Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) actually didn’t go far enough when he told members of the U.S. military: "Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders." In fact, as fellow armed services veteran Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) emphasized in the same video, service members "must refuse illegal orders."

Under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which was passed by Congress after the post-WWII Nazi tribunals at Nuremberg, the "I was just following orders" defense was officially discredited for the U.S. military as well. All members of the U.S. armed forces have, as "reported by The Military Times, a duty to disobey "illegal" orders. Any member of the military who carries out an "illegal" order, The Military Times observed, may become the subject of a court martial. Depending on the nature of the illegal order, a member of the military who obeys an illegal order could later be tried for crimes against humanity by an international tribunal.

Neither the UCMJ, nor any existing case law, carves out an exception for "illegal" orders issued by the Commander in Chief. Thus, Donald Trump's effort to label an accurate quote of military law as "sedition" and the "announcement" by Trump's renamed "Department of War" that it is investigating Kelly, are patently absurd.

The more serious questions are: (1) Did Trump's call for Kelly and the five other Democratic members of Congress who publicly called upon members of the military to comply with their "duty to disobey illegal orders" to be "hanged" amount to a criminal violation of 18 U.S. Code §115, which makes it a crime to threaten to assault a member of Congress in retaliation for their performance of their official duties --- (here using their office to remind members of the military of their obligations under the UCMJ)? And (2) whether his amplification of calls for them to be "hanged" amounts to a high crime that warrants impeachment…

Even if nothing else was taking place at this perilous moment, the September 8 SCOTUS decision to temporarily suspend both a presumption of innocence as well as the right, previously guaranteed by the 4th Amendment, not to be seized absent a reasonable suspicion of unlawful status, is deeply disturbing. Taken in context of recent events, the Court's decision on the "shadow docket" poses an ominous threat.

The decision was handed down after the "dangerous sociopath", President Donald J. Trump, threatened to arrest California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of his chief political rivals. More importantly, perhaps, it was handed down shortly after Trump threatened to use the U.S. military to invade Chicago.

If the same SCOTUS majority goes on to temporarily suspend the Order issued on September 2nd by U.S. District Court Judge Charles E. Breyer, that enjoined Trump's use of the military to engage in local law enforcement without the consent of State and local authorities --- an action that Breyer ruled to be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act --- it could hasten a bitter end to federalism and to our constitutional republic…

To Right-Wing Billionaire Charles T. Munger, Jr.: Despite the fact that you, along with former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, supported the 2008 ballot measure that created an independent redistricting commission for California state legislative offices and the 2010 ballot measure that extended the independent commission's jurisdiction to California's Congressional elections, "cynical hypocrisy" now be thy name.

After being approved by both chambers of the California state Legislature, on August 21, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the "Election Rigging Response Act", a ballot measure (Proposition 50) that will come before the entire California electorate in a Special Election this November 4 for an up or down vote.

The measure, as the Golden State governor explained, calls for a "temporary" shift of the power to redistrict California's Congressional seats from the state's constitutionally mandated independent redistricting commission to the super majority Democratic Party-controlled State Legislature. This, Newsom asserts, is necessary to counter the extreme partisan gerrymander that, at the express request of President Donald J. Trump, was adopted by the GOP-controlled TX state Legislature. Newsom is of the view that a "temporary" departure from California's non-partisan redistricting is necessary to counteract Republican rigging of the 2026 Congressional election. (In this writer's view, Prop. 50 is needed to prevent this nation from devolving into a full-blown fascist dictatorship.)

Note: Prop. 50 does not alter the continued use of the independent redistricting commission with respect to Golden State legislative offices.

Even before Newsom signed the Election Rigging Response Act into law, Californians, statewide, received a slick, 4-page mailer from a group calling itself "Protect the Voters First Act". At the bottom of the last page, the mailer reveals that Munger is its principal funder.

Munger's mailer accurately describes California's independent redistricting commission system that he helped to create as a "landmark election reform"; one that "has become a national model for independent redistricting." But the right-wing billionaire's deceptive mailer fails to mention that, in 2021-22, every Congressional Republican opposed federal legislation that would have extended California's "national model for independent redistricting" to all 50 States.

