NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR OCTOBER 8.
Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
– Abigail Adams
Letter to John Adams, 3-31-1776
This week’s featured post is “Two Ways Brett Kavanaugh Could Be a Hero“. That sounds crazy, but here’s the basic idea: In a difficult situation, the hero is somebody who steps up to take the risk or pay the price. Heroes don’t shove burdens off on other people.
If you happen to be in west central Illinois next weekend, you can hear me discuss “Men and #MeToo” at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on Sunday morning at 10:45.
This week everybody was talking about Brett Kavanaugh
The dust is still swirling from the second accusation that came out in The New Yorker yesterday. The second accuser is a Yale classmate, and apparently was picked out for victimization because she was drunker than the other women at the party. So her account is correspondingly muddled. She would have made a terrible first accuser, but her story does bolster Christine Blasey Ford’s.
This morning, other news outlets are still trying to figure out what to do with the second accusation. As of 9:30, the New York Times still wasn’t headlining it, but referred to it in an article about Diane Feinstein’s call for a delay. Otherwise, the committee will interview Dr. Blasey Ford on Thursday. (I predict Kavanaugh will withdraw before then.)
One constant in Republican defenses of Kavanaugh is that he is a “man of integrity” and “one of the finest human beings you will have the privilege of knowing“. But what exactly are they talking about?
I’m not aware of him working with Mother Theresa, making a major career sacrifice for a principle, rescuing people from burning buildings, winning a Medal of Honor, or doing anything else that rises above the kinds of things that ordinary decent people do. He drives other people’s kids in a carpool; he coaches girls basketball; a lot of women say he has treated them well. Good for him, but don’t we all know people we could say similar things about? I don’t think any of that should qualify him for sainthood.
To me, this sterling reputation looks like a benefit of privilege: He’s a straight white male Christian conservative from an upscale family, so he is presumed to be a man with a high sense of honor. No actual supporting evidence is needed.
When Kavanaugh was nominated, here’s the first thing he said:
Mr. President, thank you. Throughout this process, I have witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.
It may not have seemed like a big deal at the time, but that was a brazen, obvious lie. Trump picked Kavanaugh off a list of 25 names that was given to him by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, a straight white male Catholic conservative from an Ivy League school. So Trump conspicuously didn’t consult widely or seek input from large numbers of people from diverse backgrounds. On the contrary, together with the Neil Gorsuch search process, the Kavanaugh process was probably the least rigorous search in recent American history. That was public knowledge, and Kavanaugh surely knew it too.
In other words, whatever Kavanaugh’s version of “integrity” entails, he’s not above telling a big public lie to flatter someone important. He’s not above introducing himself to the American people by telling a big, obvious lie.
So now he needs us to believe him rather than the women who accuse him of misconduct. Why exactly should we do that?
This picture of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority (posted by Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii) is worth contemplating. How small a slice of America do they really represent? If you were accusing an over-50 well-to-do Christian white man of something, is the group you’d want to judge your credibility?
TPM has the backstory on how Democrats on the Judiciary Committee handled the Blasey Ford accusation.
Some very unconvincing arguments are being made in Kavanaugh’s defense. The NYT’s Bret Stephens offers:
I believe human memory is imperfect. I believe it deteriorates over time. I believe most of us have had the experience of thinking we remember something clearly, only to discover we got important details wrong.
I know there are studies showing that spouses often remember very different facts about important moments, like their wedding or honeymoon or how they met. I myself sometimes notice that I remember an event happening in a room that didn’t exist at the time. But I very much doubt that ordinary human memory drift extends as far as “Wait, maybe it was the other guy who tried to rape me.”
A number of defenders have put forward some version of the he-was-just-17 argument. You know who’s not convinced by this? 17-year-olds.
“They just keep saying ‘He was in high school—boys will be boys,’” says Maurielle, a 17-year-old from Houston. “But I’m in high school—I don’t want that to happen to me.”
Making up stuff about Blasey Ford shows lack of faith that the truth is on your side. No, she isn’t poorly reviewed as a professor, she doesn’t carry a grudge against Kavanaugh’s mother, she didn’t accuse Neil Gorsuch of anything, she’s not a big Democratic donor, and her brother has no connection to the Trump/Russia investigation.
