For the first time since my baby boy was born, he will not be with us for Thanksgiving. First, the lost boys were gone, and now he has moved on to the sharing stage of life, spending Thanksgiving with the family of his special person.
Last year, they came here, home, for Thanksgiving and it was wonderful. It’s only fair that they go elsewhere this year. Fairness is good, but it doesn’t change the fact that I miss having them here for Thanksgiving. Continue reading
My slightly snarky take is that poor Ka$h feels left out of the “Pleasing Trump Club” after show-toady Pete Hegseth twitted that he’s directing that retired Captain, Astronaut and now Senator Mark Kelly be “investigated” at the command of his master. With Pete proving his devotion, what’s Ka$h to do?
The six Democratic members of Congress who recorded a video informing troops that they could refuse illegal orders said on Tuesday that they were being investigated by the F.B.I.
The group, made up of veterans of the military and the C.I.A., said the bureau had contacted the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms requesting interviews with them, though it is unclear what, if any, laws they might conceivably have violated with their video.
Former legal director of the ACLU, David Cole, explains the First Amendment ramifications of using governmental investigations to silence speech that displeases Trump. Continue reading
On the one side, you have a person who has flown fighter jets in combat, gone into space and had his wife shot in the head. Some might call Mark Kelly a true American hero. On the other side, there’s the draft dodger with bone spurs and the laughably unqualified show pony toady with hair gel who can’t keep a top secret (or staff). But that does not mean the former can’t do wrong and the latter should call Senator Kelly to account if he did.
Unlike the others in the video, Mark Kelly is a retired naval captain, which makes him subject to recall to active duty and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. While Trump called this conduct “seditious,” subject to the punishment of “DEATH!!!”, it was clearly not sedition. But is it otherwise actionable under the UCMJ? Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth seems to think so. Continue reading
When the case was commenced, it was still called Facebook, well before Zuck decided to blow his wad on a metaverse no one wanted or needed. You remember Facebook, the social media site that overcame then-dominant MySpace that has since become grandmothers fav hangout. If there is one certainty in social media, it’s that domination is fleeting and what was cool and hip one day is played out the next. Remember when AOL was so powerful that it bought Time Warner? There are now a total of 12 of us who still use our archaic AOL email addresses, waiting for nostalgia to kick in so we don’t look like the dinosaurs we are.
So it came as no surprise when Judge James Boasberg tossed the Federal Trade Commission action against now-Meta. Continue reading
To those of us who did not have the experience of serving as a Judge Advocate General officer in the military, the video made by members of Congress may seem like an invitation for soldiers and sailors to decide for themselves what orders are illegal and should not be carried out. David French, however, was a JAG and explains that, while the video may not have provided a good explanation, the procedures and law are not quite so mysterious.
Notably, Trump, who called it seditious and punishable by death, was neither a member of the military nor a lawyer. French began by giving two examples, the order to bomb Iraqi insurgents in a farmhouse and the order to kill a prisoner who committed an atrocity. As to the first, David calls the question one of “distinction.” Continue reading
The themes should be familiar to any regular reader here, that the president has ordered the military to engage in conduct in violation of law and the Constitution and that it is incumbent on the military to refuse to obey illegal orders. For his part, Trump has determined that the law is whatever he says it is and it is the duty of every loyal member of his administration to accept the law and facts as he declares them to be.
Members of Congress, all of whom are either military or intelligence service veterans, crafted a video asserting this, reminding the military that its sworn duty is to the Constitution, not Trump.
There was a reason why Trump named Lindsey Halligan, an insurance defense lawyer who was unquestionably loyal, to the position of interim United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after firing career prosecutor Erik Seibert for his refusal to indict former FBI Director James Comey. Halligan would do as ordered, no matter what obstacles stood in the way. The problem, however, was that she just didn’t have the knowledge, experience and ability to do so lawfully.
Consider two stories, both from this week alone. First, on Monday, William Fitzpatrick, a federal magistrate judge who is assisting Michael Nachmanoff, the federal judge presiding over the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released an opinion about a series of staggering procedural irregularities that originated with Lindsey Halligan, Trump’s handpicked prosecutor in the case.
David French runs through the “comedy of errors,” or tragedy of incompetence if you can’t laugh about it, that permeated the Comey indictment process. Continue reading
Calling people by insulting, if infantile, names is something of Trump’s hallmark. There was Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe, Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted Cruz. It appeared that Trump believed this somehow tainted his enemies by branding them, even if the appeal of such childish tactics failed to go beyond his most faithful supporters.
But the manner in which he addressed Bloomberg News reporter, Catherine Lucey, on Air Force One went beyond the pale.
The New York Times headline is that Trump “bows to reality,” which would be a perfectly fine explanation for most people. But Trump? The guy who has managed to gaslight/recon January 6, seen by pretty much every American in living color, as a day of love rather than an insurrection? The guy who insists that foreign countries pay tariffs? The guy who feels the compulsion to tell America that he’s smart and a “stable genius” because he remembered five words (which the doctors say no one has ever done before) and everyone who disagrees with him is low IQ and stupid?
Since when did Trump care about reality? Continue reading
There was an assumption, bordering on religious tenet, that computers and smartphones giving students constant access to the internet would put all of human knowledge at their fingertips at any moment, and this was going to change everything for the better. Accordingly, much of what was considered valuable in education changed. From such banal skills as handwriting to higher order skills such as reading books or knowing how to do math calculations, smartphones made them unnecessary and superfluous.
After all, who needs to write when the future is keyboards? Who needs to know math when the phone can calculate any problem a thousand times faster? Who needs to read a book (ugh, boringo) when you can google its synopsis, boiling thousands of pages into a sentence or two? Maybe school children do? Continue reading