Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Get ready for another magical night in American politics. Yes, the fourth Republican Presidential Second Place Debate is tonight, being broadcast by an obscure cable channel called News Nation. The whole country is crackling with excitement at the prospect watching of the last four standing, Former New jersey Gov., Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Former S. Carolina Gov Nikki Haley going mano-a-mano once again.

Actually these debates have been the most boring political rituals in human history. The presidential race may be heating up and the stakes could not be higher but these events cannot wind up too soon. Their only purpose is to help the GOP base figure out who might be an adequate replacement if Donald Trump keels over at the Mar-a-Lago omelette bar one Sunday and I’m not sure most Republican voters really care who that might be.

DeSantis’ previous position as first runner-up has been usurped by Haley who is still riding the little boomlet that has pundits declaring that she is “surging” in Iowa and New Hampshire. The truth is that she’s pulled even with DeSantis for second place in the first and overtaken him for second in New Hampshire. That might mean something if it weren’t for the fact that Trump is leading both of them by nearly 30 points in Iowa and is leading Haley by 26 points in New Hampshire. (DeSantis has dropped to 4th there.) Nationally, Trump leads by nearly 50 points. So this Haley surge is reminiscent of past forgettable moments like when Newt Gingrich briefly took the lead in the GOP primary in 2012.

What is significant about the Haley boomlet isn’t this minuscule surge in her polling, it’s the massive surge in her donations from billionaires. It’s not just the Koch network which garnered huge headlines when it was announced that its Americans for Prosperity Action fund was endorsing her for president after laying out of presidential politics for some time. Haley attended at fundraiser New York attended by top Wall Street financiers on Monday and raised a whopping $500,000 in one fell swoop.

CNBC reported that the event was held at the “luxurious Upper West Side penthouse of former Facebook executive Campbell Brown and her husband Dan Senor, chief public affairs officer at hedge fund Elliot Investment Management” which was founded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer. (According to Theodore Schliefer of Puck News, everyone was slightly disappointed that Singer himself was not in attendance because everyone on Wall St. is waiting on tenderhooks to see who he has decided to back.) But, among those who were there were:

Cliff Asness, a co-founder of investment firm AQR Capital Management, Kristin Lemkau, CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s wealth management division, Robert Rosenkranz, head of Delphi Capital Management and Ray Chambers, a philanthropist who once had a stake in the NHL’s New Jersey Devils were all spotted.

CNBC notes that Lemkau showed up just days after her boss Jamie Dimon exorted people to back Haley at a conference hosted by The New York Times’ DealBook franchise. Dimon put it like this, which was laughable:

“Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley, too. Get a choice on the Republican side that might be better than [Donald] Trump,”

There is at least one liberal Democrat who stepped up early to help Haley in order to stop Donald Trump, Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has funded a number of causes in opposition to Trump, but he’s a rarity. Liberal donors would generally rather spend their money on Democrats than Republicans.

The question is why in the world are these rich donors suddenly backing Haley so strongly when they are very unlikely to get much of anything out of it? As Pucks’ Schleifer observed:

[P]lenty of the people donating six or seven figures to Haley or DeSantis at this point don’t reasonably expect their candidate to win, a phenomenon I’ve never experienced before. The dominant feeling among major donors is a sense of apathy—that this is Trump’s race to lose, to say the least.

What is she doing that has them so enthralled that they are throwing away their money on her doomed campaign? The easy answer is that these people all have way too much money so these millions are just pocket change to them anyway and they can take a flyer. If there’s ever been a better reason to raise their taxes to better fund the government, I’ve never seen it. And that may hold the real answer to the question of why they are now looking at Nikki Haley.

As you’ll recall, in the last debate Haley broke dramatically with Donald Trump by declaring that “any candidate that tells you they’re not going to go after Social Security and Medicare is not being serious.” She didn’t sugar coat it with the usual euphemisms by saying “we need to reform entitlements” and she’s made it clear that she not only wants to raise the retirement age, she also wants to reduce benefits for current beneficiaries by changing the cost of living formula. None of that is new for the pre-Trump GOP, but it’s been off the table since he took office.

In fact, one of Joe Biden’s finest hours was when he goaded the congressional Republicans into insisting they had no intention of threatening the programs:

Joe Biden and the Democrats have made it clear that if they get the majority they plan to raise the caps on Social Security and Medicare taxes to shore up the program. These people are adamantly opposed to that and will do anything to prevent it.