Instead, the mailer falsely goes on to proclaim that California's Prop 50 is a threat to democracy...

Coming on the heels of the presently enjoined, 4th Amendment violating, racial profiling mass roundups of Latinos in California, the Trump regime's effort to not only federalize law enforcement in the District of Columbia but also to target the homeless for removal resurrects the ghost of the late Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller.

An acknowledged anti-semite, Niemöller initially supported Hitler's rise to power. But he drew the ire of Der Führer's totalitarian regime after he openly opposed the Nazification of Protestant Churches.

Narrowly escaping death after he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1937, Niemöller spent the years 1938 to 1945 in infamous Nazi concentration camps.

Following his release from Dachau in 1945, Niemöller penned the poem, First They Came...

It is nothing short of reckless, from the perspective of national security, to allow any individual or private corporation to maintain monopoly ownership and control over a global Internet satellite communications system.

Nonetheless, today, courtesy of launch licenses issued by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), the world's richest man, Elon Musk --- net worth $273.5 billion --- has amassed monopoly control via Starlink, a global Internet communication system that owns and operates more than 6,300 satellites.

Haven't we --- almost literally --- seen this movie before? And does it ever end well?

The scope of this non-fictional threat is by no means confined to the enormity of Musk's wealth. As The Atlantic's Marina Koren astutely observed in "Elon Musk Has the 'Off Switch'", the combination of ownership and control over X (formerly Twitter) and Starlink has enabled Musk to wield "unprecedented power." And we've already experienced an instance in which Musk, who reportedly "regularly communicates" with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has utilized that "unprecedented power" to undermine a core component of U.S. foreign policy...

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance," instructed James Madison, one of our nation's founders, "and a People who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives."

That maxim is especially apropos today when it comes to California's Initiative and Referendum process, adopted in 1911 to afford the People of California the right to exercise direct democracy. Unfortunately, democracy is undermined when the Initiative and Referendum process is used as a tool by corporate interests to manipulate and bamboozle voters.

Wealthy institutional landlords, operating as the California Apartment Association, have spent some $56 million to flood the airwaves with misleading No on 33 Ads, aspiring to block a measure that would allow municipalities across the state to institute rent controls. If adopted, Prop 33 would simply repeal the state's 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act signed into law by then Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. The nearly 30-year old Costa-Hawkins law prevents cities and counties from imposing rent controls on structures built on or after 1995. The statute also bars California counties and municipalities from imposing rent controls on single-family homes, even if those homes have been acquired by profiteering Wall Street investors.

Prop 33 does not directly impose rent controls, and it does not, as the landlords falsely claim in their well-funded campaign against the initiative, overturn "more than 100 housing laws" or eliminate "unjust eviction protections". Instead, if adopted by state voters this year, Prop 33 simply reinstates the right of cities and counties in the Golden State to enact rent-control measures that local governments possessed prior to passage of Costa-Hawkins.

Institutional landlords have not confined their assault on direct democracy to a deceptive ad campaign against Prop 33. They've also spent more than $35 million to advance what opponents of a separate measure, Prop 34, describe in the State Voters' Guide as a "Revenge Initiative." Prop 34 purports to make "permanent" a right that already exists: the right for MediCal, the state's version of Medicaid, to negotiate prescription drug prices. But the deceptive Prop 34 is carefully tailored by the same corporate interests opposing the rent control initiative to target and penalize just one single entity: the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has a history of backing rent control measures and is the principal supporter of Prop 33...

Two organizations representing the Haitian Diaspora filed a civil Complaint [PDF] in the U.S. District Court in Miami on Friday on behalf of the terrorized Haitians who legally reside in Springfield, Ohio.

The named defendants include Republican candidates for President, Donald J. Trump, for Vice President, J.D. Vance, and Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. The other named defends include Donald Trump, Jr., Ohio's Republican Attorney General Dave Yost, X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) and the State of Ohio.

The Complaint alleges that the defendants, with full knowledge of falsity, not only spread dangerous defamatory lies --- the false claim that Haitians were stealing and eating pet dogs and cats --- but have also engaged in hate speech, a contention, plaintiffs allege, that is bolstered by a federal judge's determination, in Segat v. Trump (2019), that then President Trump's decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians was likely influenced by racial animus. The court based its conclusion in that case, in part, upon Trump's reference to Haiti as a "shithole country" and the former President's false claim that Haitians migrants were bringing AIDS to the U.S.