Flatly misstating Blasey Ford’s account is not convincing either. Here’s Franklin Graham (whose Dad apparently forgot to warn him about bearing false witness):
Asked by the CBN interviewer what kind of message his remarks send to sexual abuse victims, Graham replied: “Well, there wasn’t a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away.”
Kavanaugh “respected” her refusal, according Blasey Ford, after groping her, trying to pull off her swimsuit, and holding his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. And he didn’t “walk away”; she escaped after Kavanaugh drunkenly fell off her.
Two related items of interest: Following the lead of actress Alyssa Milano, many women have responded to Trump’s tweet
I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.
by telling their own stories under the #WhyIDidntReport hashtag.
Or if you want to sum it all up with one story, look at “What Do We Owe Her Now?” in The Washington Post. When Elizabeth Bruenig was a sophomore in high school, a junior cheerleader reported a rape and became an outcast. The physical evidence supported her claims, but the authorities never filed charges, leading to the local rumor that she had made the whole thing up. When Bruenig grew up and became a journalist, she decided to investigate.
Nate Silver tweets that Kavanaugh is polling worse than any previous nominee who got confirmed. And that was before the latest charges.
and Rod Rosenstein
The New York Times is reporting that Rosenstein will lose his job today, either by resigning or being fired.
If Mr. Rosenstein exits, Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, would assume oversight of the Russia investigation, according to a Justice Department official. The acting deputy attorney general would be Matthew G. Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an unusual move.
This follow an NYT story earlier in the week, which claimed that Rosenstein felt misused after his memo gave Trump cover to fire Jim Comey. Reportedly, he discussed the 25th Amendment (through which Trump could be removed without impeachment) and suggested taping Trump secretly. Rosenstein denies those reports.
Vox sees problems ahead for Bob Mueller:
Rosenstein’s departure strikes at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation because Mueller had to run major investigative decisions past the deputy attorney general. Rosenstein’s temporary replacement, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, could simply refuse to approve Mueller’s requests, effectively slowing the whole investigation to a crawl — or even fire Mueller outright if he felt there was a reason to do so.
So the long-anticipated constitutional crisis could be upon us.
and the midterm elections
We’re about six weeks out from the election, and everything the Republicans expect to turn the tide in their favor keeps backfiring. Kavanaugh was supposed to work for them, and several candidates have been running attack ads against Democratic senators for not supporting Kavanaugh. That now looks like wasted money.
Nate Silver’s model now gives the Democrats a 4 out of 5 chance of gaining control of the House and a 3 in 10 chance of winning the Senate.
and the consequences of Hurricane Florence
A lot of North Carolina wasn’t built with this kind of flooding in mind. (In fact, in 2012 the legislature banned state agencies from basing plans on a study that predicted rising sea level from climate change.) So toxic coal ash is entering the Cape Fear River and the waste pools from hog farms are also a problem.
Grist explores the side issue of why massive hog farms are in North Carolina to begin with. Hog farms should be in places that raise massive amounts of hog feed, like Iowa. Then the manure can fertilize the fields rather than build up in toxic pools.
If North Carolina wants to end the pattern of water pollution, it has to find a way to spread out the livestock or treat their waste. And the state needs to face the fact that once-in-a-lifetime floods are now hitting more than once a decade.
In this week’s episode of “What’s Wrong With That Man?”, President Trump toured hurricane-ravaged North Carolina. Talking to someone whose house was damaged by a storm-driven boat (and was having trouble getting his insurance company to cover it), Trump commented, “At least you got a nice boat out of the deal.” On the same trip, he also handed a box lunch to another victim, telling him to “Have a good time.”
It’s hard to know what to do with comments reflecting such a basic lack of human empathy. Stephen Colbert decided to turn them into a children’s book.
but you have to see this political ad
It’s not often you can get six of your opponent’s siblings to make an ad for you.
BuzzFeed tells how this ad came about. Six of Rep. Paul Gosar’s nine siblings appear in the ad and two others support it. But their 85-year-old mother is still on Paul’s side. This should make for a lovely Thanksgiving.
and you also might be interested in …
Congress is currently working on appropriation bills for the fiscal year that starts next Monday. Current bills don’t include the funding Trump wants for the Mexican wall, so he is talking about a veto, possibly shutting down the government or some large part of it.
