Let’s tiptoe into this new year very gently, and just gossip a bit. I take it Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago was kind of a downer. Melania was absent (her mother is sick, but Melania hasn’t exactly been glued to Trump’s side for months). Second, according to magazine accounts the “A List” at this party consisted of Roger Stone, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Mike Lindell, and Rudy Giuliani. The entertainment was an Elvis impersonator, Vanilla Ice, and a guy in a ninja turtle costume.

I’M SORRY WHAT https://t.co/S4CU1pyuUe pic.twitter.com/uPf5PFesZq

— Tom Sauer (@thomasbsauer) January 1, 2024

That’s just sad. Now, aren’t you glad you weren’t there? Full disclosure, I had a glass of wine and went to bed about 10 o’clock. And I’m perfectly content with that.

Put this in the “some days you can’t catch a break” department. You remember Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP chair married to a co-founder of Moms for Liberty who was accused of assault? by a woman with whom he and his wife had enjoyed threesomes? Ziegler gave the police a video of his visit to the woman, which he said shows consensual activity. Now the police are considering charging Ziegler with making the video without the woman’s consent.

Speaking of Moms for Liberty, Josh Marshall has been chronicling the adventures of Clarice Schillinger of Pennsylvania, who “runs two Moms for Liberty-esque SuperPACs, Keeping Kids in School PAC and Back to School Pac.”

She was also a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2022. Here she is hanging out with President Trump back in better times. She and Trump talked about “how the moms are upset and how we’re going to save America. And the grandmoms and the caregivers, all of us. When you touch our children, it’s about the future of democracy. This is what happens.”

Now Schillinger has been arrested touching children in the form of punching out a sixteen year old at a booze-drenched birthday party she threw for her seventeen year old daughter at the homestead in Doylestown, PA.

This is the Pennsylvania Inquirer — seriously, read this  —

Multiple teenagers were assaulted by intoxicated adults during the Sept. 29 party at Clarice Schillinger’s Doylestown home, according to a police affidavit. Police say that Schillinger’s intoxicated boyfriend punched one teen in the face and assaulted another. That teen also was punched in the eye by Schillinger’s intoxicated mother, who also chased that teen around the kitchen, the affidavit said.

As teenagers tried to leave the home on Liz Circle, Schillinger — who police said had supplied the more than 15 minors at the party with a basement bar stocked with vodka and rum, played beer pong with them and encouraged them to take shots with her — ordered them to stay.

She then punched one young man in the face three times, according to the affidavit, which said video footage showed Schillinger lunging toward a group of teenagers in the foyer and having to be restrained.

So now there’s two things to be grateful for. You weren’t at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve, and you aren’t related to Clarice Schillinger. The whole family sounds demented.

Josh Marshall has an update today on more of Schillinger’s political activity, which sounds about as hinky as that party.

This is going to be one mother of an election year, folks. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. You all know you’re always welcome to come here and vent, any time.

Item One, Maine’s decision that Trump is ineligible to run for POTUS. The Hill reports that right-wing radio host Larry Elder (I’d never heard of him) predicts the Maine decision will “set the country on fire.” Except it won’t. Trump’s thugs will send threats to the Maine Secretary of State, who probably will need extra security for a while. But that’s all that’s going to happen.

Presidential election polls notwithstanding, IMO Trump and his MAGA movement are not beloved by most Americans. I’m betting that the true MAGA, fanatical believers are maybe a quarter of the adult population. Trump’s current “favorability” is at 42 percent, but I’m betting a chunk of that 42 percent doesn’t feel strongly enough about Trump to go out and riot for him. These are low-information voters who aren’t paying that much attention and just habitually vote for Republicans.

And when the country is not set on fire, someone should look up this Larry Elder guy and point that out.

The Election Law Blog thinks that the Maine decision will make it more likely that the SCOTUS will review the issue. I have a hard time believing the majority will support the Colorado and Maine decisions, but how they disagree is going to be interesting by itself. I bet John Roberts even now is trying to think up a way to keep Trump on ballots without negating the text of the 14th Amendment. Good luck with that.

