King Solomon would approve this decision: nobody won, but justice prevailed!

Dr. Orly Taitz’ undistinguished attack on Charles Edward Lincoln resulted in Fort Lauderdale a hearing attended by several witnesses, several lawyers including top-notch Philadelphia attorney Philip J. Berg for Lincoln, and an audience of two (possibly homeless but definitely unemployed) paid bloggers.

Nothing else of any note happened. Nobody “won”, but justice prevailed, and the case will go forward, thanks to Judge Dimitrouleas’ order of last Friday that U.S. Bank should answer the 4 out of 7 remaining counts of Plaintiffs’ original Complaint.  On PACER:

The following transaction was entered on 2/9/2010 at 2:08 PM EST and filed on 2/9/2010

Case Name:	Rivernider et al v. U.S. Bank National Association
Case Number:	9:09-cv-81255-WPD
Filer:
Document Number:	58 Lurana Snow Denied Sanctions February 9 2010

Docket Text:
ORDER, no sanctions will be imposed by the court on the plaintiffs or Dr. Taitz, and the parties and witnesses shall pay their own attorney’s fees. Signed by Magistrate Judge Lurana S. Snow on 2/9/2010. (cqs)

Oh Cursed Spite, that ever I was born to set it right…..(To run or not to run, that was the question)….

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous commie-pinko pundits, critics, and general lowlife lowbrows,

Or to take arms against the sea of troubles which they and their ilk have created,

And by opposing (at least attempt) to end them (or at least curtail their influence and power…).

****************************************************************************************************

“Everybody knows that the system’s rotten: old black Joe’s still a pickin’ cotton for your ribbons and bows, as everybody knows.” (Leonard Cohen);

“Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint, Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.”

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

So this is where I am in life.  I am going to be 50 years old in April (time is definitely out of joint).  I have no significant accomplishments to speak of except a Ph.D. dissertation I wrote at Harvard which was accepted for publication but, because I wanted to polish it up and update it, never got published and as of the present time is so totally out of date that it is no longer publishable.  I have had dozens of ideas for books which I never wrote more than an outline for.

Oh, I also got a J.D. from the University of Chicago and worked with and for a couple of Federal Judges as a Judicial Extern and Judicial Law Clerk, but I never could stand the billable hours routine at law firms or, for that matter, even the 9-5 routine at a normal job.  I wanted to be on my own.  And so I was for a few years in Texas, “on my own” as an attorney-and-counsellor-at law, but apparently even that was too much normative conformity for me—because the moment I started taking some interesting and “righteous” civil rights cases, as opposed to mere commercial litigation, real estate, and bankruptcy, I found myself under attack and then, within 3 years, forced “to resign in lieu of discipline” after having been convicted of the heinous felony of mis-stating two digits of my social security number on an otherwise complete and correct application to open a non-interest bearing checking account at Wells Fargo.

Harvard didn’t want me back at that point (2000) although I went, stayed a couple of months at the Faculty Club on Quincy near the Fogg Art Museum, did some privately sponsored research, and asked.  Things had changed.  A return to academics was just not in the cards for me.  Again, the problem of being significantly more of a “maverick” than Sarah Palin ever dreamed of being in her worst nightmares (a Palinesque big wink wouldn’t look so good over my bloodshot eyes tonight, and to think SHE’S four years younger than I am…).

Listlessly, after nearly dying on Zamalek Island in Cairo, Egypt after a common mugging/head injury sustained on November 30, 2000, I returned to Texas for no particularly good reason except I had a wife and 8 year old son waiting for me there.  I had gotten divorced from my wife once in February 1999 but was already back together with her—reunited, oddly enough, by the mere fact of being indicted on preposterous charges in December 1999—she was a real hero to me at that point in my life.

But that didn’t last long and in less than a year-and-a-half after surviving attempted murder in Egypt my wife and I were on very bad terms again.  Things had seemed OK for a while.  I had done a little teaching at Austin Community College (I was driving from Cedar Park to the Pinnacle Campus to teach a section in History on September 11, 2001—only listening to Wagnerian Opera and not the radio I was puzzled when I got on the elevator and everyone was in worried/panic mode).

In July 2002, my wife and I broke up again, what I didn’t know was that it was going to be for the last time.  We haven’t been back together since.  Initially I had custody of our son Charlie, but it was at that point that my real odyssey, and what I have concluded was my real purpose in life, really began.   I am who I am today because of Judge Michael Jergins of the 395th Judicial District Court in and for Williamson County, Texas.  I had for a long time seen evidence and suspected that Texas Family Court judges disregarded both the Texas and United States Constitutions, but it was only when I learned the customs, practices, and policies of Judge Michael Jergins and his acolytes J. Randall Grimes, Laurie J. Nowlin, and Michael P. Davis, and started getting in touch with other parents/family court victims, especially one Rhonde Malmquist nee Moe, that I realized that I was, in Georgetown, Williamson County, at the epicenter of something much bigger than the stupid police brutality and callous treatment of personal liberty and property intertests which I had encountered in Lago Vista.  If the Lago Vista police were like highly localized tornados going through people’s houses occasionally, the Family Law Courts in Williamson County, and by extension the entire Family Court system in Texas, as a stagnate hurricane sitting in place with a radius 200-500 miles in every direction emanating from the Attorney General’s (Greg Abbott’s) offices in Austin.  Texas is a big place, and the wealth redistributing-family destroying Texas Family Court was an enterprise engaged in and affecting interstate commerce which constituted the biggest “racket” I had ever seen.  And so I dedicated my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to fighting the Constitutional perversions which are the Family Code and Family Court system of Texas.

To make a long story short, that occupied almost all my time and energy from July 2002-April 2006.  I made some great temporary alliances during that time which should have lasted longer.  But the simple truth is that by May 2006 it was all over.  There was nothing more that I could or wanted to try to do.  And my son was starting to show some signs of breaking away without judicial assistance, although the final breakthrough didn’t really happen until August 2007, by which time I had already decided to leave Texas, where I basically had been stripped of all my civil rights in January 2006, even before Judge Walter Smith’s order of March 2008 banning me even from ever filing in the Texas Federal Courts again—I was already living in Florida by then, after a few exciting incidents which I have described in the “about” section of this blog….http://charleslincoln3.wordpress.com/about. Oh yes, and during these same years I had also met and gotten to know and admire one Montana State Senator Jerry O’Neil, who has dedicated his life to fighting the state-sponsored monopoly over the practice of law.  Jerry has become one of my models in life.  I admire him more every time I look at his work, his persistence, and see him continue on.  For me, Jerry O’Neil “veritate gladiator arena publicae unus est”  (He is a true [professional] swordsman in the public arena) and I think I should be more like him: turning my own bad experiences into a crusade to make the world a better place.  He is somehow at the same time ethical, practical, and politically successful by setting modest goals.  I only question why he has set his goals QUITE so modestly, because I think he could be at least as great a force in the United States today as Ron Paul if he were to TAKE the national stage.

So now here I am, half a century old and dedicating my life to fighting yet another major fight on behalf of the underdogs of the world: a fight against mortgage foreclosure nationwide.   I have some cases right now that are more promising than before.   I have in these past 13 years since the 4th of July, 1997, parade in front of my former office on Dawn Drive in Lago Vista learned so much about the corruption of the court system, the government generally, and above all the monetary system and economy, that I wonder how I have ever avoided going into politics—not to serve the system as it exists but to scrap it.

On the one hand, if I run for public office, I will suffer much more of the same kind of garbage slander and attacks that I have experienced since first becoming involved with a certain Moldavan-born, Israeli-educated, Orange County Dentist named Dr. Orly Taitz, D.D.S., Esquire.  I wish I had never met her, except that I never would have come to live since September 2009 by the beach in San Clemente if it hadn’t been for her, and San Clemente, California is one of the most beautiful and satisfying places on earth—and God only knows I’ve lived and traveled all over the United States, the Americas, and Europe and the adjacent the Mediterranean areas of Asia and Africa.  The only other possible advantage of having met Dr. Taitz last year is that perhaps I had my little retarded “sex scandal” episode before I was running for office, rather than after or during the process…..

If I can arrange it, I will always call San Clemente home from now on, and never live far from the Pacific beach again.  Oddly enough, this was my dream when I was in High School at the Hollywood Professional School (aka Hollywood Conservatory of Music & the Arts)—to live by the Pacific beach—except back then it was to live in Malibu—which is now way too crowded and expensive and the traffic much too heavy.  But San Clemente is like a combination of the Santa Monica and Malibu of 35-40 years ago: just urbane enough to have lots of good restaurants and shops all within walking distance of the water, with a fine view of Santa Catalina Island offshore.  In short, I have found my Shangri-La, and have lived there listening to the waves longer than most people dare to dream of doing.  Yes, I owe it all to the combined efforts of Orly Taitz and Steven D. Silverstein: her witless, naive, almost childlike incompetence, and his vicious and intentionally and expressly sharklike corruption and thievery.

During the past six months, also, however, I have realized that the California system of non-judicial foreclosure is an almost insuperable barrier to the security of home-ownership and private property.  In essence, California has already outlawed private property.  A combination of inflationary economics, an irresistable socio-cultural pressure always to expand and consume more and more and more, and a lack of attachment to place or fundamental respect for the concepts of home, family place, privacy, and real, long-term ownership, have all conspired to make California residences temporary and the California economy largely nomadic or transitory.   And the corporate infrastructure supports the socio-political superstructures of the courts and legal profession and financial institutions which are dedicated to wiping the family, private property, and all other remnants of the bourgeois state OFF THE MAP.

One common feature in the corruption of the Family Code and Court system in Texas, Florida, and California, and the mortgage finance customs and practices everywhere in the United States it seems, is that Federal economic and monetary policies can be found as the driving forces underlying any statutory or customary scheme of business practices or social policies.  The boundary between state and federal has become blurred.

My first thought was to run for Governor of California (“Terminator” and nominal Republican but de-facto socialist Arnold Schwarzenegger has presided over the most complete economic collapse of any state together with its government since the Great Depression of the 1930s—an unworthy heir to Governor Ronald Reagan he has proved to be indeed…..).  But it was pointed out to me that there is a five year residency requirement, and that at least one state, North Dakota, had previously, in 1937, removed by judicial mandate a governor who was elected in spite of his lack of five years residence.  This was the case of Thomas Moodie, elected in 1934-5.  State of North Dakota v Thomas H Moodie 1937

Since my association with Dr. Orly Taitz, DDS, Esquire was predicated in part on misguided personal emotions and in part on a shared distaste for the current de facto President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, and since our outward expression of dissatisfaction for Obama was our complaint that he was not a “natural born” American citizen and hence not constitutionally qualified to serve as President—given all these circumstances I have decided it would be best not to run for governor and risk becoming a historical footnote on the order of Thomas H. Moodie.  I know nothing about Moodie but I doubt he was anything like Obama, who is every bit as American as King Kong but not half so honest nor articulate nor generally sympathetic and likeable….and in the implementation of national policies is much clumsier (perhaps one should say “clunkier”) and much more destructive….  Obama was elected for one and only one reason: the Country couldn’t stand another minute under Bush or anyone who looked even remotely like him, which, ironically enough, John McCain, whom Bush had politically though not physically assassinated in 2000, looked significantly more like Bush than Obama, and Sarah Palin, rightly or wrongly, seemed extraordinary only in that she MIGHT have constituted an intellectual step DOWN from George W…..if that’s possible…. which it really and truly might not be….

But in any event, it does seem that although I am constitutionally disqualified for running for California Governor because I have not resided there continuously for five years, I AM eligible to run for and yes, even to serve as a United States Senator.

If I were to run, I know I would stand little or no chance of winning.  I will not be able to raise millions in campaign funds, or at least I cannot see how I would or even could, and California is the most populous state in the Union.

Yet on the other hand, I might be a good candidate.  Californians pride themselves on being trendsetters for the nation, always ahead and iconoclastic, at the same time as they set up the icons that everyone else follows.  California is ethnically diverse and I’m rather distinctively WASPY, but I was confirmed at All Saints Church in Beverly Hills, which is a good place to be a certified WASP if ever there was one.  I’m also a WASP who speaks Spanish fluently, having lived and worked on and off in Mexico, Honduras, Belize, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere in Latin America on and off for the 15 years I was involved in archaeology (1976-1991).  And even in my “fall” from establishmentarian grace I think I might have something real to offer Californians:  California has the highest prison population in the United States, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (per capita/population wide) and it has to stop.

I spent most of my 54 days in Federal Custody at MDC Los Angeles, and so I became acquainted with the evils of the Federal and State prisons in modern times.  I have often said I am grateful, even thankful, for that experience, for that journey into America’s own Heart of Darkness, and it changed my life forever.  Never again will I believe that this is a truly fair, free, or just country, or that the mass incarceration of over 1% of the adult population is anything but a catastrophic indictment of what used to be called SERIOUSLY (and not just in our National Anthem) “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  Only a cowardly nation of quivering slaves would incarcerate so many for so little reason.  The largest single group (by raw number of persons) in Federal custody is composed of Hispanics on various sorts of immigration crimes.   This is a scandal, because everywhere Hispanics are enthusiastically employed without regard to legal status.  HYPOCRISY!  Yet so many of my fellow whites are scornful and fearful of people “with a record.”  I regard all the legal insults which have been leveled against me as “red badges of courage” and I would like to educate my fellow whites, and improve the self-image and esteem of those groups hit harder with prison and penal sanctions generally.

So why should I NOT run for Governor in this diverse state of California, and tell the oppressed classes that I am one of them, and that I would like to lead them all out of the present authoritarian disaster into a better world.  It might be that some sort of political empowerment through separation would be necessary to give blocks of power back to the hispanic and black people of America.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, but in effect, socio-cultural policies of “diversity” and “social integration” amount either to voluntary or enforced loss of identity for everyone.  If “Black is Beautiful”, maybe black should stay black and empowerment of groups will strengthen identities and senses of worth and well-being.  One of my many pet peeves against Barack Obama is that he was elected in large part as the first “black” President, but in form, function, and effect he is about as “black” as his running mate Joe Biden or his Secretary of State and former adversary Hillary Clinton—Obama’s Kenyan heritage and possibly de jure Kenyan citizenship being the only really “African” thing about this graduate of Columbia and Harvard who taught at the University of Chicago and speaks with no accent of any kind.

But in addition, I have become aware of so many problems in Federal Welfare and Social Security Law which have become the guiding lights of socially targeted wealth-redistribution and family destabilization programs in America. The mortgage finance and family code/court disasters I mentioned above all trace their origins back to Federal Law regarding monetary finance and social security.

So should I run for Senate?  I am thinking hard about it.  In one sense I would rather be governor, but there’s basically noplace where I have been a steady resident for the past five years: Texas, Massachusetts, California, Florida, Montana, Louisiana and British Columbia—in about that order too—each of these places has a claim on my recent residence/citizenship Identity.  During the past year it’s ONLY been Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, and California (OK, one weekend in Montana….hardly counts, oh, almost forgot, a couple of weeks in Connecticut, a couple of days in Philadelphia, St. Louis, New York City, and Georgia).  The past few months in San Clemente have been very pleasant—I COULD settle down there, even though I haven’t quite done so yet….

If I were to run for office, my platform would run something like this which I wrote up while thinking about running for Governor, before I realized the residence requirement barriers….):

Platform Planks for Constitutional Reform:

Part I: Judicial Reform: ALL JUDGES AND OTHER GOVERNMENTAL OFFICERS TO BE BOUND BY AND LIABLE TO THE PEOPLE FOR VIOLATIONS OF OR INFRINGEMENTS UPON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE SEVERAL STATES

(1)            Constitutional Courts:          All judicial decisions concerning the life, liberty, or property of individuals shall be made only by juries of 12 persons, all of whom, before being impaneled as jurors, shall prove that they are literate and able to pass an examination on the Constitution, laws, and history of the United States and one state.

(2)            Constitutional Juries:         All judicial decisions concerning the validity of laws or governmental actions of any kind shall be supported by jury findings concerning matters of fact in support of or against the laws.

(3)            Constitutional Judges:         No judge nor any other court officer shall ever enjoy immunity from the law for any action aside from rendering or enforcing decisions necessary to decide cases properly submitted to and decided by juries; this is the proper application of “absolute” judicial immunity—it is “absolute” only when reconciled by a judge as conforming with the constitution and laws being applied and the judge’s opinion shall be the measure of his conformity.

(4)            Constitutional Executives:          No prosecuting attorney or any other executive officer shall enjoy any immunity from any action aside from reasonably applying or enforcing the law of the land according to the Constitution of the United States and to the law of the state in which they are employed; this is the proper application of “qualified” executive immunity—it is qualified by a jury’s assessment of reasonable compliance with the Constitution and laws of the relevant jurisdiction.

PART II: Government control over private commerce, INDIVIDUAL RESPONSILITY FOR INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS IS PARAMOUNT—

MONOPOLES & LICENSES FOREVER FORBIDDEN FOR ALL REASONS

(5)            No state or federal government shall license or grant a monopoly concerning any kind of human activity or behavior except for the enactment and modification of laws, enforceable in the courts of any individual state or the Federal Union.

(6)            Marriage, Law, and the ability of the people to defend themselves against all enemies, including the government: In particular, all licenses or state monopolistic practices concerning marriage, speech or expression concerning the law, sometimes known as “the practice of law”, and or restricting or limiting the private ownership of firearms, weapons, and personal property of any kind (including alcohol and drugs) are abolished and shall not be resuscitated under the guise of “regulation” or “public welfare prohibition” for any reason (but personal liability for the sale or prescription of harmful drugs shall forever be unlimited).

