Legal advice

 Satire -- how does it work?  A Facebook page called America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) wrote that Zohran Mamdani has effectively ended the Macys Thanksgiving Parade by demanding "$10 million to rent Fifth Avenue."  Alert readers will have noticed that Mamdani takes office on January 1, 2026, and that the parade has never occurred on Fifth Avenue.  Dull-witted readers proceeded to lose their digestive product:  "Great job, New York.  You got what you voted for," gloated one.  Another advises, "Be serious.  The man is delulu [sic]."  "The undoing of 125 years of American tradition," mourns Grizzly Greg, whose avatar is a bear in a Navy uniform.  Nobody read down to ALLOD's statement:  "NOTHING on this page is REAL."  Is it legal to fool people by appealing to their prejudices?  I need to know before I write that ZM is closing all the churches and banning the tree at Rockefeller Center.

Well then, is it legal to remind members of the military that they swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and that they can refuse illegal orders?  Six members of Congress who are military veterans produced a brief video to that effect which enraged Generalissimo Bone Spurs:

How can it be illegal to say "don't break the law"?  The generalissimo has already labelled it "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR" and pronounced a sentence of death "like GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD."  His Secretary of Warfighting dismissed it as "Stage 4 TDS" although it did not refer to Trump by name.  The six Democrats have introduced the No Troops in Our Streets Act to prevent further deployments in blue cities, but there's plenty of other illegality on the table, including the continued slaughter of anyone in the Caribbean with a boat and the threatened invasion of Venezuela.  According to NBC News Southern Command sought and then ignored the advice of its senior judge advocate general (JAG) before beginning to attack boats in September.  In other words, they already know it's illegal, they just don't care.

The Democratic leadership are taking Trump's threats seriously, announcing that they have contacted the Capitol Police and the House Sergeant-at-Arms about the safety of the six.  They call on Trump to "delete these unhinged social media posts and recant his violent rhetoric before he gets someone killed."  By nightfall he'll be calling for their dismemberment, while his myrmidons complain about the violence of the left.

Here's one now, Squeaker Mike Johnson (Myrmidon, Greek, "ant people"):  "What I read was he was defining the crime of sedition."  Trump's no lawyer, Ant Man, but you supposedly are, so you know sedition does not mean disagreeing with a felon/rapist.  Please go on:  "That is a factual statement, but obviously attorneys have to parse the language and determine all that what I'm saying, what I will say unequivocally."  Another fine example of speaking in tongues.  

Senator Chris Murphy was more blunt:  "The president of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed.  This is not normal.  We cannot allow this to feel normal.  This has never happened before in the history of the country...If you are a person of influence in this country, maybe it's time to pick a fucking side.  If you are a Republican in Congress, if you are a Republican governor, maybe it's time to draw a line in the sand and say that under no circumstances should the president of the United States be calling for his political opposition to be hanged."  Don't be naive, you remember his verbal shrug when the mob proposed hanging his own vice president ("Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution").  Maybe he's working from a different Constitution.

Mike Pence was in Washington for the National Cathedral funeral of Dick Cheney.  Neither Trump nor Vance was invited, though the couch humper broke ranks to offer "condolences to Dick Cheney and his family."  It's unusual to send condolences to the dead person but this is Vance, the man who struggles to buy a donut.

Times change.  The Mamdani campaign was punctuated by horrified cries of "But what if he had been mayor on 9/11!"  Now it seems the terrorist attacks of 24 years ago are no big deal, at least to Newsmax's Rob Finnerty, and it's time to move on.  Finnerty believes every one of Trump's lies about Saudi Arabia investing all of its GDP in the US and how we should befriend them before China does.  "9/11 families were understandably upset by Trump inviting the crown prince to the White House but Trump is transactional...twenty-five years after the Second World War Japan and Germany were US allies."  He's right, although he omits the part where we destroyed them utterly, tried and executed their wartime leaders and replaced their dictatorships with liberal democracies.  Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship which has yet to acknowledge any responsibility for the attacks and it was Iraq that was punished for them.  And did Japan or Germany build one of these for Harry Truman?

Transactional Trump has a peace plan for Ukraine which looks suspiciously like his old one.  In exchange for giving Russia parts of the Donbas which it currently does not occupy, Ukraine and Europe would get a US security guarantee against further Russian aggression.  The real difference between Trump and Neville Chamberlain is that Chamberlain could operate an umbrella.  

Wouldn't it be hilarious if the next Nobel Peace Prize goes to whoever negotiates a ceasefire between the US and Venezuela?  Maybe Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico.

The Trump administration is all about freedom of expression unless you want to criticize Trump or burn an American flag or acknowledge that LGBTQ people exist or promote science at the expense of conspiracy theories or mention climate change or -- you know what, just admit how free the expression has become since January.  In today's episode we learn that the Coast Guard no longer considers the swastika to be a hate symbol, just "potentially divisive."  Same for nooses and the Confederate flag, though the Stars and Bars is still prohibited for now.

This is going to add to the gumbo of unhinged conspiracy theories about the enormous Denver International Airport which has been called an immense swastika because of the pinwheel layout of its runways, an underground bunker for global elites, a secret center of Freemasonry, a base for our reptilian overlords and a portal to hell.  The management isn't helping by putting up signs that say "Yes, the lizard people are real" and a lot of the art is truly scary, like Mustang, known to the cognoscenti as Blucifer:

Thirty-two feet high with glowing red eyes, what were they thinking?  And when it opened in 1995, how could they have known about Stephen Miller?

Guaranteed to leave you mumbling, "Please, I just wanted a coffee and a Cinnabon..."