Split screen: Impeachment is all about counter-programming against Georgia trial

By Hal Brown

With House Republicans it's all about egos and eyes.

The clamor to hold impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden is a deafening cacaphony of caca. 

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It's quite a task for people like James Comer and Matt Gaetz to outdo Marjorie Taylor Greene who called for red state succession on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 for mooning for the media. You may accuse the likes of these Republicans for lots of things but you can't say they are camera shy. You get between them and a camera at your own peril.

Now that Kevin McCarthy has bypassed a House vote (which would go down in defeat) and initiated a House impeachment inquiry (story) it is amusing to watch Greene erupt spewing molten lava like Mt. Kilauea claiming she was pressing for a Biden impeachment inquiry immediately upon taking office: see

Feud erupts between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz over Biden impeachment.

Still, try as they might media hogs like GOP members of the House Gaetz, Comer, Jim Jordan, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert et al, and Tommy Tuberville in the Senate, don't stand a chance of being immortalized in stone. It is Marjorie Taylor Greene who is vying to be sculpted on the Mt. Rushmore of GOP gigantism.

In the coming weeks thanks to Georgia courts allowing live video coverage we can expect compelling, perhaps dramatic, reality TV. The show will be starring well known "celebrities" whose faces are well known like Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheesbro, whose name not his face are familiar. If Trump doesn't get his case removed to federal court, the mega MAGA star Donald Trump, the only defendant who actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, will be must-see TV if he's in court, especially if he decides against his lawyers' advice to testify.

He has the star, once defaced and replaced, there, and it is the most prominent attraction:

Read article about the star

Ironically, in order to pry eyes away from the trial if Trump is a featured celebrity House Republicans will have to put on a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus extravganza.

This will be a challenge if their center ring attraction is only Hunter Biden. If President Biden testifies (the last president to appear before Congress was Gerald Ford) depending on what's happening in Georgia I can see the GOP winning the ratings rounds for a period of time. MAGAs want to see their GOP heroes make Joe Biden squirm under their barrage of goofball gotcha questions. Lots-a-luck with that. The president doesn't do squirm.

One crazy place to be will be in the control rooms of the major television  networks where directors will have to decide what to feature on the biggest portion of their split screen when interesting things are happening simultaneously. TV hosts and panelists will have to go back and forth as they talk about the House impeachment and the Georgia trial. Complicating all of this will be any other trial involving Trump which may be occurring at the same time but doesn't have live TV coverage.

The only thing that might wipe the political news off the media is a catergory nine earthquake along the San Andreas fault (aka The Big One) which literally wipes out large portions of coastal California, Oregon, and Washington.

Something about self-awareness

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired clinical social worker psychotherapist (about me)

There are many articles with good defitions of self-awareness. This one should suffice to describe what I mean by this term for this blog:

There Are Two Types of Self-Awareness 

For the last 50 years, researchers have used varying definitions of self-awareness. For example, some see it as the ability to monitor our inner world, whereas others label it as a temporary state of self-consciousness. Still others describe it as the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

So before we could focus on how to improve self-awareness, we needed to synthesize these findings and create an overarching definition.

Across the studies we examined, two broad categories of self-awareness kept emerging. The first, which we dubbed internal self-awareness, represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others. We’ve found that internal self-awareness is associated with higher job and relationship satisfaction, personal and social control, and happiness; it is negatively related to anxiety, stress, and depression.

The second category, external self-awareness, means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors listed above. Our research shows that people who know how others see them are more skilled at showing empathy and taking others’ perspectives. For leaders who see themselves as their employees do, their employees tend to have a better relationship with them, feel more satisfied with them, and see them as more effective in general. From The Harvard Business Review

I got the idea for this blog when I was watching "Morning Joe" where the panel was interviewing Walter Isaacson, author of a soon to be released book about Elon Musk. The discussion centered on his personality and how his having a self-described form of Aspergers may effect his behavior. It's been repeorted that he's said some outraegous things to people and shortly afterwards claimed convincingly that he never said what someone heard. As you see below, Isaacson said there seemed to "be two, three, four different types of Elon" and he went on to say it was as if he had muliple personalites.

