Sunday, November 30, 2025

THE DUMBEST CRIMINAL

 







CLEAVAGE TRUMPS COMPETENCE


        CLEAVAGE TRUMPS COMPETENCE
 




HEATHER

 

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth

 

Mark Kelly Is Being Investigated for Telling the Truth

Nov. 26, 2025

By David Cole

Mr. Cole is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School and a former national legal director of the A.C.L.U.

On Monday Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, directed the Pentagon to investigate Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain who flew combat missions during the gulf war and took several spaceflights as an astronaut before he was elected to serve Arizona’s citizens in Congress. His potential crime? Telling members of the armed services that they do not have to follow illegal orders. But saying so is not a crime; it’s a true statement of the law. And even if President Trump doesn’t like it, it’s protected by the First Amendment.

In a video released last week, Senator Kelly and several other Democratic lawmakers reminded members of the military that they “can refuse illegal orders.” That’s exactly right. “Following orders” is not a defense if you follow an illegal order to commit a war crime, as Allied prosecutors established at the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after World War II. Members of the military have not only the right but the obligation to refuse illegal orders.

The video enraged Mr. Trump, who evidently likes his orders followed, regardless of whether they are lawful. On Truth Social he called the video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He then reposted another person’s message that said, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!” Now his defense secretary has opened an investigation into whether Mr. Kelly committed a military crime by saying what he did. And the F.B.I. has followed suit by seeking to question the six lawmakers in the video, all of whom served in the military or the intelligence service. (Mr. Kelly alone is subject to military jurisdiction because he is “retired,” while the others did not serve long enough to be eligible to retire with a pension.)

If anything is lawless here, it’s the investigations. The video itself mentioned no particular orders. On “Face the Nation” Mr. Kelly, a member of the Armed Services Committee, questioned the legality of the orders to kill suspected drug smugglers at sea. But on that point he’s echoing what countless experts in the law of war have said. Even John Yoo, one of the former Justice Department officials who notoriously greenlighted the waterboarding of Al Qaeda suspects, has questioned the legality of the strikes, arguing that “the United States cannot confuse crime with war.”

It’s hard to find anyone outside Mr. Trump’s inner circle of solicitous advisers who considers the killings legal. The administration has notably declined to publicly disclose a memo that is purported to advance a legal rationale for the strikes, which have already killed more than 80 people. Even if you are tried and convicted of smuggling drugs, you cannot be executed for that crime alone — much less by summary execution meted out from the air.

The notion that we are at war with drug smugglers confuses a metaphor for reality; the war on drugs is no more an armed conflict than the war on cancer is. In any event, during an actual armed conflict, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians who are not actively engaged in hostilities against us. Yet instead of conforming the military’s conduct to the law and halting the killings, the Pentagon is now investigating Mr. Kelly, and the F.B.I. wants to question both the senator and his colleagues for doing nothing more than stating what the law is.

We’ve seen something like this before, but it’s not a precedent we should be proud of. During World War I, Congress made it a crime to incite insubordination in the military. More than 2,000 people were prosecuted for criticizing the war under this law, and about 1,000 were convicted. Several of these cases made their way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions. Among those convicted was Eugene Debs, who ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate in 1920 while serving his sentence and received nearly a million votes.

In its decisions affirming the convictions, the Supreme Court reasoned, without a shred of convincing evidence, that the speakers posed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, a “clear and present danger” to the country. One defendant, Charles Schenck, had mailed leaflets to men who had been drafted, criticizing the war and urging them to “assert your rights.” Another, John Frohwerk, was convicted of writing a dozen news articles similarly criticizing the war effort. Debs was sentenced to 10 years for praising imprisoned critics of the war in a speech, among other things.

In none of the cases was any evidence offered that anyone had actually acted upon the criticisms, or that anyone had in fact incited insubordination. The mere possibility of interference with the war was enough.

