Showing posts with label Hal Brown Portland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hal Brown Portland. Show all posts

October 18, 2022

Investigation: The mystery of how Trump got Judge Cannon, coincidence or not?

Trump managed to get a Trump loving judge to kiss his royal ass, but was it blind luck?

By Hal Brown

I changed the photo of Trump originally depicted in an image someone else made of him on a mocked-up Time cover (here and below) to make him look decidedly unpresidential. I put him in prison and added Lady Justice on the left and an X'ed out altered image I made of Judge Cannon on the right.

Another of my images: Judge Cannon's reputation among what appears to be the vast majority of legal scholars seems to be in ruins. Does she care? My impression is that she couldn't care less even though she is in dire need of the legal version of a visit to the emergency room.


You need a Daily Beast subscription to read this article on their website where you can see the illustration which shows a rendering of a well-worn paperback mystery titled "The Cannon Clue."


You can read the Daily Beast article without a subscription here on YaHoo.

 RAWSTORY provides a good summary:

The Daily Beast story describes how Trump lawyers may have shopped for a judge they presumed would be not merely friendly but lovingly to kiss the ample Trump royal ass. The crucial would here is "may" since so far there's no proof they did this. Was the fix in? Or did they decide to increase the odds that they'd have Judge Cannon assigned the documents case. We just don't know the answer. This has not stopped speculation.

If you couldn't buy an item you needed in a nearby store in this era of online shopping you might get it from Amazon. But they did have the equivalent of an online store to file their case. They claimed the online mechanism was offline but it turns out it wasn't. This was a lie. So they they hit the streets and traveled some distance from the court where the case normally would have filed to Judge Cannon's courthouse. However, there are nine judges there so there would be no guarantee she'd get the case.

This is the gist of what the article reports:

When Donald Trump’s legal team filed their court paperwork protesting the Mar-a-Lago raid, a lawyer took the rare step of actually filing the paperwork in person. At a courthouse 44 miles from Mar-a-Lago. And they got a judge to oversee the case that was outside both West Palm Beach—where the raid took place—and the district where they filed," the Daily Beast reporter wrote. "Those incredible coincidences have led lawyers and legal experts to suggest that something may not be above board with how Trump’s team filed their lawsuit."
It turns out that filing such legal briefs are almost never done at a courthouse in person anymore. In almost all jurisdictions they are done electronically. 

The RAWSTORY article concludes:

Lawyers in the area, who didn't want to give their names, also found the method of filing the lawsuit curious.

According to one, "I don’t know anybody who files in person. I didn’t even know you could do that anymore. It looks like this person was trying to select a particular judge,” while another suggested, "People don’t do this anymore. It’s extremely odd. I guess you could do this if you wanted to get a particular judge—or avoid getting a particular judge."

So far there's no irrefutable proof that the fix was in. It may be that the cards were stacked to favor Cannon's being assigned the case. It may be a coincidence. 

This is from The Daily Beast:

  • “I think somebody pulled a fast one in the clerk’s office to rotate it to a friendly judge. It doesn’t sound like it was done by the blind filing system,” mused another.
  • ...which consists of nine judges. Cannon is in a neighboring division, so she can occasionally get West Palm Beach cases.
  • Theoretically, that would give Trump a 1-in-9 chance of getting Cannon on the case.
  • However, The Daily Beast analyzed new case assignments in West Palm Beach in the week preceding Trump’s lawsuit and found that Cannon actually got a much higher share, nine of the 29 new complaints—roughly a third of all cases.
  • But the system still appears random.
  • On Monday, Aug. 22, in West Palm Beach, Cannon got the first case. Trump’s lawsuit was the second of the day in that division, and she got that too.
  • A head clerk of federal courts in another state told The Daily Beast that lawyers sometimes time filings as if they’re players at a casino. Sometimes it works.
  • “If you play cards and count the cards, I suppose they could say, ‘I’ll hold this here until I see if other judges got assignments.’ But it would be very risky because it’s random,” she said.

 It all may boil down to what you believe:

Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw:


 

I made my illustration after reading the RAWSTORY article and posted it as a comment there among similar illustrations, below, which other readers posted. I altered this Time Magazine image to make my own:

I changed the photo of Trump to make him look decidedly unpresidential. I put him in prison and added Lady Justice on the left and an X'ed out altered image of Judge Cannon on the right.

