I was really glad to learn that the Spanish Inquisition was "people arguing back and forth". Thank goodness, I had the impression it was something entirely different. That doesn't sound so bad at all.

^^^^^ If there was any arguing back and forth, I suspect it was more like:

Inquisitor: "Tell us what we want -- now!!!!!"

Prisoner: Silence

Inquisitor: "Okay, you forced my hand."

Picks up red hot poker and lays it on the chest of the prisoner

Prisoner: "Stop, for all that is good in the world, please stoooooppppppp" Stoooooppppppp......."

Okay, I’m still pages behind. I was busy yesterday and still trying to catch up so sorry if this one is already pointed out.

Taitz said:
“Ms. Taitz: Okay, I’m not a challenger, there are four challengers (inaudible)”

So if she isn’t a challenger what is this? Another lie?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81115925/Indi ... enge-Taitz

Yes thanks Loh for that great report, and a big thanks to everyone else too. I’m still catching up, (but I have a very sick 18 y/o kitteh who I think I’m going to have to take to the kitteh ER so it might take me a while )

I did just wanted to comment on this photo. Is everyone else in the photo except Taitz asleep?

Let me echo the thanks to Loh for the report and GG for the file.

Count me among those who have no problem with how the committee members acted.

If someone had been this stern ( ) with her in the past, perhaps she wouldn't be the disrespectful bitch that she is now.

Or maybe she would. Who knows. Well, I guess Yosi knows. And he has my sympathies.

In my opinion, this committee (commission?) treated her exactly as she needed to be treated. The Spanish Inquisition comment was a little odd, but I suspect he was just caught up in the moment.

The judges and other authority figures before whom Orly has appeared in this crusade of hers, by their refusal (or reluctance) to be firm with her and keep her blatherings to the point, have taught her this conduct.

It's time she was taught proper behavior, and Friday was the first lesson.

Karl was impressed with Orly's zibits:
http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/?p=32123

A couple brief notes I may have missed in my report.

The first time Orly spoke after the five minute recess, her voice broke. She sounded on a number of occasions as if she were about to break down and cry.

When Orly's entourage erupted out of the room at the end of the hearing, the birther I'd talked to briefly earlier loudly said "What a load of shit" or something of the sort as he left. I had more sympathy for this guy than for the lunatic he chose as a lawyer.

However, I don't remember any of these people saying they were Democrats. Every other legitimate challenge at this hearing was of people challenging someone from their own party in a primary, or people in a district challenging an ineligible candidate from out of their district. What was going on here was not an attempt by voters to assert their own rights, but an attempt by the crazy wing of the Republican party to destroy the rights of Democrats to choose our own candidate, who happens to be a sitting President. .

This was not people trying to vindicate their own right to vote. None of them are even voting in the Democratic primary, as far as I know. This was people trying to steal MY right to vote, since I WILL be voting in the Democratic primary and I will be voting for Barack Obama. I'm fucking insulted at the very idea that the Election Commission should have stolen my right to vote based on Obama's correct choice not to dignify a farce with presence even through counsel. If thinking I have a right to vote in my own party's primary without interference from out of state lunatics, and that there are such things as rules of admissibility is "groupthink," then so be it. Call me guilty.

I am proud that on the Election Commission, two Republicans, one of them Romney's campaign chair, would have absolutely nothing to do with Orly's deeply undemocratic thuggery and treated it with the contempt it deserved.

That said, the challengers would have been treated with more respect if they had actually presented their cases, instead of dragging in an incompetent out-of-state "attorney" to shit on the floor, insult this state and the people in it and try to incite a riot.

yeah, but that's from some function in California a while back.

Hope the kitteh is okay.




Loh, thank you for the great reports.

I think they were too polite. I think the commission should have given Taitz no more time when she disrupted the meeting and sneered and shouted "No, you are out of order." How dare she. She should have been sent packing. She was treated with a courtesy she denies others, and which she forfeited once she began to abuse these volunteer commissioners. She was also practicing law without a license after being told she couldn't, although it was so incompetent anyone would be hard pressed to call it anything close to what a lawyer or even a law student does.

Finally, and on a slightly different subject, I resent the group think comment. I think it's completely out of bounds. On the other hand, when this disparate group can come to a consensus, then I know I am on the right track.

I'd like to apologize for my little outburst[s] last night, especially for the word "groupthink," which has rightfully offended some of you.

I thought the way the commissioners handled it was great, for the record.

I enjoyed the hell out of that hearing. I haz a witness: Wifehorn was home at the time. I was woo-hooing and laughing my ass off and thoroughly enjoying every stinkin' minute of it. Great smackdown. Loved it.