(7)            The States and Federal government may make laws reasonably regulating any species of human activity not constituting a fundamental right enumerated in the Bill of Rights, so long as no license or de facto monopoly is implied or created, and such laws reasonably regulating human activities are enforceable ONLY in the constitutional courts of the land—and no administrative courts without juries shall ever be erected or maintained by any state or the Federal government.

(8)            Fundamental rights include freedom of speech and of religion, broadly defined, the ownership of land and things as private property, free from government rents, including all manner of private expressive or associative conduct within the home or family.

(9)            No person shall be deprived of life or physical liberty for any activity concerning commerce, but all failures, frauds, deceits, and trickery shall be punishable according to sentences imposed by juries under the guidance of constitutional judges, and these offenses of failure, fraud, deceits, and trickery may result in debts extending to and collectible from a perpetrator’s family and associates which limit an individual’s associative, expressive, or economic liberty or commercial activities, including the right to own or acquire property except on behalf of victims of failures, frauds, deceits, and trickery, and may also result in banishment from a community and exile from the jurisdiction of a state or the Federal union.

(10)        Juries may also impose sentences of corporal or capital punishment or deprivation of physical liberty where commensurate with the offenses committed.

(11)        Prior to trial, persons accused of any sort of wrongdoing may be reasonably restrained in their physical liberty to preserve the jurisdiction of the courts, but such restraint shall be subject to the supervision of citizen juries empanelled to supervise all prisons and jails and systems of physical restraint.

(12)        Corporate and professional immunity of every kind is abolished.  The commercial and business advantages of pooling wealth or talent shall never again be allowed to interfere, as a matter of state or federal law, with the power of juries to find or assess individual responsibility against corporate owners, operators, directors, or employees, according to the facts as juries shall hear and decide them under the guidance of constitutional judges.

PART III:  WATER, AIR, and THE ENVIRONMENT—

THE COMMONS OR THINGS BELONGING TO ALL OR NO ONE

(13)        Water, Air, and other things in the environment, including animals or plants which have not been tamed, captured or reduced to domestication by humans, shall be called “the commons”, “the common wealth” and shall be understood as things belonging either to everyone or no one, and state and federal governments shall have the power to protect the commons according to the traditions of Anglo-Saxon or Roman law, according to the selection made in each state or the Federal government.

(14)        The damming of rivers (other than partial diversions of waterways for agricultural irrigation of arid lands), and the monopolization of acquifers or subterranean waters not exactly congruent with surface ownership of the land, shall be forbidden as a violation of the rights of all people; all now extant governmentally operated dams should be dismantled.

(15)        The ocean and large navigable lakes may sometimes be dammed to create more land, but such dams must be authorized by constitutionally enacted laws by the Federal or State legislatures.  Private persons may then acquire such reclaimed property from the government.  Otherwise, the ocean floor and bed of navigable lakes shall not be privately owned, but pollution or destruction of either shall be an offense against all people.

(16)        The private ownership of the surface waters of navigable rivers and lakes connected to navigable rivers and the ocean is abolished and shall be forever be forbidden.

(17)        Any claim to the private ownership of air is null and void.

(18)        Any and all pollution of the air or water shall be actionable by all injured parties in court without limitation to time of injury or amount of damages.

(19)        The government may engage, as may private persons, in industrially polluting activities such the operating and/or launching of motor vehicles, aircraft, and rockets, but individual liability for injury shall attach to any individually responsible governmental officers or employees, except that any otherwise responsible governmental officer or employee who can show that he was acting reasonably pursuant to a lawful legislative or judicial mandate shall be fully indemnified for his liability by the government for any assessment of liability by a constitutional jury or judge.

(20)        Governments shall not tax or otherwise attempt to redistribute income or property equally among the people, except with regard to the aforementioned restrictions on private ownership of air or water.

A slightly shorter summary came after thinking a little bit more about the “slings and arrows” I had mentioned before:

The degree to which I’ve been abused, attacked, and generally “jabbed” on a half-dozen various lefty-comsymp websites during the past year has hardened my resolve—this Country, and California in particular, is run by socialists.  Some of the laws they have passed, and policies they have instituted are truly reprehensible.   I have no idea how old California Civil Code Section 2924 is, but the entire California non-judicial foreclosure system authorizes theft of property under color of law, glorifying senseless destruction of homes and families and increasing economic instability as a matter of official state economic and judicial policy.   The worst anything can say about me is that I’m crazy and demented—even on the lunatic fringe perhaps—but nobody can call me an idiotic socialist… not without my fighting back anyhow…..

In MY version of America—there would be a restoration of all laws guaranteeing the security and stability of the home and of the family structure, of freedom to work and be productive and to compete, free of monopolistic licenses administered by the nation-state and state-corporate government for the benefit of their cronies only.   In general, state control over the economy and private life will be rolled back to a bare minimum, but this will be counterbalanced in favor of the individual by much stronger juries and more honest and independent judges.  Lawyers and litigants will never again be dependent for their livelihood on currying favor with or making campaign contributions to judges.  If there is to be a bar, it will be a voluntary private organization, like a Church or a labor union, and will impose private sanctions based upon the will of its members, not on the whim of modern day kings who wear black rather than red and ermine robes.   No one will ever again be compelled to be a member of any organization in order to have a job or hire people to work in one.  Everyone will be free to compete in every profession.  Each individual will shoulder more risk, but also more responsibility to learn and evaluate, because the state will no longer provide “welfare benefits” of authorizing its agents and supporters as the only competent individuals.  To the degree possible, the family will be free to be the core unit of the economy again, and no family will be forcibly broken up in the name of incredibly vague standards like “best interests of the child” administered by “Departments of Children and Families” (that’s the Florida name—I happen to be writing this from Florida)—as if Children and Families were the wards of the State, and existed ONLY by grace of the sovereign will….

If it is crazy, demented, and luny to think that the Family Courts, Banking system and the attorneys who support them in California and elsewhere in this Country are hopelessly corrupt and opposed to every core American value from initiative to pride in ownership, from “credit” based on productivity rather than normative conformity, then I am proud to be called a crazy, demented, lunatic in California.

The resistance which Steven D. Silverstein has mounted to my litigation against foreclosures and evictions in Orange County has convinced me that the laws of the State of California are the worst in the nation with regard to property ownership and financial foreclosures.

As in NO other state in the Union (except those like Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon which slavishly copy California Law), California law protects LIAR and CHEATS.

This has to stop: the immunity of liars whose lies are perfected by attorneys like Silverstein MUST be stopped.  The transformation of California from a state owned by the people to a state owned by international Banking Interests has to stop.

The degree to which economic activity in California is regulated in favor of big business is appalling and astonishing….every activity imaginable staggers the mind.  There are laws for everything in this state.

The reason I would like to run for Governor in this state is to use the Governorship, or much more likely, merely the candidacy for the Governorship, to serve as the “last refuge of free speech” to preach against the monopolistic power of government and the banking conglomerates acting in collusion.

There is nothing worse than the collusion of the banking and financial industries with the attorneys of the state of California and, not coincidentally, the judges of the California Superior Courts and the State Bar of California.

I look forward to hearing from you all…even if it’s only to tell me again how crazy I am for considering this.  I feel, in fact, that it is absolutely essential to have a literal and figurative platform from which to attack the banks and their “servicers” and the attorneys who support their activities, a platform from which I cannot be removed by judges and court bailiffs who deem me “out of order” or “in contempt of court” for failure to obey incompetent and improper, and wholly unconstitutional, judicial orders.

As Noted, I’ll be working on my campaign platform and candidate statement this week, but the basic elements, the key points that I would like to advance, will be as follows:

(1)      FIFTH AMENDMENT PRIVATE PROPERTY: Restore the sanctity of private property by limiting governmental (including both state, county, and local police and judicial) power to seize private property for private gain, as is the fundamental reality of mortgage foreclosure and eviction law in this state today.

(2)      COMMON LAW OBLIGATIONS OF CONTRACT TO BE SECURED AND GUARANTEED AGAINST STATE INTERFERENCE or PRIVATE ABROGATION AND DISREGARD:  All obligations obtained by contract shall be governed by privity of contract and the common law. All statutory provisions (such as California Civil Code 2924) which abrogate or interfere with the HONEST application of common law (which exalting the status of liars and thieves of every kind) should be deemed unconstitutional interference with the obligations of contract and should be stricken from the books either by judicial declaration or legislative fiat, or else the Governor should refuse to enforce or allow any state executive power, including county sheriffs, to enforce the provisions of this law.

(3)      STATE LICENSES & MONOPOLIES, INCLUDING THE MONOPOLY ON STATE VIOLENCE AND FORCE, AND ALL OFFICIAL IMMUNITIES, SHALL BE OPENED UP TO POPULAR REVIEW:  All state issued licenses, patents, and monopolies shall be reviewed for potential abolition by repeal or through judicial declaratory, or else the Governor should refuse to enforce or allow any state agency or executive power to enforce licensing provisions more than 180 days after the next governor takes office until a complete review has been committed and, in the interim, all state funding for the State Bar of California shall be impounded.  All statutes immunizing attorneys and judges from suit for any reason except the mere advocacy of legal positions or rendition of such legal decisions and opinions as are actually required to decide the core elements of cases and controversies over which a court has jurisdiction shall be removed and abolished by judicial declaration, legislative fiat, or executive refusal to uphold any such immunity.

(4)      FREEDOM OF CONTRACT AND PRIVATE PROPERTY ARE THE SUPREME VALUES OF THE STATE AND PEOPLE (ALL NON-ENVIRONMENTAL RESTRICTIONS ON COMMERCE and SUBSIDIES TO BUSINESS TO BE ABOLISHED):  All state restrictions on business and commerce, except those necessary to prevent the contamination of the environment by hazardous chemicals or industrial pollutants, shall immediately be suspended and subjected to review, but all defenses and limitations on liability for damages for personal injury shall be lifted in the courts of California, so that the ability of the people to defend themselves, rather than to seek governmental protection, shall be maximized.  The state as a corporate welfare organization shall cease to exist.  This Governor will approve no new contracts with any privately owned or corporate contractor who has done business with the state during the past eight years.

(5)      (ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES TO RETAIN SPECIAL STATUS): The environmental interests of the people of state of California shall be reevaluated according to the Ancient Anglo-Saxon theory of “the commons” and the Ancient Roman theories of res nullius and terra nullius. That which no person has captured may be protected by the state, but all things which have been reduced to private property shall be deemed as protectable ONLY as private property, and no expropriation of property shall be made by executive order implementing any state or federal law.

(6)      The official languages of California will be English and Spanish bilingually equal, on the Canadian model; programs shall be implemented for testing prospective voters on law and constitutional competence which will require a familiarity and knowledge of the law superior to any test now required for naturalization of foreign citizens.  No person shall be allowed to vote who cannot pass a written multiple choice test at least 180 questions long on the constitution and laws of the United States and California with a score of at least 120 or better out of 180.

(7)      All inmates in the prisons and mental health hospitals in California will be released except those convicted of murder, forcible rape, or assault; all persons incarcerated for financial crimes or drug crimes will be released pending evaluation of their ability to pay indemnity to their victims within a system of state supervised parole; the goal of eliminating post-trial incarceration will be explored in favor of options including corporal punishment (whipping or branding) and financial restitution for all injuries “every crime will sound in tort”).

(8)      The governor will refuse all attempts to enforce the United States Patriot Act or “Real ID” Act in the State of California.

(9)      The governor will propose to the legislature various provisions nullifying the unconstitutional laws enacted and adopted during the past thirty years by the federal government of the United States.  There will be a presumption of validity afforded to any law over 30 years old, except for all laws relating to the banking and financial industries, “the war on drugs”, and the collection of internal revenues.

I have set up a new e-mail: lincoln_for_california@rocketmail.com, and I invite anyone who cares to do so to write me there about whether they think I should run or not.  I am tending, right now, to think that I should run as an “independent” for Senator in the November Race.  California law (quite unfairly I think) seems to forbid anyone who loses in the Partisan primary elections from running as an Independent in the General Elections—but it’s not possible to challenge every single unfair or unreasonable law on every subject all of the time—I should know because I sometimes seem to try to do just that… Humans have just passed too many such laws…. for too long….and most people like their lack of reason…. So would I have a chance of getting my message across?  I already KNOW that I have at best a dismal chance of actually winning any statewide election, but I’m probably going to try….and I just need some “popular reaction and guidance”.  My son Charlie is wildly in favor of my running, but he’s only 17 and a half this month—he’ll be old enough to vote in November….. Most of my friends have said “yes I should”, most of my consultation clients ask if I’ll still have time to work with them if I run (yes I will….), and so far only one friend has said absolutely not, although a few haven’t answered/addressed the point at all.   Lucas D. Smith may have jumped the gun by saying it was a sure thing, but I’m definitely considering whether I was meant to be Prince Hamlet or not…Oh Cursed Spite….I think I might just have been born to set it right….or die trying…..

Death Came, as it must to all men, to Georges Kourembanas, my brother-in-law, age 51

I will say it again:

I have been an unworthy hypocrite to judge you; you and I were so much alike; you were always my brother; I shall miss you.

CEL III: Georges Kourembanas was a big man who loved his women, loved his dogs, loved his liquor and cigars, and was loved by all in turn.  He was strong and seemingly indestructible, but he just died at age 51.  How I resented him!  How I envied him!  How I hated him for his life of leisure and luxury living the last ten years of his life on Greek Islands in the Aegean and Cancun!  How I envied the fact that certain people loved and cared for him who could not love and would never care a fig for me!   How I wished that I were as physically strong as he was!   How I wished I had his life, and so, could any two males of the human species be less alike than me and my brother-in-law Georges, who died one week ago on Friday, January 22, 2010, at about 8-8:30 PM in Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico, at his home with his mistress Lena who called him “Daddy”, even though knowing that he was beloved by his wife Lisa?

Last Saturday January 30, 2010, Georges Kourembanas was laid to rest beside his father, Panagiotis Kourembanas, a Greek Orthodox Priest, who also died young (at 54, in 1984) in Detroit, Michigan, though both father and son were born in Athens, Greece.  His family all surrounded and mourned him during this past week, although he had literally been an exile, shunned or ignored by all but his Anglo-American wife Lisa, who collapsed at the graveside, his mother, who after 37 years in the United States speaks less English than most foreign secondary school pupils immediately after flunking their first year exams in English, and his sisters, one of whom is my wife from whom I have been estranged for 8 continuous years now and my son, whom she and the system hid from me until he broke through the barricades and found me.

Not having any memory of the heartaches associated with Georges during 1990-1999, my 17 year old son Charlie was very sad about his uncle Georges, who died at age 51, just about two weeks after his birthday in fact, which was January 9—he was born in 1959, one year, three months and one day older than I am now.  He was healthy, at least considering everything, he was a body-builder (contestant representing Greece in the Mr. Universe pageant in 1983), who later became addicted to steroids and then to crack cocaine, which caused his family (including me) no end of trouble and grief.  But he was a good natured and happy guy. “I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”, said Shakespeares’ Mark Anthony, “the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones, so let it be with Caesar.”  In Georges’ case, it seems almost exactly the opposite (his family cried and forgave him all his sins), except that I plan here to write the good, the bad, the ugly, and try to put it all in the context of the world that I think made him who and what he was, and how he and I, as unlike as any two people could be, in so many ways have travelled along similar and parallel paths…rather lonely, difficult paths in fact….

You see, Georges and I both became, in very distinctive ways, victims of American injustice and oppression and the corruption of the American government in the “land of the free.”  We were both deprived of our rights.  We were both made to seem less that ordinary worthy citizens, and we suffered from these unconstitutional offenses against us, as did our country which inflicted these offenses…

First I should quote what my son Charlie, born August 23, 1992 under windows taped with St. Andrews Crosses at St. Mary’s Hospital “Birth Place” in Palm Beach, Florida, during the early landfall of Hurricane Andrews, wrote about his Uncle—(The Following Paragraphs are Charlie’s epitaph for his uncle):

CEL IV: To me, to my mother, to his own mother, and to his wife and friends, Georges Kourembanas was a Great Man, he lived a life that in some ways was extraordinary, eccentric, perhaps unenviable, but many, including some who never met him, would agree that there was something Great about his heart and soul as well as his body—his physical strength.  His mother was my maternal grandmother, Neonina (aka “Nina”) Kourembanas.

One of the dearest of all God’s Saints to me is Saint George.   I grew up reading my Father’s English stories of St. George and the Dragon under the white and red flag of England, but St. George was also the Patron Saint of my mother’s native Greece with its universally recognized blue and white flag, but also of Aragon, thus triangulating Europe (and my parents’ lives—my mother from Greece, my father of Anglo-American heritage, but they met in Mexico, speaking Spanish).   One of the few things my parents ever agreed on was to celebrate St. George’s Day on April 23, and we used to go to Saint George’s Church on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, where there were dragonslayer windows made and set by George Comfort Tiffany (damaged but not destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, 2005).

My Uncle Georges, had a traditional Orthodox Greek icon of Saint George in his room above his bed.  One of my earliest memories with Georges was in the 90s when I went to a Karate Tournament.  I won by tapping my opponents head, Georges remembered that very well and reminded it to me many times; I imagine he was proud as he himself was a boxer who won “golden gloves” in several tournaments (he told me this when I was in Cancun during the summer of 2007).

If I were to describe my uncle Georges in one word it would be that which he told me ran in our blood, Spartan.

Beside mere physical ability strength Georges was one of the kindest men I have ever met, he would often tell me that he loved me with all his heart, and “Charlie I have a big heart.”