In addition to defamation per se, the Complaint alleges that the Defendants have engaged in a conspiracy to violate their civil rights, including the 14th Amendment right to Equal Protection under law. It goes on to allege defendants incited, aided and abetted violence against the Haitian residents of Springfield...

Republican Ken Paxton, the ethically challenged Texas Attorney General, who paid nearly $300,000 in restitution to plea bargain his way out of a securities fraud indictment that had been pending since 2015, is vehemently opposed to the effort by state county election officials to encourage voter registration via the unsolicited mailing of voter registration forms to likely eligible voters.

Paxton's effort at voter suppression in two of the Lone Star State's most populous --- and Democratic-leaning --- counties, has now resulted in several lawsuits. A suit in state court filed by Paxton against Bexar County (San Antonio), and two filed in federal court, one each by Bexar and Travis (Austin) Counties charging the Attorney General is attempting to suppress the vote in violation of long-standing federal law...

At last Tuesday's Presidential Debate, one of ABC News moderator David Muir's questions to Donald Trump referenced a recent apparent admission by the former President that he'd actually lost the 2020 Presidential election "by a whisker". Trump went on to claim that those televised remarks were meant as sarcasm.

That produced the following colloquy...

This was a classic case of Trump doubling down on the Big Lie that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. In more than 60 cases, state and federal courts --- at the trial and appellate levels --- rejected legal challenges filed by Trump and his allies. In many instances, the cases were lost, not because Trump or his allies lacked legal standing to bring the case, as Trump claimed, but because they failed to produce evidence to support their claims of fraud. Indeed, on some occasions, Trump's attorneys even admitted they couldn't establish fraud.

Consider, for example, our coverage of a Nov. 21, 2020 Decision [PDF] by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann in Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, a case in which then Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted, in open court, that he had no evidence of voter fraud to present to the court...

Attorneys from the watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), including a retired federal judge, have now filed an Amici Curiae Brief [PDF] (friends of the court brief) in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeal in relation to the stolen classified documents case (United States v. Trump).

The case was recently dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee, who contended that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not have the power to appoint Jack Smith as Special Counsel. In the view of former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, the "devastating" 81-page brief [PDF] Smith filed in conjunction with the government's appeal of that dismissal order, suggests a near certainty that Cannon's dismissal order will be reversed by the appellate court.

While Smith may have been constrained by DOJ policy not to seek Judge Cannon's removal in his motion, CREW isn't so constrained...

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command," wrote George Orwell in his classic dystopian novel, 1984. It was a lesson that the Republican Party has learned well.

A recent poll pertaining to whose economic approach is preferred by American voters --- Donald Trump's or Kamala Harris's --- suggests that we remain in the midst of an Orwellian moment driven by GOP disinformation and the mainstream media's inability --- or disinterest --- in countering it. But, really, it's not particularly difficult if one tries.

As the business magazine Fortune described in early 2021, Donald Trump left office with "the worst jobs records since Herbert Hoover". Before that, in late 2020, a U.S. House Budget Committee report noted that Trump's mishandling of COVID had been an "epic failure" that "resulted in thousands of avoidable deaths and the most severe economic crisis in a generation...[S]mall businesses across the country [were] closing their doors for good, families [were] facing hunger and eviction, and millions of Americans [were] still having to make the impossible choice between their health and a paycheck."

The Biden administration, largely as the result of legislation passed before the MAGA Cult barely gerrymandered its way to a do-nothing House majority during the 2022 midterm, produced the fastest economic recovery and lowest inflation rate on the globe, as compared to all other advanced nations. Biden's economic record includes the "two strongest years of job growth in history", the creation of nearly 11 million new jobs, including "750,000 new manufacturing jobs", and, at 3.5%, "the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years." Where Trump never fulfilled his oft-repeated promise to create infrastructure projects, the Biden administration finally delivered, by making "infrastructure investments in all 50 States, D.C., territories and throughout Tribal Nations."