As CNN reported, the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity Action made it clear in their endorsement why they are backing Haley:

Emily Seidel – a top official in the influential political network associated with billionaire Charles Koch – praised the former UN ambassador’s “courage” for advocating changes to “an entitlement system that makes promises it can’t keep.”

And they aren’t the only ones:

“We need a complete reevaluation of entitlements,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot who is weighing backing Haley

In fact, I think we can assume that Haley’s eagerness to cut these programs is a primary motive behind the surge in big donor interest in her campaign. They may realize on some level that she is not going to win this time but they are signaling that this is the way to a billionaire’s heart. If you’re willing to force poor elderly people into even worse penury than they already are, you are their kind of gal. They are investing in a future when Donald Trump is no longer telling his followers what they want to hear.

It will be interesting to see how Trump handles this. Although he’s vaguely indicated that he thinks cuts could be offset by growth for some reason, for the most part he’s held fast to his promise that the two vital programs cannot be cut and he’s kept the party with him. But as we can see, that’s a very tenuous promise. The real owners of the Republican Party are preparing to reassert themselves and this one little populist promise will die the day that Trump is finally out of politics. Haley is savvy enough to see that coming out strong on this issue tells the billionaires everything they need to know about who she really serves.

Salon

What the public doesn’t know

Many readers may have first come across Elizabeth Warren (as I did) in an online lecture: “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net.” The then-Harvard Law professor lectured in the glow of her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.” Warren described how since the Reagan administration the rich got richer and the rest got screwed. (She put it more delicately.)

The America Prospect this morning argues that Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis should in the public interest publish data it surely has that would make Warren’s case without her (or you) having to do the research.

This data is already collected but not displayed in a user-friendly form. The Gini index is reported annually, but Gross Domestic Distribution could be shown quarterly along with GDP, and offer granular data about who’s getting what share of growth. https://t.co/xYFMZwdjHI

— David Dayen (@ddayen) December 6, 2023

“Last year, America’s current-dollar GDP grew 6.6 percent to over $26,000,000,000—one quarter of the entire world’s total output, produced by just 6 percent of the world’s population,” explains Richard Parker. Yes, but who benefited?

And so when the latest GDP number is announced, it’s front-page news in newspapers and magazines everywhere, a leading story for TV and radio, and the preoccupation of an almost uncountable number of online sites. But you may have noticed something strange about GDP: Because it’s a measure of the total economy’s output, it’s silent about how that output is divided among Americans. We’ve been living—and are living right now—in a nation with ever-increasing inequality, which makes the question of who gets how much of the GDP as important as GDP itself. And that makes it time for the government to start measuring and reporting more than GDP’s sum of our aggregate production. We need to know how GDP growth is distributed.

Let’s for the moment call such a measure the GDD—for “gross domestic distribution.” (I’ll explain how it would work in a moment.)

Most Americans already know that America has been growing ever more unequal—but beyond that, they know few details. Government tells them that GDP is still growing—by 5.2 percent in the last quarter—but not that nearly all of that growth is captured by the wealthiest 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent.

Yet what most Americans know intuitively is that life for the Great American Middle Class has gotten much harder—something the government’s own data has been recording since the 1970s. That data shows that, to begin with, the broad middle class’s share of total household income has fallen from over 60 percent in the 1970s to barely 40 percent. Among young Americans—the millennials—far fewer are earning more than their parents at the same age, and the gap is growing wider, especially for the majority who lack college degrees.

Yet because that’s been a steady, slow-rolling decline, officials haven’t talked about what’s happening the way they do for a significant “event” like the Great Depression—or our recent Great Recession and COVID lockdown. Like the frog in the pot that gets hotter slowly, the temperature keeps rising—but the frog doesn’t jump.

Parker’s complaint is that while the data is there, it’s not available in user-friendly form (something I’ve found across the country with state election data).

What the BEA doesn’t do is tell you how Americans’ income can be broken out and arranged by the size of their incomes—ranked by the top 10 percent, say, or the middle fifth, or the bottom half. Thus, you won’t learn from the BEA where income has been flowing over the years—how much to the one percent or the poor or the middle class. That is, needless to say, elementary information for addressing income inequality—a serious topic to, let me remind you, 80 percent of Americans nowadays.

