintiffs to bring suit.

So, yes, this is an outrage.

She was 96.