Just a quick note to let you know we’re off this week on the podcast. We’ll be back next week at the standard time.

Many have learned over the last three months how Hamas and the Israeli right, and especially Benjamin Netanyahu, have a paradoxically symbiotic relationship. Arch-enemies and yet dependent on each other. It’s occurred to me in recent days how many of Israel’s fiercest critics have a comparable relationship with the many far-right extremists who make up Netanyahu’s current and, one hopes, final government. From the start of Israel’s current campaign in Gaza, various members of the current coalition have opined or hoped that the carnage and destruction might be an opportunity to depopulate Gaza.

This kind of rhetoric comes in two basic forms. One is the simple fact that Gaza is a warzone with immense destruction. And civilians generally flee warzones. We saw it in Yugoslavia. In Syria. We see it in Ukraine. That’s what happens in wars and warzones. Civilians flee. But of course this history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict makes it totally different. So you have members of the Israeli far right saying, with perfect disingenuousness, why not let these poor people flee? It’s a humanitarian gesture. It’s helping them! Others barely even bother with this pretense of voluntary departure. It’s just an opportunity to get Gazans to leave.

The last we heard of embattled Florida GOP chair and prolific threesomer Christian Ziegler, the state party was preparing to boot him from office notwithstanding the lack of any mechanism in state party bylaws to do so. But now police appear to be investigating a new potential crime.

Troy Republicans had a hot idea: appoint Jason Schofield, the former elections commissioner of the Rensselaer County Republicans, to serve as an assistant to the city clerk. Public service is a good thing. So that sounds normal enough. But what happened to Schofield’s gig as elections commissioner? Welllll …. he had to resign a year ago as part of pleading guilty to federal elections fraud charges tied to fraudulent absentee ballot applications in county elections back in 2021.

Okay, if you want to be really technical about it. It’s not Moms for Liberty, the group cofounded by Florida threesomer Bridget Ziegler. But it’s the same political movement of post-Covid rightwing moms mobilizing to take over school boards and rid them of the “woke mind virus.” Pennsylvania’s Clarice Schillinger 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.

I wanted to take a moment to marvel over the Nikki Haley situation with you. The conventional take is that as she’s risen in the GOP presidential primary contest she’s getting the heightened scrutiny that goes along with it. But that’s not actually true. As with so much else in the news, that take is driven by vibes and the need for a storyline rather than any actual data. FiveThirtyEight says that on October 1st she was at 6.9% support in nationwide polls. Today she is at 11%. That’s a 4 percentage point shift when Donald Trump, today, remains literally 50 percentage points ahead. The only place where there’s even been a modest shift is in New Hampshire. And it’s quite modest. There she’s moved to about 25% support after almost two months at 20%.

So … Go Nikki! Laying the groundwork for a 2 to 1 trouncing in New Hampshire to build momentum for a … well, not really clear that it’s for anything. But let’s not be spoil sports!

I give you my favorite editorial fail of the final week of 2023, from the Times write-up of the Maine disqualification …