What the public doesn’t know won’t upset the status quo. Is that by design? The problem is (Parker dons his tinfoil hat, and I mine), “the government has a vast amount of detailed, publicly available information about the distribution of Americans’ income. It’s just that apparently the public doesn’t know it.”

Thus, here’s how a Harvard Business School study found Americans think income gets distributed vs. how it really is and how they think it should be:

As I’ve found with election data, Parker found after inquiring if “the BEA would be open to adding GDD data from the Census Bureau to its GDP reports,” that the issue comes down to bureaucratic turf and budgeting. Mustn’t pull back the curtain and reveal the Wizards.

A 2022 report by the nonprofit Washington Center for Equitable Growth recommended:

The federal statistical system needs to be resourced to expand and continue reporting on inequality … Four decades of rising inequality calls for a more robust policy response to ensure broad-based growth in the U.S. economy. An important first step is to develop the data infrastructure to track growth in inequality over time, so that policymakers can monitor and respond to the problem, and voters can hold them accountable to producing strong growth for all U.S. households.

I could say something similar about state election data. But now that’s 50 agencies and budgets. Imagine what happens to all the federal data with MAGA lackeys in charge.

Trump Plus Nothing, The Sequel

Donald J. Trump and his MAGA horde attempted the murder of the United States of America on January 6, 2021. Give them a second chance and they may succeed. The media have finally caught on. The claxon sounding over at The Atlantic is itself news. (There are new articles there today.)

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, it’s said. Trump has announced his plans to make the 2024 election one for the country. His collaborators are mixing up the Flavor Aid now.

Prepare for Trump Plus Nothing, The Sequel. Call it mass insanity or something else, Trump’s followers are indeed ready once again to make their obeisance. During the COVID pandemic, many eschewed masks and vaccines and gave their lives for him. As former Trump fixer Michael Cohen explained, he talks like a mob boss. He doesn’t give explicit orders. The Boss lets underlings know what he wants and they go do it, even to their graves.

“Call it the opposite of virtue signaling,” writes Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark:

Trump’s harsh 2025 immigration agenda of travel bans, large-scale raids, detention camps, and “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” along with a House bill reflecting his views, are hanging over Republican senators as they try to negotiate a border security deal crucial to passing a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza. The Republicans are acting as if Trump is “looking over their shoulders,” a Democratic source told Washington Post writer Greg Sargent.

Health care is the next test for conservatives trying to out-conservative each other. By suddenly renewing his vows to kill the 2010 Affordable Care Act, Trump has now signaled what he expects from them. As in fealty, or else.

Lawrence’s focus this morning is health care policy. The Greg Sargent column suggesting Republicans sense Trump (and Stephen Miller) “looking over their shoulders” was about immigration policy. Whatever hints Trump drops, whatever mood strikes him in a second presidency, MAGA civilians and lawmakers will jump through their asses to deliver for The Boss. Zombie apocalypses are fiction. MAGA Republicans mean to make the Trump apocalypse a reality.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R), 48, of North Carolina announced on Tuesday he will retire at the end of his term, saying, “This is not a decision I come to lightly, but I believe there is a season for everything and—for me—this season has come to an end.”

McHenry counts today as a moderate conservative. He served as Speaker pro tempore during the GOP’s weeks-long effort to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy with whom he was closely aligned. Like animals nervously signalling the arrival of an earthquake, he’s heading for the exits.

Update: McCarthy is following McHenry out the door.

Krugman is on the case

Let’s deal in reality for a moment shall we?

Over the past six months, the personal consumption expenditure deflator excluding food and energy — I know that’s a mouthful, but it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation — has risen at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, down from 5.7 percent in March 2022.

The Fed’s inflation target is 2 percent, so we’re not quite there yet. And you shouldn’t expect the Fed to declare victory any time soon. As I can tell you from personal experience, anyone suggesting that inflation is more or less under control can expect an avalanche of hate mail and hostile commentary on social media. In fact, I believe that the vehemence with which some Americans insist that inflation is still running wild distorts coverage in conventional media, too, because journalists are deterred from saying anything positive. And the Fed has to be especially careful, because it would lose credibility if inflation went back up after sounding too optimistic. The truth, however, is that inflation is looking very much like yesterday’s problem.

But wait — don’t real people have to buy food and energy? Well, there are good reasons for policymakers to look at “core” measures excluding components that jump around a lot, but in case you’re interested, prices including food and energy have risen at an annual rate of … 2.5 percent, the same as core inflation.