Half an hour later, I start reading personal remarks, which violate the rules of the forum. Then I start getting PMs: "Get rid of this guy!!" Then I start getting emails. I prob'ly had tweets, too also, but I didn't read my tweets. Suddenly, I couldn't just enjoy the smackdown and the aftermath any more. Suddenly, I had to pay attention to the drama and turmoil. I couldn't be just an Obot enjoying the day. I had to be the admin, sorting out conflicting claims and trying to keep the board from descending into flame wars. It really did ruin my enjoyment of the hearing.

Plus, I'm still sick with the GBS and I have my days when I'm just pissed about it all day, and yesterday was one of them. My feet went to sleep last October 9 and haven't woken up yet. My recovery is stuck in neutral. I'm still having a hell of a time with nausea. I puked my guts out last night at 11 pm. I do that 3 days a week. Sorry if that's TMI. Also, I really don't like banning people or confining them beneath the bridge. Did I mention I'm the group leader of the Grumpy People? Gimme a minute, I'll think up some more lame excuses.

No, wait. I'm apologizing. I do apologize.

Balak is not a birther. He hasn't been a troll before today either. He's been here five months. If he writes a stupid post, people are free to simply ignore it. If nobody had responded to his first post, would he have kept going all day? I don't know the answer.

All of a sudden it was 9 pm, and I felt like shit and knew I was going to lose my dinner, and I was trying to catch up on the posts, and I couldn't because I had to respond to PMs and emails and people telling me he's a birther.

So I did what I always do: I lost my temper.

But suppose for one minute you hadn't ever known about the birther movement before you saw yesterday morning's hearings. Suppose you watched all the challenges, not just the Orlybots. You wouldn't learn enough about birtherism in those few minutes to understand what was going on. The only thing you'd understand is that the commission treated that group about a thousand times more rudely than all the prior challengers. And the commissioners started the rudeness IMHO, not the challengers. If you didn't already know about birtherism, you might think Orly and her peeps got railroaded.

One last comment, and then I'm done. Not saying Balak is a troll still, just about trolls in general.

IMHO, after many, many years on forums like this, I sincerely believe that if you post "I'm putting this person on ignore" ... then the score is now Troll 1, normal person 0. Generally speaking, the purpose of a troll is to get people really, really annoyed. That's a great way to admit that you're really, really annoyed. If I put someone on ignore (which I don't, but just sayin'), the very last thing I'd do is let the troll know about it. YMMV, of course.

I'll try not to be so grumpy today. It really was a spectacular smackdown, and I'm enjoying it again today.

But I'm sorry I lumped you all in together, and I apologize for my grumpiness and mischaracterizations.

Moving forward using all my breath:

Orly posted last night that she's in her hotel room in San Francisco.

She still thinks she's speaking to the GOP Convention at 4 p.m. in the Hyatt at the San Jose airport.

The Liberty Caucus still thinks they uninvited her.

Today may produce some seriously hilarious entertainment all on its own.

Pretty sure that was from when Orly disrupted a Damon Dunn campaign speech to the Hermosa Beach Tea Party. I could be wrong, of course. But that was a performance and a half. The Tea Party host, in absolute awe, asked Orly, "What kind of person are you?"

I agree. This may be the second time Orly lost to an empty chair, but it was the first time she lost to one live in a public hearing. Not only was she told her entire 300 page loren ipsum was the unauthenticated hearsay that it is, the SSN info, her pride and joy, was said to be flat out irrelevant. She tried for a default, (in which she clumsily pretended she wasn't attempting to practice law by urging her plaintiff to repeat her request) and was voted down 4-0, including two Republicans, one who told her that he absolutely was no fan of the President, but that President must be respected.

Orly likes to believe that she's popular and a voice for millions who are outraged at the blatant corruption, etc. of the Great Usurper. I think she views herself as an individual who should rightly be influential in mainstream Republican circles. (Witness her posts on Mitt Romney, who most of her supporters would think would be a RINO Obama). She does not like being told no and she firmly believes that her free speech rights mean that she gets to speak to whomever she wishes and they must listen.

If she's in a fighting mood (very likely after the Indiana Smackdown), I hope that the Liberty Caucus has decent security.

The difference between a judicial trial and an administrative hearing is critical. It may be masked by the fact that when appropriate, the two types of hearing sometime adopt what look like similar procedures, but the goals of the procedures are different.

A trial is a formal contest between two parties, where the goal is to vindicate the rights of the parties before the court, the plaintiff as well as the defendant. The effect on the world at large is basically irrelevant. Anyone with a dog in the hunt had best lawyer up and get involved, or waive their rights. Rules of procedure are strict and enforced upon the demand of a party whose rights are infringed by a failure to adhere to procedure. In theory, this is supposed to lead to "justice." In reality, it usually does, at least when both parties are adequately represented. This may not be the case when one side is a huge corporation with 20 lawyers and the other side is a pro se defendant. However, I'll argue social justice in civil litigation another time. The most important issue for this discussion is that a trial is something occurring before part of the JUDICIAL branch, which decides controversies between parties.