 

Those decisions are now viewed as egregious missteps in the interpretation of the First Amendment. Today’s free speech doctrine looks instead to the subsequent dissents of Justice Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis in Abrams v. United States and Gitlow v. New York, which argued that the First Amendment prohibits censoring speech because it criticizes the government, and maintained that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” not whether it pleases government officials. Years of repression against union activists, communists and civil rights activists ultimately led the Supreme Court to adopt robust protections for free speech on matters of public concern — under which the prosecutions of World War I would all have been invalid.

As a result, it is now clearly established that I cannot be prosecuted for saying, in this essay, “Members of the military have not only the right but the obligation to refuse illegal orders.” Nor could I be prosecuted for stating, as I also have, that the orders to kill suspected drug smugglers are illegal. The First Amendment protects all such statements. Indeed, it protects explicit calls for illegal conduct unless the speech is both intended and likely to incite imminent illegality, a standard rarely met, and one not even approached by Mr. Kelly’s words.

The administration maintains that it can investigate Mr. Kelly because he is a retired naval officer. In other words, because he fought for his country — something Mr. Trump managed to avoid doing — Mr. Kelly has less First Amendment protection than the rest of us. That’s wrong.

It’s true that the Uniform Code of Military Justice applies to retired members of the military. On very rare occasions, retired members have been called up to stand trial in military court for violating the military code. The only code provision that addresses mere speech, however, is the rarely used Article 88, which prohibits officers from using “contemptuous words” against the president and other high-level officials. Nothing Mr. Kelly said was remotely “contemptuous,” which a military judges’ manual defines as “insulting, rude and disdainful.” Mr. Kelly did not even mention the president or any other official; he simply described the law that governs service members.

The fact that Mr. Kelly is a retired officer does not authorize an exception to the First Amendment. While restricting how officers speak about the president may make sense when applied to active-duty officers, where respect for the commander in chief and military discipline are paramount, it makes no sense when applied to a retiree who engages in no military activity and exercises no military authority.

Precisely because those exercising command authority are often limited in what they can say, it’s all the more important to protect the speech rights of those who have retired and can offer their perspective. Some of the most important voices questioning President George W. Bush’s torture program in the war on terror were retired admirals and generals. Such officials rarely speak out on military matters, but when they do they deserve to be heard, not criminally investigated.

We ask a lot of those who put their lives on the line defending our nation. The least we can do is respect their free speech rights once they’ve retired.

 

ROTHKOPF

 




We Have Descended into Utter Madness

A new sense of urgency is needed. Our national crisis has grown much more acute.

David Rothkopf

Nov 29

 

 

 

We have descended into utter madness.

We knew we were at risk of it. We struggled against it as it was happening. We called out the warning signs and its first manifestations. And yet, somehow, its onset has accelerated and deepened and we are suddenly in a place of lunacy more acute than this country has ever experienced.

What is more, for all of our awareness and resistance, it is clear right now that our response is too subdued, too complacent, too accepting of the inarguably unacceptable.

At least, as it turns out, frogs do have the common sense to jump out of a pot of water as its temperature grows unacceptably high. We don’t. The water is boiling all around us.

Take the news of just the past few days as sketched out in headlines and shards of social media.

We are about to go to war against another country for no reason. Our president is delusionally barking out orders to the planet, seemingly convinced he rules the entire globe.

He commands closed the skies of a foreign land. He demands the people of another nation vote for his political ally or he will punish them. He sets free a convicted drug lord while arguing that he is waging a hemispheric battle against narco-terrorists. His minions are committing war crimes in his name, lying about their justifications, bringing disgrace on our country and our armed services.

A person with a video play AI-generated content may be incorrect.

 

In the wake of a tragic killing, he and his aides are making racist proclamations and promising sweeping draconian measures including banning entry to the US of all people from the “third world” and expelling from this country naturalized citizens who do not ascribe to our leaders’ ideas or political opinions. He has turned the legal apparatus of this country against his perceived opponents, even those who are only doing their duty and urging others to do theirs, even those who recognize that illegal orders are being given that are resulting in crimes for which all those involved except the president himself can be prosecuted.