The more familiar Consumer Price Index is rising a bit faster, by 3 percent, but that’s entirely because it puts a higher weight on housing, which at this point is very much a lagging indicator.

What’s remarkable isn’t just the fact that we’ve made so much progress against inflation, but also the fact that this progress has seemed to come without any visible cost. So far, this has been “immaculate disinflation,” requiring neither a recession nor a large rise in unemployment.

Here’s a chart I find helpful for telling the story of inflation in recent years. The horizontal axis shows the fraction of adults between 25 and 54 who are employed, an indicator that is closely correlated with the unemployment rate but has seemed to be a bit better at measuring how “hot” the labor market is running. The vertical axis shows core inflation:

The blue dots at the bottom are annual numbers from 2000 to 2019, while the red line above shows the path since January 2021. Prepandemic, there was on average a modest positive relationship between employment and inflation, shown by the dotted line. But inflation went far higher than this relationship would have led you to expect, then rapidly came down without any significant loss in jobs.

So what explains this history, and how does it compare with economists’ predictions?

There were some big disagreements among economists here. Almost everyone, I think, was surprised by how easily we reduced inflation. But some were more surprised than others.

Here’s a schematic picture with three arrows starting from the high inflation, fairly high employment position we were in midway through 2022:

The curve labeled “LS” shows the very pessimistic view held by economists who believed that we would need to go through a period of large job losses and very high unemployment to get inflation down, the way we did after the 1970s. Yes, L.S. stands for Larry Summers, the most prominent advocate of that view, although he had plenty of company.

The arrow labeled “PK” shows the much more optimistic — but as it turned out, insufficiently optimistic — view held by economists who believed that getting inflation down would have some cost in terms of unemployment, but nothing like the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s. P.K. stands for the obvious: In August 2022 I put out a newsletter explaining why I thought the analogy with the aftermath of the 1970s was all wrong. I was, in fact, baffled by the extreme pessimism I was hearing. More on that later.

But I didn’t think disinflation would be painless. I believed that the U.S. economy was overheated, with demand exceeding supply, and expected that correcting this imbalance would involve some pain. “Getting inflation down,” I wrote, “requires cooling the economy down, but not putting it through an extended slump.”

And who’s R.W.? That’s the real world, where getting inflation down didn’t require any job losses at all. How was that possible? Demand may have exceeded supply in 2022, but the gap appears to have been closed not by reducing demand but by increasing supply, as lingering disruptions from the pandemic were resolved.

I think those of us who weren’t quite optimistic enough can be forgiven for not seeing this coming, although I would say that, wouldn’t I? And I did believe that the Fed was justified in raising interest rates given what we knew at the time, although I’m quite worried now that the Fed has overdone it and should start cutting soon.

But where did the extreme pessimism of some of my colleagues come from?

Several economists had warned that the American Rescue Plan, the large spending bill passed early in the Biden administration, would be inflationary, warnings that appeared to be vindicated by the inflation surge of 2021-22. In retrospect, these economists may have been right for the wrong reasons, since inflation eventually surged, not only in America but almost everywhere:

This suggests that inflation may have had less to do with overspending than it did with pandemic-related disruptions; see the article by Claudia Sahm in “Quick Hits” below. But my big question is why so many economists predicted that the rapid initial rise in inflation would be followed by protracted stagflation.

The thing is, we have a standard story about why ’70s inflation was so hard to end, which relies on the way persistent inflation had become entrenched in expectations. But this clearly wasn’t the case in 2022. So while predictions of inflation in 2021 more or less reflected textbook macroeconomics, predicting stagflation after 2022 meant throwing out the textbook in favor of novel arguments for pessimism.

Furthermore, what struck me in 2022 was that the arguments that leading pessimists were making for persistent high inflation had no logical connection to the arguments they had made for a surge in inflation back in 2021. They were predicting the same thing but for completely different reasons. There was nothing linking the inflationist views of 2022 to those of 2021 except a shared pessimistic vibe.

And vibes are a poor basis for economic analysis. Indeed, vibe-based predictions of stagflation — vibeflation? — turn out to have been completely, you might say epically, wrong.

