I was too tired last night. Sorry. The trolls are difficult to handle until you figure out what they are doing. Suffice to say one of them is pimping their blog site with every comment they make. Polarizing the discussion to heat it up so as to be able to post more comments and thus more links to a very mediocre blog site with nothing very original on it. So be awake and catch it when it cometh here. And it doesn't come alone. More effective when more than one can back up and attack. Not a full fledged flame war, just a highjacking of the thread to get free ad space for a personal blog that posts on dkos too. Hang on to your shirt kos! More and more people are grabbing your shirt tails for dear life so it must be getting heavy to pull them along.
Well, make the jump for more legal stuff. At least for those who want it. I am sure those that want to be noticed will also be here. I have some trolls in my pocket tonight and will use them, so post civilly. I don't mind criticism if you support it with facts and tell me why. I now know you are not critiquing my legal reporting (not advice)and warning me to help me but rather the opposite, to try and dig a hole for me. Go ahead babe. Bring it on. I got the tools now and the people to work with who know how to use 'em! We are all salivating.
Yesterday was a discussion of techniques, tools, ways to initiate and respond. This is the problem we all face. We know the Constitution enabled us to be free. But as one of the great men said, "Man is free and everywhere I look he is in chains." We have a Constitution and laws that are so full of power for us that we can't even dream of it it is so lost in antiquity. And it took just over 200 years to forget it. We have lost all our knowledge and handed it over to our lawmakers, who were never supposed to make a career of Congress. The early ones went home to their farms and worked when they were out of session.
What if I told you there was a mechanism in the laws to provide for a citizens grand jury with all the powers that we know a grand jury has? What if we literally have the power to form a group and bring all members of congress, the judiciary and the executive to testify before our grand jury? Ha! I can hear the snickers already. The screams of the lawyers. The howling of the mob. What if this were so? Why would we need to bitch and moan for congress to investigate this and that? Why would we complain about their lack of a spine?
I am also going to tell you that Zimmerman is a Jew and a very devout Christian, aware of possible hypocrisies in what he is teaching. A man that does not want publicity and here I am fomenting it when I shouldn't be. I will tell you that most of the people taking this seminar are fundamentalists and if you ever want to understand them and how they are thinking about any issue at all, take this seminar if it ever becomes available to you. They are not down and out by any means. They are learning and mastering tools we haven't even thought of.
They don't want the health care we want to bring them. Why? They do not want to pay a monthly fee for the kind of health care they don't want. (Until they do want it that is.)They do not want to be forced to do anything, whether it is good for them or not. They will fight against us for all the social progress systems we want to put in place. And their reasons are not so awful. For example, I pay medicare premiums and now have even more taken out for the drug benefit. I never go to the doctor and take no meds. I know a woman around the corner who uses her medicare constantly because she is a walking hypochondriac. To listen to her for an hour or so is to feel exhausted. She has a tablefull of pills and each doctor ultimately is unable to help her. So she goes to the next and adds to the table of pills with products from the new doctor's office. Cynical me is disgusted with this waste of money. She is really buying attention and solicitation from doctors that she can't get in her personal life from her husband or anyone else. And trust me, the more medical benefits, the more of these people will crawl out of the woodwork. And she is an ultra progressive. And here I have to agree with the fundies taking this course concerning their fears about socialized medicine. I understand their fears but I don't agree with them. I definitely have no sympathy for my progressive "friend". She needs about five years on the couch three or four times a week. A classic hysteric described in Freud's Vienna she will never get healthy. Never.
I really have nothing but respect for this teacher. He is a careful, committed, person with a high level of consciousness imparting information to many people who have not had much formal schooling. And the schooling they got they hated. They really have difficulty listening and taking notes, something we here at dkos take for granted now after all the years of doing it. They have difficulty grasping the vision. I think I turn them off as I am so there with the implications of what is possible. I have researched, done a thesis, so composing a brief, a summons, a complaint, while not duck soup for me is well within my capacity to do so effectively. I have spent so much past time in court and with lawyers (try to do real estate and avoid it)that it is labeling and enriching all my experience. I understand now why I was frustrated 95% of the time with my lawyer. I would sit and think why doesn't he ask this, why not that, oh please say x, until I would squirm in my seat to listen to dull unimaginative responses from him. Again with the exception of a very few who were on top of it. Marino in Philadelphia is a gem of a criminal lawyer. I would refer anyone to him. He does not make work to add up the hours. He has plenty of work. He is brilliant, creative and impatient.
It is like any other profession. Full of clods and some geniuses. And most of them mediocre at best.
Example: An accountant in Illinois I think it was, was very successful. She owned three houses, one for her, one for her mother, and one she bought and resold to her son. All had mortages on them. She was so good with her clients and very successful winning against the IRS. She paid her mortgages on time, she had plenty of money. But the bank was putting the mortgage money from her residence in escrow and not crediting it to her account. She never checked. Do you? I just started to. Gulp! Well when they did it for 6 months they foreclosed. And it was right around tax time, her busiest time. And not only that, the banks holding the mortgages on the other two houses also called them in. Well they can't do that! She paid her mortgage on time for all of them. They can't do that? Can they? Well check your mortgage agreement. In many of them there is a clause in the fine print saying that if the bank has a liquidity problem they can call the mortgage in. Did you know that? I just found out today myself. Look at yours and check. So there she is. She calls Z for help. What to do? If she fights it it will take all her time in her busiest time of year, the time she makes all her money almost for the entire year. She will lose all her clients. Z tells her to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. That will give her six months so she can concentrate on her tax clients and deal with the banks later. Ok she says and calls him a couple of days later. Did you do it he says? Well, I filed chapter 13 she says. Why he says. Because I saw an attorney and that's what he told me to do. Well you have to fire your attorney and now you can't change to 11. But I have developed something that I think will work for you but it hasn't been tried yet. So he tells her what it is and how to do it so she does not really having any other choice. She goes to the first hearing for it after she files and no one is there. No bank, no attorney, nobody so she wins by default. The judge wipes out the entire principal left on her mortgage and awards her I forget how many thousands punitive damages. She goes to the second hearing. Same thing. No one there. the judge wipes out that mortgage's principal but doesn't award damages. She is suing separately for damages. Same on the third house and no damages are awarded. No information on whether she is suing for damages for that one.
Well, what would make a bank not show, lose about 100K by default? And not once but three different banks? Why? Well I know. And I am not going to incur the ire here of lawyers threatening me with going to the Missouri bar and trolls linking to names of lawyers I have mentioned and telling me I am now liable for what I have said about them even if it is true (and it is). So if someone who is pimping their personal blog here on kos by double posting and having a link in every comment, provoking argument so they can post more comments and hence more links, pretending to be commenting for my own good about legal "advice" as opposed to reporting, which I am doing here,but really to set me up for trouble, which I think they have already done, I guess I am going to have to handle it. I will find out tomorrow if this is what certain telephone calls are about. These local people are snakes and powerful big fish in very little ponds. I dislike seeing kos go the way of Utne Cafe's Meta discussions a number of years back. So I think you are all forewarned tonight. Let's see what happens,eh?