Item Two, new reporting on the fake electors scheme. CNN —

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

These people are so busted. If only we had an uncorrupted judiciary now. Trump would be in jail already.

Item Three, Nikki Haley’s history problem. I wasn’t surprised that she whiffed on a question about the cause of the Civil War. I am surprised that the event at least got a little traction in the news. Whether it hurts her campaign is still to be seen. Her “clarification” didn’t help her any, I don’t think.

There’s also this:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has launched four billboards in Iowa attacking Republican presidential candidates for their “anti-history record” as they spend the weekend campaigning in the Hawkeye state.

The billboards, which will be in Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, come as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley faces criticism over her remarks at a town hall event in New Hampshire in which she failed to mention slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

The former South Carolina governor suggested the cause of the war was “basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” She later claimed the voter who asked her the question was a “Democrat plant.”

The ads the DNC is launching target Haley for her comments, as well as the records of her fellow GOP candidates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Trump. The three currently top the GOP primary field in the state, according to Decision Desk HQ and The Hill’s aggregation of polls.

I agree, and note that four billboards is a small expense as campaign expenses go.

You might remember last April’s school shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville. I know, they all run together in memory sometimes. But this one inspired a few Democratic members of the Tennesse legislature to demonstrate for gun control legislation. And the Republican majority silenced them. Even if you don’t remember the school shooting, I bet you remember the Tennessee Three — Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, Gloria Johnson. They tried to move the needle on gun legislation in Tennessee, and failed. They’ve since all been reinstated.

Today the New York Times tells the story of some parents from that Nashville school who tried to get the Tennessee legislature to see sense. In brief, they failed. But what makes the story interesting is that these were white, Christian, mostly conservative, upper-income parents, mostly the moms. And they got no more respect than the Tennessee Three.

Ms. Joyce and other Covenant parents felt they stood a better chance than anyone at cutting through the divisions on gun control. Among them were former Republican aides, gun owners and lifelong conservatives who could afford to spend days at the legislature. …

… But the Tennessee legislature proved more hostile than the Covenant parents imagined. And when Ms. Joyce heard just one more gun rights supporter dismiss the parents’ concerns after days of restraint, her patience snapped.

The shooter at Covenant “hunted our children with a high-capacity rifle,” Ms. Joyce cried out, her voice cracking, as she confronted the gun rights supporter in the Capitol rotunda. He walked away, but not before suggesting she listen more closely to his arguments.

“I have held my composure,” she said, now openly angry despite the crowd that had gathered. “I have stayed calm. I have been silent and quiet and composed. And I am sick of it. Listen to me.”

The shooter in Nashville was a trans man named Aiden Hale. He killed three nine-year-old children and three adults and was shot dead at the scene. Hale was under treatment for an emotional disorder that had caused concern among his family. Yet he was able to legally purchase the firearms in his possession that day — an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 9 mm Kel-Tec SUB2000 pistol caliber carbine, and a 9 mm Smith and Wesson M&P Shield EZ 2.0 handgun. The parents wanted a law “that would allow judges to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others,” the Times reported.

Nope; that was a nonstarter. The idea was dead on arrival before the legislative session got underway. Instead, the Republican majority wanted a bill that would allow people with enhanced carry permits to take handguns into schools. When a mother demanded a justification for more guns in schools, a legislator scoffed at her, saying that if Aiden Hale hadn’t gad guns he could have run the students over during recess.

I take it these parents had never been treated so shabbily before in their lives. They had assumed that if they were reasonable and well behaved they would at least be listened to. Nope.

Eventually Tennessee did pass some bills to enhancee school security, but no gun control bills of any sort that I can find.

Today WaPo has a retrospective on Sandy Hook, or rather the gun control laws that didn’t happen after Sandy Hook. The article interviews four current and three former senators, all Democrats, who had voted against gun bills after Sandy Hook. And now they are sorry. I notice that no one bothered to interview Republicans to see if any of them are sorry.

The Sandy Hook parents interviewed sounded a lot like the Tennessee parents. They were grieving. They were ignored. And nothing gets done.

In other news, see Florida teen kills sister during fight over Christmas gifts, sheriff says.