Other commenters posted these images:








October 11, 2022

The horror of a second Trump presidency

The horror of a second Trump presidency

A Washington Post Magazine article excerpted by Hal Brown

If you don't subscribe to the WaPo here are the bullet points from this article:


What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.

The scenarios are ... grim.


October 10, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. 

From the article:

To help game out the consequences of another Trump administration, I turned to 21 experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights. They sketched chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions that could unravel the nation (if Trump is reelected).


Based on what these experts described, here are the three phases described in the article:

Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government

… He installs super loyalists.

... He governs without Senate advice and consent.

... He creates a MAGA civil service.

Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.

... He uses the military to promote his own political power.

In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.

... American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.

... Intelligence work is harmed.

Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.

... Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.

... The bonds that bind the Union loosen.

... The chances of civil war increase.

That’s when the potential for violent conflict is real. For those studying the implications of these trends, “there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,” says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. “My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.”

... 

Could it happen here? Would it be that bad? The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top — “crackpot, practically,” acknowledges Wilentz, the Princeton historian. But to dismiss it, they say, would be naive — and they urge vigilance and civic engagement to prevent the nightmare from coming true. 


The article concludes:

After four more years of nihilistic energy like that, the experience of being American could well have been transformed into something unrecognizable. “If Trump wins, I don’t imagine some kind of normal inauguration in ’29,” (Timothy) Snyder says. “If we want a normal inauguration in ’29, we need one in ’25 which involves somebody else.”


Author profile, David Montgomery

Washington, D.C.

Staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine

Education: Princeton University; University of Michigan

David Montgomery was a reporter at the Buffalo News before joining The Washington Post in 1993. He covered Prince George’s County, politics in Maryland and life in D.C., then became a feature writer in the Style section. Now he writes features and profiles for the Washington Post Magazine.
Honors and Awards: 2022 Climate Narratives Prize, 2nd Place, Arizona State University, for "The Search for Environmental Hope" ; 2018 Excellence-in-Features, 2nd Place, Society for Features Journalism, for "After the Fall," the story of a Confederate statue in Demopolis, AL 

Languages spoken in addition to English: Spanish

Afterword: 

Michael Cohen isn't an expert in any of the fields that would provide the type of bonafides that the author of the Post article sought to ask their predictions about the consequences of another Trump presidency. However, he is the only one who knew Trump up close and personal, who was very familiar with his modus operandi and, significantly, helped him implement his nefarious schemes. With this in mind it is worthwhile to consider what he predicts in this article: 




They also cross-publish with Salon, and summarize article published on websites which you need to subscribe to in order toe read them, The New York Times and Washington Post for example. They have an active c0mment section.


October 7, 2022

Mainstream media fails to warn that Trump aspires to be a fascist warlord

Mainstream media fails to warn that Trump aspires to be a fascist warlord

by Hal Brown

Comment on my stories on Facebook (here) or on Twitter (here). Stories that pique my interest through the day are down the page.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega once again tried to sound the alarm about just how dangerous Donald Trump is. Unfortunately Salon's alarm bell isn't nearly loud enough to wake democracy loving Americans  up so they do something to stop it.

His message can be summarized in just the first two and the last paragraphs. 

Donald Trump aspires to be a warlord. He publicly admires despots, tyrants and other authoritarian leaders who kill their enemies and take away the rights of anyone who oppose them. Mental health professionals have repeatedly warned that Donald Trump is likely a sociopath with an erotic attraction to violence and mayhem.

He has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for the rule of law, democracy, human rights or other restrictions on his behavior. He encourages his followers and allies to engage in acts of terrorism and other violence on his behalf. The most notable example came, of course, on Jan. 6, 2021. To this point, Trump has been limited by his cowardice. He prefers to have others engage in violence on his behalf instead of directly ordering such acts or participating in them himself.

This was the lead story in Salon this morning:


By way of 
comparison this was the lead on FoxNews' website this morning:


Alas, Salon's influence is less than nil when it comes to swaying opinion among the people whose eyes to the growing menace of Trumpian fascism in America couldn't be more tightly closed.

The story has been cross-published on RawStory (here) where it is trending and has, as of this writing, 167 comments. 

I have written extensively about Trump being a dangerous malignant narcissist who revels in violent fantasies. In fact just the other day Trump's writing about Mitch McConnell having a "DEATH WISH" prompted me to write this story showing him as I think he fantasizes himself:



I am alway interested in what other mental health professionals have had to say about him, particularly the only one who knows him up close and personal. Chauncy DeVega quoted Mary Trump in his story.