You can watch the 13 miute video here.

This really has little to do with what I want to advocate for here. Musk is just an example of someone who, if they had self-awareness and cared about being a force for good, would make a major difference in other people's lives. My impression is that Musk lacks self-awareness. He also may be a malignant narcissist (see my blog What to Make of Musk from Sept. 9th)

It is fair to compare him to Donald Trump because Trump probably has some self-awareness but just doesn't care, in fact he may be very much aware of how he hurts others and relishes doing it.

To the extent that Musk is like Trump in being a malignant narcissist (as I wrote the other day) he may not care either and may enjoy hurting others.

The self-awareness I want to focus on may be best understood by looking closely at people who have little or just about no self-awareness.

Of all the traits such as empathy and caring for others which we would hope are possessed by people whether in power to influence very large numbers, or who can by virtue of their positions make like good or miserable for those in their lives whether in the companies where the exert control over subordinates, or in their families, over all these characteristics is having self-awareness.

If someone wants to be what would generally considered a "good person" they must be able to take a long, hard look at who they are and how they're behaviors, their words an deeds, effects other people.

Again, one has to want to be a good person. If someone, for whatever reasons, doesn't care who they hurt in pursuit of their goals no degree of self-awareness will matter.

For those who do care, if you don't already have a depth of self-awareness, there is hope. The first step can be for everyone - I mean everyone - to decide to engage in a self-assessment beginning by asking people in their lives how their words and action effect them.

This means both family members, friends, and people who you work with. Those who are in postions of authority over people, and may have the power to deny them promotions or even fire them, could distribute a questionnaire that would be responded to anonymously. It could be a simple true/false list a rating scale for questions. For example:

25 Employee Satisfaction Survey Questions You Need to Ask

If you find out that people view you as judgmental, arrogant, distant, unapproachable, quick to express disapproval, or get anxious when they are dealing with you, or have any other characteristics you want to try to change psychotherapy is a good option.

If you even want to know how people in your life view you you are probably halfway there.

Addendum:

Thanks to those of you who read, or at least scrolled down, this far. For you, here an explanation of the photo I just took to use at the top of the story. I looked at various graphics under an image search for self-disclosure and not only were most copyrighted, but all were boring. Lots of them show people looking in a mirror.

I decided I take a photo of what's on my table with a few items added and rearranged (the yellow coffee cup was already there, I added the black one). What does it say about me? I'll leave that up to you to speculate about.

The $47,000 Question: What will it take for Trump cultists to fall out of love with him?

 

By Hal Brown

I'm showing my age in the title. The 64 Thousand Dollar Question was popular in the early 1950's when it was hosted by Hal March, the only famous person with my first name who I knew of even though actor Hal Holbrook was on Broadway playing Mark Twain at the time. I am old enough to remember when $64,000 was a small fortune. The household median income in the U.S. in 1950 was $2,990 and you could by a nice house for $7,000.

I titled this "The $47,000 Question" because Trump is running to be the 47th President of the United States and is making a big deal of this number. I suppose you could call this the $47 trillion question.

He even has something of a Mein Kampf-like manifesto called Agenda47 which I wrote about yesterday here.

There are Trump cultists and there are Trump cultists. A few can actually have an immediate effect on his electability if they fall out of love with him. One is Judge Aileen Cannon. 

We have no idea whether Judge Cannon is following Trump's shenanigans like this with another Florida judge:

If she has a EUREKA! moment where she falls out of love with her dreamboat she might actually rule in the Mar-a-Lago documents case treating Trump like he was any other defendant.

Then there are people like Walt Nauda:

Click above to read

I can't imagine that the other defendants in the Georgia case who aren't named Trump are thinking that the limits of loyalty ends along the line to the lockup.