This is a time when major proposals can get swept into a bill without much fanfare. One such is in the House’s version of the appropriation bill for Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education: It would “cut 15% of federal adoption funding to states and localities that penalize adoption agencies that refuse to place children in families that conflict with the agency’s ‘sincerely held religious beliefs or convictions'” and also bar “the federal government from refusing to work with adoption agencies that discriminate.”
Once again, Christians would get the special right to ignore discrimination laws, and gays and lesbians would lose the “equal protection of the laws” promised in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
If you’re going to give huge tax cuts to rich people and big corporations, you have to crack down somewhere. How about on young people who have trouble repaying their student loans?
The proposal unveiled Monday would sharply curtail income-based loan repayment plans, scratch the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, embolden the government to go after students who don’t pay their loans and cut funding for federal work study in half.
… The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is eliminated in the proposed budget. This program allows former students who fulfill certain public service positions — such as public school teachers or health researchers — to have their loans erased after 10 years of on-time payments. Nearly two-thirds of student loan borrowers who’ve shown interest in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness earn less than $50,000 a year.
… People whose loans fall into delinquency would be subject to more stringent enforcement as the proposal also calls to “streamline the Department of Education’s ability to verify applicants’ income data held by the Internal Revenue Service.”
A new round of tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect today. These tariffs are 10%, and will automatically rise to 25% in 2019 if no new deal is negotiated. China is retaliating, and there’s no end in sight.
I’m slowly making my way through Bob Woodward’s Fear. I recently hit the point where Trump is reviewing a proposed speech on the economy and writes in the margin “Trade is bad.”
Apple has warned that tariffs on Chinese imports will raise the cost of its products to American consumers. Trump has responded that Apple should just make its iPhones in the US. Vox takes a look at how practical that is. Not very, as it turns out.
The issue is not so much cost of putting an iPhone together, or even the cost per part on paper. The issue is skill, scale, expertise, and infrastructure — all of which require money, time and long-term investment. Unlike other manufacturing jobs that have migrated from the United States, Apple wouldn’t be bringing them “back” so much as starting from scratch. The cost would come in attempting to build a system that’s never been in the US, but has been built over decades abroad.
China has these jobs because it has put together the right combination of “craftsman-like skill, sophisticated robotics, and computer science”.
“There’s a confusion about China,” [Apple CEO Tim] Cook said. “The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.”
If Apple could do it, making iPhones in America would raise the price anywhere from $16 to $100, depending on what “Made in America” means to you: If the US plant would just assemble parts made elsewhere, you get the lower number. If you want all the parts made here too, you get the higher number.
For similar reasons, the official statistics exaggerate how big a dent iPhones make in our trade balance with China: China is reaping about $8 from each iPhone, but a tariff would fall on the full import price of around $240.
Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate DeSantis has run into another racial controversy (his fifth since winning the primary a month ago).
A Republican activist who donated more than $20,000 to Ron DeSantis and lined up a speech for him at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club recently called President Barack Obama a “F—- MUSLIM N—-” on Twitter, in addition to making other inflammatory remarks.
Steven M. Alembik told POLITICO on Wednesday he wrote the Obama tweet in anger, that he’s “absolutely not” a racist and that he understood that DeSantis’ campaign for governor would need to distance itself from the comments — which the campaign promptly did.
Of course Alembik isn’t a racist. I’m sure lots of non-racists tweet about F—- MUSLIM N—-s every day. Nonetheless, Paul Waldman raises the question: “Why do all these racists keep joining the GOP?”
DeSantis may have been embroiled in an unusual number of these controversies, but it’s what every Republican candidate worries about these days. What if some supporter of mine says something shockingly racist? What if that guy who introduced me at that rally turns out to be a klansman? What if I get endorsed by some neo-Nazi group?
But you know who doesn’t have to worry about getting endorsed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racists? People who don’t give neo-Nazis, white nationals and racists any reason to believe that they share their views.
and let’s close with something awesome
A bridge through Vietnam’s Ba Na Hills, held up by stone hands.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
The linked article on student loans is about Trump’s budget back in February.