As we recently reported, during her swift-moving, upbeat campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has advanced immensely popular economic policies. Yet, according to a report on a head-scratching 3-day Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Aug. 23 and Aug. 25, 2024, "former President Trump's approach to the economy and employment was preferred by 43% of registered voters, as compared to only 40%, who preferred Harris's approach."

The Orwellian misinformation leading to such a polling result can be attributed, in no small part, to an epic mainstream media failure to adequately cover the Biden administration's stellar economic accomplishments. More directly the answer can be found in a recent book authored by Steve Benen, longtime blogger and producer of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, entitled Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past. In it, Benen notes that, for a significant percentage of the electorate, Trump's fictions have simply displaced reality. Many Americans have been duped by a brazen collective and organized effort by Trump, Congressional Republicans and the right-wing media echo chamber to rewrite recent history...

Marveling at the remarkably positive vibe emerging from the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch observed:

That "new power dynamic" Bunch references is embodied in Vice President Kamala Harris' open alignment with the economic needs of the vast majority of Americans who make up the working and middle classes.

Whether or not the recommendation from Sen. Bernie Sanders, this nation's most progressive Senator, was a factor, it is clear that Harris' decision to pick one of the nation's most progressive Governors, Tim Walz of Minnesota --- a governor who gleefully signed a bill for free breakfast and lunch for all school children into law --- as her Vice-Presidential pick, reflects her commitment to progressive values.

As Georgia's Republican former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan made clear during his DNC speech, there's no need for Harris to move to the right to attract voters from outside of the progressive realm. The threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump, Project 2025 and the MAGA cult, along with the Democrats' commitment to "freedom", "patriotism" and respect for the rule of law, will be enough to attract honest conservative voters irrespective of whether they still call themselves Republicans or now describe themselves as either former Republicans or independents.

By adhering to her progressive economic values --- whether it comes to support for organized labor, an increase in the federal minimum wage, the expansion of social safety net programs, tax increases on the wealthy, the expansion of accessible health care and a crackdown on corporate price gouging --- Harris can not only maintain authenticity but also take advantage of the fact that an overwhelming majority of the American electorate both want and need such progressive economic policy initiatives...

Non-profit government watchdog, Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) has detailed what they describe as an illegal plot among Trump-supporting county election officials to sabotage the certification of the 2024 election results.

The scheme has been reported elsewhere in recent days, including in an excellent deep dive by Justine Glawe at Rolling Stone, reporting on "nearly 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials [in battleground states] who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results."

In a lengthy and detailed State-by-State Analysis [PDF] released this week, CREW is offering a roadmap of legal remedies in each of eight battleground states that, if followed, they believe can defeat the looming threat posed by such a scheme and ensure timely certification of results in this November's Presidential election...

Late last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and 34 fellow Senate Democrats introduced legislation that would not only overturn the "Presidential Immunity" ruling invented by the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority last month in Trump v. United States, but would also strip both federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court of the jurisdiction to so much as stay criminal proceedings based upon a claim of "presidential immunity".

The proposed No Kings Act [PDF] cites provisions of Article III, §2, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which expressly authorizes Congress to carve out "exceptions" to the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction. The newly introduced Act declares that "a President or Vice President is not entitled to any form of immunity from criminal prosecution for violations of the criminal laws of the United States unless specified by Congress," and then invokes the Article III clause to prevent federal courts from blocking any such prosecution on the basis of the Trump v. U.S. ruling.

Moreover, as the Democrats' announcement explains, the Supreme Court would also be barred from reviewing the Constitutionality of the No Kings Act itself. While the bill would allow Presidents and Vice Presidents to challenge its constitutionality, any such challenge would be ultimately decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rather than by SCOTUS.

According to Schumer's statement:

The legislative Act, as proposed by Democrats, is manifestly different from President Biden's proposal to overturn the presidential immunity decision by way of a Constitutional Amendment...

In a recent item, "Overdue Debunking of MAGA Cult Xenophobia", I noted how "throughout history, decent, hard-working immigrants (like me) have contributed to the economy and our national security".

Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman who could very well become the 47th President of these United States, is amongst the best contributions a pair of immigrants, Donald J. Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, have given to our nation.

Their daughters Kamala and Maya are by no means their only contributions...