Ocelot II
Ocelot II's JournalLink to the document here. Raw Story never bothers to link to the source,
which is only one of the many irritating characteristics of Raw Story. This document is so awesomely and hilariously awful that it deserves to be read in its entirety and mocked mercilessly. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72028010/82/national-trust-for-historic-preservation-in-the-united-states-v-national/
1. "Last night, shortly after 6:00 p.m., an armed assassin approached a White House security checkpoint near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, professionally pulled a high caliber gun from a bag, and opened fire in the exact direction of the White House. Brave Secret Service officers returned fire. The gunman was killed and an innocent bystander was seriously wounded in the shooting."
How would the existence of The Ballroom prevent a bystander outside the WH grounds from being injured by someone shooting at the WH (which, by the way, has had bulletproof windows since the '40s)?
2. The Ballroom "is being constructed to ensure that the President can perform his constitutional duties in a safe and heavily secured facility."
How have the previous 45 presidents been able to perform their constitutional duties safely before now? No president has been ever been assassinated or attacked inside the White House while performing their constitutional duties.
3. The Ballroom "will provide a “SAFE HAVEN” from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th. It will provide a highly secure space for future Inaugurations, and other major events, such as the recent visit of the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, and the coming visit in September of President Xi of China. Without this National Security Facility, such events are otherwise relegated to the vulnerable tents on the South Lawn, exposed to various threats, as again shown by last night’s shooting, which would have been easily in range to reach a tent (in all cases made of plastic or canvas, which has virtually no ability to stop a bullet, unlike the walls of the Facility under construction, which has the highest degree of bullet stoppage, including that of a higher range than a large caliber AK-47), on the White House South Lawn, and cause death and destruction."
Major events such as the referenced state visits by foreign dignitaries are not held in tents. They take place inside the White House in the East Room, the State Dining Room, and the Blue Room, or sometimes in the Blair House. The East Room holds 200–250 guests, and the majority of state dinners are and have been held there. Occasionally, guests have been accommodated in Rose Garden (now paved over). Occasionally (and not in the winter) a tent has been erected on the South Lawn (once during the Obama administration and once during the Biden administration) for overflow.
4. "Top Secret features have been revealed to potential enemies, criminals, and all others, including the fact that there will be a major drone port and Government sniper facilities on the heavily secured roof of the Ballroom, all for the sake of an unhappy passerby, a woman with absolutely no standing, represented by the “National Trust,” which was defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them."
Security features like snipers have been installed on and around the White House for decades and are no secret (and if they are top secret, why are you talking about them?). Snipers are routinely stationed on the roof.
5. "In light of the recent attacks against President Trump’s life—including two attempts in less than a month—the injunction entered by this Court for the benefit of a strolling woman, who filed suit against the East Wing Project long before she knew what was going to be built (This is a woman who is a known serial plaintiff throughout Washington, D.C.), and who has absolutely no standing, must be immediately vacated, and this suit, which is a complete embarrassment to our Country, must be dismissed. This is a terrible, tremendously harmful case to the United States of America, and all it stands for!"
The woman in question is Alison K. Hoaglund, an architectural historian and a trustee on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and is the named plaintiff. As an expert and a trustee she was named specifically to establish "aesthetic injury"—the legal standing required for the National Trust to challenge the construction.
I have no doubt that Himself requires all legal documents to be submitted to him for review before they are filed, since no self-respecting lawyer would ever write this way - but in order to work for Trump a lawyer would have had to shed every vestige of self-respect.
I would find the document hilarious if it hadn't been paid for with my tax money.
Read it here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645.81.0_1.pdf
I'm convinced that Toady Blanche and his craven minions at DoJ submit their legal briefs to Trump for approval before filing them to ensure that there are enough random and ungrammatical capitalizations of words that normal English-speaking people don't capitalize, insults, transparently tendentious descriptions, and the frequent use of the regime's made-up term for any disapproval of or disagreement with Dear Leader, "Trump Derangement Syndrome." To say that their arguments are disingenuous is the equivalent of suggesting that bears relieve themselves in forests, but my favorite is the performative outrage at any doubt that the so-called "Militarily Top Secret Ballroom" is absolutely essential to protect the president and his entourage (and therefore National Security itself!) from TDS-inspired assassination attempts at public events like the WHCA Dinner, at which there has never before been such an attempt, and at which in this case was thwarted at the first level of security and on a different floor of the hotel.
I am also wondering whether Satan himself presented the contract for the sales of the souls of the lawyers whose names are on the brief, or whether it was emailed and an electronic facsimile signature was all he needed.
There can be a pretty fine line between mad and bad sometimes.
And Trump is evidence that both conditions can exist in one person. He is not normal, not even slightly. He's a whole festering ball of personality disorders, DSM-V all condensed and shoveled into one person; and some personality disorders cause people to behave very badly. Since he has almost all of them, epic badness is to be expected. He's not a classic schizophrenic; he doesn't really think he's Jesus, for example; only that he's just as good as and as worthy of worship as Jesus. I don't think he could be persuaded to walk on the newly-"improved" reflecting pool once it's filled or try to turn one overcooked hamburger into meals for the multitudes; he doesn't think he's the original miracle-doing Jesus. He just loves it that MAGA thinks he's Jesus-like because he's a megalomaniac and a narcissist. He's completely self-absorbed and doesn't care who he's talking to as long as he knows someone is listening, which is why he saw nothing peculiar about talking to small children about Iran's nuclear weapons. He's all transmit and no receive, and he saw the children only as receivers for his transmissions. They could have been anybody with ears. He's a total solipsist, meaning that to him other human beings with minds and emotions and needs and agency don't exist, so he will do bad things on the regular because he's interested only in himself and other people are just tools for him to manipulate. None of that is normal, and it's the merger of mad and bad.
Hey, Kevin. Can I call you Kevin? Or should I be more formal and call you Director Asshat?
In any event, Director Kevin Asshat, I'd like a word. Actually, it's a question: Do you really, really like the smell of Trump's farts and the taste of his ball sweat? Because you're spending an awful lot of time in that region, and the problem is that when you're down there tickling the Big Guy's taint you can't read charts or analyze numbers or even hear Lindsey Graham whining, "Hey, Kevin, it's my turn! I need to get my head in there at least up to the ears or he won't invite me to his birthday party!" But maybe all that gas that you can't get enough of has a psychotropic effect that makes you hallucinate Jesus telling you Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being you've ever known in your life, plus he's an economic genius who can even distinguish a squirrel from a rhinoceros. But when he's gone, Kevin, what are you going to do with your sad, stupid life?
Back in the '80s I applied for a job at the local U.S. Attorneys' office
and was pleasantly surprised when I actually got an interview, which went well, but I didn't get the job. Even so, just getting an interview felt like a small professional triumph, since in those days AUSA jobs were in high demand. Now, though, it seems that if you graduate at the bottom of your class from Big Al's Bait Shop and Legal Academy, pass the bar on the fourth try, get turned down by Saul Goodman, and you can't afford to open your own office in the basement of a nail salon in Albuquerque, you apply for an AUSA job under an assumed name and with a paper bag over your head, and they'll probably take you and give you a signing bonus. But who wants the permanent stank of the Trump DoJ on their resume, assuming you even have a law license after doing whatever legal atrocity you are ordered to do?
Thank you! There's a whole thread of piling on Comey wrt the 2020 election
which, they said, makes his ridiculous, outrageous prosecution for posting 86-47 in sea shells somehow OK. He deserves it, some people said. And it made me wonder - sadly - whether some of us alleged liberals are just as eager as Trump to prosecute someone for a thing that isn't a crime but is clearly protected speech just because they don't like him and think he deserves punishment even if it's for something completely unrelated. But take that headline and just change the name to, say, Adam Schiff, and the same folks would be up in arms, as they should be. It shouldn't matter who it is.
So my question to those who think Comey deserves this sham, vindictive prosecution is, WTF is wrong with you? If you became the attorney general in some future Democratic administration, would you prosecute the truly loathsome Kash Patel for writing 86-48 in sea shells because statutes of limitations have run on any crimes he did commit so you can't bust him for those? If your answer is yes, then shame on you for wiping your ass on the same Constitution Trump used for the same thing.
First they came for Jim Comey and I spoke out because I know the rest of the fucking poem.
If Piggy isn't personally reviewing Blanche's filings to be sure he uses enough random capital letters,
exclamation points and words like FAKE, Blanche and his minions are doing it on their own so Himself will be sufficiently pleased by their work. It's the lawyers' equivalent of wearing gifted Florsheim shoes that don't fit - accepting the humiliation of writing a memorandum that would get a law student an F in a first-year legal writing class.
It's interesting that they are asking for an indicative ruling, which is a way to ask the district court to act on a matter over which it has no jurisdiction because it's being appealed. So the court has the option of deferring consideration of the motion, denying it, or stating that it would grant the motion if the court of appeals remands for that purpose or that the motion raises a substantial issue. In other words, Blanche wants the district court to tell the Court of Appeals that it would grant their motion if it had jurisdiction, so the case should be remanded for that purpose in light of the "assassination attempt" (that occurred on a different floor of the hotel and was promptly thwarted by security without the need for 7" thick bulletproof windows).
For now, all we can do is take a careful look at both the content and the source.
If the source is some obscure purveyor of videos seeking likes and clicks, and it contains material that looks either too slick or too cartoonish, assume it's AI. There are videos on YouTube and elsewhere that purport to be by Rachel Maddow and other well-known cable tv hosts that seem fairly real - using their voices and images, though sometimes the voices are too fast - but a real Maddow video will have the MS NOW logo, and these don't. If the video doesn't come from a known source and it looks slick or artificial it's AI. We are seeing a lot of elaborate cartoon-like "artwork" that is obviously AI. If something purports to be an actual photograph, it's usually too shiny; also, look for weird shadows and shapes, extra fingers or impossible overlays of objects. Be discerning. Don't post something just because you think it's clever. AI steals the images and the intellectual property of real people and churns it into crap.
I am gobsmacked. Maybe I shouldn't be, since this stuff keeps coming to the surface
about men from all over the political spectrum. But Swalwell was an articulate, forceful spokesman for liberal issues - and nevertheless he betrayed us in the most egregious way possible by pretending to be someone who spoke for abused women. Release the Epstein files, he said. “Every member of the Judiciary Committee, every Republican, every Democrat voted to release these documents and to have them in our hands,” he said. “They were supposed to be in our hands so that we could stand up for victims and to make sure that we know the names of the people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein,” he said back in December. https://www.ms.now/news/eric-swalwell-hearings-epstein-files-trump-administration-accountability "Stand up for victims"? Hello? A guy credibly accused of drugging, raping and choking a woman says what? Did he think it was OK while Epstein's actions weren't because the women he abused were adults? WTAF? Jesus on a pogo stick, what's wrong with these men?
Which doesn't excuse anyone else, regardless of political affiliation.
However, it's a useful fact to bring up if GOPers try to climb up on their high horse re: Swalwell. The sad reality is that we live in a society in which powerful men, even apparently admirable ones, routinely abuse women and mostly get away with it. Swalwell's case is not like Al Franken's, though. Many Democrats, fearful of being accused of excusing bad male behavior, offered Franken up as a sacrificial lamb without giving him any opportunity to present a defense to accusations of "inappropriate" actions far short of Swalwell's (or Trump's), and now regret it. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al-franken And Trump didn't get away with all of it - see the case of E. Jean Carroll - it's just that his cult doesn't care. We should care. Swalwell shouldn't get the Franken treatment - if he is able to refute the accusations he should be given a chance to do so - but the situation is a reminder that a man's location on the political spectrum doesn't necessarily determine whether he's a pig in his private life. See also, e.g., Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Andrew Cuomo.
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: Minnesota
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2003, 12:54 AM
Number of posts: 131,419