Together while spending the summer with Georges in Cancun during July and August of 2007 he decided to train me in body building for he was one of best bodybuilders in the world. During the 80s he was awarded Mr. Michigan three times consequently he went to Greece and became Mr. Greece then in the Mr Universe competition which he won 8^th place at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Georges Kourembanas was born in the Kingdom of Greece, son of an Orthodox Priest who married a model, so an unlikely start for a champion body builder. His Mother and Father immigrated to the United States in 1970 foreseeing the downfall of the Dictatorship of Papadoupoulous, and meeting up with George’s maternal Uncle John Samohin and George’s maternal Grandmother in Detroit, bringing both of Georges’ young sister, my mother Elena, with them (my aunt Alex was born in Detroit in 1973).

In the summer of 1974, after Georges had already started working out at the original PowerHouse Gym on Woodward St. in Detroit,  Georges went to Greece to visit with his parents and little sister Elena; there he witnessed the commotion in the streets of Athens during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

By 1980 Georges won “golden gloves” in boxing, having already won 1977 Teen Mr. Highlands 4^th Place, and several other teen bodybuilding awards.  After graduating from High School George went to Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1981 Georges won Mr. Michigan, then in 1982 he was awarded Mr. Michigan Most Muscular, and then in 1983 he won 1^st place Tall Mr. Michigan.

Since Georges was born in Greece, and could was not eligible to compete for the American title Mr. USA, so he went back to Greece to become Mr. Greece and to represent Greece in the 1984 Mr. Universe tournament in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace, where he took eighth place.

In 1984 Georges and his family suffered the loss of his Father, Panagiotis (aka “Peter”) Kourembanas; who was a Greek Orthodox Priest and fell of a heart attack while delivering the Good Friday Sermon in Toronto, Canada (Detroit and Toronto form part of the same Orthodox Diocese, or at least they did back then).

Georges by this time had already come to be known as ‘The Greek’ in many parts of Detroit. He met his future wife Lisa Ann Cook in 1983/4.  She was a beauty queen and a body builder herself—they were quite a striking couple.

Like so many athletes, I’m afraid that my uncle succumbed to the temptation of “enhancement” drugs, i.e., steroids, and unfortunately for him this led to other kinds of “substance abuse” with consequences I think my father will write more about below.  Drugs are apparently sold on credit—but since repossession of collateral to users is rarely an option, collection techniques tend to be significantly more than dunning letters followed by notices of default and acceleration.

In connection with one deal gone bad, Georges was shot on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1990, in the head through the ear, a bullet that he would carry with him to his death, and while still conscious he protected himself, left the area in his 1987 Camaro, and instead of going to the hospital right away he drove, with blood squirting out of head, to Lisa under the impression that he was going to die. When Lisa saw him she convinced him to go to the hospital where he spent about a week not knowing wheather he would survive or not. By the Grace/Protection of God Georges said he survived.

Georges was shot again in Austin on Christmas morning 1990—he carried some of the bullets he got on those two occasions to his grave, but God had other plans for him than to die a victim of crime.  Instead, Georges died a victim of injustice, American injustice, and that’s where my father is going to take over and write the rest of this.  I can say very little more, except that my whole family have cried every night since he died, and I have lost one of my best friends, one of the few people who remained loyal both to my Father and Mother (along with his wife Lisa) during their long divorce and fighting.

CEL III: I confess that there was a time when I felt my brother in law was a terrible burden, an imposition, a weight sinking my life which I could not bear.  I blamed my wife and mother-in-law for what I called their “Co-Dependence” on Georges during his steroid abuse and crack-cocaine addiction years.  Today as we all remember him, I will try to forget the bitterness that I once felt—the unjust accusations I once made that he was the breaking factor in my marriage to Elena—because it was obviously our fault and no one else’s—oh well, perhaps some fault can be laid at the doors of “the system”, some of its judicial officers and agents, and particularly one false and treacherous Hungarian archaeologist ex-friend of mine, perhaps they were to blame also, but not Georges—Georges was true blue—flawed but stained if by anything then only with his own blood, and his own human frailty—yes, frailty, for all that he was strong enough to tear phonebooks apart.

Most of the substances which constitute modern illegal drugs have been known to man since the dawn of time….at least since the beginning of civilization. Some modern drugs, like “LSD” the favorite of so many young people in the 1960s-70s, and “Crack”–the synthetic form of Cocaine which became popular in the 1980s, and to which Georges eventually became addicted, are artificial, but clearly the need for mind-numbing intoxicants and poisons is one of the “discontents” of civilization to which Sigmund Freud so often referred.

In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, a substance called “Soma” was rationed out to all people liberally—without any of the side effects of alcohol or other drugs.  The importance of drugs to the 19th century British Empire is epitomized by the “Opium Wars” which forced drugs on an isolationist China.  The importance of drugs to the 20th century American Empire is punctuated by the events of 1919, during which year the United States acquired the patent for Heroin and Bayer Aspirin from Germany as part of the Treaty of Versailles, at the same time that the United States passed the 18th Amendment imposing the Prohibition so definitive of the 1920s, and the origins of both organized crime and the earliest formation of a Federal Police State in the United States of America.  There are those who say that William Randolph Hearst was responsible for making George Washington’s favorite crop—Cannabis Sativa illegal in the 1930s to protect his own interest in synthetic fiber ropes, but the true beneficiaries of the suppression of marijuana were each and every police department and above all the FBI, DEA, and ATF organs of the Federal government, which grew and maximized their power with every new “commercial” regulation of drugs in violation of the constitutional liberties of the people.

Psychoactive or narcotic drugs have been used throughout history, and alcohol is still used without prescription to this day.  So I have asked myself, since I was a small child, how is it that opium aristocratically inspired so many poets and other historical figures from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Cardinal Richlieu, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allen Poe only to become an abomination forbidden by law in modern times….all over the Americas and Europe….

The reason to me is obvious: government cannot thrive except by forbidding and monopolizing that which people crave.  The earliest example of this in the history of the United States is the play of righteous emotions similar to those I confessed, at the start of this post, to feel about my brother-in-law Georges: envy and resentment of what others have.  The War Between the States in the years 1861-1865 was about many things, but one of them was the envy and resentment of the Northern Whites who prided themselves on hard work and self-sacrifice against the more indulgent, hedonistic, and languid slave-owners of the Southern white world.

The 13th Amendment forbade slavery or involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime”—and from the day of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox until the present day, the prison population of the United States of America has grown until it is the largest in the world (relative to the population of the country as a whole) and the absolute number of incarcerated, paroled and otherwise judicially restrained black people now exceeds the number of African-American slaves in 1860 (and the number of white prisoners, parolees, and probationers exceeds the entire population of the American Colonies in 1776).

Three years before the secession of South Carolina on December 20 1860 through the secession of Texas on February 1, 1861, the United States Supreme Court, per Chief Justice Taney, handed down a significant decision in a case called Scott v. Sanford (1857) which decided, among many other things, that one state could not declare to be illegal a form of property which was legal in others, as a matter of comity, due process of law, and many other reasons.  The “due process” reasoning of Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in “the Dred Scott” case is still worth reading, although the memory of the 19th century’s most deadly and devastating war, three constitutional amendments, and many generations of civil rights litigation have otherwised tarnished the memory of the only U.S. Supreme Court case which can ever be said to have had an effect more disastrous than the Judgment of Paris….

So the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery or involuntary servitude EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME, and all of a sudden, the U.S. Criminal Codes started to expand exponentially—because civilized society will apparently not exist without slaves.  Having abolished one species of private property by war and constitutional amendment, the United States Government in the 20th Century started to regulate all manner of commerce and private property, which caused much unhappy spinning in the graves of the Founding Fathers.  Worst of all, the 1920s saw the triumph of the First Prohibition, in which the constitution was amended to forbid the sale of alcohol.  Having proved to be the worst experiment in the moralistic legislative history of the human race, Prohibition of Alcoholic Liquors was repealed in December  of 1933, but it was almost immediately replaced by utterly unconstitutional restraints on drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, opium, and all their derivatives.  The “commerce clause” justification for the federal regulation of drugs is a farce, one of the cruelest hoaxes ever played on a free people, but to explain why no American Patriot would ever suggest that George Washington should have ploughed under his profitable “rope” crop would just be to go too far astray from this story, which is still about my brother-in-law, Georges Kourembanas.

The bottom line, to my mind, is that Government wanted to expand its power, and Government DID expand its power, by controlling what people have always naturally desired and craved: narcotic and psychoactive drugs.  The “War on Drugs”, since the phrase was coined by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in an attempt to fill the prisons of his state and build more, but especially since this “War” was adopted by Richard Nixon whose advisors told him not merely to make “detente” with Communist China, but also to start emulating its policies of mass incarceration, has operated as one of the largest slavery-cum-corporate welfare programs in the history of the world.  Vast numbers of unemployed youths, skillful middle-aged businessmen, and entrepreneurs of every kind have, since about 1966, been swept into prison through coerced plea agreements engineered by a cabal of licensed attorneys and the judges who love and control them together with the corporate franchises which fund all of them, and between 1-2% of the American population is now locked into slavery from which escape is much less likely, and emancipation much more stringently regulated, than Antebellum slavery ever was in the South.

Computers mean that tracking of “escaped slaves” is much more certain and recapture much more likely than it ever was in the days of the “underground railroad”—and of course, all middle class whites, Northern and Southern, Eastern and Western, rejoice in the burgeoning population of the prisons until they or their relatives end up in the trap—at which time it’s just “too bad, so sad” that the privileged middle class population never learned that “none can be free until all are free.”

White America loves the “war on drugs” and the explosion of prison population which has accompanied it.  African and Hispanic Americans can be disproportionately incarcerated for the most trivial crimes, and the most uppity and enterprising white people are likewise incarcerated or threatened with incarceration whenever they get to “uppity” and/or “big for their britches”—unless of course, they are part of the truly immunized elite inner circle.  Entrepreneurial spirit and individual initiative rot in prisons—but corporate values flourished and corporate subservience is instilled in prison, in case you missed the lessons or ignored them in U.S. Elementary-High School (or for that matter in British schools whether portrayed by Dickens or in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”).  Every indication is that President Barack Hussein Obama fully intends to crush every relic of American freedom that exists, and enforce a rigid conformity to his plans by ever expanding the powers of government through Homeland Security and more and more prisons, private and/or public. Guantanamo will eventually be closed, of course, and replaced by prisons inside the U.S. where indefinite detention without trial will be permitted and the Writ of Habeas Corpus lost forever.

But this is the unjust world reality which trapped and destroyed Georges Kourembanas during the years 1990-2000 and, more than any other single factor, caused his death in exile, however luxurious, in Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico on January 22, 2010.

You see, Georges, as noted above, was not born in the United States.  He was accepted and respected as an American in Michigan for years, as so many immigrants have been.  But Georges never gave up his Greek passport—he was content with a “Green Card” (as was his sister, my wife, throughout our marriage—although since our separation she has apparently gotten a Blue American Passport and given up her Democratia Hellinika-E.C. Diabaterio which I always thought was so neat….).  Well, at the very least, she’s voting now…..I’m not quite sure about all that….but I digress…

Georges Kourembanas was (unsurprisingly) arrested several times during his years “under the influence.”  In this he differed little from another fellow named George who just happened to be governor of Texas in 1999.  Aside from the natural class-based consequences of having an Orthodox Priest rather than a U.N. Ambassador and CIA Director for a Father, Georges Kourembanas’ life was little less accomplished than George W. Bush’s.  But as George W. Bush was riding on the modern American prison-based slave-ocracy and its attendant envies and corruptions, Georges Kourembanas was arrested and the government of his adopted land sought his deportation.   There is no “exile” for American citizens who misbehave, but there is deportation for legal residents who do the same or less.  Literally HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS bordering on MILLIONS of Hispanics are imprisoned throughout the United States for nothing much more than job hunting and maybe then getting drunk (and stopped) on a Saturday night.

I have often said that if Mexico were to imprison rowdy Americans in Cancun, Acapulco, and Mazatlan at the same rate that Mexicans are rounded up in the United States, that the United States would invade Mexico and bring about the North American Union immediately, without further delay or debate.  I also think to myself that there is no real contradiction between building a big prison-like unescapable/uncrossable fence along the Mexican border and proposed a North American Union, because the corporate powers of the United States would like nothing better than to convert Mexico into one gigantic prison-labor camp from which workers could be employed or removed as market conditions should necessitate.  If the politicians of Mexico had any pride….things would be different, but they are mostly former employees of American Corporations such as Coca-Cola, so it hardly matters.

“Moral Turpitude” is what makes people like Georges Kourembanas deportable.  ”Moral Turpitude” is a concept as amorphous as “original sin” which Immigration Courts use to send “undesirables” back from whence they came.  Was Georges Kourembanas less desirable than George W. Bush?  In my opinion, and probably in the opinion of hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans around the world at least from Iraq-to Afghanistan, there is really no comparison or competition at all.  Georges Kourembanas as a man who loves his women, loves, his dogs, and loved his liquor, and never hurt anyone.  ”No one died when Clinton lied” was one of my favorite Bush-era bumper-stickers.

Georges family—my in-laws—took good care of him at the same time that they shunned me as my marriage to his sister resolved itself into a dew.  Care packages and love and visits flowed from Austin to Athens during the early 2000s after Georges took “voluntary departure” instead of deportation—he could have contested deportation but he would have stayed in jail for God knows how long while he did, and he was never convicted of anything which the Greek authorities thought worthy of note.  After a year or so in Athens Georges eventually settled in a Lemon grove amid olive and fig trees on a little island in the Aegean.  He lived there with Lena his mistress while his wife Lisa and his mother and sister and even my son visited him de temps en temps.

I am sure he was lonely and bored living there in a fruit orchard, but his family took care of him, so he never had to work, and I did envy him his existence no end.  I lived along during the years 2002-2007, but I talked to Georges’ American wife Lisa—sometimes almost daily, sometimes only once a week, recently (especially since I left Texas in 2007) not quite so often.  But Georges and Lisa talked to me and helped me keep up with news about my son when the truly criminal state domestic relations courts of Williamson County, Texas, took my son away from me.  So I got to know Georges better and talked to him more often by telephone during those years than I ever had when he lived in the United States.  And yes, Georges was a very kind, good, and big-hearted man, and he always assured me that my son loved me and missed me—and he was obviously telling me the truth.

His wife Lisa?  Well, I have often written that Georges and Lisa were like Tristan and Isolde—always separated, always longing for each other.  Lisa was the ideal loyal and patient wife, in every way tolerant of Georges and his needs (including his need for a permanent female companion on the other side of the Atlantic).  In spite of the situational peculiarities, I think that they really did love each other on an epic, Wagnerian level which few can understand.  Lisa supported Georges, assisted occasionally by my wife Elena and her mother Nina, not so much by any of the other Greek relatives on this side of the Atlantic, except possibly for Tia Maria whom I only met a few times at her home in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City.  Lisa, like Georges, had a huge heart, great compassion and almost boundless love, at the same time that she became physically weak due to breast-implant poisoning caused by Dow Pharmaceauticals.  She was as much a victim of the American Corporate love-hate affair with drugs, in that sense, as Georges himself.  But Lisa was my true and steadfast friend and through her love for Georges I came to care for my brother-in-law more than I ever dreamed I could have.  My wife Elena always resents the fact that Lisa (alone among my in-laws) supported me in my quest for custody of my son, and she sometimes quotes hatefully and sarcastically how I called Lisa my “Rock of Gibraltar”, but I stand by my evaluation.  I know of no one truer and more loyal and steadfast than Lisa Ann Cook, and Georges was the luckiest man alive to have the love and generous acceptance and tolerance and support of such a wonderful woman, who never judged others but always tried to understand why those who inflicted harm on her might have done so.   In this, she was the truest of true Christians.

So Georges was strong, likable if not downright lovable, and yet he was caught up in currents of history which rendered his life difficult, a struggle, almost impossible.  He was “a man without a country”—never quite American enough to give up his Greek passport while he was living here throughout the nearly thirty years from 1970-1999.  Georges Kourembanas was a three-time “Mr. Michigan” (different awards) who represented Greece in the “Mr. Universe” competition in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He was determined to be a morally turpitudinous undesirable by the same government which created first the demand for drugs and then the war against drugs as a means of maximizing governmental power and control over the population at large.

Was America made any safer or more morally upstanding by deporting my brother-in-law?  No, definitely not—America became poorer and probably more dangerous—indeed, almost certainly more dangerous, because every person removed against his will is another person whose destroyed life is a feather-in-the cap of brutal authoritarianism in America.

Several members of my family-in-law feel so very sad and guilty that they did not do more for Georges during his lifetime.  My main suggestion that may have improved his life was that he relocated from Greece to Cancun, and was closer to his family during the last several years of his life as a consequence.  I had intended to spend lots of time with Georges in Cancun (en mi Mexico lindo y querido), but for several reasons that never happened.

One of those reasons, of course, was the troubles I had during these same years with the same American government which oppressed my brother—yes, in that he was not just my brother in law, but my brother.   I too had to struggle with charges of ridiculously trivial criminality (I never did drugs—at least I have never done them as a mature adult—that wasn’t my problem—I had plenty of others—when I was indicted (coincidentally in December 1999, shortly after Georges took his involuntary departure) my pre-trial release officer finally stopped giving me the degrading urine tests because they were just pointless).