I wanted to put her words into an illustration showing an angry Trump so I looked "angry Trump" up on DuckDuckGo and the Salon article came up first:
Click above to enlarge

Here are the words I wanted to highly with the photo:

Chauncey DeVega concludes his article as follows:
Aspiring warlord Donald Trump has told America and the world exactly what he and his movement intend to do. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media and other hope-peddlers have deluded themselves into thinking that it's all a misunderstanding or harmless hyperbole. We should take Trump at his word. On these issues, he does not prevaricate or tell lies. It will do no good to protest that you couldn't possibly have known. We all knew this was coming, and now it's here.

If the crisis to democracy isn't here right now it certainly is around the corner. Like Putin having amassed his troops for their so-called military exercise on the borders of Ukraine, Trump has readied his soldiers to do battle.  The signs are there. How big do they have to get?

Whether it's the Boy Scout motto, Miguel de Cervantes, or the proverb "to be forewarned is to be forearmed" the message is the same...


Afterword:

The proverb "to be forewarned is to be forearmed" should be applicable to Donald Trump.  For proverb and idiom mavens (from this website):

Many idioms that have no obvious source are often referred to, for no good reason, as 'old proverbs'. 'Forewarned is forearmed' has a genuine claim to be called such, as it dates from at least the end of the 16th century, and could be much earlier. The Latin saying 'praemonitus, praemunitus' loosely translates as 'forewarned is forearmed'. There's no evidence to show that the English proverb is merely a translation of the Latin though. The two sayings could easily have originated independently.

The meaning of the proverb is quite straightforward and literal - so long as it is understood that forearm is here the archaic verb meaning 'to arm in advance', rather than the noun forearm, that is, the part of the arm between the elbow and wrist. The saying is so straightforward in fact that it was originally simply 'forewarned, forearmed'. It is found in that form in Robert Greene's A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (a.k.a. The Art of Conny-catching), 1592:

"forewarned, forearmed: burnt children dread the fire."

Stories of the day that piqued my interest.


This article came out in February. It is now even more relevant than it was then:


The hypothetical look into what happens if Trump goes to prison


Here’s Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter, by Ross Doughat (NY Times, Subscription)

The essay begins:

“I strongly supported Obama for President,” Elon Musk tweeted late last month, part of the spree of ideological comments accompanying his continuing takeover of Twitter, “but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Around the same time, he set the social-media platform ablaze by reposting a cartoon showing a stick figure comfortably on the center-left in 2008 redefined as a right-wing bigot by 2021 because the left-wing stick figure had raced way off to the left. Then this week, he expressed the same kind of thought in the abbreviated style for which the site is famous: “Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias.”

And now, at last, we have the news that he’s likely to allow Donald Trump to tweet freely once again.

All of these comments and promises align the country’s richest man with the rightward side in our culture war. But though I don’t know Musk — I’ve never interviewed him or hung out with him in any secret billionaire lair — I think I know enough about him, and I know enough Silicon Valley people like him, to suggest that neither his tweeted self-descriptions nor the criticisms being lobbed his way capture what’s distinctive about his position and worldview.

A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon; even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.

If you think this sounds uncontroversial, think again. First, the dynamist may not care where novelty and invention spring from: Unlike the purist libertarian, he might be indifferent to questions of public versus private spending, happy to embrace government help if that’s what it takes to get the new thing off the ground — and happy to take that help from regimes like Communist China no less than from our own. And he may be willing to risk much more than either the typical progressive or the typical conservative for the sake of innovation. Political principle, social stability and moral order are all potentially negotiable when discovery alone is your North Star.



My comment:

Full disclosure: I have a Twitter account which I primarily use to try to promote stories I post on my blog. I fully expect Musk to allow Trump to resume tweeting. Aside from the negative of handing a victory of sorts to Trump, there are two positives. The lesser is that if he personally invested money in Truth Social that is gone since that platform will immediately go under. The greater positive is that every time he tweets something off the wall or outrageous (which will be most of the time) there will be numerous sarcastic, scathing, and snarky replies, some with contemptuous, mocking, and ridiculing illustrations which will be posted in articles about his tweet.