The most important members of the Trump cult are the millions who worship at the fatasses' feet:

Experts have tried to analyze the appeal of Trump for ordinary people and cult experts like Steve Hassan have been trying to educate the country about the psychological hold Trump has on his folowers (read Cult Expert Steve Hassan is on a controversial cursade in Slate).

The millions of voters who will make the difference between Trump winning or losing in the primary and if he wins against President Biden may flush him down the drain not because of one revelation, but more likely I think they will experience the drip-drip-drip of damning news about him having decieved them into believing he was divine. I expect they won't wake up one morning and say "I'm so done with him" but instead will vacilate back and forth for a period of time.

It is incredibly difficult to admit you were taken in by a master con man. It takes a lot of self-awareness to admit one was gullible. Much will depend on where ordinary Trump cultists gets their news and how they shape their opinions. Peer groups have a major effect so if they surround themselves with other cultists their beliefs won't be challenged. If they have friends and family who try to get them to see the truth about Trump it might help break through their denial of reality.

We also have those in the right-wing media who influence Trump cultists. What will it take to disabuse them of their alligance to Trump? The answer is that they will drop him like a hot potato when their bosses tell them to because supporting him and giving him a forum no longer brings in revenue. This is all the better for the likes of Tucker Carlson on X and Steve Bannon (with his Warroom show) but they don't have the reach of television. Still, Fox News is on everyone's TV and has a major impact on what people think about Trump.

The known unknown that may have a huge impact is the Georgia trial and if Trump testifies is how his behavior under cross-examination will be perceived by his cultists. Trump is aggressive this has worked with his cult, they love it, but he's always snarled, blustered, and blown his stack on his own terms. He's never done it from a witness stand on live TV.

Another group who can tarnish Trump's golden glow are the other GOP candidates for president. I suppose you can break them into a few groups. Of course, there is Chris Christi. He doesn't stand a chance of winning the nomination.  He can only go after Trump if they ever share a debate stage. Then there those who have their sights on Trump chosing them to run as vice president and those who don't want to incur the ire of his base. Notably there's Nikki Haley who has come fairly close to breaking with Trump probably because she thinks DeSantis may crash and burn leaving her as the only credible candidate with a chance of success to take him on once she exposes Vivek Ramaswarmy for the fraud that he is.

One way for Trump cultists to fall out of love with him is to fall in love with someone else. It won't be the the dour DeSanstis for obvious reasons not the least of which is that Trump has dumped on him dubing him Ron DeSantimonious, but I can see it happening with Nikki Haley. This could happen if the bigots among the cultists overlook the fact that she's an Indian-American. 

They also might take into consideration that she might stand a better chance of beating Biden in the general election than Trump. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Hail Haley movement among Republicans that really want to win back the presidency and make sure America doesn't turn into the kind of country Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswarmy want it to be.

I think she's a more appealling candidate for the Republicans to chose for the general election than Pence, Asa Hutchenson, or Tim Scott or  the currently declared candidates (here).

In conclusion:

Click to enlarge

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:

Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

Oh poor Donald, turn that frown upside-down

By Hal Brown

If it's really getting through to Donald Trump that the predictions coming from the likes of George Conway that he could actually end up in prison then the photo (below) used for the article in RAWSTORY about what Conway said on "Morning Joe" earlier today would be appropriate. 

While I can't manage to muster any empathy for the malignant narcissist, sadist, and bully who has proved willing to do anything to maintain his dictatorial power, perhaps I can at least eke out a smidgen of sympathy for the poor man. Hmmm... is there anything smaller than a smidgen? 

I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in,  but if he had a fleeting moment of angst and if, an if as big as the planet Jupiter, I wanted to cheer him up I'd have to reenforce his delusion of being invulnerable. In that remote or remotest possibility I'd tell him to turn his frown upside-down.

Here's the Rawstory article about what Conway said with my illustrative magic added.

Conway told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that although Trump's inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection was probably the most serious crime Trump has committed it would be a difficult case to prove. He said that the easiest case to prove was his likely violation of the Espionage Act. Conway said:

"That to me is the shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit is that case. It's so simple. It's like the U.S. attorney trying to bring a big mob case against the Five Families and trying to connect it up to the boss and all of a sudden they get the call from the NYPD saying, hey, the big boss is loading jewelry on a truck at Kennedy Airport, and you know, that's what happened here."