I too had to struggle with questions of moral turpitude and the significance of such charges for my professional life.  I had had such a fine education and opportunities unparalleled in most people’s lives.  I was very lucky.  But in 1997 I had stood up to the system and sued my local police department for not one but 7-9 instances of police brutality, corruption, and civil rights violations.  And at that point, all-of-a-sudden, my previously essentially dull and blameless life became “morally turpitudinous” and I became in the eyes of many critics an “incompetent attorney.”

So if Georges Kourembanas can hear me—if he has crossed the River Styx—or if he is standing somewhere in the upper levels of limbo or purgatory, I hope he will hear my apology for my hypocrisy in criticizing him, in thinking myself superior to him, in believing that my education was in any way superior to his physical strength and good heart (even though his physical heart finally gave out on him, much too soon).  I apologize to him that I could introduce him to the Quintana Roo and Yucatan and Mexico and Belize that I know and love, because I think it would have made his last few years so much better than just hanging around the beach and hotel zone of Cancun.  He and I were both victims of some of the very same authoritarian and repressive forces in the United States in Texas which reached their political apogee in the years after 1993-6.  He and I were both victims of the streamlining and mass production of criminal prosecutions in the United States which all have, as Ayn Rand predicted so many years ago, the sole purpose of rendering us all “criminals” just waiting to be arrested here “in the land of the free” or any of the formerly freedom-loving countries of Europe or the Americas.

Georges and I are also victims of some of the same personal and familial situations.  Now in his epitaph I will not speculate here on what any members of his family could have done for him that they did not, because all I know for sure is that they loved him more than me, so very much more, in spite of all his flaws, and since he was blood, I suppose I can forgive them that.   But in the midst of all that I think he was ten times blessed to have Lisa as his wife and lifetime companion and supporter.   The bottom line is that our two lives, so different, as that of my late brother-in-law and my own, were actually parallel in terms of the circumstances of our “exile” from society.  I still envy him for all the love he enjoyed, and up to a point, I even envy him his early death in Mexico.  Sometimes I wish that I had died, when I had the chance, ten years ago in Egypt.  But I apparently had a purpose to live, and for that reason I do continue to live, and breath, and fight, and remember the pointless injuries done to Georges, my brother-in-law, my brother-in-suffering, and my brother-in-the sometimes loneliness of exile.

Two years ago, today, on Groundhog Day 2008—I emerged from a Black Hole!

I want to thank Bill Trudelle, Nancy Jo Grant, Jerry O’Neil, Peyton Yates Freiman, Bob Hurt, and my son Charlie who have all been so steadfast since the occasions, transactions, and occurrences giving rise to this web-blog transpired.   The 54 days preceding the last two years were among the roughest and strangest of my life.  They have changed my thinking about life and will continue to govern my thoughts until the day I die.  While in Federal Custody I saw a great deal of injustice and met very few if any people I feared or disliked.  The most frightening person (by appearance) was Vance Fecteau the day he and I were arrested in Los Angeles.  He looked AWFUL and I’m not quite sure why.  He turned out to be one of the nicest people I have ever met.  Vance Fecteau and Moshe Leichner were so completely and totally selfless and devoted to sharing in circumstances which would make most people selfish and bitter.  Although it is almost impossible to maintain contact with people “on the inside” when you’re “out”—especially when you’re working hard to rebuild a life—I have never forgotten and will never forget those two amazing men—MDC Los Angeles and the Grady County Jail.  I think ALL AMERICANS need to spend a few days in Jail—just to understand how evil and inhuman incarceration really is.  We all need to know and make friends with FELONS so that we will realize how trivial the criminal laws of this country is.   The men with whom I dined at MDC Los Angeles were among the highest calibre and most interesting group of people I have met in one place outside of the Harvard Faculty Club, Chicago’s Hutchinson Common, and the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C..  The world is upside down, time is out of joint—and cursed spite that I was born to set it right!   The United States needs to open the doors to its prisons and tear them down, or else convert them into hotels or high security storage—for objects, not people.   NONE CAN BE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE!

To Judge Janice Graham Jack and Judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern District of Texas I say: “thank you for the privilege of seeing my country’s Heart of Darkness.”    I hope that the opening of the jails in the United States will happen and be celebrated like Bastille Day in France, with much the same symbolism and jubilation.  I pray every day for a revolution in this country—a revolution through the ballot box and the legislatures—so that only impure blood will stain the land of these United States (in the spirit and words of “La Marseilleise”).

I give thanks on Groundhog Day for my present freedom and enlightenment about reality which came to me in the bowels of the Federal System, being kept in caches dragged around like a lame dog in iron chains for 54 days for some Texas Judge’s amusement and the satisfaction of her power.  I will never forget those days.  I will never forget those people.  I will never forget that America incarcerates millions of its own people, and of the people of neighboring countries who came here only, like my ancestors, looking for a better life.   It is the welfare system that draws them all here—the notion that government can save everyone from harm and protect everyone from injury.  But if the price of governmental welfare and security is a nation of jails and prisons, I say let us all take our chances and all the risks that come from breathing free air!  Let us all dismantle our police departments and throw away all their high-tech Patriot-act funded surveillance gear.  Let us go back to a time where we are each our own and our brother’s keepers.  Let us live as free women and men and punish ONLY those who would take our liberties from us.  Let us teach our children to love and not to fear, to nurture and not depend on their fellows, their brothers and sisters, who are in need.   Let us all take our lives in our own hands and banish thoughts of fear and the degradation that has come to us from building bigger and “better” (meaning more secure, less “escapable”) prisons.

NONE CAN BE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE!

January 24, 2010: Boy Scouts-1908, Casablanca-1943, Churchill-1965, Ted Bundy-1989

Today in History — Sunday, Jan. 24 (Stephanie Romanov/Lilah Morgan on Angel)

By The Associated Press

Today is Sunday, Jan. 24, the 24th day of 2010. There are 341 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Jan. 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered a gold nugget at Sutter’s Mill in northern California, a discovery that led to the gold rush of ’49.   Now “All the Gold in California” has been outlawed as ordinary currency, so that somehow the Constitutional mandate that only gold and silver be used as tender for all debts, public and private, has been precisely turned on its head, yet no one seems to care.

On this date:

In 1742, Charles VII was elected Holy Roman Emperor during the War of the Austrian Succession.  The Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling last week, held that large corporations and millionaires will be entitled to spend all that they want on future “wars of succession” in the United States.

In 1908, the Boy Scouts movement began in England under the aegis of Robert Baden-Powell.   I was a Cub Scout who made it into Webelos, but never into a full Boy Scout.  My Charlie son started as a Bear (I had started as a wolf, the year before) but made it into full Boy Scout-hood.  It is ironic to think of the conceptual relationship between Scouting and “Hitler Youth” and various communistic youth groups, as Baden-Powell’s own name seemed to transcend the Anglo-Germanic cultural and linguistic line.

In 1924, the Russian city of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad in honor of the late revolutionary leader. (However, it has since been renamed St. Petersburg.)   No country has ever gone through 75 year convulsion back and forth anything like what Russia experienced moving from Tzarist rule at the beginning of 1917 through the foundation and elaboration of Soviet Communism in the LEAST developed nations of Europe to the final collapse of that system by 1992.  Yes, 75 years that saw several levels of civilization wiped out and rebuilt over the corpses of millions.  Not as bad or brutal as the cultural revolution in China, the irony is that China is now generally seen as the more successfully capitalistic of the two countries that (when I was a kid) were emblematic of the struggle for world communism.  If had to be a Russian and could choose, I think I would have liked to have lived as an adult in the first quarter of the 20th century, because the hopes and aspirations of revolutionary communism were so noble, before the horrors of the Stalinist purges wiped out all illusions of communist decency.   Trotsky was the last decent communist, but he died at the hands of  Stalin’s agents in Mexico City during August of 1940, one year after the Stalin-Hitler Pact.  Trotsky had fled and finally settled in Mexico after being expelled from the Communist Party after Stalin’s rise to power.  As summarized in Wikipedia (as the entry existed at 9:00 pm on Monday, January 25, 2010)(I appreciate the commentator who pointed out that in my original version I had mistakenly given the year of Trotsky’s death as 1938—sorry folks, I do these things from memory and I wasn’t thinking—I wonder how many college students in the United States today know anything about Trotsky or the Socialist Internationals or for that matter, how many college students or other Americans can recall or imagine what Mexico City was like before it was choked by overpopulation and automotive pollution.

My grandparents visited regularly from the 1920s-1980s described it as one of the most climatically perfect spots on earth—until about the year I was born, unfortunately, so I never saw it that way either, although they continued to visit the opera there until the year after my grandfather died—they knew Placido Domingo when he was a student at the Conservatorio Nacional de la Musica in Polanco, Mexico City, in the 1950s and were instrumental in bringing him to Dallas, where he performed in the Dallas Civic Opera in 1961—they took me to New York when I was 8 for his Metropolitan Opera Debut…I later became a great fan of Domingo myself and think he has far outshown Pavrotti and Carreras throughout his career….especially in his performances of Wagnerian opera, of which, ironically enough, anti-Fascist Leon Trotsky was supposedly a great fan):

As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky’s ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a term coined as early as 1905 by his opponents in order to separate it from Marxism. Trotsky’s ideas remain a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. He was one of the few Soviet political figures who were never rehabilitated by the Soviet administration.

(But to return from this lengthy digression to the historical record for January 24….):

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill concluded a wartime conference in Casablanca, Morocco.

In 1965, Winston Churchill died in London at age 90.

In 1978, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite, Cosmos 954, plunged through Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated, scattering radioactive debris over parts of northern Canada.

In 1985, the space shuttle Discovery was launched from Cape Canaveral on the first secret, all-military shuttle mission.

In 1987, gunmen in Lebanon kidnapped educators Alann Steen, Jesse Turner and Robert Polhill and Mitheleshwar Singh. (All were eventually released.)

In 1989, confessed serial killer Theodore Bundy was executed in Florida’s electric chair.   People like Ted Bundy definitely make capital punishment seem like an attractive option, but there is some irony that rare serial killers and their execution are such iconic events in the history of mankind, while the mass imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, of other Americans hardly makes the news at all.  The Federal government can indict and convict almost anyone of almost anything, because the Federal prosecutors so closely control the grand juries and Federal Judges so closely control the petit juries that independent thought among jurors is probably rarer than death by drowning in showers….  Anglo-American juries were historically not so impotent, and all Americans should reflect on what can be done to restore the power of juries.   I have very little that’s good to say about the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but he does consistently favor restoration of power to juries.  Of course, he probably does so only because of a slavish dedication to popular and legislative choice and decisions that it is almost impossible to find a legislatively enacted statute which is so bad as to be found “unconstitutional” in Scalia’s eyes.

In 2003, Tom Ridge was sworn in as the first head of the new Department of Homeland Security.  The spirits of the Stalin’s NKVD and Himmler’s SS were present at this inauguration, and they applauded loudly.   Nothing should be higher on any Patriotic American’s list of national priorities than the abolition of Homeland Security and most of its components and powers, as well as the full and 100% repeal of the 2001 Patriot Act (as amended through this day) and its predecessor the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which together have all but outlawed the Constitution, not only for the living, but I discovered today, even for the dead: corpses and other “human remains” entering the United States are controlled and regulated by Homeland Security and private parties cannot arrange such transportation—only government licensed funeral homes!  We live in a Maoist version of America—and this particular amendment to the Patriot Act and the powers of Homeland Security was only enacted 7 months ago, according to what they told me at “Delta Care” (the division of Delta/Northwest Airlines that is responsible for the “cargo” transportation of “human remains”…..).  As Ronald Reagan said, and as I always quote: “The most terrifying phrase in the English language is: ‘we’re from the government and we’re here to help you.’”  RUN do not walk when you hear any version of those who support such policies…..

Ten years ago: Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore posted victories in the Iowa caucuses.

Five years ago: Authorities in Iraq said Sami Mohammed Ali Said al-Jaaf, an al-Qaida lieutenant in custody, had confessed to masterminding most of the car bombings in Baghdad.

The United Nations broke with years of protocol and commemorated the 60-year anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, directly linking its own founding with the end of the Holocaust in some of the strongest language ever.   This is, I think, a very real direct link.  It is not too much to say that the Nazi Holocaust is the foundation for modern Globalist “Religion.”  It is the credo and the sanctus of the modern political “eucharist” of Thanksgiving for Globalism and World Peace.    The U.N., of course, is the Agnus Dei (lamb of God) that taketh away the sins of the world by enforcing world uniformity and peace.    The Communist Chinese Government of Mao Tse Tung replaced the Free Chinese remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek on Taiwan in 1971 thanks to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s efforts. Despite the nominal commitment of the United States in general and the Republican Party in particular to the defeat of world communism, the man who was then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations states as follows:

Ambassador George H. W. Bush: “Fellow Delegates, the issue is clearly marked now: inclusion or expulsion; impartiality or one-sided and arbitrary punishment. If this is not an important question, what is?”

Was George H.W. Bush a “sleeper” agent for the Communists?  His career and that of his son can be described in large part as the arc of the final triumph of Globalist Internationalism in the United States over the isolationist patriotism of Senator Barry Goldwater who proposed again in 1971 that the United States withdraw from the U.N. or at least cut all funding.   Nixon and Kissinger created and sponsored the political career and advancement of Ambassador George H.W. Bush.  Goldwater created and advanced the career of Governor Ronald Reagan, but when Reagan became President, it was the Nixon-Bush “moderate” approach which seemed to dominate the government, and prevent Ronald Reagan from keeping any part of his 1980 campaign promises to turn back the disastrous effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.   Richard Nixon had started out his political career as a virulent anti-communist but achieved his plaee in history by legitimizing Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai, the greatest criminal murders in world history, whose least effective and lowest henchmen make Ted Bundy look like one of Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts…. much (I feel certain, without knowing for sure) to the misery of Winston Churchill’s ghost…..accompanied by much spinning in the grave….

One year ago: Pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who safely landed a crippled US Airways jetliner in the Hudson River, received a hero’s homecoming in Danville, Calif. President Barack Obama met with his economic advisers after asking Americans to support his economic package as a way to better schools, lower electricity bills and health coverage for millions who lose insurance. Brazilian model Mariana Bridi, 20, died after contracting an infection that forced doctors to amputate her hands and feet.  Alissa Czisny won the women’s title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Cleveland. Katie Stam of Indiana was crowned Miss America.

Today’s Birthdays: Actor Ernest Borgnine is 93.  I will always remember him as Quentin McHale in McHale’s Navy—always one of my favorites as the son of a Navy man and the grandson of another who made worldwide shipping safer and cleaner….

Actor Jerry Maren (“The Wizard of Oz”) is 91. Actor Marvin Kaplan (“Top Cat”) is 83. Cajun musician Doug Kershaw is 74. Singer-songwriter Ray Stevens is 71.

Singer-songwriter Neil Diamond is 69. Singer Aaron Neville is 69. Actor Michael Ontkean is 64. Actor Daniel Auteuil is 60. Country singer-songwriter Becky Hobbs is 60.

Comedian Yakov Smirnoff is 59. Bandleader-musician Jools Holland is 52. Actress Nastassja Kinski is 51.

Rhythm-and-blues singer Theo Peoples is 49. Country musician Keech Rainwater (Lonestar) is 47. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan is 44. Comedian Phil LaMarr is 43.

Olympic gold medal gymnast Mary Lou Retton is 42.  I will never forget her performance and personality in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics if I live to be 120 years old….

Actress Stephanie Romanov (Lilah Morgan on Angel) is 41. Rhythm-and-blues singer Sleepy Brown (Society of Soul) is 40. Actor Matthew Lillard is 40.

Actress Merrilee McCommas is 39. Actor Ed Helms is 36. Actress Tatyana Ali is 31. Rock musician Mitchell Marlow (Filter) is 31. Actress Mischa Barton is 24.

Thought for Today: “God gives us relatives; thank God, we can choose our friends.” — Addison Mizner, American architect (1872-1933). It’s not necessarily the same thought, though it’s related, but my grandmother always used to say that the police really shouldn’t investigate or prosecute interfamily murders at all, “because if next of kin don’t know who deserves to live or die, nobody does.”  I think Oscar Wilde might have been sympathetic to this philosophical position…..

Robert E. Lee’s Birthday (and Edgar Allen Poe’s)

Today is Tuesday, Jan. 19, the 19th day of 2010. There are 346 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Jan. 19, 1960, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America was signed by both countries in Washington, D.C. (Domestic opposition to the treaty led to the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi (nah-boo-soo- keh kee-shee)).