Related from BuzzFeed

We were on...
"Have you ever had a friend who’s had one of those on-again-off-again relationships, like a less cute Ross and Rachel situation?"



 Excerpts:

.... it was easy to imagine Republicans launching apoplectic broadsides in response to Biden’s sweeping and progressive pardons. The public would inevitably hear tired clichés about Democrats being “soft on crime” and failing to appreciate the seriousness of “gateway drugs.”

And yet, in the wake of Biden’s announcement, the Republican National Committee had literally nothing to say about it. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee were silent, too.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also completely ignored the developments.

To be sure, it’d be an exaggeration to suggest that all Republicans sat on their hands. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who routinely complains that not enough Americans are behind bars, made sure to register his disapproval yesterday. So did one of Fox News’ prime-time hosts.

But by any fair measure, the GOP apparently thought that the smart election season move yesterday would be to let Biden’s pardons go unmentioned.

My own opinion on this is that the timing coming prior to the November elections is smart. Biden has been characterized by the Right as being old and out of touch with the younger generations which these days seems to mean anyone not on Social Security. In the case of marijuana there are numerous potential voters left, right, and center who have used it in the past or who currently used it. Whether any of them are inclined to vote Republican might change their mind based on this issue alone is hard to say. However, it can't hurt and it may very well help some Democrats in close races.


Excerpts:

"...if God Himself actually tells you (to kill someone), and He’s like, 'Hey, I am the ultimate governor of all of life, and I have judicially said that person is going to die, and I’m telling you to do it,' yeah," Winger said. "Now, historically, as a Christian, do I expect this to happen? Not really.

He later backtracks:

 "So, as a Christian, in principle, if God tells you to kill someone, yes, you should. It’s God."

"But in practical reality, I really don’t expect this to happen," he continued. "Not that there could never be an exception, but if anybody comes up to me, and says, 'God told me to kill so-and-so,' my default is to think they’re probably wrong, because there’s a lot more weirdos out there than there are people that God is telling to do something like that. There’s my answer."

Basically he's saying that it is "weirdos" who hear God telling them to kill people. In fact, anybody who actually hears voices whether they believe they come from God or a teapot is mentally ill. It doesn't matter whether the voices tell them to adhere to Christian values or run naked in the street, they are still auditory hallucinations.

This is bad news for the FBI and in particular Trump appointee FBI Director Wray:


Read article about this in RawStory. It isn't just Director Gray that is under fire. Attorney General Garland is also being harshly criticized for the way is, or isn't, handling the documents investigation.

You probably don't read The Bulwark. If you don't look at from time to time you miss stories like this:


Excerpt:

Masters was asked, point blank, if he thought the 2020 election was “stolen” or “rigged—in any way, shape, or form—enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” and Masters replied:

I suspect that if the FBI didn’t work with Big Tech and Big Media to censor the Hunter Biden crime story, yeah, I suspect that changed a lot of people’s votes. I suspect President Trump would be in the White House today if Big Tech and Big Media and the FBI didn’t work together to put the thumb on the scale to get Joe Biden in there.

Trump is 'daring the DOJ to come and get him' over more missing documents: NYT's Haberman...


She said ""The Trump team is basically daring the DOJ, once again, to come get him and we'll see what the DOJ does."

I am very skeptical this comes from Trump's team of lawyers telling him what they know is in his best interests. It may be another "team" of sycophants. If he hears it from his lawyers they are telling him what he wants to hear. I think this comes form Trump and is absolutely predictable because he is a malignant narcissist with seriously impaired judgment. He revels in the thought of a confrontation where he, in his grandiose delusional state, which he thinks he will win. He's bought into his own propaganda, into the iconography produced by artists hawking their wares to his cult.




Here's a name from the past that I bet you forgot about:

Harvey Weinstein’s Second Trial For Rape And Sexual Assault Charges Begins Next Week. Here’s What You Need To Know.

After being convicted of sexually assaulting two women in New York, the former movie producer is facing criminal charges related to five other women in Los Angeles.


Oregon news: 


This is bad, very very bad...




October 4, 2022

Elon Musk put a Tesla in space, now he wants to end a war, and other stories

 Elon Musk put a Tesla in space, now he wants to end a war, and other stories

by Hal Brown

You've probably been keeping up with this story:

I don't have any particular insights into his motivations for advocating for this plan in a series of tweets (here).