Vibes are not reality and we need to live in reality right now, more than ever. That so many keep acting as though it is is yet another sign of our deep political crisis,

Speaker Mike Johnson says the House is working on releasing new Jan. 6 tapes and will blur out the faces of rioters:

“We don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.” pic.twitter.com/dExchE0qbr

— The Recount (@therecount) December 5, 2023

I could hardly believe I heard him right and had to listen to it twice. Not much is shocking these days but this is. The Speaker of the House is protecting the insurrectionists from the FBI. And he’s admitting it as if it is perfectly normal.

This is so far beyond normal we’re living in another dimension now. We are broken.

It’s way more likely than we think

David Frum is one Never Trumper from whom I still recoil even though I’m a big believer in a popular front against Trump. He’s still a wingnut in some very important ways. Nonetheless, this big Atlantic issue about what will happen if Trump wins has a number of good articles and I thought his was was especially thought provoking:

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.

From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.

He goes on to point out that all the guardrails that existed in the first term are gone and that those who will be part of his new administration will be nothing but sycophants and henchmen along with groups of chaos agents and radical authoritarians:

This is what I found so interesting, though. He talks about the chaos that will ensue when he tries all these things which is not something I’ve seen too many people talk about. It’s not as if the rest of the country is just going to sit quietly by:

If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

The outvoted would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the objective.”

So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

And what might follow that? In 2020, Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election. Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.

[…]

That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic structure of the United States.

A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke” college students.

For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

I can’t help but point out that Frum’s former boss, the man he extolled as the greatest president since Lincoln, also won on the thinnest of pretexts having lost the popular vote and obtaining the office with the help of operatives interfering with the vote count, his Governor brother and two Supreme Court justices appointed by his father. Even so, he was hardly humbled or chagrined by any of that and famously said “I got political capital and I’m gonna use it.” And boy did he, with the full support of the Republican establishment including people like Frum. It was obvious then that the GOP was off the rails.

Nonetheless, we are where are and he’s right that we are careening into the unknown. Trump and his henchmen want the majority to protest because they want the excuse to use the Insurrection Act to put it down, citing the January 6th precedent. That won’t be like the Tel Aviv protests. It would more likely be like Tienanmen Square. And that would be just the beginning.

Tuberville: It was pretty much a draw. They didn’t get what they wanted. We didn’t get what I wanted. pic.twitter.com/jTj1KHp6ha

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 5, 2023

I’m sure he’ll be right back in the Senate GOP fold now. No biggie. He’s still on their team.

FFS:

Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, announced on Tuesday that he would lift his blockade of nearly all the military promotions he had delayed for almost a year in protest of a Pentagon policy ensuring abortion access for service members, continuing to hold up only the most senior generals.

Mr. Tuberville said he had lifted his holds on about 440 military promotions. “Everybody but the 10 or 11 four-stars,” he said. “Those will continue.”

The announcement represented a stark reversal from Mr. Tuberville, who for 10 months had steadfastly defended his move to stall senior military promotions over a new Pentagon policy that offers time off and travel reimbursement to service members seeking abortions or fertility care.

His blockade had single-handedly disrupted the Pentagon’s ability to fill its top ranks, leaving hundreds of promotions in limbo. Other officials in senior positions were left to operate on an “acting” basis, unable to hire people to staff their new positions or to move into the quarters that come with the job.

The reversal came amid mounting pressure on Mr. Tuberville from both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Tuberville said on Tuesday that he had decided to lift the blockade after senators hatched a plan to temporarily go around the chamber’s rules to allow confirmation of almost all military nominees as a bloc. That would have been a major break with tradition and a step many senators in both parties were reluctant to take.

“It’s been a long fight,” Mr. Tuberville told reporters. “We fought hard. We did the right thing for the unborn and for our military, fighting back against executive overreach.”

With “friends” like these …

This story about the head of the Florida GOP and his wife, the founder of LGBTQ-hating Moms for Liberty, is stunning:

The head of Florida’s Republican Party indicated Saturday he will not step down while facing an investigation into sexual assault, rejecting calls by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to give up his role as the party’s top operative.

In a letter to the state GOP, chairman Christian Ziegler did not address the allegation – which continued to send shockwaves through the state on Saturday as troubling new details about the investigation emerged – but suggested a conspiracy was afoot to leak details from the Sarasota Police Department probe.

“We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up,” he wrote.

According to a search warrant affidavit, which CNN obtained from the Florida Center for Government Accountability, Ziegler and his wife Bridget planned a three-way sexual encounter with the alleged victim on the day of the alleged assault on October 2, and “when the victim learned that Bridget could not make it, she changed her mind and canceled with Christian.”