On this date:

In 1807, Confederate general Robert E. Lee was born in Westmoreland County, Va.; until sometime in the 1960s, or possibly even the early 1970s, January 19 was a holiday celebrated in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia and many other states formerly belonging to the Confederate States of America.  When I was a law clerk in West Palm Beach in 1992-1993, the people of Okechobee, Florida, and several other inland “Cracker” towns were famous for still celebrating the (by then unofficial) birthday of one of West Point’s finest graduates, who built the first levees along the Mississippi River and was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  My good college friend John K. Naland, now of the U.S. State Department, had the honor of serving in the same U.S. Army First Company, First Division, First Army, of which Captain Robert E. Lee was once commander.  The college fraternity called “KA of the South” at Tulane when I was an undergraduate still had Full-Dress (Confederate Officer Grey) Uniformed Parades with their little sisters in southern belle costume on this day around the statute of General Lee, eternally facing north, at the center of Lee Circle on St. Charles in New Orleans, right around the block from Confederate Memorial Hall, where Jefferson Davis was laid to rest in 1893.  It is a great historical museum, and is now adjacent to both the Museum of Southern Art and the World War II (formerly D-Day) Museum.  And yes, my great great grandfather and his brothers all fought with General Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and one of them (“Wolf”) was wounded and lay on the battle field for 3 days, until he was taken to a Northern P.O.W. hospital camp, where he was healed and ultimately released, in New York, where he got a job at the Bank of New York, and was then transferred back to New Orleans where he met and married an Acadienne (Cajun) girl of French and Native American (Tunica-Biloxi) descent.  His son (my great-grandfather Benjanmin) became a state Judge.  My grandmother Helen grew up in the most amazing cultural melange of Southern Confederate Nostalgic Patriotism, adoringly Francophone/Francophile  heritage, and Post-Reconstruction mixed racially prejudiced and ambiguously ethical and arrogant.  She inherited her grandfather’s blue eyes and pale skin along with her grandmother’s straight black and thick hair, and told stories about how she was afraid that she would be separated from her fair-haired sisters and ordered to the “back of the bus” or trains in the same state that required 1/8 African = 7/8 White “Octaroon” Homer Adolph Plessy to ride in the back of the St. Charles streetcar.  New Orleans up until about 1880 had known no such thing as de jure segregation, even though it had started up in other parts of the South after the War as the defeated whites tried to protect themselves and their heritage.  Such things are now called “invidious racism” when performed by whites, but cheered as justifiable and laudable “ethnic pride and heritage” by all other groups.

In 1809, author, poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston.

In 1853, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Il Trovatore” premiered in Rome.

In 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union.

In 1937, millionaire Howard Hughes set a transcontinental air record by flying his monoplane from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.

In 1955, a presidential news conference was filmed for television for the first time, with the permission of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1966, Indira Gandhi was elected prime minister of India.

In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon nominated G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court; however, the nomination was defeated because of controversy over Carswell’s past racial views.

In 1980, retired Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas died in Washington, D.C. at age 81.

In 1990, Arthur J. Goldberg, former Supreme Court justice, labor secretary and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was found dead in his Washington apartment at age 81.

Ten years ago: Michael Skakel (SKAY’-kul), a nephew of Robert F. Kennedy, was charged with bludgeoning to death 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich (GREH’-nich), Conn. in 1975, when he was also 15. (Skakel was later convicted, and is appealing.) A dormitory fire at Seton Hall University in New Jersey killed three people and injured 62. Former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi died in Tunisia at age 65. Actress Hedy Lamarr was found dead in her Orlando, Fla. home; she was 85.

Five years ago: Previewing his second inauguration, President George W. Bush pledged to seek unity in a nation divided by political differences, saying, “I am eager and ready for the work ahead.” Condoleezza Rice won strong but not unanimous endorsement as secretary of state from a Senate panel. The American Cancer Society reported that cancer had passed heart disease as the top killer of Americans age 85 and younger. Former chairman and chief executive of Citicorp Walter B. Wriston died in New York at age 85.

One year ago: Russia and Ukraine signed a deal restoring natural gas shipments to Ukraine and paving the way for an end to the nearly two-week cutoff of most Russian gas to a freezing Europe.

Today’s Birthdays: Former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar is 90. Actress Jean Stapleton is 87. Actor Fritz Weaver is 84. Actress Tippi Hedren is 80. Former PBS newsman Robert MacNeil is 79. Movie director Richard Lester is 78. Singer Phil Everly is 71. Actor-singer Michael Crawford is 68. Actress Shelley Fabares is 66. Country singer Dolly Parton is 64. ABC newswoman Ann Compton is 63. TV chef Paula Deen is 63. Rock singer Martha Davis is 59. Singer Dewey Bunnell (America) is 58. Actor Desi Arnaz Jr. is 57. Comedian Paul Rodriguez is 55. Conductor Sir Simon Rattle is 55. Actress Katey Sagal is 53. Reggae musician Mickey Virtue (UB40) is 53. Rock musician Jeff Pilson (Foreigner) is 52. Actor Paul McCrane is 49. Actor William Ragsdale is 49. Tennis player Stefan Edberg is 44. Rock singer Whitfield Crane (Ugly Kid Joe) is 42. Singer Trey Lorenz is 41. Actor Shawn Wayans is 39. Rock singer-musician John Wozniak (Marcy Playground) is 39. Actress Drea (DRAY-uh’) de Matteo is 38. Comedian-impression ist Frank Caliendo is 36. Actress Marsha Thomason is 34. Actress Jodie Sweetin is 28. Actor Logan Lerman is 18. Olympic gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson is 18.

Thought for Today: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” — Hedy Lamarr, Austrian-American actress (1914-2000).

More on Systematic Abuses of Fundamental Due Process in Florida Foreclosure Courts

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE 20th JUDICIAL CIRCUIT

IN AND FOR LEE COUNTY, STATE OF FLORIDA CIVIL DIVISION

CASE NO: 08-CA-050359              (Malcolm Doney CATALPA VACATE SJ)

Judge: Rosman Jay, B.

Century Bank FSB

Plaintiff,

vs.

GEORGE M. DONEY

VALERIE J. DONEY, et al,

Defendants.

_______________________/

DEFENDANT GEORGE M. DONEY’S VERIFIED MOTION TO VACATE JUDGMENT AND TO CANCEL SALE OF THE PROPERTY ON JANUARY 7, 2010.

Comes now George Malcolm Doney (GMD) who having been sworn, deposes and says:-

All statements contained in this Affidavit are from my personal knowledge and are true and I make these statements under penalty of perjury.

Defendant, GEORGE M. DONEY, (GMD) pro se hereby files this verified motion to vacate foreclosure judgment and to cancel the sale of the property scheduled for January 7, 2010 pursuant to Rule 1.540(b) Fla. R. Civ. P., states:

1. Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.540(b) provides in pertinent part:

On motion and upon such terms as are just, the court may relieve a party or a party’s legal representative from a final judgment, decree, order, or proceeding for the following reasons:… (3) fraud (whether heretofore denominated intrinsic or extrinsic), misrepresentation, or other misconduct of an adverse party; (4) that the judgment or decree is void; This rule does not limit the power of a court to entertain an independent action to relieve a party from a judgment, decree, order, or proceeding or to set aside a judgment or decree for fraud upon the court.

