April 20, 2023

He's a Republican, a vet who was a flight surgeon, is the chair of the House Security Committee and he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down.

By Hal Brown

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and other subjects. My posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I'm a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was also a cranberry farmer. Scroll archives on bottom of page to see previous blog stories. There are new ones added almost every day, although if I don't have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

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Former Flight Surgeon Cut Marjorie Tayler Greene Off

I thought it fitting that Raw Story used a photo of Marjorie Taylor Green holding a big gun to illustrate the article

GOP enraged over Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee outburst — and are threatening to boot her: report

I added the subtitle and the airplane going down in flames.

The article describes how the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, a West Point Graduate, war vet, and former flight surgeon, shot her down.

Excerpt:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blew up a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday when she called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas a "liar" and blaming him for fentanyl deaths around the country — an outburst that violates House rules about impugning the character of a witness. The tirade forced Chairman Mark Green, a Republican of Tennessee, to shut down her questioning and bar her from speaking for the rest of the hearing.
According to CNN reporter Melanie Zanona, Republicans behind the scenes are furious with her, and are considering punishments — even including a threat of booting her off the committee for future disruptions.
"GOP tensions flaring over MTG's committee hearing outburst today," tweeted Zanona. "Source close to Chairman Mark Green said he was furious w/ MTG's behavior and planned to privately reprimand her, and also said he'd encourage McCarthy to remove her from the committee if she did that again. But MTG doubled down on her rhetoric, accusing her GOP colleagues of 'doing the bidding' of Dems. She told me went to [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy’s office to talk about it & said to him: 'I don’t know how we’re ever going to accomplish anything when we can’t call people a liar when they’re lying.

You may not have heard of Mark Green prior to this incident. I hadn't. Unlike the politicians who get lots of media coverage, my bet is that most news junkies couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

I knew nothing about him until now. He's no shining light for liberals. For one example, this is what a brief web search of his name came up with from 2017 when Trump floated his name to be Secretary of the Army:

Excerpt: Army secretary nominee Mark Green's past statements and legislative record make him "a danger to every LGBTQ soldier," human rights groups claim.

LGBT advocates decried President Trump's Friday announcement floating the Army surgeon turned Tennessee state senator — who has called being transgender a "disease" and supported what critics branded a "license to discriminate" bill — to succeed the country's first openly gay Army secretary, Eric Fanning.

Green is "one of most extreme anti-LGBT politicians in the country," Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Stephen Peters, a former Marine discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law, told reporters in a call on Monday.

His politics are about as far-right as those of Rep. Greene's (from Wikipedia):

Abortion

Green opposes abortion. In a 2019 op-ed, he wrote, "modern science has revealed that mother and baby are, in fact, two separate persons—long before the baby is born" and argued that "a child becomes a child at conception".

Climate change

Green rejects the scientific consensus that human activity plays a key role in climate change.

Creationism

Green rejects the theory of evolution, which is consensus in biology; in a 2015 lecture he used creationist reasoning such as "irreducible complexity".

2020 election

In December 2019, Green voted against the articles of impeachment in the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

In December 2020, Green was one of 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives to sign an amicus brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania, a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Vaccines

In 2018, as a congressman-elect, Green said at a constituent meeting, "there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines", a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by scientific studies and rejected by medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I can imagine that someone who was an Army major who graduated from West Point and was a flight surgeon would be a stickler for following the rules and wouldn't tolerate the behavior demonstrated by Marjorie Taylor Greene coming from one of the soldiers under him.

Considering his politics, I think it is particularly significant that he shot Marjorie Taylor Greene down. In the military you could describe this as an officer dressing someone down. If she was a soldier such behavior could get her demoted.

It is typical of Greene that she doesn't care and is doubling down. That someone would dare to diss her obviously was beyond the pale for her. She apparently hustled off to complain her House husband, Kevin McCarthy, about not being able to call a liar a liar when she thinks they're lying.

It represents cockeyed optimism to think that Kevin's House honey is going to face any consequences for this behavior.

Update: This moved up to be the No. 1 trending story on Raw Story.

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April 19, 2023

If I was a gutsy journalist I might have interviewed these next door neighbors.