Surveillance video showed Ziegler arriving at the alleged victim’s residence on the day of the alleged assault, the affidavit says. The alleged victim told investigators she “opened her apartment door to walk her dog and Christian was standing outside in the hallway.” The alleged victim said Christian entered the apartment and raped her on a bar stool, according to the affidavit.

“The victim advised Christian did not wear a condom,” the affidavit said. The alleged victim said she told Christian “she was not in a place to consent” because “she had been drinking tequila all day.”

The alleged victim later called her sister and told her she had been raped, the affidavit states, noting that police interviewed the alleged victim’s sister and confirmed the details of the phone call.

Police then interviewed Bridget Ziegler, according to the affidavit. She told detectives she knew the alleged victim through her husband and confirmed having a sexual encounter with the alleged victim and her husband “over a year ago and that it only happened one time.”

On November 2, detectives interviewed Ziegler with his attorney present, the affidavit states. Ziegler admitted to having sex with the alleged victim, but said the sex was consensual and that he recorded the encounter. “Christian said he initially deleted the video, but since the allegation, he uploaded the video to his Google Drive which we have not been able to locate upon a digital extraction.”

During the investigation, police said Ziegler tried to contact the alleged victim via Instagram. The alleged victim then began communicating with Ziegler with the help of detectives, according to the affidavit. In one alleged exchange on October 27, the alleged victim wrote: “I’m not okay with what happened the other day between us”.

“Oh. That’s not good. You are my friend. Known ya for like twenty years now. Lol,” Ziegler replied.

“Yeah I know but that was not cool and you didn’t bring her [Bridget] and then did that to me,” the alleged victim responded.

“She was in. Then couldn’t because no response. She said in next time,” Ziegler replied.

Several phone calls between the alleged victim and Ziegler were audio recorded, according to the affidavit. In one call, the alleged victim allegedly told Ziegler “he sexually assault her” and Ziegler replied, “Those are big words, please don’t, no I didn’t. You invited me in, that’s it. I did not at all, and I never want you to feel that way.”

CNN has made multiple attempts to contact the Zieglers. In a statement Friday, Christian Ziegler’s attorney Derek Byrd said: “We are confident that once the police investigation is concluded that no charges will be filed and Mr. Ziegler will be completely exonerated.”

“Unfortunately, public figures are often accused of acts that they did not commit whether it be for political purposes or financial gain. I would caution anyone to rush to judgment until the investigation is concluded,” Byrd said.

The allegations have not only raised questions about Christian Ziegler’s capacity to lead the party into the 2024 election season but have drawn acute criticism because of the role the Zieglers have played in helping to execute a crackdown on LGBTQ materials in Florida schools under DeSantis.

Bridget Ziegler, 41, a thrice-elected Sarasota County school board member, co-founded Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ rights organization that has led the efforts in Florida and beyond to remove books from classrooms they deem inappropriate for kids. She has also served as a close ally of DeSantis in his crackdown on removing sexual orientation and gender identity from schools. She helped author the Parents Bill of Rights in Florida, a law DeSantis signed in 2021 in response to concerns from conservative parents that schools were withholding information about children expressing a change in sexual orientation and gender identity.

This year, DeSantis named Bridget Ziegler to the board that now oversees the Walt Disney Company’s special taxing district in Central Florida amid his clash with the entertainment giant over a state law that restricted how sexual orientation and gender identity could be taught in the classroom.

Christian Ziegler, 40, has also fiercely defended DeSantis’ agenda against national backlash from LGTBQ groups. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, he said Democrats who opposed DeSantis were “perverted” and encouraged them to leave the state.

In his letter to the state GOP, Ziegler suggested that the information made public about the investigation was intentionally leaked because he and his wife are “such loud political voices.” He said the complaint and investigation should have remained confidential until the conclusion of the investigation, and that he could not publicly share his side of the story at this point in the process.

Even DeSantis backed away, which surprises me:

The letter came a day after DeSantis said Ziegler should step down as party chairman, telling reporters “I don’t see how we can continue with that investigation ongoing, given the gravity of those situations.”

Ziegler’s not going anywhere.

Click over to read the whole thing. It‘s just outrageous.

Here’s the 911 call that alerted the police to the crime.:

A look at the 18-24 year old cohort a year out

I’m taking all polls with a grain of salt, including this one. But it’s interesting to get a sense of what this particular group is thinking because this is the first presidential election for most of them and like every sub-group of any generation, they have their own experiences and live in a unique world of conventional wisdom that has no other context.