1. Judge Thompson Ordered a Final Judgment Of Mortgage Foreclosure in the Rocket Docket Court on December 4, 2009.   This Judgment is in violation of both Fla.R.Civ.P 1.540 (b)(3) fraud and (4) the judgment is void.
2. No Default Judgment has been issued by the Clerk, or the Court in pursuance of Fla.R.Civ.P. 1.500 (a) and following the closing down of Century Bank by the Office of Thrift Supervision on November 13, 2009 for, inter alia, abuses of the Federal Truth in Lending Acts and dangerous banking practices, after an unsuccessful attempt by Defendant George M. Doney to persuade Attorney McKay to cancel the Hearing for Summary Judgment scheduled for December 4, 2009 on the grounds that he could no longer represent the former Century Bank as though it were the Plaintiff in this Action, Defendants filed an Answer and Affirmative Defenses in the Court on November 17, 2009 as permitted by Fla.R.Civ.P 1.500(c). Defendants aver that this action immediately established that this was a contested case and was not appropriate for consideration by a Rocket Docket Court.
3. Attorney McKay’s response was to file two further documents in the Court, a Notice of Re-Hearing [specifically requested to be in Courtroom 5H, known to him as the Rocket Docket Courtroom] in which he represented himself as Attorney for Plaintiff (the then non existent Century Bank) and a Motion to Substitute Plaintiff in which he represented himself as “counsel for non-party IberiaBank.”
4. Attorney McKay also informed the Court that he would not personally be present at the Hearing but would be represented by local Attorney Goetz.
5. Defendant George M. Doney (GMD) made two further attempts by email to persuade Attorney McKay to cancel the ex-parte arrangement he had made for this Hearing and specifically pointed out to him all the relevant facts as to why this Hearing should not proceed, including the inappropriateness of a Hearing in the Rocket Docket Court, previously described by Judge Thompson and recorded by Fort Myers Court Reporting on August 28, 2009, as “not a thinking Docket” [Exhibit A].
6. Florida Statue 90.108 (2) states, “The report of a court reporter, when certified to by the court reporter as being a correct transcript of the testimony and proceedings in the case, is prima face a correct statement of such testimony and proceedings.  Defendants therefore aver that this is a correct statement and an admission by Judge Thompson that when he presides at Rocket Docket Hearings that he “is not required to think” and when read with his further statement, “I would simply continue the matter and let you all reset it before the assigned judge” and with his introductory statements made at the commencement of each such Court session to the effect that the assembled Defendants “do not have any legal defenses” is prima face evidence that a heavily contested case, in which no Default Judgment has been issued [Fla.R.Civ.P. 1.500] supported by evidence in the form of “Facts that are not subject to dispute because they are capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot be questioned.”  Fla. Sta. 90.202 (12) of the Evidence Code.”
7. Attorney McKay ignored Defendant’s Answer, but filed a frivolous Avoidances To Defendants’ Affirmative Defenses on December 2, 2009 as counsel for what he knew at that time was no longer able to represent itself as a Plaintiff following its shuttering by its regulator, The Office of Thrift Supervision on November 13, 2009.   Also on December 2, 2009, Defendants filed their Motion to Strike [the non existent Plaintiff's] Motion to Substitute non-party IberiaBank and sought Summary Judgment in their favor and Sanctions.
8. Upon receipt, examination and comprehension of a copy of Plaintiff’s Avoidances to their Affirmative Defenses, [delivered by US Mail on the afternoon of December 2, 2009 and postmarked 'Fort Myers' where Attorney James Goetz has his business address, but bearing the purported signature of Attorney Mckay, whose business address is in Sarasota] Defendants discovered further evidence and commenced preparation of a further Motion to Strike those frivolous Pleadings also, but was unable to finish that document until the morning of December 4, 2009, the day of the Hearing.
9. That Motion contained a material Exhibit of 125 pages, being a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) document which was filed in the Court at 12.50 on December 4, 2009, just before the Hearing, with the intention of handing it up to the Judge at the commencement of the Hearing.   Judge Thompson’s actions prevented this evidence together with all the previous Motions, Affidavits and Exhibits filed in his Court ever being considered by him.
10. Attorney McKay has violated the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, quoted irrelevant case law, made what he knew, or should have known were false statements in writing contained in papers he has filed in this and other actions in this Court, changed his story after seeing Defendant’s Answer and Affirmative Defenses, but continued to leave his original deceptive submissions to this Court un-amended in other cases where the Defendants had not challenged those submissions, he has also violated the Florida Bar Conduct Rules, has acted in a manner towards Defendant GMD, both before and after the ‘Hearing’ on December 4, 2009 for which he has previously been sanctioned by the Florida Bar, [who were particularly concerned that he showed no remorse and continued to represent that he had not behaved improperly despite a unanimous decision by the Bar Exhibit B].
11. Judge Thompson has violated the Code of Judicial Conduct for the State of Florida, in the instant case [and GMD has witnessed at first hand angry and biased behavior by this same Judge on previous occasions, some of which are on the record in official Court Reports].  This Judge regularly violates Cannon 3A, B (4), (5), (7), (8), D (2) and E 1(a), full details of which are contained in the Affidavit of George Malcolm Doney which will be filed as Exhibit C, either at the time of filing this Motion, or as shortly thereafter as his limited time as a pro se litigant can be allocated for its final preparation.
12. The Rocket Docket Court is where Judge Thompson regularly sits, churning through anything from 200 to 300 cases in each half-day session of his Court.
13. Defendant GMD has regularly attended the Rocket Docket Court when he has prepared witness affidavits in support of defendants in foreclosure suits, and thus has personal knowledge of the modus operandi of the Rocket Docket Court that follows broadly the same procedure whether or not Judge Thompson is presiding.
14. Immediately after Judge Thompson takes his seat on the bench he introduces the assembled defendants at their Summary Judgment Hearings to the reasons for the existence of the Court [being the need to cope with the huge volumes of foreclosures, without any explanation as to the legality or otherwise of such a Court] and to the procedures that they can expect when their case number is called.
15. He gave that same introductory talk on the afternoon of December 4, 2009.  He attempted to prepare everyone who was appearing on that afternoon to accept that they do not have any legal defense by saying [as he did on this occasion] “only cases where Defendants have no legal defense are scheduled for Hearing in this Court after careful and detailed consideration.”  No explanation is given as to which person, group of persons, or entity engaged in “careful and detailed consideration” or made the decision that the particular defendants had “no legal defense” and could be identified as being responsible for placing their case into a Rocket Docket Court procedure, or what led such person or persons unknown, to conclude that “no legal defense” existed.
16. Judge Thompson concluded this portion of his introduction as he always does in such sessions by stating “If anyone believes that they do have a legal defense they need to speak up.  His actions in the instant case and on other occasions referred to in Exhibit C belied those words.
17. Defendants (GMD) and his wife Valerie J. Doney, (VJD) acting pro se, attended the Hearing and as detailed herein, had previously filed extensive pleadings in this case, most of which had been filed in good time to be available to Judge Thompson on the electronic record available to him at the Hearing and the date and time stamped copy of additional and pertinent evidence filed in the Court  just before the Hearing commenced which was brought by Defendants to the Court, that given the opportunity Defendants would have handed up to the Judge on the bench.
18. What Judge Thompson’s Order improperly refers to as a Hearing lasted no more than two minutes, did not follow the format described in that document which was signed by Judge Thompson and was conducted in the presence of a Court Reporter, being Jackie Burrell, one of the owners of Von Ahn Associates Inc., provided by the Defendants at their expense.  A copy of the Court Report is at Exhibit D.
19. Defendants regret to bring to the Court’s attention that despite the provisions of Florida Staute 90.108(2) this Court Report is inaccurate and aver that it is manifestly obvious to any reader of that report, even if the reader had not been present at the Hearing to draw that inescapable conclusion.
20. This Court Report cannot be a true record of what transgressed at this Hearing as it opens with the words spoken by Judge Thompson addressed to GMD, “Did you just listen to what I said?”  Clearly there must have been something Defendant GMD said to have provoked such a response and the fact is that in front of a Courtroom full of witnesses GMD had read the opening words that he had previously drafted from a sheet of paper he was holding in his hand.(Exhibit E).
21. Some of those words appear on the Court Report slotted in an obviously incorrect place right at the end of this non-Hearing, just prior to the aggravated battery by an armed Bailiff on Defendant GMD’s person, referred to hereinafter, and clearly did not reflect what actually transpired during the Hearing.  Only when an electronic copy of this document has lines 9 through 17 on page four of the transcript cut and pasted in front of line 1 on page three, does it make any sense as a cohesive transcript and also accurately reflect the sense of what was actually said and the order in which it was said by the three parties whose voices it purports to have recorded.
22. In addition to the sworn testimony of Defendant GMD an Affidavit is also filed by Christian Meister, EXHIBIT F, and further Affidavits may be subsequently filed by another person or persons, who were in the Court and witnessed the events described in this Motion.
23. However, in the event that the Court strictly upholds the provisions of Fla. Sta. 90.108 (2) despite the evidence now submitted, there is more than sufficient content in that Court Report to establish that the Final Judgment of Mortgage Foreclosure, signed by Judge Thompson is not an accurate and fair record of what actually transpired and to establish that the alleged violations contained hereinabove and in GMD’s Affidavit to be filed in the Court are accurate with regard to breaches by Judge Thompson, Attorneys Scott McKay and James Goetz of the Code of Judicial Conduct for the State of Florida and/or of the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Florida Bar, by both Judge and Attorneys in this case.
24. In the case of Attorneys McKay and Goetz and especially in the case of McKay this conduct was not confined to the Courtroom as detailed in evidence filed in the Court and continued after the Hearing in inappropriate e-mails sent to Defendant GMD. [EXHIBIT G].
25. Full details of what transpired subsequent to GMD receiving the transcript from Von Ahn between GMD and Jackie Burrell, who states that she is a part owner of Von Ahn are contained in the Affidavit at Exhibit C.
26. The Court should also be aware that at the conclusion of Judge Thompson’s treatment of GMD and concurrent with the laying of an armed Bailiff’s hands upon GMD’s arm, a person known to me, Christian Meister, who was one of a large number of witnesses to these events [and who has now filed an Affidavit in this case] while sitting in the Courtroom, sprang to his feet and was shouting at Judge Thompson that as a Sheriff’s candidate he wanted him to know that he had never before witnessed such a miscarriage of justice and that he intended to make certain that the people of Lee County would learn of the corruption that was taking place in this Court.  Defendants played no part in what Christian Meister said that day, it had not been pre-planned and Defendants can only assume it to have occurred as a result of his genuine disgust at what he witnessed in Judge Thompson’s Rocket Docket Court.
27. A sworn statement in support of this Motion from Defendant GMD is in course of preparation and will be submitted to this Court within the next week.    This statement, together with the Court Reporter’s  inaccurate transcript of what little proceedings took place evidence, inter alia, fraud upon the Court, lack of standing to continue this lawsuit, no subject matter jurisdiction, no Plaintiff, misrepresentations and changes of story by Attorneys McKay and Goetz, violations of law, violation of Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.500(c), breaches of the Code of Judicial Conduct, including denial of equal access rights by Judge Thompson [in his capacity as a Rocket Docket Judge to an educated, law abiding, elderly, hearing impaired American pro se litigant], Ordering Summary Judgment, [not after a careful Judicial weighing of all the overwhelming evidence, as is stated in the Final Judgment of Mortgage Foreclosure] which bears a Clerk of the Court date stamp indicating that it was filed in the Court on the day of the ‘Hearing’ (a Friday) [despite the conflicting statement that it was recorded on 12/08/2009 at 8.34am the following Monday].
28. Even the inaccurate Court Report demonstrates that all the evidence contained in Defendant’s Pleadings against frivolous pleadings from a non-existent Plaintiff in order to establish matters of law, fact, and/or equity, had been ignored and Judge Thompson elected instead to inflict upon both Defendants an unprovoked angry punishment [when the Court Proceedings evidence that VJD had not said a word during this ‘Hearing’ and that VJD is the spouse who invested substantial equity derived from her retirement funds into this property that was over appraised by the former Century Bank].
29. The clearly intended harsh discipline and humiliation Judge Thompson inflicted upon both Defendants for the ‘crime’ committed by GMD for daring to ask permission as a Hearing Impaired Senior Citizen, in compliance with his basic Constitutional and legal rights to be allowed equal access as was and is always afforded to the non-Plaintiff’s counsel and finally causing two police officers of the three armed bailiffs in his Court to move towards Defendants with one of them coming through the swing door in the Court barrier and by laying hands on Defendant George M. Doney while shouting at him “The Judge has ruled”  causing an unnecessary aggravated battery of his elderly person, causing him to feel very unwell from the shock of such unprovoked treatment.
30. Defendant, GMD also informs the Court that on knowledge and belief, Judge Thompson displayed a personal bias against him which should have brought about his Recusal based upon GMD’s prior appearances in his Court as a witness, when with the Judge’s permission he had explained in detail the extent of the void and fraudulent judgments that emanated from the Rocket Docket Court backed up by exhibits of multiple fraudulent documents filed in the Court by purported counsels to Plaintiffs.
31. GMD is a regular observer of Judge Thompson, from his attendances at the Rocket Docket Court, sometimes as an observer, or when he has filed Witness Affidavits in that Court.  Due to the volume of cases processed there every day he has observed such outbursts of bias on many occasions, often showing his intolerance and anger against Defendants when they raise questions and objections. Some of those have been cases where GMD has personal knowledge of the facts of the case as a result of his investigations, compilation of evidence and preparation of Affidavits, which on one such occasion, just like the instant case, Judge Thompson refused to read.   Details are contained in GMD’s Affidavit to be filed in the Court when it is completed and which include GMD’s two presentations that Judge Thompson permitted him to make on the afternoon of April 24, 2009 during the consideration of a case in which he had filed an evidence Affidavit and numerous EXHIBITS which proved extensive fraud in that case and many others that demonstrated that this filing of fraudulent documents followed a pattern.
32. Subsequently, despite an Order being issued for the case to be referred to the Assigned Judge it was not recorded in the Court Docket and the Plaintiff once again brought the case before Judge Thompson on July 14, 2009 when Judge Thompson permitted GMD to speak as a witness and displayed bias against a pro se litigant, this time in front of a Court Reporter.  Details will be provided in the forthcoming GMD Affidavit.
33. GMD believes that pattern and others within his personal knowledge are sufficient to demonstrate Racketeering and the active involvement of foreclosure Mill Attorneys and others.
34. In the instant case no Default had been entered in the Court, a procedurally correct Answer and Affirmative Defenses had been filed by Defendants as had Motions to Strike and for Summary Judgment to be entered in Defendants’ favor, Attorneys McKay and Goetz represented to the Court that the so-called Plaintiff, the former Century Bank was a bona fide Plaintiff despite having previously been shut down by its regulator, ‘The Office of Thrift Supervision,’ for inter alia, dangerous banking practices and Federal Truth in Lending Act violations, the original Complaint was defective, counsel had misrepresented the facts and claimed to still be representing their now defunct entity, while simultaneously claiming to represent non-party IberiaBank, making false, vague and hearsay statements in their Pleadings (in their capacities as counsels) about an alleged, but unsubstantiated arrangement they claimed the ‘Plaintiff’ had with the FDIC in order to falsely show Standing for that bank in this matter and which argument was wholly unsustainable by the facts displayed in the FDIC’s Purchase and Assumption Agreement with that bank, dated November 13, 2009.
35. Commencing on November 16, 2009, GMD made one telephone call and sent three e-mails to Attorney McKay which were filed in the Court.  Details of this unsatisfactory telephone call and subsequent e-mails are contained in GMD’s Affidavit of Support to this Motion, but Defendants wish to draw the Court’s particular attention to the fact that Attorney McKay specifically asked for the Hearing [in his Re-Notice of Hearing to be held on December 4, 2009] to be held in Courtroom 5H, the Court most frequently used for the Rocket Docket Court and where Judge Thompson was presiding and not Judge Rosman who is the assigned Judge on this case.
36. Defendants also state that Attorney McKay was repeatedly told that the Rocket Docket Court was not appropriate as this was a contested case and no Default had been issued, making Summary Judgment inappropriate.  Case Law will be supplied in the forthcoming GMD Affidavit to be filed in the Court.
37. Judge Thompson signed the Final Judgment of Mortgage Foreclosure on December 4, 2009 and it was filed in the Court that same Friday afternoon, although it was not electronically recorded until the following Monday morning, December 8, 2009 at 8.34 AM.  It is obvious that with at least 200 cases to process that afternoon coupled with the fact that the instant case was the first he ‘heard’ that Judge Thompson simply placed his signature on a document prepared by Attorney McKay and/or Attorney Goetz and did not read the content of that document, [which seems to be verified in the Court report on line 19 of page 3 by the words addressed to Attorney Goetz, "Give me a Summary Judgment"], or alternatively, he was fully aware of its content and was prepared to knowingly place his signature on a document that by his own recorded admissions in the Court Report he knew to be a series of false statements.
38. Had Judge Thompson actually read the document that he signed he would have known that his statement, “After…………… reviewing the pleadings and affidavits filed herein, and conducting a hearing on the matter, the Court orders and finds as follows:” to be completely false, as by Judge Thompson’s own admission and recorded statement on lines 6 to 9 on page 3 of the Court Report he knew nothing about the case when GMD was seeking to approach the bench and prior to saying to Attorney Goetz, “Give me a Summary Judgment” did not review any of the Defendant’s pleadings and affidavits filed and did not conduct a hearing on the matter.
39. It is therefore indisputable that at no time did Judge Thompson review anything prior to signing the Final Judgment in Foreclosure and by those admissions he has either deliberately, or negligently signed that Order in contravention of Canon 3 of the Judicial Code of Conduct.
40. In paragraph 1 he states “This Court has jurisdiction of the parties and subject matter of this action.”  The Judge knows that subject matter jurisdiction does not exist when the Plaintiff does not have a cause of action, or where the Plaintiff was an entity that has been forced to close its business for inter alia dangerous banking practices and violations of the Truth in Lending Act, or where intrinsic frauds or extrinsic frauds have been committed to mislead the Court into showing a Cause of Action where none exists.
41. Paragraph 2 of this Final Judgment of Mortgage Foreclosure signed by Judge Thompson, states “The allegations contained in the complaint have been proved by substantial and competent evidence.”  It further states that, “The equities of this action are with the plaintiff, and plaintiff is entitled to foreclose the mortgage on the real property at issue in this foreclosure bearing the following legal description…………………”
42. Defendants aver that all three of these statements conflict with The Code of Judicial conduct for the State of Florida Canon 3A and B as detailed in Exhibit B.
43. As repeatedly stated in this Motion, in previous Motions submitted to the Court and as stated  by Defendant GMD to Judge Thompson when he stated “the Plaintiff gets to speak first” there was no legitimate Plaintiff able to continue this action and the absent counsel Attorney McKay and the local counsel Goetz were both aware of that fact before they submitted their fraudulent documents to the Court and Goetz was testifying at the ‘Hearing’ and Attorney McKay had been repeatedly reminded of that same fact by GMD, once on the telephone and three times in e-mails commencing on November 16, 2009 immediately after he became aware that this entity no longer existed.
44. GMD avers that not one shred of evidence that complies with the Florida Evidentiary Code Statute was submitted by Attorneys McKay and/or Goetz either before the ‘Hearing’ or during that ‘Hearing.’  Defendants however, do recognize that hearsay and deliberately inaccurate statements that purport to portray facts to the Court were contained in their written pleadings and in an Affidavit by a now former employee of Century Bank that was challenged as inadmissible hearsay in Defendant’s pleadings.
45. In contrast, Defendants had submitted very substantial evidence that was in conformity with Fla. Stats. 90.202 (12) and (13), and as admitted by Judge Thompson were not even looked at and he could not therefore claim that the allegations of this ‘dead pretend plaintiff’ “had been proved by substantial and competent evidence.”  In fact evidence that was in compliance with the Evidentiary Code Statute and filed in the Court by the Defendants proved conclusively the opposite of what Judge Thompson’s Summary Judgment has claimed.
46. As there was no plaintiff, the equities could not have been with it and it was not entitled to foreclose or to do anything in this Court.  It is also a fact that the only evidence submitted to the Court and the only Affidavits submitted to the Court emanated from the Defendants.  Therefore Judge Thompson’s statement that “The allegations contained in the complaint have been proved by substantial and competent evidence must be false on two counts.  First there was no evidence submitted by the pretend Plaintiff [other than inadmissible and/or hearsay statements contained in pleadings].
47. Second, the only evidence that was filed in this action had been filed in the Court by the Defendants prior to the ‘Hearing’, including the full text of the Purchase and Assignment Agreement entered into with IberiaBank by the FDIC and which provides proof positive of the misleading and fraudulent pleadings put into Court by counsel for the pretend plaintiff, the former Century Bank.
48. Further evidence was submitted to the Court that Defendant VJD had invested personal retirement funds in this property of close to $200,000.  Clearly the equities cannot be with the ‘dead bank’ and even if IberiaBank could have been legitimately substituted, which it could not as shown in the evidence for reasons of failure to comply with Fla.R.Civ.P. 1.260(c) and failure to fall within the provisions of the inappropriate case law submitted by counsel for the ‘plaintiff,’ Defendant’s evidence in the form of the FDIC’s published Purchase and Assumption Agreement with IberiaBank, that entity invested zero Dollars in any loan that was shown in their records as ‘in default’ and was previously owned or serviced by Century Bank.
49. Further as previously submitted in evidence to the Court, the actual list of loans transferred has been redacted by the FDIC, and no proof that this loan was ever transferred to that Bank is currently available and therefore there is no evidence to support any of the misleading and broad statements made by Attorney McKay.
50. Paragraph 3 of the Order signed by Judge Thompson states, “Plaintiff owns and holds the note and mortgage in this matter. Plaintiff’s mortgage is a valid lien on the property, and the mortgage is in default as alleged in this action.”  This is a further inaccurate statement which conflicts with paragraph 2 of the Complaint which states, “Plaintiff or it’s assigns [emphasis added] currently owns and holds the promissory note and mortgage being foreclosed, which clearly establishes that even when Century Bank was an existing entity it was unable to categorically make the statement that Judge Thompson now makes for it in its capacity as a ‘dead entity.’
51. Defendants aver that the Equities are clearly and unarguably with Defendant VJD and that it appears that the sole objective of these fraudulent submissions is for IberiaBank for an investment of zero Dollars, underwritten by the FDIC against any loss, to get a free windfall to which it has absolutely no entitlement.  Judge Thompson, by multiple violations of the Judicial Code of Conduct and his allowing one of the Court Bailiffs to engage in aggravated battery of a Florida Senior Citizen has used the color of law for fraudulent purposes.
52. Paragraph 4 of Judge Thompson’s Order states a total amount owing, including Attorney’s fees of $377,312.64.   This is a further unsubstantiated statement, whereas Defendants state that the ‘plaintiff’ does not exist, that on the date of the ‘Hearing’ it could not have verified what it claims was owing to it by virtue of the fact that it ceased to exist on November 13, 2010 and despite the frequent claims of Attorney McKay that he is in contact with their staff and employees since that date.
53. Paragraph 5 of the Summary Judgment and Order states that the Attorney fee is reasonable.  This is a further violation of the Judicial Code.  If the submissions of the Attorneys were false and deliberately misleading [as clearly proven by Defendant's evidence filed in the Court] no amount of fees can be construed as reasonable for presenting false evidence to secure a Judgment.
54. Paragraph 6 of the Order states that the Plaintiff has a lien to secure the payment of the aforesaid sums against the property.  Defendants, again aver that ‘no existing entity’ translates into ‘no existing Plaintiff’, which in turn translates into no lien.
55. The rest of this void Judgment is concerned with the improper sale of this property set for January 7, 2010.  Defendants state, “This proposed sale of Real Property based upon a void Judgment, fraudulent pleadings and other documents submitted by Attorney McKay and Goetz on behalf of a non-existent Plaintiff, is an extension of the fraud contained in the Judgment and as such, places a cloud on the title of this property which means that the Court should not allow it to proceed and should immediately order a Stay of the Sale pending the resolution of this Motion.
56. Defendants wish to draw to the attention of this Court that all the separate matters contained in this Verified Motion are of a very serious nature and that every statement contained therein is either backed by the Fla.R.Civ.P., by relevant case law, the Evidentiary Code Statutes, The Rules Regulating the Florida Bar and/or The Codes of Conduct governing Judges and Attorneys in the State of Florida.  Many of the specific issues contained in this Motion, in previous Motions or Pleadings that have been ignored by the Court, if proven have severe criminal implications in addition to the Civil Matters to which this Motion is addressed.
57. The Court should also be aware that in all other cases that GMD has researched of a similar nature, both in Lee County and in other Florida Counties where Century Bank, IberiaBank and Attorney McKay and/or Attorney Goetz have been involved that the same fraudulent submissions have been made, evidencing that these misrepresentations are not just confined to the 20th Circuit.
58. For the Court’s further information a copy of a letter sent by email to Attorney McKay today is at EXHIBIT H.

WHEREAS, Defendants George M. Doney and Valerie J. Doney move this Court to set a Hearing to vacate this void and fraudulent Judgment, immediately Order that this case be Dismissed with Prejudice and if legal fees are subsequently incurred the payment by the Attorney’s misrepresenting themselves as counsel for what they both knew to be a non existent entity, and sanctions against those Attorneys, Disciplinary action against Judge Thompson and an undertaking that he will never again be permitted to preside over any case in which either of the Defendants are parties, or any case where GMD has submitted witness statements in order to avoid any further bias or prejudice of the kind that Defendants have clearly evidenced that they have been subjected to in this case.

Defendants request a Hearing Date to vacate this void and fraudulent Judgment at the earliest possible convenient date for the parties and the Court and in view of the substantial evidence that is before this Court, but has been completely ignored, with the result that this Final Judgment of Mortgage Foreclosure is both fraudulent and void within the meaning of Fla.R.Civ.P. 1.540 (b) 3 and 4. In all the circumstances Judge Rosman as the Assigned Judge in this case is hereby requested to issue an emergency Order to Stay the Sale of the subject property, pending the Hearing to Vacate the Fraudulent and Void Judgment.

CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE

THE UNDERMENTIONED HEREBY CERTIFIES that a true and correct copy of the foregoing has been forwarded, via e-mail on January 6, 2010 and by US Mail, to Scott D. McKay, Esq., McKay Law Firm P. A. , counsel for Plaintiff, 2055 Wood Street, Suite 120, Sarasota, Florida 34237 on this 5^th day of January, 2010.

George M. Doney                     Valerie J. Doney

16211 Shenandoah Circle,

Fort Myers, Florida 33908

Phone 239 466 3627

STATE OF FLORIDA

COUNTY OF LEE

PERSONALLY APPEARED BEFORE ME, the undersigned authority in and for the aforesaid County and State, on this the 6^th day of January, 2010 within my jurisdiction, the within named GEORGE  M. DONEY, who acknowledged to me that he is the Affiant signing this document, known to me to be the person whose name is subscribed to the foregoing instrument, and he acknowledged to me that he executed the same for the purpose and consideration therein expressed as his act and deed and in the capacity therein stated.  He is personally known to me and did take the oath.

WITNESS my hand and official seal in the County and State last aforesaid the _____day of _____________, _____.

Today in History, January 8, 2010

Today in History — Friday, Jan. 8 (195th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans 1815, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points 1919, Elvis Presley born 1935, Stephen Hawking born 1942, Amber Benson/Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

By The Associated Press (with annotations by CEL III)

Today is Friday, Jan. 8, the eighth day of 2010. Today, in my family, was always the final day of the Christmas Season, after Epiphany January 6, after my grandfather’s birthday on January 3.  There are 357 days left in the year, with only 350 shopping days left until Christmas!

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Jan. 8th, 1935, rock-’n’-roll legend Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Miss.; this is generally considered the greatest threat Southern American Civilization in general and Southern womanhood in since Samuel J. Tilden conceded the election of 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes thus marking the end of Reconstruction.

On this date:

In 1798, the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was declared in effect by President John Adams nearly three years after its ratification by the states; it prohibited a citizen of one state from suing another state in federal court; the 11th Amendment is generally considered to have been a really bad idea.

In 1815, U.S. forces led by Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans — the closing engagement of the War of 1812.

In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson outlined his “Fourteen Points” for lasting peace after World War I. Mississippi became the first state to ratify the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which established Prohibition.

1932  ”Being born 300 years after Galileo’s death and taking up the Lucasian chair in mathematics 310 years after Newton, Stephen Hawking was numerologically well prepared for his successes and achievements”, said Sir Alec Broers, the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, in his introduction to the Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday symposium. The title of the day was The future of theoretical physics and cosmology, and an important part of that future, according to the Vice Chancellor, was due to Stephen himself.

In 1959, Charles de Gaulle was inaugurated as president of France’s Fifth Republic. In Cuba, Fidel Castro and his army arrived in Havana in triumph following the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his State of the Union address.