By Hal Brown, MSW

Click below images to enlarge them.

I frequently drive by a corner where there are two houses next to each other. One always has a Trump flag flying on a pole and the other has two Pride flag on the side. I've always wondered about how these neighbors get along with each other. I've thought that if I was a real journalist I'd interview the residents of both houses and find out more about them, what they feel about living next some someone with opposite political views, and whether they ever interact with each other.

I could even set up a meeting where they could talk together about how they felt. After all it's not like I haven't sat with people who were very angry with each other. I have done marriage counseling with lots of couples who had all kinds of conflicts.

On the other hand, having had husbands drop out of marriage counseling feeling very angry with me for not taking their side and sometimes having their wives divorce them I've told friends and colleagues that I wouldn't be surprised if the way I met my end was having one of these men shoot me.

Yesterday I was driving in the rain and noticed that the Trumper house had a new flag. It was one I had never seen. I managed to take the photo below before the traffic light changed. You can see the rain on the window. The insert is from Amazon where the flag can be had for $17.99.

If I was both gutsy and reckless and wanted to risk getting beat up or worse I could have snuck onto his video surveilled property, lowered the flag, and written my opinion to it.

Here's my version of the flag:

When I decided to write this I thought I could drive back there, park, and take some better photos. Then I realized I could get my photos from Google Earth's street view feature.

The houses above and below are next to each other

There are warning signs about 24 hour video surveillance by the Trumper's driveway and one that says "Mercury Parking Only" since from what I can tell this person specializes in working on Mercury cars:

I hadn't seen the LGBTQ+ Pride flag with the clenched fist before so I looked it up here and learned what it symbolized:

As a representation of Queer People of Color, it's not known who the original creator of the flag was(opens in new tab) but represents solidarity with the BLM movement as well as the intersection of the queer and Black communities (including the importance of figures like Marsha P. Johnson(opens in new tab), the Black drag queen who may have thrown the first brick(opens in new tab) at the Stonewall Inn riots) to the movements. No surprise, the flag has become more popular in 2020 and beyond. The raised fist is a sign of unity and support as well as defiance and resistance, and the various colors on the fist represent diversity. Sometimes called the Resistance Flag(opens in new tab), according to Them writer Matt Baume: "The modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement was touched off by queer and trans people of color and their struggle continues to this day, with both communities seeking justice, equality, and freedom from oppression. And because many people belong to both communities, they’re not two distinct causes but instead overlap."

The flag with the pale pink and blue colors seems to be version of this:

I think it's a faded one of of these:

About the transgender flags.

In the window there's a video surveillance warning sign next to a Black Lives Matter poster, below:

This is the second time I've written about neighbors who have opposite political views, and even had two or three chances to talk to the pro-Trump residents. I wrote about this here:

While walking around the lovely historic town of Aurora we actually saw and waved to a couple of men who were in front of the Trumper house. I could have gone and chatted with them and then knocked on the door of the historic home owned by liberals to talk to them. What can I say? I chickened out.

Related: These are from Facebook from the Methodist church and the school in the the Oak Grove community where these people and I live:

Oh, no say it isn't so Dan Goldman, please don't deserve me saying you're a bad Jew: Jewish blogger says...

By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice. Currently internationally known expert on the inner workings of the mind of Donald Trump (click here).

The blogger in the title is your's truly who happens to be Jewish and is from New York. I grew up in a suburb of New York City, lived on W. 87th Street in Manhattan for two years during which time I worked at Yeshiva University in one of their graduate school libraries.

Hal Brown is on the right.

I really like Dan Goldman, the Jewish New Yorker who, before he was elected as a member of the House of Representatives as a Democrat representing New York's 10th congressional district which includes Wall Street was known to me as a legal analyst who often appeared on MSNBC.

Now, instead of being on MSNBC as an analyst he's being interviewed about the Jim Jordan "get Bragg circus" in New York where Goldman and a witness had a heated exchange:

Click above to view

Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY), member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Committee on Oversight and Accountability, joins Andrea Mitchell to weigh in on the House Judiciary Committee’s field hearing on crime in Manhattan. “This is a waste of taxpayer money in order to support Donald Trump and his defense of his criminal prosecution, and it's simply a political stunt designed to do that, masqueraded as an issue, as a focus on the Manhattan District Attorney's statistics, which of course Congress has no jurisdiction over.”

About Dan Goldman, from Wikipedia:

He previously served as lead majority counsel in the first impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump and lead counsel to House Managers in Trump's subsequent impeachment trial. Goldman is among the wealthiest members of Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of up to $253 million according to financial disclosure forms.

A close friend of mine who is also Jewish have used the term "bad Jew" lamenting news about Americans who turn out to be Jewish and make the news for doing something we consider bad. We don't use the term for Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu since, while we are appalled at his fascistic behavior, he's not an American who surprises us with bad behavior.

A well-known example of someone we'd consider to be a bad Jew was the late Sheldon Adelson who donated huge sums to Republicans.

He and his wife Miriam Adelson were Donald Trump's largest donors, providing the largest donation to Trump's 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference, and the 2020 campaign. He was also a major backer of Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Now I look at a Raw Story+ exclusive (shown in illustration above) by the website's editor-in-chief Dave Levinthal (bio). It shouldn't be relevant whether the author is Jewish. He has a Jewish last name and is from Buffalo, N.Y. and graduated from Syracuse University, but if he is Jewish I wouldn't be surprised if he feels the same way I do.

This is the featured story on Raw Story+

‘Anti-corruption’ Rep. Dan Goldman has made hundreds of personal stock trades while attempting to create a ‘blind trust’ for his assets

Excerpts:

As a congressional candidate last year, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) pledged to form a “blind trust” for his massive stock portfolio — a move designed to shield himself from financial conflicts of interest by giving an independent body control of the administration of his private business dealings.
Since early January, Goldman has bought or sold shares of individual stocks more than 250 times, far outpacing many other congressional super-traders, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), according to a Raw Story analysis of congressional financial disclosures.
Some of the congressman’s stock trades involve politically noteworthy or sensitive corporations — defense contractors, tobacco companies, banking firms — at a time when some Democrats and Republicans alike are agitating for an outright ban on lawmakers trading individual stocks in the name of curbing conflicts of interest.
But questions remain. Goldman’s office declined to make the congressman available for an interview, and Goldman’s staff declined to provide specific details about his personal finances, including who manages and executes stock trades on the congressman’s behalf.

I am particularly disturbed by Goldman's refusal to allow himself to be interviewed on this subject. I am also bothered by this:

Goldman did, however, catch heat earlier this year for another kind of violation: the New York Post reported that the congressman’s two luxury vehicles had amassed dozens of vehicle citations, mostly for parking infractions. At the time of publication, the congressman had reportedly paid almost all of the associated fines.

Whether he paid the parking tickets or not, the suggestion that he thinks he is so privileged he can avoid New York City parking law while "ordinary" people can't is troublesome to me.

Liberal American Jews like me and my friend, and perhaps Dave Levinthal, have a self-identity that has little if anything to do with being observant. Many of us consider ourselves to be secular Jews even if, like me, the last time I set foot in a synagogue was when I went to a bar mitzvah of a friend's son decades ago.

We "feel" Jewish and oftentimes people recognize our Jewishness. Anyone from New York, Jewish or not, would likely know I was Jewish because of my appearance. You can compare my appearance, it's okay to focus on the Jewish nose, with Goldman and I sharing this characteristic which has it's own Wikipedia entry. Unlike Dave Levinthal, I look Jewish.

Dan Goldman may have neglected to cross all the financial t's and dot all the i's because he was attending to dealing with matters of national importance. I really doubt, and I want to believe that one of the richest members of Congress wanted to hide the fact that he was a "super-trader" like Marjorie Taylor Greene. He's smart enough to have known that this is the kind of story one wants to get ahead of and not give the appearance of having something to hide.

I doubt he will ever read this (although I will put a link to my blog on the Raw Story+ article). If he does, listen-up fellow New York Jew, please respond to the request from Raw Story to comment.

Update: I don't know what to make of these replies to my comment:

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I assumed that one certainty I knew about Trump was that he's wide awake at 3:00AM. Perhaps I've been wrong.

CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE

The order I look at websites in the morning are as follows: my email, HUFFPOST to see what their lead story is, Raw Story so see what they post as breaking news stories and opinion, and then The NY Times and Washington Post.

Thus I noticed this in my email:

Cick above to enlarge

It was no surprise to me to read the words "Trump screeches at Fox News in all-caps 3 am Truth Social post" since he often posts in the wee hours of the morning. There's really nothing particularly newsworthy in the Raw Story article (here).

What would be newsworthy about Donald Trump would be that something never reported was discovered.

Indulge me here. After all there are people around the world from Russia and Latvia to Sweden and China who may consider me to be an expert on the workings of the mind of Donald Trump.

First it was his predawn tweeting and currently what he puts online he likes to call "truths" since these posts are on his Truth Social platform in the wee hours of the morning. They constituted what I thought of as an indisputable fact about this man who has thrown our understanding, mine as a mental health expert and non-therapists alike, of what the human mind can manifest.

While articles were being published by other mental health practitioners proposing various diagnoses to explain Trump's behavior in 2020 I wrote Add a section to the DSM-5. It doesn't come close to having a category for Trump.

People can walk on hot coals, undergo surgery under hypnosis, lift cars to save their children, remember every name and number in the Manhattan phone directory, and... this is what led me to write this... sleep walk and do complex tasks while they are sleeping.

Consider:

Someone who is sleepwalking may:

Get out of bed and walk around
Sit up in bed and open his or her eyes
Have a glazed, glassy-eyed expression
Not respond or communicate with others
Be difficult to wake up during an episode
Be disoriented or confused for a short time after being awakened
Not remember the episode in the morning
Have problems functioning during the day because of disturbed sleep
Have sleep terrors in addition to sleepwalking

Sometimes, a person who is sleepwalking will:

Do routine activities, such as getting dressed, talking or eating
Leave the house
Drive a car
Engage in unusual behavior, such as urinating in a closet
Engage in sexual activity without awareness
Get injured, for example, by falling down the stairs or jumping out a window
Become violent during the period of brief confusion immediately after waking or, occasionally, during sleepwalking (Reference)

As if I have to spell it out, here's the what if.

What if Donald Trump isn't really awake when he makes these 3:00 AM posts?

I written recently that there is one thing that Trump can't control during this period where he's under more stress that he's most likely ever been in his life due to his legal situation. This is his dreams. He may be having nightmares. He may wake from terrifying dreams and briefly remember being pursued by black monsters with sharp fangs who want to rip him apart.

Many people don't remember remembering their dreams, whether they are frightening or not. Therefore it's possible Trump doesn't even think he has dreams.

Likewise, people who engage in simple or complex behaviors while asleep don't remember what they did.

Using the old term for posting online because it sounds better, Donald Trump may be sleep tweeting.

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Take a break from politics, do what I did: go someplace different if you can

By Hal Brown

It was a fortuitous accident that friends who had rented a house for a week in the resort destination of Black Butte Ranch had a couple leave unexpectedly so they offered me their bedroom for a few days.

I've lived in a suburb of Portland (Oregon) for about 10 years but had never ventured to the central part of the state where this resort community is.

Getting there is not particularly easy because once you drive south on an expressway for an hour you turn east and head into the Cascade Mountains and up, up, up from sea level to 3,300 feet. The road is very curvy and you have to pay close attention to your driving. Fortunately there are many pull-off areas where you can stop to take photos.

I had a few days with minimal discussion of politics among my liberal friends and I even wrote a blog yesterday before anyone in the house had gotten up. Mostly though we just escaped thinking depressing thoughts.

I glanced at the news online when I got home this morning at 8 AM (I left there at five) and nothing struck me as worth writing about, meaning I had no original thoughts.

What I do have to share are the photos I took on the trip. The first two are political. I sneakily took the photo below of the man with the Trump 45 hat.

It was a reminder of the vast political divide in this country to see this man with a Trump hat in the book section of a thrift store in the town of Sisters which is liberal leaning. This was made up for seeing the man below in the same town. Two men with beards and they couldn't have more opposite politics.