Just 49% of voters aged 18-29 say they “definitely” plan on voting for president next year, according to the new canvass by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. That’s

“From a lack of trust in leaders on a variety of critical issues such as climate change, gun violence, and the war in the Middle East, to worries about the economy and AI, young people’s concerns come through loud and clear in our new poll,” Setti Warren, the institute’s director, said in a statement. “As the 2024 campaign season kicks into high gear, candidates up and down the ballot would be wise to embrace the opportunity to listen to – and re-engage – this generation.”

I have little doubt that the Democrats are planning to do that. They have to.

I can’t say I’m surprised that this group would be unenthusiastic about this election. We have two people their great grandfather’s age running for president! Why would they be excited about that? Hardly anyone is. But that doesn’t mean they are unreachable. There are many ways to motivate people and inspiration and identification is only one of them. It does happen to be the most appealing to young people for obvious reasons, but it isn’t the only thing they care about.

In any case, at this point they are still mostly in the Democrats’ camp:

Despite that enthusiasm gap, voters aged 18-30 gave Biden an 11-point edge over former President Donald Trump, with Biden leading 41%-30% in a hypothetical, head-to-head match-up. Thirteen percent of respondents said they were undecided, while 15% said they would not vote.

Nearly 7 in 10 of respondents (69%) who said they supported Biden said their vote was more in opposition to Trump than it was in support for Biden.

The opposite was true among Trump backers, with 65% saying their vote was driven by their loyalty to the four-times indicted and twice-impeached former president, compared to 35% who said they were opposing Biden for re-election, the poll found.

Biden held a 15-point advantage among all young voters who said they were registered to vote (48%-33%), and among the most committed voters, Biden leads by 24 points, 57%-33%. In 2020, exit polls showed Biden winning the youth vote, 60% to 36%, pollsters noted.

Among registered voters aged 18-30, Biden led Trump 34%-26%, while that lead expanded to 16 points among likely voters aged 18-30, 43%-27%, according to the poll.

The poll of 2,098 voters aged 18-29 was conducted from Oct. 23 to Nov. 6, with interviews conducted in both English and in Spanish. The poll had an overall margin of error of 2.86%.

Contrary to what you might have assumed from social media, this is not necessarily driven by the crisis in Gaza. It’s driven by youthful cynicism an emotion I remember well as a young person in the 70s and 80s. (You want shit economics, a 20 year old during the late 70s didn’t exactly have an easy time of it.)

Anyway, here are the numbers on issues:

Biden held head-to-head advantages over Trump on climate change (+19), abortion (+16), education (+14), protecting democracy (+12), health care (+10), gun violence (+9), and the Ukraine War (+4), according to the poll.

Trump had the edge over Biden on the economy (+15), national security and defense (+9), the Israel-Hamas war (+5), strengthening the working class (+4), crime and public safety (+3), and immigration (+2), the poll found

Biden held an overall approval rating of 35%, down one point from spring 2023. Forty percent of respondents said they approved of Democrats in Congress, compared to 27% for Republicans, pollsters found.

The idea that anyone would think Trump is better on immigration, Israel-Hamas and strengthening the working class — or that there’s no difference — is astonishing to me. Some education is obviously required on this.

A closer look at the numbers

The enthusiasm decline was the steepest among young Black voters, with 38% saying they planned to vote in 2024, compared to 50% in 2019, the poll showed.

Enthusiasm also dipped among Hispanic voters, 40% in the new poll compared to 56% in 2019. Enthusiasm among young white voters also dropped by 5%, from 62% to 57%, pollsters found.

Women voters, who also turned out in force in 2020 and the 2022 midterms, motivated by Republican attacks on reproductive rights, also said they were less inclined to vote in 2024, with 47% saying they definitely planned to vote, compared to 56% in 2019.

The major parties also bled support among the key voting bloc, with a third (35%) self-identifying as Democrats; about a quarter (26%) self-identifying as Republicans, and 38% saying they were independent or unaffiliated.

Compared to Harvard’s fall 2019 canvass, most of the drop-off in voting intention comes among Republican (56% in the new poll, compared to 66% in 2019) and independent young voters (31% in the new poll, compared to 41% in 2019), pollsters said.