"He's caught red-handed. Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

George Conway has been a thorn in Trump's side as his profile has increased as much as his girth since he became a Trump turncoat. He's penned OpEds and has been a frequent guest on MSNBC.

I can't find any recent articles about whether Trump still watches Morning Joe, however in 2017 it was clear that he did. This is from:

Trump Tweets Disgustingly Sexist Attack Against 'Morning Joe' Host

The president said Mika Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."

President Donald Trump attacked Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Thursday morning, insulting Brzezinski’s physical appearance in two unmistakably sexist tweets.

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017

Brzezinski appeared to respond to the president’s tweets with an image of a Cheerios box that says “Made For Little Hands.”

My sense is that while Trump, the inveterate television watcher, luxuriates in being praised on Fox News shows even he may not be able to resist checking in with "Morning Joe" to see what his nemeses are saying about him. 

He knows that if he blasts out a Truth Social post about anything said about him on "Morning Joe" or any other MSNBC show, he'll only give them publicity so I think he'll be able to restrain his impulses since there isn't a damn thing he can do to shut them up.suits as his 

Trump may avoid the wardrobe change into an orange jumpsuit, but if he's paying attention to what's happening in New York he may have to think twice about buying expensive new suits when can't squeeze into a girdle anymore:

Illustration by Wren McDonald for The New Yorker

New York AG asks judge to bar Trump from moving assets to new company he formed amid fraud lawsuit 

and

If Elon Muck buys Twitter, what with it's much larger audience than Truth Social has, I expect we'll see more impulsive tweets especially in the early morning when Trump may be groggy and not be able to sensibly resist engaging in a Twitter war with Joe and Mika. Assuming Trump come back to Twitter this will be fun to follow. 

Here's a comment on this story from Ben Kalom:

Most of us would not wish him the Demolition Man one-liner I often quote to folks in jest, "Be Well, John Spartan!"

"I want Trump to suffer the pangs of anxiety over the legal peril he is in, ..."

Naw. a snarky "Naw!" I want his frown to become a perma-frown, like permafrost. I want his risorius muscles to atrophy to the point he cannot chew food properly, and a bolus migrates across the epiglottus into his cephalic tracheal opening and permanently obstructs it.

I want more than the pangs of anxiety.

I literally want the Big Mac attack to attack him.

I want his "Glorious, magnificent, stupendous, spektak-a-lur" bulls**t to end as a one liner obit, "Choked on a fried chicken bone..."

The only way this cult of personality ends is ...

The people need their human sacrifice. They need their blood lust sated.

Find him a bunker, let him join his "hero" Adolph in ending this sickness...

Then, maybe, just maybe, we can all recover... just a little bit... before we have to deal with the next anointed one...

The Conway interview has already made it into this Salon article:

While some legal experts believe that there is evidence to charge Trump with obstruction, conservative attorney George Conway predicted that the "shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange jumpsuit" is a case showing that he violated the Espionage Act.

 "He's caught red-handed," Conway told MSNBC. "Basically what he's done, refusing to give the documents back upon request is sufficient under the Espionage Act, and he's done that, and then you have the aggravating facts about how the volume of documents and the lying and how long it's dragged on. I don't know how they don't bring the case."

Viral video showed organizers cutting open the fish to reveal a total of 10 weights, each weighing either 8 or 12 ounces.

As Fisher yelled, "We got weights in fish!" the angry crowd booed the men, who were immediately disqualified.

On Tuesday, authorities seized a boat and trailer belonging to Comisnky that was used during the tournament.

If convicted, the pair could face a year in prison and a $2,500 fine on each of the felony counts.

The men are not expected to be arraigned until later this month, and it was not immediately clear whether they had retained an attorney.

 

Moment of Zen (click to enlarge):

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.'"

Another excuse to make an illustration:

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: