Ocelot II
Ocelot II's Journal
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Gender: Do not display
Hometown: Minnesota
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2003, 12:54 AM
Number of posts: 108,733
Hometown: Minnesota
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2003, 12:54 AM
Number of posts: 108,733
Journal Archives
I have a theory about that letter, FWIW.
No lawyer, even one of TFG's sketchy mouthpieces, would write such a puerile, belligerent letter to the guy who's overseeing the prosecution of his client. What I suspect happened is something like this: TFG calls up the lawyer and says he wants a meeting with Garland. Lawyer says Garland probably won't do it because Jack Smith, the Special Counsel, is managing the case. TFG says he doesn't care, he wants the lawyer to send Garland a letter demanding a meeting, and he dictates the letter to the lawyer, insisting on the wording. And TFG wants a copy of the letter immediately, on the lawyer's letterhead. Lawyer rolls his eyes and has a secretary type it up as dictated and send a copy to TFG. Lawyer then either writes a polite, professional letter to Garland and/or Smith, requesting a conference to discuss the status of the case and does not send TFG a copy of this letter, or else he makes the request by phone so he can truthfully tell his client that he has contacted Garland. He suspects or knows that the letter TFG dictated will be posted on fake Twitter for the purpose of outraging and grifting the MAGAts but he's already sold his soul by agreeing to represent TFG in the first place, so he accepts the resulting humiliation as the cost of doing business. But the letter on TFG's fake Twitter was never sent to Garland at all.
So that's my theory and I'm sticking to it. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Wed May 24, 2023, 11:44 AM (1 replies)
Bingo. Whatever bad shit England got up to in its history,
which is also our history, was the work of many people and institutions. England had had a parliament for centuries; following the house arrest, trial and execution of Charles I by the Parliament in 1649 (obviously he wasn't really in control of things at that point), there was an interregnum during which England, led by Oliver Cromwell, declared itself a republic. During this period Cromwell brutally conquered Ireland and invaded Scotland, then returned to England and dissolved Parliament. A reconstituted Parliament then declared Cromwell "Lord Protector for life." Under Cromwell's rule Britain continued the expansion of its empire. After his death, and notwithstanding his objections to monarchy, Cromwell was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. Richard had no power base in Parliament or the Army and was forced to resign in May 1659, ending the Protectorate. Concluding that the republic thing hadn't worked out so well after all, Parliament invited Charles II back from exile and restored him to the throne in 1660. He was succeeded by his brother James II, who was basically chased off the throne after constant battles with Parliament in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and replaced by William of Orange and Mary. The Glorious Revolution established the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty.
English history consists of constant battles between forces of the monarchy, the church(es), and elected representatives. England hasn't had an absolute monarch since the early middle ages (if even then), as much as many of them wanted to be one, and to place all the evils of the empire on the shoulders of increasingly weak monarchs is to completely ignore or misunderstand this complex history. I am not advocating for monarchy; it's clearly an antiquated and unnecessary form of government that still survives only as a historical and symbolic relic. The monarchs of Britain and the other European countries that still have them are essentially powerless and ceremonial, serving only as titular heads of state, not heads of government. Any of those countries, all of which are also representative democracies, could abolish their monarchies through acts of their parliaments but so far they have chosen not to do so. It makes no more sense to heap hate on the soap-opera Windsor family that it does to hate the Kardashians. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Sun May 7, 2023, 10:22 AM (0 replies)
That empire was *our* history. We *were* them until 1776.
The US didn't spring out of nothing; it was a bunch of disaffected Brits who didn't like George III's administration and taxation of the colony they were occupying (stolen from the people who already lived there, btw). Our legal system is based almost entirely on hundreds of years of English common law, and the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution can be found in Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which he rejected the claims of absolute monarchy based on divine right and held that the inalienable rights of individuals form the basis of all rightful governments. The country we have now, good and bad, got its start in the British Empire. If it hadn't been for British colonialism we might not have ever come into existence in the first place, and certainly not as we are now.
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Posted by Ocelot II | Sun May 7, 2023, 09:37 AM (2 replies)
I have just written a sonnet for TFG!
A shambling hulk with urine-colored hair
And lumpy, greasy face all orange and saggy Slithered down his golden moving stair, Once stood before the world in clothing baggy. Imaginary concertina playing As tiny baby hands move through the air. Nasal bleating, whining, sneering, neighing Tells us how the Deep State isn’t fair. “What?” he says, “The D.A. is indictin’? Since I did nothing wrong, how can that be? It’s Hillary, or maybe Hunter Biden! Not a thing could be the fault of me.” But toadlike there he squats, with face of poker Since nothing rhymes with orange, we’ll call it ocher. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Tue Apr 4, 2023, 09:10 PM (8 replies)
I'd actually be OK with that.
What I want more than anything is for him just to go the fuck away so I don't have to hear anything he says or see his ugly orange face ever again. If that means death, exile, alien abduction, prison or any other thing that makes him go away, fine.
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Posted by Ocelot II | Mon Jan 9, 2023, 07:00 PM (1 replies)
On Grave-Dancing
Once again, a famous person who held distasteful political beliefs has passed away, and the grave-dancing has commenced. This time it was Kirstie Alley, an actress famous mostly for her long-standing role on Cheers. She was also an avowed conservative (although she withdrew her support for TFG in 2020 and announced she wouldn't vote for either candidate), and a Scientologist. Accordingly, some seem to think it's OK to celebrate her death because she's an "enemy."
Really? My own criteria for acceptable grave-dancing (YMMV) upon the death of someone whose politics we deplore require considering the following factors: 1. Was the person currently causing a significant amount of social discord, suffering, or other trouble such that their demise will make a noticeable difference in people's lives? Or were they old adversaries who were no longer involved in any kind of public life; or people whose impact was merely annoying, but insignificant? 2. Did they have family, friends and/or associates who genuinely loved them, or were they so disagreeable or toxic that they won't be missed by anyone? 3. Did they ever do anything good or useful, irrespective of their politics; i.e., did they support good causes, donate generously to charities, or provide entertainment through their art, music, acting, etc.? Were they kind to children and animals? Or were they consistently greedy, uncharitable, mean, disinclined to help people or do anything to make their lives easier? 4. Did they contribute negatively or positively to public discourse; that is to say, did they express their opinions, however wrong-headed they might have seemed, courteously and rationally, or as insulting, hateful trolls? Applying these criteria, I can't think of any reason to dance on Kirstie Alley's grave. She was just an actress with political opinions contrary to mine. I also didn't dance on the graves of John McCain, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, or Bob Dole. I didn't agree with them but I didn't hate them. In fact, the only graves I can anticipate dancing on, and might even do so with pleasure, would be Trump's and Putin's. They meet all of my negative criteria. As to other "enemies," I offer the wise words of Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, written following the Civil War. RECONCILIATION.
WORD over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world: …For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near; I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Tue Dec 6, 2022, 12:02 AM (76 replies)
I feel pretty much the same way.
After TFG was defeated in 2020 I thought, Finally we'll be rid of that toxic lunatic and things will get back to normal again. But then there was all that election fraud nonsense and crazy Rudy saying mad things in the parking lot of a landscape company and 60+ lawsuits and 1/6, and pretty soon it looked like TFG was going to be the political equivalent of long covid - you survived and sort of recovered but the unpleasant after-effects just won't go away and you don't know when they will, if ever.
So we hope for the best but expect the worst, and the outcome probably will be something in-between and in varying degrees of awful, depending on where you live. We'll have to carry on but we won't know for awhile what the final picture will be - probably not Nazi Germany but maybe some kind of "soft" fascism or something like The Troubles of Northern Ireland, or maybe just protracted struggles in the courts. The best case scenario is that Biden vetos everything coming out of a GOP-dominated Congress, but even that is just a stalemate. And what might happen in 2024 is anybody's guess. It's the uncertainty and the sense that something really bad could happen that makes me feel like the character in the Li'l Abner cartoon with the storm cloud over his head. I'm old but given my ancestors' tendency toward longevity I could be around for another 20 years or so, and right now I'm just hoping those last years don't suck too much. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Tue Nov 8, 2022, 04:37 PM (0 replies)
Oh. My. God. This opinion should be required reading in every civil procedure class
in every law school in the country. I believe one of TFG's Lawyer Barbies, Alina Habba, was responsible for the dog's breakfast of a complaint, and she was righteously whacked upside the head. Even TFG's other incompetent lawyers think Habba is incompetent. https://www.thedailybeast.com/alina-habba-the-trump-lawyer-the-rest-of-trumps-legal-team-loathes
A few gems from the opinion: What the Amended Complaint lacks in substance and legal support it seeks to substitute with length, hyperbole, and the settling of scores and grievances.
Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is a quintessential shotgun pleading, and “[c]ourts in the Eleventh Circuit have little tolerance for shotgun pleadings.” Vibe Micro, Inc. v. Shabanets, 878 F.3d 1291, 1295 (11th Cir. 2018). Such pleadings waste judicial resources and are an unacceptable form of establishing a claim for relief.
To say that Plaintiff’s 193-page, 819-paragraph Amended Complaint is excessive in length would be putting things mildly. And to make matters worse, the Amended Complaint commits the “mortal sin” of incorporating by reference into every count all the general allegations and all the allegations of the preceding counts.
Perplexingly, Plaintiff appears to argue that the Defendants obstructed investigation Crossfire Hurricane by contributing to the initiation of Crossfire Hurricane. That Defendants could have obstructed a proceeding by initiating it defies logic.