In 1973, the Paris peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam resumed.

In 1976, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai died in Beijing.

In 1987, for the first time, the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 2,000, ending the day at 2,002.25; people who think this is important obviously do not understand the concept of inflation of fiat currencies or the fact that stock market speculation is no measure of economic productivity, but on the contrary is a symptom of a stagnate and failing economy.  Let it be remembered that, on Monday, October 19, during the fall of my first year in law school, which happened to be Fall Quarter 1987, the Stock Market fell 508 points in a single day (which was a bigger NUMERICAL crash than October 29, 1929, although with fewer broad economic implications), after falling several hundred points October 12-16 the previous week (declining respectively 95 points, 58 points, and 108 points on October 14, 15, and 16).

In 1989, 47 people were killed when a British Midland Boeing 737-400 carrying 126 people crashed in central England.

In 2003, a US Airways Express commuter plane crashed at the Charlotte, N.C., airport, killing all 21 people on board. A Turkish Airlines jet crashed in Turkey, killing 75 people.

Ten years ago: During a debate in Johnston, Iowa, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley accused Al Gore of trying to scare voters by misrepresenting his health care proposal; for his part, the vice president said he had not been hiding in a Washington bunker but campaigning on “the front lines in the fight for our future.”

Five years ago: An Army platoon sergeant who’d ordered his soldiers to throw Iraqis into the Tigris River was sentenced to six months in military prison; the jury in Fort Hood, Texas also reduced the rank of Army Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins by one grade.

One year ago: President-elect Barack Obama urged lawmakers to work with him “day and night, on weekends if necessary” to approve the largest taxpayer-funded stimulus ever. Obama named Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine the next Democratic National Committee chairman. The U.N. Security Council called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza by a 14-0 vote, with the United States abstaining. No. 1 Florida beat No. 2 Oklahoma 24-14 for the BCS national title. Cornelia Wallace, former wife of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, died in Sebring, Fla. at age 69.

Today’s Birthdays: Actor-comedian Larry Storch is 87. Actor Ron Moody is 86. Broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur is 82. CBS newsman Charles Osgood is 77. Singer Shirley Bassey is 73. Game show host Bob Eubanks is 72. Country-gospel singer Cristy Lane is 70. Rhythm-and-blues singer Anthony Gourdine (Little Anthony and the Imperials) is 69. Actress Yvette Mimieux is 68. Physicist Stephen Hawking is 68. Rock musician Robby Krieger (The Doors) is 64. Rock singer David Bowie is 63. Movie director John McTiernan is 59. Actress Harriet Sansom Harris is 55. Singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith is 46. Actress Maria Pitillo is 45. Actress Michelle Forbes is 45. Singer R. Kelly is 43. Rock musician Jeff Abercrombie (Fuel) is 41. Actress Ami Dolenz is 41. Reggae singer Sean Paul is 37. Country singer Tift Merritt is 35. Actress-rock singer Jenny Lewis is 34. Actress Amber Benson is 33. Actor Scott Whyte is 32. Singer-songwriter Erin McCarley is 31. Actress Sarah Polley is 31. Actress Rachel Nichols is 30. Actress Gaby Hoffman is 28. Rock musician Disashi Lumumbo-Kasongo (Gym Class Heroes) is 27.

Thought for Today: “The devil is easy to identify. He appears when you’re terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn’t grant.” — Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York City (1882-1947).

Declaration of Independence and Our Constitution

The fourth of July is the day we remember the fragile, confused, chaotic origins of our country, still the envy of the world.  We are almost at the opposite side of the year now, one week ahead of January 4 rather than July 4, and in the same way, our Country is closer to the opposite of a nation dedicated to freedom.  During the past year I have visited Philadelphia 3 or 4 times and find it a very agreeable place.  My son is applying to the University of Pennsylvania and I honestly hadn’t ever thought so deeply about the city where this Republic was born ever before in my life.

As one who is frequently criticized as “crazy” or “mentally unstable” or worse on-line and elsewhere, I have found Philadelphia, and Independence Hall in particular, a pleasant place to sit and marvel and think about the collection of arrogant, egotistical, totally unrealistic and wildly overambitious provincials who met there, and not only defied by confronted head on their mother country—the most stable and well-developed Empire in all the world.  They did so out of their pure arrogance and devotion to insane principles, dreams, and ideals, and in doing so, because they were crazy, because they did not know that the task ahead of them was simply impossible, unimaginable, and their goals unreachable—because they had, in short, no common sense whatsoever, they (our Founding Fathers) changed the course of world history.

Today the Founders’ Patriotic Ideals are itemized on worksheets and therein targeted as “terroristic” by the FBI, a national police force created by the much transformed government which descends in a lineal, if not logical, fashion from that constitutional government which men who signed the declaration of independence feared might lead to “a new birth of tyranny” in the New World.  Apparently, even the CIA is now working domestically, as an internal police force working independently of the FBI.

The doctrine of the Anti-Federalists, their fears and “paranoias” are instructive to those of us who in these latter days face a monolithic government run by illegitimate representatives of corrupt interests.  But today is a day we should honor those who risked all and pledged their “lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor” to keep us free with the most important document in the history of the world.  Some day soon new leaders will emerge and give us our freedoms back, but right now, we live not in Jefferson’s dream and Madison’s ideal, but in their nightmare.  They say that the American Revolution was carried out by less than 10% of the population.  If  it only takes 11% of the population to make a dramitc shift in public awareness, one major place to start is in protecting our homes and our ways of life.

NOTE: if you need help saving your home from foreclosure, or if you have been foreclosed and are facing eviction, please go to www.charleslincoln.spiritualpatriot.com or email to admin@charleslincoln.spiritualpatriot.com or call Robert at 866-599-5557.  In particular if you are in California, and have any opinion about non-judicial foreclosure and eviction processes in California, please let us know all about it.  For the first time in my life, I am considering going directly into politics myself, and I would like to know whether anyone would like to help me out.

Peace be with you and with thy Spirit!  PAX VOBISCUM!

(In case it looks familiar, this is a revision of a post I originally published on July 4, 2009 @23:03).

What Uplifts Everyone without Degrading Anyone? Could it be Freedom?

My seventeen year-old son Charlie IV continues his new-found and somewhat all-consuming career of applying to colleges all over the U.S./English Speaking World.  We had talked about including Germany and France but so far he isn’t interested.  Today he was working on his application for the University of Chicago (where I received my J.D. degree, and where my mother studied and received several degrees back in the days of Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins).  In the spirit of the eccentric Hutchins College, once called the greatest collection of disturbed adolescents since the Children’s Crusade and alternatively described, with only mild exaggeration, as “A Baptist School where Atheist Professors teach Catholic Theology to Jewish Students”, the 2009 University of Chicago College Application posed the following question to Charlie as a subject for an original application essay.  I attach Charlie’s very interesting response to this challenge in full below, which Charlie ground out in just over two hours:

“Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust,” wrote the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What is “human personality?” Is it obvious what uplifts and what degrades it? Can law be justified on the basis of it? We want to hear your thoughts on justice as it relates to this “human personality.”

IS ANY LAW THAT UPLIFTS HUMAN PERSONALITY REALLY JUST?  I don’t think so…

Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln, IV, (Friday November 13, 2009)

Life itself, especially life in elementary secondary school/High School, has often seemed a lot like jail to me.  Cinderblock walls and cement floors with cheap linoleum and cheaper carpets decorate unadorned square block shaped buildings two or three stories tall, and this seems to be the standard format of institutional life everywhere and these are where I have spent most of my waking hours, from age 5 going on 6 to 17 going on 18.

Sometimes I think I should have been “a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,” or perhaps “a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  But instead all I’ve ever been student, among many other students, just another brick in the wall.  But these are the meditations of prisoners everywhere, I think.

I certainly think I can understand how sitting in jail, in Birmingham, Alabama, or anywhere else, would make a person think a lot about what is uplifting and what is degrading.  Prisons are built to “uplift society” by suppressing crime, which can only be done by “degrading” the very essence of our society, the people who came to this land described by the phrases

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

(And in fact, yes I do promise that’s the last cheesy quotation from extremely well-known poems I will make in this letter of application—but it fits doesn’t it?  Isn’t it primarily the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched rufuse of so many teeming shores, and above all, the homeless, who crowd all the different kinds of American prisons?—If I need to elaborate on this, I can and will—without the poorest, most underemployed, and least educated of the whites, African Americans, Mexicans, Vietnamese and Chinese, the correctional services industry would simply NOT be the fastest growing industry in the United States, as any watcher of late-night television knows for certain from constant advertising.)

In my 17 years and four months on this planet, I have been trying to develop my own “human personality” in the face of constant limitations and challenges.  Words like “uplifting” and “degrading” are entirely subjective, entirely relative depending on one’s position in the world and on the planet.

But from any given position in relative time-space-and-social dimensions, it is definitely obvious what is uplifting or degrading—just as it is obvious what is “good” and “evil.”  “Uplifting good actions or things” are those aspects of life which we perceive as beneficial to us and “evil degrading actions or things” are those which we perceive as harmful to us.

And jail really is the focal point for degrading some people by putting them in an evil place so that others can feel safe, uplifted, and confident in their own superiority.  Jail is also the focus, one of the ends, of that which we so often refer to as the “justice” system.  “Justice” uplifts some by degrading others.  Criminal law is but one field where some human personalities (prosecutors/defense lawyers/judges) are consistently uplifted while most others are consistently degraded.

Think, for example, if thoughts of prison and criminal are too unbearably harsh, of the mortgage foreclosure crisis.  What is more degrading than to be evicted from one’s home?  What is more uplifting than to obtain financing for your  wonderful dream home, larger and more elaborate than what you ever dreamed you could possibly afford?  What is more degrading than to be turned down for credit?  What is more uplifting than to be awarded a million dollars credit based on “stated income” with no credit check?  All these actions, events, and phenomena are true stories constituting part and parcel of the financial crisis besetting America today.

Predatory lenders have made fortunes originating and then securitizing loans, which they, as “originators” know the “borrowers” could never pay back.  That’s how hundreds of thousands of “MacMansions” were build on Florida’s Gulf-Coast and California’s Inland Empire, in Collin County North of Dallas and in explosion after explosion of suburban or ex-urban development throughout the first decade of the third millennium after the alleged birth of someone who allegedly said, “lay up your treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was, as his birth-name suggested, in so many ways an old-timey Protestant preacher of “that Old Time Religion” who doubtless knew his Gospels extremely well, probably backwards and forwards, including Matthew 6:20 and Luke 12:33.  So, IS predatory lending evil?  It has led to a crisis, which threatens not only the economic but the socio-political stability of the modern world—because thief-like investment bankers invented derivative securities and abrogated the common law, and now gnaw away at the remnants of capitalism like moths or rusting humidity.  Truth is the greatest antioxidant (anti-rusting agent) in the world, but it lies far off, out of our grasp, as we grope like blind men along the walls, and hundreds of millions of people in starving Somalia and the Sudan in Africa, millions of sweatshop workers working for pennies a day in China and “slumdogs” who aspire to be “millionaires” in India still dream of living the uplifting good life which degrading evil credit can provide.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted African Americans to share in the riches of America, because that would be uplifting and therefore positive for them.  One wonders how Dr. King would feel today to know that black men in modern America are more likely to go to jail than to become home owners, even now (especially now?) under the Presidency of an African-American who wants to expand the circular abuses of credit and preserve the system created by mostly white investment bankers.

So economic justice exemplifies a large family of Hegelian opposites, which are so easily transformed into Marxist “contradictions inherent in all things”, the dialectic between which is the source of all social change.

Are there alternatives?  Are there JUST alternatives to systems which simultaneously degrade some people so that others can be uplifted?  Are there systems which maximize the good and minimize the evil?

I sometimes wonder whether the Constitution of the United States, with its separation of powers and its Bill of Rights, was not the world’s greatest experiment in such a system which might, if properly applied, have the potential to accentuate the positive and diminuate (I looked it up in Webster’s it is a real word!) the negative.

Federalism and the three part government are tools of separating powers which at least theoretically, if properly applied, limit the ability of any one individual or group of individuals to uplift himself (or themselves) into the positions of KINGS and ARISTOCRATS while degrading others into the positions of SERFS and PEONS.  I have some distant English cousins who are listed in both “Burke’s Peerage” and “Debrett’s Peerage” and have heraldic coats of arms issued them by the College of Arms.

It must be a great feeling to be a peer of the realm, even though you can’t automatically sit in the House of Lords anymore, but the U.S. Constitution forbids titles of nobility.  In other words, the U.S. Constitution forbids something that is really uplifting TO SOME PEOPLE precisely because it is inherently degrading to others, and such things as titles of nobility, coats of arms, and ranks of peerage are UNJUSTLY but surely such things as guarantee that “some animals are more equal than others”, just as prisons and mortgage lending do.  The Declaration of Independence says that this country is built on the proposition that all men are created equal, while another distant cousin of mine once wrote that even in the context of internal divisions, we should have “malice for none and charity for all.”

How could one ever be a peer and NOT have some form of malicious contempt for all those who do not?  You would always be tempted to think you must be superior if you hold a title to all people who don’t.  A peer could not possibly have equal “charity for all.”  There are definitely titles in American Culture which seem to exalt some people over others: “Doctor,” “Senator”, “the Honorable”, etc., as if the people who have these titles are (respectively) “more learned”, “older”, “more honorable” than anyone else. (The only American title I don’t understand at all is “Esquire”—what does that mean, that lawyers actually carry shields or subscribe to certain popular men’s magazines more than others?)

While the separation of powers mandated by the Constitution would seem to be one guarantor of real equality, but it is the Bill of Rights that really seems to guarantee that no one should be guaranteed uplifting human personality at the expense of others.  Justice under the Bill of Rights guarantees to all people the rights of the First Amendment, to speak and articulate one’s political and religious (or other) philosophies as one sees fit, and to guarantee to everyone the right to peaceably assemble and to petition for redress of grievances.

Yet there are movements in the United States which seem to suppress the right of the people to petition, or even to discuss the law—such movements as are the “integrated bar” movement in the legal profession, which seems to create a kind of quasi-nobility based on law or legal knowledge or admission to what was, historically, only a private club in America—the Bar Association.  Are lawyers really the only people who understand law well enough to “petition for redress of grievances” in America these days?

If they are, then perhaps the residual guarantor of freedom and equality in America, the Second Amendment, is the last real bastion of equality.  In Colonial Latin America, only “noble Indians” (i.e. Indians who were accepted as “superior” by Spanish Authorities) were allowed to carry firearms, and in fact even these “Indios Hidalgos” could only acquire the right to carry firearms by applying for a license.

In the United States of America, I believe that everyone should be allowed to carry firearms for the simple reason that, if the Maya and Aztec had had firearms and cannons in the 16^th Century, they probably would never have been conquered and subjugated by the Spanish, and their nobility would have never been made subordinate to the Spanish.  It is degrading to be conquered although it is very uplifting to conquer.  The human personality of a Conqueror probably feels very good, literally “on top of the world.”  But such an uplift is possible only at the expense of degrading others, and that is why the real balance of power must be maintained by freedom of speech, backed up by the equal right to keep and bear arms.

Likewise, in all probability, black Africans would have been enslaved in much smaller numbers if they had possessed firearms, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, job in the 1960s, as well as his tenure in the Birmingham Jail, might have both been quite a bit less burdensome and onerous, because there’s nothing that uplifts every human personality so much as preserving the individual right to speak, when no one else’s right is accordingly diminished or degraded.  These are rights worth keeping and bearing arms to preserve.

You Can Stop Evictions! Call for a Civil Rights Removal Revolution! The Truth about California Non-Judicial Foreclosure is, it’s all based on LIES, LIES, and MORE LIES! There’s one simple reason: California Civil Code Section 2924 Protects the Liars!

NOTICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS REMOVAL v BANK OF AMERICA AURORA I DIAZ 12-10-09-BARRETT DAFFIN FRAPPIER

NOTICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS REMOVAL v SILVERSTEIN CHRISTYNA LYNN GRAY 11-30-09-SILVERSTEIN

NOTICE OF NOTICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS REMOVAL v SILVERSTEIN CHRISTYNA LYNN GRAY 11-30-09-SILVERSTEIN

RN March Civil Cover Sheet v Silverstein 11-06-09

NOTICE OF CIVIL RIGHTS REMOVAL v SILVERSTEIN RENADA NADINE MARCH 11-06-09-SILVERSTEIN

Renada Nadine March Response to Order to Show Cause 12-01-09

12-07-2009–1st Amended Complaint Gray-Lincoln-March v Silverstein

The Honorable George Wu’s Order of 12/11/09, U.S.D.C., C.D.CA

Motion for Stay of Remand Pursuant to 28 USC Section 1447(d)

The truth is that you WILL be evicted from your home MERELY by the fact of being brought as a Defendant into any California Superior Court in any Unlawful Detainer Action (UDA) or Forcible Detainer Action filed after or on the basis of any non-judicial foreclosure carried out APPARENTLY under the letter of California Civil Code Section 2924, which is the greatest protection offered to thieves and liars since the U.S. Patriot Act amended the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act to erode American Freedoms and destroy individual liberty in this country.