His emissaries are selling out our allies and seeking to pressure them into capitulation to foreign enemies in ways that will undermine our national security and that of many of our most important friends and partners.

Starkly unqualified crackpots have been put in charge of our healthcare system and are actively seeking to undo two centuries of progress in the administration of public health. Children are already dying because they are stigmatizing vaccines, attacking science itself for ideological reasons and with utter disregard for the risks that are being created. They are responding to a climate crisis by systematically stopping programs that might contain it and accelerating those that will certainly make it worse.

Corruption is rampant, in the open, almost celebrated. The White House has been partially torn down and is being replaced by a monstrous monument to the president’s ego…one unlike any ever conceived by any past leader in our history…one that increasingly grows so out of scale with both our executive mansion and the limits of good taste that the architect and contractors are seeking to distance themselves from the project.

Heroes are called traitors. Journalists and others who seek to exercise their first amendment rights are crudely bullied or worse. Racists are being given rein make their twisted vision of what America should be into a reality enforced by the law. Armed thugs are on the march in our cities rounding up the innocent. Vital programs upon which millions depend are being shutdown. Universities are being directed away from learning, intellectual independence, the traits that made them the envy of the world and forced to bend the knee to an ideology that promotes ignorance and prejudice. With a few quick keystrokes, the mentally unstable man who is leading this country believes he can reverse every executive order of his predecessor and threaten him with prosecution.

This is just a summary of the past few days. This is just a progress report on our descent into a state that, unchecked, will surely destroy our country and that, even if reversed, will take decades to undo and repair.

It is not an exaggeration to observe that on virtually every issue of importance—national security, foreign policy, economics, budgets, taxation, tariffs, healthcare, social services, energy, environment, education or the rule of law that the policies and positions adopted by this administration are not just greatly deviant from our past or the views of the opposition or the views of the majority of Americans or our historical positions…they are completely wrong, the opposite of what is needed.

In almost every case, where the president and the administration can make a choice, they make the most damaging choice, the most dangerous choice.

Think about it. Do your own math. Run through your own checklist. Perhaps you will find a few isolated areas in which they are not doing the worst possible thing. On one or two or a handful perhaps, they may be making a positive contribution to our well-being. But that is a handful out of countless instances in which the worse case is the case with which now find ourselves contending.

And it is less than a year into this administration. And the president is clearly, visibly, ever more rapidly declining, losing his faculties, losing any sense of perspective or limitations he might once have had, shouting into the void his commands, serving his needs, and seeking to institutionalize his pathologies in our national institutions and life.

As shocking as this is, however, our president’s dementia and character flaws and the defects of those in his inner circle are not our biggest problem.

We are the problem.

I don’t mean you, per se, no doubt you share my views on the above. No doubt you have been railing against what we see and are profoundly disturbed by where we are.

I mean the American people. I mean the third of the electorate who apparently still support what is happening. I mean the GOP legislators who enable him and their constituents who continue to back and empower them. I mean the traditional media that continues to both-sides a profound national crisis. I mean new media that feels snark and “I told you so” and calling for outcomes that will never occur are adequate. I mean those we know who just seek to change the subject or have grown inured to all this or think it is business as usual and that it will be reversed by time without any effort from them or who assume that shaking their head and lamenting our state is somehow enough.

We have reached a point at which recent events should be demanding that every group mentioned above, that all who have enabled or tolerated or not done enough to prevent where we are now must reconsider.

This moment must be a turning point. It is time to recognize that we have entered a dark, perilous new phase of the drama of the Trump years and it is up to us all that we ensure we are in the last act of that play.

