Mike Strickland faces a hearing today in Portland, Oregon for drawing his weapon on anarchists who roughed him up during a July 7th protest and were rushing in for a second go at him.
Strickland drew his legally obtained and licensed concealed Glock pistol, never placing his finger on the trigger, but drew down on the people advancing toward him, stopping what he believed was going to be an attack. He withdrew, walking backwards away from the threat and holstered his weapon when he believed the immediate threat was over.
Since then, the Portland area journalist has been jailed, his tools of his trade–cameras, recording equipment and his own recordings, which are exculpatory evidence in his case, have been confiscated–and Strickland has been ordered to stop working in journalism, thus depriving him of his ability to make a living.
This heavy-handed attack on the rights on one man has been done by the Multnomah County District Attorney and is due to what some involved in the case believe is a political agenda.
Absurdly, the case is also based on the testimony by some of the very people who were rushing to attack Strickland.
Some of those people are planning to testify against the Portland journalist in court.
Here’s one of them.
Image Credit: Screenshot/YouTube
Ben Kerensa has recently become a fixture in the last couple of years at Portland protests.
Here he is yesterday blocking access to all vehicles and then surrounding one car targeted by protesters. These photos come from KOIN TV’s live shot at the airport:
Before you go thinking Kerensa’s just some gadfly protest fan-boy, let’s consider his dangerous and violent past.
Here’s the thumbnail sketch. Kerensa has a history of calling in phony bomb threats, phony police reports and impersonating an FBI agent. He’s spent time in at least one California federal prison and convicted in Oregon on federal charges of impersonating an FBI agent–more than once. He was also under parole and probation officials in Oregon.
He has been in trouble with the law in at least three counties, Multnomah, Curry and Marion.
And that’s just for starters.
He’s also a hacker, so if anything happens to this website, I’ll consider him the #1 suspect.
And this man with a history of lying, phoning in false threats, filing false police reports, impersonating authorities and much, much more is a person on whom the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office is relying to prosecute Mike Strickland.
Next time: When Kerensa phoned in a SWAT call to a Salem hospital and his antics at a huge San Francisco Tech fair.
Mike Strickland will be in Multnomah County court today as the judge hears motions for his case.
A perfunctory and necessary rite, both sides will get an idea of where the other side is going strategically, if they didn’t already know from discovery in the felony gun use case.
Strickland was arrested and charged with 21 counts of menacing and unlawful use of a firearm for drawing his hand gun in self defense during the July 7, 2016 Black Lives Matter/Don’t Shoot Portland protest.
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s office clearly has decided to use Strickland’s case as a precedent to draw the line at when legal concealed handgun permit holders may draw a weapon in Multnomah County. A lot rides on this case, which is why prosecutors haven’t dropped it, even though Strickland’s case of self defense is stronger on the merits.
Through research and interviews, including trying to talk to the deputy district attorney involved in the case, and talking to eyewitnesses and anarchists, the consensus is, this case is politically motivated.
In fact, it’s an outcome in search of a case.
Which brings us to the number one “victim” in the case.
It was last July 7th. Hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Portland for a Black Lives Matter/Don’t Shoot PDX rally, march and protest. Those gathered at Pioneer Courthouse Square received a pep talk from self described black panther members on doing violence (which I’ve elaborated on before and have received more information on which I’ll outline in a future post) and proceeded to march toward the rally spot.
As protesters listened to speeches on the steps of a nearby building, a smaller group of anarchists saw Strickland recording the event. Strickland covers these events as a journalist for his own social media outlets, one of which is entitled, “Laughing at Liberals” and for a popular news website.
The men made a decision to “go get” Strickland.
The reason why will be dealt with in a future post.
During the protest, a contingent of anarchists snaked around the crowd and rushed Strickland from at least two sides. The moment is captured on video which I’ve chronicled in my previous posts. And since those posts were published, more video evidence has been obtained.
The first victim mentioned in the complaint against Strickland describes “male wearing a blue hooded top, dark pants and a black messenger bag” who was “in fear of imminent serious injury…”
The “victim” is this man:
Photo Credit: Screengrab/YouTube
The man whom the DA claimed to be “in fear of imminent serious injury…” was one of the anarchists encircling Strickland. He’s the heavy-set man coming at Strickland on his left flank. He stopped only because Strickland drew his weapon.
Why would Strickland ‘go to guns’ at this point? Because he’d already been roughed up by some of the same people in the crowd.
Here’s a photo of this “victim” from a previous protest.
Image Credit: Screenshot/YouTube
Police officers who have seen this tape have previously stated on this website that Strickland broke no laws. At the point they saw this full video, they didn’t know that the anarchists had previously roughed up and threatened Strickland. Knowing that, it seems that Strickland had an even greater reason to pull his gun in self defense.
The DA terms this man a “victim” when he certainly appears to have helped provoke the act of self defense. Furthermore, this “victim” possesses a long and ignominious rap sheet which includes a major federal bomb threat case and other very, ah, interesting crimes. Indeed, the DA is using a very shady character to buttress their rickety case against Mike Strickland.
I look forward to the cross examination of this man by the defense.
My next post will outline who he is at length and his rap sheet.
One of the most revolutionary documents written.
He lectures the church, explains his willingness to be arrested and calls for peaceful protest.
“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
I can think of dozens of times I trotted out the annual “Who Pays Taxes” numbers from the National Taxpayers Union on my talk show. So instead of losing the numbers into the ether, let’s take a look at them in living color.
Photo Credit: National Taxpayers Union
Simply put, the top 1% of the income earners pay nearly 40% of all income taxes. The top 1%-5% pay nearly 60% of all income taxes. The top 10% pay nearly 80% of all income taxes.
So when there are tax cuts–which Donald Trump promises to make, encourage your ‘eat the rich’ friends to spare us the outrage over how the tax cuts disproportionately help the rich. They only “disproportionately” help as much as they disproportionately hurt.
Information is power and patriot author William J. (“Bill”) Federer provides powerful information in his www.AmericanMinute.com (1/1/17) for Americans to use to fight lawyer tyranny to conserve and preserve the Constitution of the Founding Fathers.
Federer, whose book “America’s God And Country; Encyclopedia of Quotations” is the best single volume evidencing what the Founding Fathers believed about religion and Constitutional governance, demonstrates in his AmericanMinute.com column what Thomas Jefferson “really meant” by his famous “Wall of Separation” metaphor regarding separation of church and state: It and Jefferson didn’t mean that government had to be protected from religion. On the contrary, it meant that religion had to be protected from government.
The information Federer provides is generally not available to non-lawyers. It can empower ordinary non-lawyer Americans to fightback against elitist liberal lawyers epitomized by those of the secular extremist ACLU, which has become the Taliban of American liberal secularism. Those lawyers, in league with other liberal lawyers sitting as judges, dictate to Americans that Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers intended the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution to be used as a club to drive all religious thought, expression, and symbols out of the public square as a violation of the concept of “separation of church and state.”
There is no more exploited misinterpretation of the Constitution than that based on Thomas Jefferson’s reference to a “Wall of Separation” between church and state in Jefferson’s private reply letter in 1802 to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, who had congratulated Jefferson on his election as the third President of the United States.
Baptists had been violently persecuted in Connecticut, in which the established religion of the State was Congregationalism. Jefferson used the “Wall of Separation” metaphor to assure the Danbury Baptists that as president Jefferson would protect their exercise of freedom of religion from oppression by government.However, Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” metaphor has been used by modern liberal secularist lawyers sitting as judges to interpret the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment to mean that the government must be protected from religion rather than that religion must be protected from government.
This misinterpretation has been used by liberal secularist elitist lawyers to convince Americans, wrongly, that the doctrine of “separation of church and state” is in the Constitution. It isn’t; never was. Neither was Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” metaphor in the Constitution; nor in the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson authored; nor in any “public” or “official” writing of Thomas Jefferson, including all his writings as the Third President of the United States.
Indeed, as President, Thomas Jefferson regularly attended Christian Church on Sundays. Not only that, but Jefferson, as president, actually authorized use of the Federal Government buildings in Washington, D.C., for the holding of religious services, and attended services in those government buildings. How does that conduct of President Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers, square with an interpretation of his metaphor of a “Wall of Separation” to mean religion had to be separated from all things related to government under the First Amendment Establishment of Religion Clause?
