Josh Marshall
BREAKING: You Might Be Compelled to Think that Bridget Ziegler Is At Least Sometimes a Good Person
There’s yet more information out now about the now-mostly-dethroned threesomeer power couple of Christian and Bridget Ziegler. And despite her obvious hypocrisy, I’m compelled to note that Bridget comes off somewhat sympathetically in the new material. Christian, well, a bit less so.
The latest update comes to us from the Florida Trident, which broke the original story and has been first on many of the subsequent details.
Though the new text messages don’t say so specifically they certainly suggest, unsurprisingly, that when it came to threesomes, this wasn’t Christian and Bridget’s first rodeo. Or their last. The first assignation appears to have occurred in February 2021. On February 19th, Christian texted Bridget to “come home, stop, and pick up [the woman] to play again and be crazy.” Bridget was up for it but also concerned that, even though the woman was consenting in a formal sense, she might be too troubled and that sharing her as a sexual partner might be taking advantage of her.
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YOLO on the Down Low—Meet State Rep. Jim Lucas, the Feralist Indiana Has to Offer 
Last night I brought you news of Indiana State Rep. Jim Lucas (R) who was meeting in a corridor of the state capitol with some high school students who came to talk about out of control gun violence and their fears of being gunned down while in algebra class. The video I linked in that post shows the moment he flashed them his loaded pistol to convince them that guns are actually totally awesome. His point seemed to be: guns aren’t scary. You don’t think I’m gonna shoot you right now, do you?
I’ve taken a crash course in Lucasian studies overnight and from what I’ve learned it’s hard to believe Lucas hasn’t yet made the jump to Congress to join the House GOP conference.
As you might expect, Lucas appears to have a long history of posting what a local NBC affiliate in 2020 rather charitably called “racially controversial social media posts.” In that case it was a new meme he’d made with a photo of black children over the text “We gon’ get free money!”
In the wake of that controversy he explained that he “was bored last night and made several memes on imgflip.com, essentially mocking our government and it’s overstepping it’s (sic) authority.”
Read MoreAmazing what people are capable of. Indiana House GOP Rep. flashes his loaded handgun at high school students at the capitol to discuss their concerns about gun violence and getting shot to death during algebra class.
The news startup, The Messenger, announced today that it is closing, effective immediately. This comes only a few weeks after a round of layoffs that made it seem that the site’s days were numbered. It does not come as a surprise. The first thing to say about this is the obvious one which is that a lot of journalists lost their jobs today. And, in addition to the personal shock and hardship entailed in anyone losing their jobs, journalists play a unique and important role in the civic and news infrastructure of society. So it sucks.
The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story. This requires some explanation.
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Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
For some time I’ve wanted to take up a question that David Kurtz took up recently in Morning Memo. In short, the federal judiciary has failed the country in allowing a renegade ex-president to nullify federal law by means of a more or less open policy of endless delay by means of frivolous motions, appeals and more. As the old adage has it, justice delayed is justice denied. This hasn’t simply been during his criminal prosecutions, which I will discuss in a moment. It stretched over the time of his presidency as well. We know that during his presidency President Trump filled the federal judiciary with a slew of right-wing judges, many of them out-and-out corrupt. He also corrupted the Supreme Court with his unprecedented three appointments in a single term. But here I’m not even talking about right-wing Republican judges who often appear partial to Donald Trump’s ideological aims and frequently his narrower electoral ones as well. We know for instance that Judge Aileen Cannon, a corrupt and transparently partisan Trump appointee, has more or less single-handedly sabotaged the classified documents prosecution. Set that all aside. What I’m talking about are the fair-minded judges who allow a mix of institutional courtesy, established practice and inertia to allow Trump to make a mockery of the criminal justice system
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Cool Mom Clarice’s Ongoing Fight for Her Right To Party
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Moms for Liberty and Moms for Liberty-adjacent, right-wing school board moms like Bridget Ziegler and Clarice Schillinger, it’s that they know how to party. You’ll remember that late last year Schillinger, a one-time candidate for Lt. Gov of Pennsylvania and the head of a major anti-woke school board group in the state, was charged with a mix of offenses related to allegedly assaulting and boozing up minors at her daughter’s 17th birthday party. After a preliminary hearing on Monday, Magisterial District Judge Stacy Wertman held Schillinger over for trial on the same charges after hearing reality TV-style testimony about Schillinger’s, her mom’s and her then-boyfriend’s feral behavior corrupting the youth of Bucks County Pennsylvania — and in some cases just beating the crap out of the youth of Bucks County when they simply tried to escape her house.
Schillinger was released on her own recognizance pending trial.
Let’s go to the video (metaphorically speaking)…!
Read MoreHere is a brief postscript to yesterday’s post about UNRWA. As I noted, Israel shared a dossier of intelligence which purported to show that roughly a dozen UNRWA employees were not only affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad but directly participated in the death squad massacres in southern Israel on October 7th. The intelligence appears to have been detailed, precise and basically incontrovertible, as judged both by journalists who have reviewed portions of the dossier and the response of various government funders. A growing list of governments, beginning with the U.S. but now including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and others, have suspended funding in response. As far as I can tell no one connected to UNRWA has disputed the claims about the specific staffers and they’ve all been fired.
But there’s something that doesn’t quite seem to fit about the response. It seems at least a bit more than you’d expect.
Read MoreThe Department of Defense has identified the three soldiers killed in the drone attack on the undisclosed U.S. base in Jordan. They are Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, GA; Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, GA; and Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, GA. The three were assigned Fort Moore, Georgia and deployed near the Syrian border as part of the U.S.’s on-going fight against the Islamic State.
Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” is out tonight with a report about the pro-Palestine “Ceasefire Now’ protestors which are showing up at basically every Biden event.
Here’s the lede of the newsletter which gives a taste of it …
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About That UN/Hamas Story
You’ve probably seen the stories about the UN Agency which allegedly had amongst its employees Hamas operatives who directly participated in the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. The story is both more and less than it seems. The background helps illuminate this as well as much of what we’ve seen over the last three months.
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was founded in 1949 to administer refugee camps for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had either fled the fighting or were driven out by the Israeli military during both phases of the Israeli War of Independence, what Palestinians call The Nakba. (Most of this happened during the first phase of the war.) There were camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Those camps are still there 75 years later. “Camps” is a misnomer. Over time permanent buildings replaced temporary structures and tents. Schools, hospitals, civic buildings and businesses grew up. They are more like towns, or districts of towns. The vast majority of residents of the camps are third and fourth generation descendants of the original refugees of 1947-48. Under UNRWA’s framework they are also refugees. UNRWA still plays a central role administering these communities — running schools, hospitals, various civil services.
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