To do so, we must start by recognizing that what we are seeing happening, what has dominated the headlines every day this week, and the spiraling descent into national psychosis that we are experiencing is qualitatively different and much more grave even than that we have experienced before. And we must acknowledge that there are still three years to go in this presidency and we must imagine what they will look like if current trends go unchecked.

The water is boiling.

It is time to get out. It is time to call it a crisis. It is time to sound the alarms. It is time to reject those who would excuse it. It is time to become intolerant of the intolerable, the equivocations, the excuses, the too timid responses. It is time to spend every erg of energy at our disposal to hasten the exits of the enablers and the principal actors at the center of all this.

Electing Trump was a mistake. Trump’s first term was for the most part a series of calamities. He should have been impeached and removed both times it was before the Congress. That he led an insurrection compounded and exceeded past bad choices and actions of he and his team.

But where we are now is qualitatively worse and growing more precarious daily.

Thanks to the Supreme Court and the supine Congress and the right wing media bubble and the apathy of most Americans and the bumbling of the opposition, Trump and those around him have been sent a message that they are above the law and that they have more power than anyone who has ruled here since George III. They believe they are unstoppable. He really does believe he can issue decrees on Truth Social and the laws and the world must submit to his will as soon as he has completed saying, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

It is for that reason we must see those words as a call to action. We do need to direct our attention to these matters.

My sense is, as I have often written before, that while all of us have a role to play here, it is going to require a new generation of leaders and voters to step up. They will determine the tenor of the debates to come. They will determine—by whether they turn out or not—the outcomes of the elections in 2026 and 2028. They will determine what alternative course of action can be followed that can stop this era of self-destruction and find new goals and remedies and a new path forward.

The problem is that for most of Millenials and Zoomers, Trump has been a fact of political life for virtually all their time as adults. He is the norm. And so they must either come to recognize that is an illusion or they must reject that norm and demand a new one.

In any case, noting the special role emerging generations must come to play while important to note, does not leave the rest of us off the hook. We all must come to terms with the idea that what we have done thus far is not enough. It is not working. Our situation is only growing more dire. Past demonstrations have not been big enough. Past calls to action have not been urgent enough. Each of us has to ask, what more can we do—even if we feel we have done a great deal—and then we must do it.

Because, as I noted at the outset, as I hope all of you have recognized over these past few days, we have descended into utter madness.

CROOKED MAGAt SCUM


 






SLEEPY SLOB


 





Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

 

Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

Tina Brown

Nov 17, 2025

Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the humiliation of a clear loss to his own base, Trump now supports the files pouring forth into the world, and said he would sign the bill if it passes. Trump, the product of legendary reality TV, should have known that he could not kill the Epstein obsession loop. First, because pedophilia is a core MAGA agitant. And secondly, all those videos and photos of Trump and Epstein make for an enduring TV story. That clip of the two of them leering at cheerleaders and models at a louche 1992 Mar-a-Lago party, with Ghislaine Maxwell standing right behind them, looks more like the Zapruder film every day.

A person in a suit and tie AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Partners in slime (Credit: NBC News)

Michael Wolff, the sour savant of American media who has written multiple bestsellers excoriating Trump, has been caught himself in the river of ooze. Just when he is the ubiquitous go-to source for everyone looking for dark insights into Trump’s hide-and-seek with Epstein malfeasance, last week’s email cache shows Wolff to be another pond eel swimming in the Epstein access estuary. (Cf. the consigliere tone of Wolff’s “You can hang [Trump] in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you.”) Today, Wolff defends his tactic as an attempt to ingratiate himself with Epstein for the eventual blistering story Wolff was sure to write. Perhaps, there, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He certainly conned Rupert Murdoch’s experienced comms team at News Corporation into giving him an all-access pass to the most powerful man in media, only to violate every agreed-upon ground rule and sell sources down the river. (After Wolff first made nice, then trashed me in New York magazine, I retaliated in the pages of Talk by describing his “baleful masturbatory glare,” which gave me a modicum of satisfaction.)