Enthusiasm remained strongest among self-identified Democrats (66% in the new poll, compared to 68% in 2019).

More voters with a college degree (69%) and college students (55%) said they planned to vote compared to young voters who were not in college or did not have a degree (40%). But even those numbers showed a decline from their 2019 tallies, according to the poll.

They are a key voting bloc for Democrats and it’s going to be very important to get them out. It’s too early to make any assumptions about this, though. Nobody’s got any enthusiasm for this election because everyone knows it’s going to be a shit show. These young people have never known anything else.

One dark finding in these numbers, according to the pollster who appeared on Morning Joe today, is that a majority of men in this cohort support Donald Trump. He attributed it to the Joe Rogan bro effect which unfortunately doesn’t surprise me. The gender gap remains alive and well.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

There were no Confederate flags, but the high school band still struck up “Dixie” as a fight song at pep rallies before integration finally reached Greenville, South Carolina in 1970. A recent arrival in the “New South,” I was called Yankee now and again. It was strange then. That “heritage” seems even stranger now.

Anna Venarchik, herself an Alabama native, writes about the legacy of The United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC over decades very successfully retconned the Civil War as something other than bloody treason by an entire region of the country to prevent the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House. That too was a Lost Cause.

 “They all think we’re white supremacists but they don’t want to bother to find out,” said one member on a Zoom Venarchik attended this decade.” Who “they” were went unsaid.

“I am interested in people understanding that the organization is a forward-looking organization,” a youngish septuagenarian from a New York chapter told Venarchik, before reversing herself and declining an interview. The UDC declined Venarchik’s other efforts to secure an interview. She never got to inquire in what way the UDC is forward-looking.

These days, the UDC’s principle focus is on retaining its marble headquarters in Richmond, dedicated in November 1957. Venarchik explains after sketching a brief history of the group:

The Daughters settled in the former Confederate capital after Governor William Tuck, who spent his governorship fighting civil rights laws, offered the land. Virginia’s General Assembly approved the offer in 1950 and tacked on $10,000 toward construction fees. The deed, however, included stipulations: If the UDC doesn’t use the property for five years, it reverts to the Commonwealth. The UDC cannot sell the building, because the state controls the land; the group cannot move it, because it’s marble. If they ever couldn’t pay for upkeep, they would have to abandon the memorial.

The structure was vandalized and firebombed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Since then, UDC monuments have come down across Richmond.

“Just the nicest ladies” is how the Daughters see themselves. They often used such phrases while discussing their charity projects. Divisions annually report how many hours of volunteer work they complete: in 2021, over 12,000 hours in Florida, over 180,000 in Texas. But their use of the phrase also suggests how they define “racist”: someone who feels animosity toward Black people, who wishes to see communities of color suffer. And “white supremacy” is associated with violence, not societal conditions. By holding to these definitions, the Daughters maintain confusion as to why such terms are applied to them. They don’t feel these things; they’re just nice ladies.

I spoke with a former member of the UDC’s brother group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (he requested anonymity), who cautioned me against generalizing the organization, which isn’t a monolith. He worked with Daughters in Richmond for years and said some divisions are more genteel, others more “hard-core.” Some Daughters want to save statues—especially in North Carolina—others just like to hang out with friends. And some were formerly members of the Children of the Confederacy, the auxiliary organization where youth learn “true” history. In 2021, the youngest member was added at only 45 minutes old, so I found it ironic—and disturbing—when one Daughter told me she sympathized when descendants of the enslaved are offended by Confederate statues. But she added that it’s important to make sure such people understand the true narrative: “You can tell them that they have been lied to all their life.”

Venarchik’s account of a Myrtle Beach UDC conference reads like a performance of The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.

Being branded a loser is bad. Really bad. Any show of weakness is disqualifying, a mortal sin on the right. Donald Trump is obsessed with projecting strength. Vladimir Putin and Trump’s other crushes are strong, and strongmen. The lengths to which Trump and the MAGA cult will go to avoid losing we witnessed after November 2020 and in courts since. The UDC spent over a century redefining the Lost Cause as the South’s finest hour, thwarted only by Yankee treachery.

Given half a chance, MAGA will do the same with Trump’s 2020 loss (he didn’t lose) and Jan. 6. That’s not a prediction. It’s already happening. Trump won. Who you gonna believe, Trump or your lyin’ eyes? There was no insurrection. Jan. 6 was a War of Liberal Aggression.