“They had this family spat over who was getting what and how much money was being spent on who,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told a news conference Tuesday.

The argument continued as the family made their way from the store to their grandmother’s house in Largo, Fla. The brothers were each in possession of a gun, the sheriff said.

“They get to grandma’s house [and the 14-year-old] takes out his gun and tells him he’s going to shoot him in the head,” the sheriff said.

The older brother said he didn’t want to fight and asked his younger sibling to get out of the house, he added. Their uncle and sister, Baldwin, attempted to turn the situation around.

“You all need to leave that stuff alone … It’s Christmas,” Baldwin told them while standing outside the property, according to Gualtieri.

The 14-year-old, after allegedly threatening to shoot his sister and her baby, is accused of shooting Baldwin in the chest while she was holding her son in a carrier at 1:45 p.m. She fell to the ground and was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Her baby was not injured.

Seconds after the shooting, the 15-year-old brother came outside holding his own handgun and shot his younger brother in the stomach, Gualtieri said. The 14-year-old was unarmed when his brother shot him, he said, and is in custody in stable condition at a hospital.

The 15-year-old then fled, tossing his weapon into a yard nearby, Gualtieri said. He was later taken into custody at a relative’s house.

Gualtieri said that both teens were arrested and that only one of the two weapons was recovered at the scene, expressing concern that the missing gun would eventually be picked up and used in another crime. Audio of the incident was captured on a neighbor’s camera, Gualtieri said.

“The problem is, we got way too many kids out there with way too many guns,” Gualtieri said, adding that he hoped gun laws would change. “We need to get serious, and we need to get tough.”

Exactly why teenagers needed to be carrying guns to go Christmas shopping and on to Grandma’s house escapes me. But I’m sure somebody would argue that if they hadn’t had guns they would have just run each other over in their pickups.

But, y’know, sometimes it’s the gun. Someone with poor impulse control loses it and starts shooting. If that 14-year-old hadn’t had a gun, his sister would still be alive. It’s that simple. And as far as school shooters are concerned, I suspect shooting is the attraction. If shooting, especially with absurdly high-powered firearms, were no longer possible, I rather doubt we’d suddenly see a rash of vehicular homicides on school grounds.

Tom had cancer. Dick is still alive.

Enjoy the holidays. I’ll post again next week. We’ve got a long and possibly terrible year ahead of us, so take break if you can.

SCOTUS is more useless than I feared.

Steering clear of a political firestorm for now, the Supreme Court said Friday it would not immediately decide the key question of whether Donald Trump has broad immunity for actions he took as president challenging his 2020 election loss.

The court denied without comment special counsel Jack Smith’s request asking the justices to circumvent the normal appeals court process and quickly decide the question, which looms large in Trump’s prosecution in Washington over allegations of election interference.

I’m sure there will be more commentary on this soon.

I’m still here; I’ve just gotten really busy. Christmas stuff, mostly. And now I’m too tired to wsrite much.

Some Colorado ruling, huh?

When I first heard that Trump had been found disqualified to run for POTUS in Colorado, I assumed the SCOTUS would reverse this pretty quickly. And they might. But the fun part is going to see what kind of hoops the justices will have to jump through to reverse it. Adam Serwer:

The Colorado court weighed all of this in arriving at its decision. “We do not reach these conclusions lightly. We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us,” the justices in the majority wrote. “We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

In framing the stakes this way, the Colorado court is calling the bluff of the U.S. Supreme Court’s originalists, forcing its conservative justices to choose between their purported legal philosophy and the partisan interests of the party with which they identify. The ruling itself seems written with a consciously originalist interpretation, with an eye toward legitimizing its conclusions to the justices who will ultimately be compelled to deal with the case.

The Colorado justices wrote a very originalist/textualist decision, and even cited an earlier Bret Kavanaugh decision as a precedent. So if the court nixies this it’s going to have to reject originalism.

This could be fun.

This seems the stuff of alternative realities. But it isn’t.

Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday invoked Vladimir V. Putin to support his case that the four criminal indictments he is facing are political payback, quoting the Russian president saying that the charges undercut the argument that the United States is an example of democracy for the world.