A person in a suit and tie with a microphone AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Epstein consigliere Michael Wolff

 

One of the biggest hazards of releasing private emails is how much they expose the multiple faces people in high places present to the world. Money, not sex, is often the embarrassing Achilles’ heel. How much was former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers’ sustained digital banter with Epstein really about the world of ideas or just foreplay to secure a handsome grant to his wife’s Poetry in America initiative? (Summers to Epstein: “My life will be better if I raise $1m for Lisa…Ideas?”) Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson used Epstein as a gushing human ATM to cover her mountainous debts for years. But after publicly disavowing Epstein with an “I abhor pedophilia” aria, a leaked 2011 email shows she almost immediately sent him a suck-up mea culpa: “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me. You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.” Exit stage left the erstwhile Duchess of York.

Even Epstein himself, a prolific, typo-strewn e-correspondent, pondered to Summers in 2017: “Interesting argument whether using WhatsApp is obstruction of justice. Deletes after sending?” You wish, Larry. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called on Harvard to cut all ties with Summers, given that the new emails reveal his “monumentally bad judgment.”

Threat Level

Just as piquant as the emails in the latest dump is an Epstein profile draft in there by Michael Wolff that was never published. At this point, Epstein has been so demonized, if one can use such a word for someone so personally depraved, it’s hard to understand why esteemed figures like Bill Gates, Oliver Sacks, and Stephen Jay Gould did not recoil from Epstein’s advances. Wolff’s piece gives us a glimpse of the other Epstein in action—doing Big Thinks as the philosopher of wealth creation. “It used to be,” Epstein mused to Wolff “that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social-engineering philanthropy, unique….Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality-altering scale.” Epstein did not see that his own wealth had created a personal distortion field that normalized his horrific predations.

Penis Envy

Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill, bipartisan members of Congress, including Reps. Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are hosting a cluster of Epstein survivors for a press conference to “discuss next steps.” I talked with one of them yesterday: Rina Oh, a 46-year-old Korean-American artist, who was groomed by Epstein through a pretend interest in her art. Just as Wolff shows us the intellectual manqué side of Epstein, Rina, now the serene-faced mother of two sons, offers unsettling details about the competitive atmosphere inside Epstein’s sexual ménage. When the pedophile magus made clear to the girls that Maxwell was too old to attract him, Ghislaine’s own jealousy became a toxic force. By 2001, Rina believes, Epstein and Maxwell hated each other. “Their relationship was very awful, very strange,” she told me. “I actually didn’t ever suspect that the two of them were having any type of a romantic relationship. I thought she was an associate of his, especially when I saw them fighting. Ghislaine was snickering at him in that British accent and they were throwing insults at each other.” She recalls, “He took me and another girl to the tennis court at Mar-a-Lago, where Ghislaine was playing. He got her attention…and stood behind me and started humping me through my clothes.…He was shrieking and laughing, making fun of Ghislaine.” She believes Epstein bought Ghislaine the Manhattan townhouse, which sold this year for $18 million, to get rid of her, and that Ghislaine ramped up her role as Epstein’s procuress in the 2000s as the only way she could hang on.

A person standing on a staircase AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Epstein survivor Rina Oh (Credit: Jackie Molloy/The Sunday Times)

 

Rina is also convinced that Epstein’s core issue was that “he had an extremely deformed penis.…Some people have described it as the shape of an egg. I think it was more of the shape of a lemon, and it was really small when it was fully erect. It was probably like two inches.” She does not believe he was capable of penetrative sex. Strangely, I had this conversation with Rina right after reading on the Drudge Report about new DNA research on blood taken from fabric from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself, suggesting that the Führer had the genetic marker for Kallman syndrome, which can result in the misfortune of a micropenis.

See what I mean? The angles are endless. Yet Trump still believes he can quash this story.

Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)

Total Pageviews

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Blog Archive