The actual new news on student loans is that so far, DOE has found a way to reject 99% of applicants for forgiveness: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/09/24/public-service-loan-forgiveness-rejected/#aadd4b218247
Thank you.
Kavanaugh will not withdraw. He will be confirmed along party lines. He is the Republican dream candidate. If you listen to the Republicans they are all saying the same thing; boys will be boys, horseplay, youthful indiscretion, drinking, she was drunk, the women are lying (like they wanted to put through hell to stop him from getting to the court), a Democrat plot,… The best that we can hope for is that when the Democrats regain the Senate (which could be years) they will impeach him for lying to Congress during a confirmation hearing because they do have him on that.
No one is focusing on Kavanaugh’s biggest lie – that he considers Roe v. Wade to be “settled law.” The religious right has been salivating over the balance of the Court changing to allow Roe to be overturned; if we are to believe Kavanaugh, he’ll vote with Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Kagan to preserve abortion rights as “settled law” if it should come up.
Of course, the pro-choice side doesn’t believe him. We know he’s saying this because he has to give cover to Collins and Murkowski and any other pro-choice Republicans who would be obligated to vote against him if he admitted his true feelings. But the pro-life side doesn’t believe him either, otherwise, they’d be screaming to the rafters to scuttle Kavanaugh’s nomination and replace him with someone else who’s willing to outlaw abortion. Their support of him speaks volumes.
I imagine they’ll thread the Roe v Wade needle the same way they’ve been doing for years: respect that you theoretically have a right to one, but it’s totally okay if practically it’s not possible.
Enjoy your break. I will miss The Weekly Sift.
Sally Willson
Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
The quote from Abigail Adams above reminds me of a question I’ve been considering lately. Given Russian interference, voter suppression, and extreme partisan gerrymandering, at what point is it appropriate to withdraw consent from a government that only holds power due to the consent of the people? If the results of elections are demonstrably not the will of the governed, what right does a nominally democratic government have to rule?
The only “right” government has is our collective agreement to abide by its rule. But once you cross the line into open revolt, you lose any expectation of due process. So revolt should be reserved for the most extreme circumstances, when conditions are so bad, you’re willing to die rather than continue to endure them.
We need help. Almost 10 years of abuse of power most cannot imagine. Please help us. It’s a long story, but please read it anyway. We need a hero. There are two flight paths in Orange County, California, one due north towards Riverside and one due south over the ocean and back under Dana Point. We are not under any flight path, we live due east and over 20 miles from the John Wayne Airport. There is no flight path over Mission Viejo. We are 64 year old professionals, married 32 years, own a home and business here in Orange County and have never been in trouble. My husband used to be a pilot and had a plane at John Wayne Airport. I was raised here and we both have lived here most of our 64 years of life. My husband was a pilot and had a plane at JWA. We called JWA in 2009 as a favor to our next door neighbor to ask nicely if the student pilots could stop doing stall maneuvers over our homes (it’s illegal). within 15 minutes, the director at that time, Mr. Alan L. Murphy, was over us in our driveway doing figure 8s just above our roof. The abuse has not stopped since. The FAA is a self-policed organization, which should never be allowed, and so a citizen cannot get help with this abuse of power. Mr. Michael Huerta, the head of the FAA, whom we contacted in May of 2014, seems to be running a mafia style organization. If a woman contacts noise complaint, she gets a very low flight path over her home, spied on and stalked with aircraft. We have found five other women in Orange County suffering this same fate. There are probably many more. In our over 9 years of this extreme abuse of power, we have contacted every single person in power we could think of. I use to work for the senior deputy district attorney for OC Bryan Brown and DA Richard Farnell. They came to our wedding and I received the such a great letter of recommendation when I resigned that position. Our county is completely corrupt. Frank Ury, the ex mayor in Mission Viejo, as a preemptive strike in an election year after being asked to step down or face recall for refusing to deal with the abuse of power at the airport, filed for restraining orders against us so we couldn’t participate in any recall. He stated in his request that we threatened his children (what a horrible lie to avoid being recalled). His receptionist, Jennifer Wilson, to whom we had never spoke, joined in on this fraudulent request. We have no idea why a woman would participate in this fraud against another woman who is just begging for help