An administrative hearing is a hearing by a part of the executive branch, generally an administrative agency. The executive branch does not generally make binding determinations as to what the law is. The job of the executive branch is to DO. Unlike the relatively helpless judiciary, the executive branch has people who go out and DO things, build buildings, administer programs, and even, in the case of resistance, send out guys with guns to eliminate the resistance and THEN do things. The purpose of inviting public comment and participation does not reflect a core purpose of resolving disputes of rights between private parties, but reflects a general desire that the public participate in carrying out the law. It is not the job of the executive branch to question what the law is, but to carry it out.

This dichotomy is reflected in this way in these kinds of hearings. To initiate a civil trial, one must have standing and some reason your name should be on the caption. You generally won't get a trial if you sue for your next-door neighbor to be compelled to wear suspenders, because you think he'd look better that way. By comparison, an administrative hearing is about an executive agency carrying out its duties. Often, there is a compulsory hearing (like the Election Commission hearing) to allow the public to comment and state its views. Anyone interested can show up. Usually, that is people within the jurisdiction who have opinions. The very basis of allowing challengers and public comments at an Election Commission (at least one constituted as Indiana's is) is to allow public commentary by the very public (Indiana voters) who are impacted by the Commission's decisions. (Needless to say, Moldovan Communists are not among this public.)

Notably, many administrative hearings these days, such as benefits hearings, do actually involve substantive rights. I won't go into this in any detail, but just repeat my reference that Judge Friendly's works on due process in the administrative realm are the core of modern thinking on the subject, and while I am personally considerably more liberal than Friendly, I'd say start there if you're actually interested in the subject.

However, this Election Commission hearing is not, basically, about deciding substantive rights. It's about the Secretary of State carrying out its statutory duty to put together ballots so the citizens of the state of Indiana can vote. Everything about how this happens is tailored toward a single goal: putting out a bunch of pieces of paper or these days electronic ballot files to be loaded into voting machines, so that on election day, people can cast votes. There is no particularized right of any individual to have a ballot they like looking at.

Now, the content of a ballot does reflect many rights. It reflects the rights of the candidates to appear on the ballot, which is why candidates are so often named parties in contests over the ballot. The right to appear on the ballot is essentially the implementation of the core right, which is the right to run for office, which is meaningless if your name does not appear on a ballot. Not appearing on a ballot, in most cases, is the death-knell of a political campaign. In primaries, the rights of political parties are represented by having their certified candidates listed on the ballot. Political parties themselves are composed of individual voters, like me, and here is where my rights come in. I have the right to vote in my party's primary for the candidate of my choice, and collectively, my fellow party members have that right.

Then, there is a right of people in general to have a working democracy. This is generally not sufficient to confer standing in a court of law, but is sufficient for appearing before an administrative body to state an opinion.

Here's another major distinction. A judge has an absolute obligation to be impartial, not to reach an opinion beforehand, only to make a decision based on evidence of record admitted based on what parties have submitted, stipulated, or otherwise put in the record, subject to challenge by any other party.

An administrative agency may very well have already decided to do what it is going to do. It has no obligation to be impartial. It has the obligation of carrying out the law, whether that involves sending out excavation equipment to drain a swamp, sending out guys with guns to stop someone from draining a swamp because it is now protected wetlands, or otherwise doing the business of the state. While hearings may have the trappings of court proceedings, in effect, anything that goes on in these hearings is a public comment period, not a trial. The administrative agency has the job of doing something, in this case, putting together a ballot and putting it in front of the snoots of the voters on election day. Not putting that ballot below the appropriate snoots on election day is Not An Option.

The impatience of this particular Election Commission is not because it was "biased," and that accusation is not only wrong, but stupid. They have a short deadline to do their jobs. They are entirely open to improving the ballot by removing joke candidates and those clearly ineligible. They are entirely willing to hear arguments on arguable challenges to candidates and to create a record for further review.

However, as the Chair noted repeatedly, clearly understanding the difference between an administrative agency and a court, there are some matters that are only appropriate for review in a court. Unlike many administrative agencies, the Indiana Election Commission conscientiously preserved the record for judicial review in even Orly's case, not that these churlish curs even appreciate that.

Basically, Orly was demanding the Commission break the law and remove Obama from the ballot based on no evidence at all, when the law demands that a party's certified candidates appear on the primary ballot. Even if the pile of garbage she submitted, much of which is completely unintelligible, were "evidence," it would not justify the Commission breaking the law, which is what Orly demanded.