Mr. Trump made the comment during a campaign speech in Durham, N.H., in which he focused on pocketbook concerns of voters, hammered the state’s Republican governor, who endorsed one of his rivals, mocked his lower-polling competitors for not performing better and painted a dystopian vision of a country in “hell” under his successor, President Biden.

“Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden’s — and this is a quote — politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia, because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Mr. Trump said as he railed against the 91 criminal charges he is facing, citing Mr. Putin speaking in September.

Mr. Trump added: “So, you know, we talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his ass. It’s an amazing thing. And they’re all laughing at us.”

If we could go back in time about 60 years and tell Americans that some day the presumed Republiccan presidential nominee would not only be under several criminal indictments, he’d be quoting (with approval) a Russian dictator and slamming American democracy, and that this guy could possibly win — they wouldn’t believe us. It’s like the Republican base has become the mirror opposite of what Republicans used to be.

CNN added a bit to it: ““Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s a threat,” he told supporters at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire.” Joe Biden called him a threat to demoracy, so he has to return the favor. It’s the “I’m not the puppet. You’re the puppet” claim he threw at Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump also loves Viktor Orban, of course.

Republican polling leader Donald Trump approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, part of an ongoing effort to deflect from his criminal prosecutions and spin alarms about eroding democracy against President Biden. …

… He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.

But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”

CNN reported that Trump also called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “very nice.” Human rights groups might disagree.

This is from the NY Times:

At the rally on Saturday, a relatively new slogan for his campaign — “Better Off With Trump” — was displayed on a screen over Mr. Trump’s head as he stood onstage before a packed crowd at the Whittemore Center at the University of New Hampshire. In his speech, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Biden’s economic policies, and then broadly said the president had contributed to the degradation of Americans’ everyday lives.

“We’re going to bring our country back from hell. It’s in hell,” Mr. Trump said. He cited statistics like mortgage rates and attacked Mr. Biden’s energy policies. He also revived a widely condemned comment about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” noting that immigrants are coming not just from South America but also Africa and Asia. He did not mention Europe.

Who is buying this stuff? Racists, obviously. But there was a time our national leaders liked to say things like “We stand, as we have always stood from our earliest beginnings, for the independence and equality of all nations. This nation was born of revolution and raised in freedom. And we do not intend to leave an open road for despotism.” (John Kennedy, 1961) Trump is an open road to despotism. A whole lot of Americans are, apparently, completely deaf to this.

And then there are the evangelicals. I’ve been reading the book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta. I’m about a third of the way through it. It’s a survey of how screwed up evangelicalism in the U.S. is right now. Alberta is himself a sincere evangelical. I’d call him an old-school, traditional sort of evangelical. He is genuinely appalled at Trump support among evangelicals and the rest of the crap that’s coming out of evangelical churches. One of the points he makes is that a lot of these people falling into rabbit holes of crazy are genuinely convinced that the “secular left” is out to get them and destroy Christianity. Certainly a lot of people are (understandably) hostile to organized religion these days, but I’m not seeing calls for violence against Christians.

And, apparently, it’s just American evangelicals who are crazy. Evangelicals in Europe and Australia are still normal. So what’s causing the crazy is something happening here.

At one point a bunch of people were rushing to buy some dreadful pro-Christian nationalist book, saying we’d better get it now, because the secular left will somehow round up all the copies and burn them. They really believe this. And yes, I called it a dreadful book, but burning books doesn’t make ignorance go away.

By the same token, a lot of the racists must really believe the Great Replacement Theory, that “the left” somehow wants to replace white people with non-white people. So book burning (by them) is okay; indiscriminate killing of nonwhite people is excusable.  They have given themselves permission to do unto others what they believe someone wants to do unto them. Except they are imagining things.

Conservatives have lost the culture war, says David Atkins. Here’s just some of his argument:

Contrary to the right-wing insistence that “woke goes broke,” the biggest movie of the year was Barbie, a stridently and subversively feminist juggernaut that raked in over $1.36 billion at the global box office. Oppenheimer, a nuanced meditation on the creation and use of the American nuclear bomb, followed closely behind with just under $1 billion in global ticket sales and broke box office records for a biopic. Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid, which endured heavily racist conservative attacks for featuring a Black lead, hauled in $569 million globally and broke streaming records on streaming service Disney+.