against bullying that most people cannot imagine. After we were served with the request for RO’s, Jennifer Wilson sent an email to our home. I didn’t realize it was her and wrote back that I would never contact her because she kicks women in the teeth for begging her boss for help. Upon receipt of this email, she called her attorney so fast to see if she could get me arrested. She had been by that time moved to slope maintenance in Mission Viejo. She had workers come over and cut down almost every tree in front of our home for revenge for my email. She said the trees were infested. We had them tested and they were not. Her husband is an OC Sheriff and since we began blogging to find help, he has begun dive bombing our home with the Sheriff’s office helicopters, shakes our home with these very large helicopters, stalks us to restaurants and buzzes them at such a low altitude, no one can ignore it, sits in the sky behind our home at night with binoculars staring into our home (we live on a hill) and stalks us wherever we go. The entire Sheriff’s office now makes sure we can’t go anywhere without 3 or more Sheriff SUV’s coming into view. Vehicles with blacked out windows follow us (a black Escalade, white Audi and others). I have googled the hours of a business, and while on my way to that business, I will be surrounded by Sheriff SUV’s, 5 at a time. Camp Pendleton started helping Mr. Alan L. Murphy right away in 2009 and dive bombs and shakes our home with helicopters and jets. They have dive bombed us on the beach with military helicopters so many times, we have stopped going. I can’t even go outside in my yard without someone in aircraft coming up here immediately and bullying me. They know every time we go outside and where we are going. No one will do a sweep or stop the spying. We had our phone company come to our home to find out how they are spying on us, and when the gentleman that came out said “no one is spying on you”, I told him “watch this”. I got on my computer and wrote “I am home” to a friend and immediately a private plane was up here dive bombing our home. We tried to move to another county for 8 months and Mr. Alan L. Murphy sent military jets screaming over every appointment we made online to see a home. When we finally called the police in Mission Viejo to file a report, and after I said two sentences, the officer who came out told us he would not take a report and that we had better never call the police for any reason??? Why? We have done nothing wrong. Then we realized why. Mission Viejo PD, mainly now ex Chief of Police Lt. Binning, was participating in this abuse of power by spying on us in our home, stalking us and dive bombing us hundreds of times with their helicopter. He uploaded pornography to our computer, called our home repeatedly to leave on our phone machine, the same sound we just made in our home so we understood they are listening to every word we say, (the police, Sheriff, fire department and who knows who else still is spying on us in our home. We know this because they know every time we are going to leave our home and where we are going. They follow us and dive bomb us in restaurants, parking lots, etc.). Lt Binning called our home late at night to wake us up and erased our emails several times. He was removed from his position over this. The police, Sheriff and fire department here in MV will come to a parking lot where we have gone into a business and when we come out, turn on their sirens. They pull up next to restaurants where we are eating and turn on their sirens. When we began wearing earplugs and headphones to mitigate the feelings of suicide from this extreme and ongoing abuse of power using aircraft, Mr. Barry Rondinella began using chem trails all over the skies in Orange County. Big chem trail X’s over our home and in the skies around our home so we cannot even open our drapes without being bullied. We will decide which restaurant we want to go to and when we get there, chem trails over the restaurant. There should never be chem trails in the skies over Orange County. We wasted 8 years begging our totally corrupt county for help. Bullies want their victims to believe everyone hates them. These people are consummate bullies. NO ONE SANE AND SOBER DOES THIS TO ANYONE FOR ANY REASON. On November 13, 2015, a new director came to Orange County, Mr. Barry Rondinella. We were praying he was going to be a decent human being. We couldn’t have been more wrong. He promised in the newspaper that he was going to strictly enforce the airport curfew laws in Orange County (our airport closes at 10pm). His first week, he flew everything he could over our home 24/7. We and three of our neighbors had cameras pointed skyward for 5 days, from 6pm – 2am. Over 50 hours of pure illegal abuse on video. When we read that Mr. Rondinella came here from LAX, we realized that he was the one sending jets over our home all night every night for eight years from LAX, keeping us from sleeping. I truly just about lost my sanity. Our business went downhill because we were so tired, our marriage and health suffered greatly. There is no flight path over Orange County from LAX, but they send jets over our home every day and night. These guys know how