Crazy: Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, told Senate investigators yesterday that House speaker Nancy Pelosi called him on January 8^th, concerned about President Trump’s ability to launch nuclear weapons.

  “She was concerned and made various personal references characterizing the president,” Milley said. He told the senators that he informed Pelosi that the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons but “doesn’t launch them alone.”

  He wouldn’t characterize or elaborate on what Pelosi said about Trump.

  What Pelosi said is fleshed out in a transcript obtained by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa for their new book about Trump, “Peril.” According to their reporting, Pelosi told Milley, “He’s crazy, you know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time” and, in a reference to the January 6^thinsurrection, “He’s crazy and what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.”

  Milley testified that he told Pelosi he’s not qualified to judge the President’s mental health, but according to “Peril,” he told Pelosi, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.”

  Milley’s comments came in the context of testimony about his phone calls to his Chinese counterpart last October and January assuring the Chinese that the US had no plans to attack. With Trump’s refusal to accept the election result and the insurrection, the Chinese were worried about the US becoming instable. “My task at that time was to deescalate,” Milley said.

Numbers Game: Answering questions about the messy exit from Afghanistan and the country’s military collapse, Milley and Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie both suggested that they had recommended to President Biden that he leave 2,500 troops in the country.

  Biden instead ordered everyone out and said recently that he doesn’t recall anyone telling him to leave troops. Asked by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton why he didn’t resign in protest, Milley said, “It would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken. This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we’re going to accept and do or not.”

Book Beat: Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary who notoriously never held a briefing with reporters, is publishing a tell-all next week in which she accuses Trump of abusing staff, making sexual comments about a young White House aide, and placating dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.  

  In her book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,”  Grisham says about never holding a briefing that, “I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic.”

  Defending in advance of publication, Trump issued a statement saying, “Stephanie didn’t have what it takes” and that  “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”

Self-Control: Gymnast Simone Biles, who pulled out of almost all her events in the summer Olympics, told New York Magazine she should have quit much sooner. She told the magazine that she suffered for years after the sexual abuse by team Dr. Larry Nassar, “But I was not going to let him take something I’ve worked for since I was 6 years old. I wasn’t going to let him take that joy away from me. So I pushed past that for as long as my mind and my body would let me.”

  At the Olympics, Biles said she had “the twisties,” loss of the sense of where she was in the air while performing. She told New York, “My perspective has never changed so quickly from wanting to be on a podium to wanting to be able to go home, by myself, without any crutches.”

What Goes Up: The S&P and Nasdaq stock indexes dropped more than 2 percent each yesterday, the biggest drop since May. The Dow Jones closed down 1.63 percent. A business and economics writer we know would tell us that with the markets so high, a drop like this is nothing.

The Spin Rack: Forty-one year old Jarrod Ramos, who pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder in his assault on the Annapolis offices of the Capital Gazette newspaper in 2018, has been sentenced to five consecutive life sentences in prison plus one more for shooting someone who survived. Ramos had been ruled legally sane. — Former President Trump lost his attempt to enforce a nondisclosure agreement against Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former White House aide and star on “The Apprentice,” who wrote a tell-all book about serving in his administration. She said in a statement, “Finally the bully has met his match!” — Gas stations in Britain are running low and there are long lines at the pumps caused by a shortage of fuel truck drivers. Older drivers are retiring and there’s a delay turning out trainees driver trainees are facing delays in getting licensed because of the pandemic.

Goodbye, Farewell: Thousands of New York medical workers met the mandate and got vaccinated against Covid-19 rather than be fired, but resistance continues all over the country.

  Leonard Pitts, a syndicated newspaper columnist, wrote that an “Army lieutenant colonel, some airline employees, a Major League Baseball executive, the choral director of the San Francisco Symphony, workers at the tax collector’s office in Orange County, Florida, and, incredibly, dozens of health care professionals,” all quit their jobs rather than get vaccinated against Covid-19.

  And then he wrote, “Well, on behalf of the rest of us, the ones who miss concerts, restaurants and other people’s faces, the ones who are sick and tired of living in pandemic times, here’s a word of response to you quitters: Goodbye.”

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