A Federal Judge in Los Angeles has just ruled (December 11, 2009) that Removing Defendants must identify “an explicit legislative enactment that will inevitably deny her [or his] rights.”  California Civil Code Section 2924 is an explicit legislative enactment that will inevitably deny YOUR rights also.  That same federal judge ruled that the Removing Defendant must allege that “it can be clearly predicted by reason of the operation of a pervasive and explicit state [] law that those rights will inevitably be denied by the very act of bringing the defendant to trial in state court.”  It can be CLEARLY PREDICTED by reason of the operative of a pervasive and explicit state law, namely California Civil Code Section 2924, that your rights will inevitably be denied (by liars speaking and writing nothing but lies) by the very act of bringing the defendant to trial in the California Superior Court system in the aftermath of a non-judicial “Liars Immunity” Non-Judicial Foreclosure.

If you would like further information or help, Tierra Limpia and Deo Vindice stand ready to help YOU make this Revolution Happen!  Call Robert J. Ponte at 860-599-5557 or Peyton Yates Freiman at 512-923-1889 or any of the telephone numbers listed on the pleadings, notices, and motions above.  We are busy fighting the dragons….please be persistent if you want to join our Civil Rights Removal Revolution against Wrongful Evictions following Wrongful Foreclosures in California.  Feel Free to leave your Comments or questions here below, also.

Merry Christmas to All!

Joy to the World, the Lord is Come, Let Earth Receive her King!”
“If there’s a day in history that I’m familiar with, without a doubt one day stands out December 25.”
It hardly matters whether you believe that Christ was born of a virgin or that he was the descendant of the House of David or whether you believe that he will come again in Glory to judge both the quick and the dead, or in the resurrection of the dead in their flesh and the life in the world to come.  The simple fact is that the symbolic value to which hundreds of millions of people attach and attribute to this day is indeed “the hope and fears of all the years.”  The hope that people have for a good and decent life, whether those hopes be articulated by white, black, brown, yellow or red people, are embodied in the preaching called “The Good News” of the Gospels.
The lessons taught by that certain Rabbi Yeshua, son of Joseph, brother of James, are among the greatest lessons ever taught, and I don’t see how anyone can possibly argue with the truth, beauty, and value of the words that came down to us in those four amazingly short books attributed to his friends Mattias, Marcos, Lucas, and Ioannis.
Yes, there is no day in history like December 25, even if the “historical” Jesus was more likely to have been born closer to March 25 (I like to think that the historical Christos and I have a few things in common, and so I can imagine that the historical Jesus shared “my sign” and I’m an Aries…..)
No more beautiful speech was ever given than the Sermon on the Mount, and I do not see how people of all faiths cannot follow those words of justice and wisdom.
This year I am not sending out any Christmas Cards or Greetings by regular or electronic post.
For the First Time in 7 years I am spending the entire Holidays with my own only born son Charlie, and between all the crises with Orly and the various mortgage cases, there’s just been no time.
But to all my family, my friends, acquaintances, and yes, even to my enemies and critics (including the commie-pinko-bastards on so many hateful sites who ridicule me and everything I do), I say,
“PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN” and advise them all
“To LOVE THE LORD THE GOD WITH ALL THY HEART AND ALL THY SPIRIT”
and likewise
“TO LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF”
—because on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets….
Yes, I would love my neighbors (and even my enemies and critics, which now include Dr. Orly Taitz) as myself, and by “love” I mean all that Jesus and St. Paul meant rendered in that Greek word “Agape”.    I tried to teach Orly this lesson all year, but it is particularly good to remember it at Christmastime,
it is good to remember that aside from Christ’s preaching in the Gospels, the greatest wisdom in the New Testament is found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13:
1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all Faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.
4 Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth Faith, Hope, and Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love.

Completing the First 1% of the Third Millenium….

I remember New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1999 in New Orleans—what an amazing party it was.  My then 8 year old son rode on my shoulders as we were crushed among the crowds at Jackson Square.  I recall we had a really good view and nearly a perfect vantage point at one early point about an hour before midnight, but got distracted by something and then by midnight we were just in the square crushed by what seemed like millions, looking at the fireworks from the Riverwalk by the Old Jax Brewery.   Elena and I had discussed when deciding it was time to “get pregnant” with Charlie that it would be fun to have a child who would remember the transition between the 20th and the 21st century, and having Charlie in 1992 was almost the last chance to have such a child.  Charlie was born during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 on August 23, 1992, in Palm Beach, Florida.  It was an amazing event.  We were on the first page of the Palm Beach Post the next day—a beautiful picture of Elena holding Charlie with me on the telephone in the background.  We knew we were going to have a boy and it was a foregone conclusion he was going to be Charles Edward Lincoln IV, but we added the name “Andrew” as a second middle name, and among other oddities, the windows of St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach were all duck-taped with gigantic X-es, which on the horizontal hospital windows looked like transparent Scottish flags bearing St. Andrews’ Crosses.

This holiday vacation, as I mentioned before, is the first time since 2001-2002 that Charlie and I have been able to spend the entire Christmas and New Year’s holiday together.  The fact that we have done so (in California) as well as the fact that we spent the past two summers together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a tribute to Elena K. Lincoln’s spirit and willingness to compromise and/or admit de facto defeat or mistake, in the face of her de jure victory in Court, which was the event or series of events which changed my life, and caused me to take the paths I have taken in life since 2002.

Yes, during the past decade, the first 1% of the Third Millenium, I dedicated my life in large part to attacking the Texas Family Code, a tradition which I continue now in Florida, and would like to begin in California.  The Texas Williamson County Family Court establishment was my first great confrontation with a major establishment.  The City of Lago Vista Police abuse cases in my hometown/backyard in 1997-98, which ultimately got me disbarred in the W.D. Texas and , were just a very mild warmup to what became a major anti-establishment civil rights and reform career.  Lago Vista Police Chief Frank Miller and his “prize” officer Bart Turek were my first major civil rights adversaries, but I did not hate them or even particularly dislike them.   They had just instituted and upheld a misguided and injurious police policy in Lago Vista.  The people I came to hate were those who destroyed my family and took my son away from me for during 2002-2007, with only a few respites.  I have dedicated my life to exposing the lies and the evil embodied by Williamson County Judge Michael P. Jergins, Laurie J. Nowlin, J. Randall Grimes, and Michael Davis, as well as their henchment such as the crew of psychologists including Don Jones.

But this moment, these two weeks with my son, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with the low hills of Catalina Island in the background, is one of the sweetest moments of my life, and I thank God, and Elena for it.  I should note that I invited Elena here to share this moment not once but many times.  There’s enough sleeping space here for three to be in private rooms, as was proved when Peyton and Charlie were both here for Thanksgiving.  But Elena demurred, preferring to go to Cancun, ironically enough, since the Yucatan Peninsula was where Elena and I met in 1985.

Anyhow, to everyone out there, I wish a glorious and prosperous New Year 2010, and I hope that whatever happens to me, Charlie, and Elena, and to everyone else, that the next decade will be as full of emotional, psychological, and spiritual growth as the past decade has been for me.  In every defeat and setback I have found the inspiration to move forward and see deeper truths and meanings, and for such experiences I can only be thankful to all who gave me such opportunities, even if they meant me harm by doing so.  The absolute rock bottom low-point of this decade for me was clearly the death of my grandmother Helen in May 2001.  But not a day goes by that I do not recall fondly and given thanks for the century of life my grandmother enjoyed on earth and at all the time I shared with her and her husband, my grandfather Al, who predeceased her by 21 years in 1980.   The high points of the decade were all spent with my son, and none were higher than our days on Harvard Square and in California.

On this beautiful New Year’s Day looking West, I remember and give thanks to all my good friends and allies during the past ten years (whether we’re in contact to this day or not), in particular to my trustee, Peyton Yates Freiman, a more honest and truer soul does not exist!   I also recall my oldest friends Helen S. Carr (the only person not related to me by blood who has remembered every birthday, Christmas, and intercardinal solstice or equinox to me since the 1970s) and John K. Naland, but also to my newest best friends just made in 2009, Robert J. Ponte, Dennis & Milenne DeLeon, Renada Nadine March, and (irony of irony’s, because I first heard of her as an adversary) Lisa Liberi.  In this transitory life, in this “shake and bake” world we live in, there are many people who were once important to me whom I never see anymore, even if I have not forgotten them, but I hope that my new friends from 2009 will remain with me always.

No inventory of my most steadfast friends could ever be complete without “honorable mention” of Lisa Cook, my sister-in-law in Michigan, who talked to me and understood me and listened to me for years when to do so meant that her own husband’s family (my wife Elena’s relatives) would heap scorn upon her during “the war years” when Elena was calling me “Not Family, but Cancer in the House.”  Lisa was always there for me and I tried always to be there for her, even when nobody else was.  Charlie’s Brazilian Godmother Helir Arlotta from Palm Beach and Tarpon Springs, Florida, falls into this same category….  I don’t have Lisa’s new telephone number (I tried to reach her over the holidays) and Helir has vanished, but we do not and will not forget each other, I’m sure.

Throughout it all, the priests at St. Luke’s-on-the-Lake in Austin provided genuine friendship and support—and I will never forget them even though I might never spend much time in Austin again.  Father James P. Jameson, a fellow Harvardian, Father Philip May, and Father Mike Wyckoff were there for me (during the “war years” with Elena) when I had no one else to whom I could turn.  They are true Christians, true gentlemen, and truer friends than I ever deserved.  Father May was actually willing to meet with me and Charlie in secret in 2005, to provide “aid and comfort” like the Church Martyrs of old….

I remember more often that they will imagine possible the close relationship I had over three years of tumultuous conflict with my steadfast attorneys during the “War Years” (withe Elena of 2003-2006 Francis Wayne Williams Montenegro and Valorie Wells Davenport.  They worked mostly for free, certainly without any profit, and their dedication to my cause was incomparable, encapsulated in Francis Williams’ statement that he would support me even if threatened with a firing squad, and I believe he meant it at the moment, even though he and Valorie, once actually faced with an “offer they couldn’t refuse” by way of extortion or a “constructive bribe” from the Deputy Texas Attorney General James Carlton Todd, Mike Davis, J. Randall Grimes, and the obviously intimidated visiting Judge James F. Clawson (who replaced Jergins after the Federal suits), ultimately gave up the struggle rather than face sanctions.  Francis and Valorie also introduced me to two good people Corinne Irwin and Rod A. Dal Sasso.  I remember and pray for my late father Charles Edward, Jr., who supported my struggles until he could not stand to hear about them anymore.

I remember my friends in the Southern District of Texas early mortgage note battles: Dan Swank, Jacques S. Jaikaran, Mike Palma, Robert Bruce, and David A. Sibley (who despite some ironic vicissitudes, started off a friend and returned to friendly status) from 2006 and  Jon Drew Roland, my first trustee and closest friend and ally from 2004-2007.

Daniel Louis Simon of Liberty Hill joined my crusade against the Texas Family Courts and Code and has become a steadfast and probably last-long friend.  He holds the dubious distinction of having been sanctioned for following my lead against the Texas Family Courts and Code by Judge Walter Smith, who sanctioned Dan and me jointly and severally to the tune of $150,000.00 in March 2008 for the sole purpose of preventing us from continuing our crusade against the Texas Family Code in Federal Court.  His continued friendship and support is a great comfort to me, and I hope I can provide the same for him.

Between January 2005 and September 2007, I went through major ideological transformations in my life, realizing that the “normal” paths to reform were all but closed in the United States.   It was during these years that I also met and first had the privilege of meeting and working with Senator Jerry O’Neil of Columbia Falls and Kalispell, Montana.  Many friends, even on this ten year list, have already come and gone out of my life, but I hope Jerry will remain my friend for all the rest of the days we might both be living on earth.  He is the truest Patriot I know, one of the greatest constitutional scholars of the “Old School”, and one of the most honorable men on earth (in addition to being, as my son says, “the coolest guy I ever met”).

I remember my Florida friends and accomplices Nancy Jo Grant, Bob Hurt, Bill Trudelle, Pearl Lanier Bryan, and Kathy Ann Garcia-Lawson.  Nancy is a hero who should be known to all Patriotic Americans.  Bob, Bill, & Pearl have provided me with so much support and courage.  Pearl is a warrior among warriors.  Kathy Garcia-Lawson is in so many ways my soulmate, with regard to our parallel paths crusading against (respectively, the Texas and Florida) Family Law and Domestic Relations Courts.  Kathy is such a paragon of the devoted, virtuous spouse committed to and still in love with her husband, even after five years since he left her, I can only stand in awe of her.  Kathy breathes new meaning into the words “family” and “until death do we part.”  Kathy’s funny, sassy, and spunky daughter Alexandra, and all of their friends whom I have met in Palm Beach Gardens, especially Claire and Rebecca.  I love Kathy, her character, and her mind, and hope that she and I will also forever be friends.  And yes, in connection with a person to whom Kathy introduced me, I even will toast on this day Orly Taitz whose affection and company “woke me up” in so many ways up through November 4, 2009—May she find peace and harmony and achieve freedom from want and freedom from fear sufficient that she might break free from the golden shackles that hold her prisoner in what may be a comfortable or even palatial prison.

And I would especially like to remember Vance Fecteau and Moshe Leichner, whom the Federal government continues to hold in prison, who were my closest friends during the worst 54 day period of my life, and who made even that extreme low moment a much brighter, more enlightened, and so more bearable moment.  I doubt that it will happen within the next decade, but I pray for a day when America and the rest of the world will be truly free again, when 1-2% of the population will no longer be incarcerated or on supervised release of some sort, when crimes will be established and measured only by their actual injury to others, so that no person will ever again be incarcerated merely to increase the arrest rates and the prison population so that large corporations owned by major politicians can make larger profits.  I can honestly say that all my experiences in the past decade have educated me and made me a better person and patriot.

To all Hate Mail Writers, a simple trio of messages

(1)  If you strike me down I will come back stronger than you can possibly imagine.  (I actually have a fairly good track record of doing this).

(2)  Go get a life for the New Year!  I have this feeling that 2010 is not going to be a year for hateful idiots of any political stripe.

(3)  I don’t know how to answer Hate Mail so I’m not going to bother—save your time and energy; I will not even honor your insults by responsive e-mails or messages here.

Is Diversity Self-Defeating (how can you maintain diversity if everyone and every situation is the same?)

What exactly IS diversity? How do you measure it? What is the purpose of diversity? Does diversity mean that everyone has to like the same thing, or can we make choices? Can the editors of a magazine say that they like all blondes or all blacks? If “Black is Beautiful”, as I happen to think it is, why would we want to mix it with white? If “Blondes have more fun”, why shouldn’t they have fun together? If everyone is all mixed up, is there really any diversity at all?  Is every person and every individual publication responsible for affirmative action quotas and diversity?  How about diversity of beliefs?  How about the belief the diversity might be completely self-defeating philosophy?

Vanity Fair’s “New Hollywood” issue completely lacks diversity

One thing magazines love to do is call dibs on who will be the new “It” celebrities in the year to come. Sometimes they pick stars whose careers are destined to take off, occasionally they make incredible calls with near-nobodies who later become A-listers, and usually the majority of their picks fade into oblivion. While we’d like to think celeb bible Vanity Fair puts a great deal of thought and planning into its annual “New Hollywood” issue, this year the editors really limited their scope when it came to choosing the next big stars. (Or perhaps they overemphasized the “Fair”? ) Every woman on its new cover is extremely thin and very, very white. Unless Vanity Fair considers one redhead to be diversity, we feel the need to cry foul.
The cover of the March issue features Abbie Cornish, Kristen Stewart, Carey Mulligan, Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Hall, Mia Wasikowska, Emma Stone, Evan Rachel Wood, and Anna Kendrick. Many, if not all of these women have good reason to grace the Vanity Fair cover, and to be a part of what they have dubbed “the fresh faces of 2010.” Evan Rachel Wood has garnered critical acclaim since her Golden Globe-nominated performance in 2003’s “Thirteen” as well as loads of media attention from her highly publicized romance with rocker Marilyn Manson. Kristen Stewart was catapulted to fame by the mega-successful “Twilight” franchise and will star as Joan Jett in the upcoming film, “The Runaways,”  while Amanda Seyfried’s career was put in motion after her role in 2008’s “Mamma Mia!” But WAIT: Vanity Fair already had both Stewart and Seyfried on an August 2008 cover touting “Hollywood’s New Wave.” And this was also a white-girl-only cover. Were there no promising young actors of color who could have been featured in either issue?

Vanity Fair

Though it’s true, Young Hollywood is predominantly Caucasian, we can think of a slew of non-white, non-rail thin actors who made a splash this year (Gabourey Sidibe from “Precious” anyone?). In the accompanying article, Vanity Fair writer Evgenia Peretz calls out the young cover stars by their best attributes: “downy-soft cheeks,” “button nose,” “patrician looks and celebrated pedigree,” “dewy, wide-eyed loveliness,” “Ivory-soap-girl features”—which sounds like an uppity white-girl stereotype, someone we’ve all become very familiar with seeing on the big screen, nothing new about it. Roles for black, Asian, and Latin actors are scarce in Hollywood, but surely Sidibe,  Zoe Saldana of “Avatar” and “Star Trek,” and Freida Pinto of “Slumdog Millionaire” are having their moment. Vanity Fair may have been looking for the most promising batch of talent for their issue, but they should have been looking for a diverse group of women as well.
Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair, August 2008

Can anyone tell me whether this is real or not? Even Bush could ad lib while reading “My Pet Goat”…..on 9/11….

Pitiful: Obama Needs TelePrompter to Talk to Schoolkids

Here’s President TOTUS the other day in Falls Church, VA speaking to a group of sixth graders. You would think this towering intellect could ad lib for five minutes for some kids, but you’d be wrong.

He really is pathetic.

In case you think this is a Photoshop gag, more of the photos are here.

Via here.