to destroy a person to a point that they can’t even defend themselves because they are so tired and depressed, they sound crazy when begging for help. To have sleep taken from you is so egregious and damaging. These people understand psychological warfare and know how to take someone apart. They have parked A & S airport vans across the street for hours to keep up the stress (there are no homes across the street from our home). We have video tape of my husband asking one of the drivers who he was here to pick up, and shows him not having a name or address. A very important element to this abuse of power is that we are not allowed one day off. This is so important to these people. They understand that in order to drive someone to suicide or to cause cancer, they must produce fear, grief, depression and take any feeling of safety, privacy, sleep or joy from you every single day. They use to send aircraft, especially military, over our home so low up to a hundred times a day. The John Wayne Airport is constantly involved in lawsuits that cost the citizens of this county millions of dollars because of their abuse of power. The bullying is now down to just a daily “maintenance dose”. They understand the cumulative psychological effects of this abuse and know that all that is required to take us apart after nine and a half years is just to dive bomb our home a couple of times a day and stalk us to a restaurant or store. We have been stalked and bullied in jacuzzi’s at hotels, restaurant parking lots, hotels in Ojai, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Temecula, San Diego, Lake Pilsbury, Miracle Springs and Yosemite. So it’s not like they just want us to leave Orange County, they want to bully us no matter where we go. My heroes before this began were the military, the police and especially OC Sheriff. All my heroes have happily and viciously joined in on this cowardly abuse of power as a favor to Mr. Alan L. Murphy and Mr. Barry Rondinella. So incredibly sad. No one understands how it feels to know that if I or my husband suffers a heart attack or our home is broken into, we have no one to call. No one will come and we have been told so. Women who are very powerful and rich are too afraid to tell anyone about abuse by Hollywood directors. Yet, everyone thinks women who have no power or money should stand up to the military, the FAA and the Sheriff, Fire and police departments? This is like what a cat does to a mouse. Plays with it until it’s dead. If no one helps us, we will be hunted and bullied with aircraft and live in fear for the rest of our lives. Although it’s illegal to spy on, harrass and stalk anyone, these men have made it very clear to all of us up here that they are above the law. We wasted 8 years begging the government officials of this totally corrupt county only for them to join in. I have a tumor in my thyroid so large I sometimes have to move it to the side to drink water. We have contacted every political leader in our county and state. The only person who has helped us is Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom. Please don’t vote for the following people. They will not help you if someone who works for the government comes after you. These people include District Attorney Tony Rackaukas, Patricia Kelly, Cathy Schlict, Frank Ury, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris, Diane Feinstein, MiMi Walters, Assemblyman Brough. We have contacted every anti-bullying organization, every military organization, newspaper, journalist, and anyone else we could think of. We are in the last chapter of our lives and if no one helps us, we will run until we die. If a government employee comes after you, and your neighbors are too afraid to get involved (and they have seen this first hand so who can blame them?), you will be on your own. We are good people. We had ordinary good lives together for 30 years and then we crossed the path of government employees who apparently are above the law. Mr. Alan L. Murphy, Mr. Barry Rondinella, Sheriff Wilson, Officer Binning, Jennifer Wilson, MV Fire Department, Camp Pendleton and all of their friends have joined in on this abuse of power. We have never done anything against another person on purpose. We believe in being good citizens and don’t believe in revenge. But people don’t help one another in Orange County and the gang mentality of the government employees is beyond belief. If you need help with abuse by a government employee in Orange County, all the other employees will come after you. They have dug up the street in front of our home at 1am twice, our electricity was turned off twice without notice, cut down our trees in front of our home, we have been taken to court, sent a letter by MV City Council member to remove something from our driveway after 3 days or be fined over $100.00. Nine and half years. People commit suicide from far less egregious bullying than we have taken and continue to take on a daily basis. If we can’t find help, we will never have our hard-earned lives back again. I have heard the saying “the Orange Curtain” many times while growing up here in Orange County. I now understand that saying so well. Be afraid Californians, be very afraid. We need a hero.