Notably absent from the Amended Complaint, though, is any allegation that any Defendant interfered with law enforcement with respect to the commission or possible commission of any federal offense. Plaintiff endeavors to significantly broaden this provision to criminalize the dissemination of any purportedly misleading information, regardless of any connection to some federal offense.
The federal wire fraud statute prohibits “only deceptive schemes to deprive the victim of money or property”—not “all acts of dishonesty.” Id. With this predicate act, Plaintiff tries to fit a square peg into a round hole. The alleged harm Plaintiff describes to his “political and/or business reputation” is not the type of harm the wire fraud statute remediates.
Plaintiff offers nothing plausible in support to suggest that Defendants had an illegal purpose or an intent to commit racketeering acts. These allegations fail for the same reasons the conclusory allegations of discrimination failed in Iqbal: they are “an unadorned, the-defendant-unlawfully-harmed-me accusation.” Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678. Moreover, neither politically opposing Plaintiff, disliking Plaintiff, nor engaging in political speech about Plaintiff that casts him in a negative light is illegal. Without an illegal purpose plausibly alleged in the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff has failed to allege a RICO enterprise.
Moreover, many of the statements that Plaintiff characterizes as injurious falsehoods qualify as speech plainly protected by the First Amendment. Some are statements of opinion based upon Plaintiff’s four years in office... Because Plaintiff has failed to allege the essential elements of an injurious falsehood claim, this count must be dismissed. And as for Count IV, the conspiracy allegations are formulaic, conclusory, and implausible. Moreover, “the gist of a civil action for conspiracy is not conspir[ing] itself but the civil wrong which is done pursuant to the conspiracy and which results in damage to the plaintiff.” ..Without the underlying injurious falsehood claim, there can be no conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood.
In Count V, Plaintiff sues: his own Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein; formerDirector at the FBI, James Comey; former Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe; lawyers for the FBI, Kevin Clinesmith and Lisa Page; an official with the Department of Justice, Bruce Ohr, and his wife Nellie Ohr; and an FBI agent, Peter Stzok, for malicious prosecution. But Plaintiff was never prosecuted... An Inspector General Report specifically explained that the investigation was not predicated on DNC information or the Steele Dossier, but on a tip from a friendly foreign government. Of course, Plaintiff is free to disagree with the conclusions of the Inspector General’s Report. But, as I have already cautioned, he may not misrepresent it in a pleading, and he certainly may not misconstrue it in an attempt to offer support for this ill-fated claim.
Count X reflects the high-water mark of shotgun pleading and is accordingly dismissed. And it is dismissed with prejudice, as none of the underlying claims survive for which, even if properly plead, Defendant Clinton could be held liable under an agency theory.
It is true that under Rule 15 “[t]he court should freely give leave when justice so requires.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(a)(2). But a district court need not allow amendment “where amendment would be futile.” Bryant v. Dupree, 252 F.3d 1161, 1163 (11th Cir. 2001). It is not simply that I find the Amended Complaint “inadequate in any respect”; it is inadequate in nearly every respect.
Defendants presented substantively identical arguments in support of dismissal in the earlier round
of briefing on Plaintiff’s original Complaint. But despite this briefing, Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint failed to cure any of the deficiencies. Instead, Plaintiff added eighty new pages of largely irrelevant allegations that did nothing to salvage the legal sufficiency of his claims. The inadequacies with Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint are not “merely issues of technical pleading,” as Plaintiff contends, but fatal substantive defects that preclude Plaintiff from proceeding under any of the theories he has presented. At its core, the problem with Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm; instead, he is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157.267.0.pdf ![]() If any lawyer ever deserved crushing Rule 11 sanctions it's Alina Habba. Wadda maroon. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Fri Sep 9, 2022, 11:09 AM (4 replies)
The media don't have to report it; this is something people see themselves, every day.
Posted by Ocelot II | Wed Aug 3, 2022, 11:42 AM (1 replies)
I have always been a pretty committed institutionalist, but
after watching the 1/6 hearings so far and reading the recent opinions of a no-longer-legitimate Supreme Court, as off this evening I'm kind of like, "FUCK IT! BURN IT ALL DOWN!" We don't have the country we thought we had, or even could have had, because too goddamn many people in power suck and too many other people like it that the people in power suck, and the system just does not fucking work. Maybe this country is just too big and complicated for the original system to work, or maybe it never really did but for 200 ears wheezed along just well enough for us to think we were the Shining Fucking City On The Shining Fucking Hill and didn't notice the rot in the basement. Or chose not to notice it.
So the gaping holes in the system allowed TFG to crash through the guard rails that were really only made of toilet paper straight from Mitch McConnell's bathroom, and 2/3 of the Supreme Court just stood there and said, Hell, yeah, as the car rolled down the embankment. The founders knew it was all an experiment anyhow, and I guess the lab just blew up. |
Posted by Ocelot II | Fri Jun 24, 2022, 10:30 PM (1 replies)