Here are a few replies to the tweets (click to enlarge image):




While it prompted lots of replies on Musk's Twitter feed, it also led Zelenskyy to post his reaction in a tweet of his own:

Other Ukrainian officials also responded on Twitter:




I don't think it's an outlandish assumption to think Musk believes that being the world's richest person he may have the world's biggest brain (we've heard that before).

Why not, then, shouldn't he be able to come up with an idea that will end the war of Russian aggression in Ukraine?

No dummy, 

Linus Pauling duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds...

and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry  had no background in medicine or medical research.

I suppose in a world where on one extreme we have a former game show host and rule breaking real estate developer becoming a mentally imbalanced woefully uniformed president and on the other extreme we have a comedian becoming a heroic  president of another country everyone's idea should be judged on their merits.

 Other news of the day 

This story is also related to Ukraine though in a very different way:

Deleted tweet proves the GOP’s Putin propaganda knows no bounds


The Conservative Political Action Conference parroted pro-Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine in a since-deleted tweet, fitting a disturbing pattern in the GOP.

Below: Let's hope dog lovers in Pennsylvania not supporting Walker, where some people may still decide to shoot their dogs when they are unable to hunt anymore, decide that they can't vote for someone who tortures dogs and other animals. They may be able to say let bygones be bygones for paying for his girlfriends abortions or not be bothered by reports that he was a wife beater but hopefully they draw the line at cruelty to animals.


Salon image augmented by Hal Brown

While on the subject of totally unqualified Senate candidates, how about the breaking news about Hershel Walker denying he ever paid for a girlfriend's about claiming this is a total lie? As you may have read in his book he revealed he suffered from multiple personality disorder:

He may be telling the truth as he knows it, or more specifically as he remembers it. In my 40 year career as a psychotherapist I treated five clients with this disorder, currently called dissociative identity disorder. A hallmark of this disorder is that among the various personalities, called alters, there are various kinds of amnesia. In many if not most cases certain personalities can take over with other personalities not having and awareness of what they are doing.

A true cure for this disorder come about when all the identities or alters are integrated into one and there are no amnesiac experiences when one personality is in control and the others aren't and in fact are totally unaware of what is happening. 

Walker claims he's been cured but there's no way to prove this. It is an exceeding difficult disorder to treat let alone achieve cure. In my experience the best a therapist can do is try to keep the self-destructive or dangerous personalities from acting on their impulses or desires.

It is quite possible that the personality or personalities that arranged for and funded the abortion blocked the memory from the other personalities. Unless all the personalities are now integrated along with all of their memories, there is a chance Walker is telling the truth as he knows it about the abortion.


RawStory paraphrases profanity in this title of this story:
Click below to enlarge:

Excerpt:

Trump, who plainly did not want to lose his top economic adviser, told Cohn he should feel free to publicly voice his disagreement, and encouraged him to go to the briefing-room podium and say whatever he needed to."

"You’ll do the right thing," Haberman writes that Vice President Mike Pence said, while putting an arm around Cohn like some kind of mafia movie. 

"Cohn said he would complete his efforts to pass a tax bill, which had been his passion throughout the year, and not stay much longer," the book continues. "'But you should assume I’m done,' Cohn said. He still had his resignation letter in hand, undelivered and unaccepted. As Cohn left the Oval Office, Kelly whispered to him, 'If I were you I’d have shoved that paper up his f*cking ass.'"




Excerpt:

"Increasingly core to a lot of people in the Christian faith, and particularly in the white evangelical world, is politics and culture," Wehner said, "and in a sense, faith is engrafted. It’s a secondary issue. A friend of mine uses the term 'hood ornament — that faith becomes a hood ornament: It validates these pre-existing attitudes and ideologies. But the way it’s being done is that people are unaware of it, because they’re going through and, in my experience and in my observations, is they’re proof-texting their preordained political, cultural, sociological beliefs, and then saying this is what the Bible says."

Totally out of left-field...

 ... because Portland is my adopted hometown I thought I'd share a lesson learned by some crooked strip club owners here. You may know that Portland is known for it's many strip clubs, some of which vie for the title of the quirkiest:

I suspect that these businesses take in a lot of cash, not only because patrons stuff greenbacks into the performers g-strings, but because men don't like to pay using credit cards for obvious reasons. Since I've never been to one I can't say I observed this in person.

Here's the local story about how trying to avoid paying taxes on cash can come with serious consequences:




 

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