Meanwhile, few people in history have lost as much money as quickly as Elon Musk has since taking over Twitter (now X). After endorsing Biden in 2020, Musk has become a right-wing icon by promoting homophobic, transphobic, racist, and anti-Semitic positions while advocating far-right conspiracy theories all the time feigning to be a zealous free speech advocate even as he caves to authoritarians. He bought Twitter largely because he was unhappy with its supposed left-leaning slant and has shifted the platform well to the right. The result? A financial disaster. Since the takeover, major advertisers have been fleeing Twitter (sorry, X). The flight has accelerated to crisis levels since Musk endorsed the anti-Semitic Great Replacement conspiracy. X is now worth at most $19 billion, compared to the $44 billion he paid. The enterprise is in grave danger of being forced into bankruptcy by its creditors.

It stands to reason. Counties that voted for Biden constitute 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Americans continue to urbanize, with the percentage living in urban areas reaching 80 percent and growing. Blue states remain more prosperous than red states and subsidize them heavily.

And so on. The Right really is falling behind in nearly every way such a thing can be measured, and while they may not consciousely admit this, deep down they must feel it. And this makes them dangerous.

But they’re doing it to themselves. The “left” is not taking things away from the economies of red states. Red states are making stupid economic choices. And the “secular left” is not turning the young folks away from Christianity. The young folks see people calling themselves Christian on teevee and want to part of that.

Meanwhile,  unfortunately, a whole lot of Americans who are not crazy and not especially dangerous are not following politics closely enough to know what’s going on. Will they show up to vote next year? Who knows?

Election years are always stressful, but 2024 is going to be unimaginably nuts.

Just happened: Jury Orders Giuliani to Pay $148 Million to Election Workers He Defamed. 

On to the outrage du jour:

A binder containing highly classified information related to Russian election interference went missing at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, raising alarms among intelligence officials that some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Its disappearance, which has not been previously reported, was so concerning that intelligence officials briefed Senate Intelligence Committee leaders last year about the missing materials and the government’s efforts to retrieve them, the sources said.

In the two-plus years since Trump left office, the missing intelligence does not appear to have been found.

The binder contained raw intelligence the US and its NATO allies collected on Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods that informed the US government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election, sources tell CNN.

The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe.

It gets better.

The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office. The former president had ordered it brought there so he could declassify a host of documents related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. Under the care of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the binder was scoured by Republican aides working to redact the most sensitive information so it could be declassified and released publicly.

The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.

We’re getting to the juicy part.

The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.

Instead, copies initially sent out were frantically retrieved at the direction of White House lawyers demanding additional redactions.

Just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated, Meadows rushed to the Justice Department to hand-deliver a redacted copy for a last review. Years later, the Justice Department has yet to release all of the documents, despite Trump’s declassification order. Additional copies with varying levels of redactions ended up at the National Archives.

But an unredacted version of the binder containing the classified raw intelligence went missing amid the chaotic final hours of the Trump White House. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance remain shrouded in mystery.

The binder didn’t turn up among the documents seize from Mar-a-Lago. CNN goes on to say that Cassidy Hutchinson believes Mark Meadows took the binder home with him. Meadows denies this.

The binder’s origins trace back to 2018, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes, compiled a classified report alleging the Obama administration skewed intelligence in its assessment that Putin had worked to help Trump in the 2016 election.

The GOP report, which criticized the intelligence community’s “tradecraft,” scrutinized the highly classified intelligence from 2016 that informed the assessment Putin and Russia sought to assist Trump’s campaign. 

If Nunes is behind this, I assume it’s junk as far as Russian interference in the election is concerned. But some stuff in it is genuinely hyper-sensitive. The CIA wouldn’t let Republicans handle the documents unless they were kept in a safe within a CIA vault, or a safe within a safe. CIA Director Gina Haspel was concerned release of the documents would reveal sources and methods. Trump nearly fired her because she was opposed to releasing the stuff in the binder.