It is the job of the Election Commission to decide issues nearly immediately and take them to completion before a HARD deadline. If they fail to do that and get ballots in front of voters on election day, not getting reappointed is the least of their problems. Around here, torches and pitchforks would not be an unrealistic outcome.

Only a court could go further and, after weighing admissible evidence, go further and do things like enjoin the certification of signature petitions, delaying an election.

Delaying a statutory deadline would be absolute anathema to an Election Commission. By comparison, disrupting things like that is something courts do all the time. The "stay" that Orly constantly demands (not having the slightest clue what a "stay" is and why you would want one) is a perfect example of judiciary power. It is basically a court saying "stop whatever the hell you're doing and wait until we decide." While an executive agency has the power to bulldoze your house and put up a sewage plant, the judiciary lacks that power. However, it has the power to stop the executive from doing that until it decides otherwise.

Here's my conclusion. Orly has been treated with something resembling respect by the judiciary, which has the job of resolving disputes between private parties. None of her "plaintiffs" had standing. Now, she is attempting to meddle in the business of political parties by challenging the process by which they choose their own candidates. Even Republicans are big on political parties having the right to choose their own candidates.

Yesterday, she chose to piss in that bowl of cornflakes publicly, and got what she deserved. Period.

Nobody who had any clue what an administrative agency is or what it does would have done something that stupid, or defended something that stupid, or absurdly insisted on calling an administrative agency a "court." I hope I have explained thoroughly why insisting otherwise is not merely ignorant, but that after it has been explained unanimously by dozens of people, at the very least borders on the malicious.

Apologies if already posted. Perhaps the empty table wasn't...

S. Anthony Long

Sarah Steele Riordan

No apologies necessary at all! Thank you for posting these. Even though I was there, I was somewhat confused as to who was who. My report may be confuzzled as a result, and putting faces to names is important.

I, too, enjoyed the heck out of that hearing. It was circus. And observing the indignation on the part of the Commission members was very satisfying.

That being said, my work has me involved in a lot of quasi-judicial proceedings - before both hearing officers and commissions. If I have learned anything it is that those presiding over such hearings are better served if they are able to keep their emotions and associated rhetoric in check. There are more effective ways to keep unruly participants in line than having to refer to the backside of someone's anatomy (I say this even as I admit enjoying hearing it said).

I got the distinct impression that the Commission wasn't sure how they were going to handle this matter and, as a result, didn't follow their normal routines and procedures. In some ways they allowed themselves to be sucked in. Particularly telling was the motion to deny admissability of Orly's "evidence" followed by the corrective action after the five minute recess to allow the materials to be included in the record even though they didn't qualify it as evidence. And then the chair gave Orly her ten minutes of presentation time. Clearly, the Chair of the Commission had gotten procedural advice from counsel during the recess.

Rude, unruly and inappropriate behavior on the part of hearing participants is best managed by sticking to tightly prescribed protocols and by modeling the behavior one prefers from such participants. Utlimately, that may not result in these participants behaving better, but it does produce a more defensible and unblemished record should matters be appealed.

Cheers!
Dawg

P.S. Still, it was awfully fun to watch.

I don't think that having the video (tape? what century is this?) go viral is going to have the effect that they think it will.

This ^^^

Agreed. People who are truly mentally ill, often don't know right from wrong. That's why they get committed to treatment hospitals rather than sentenced to jail. In Orly's case, she clearly has the capacity to discern right from wrong. Combine her lack of personal ethics with her ignorance about the craft of lawyering and you get what we consistently observe from her. I cringe to think how this translates into her dentistry practice.

I have no doubt that at some point Ms. Taitz will be disbarred and/or subject to further sanctions as she continues to grasp at straws in pursuit of her quixotic quest. Given her total immersion in conspiracy theory dysfunction, however, I doubt she'll ever reconnect the dots and understand how her behavior is what brought her to that precipice.

Loh... Lovely write-up on courts and administrative hearings. Thank you.

A good example of this is how quickly she shifted to "I'm not here as a lawyer or a challenger" mode when questioned yesterday. Some of the fruitcakes (technical term) would have just bulled ahead insisting they were a lawyer or whatever they think they are, because they're consistent in their incorrect beliefs.

I wondered what some of the true believers thought when they saw or heard her shift her story like that. Did it ping somewhere in their brains?

Did anyone else notice the Freudian slip at the beginning of the video where Orly says: "Obama isn't even his middle name?"

I don't know what to call it, but Orly isn't capable of civilized human response. Maybe that's a mental disorder of some kind. Not that I care. She is evil, mean and dishonest. Fuck her, to put it gently.