Notwithstanding, the ACLU and other liberal secularist attorney organizations of its ilk, liberal judges, academics, and media, have read Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” into interpretation of the First Amendment’s Establishment of Religion Clause to mean that religion has to be separated from government to protect government from religion; rather than that government has to be separated from religion to protect religion from the government.
Here’s a common example of the wrongheaded interpretation:
In short, what has happened is that the Founding Fathers manifestly desired to protect freedom of religion — freedom of conscience — from government interference through the Establishment of Religion Clause. But modern liberal lawyers, as advocates and as judges, have instead effectively reversed the intent of the Founding Fathers by using Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” metaphor to interpret the Establishment of Religion Clause to mean the government must be protected from from religious thought, and religion must be driven from the public square and political discourse.
Why is it important for Americans of this era to know what Jefferson really meant in his use of the “Wall of Separation” metaphor? It is important because liberal secularists have used Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” metaphor to justify an interpretation of the Establishment of Religion Clause as requiring banning prayer from public (government) schools; banning the Ten Commandments from libraries, schools, and other government-related public areas; and attempting to ban religious symbols and expressions, almost always targeting the Cross, from veterans memorials and other public (government) places and spaces.
Here’s what the First Amendment of the Constitution really says:
By decisions of five the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court, religiously followed by lawyers sitting as federal judges, elitist liberal secularist lawyers have effectively driven religion out of the public square and political discourse on how “We, the People,” should be governed, creating what the late Richard John Neuhaus called the “Naked Public Square” in his landmark book of that name– a public square “naked” of religious thought.
These decisions driving religion into the closet and out of the public square have not been made by reaching a political consensus of “We, the People.” Instead, they have been made exclusively by lawyers — liberal lawyers of intolerant secular extremist organizations like the ACLU, and like-minded liberal lawyers sitting as judges, including in particular five of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court in 5-to-4 decisions.
The interpretations of the Establishment of Religion Clause driving religious thought out of the public square have been reached by elitist liberal lawyers appearing before the courts convincing other liberal lawyers sitting as judges to interpret the Establishment of Religion Clause in their own modern liberal secularist image, effectively amending the Constitution by judicial/lawyer decisions, no matter the original intent of the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, to protect religion from government, not to protect government from religion.
Notwithstanding Supreme Court decisions, the banishment of religious expression in the public square is persistently pushed by ignorant lawyers and government officials and must be fought for again and again in the courts.
Where, in this process, are “We, the People” and not just lawyers, who have usurped the judicial branch onto themselves, since only one class of Americans can serve in the judicial branch — the lawyer class?
Why do we Americans continue to allow the lawyer class to be the only Americans capable of being judges, since there is nothing in the Constitution requiring even Supreme Court Justices to be lawyers?
But from the first Chief Justice John Marshall to today, the nation’s lawyers have conned Americans into believing that only lawyers are smart enough and fair enough and ever-so honorable enough to serve as judges in the Judicial Branch, a kind of new High Priesthood of the Law; a Secular Sanhedrin; or new new Feudal Lords in robes controlling the thought and beliefs and acts of ignorant peasants clinging to their religion (but not their “guns” because the Feudal Lords wouldn’t allow them to have guns–just as modern lawyer-judges are trying to do by interpretation the Second Amendment to mean something other than what the Founding Fathers intended.)
Think of it: The fact that most of the Establishment of Religion Clause Supreme Court decisions are 5-to-4 means, effectively, that one (1) lawyer on the Supreme Court is determining what the Founding Fathers’ Constitution means and determining the nature of the social, religious, and political culture of America. One (1) lawyer’s vote ultimately determines the meaning of the fundamental source of American law, the Constitution, which trumps all other federal, state, and local laws in all fifty states.
Think of that in a country of over 300-million citizens who are compelled to abide by these Supreme Court decisions in which four lawyers agree, and four lawyers disagree, and one (1) lawyer then casts a vote for one side or the other and 300-million Americans must kowtow to that decision. “We, the People” cannot participate at all in the making of such culture changing decisions since only lawyers can serve in the judiciary, including on the Supreme Court, by custom and not by Constitutional command. It is “The Great Con” of the lawyer-class to usurp one-third of our federal government “for lawyers only,” and amend the Founding Fathers’ Constitution by the 5-4 decisions of these lawyers-only judges.
When allowed to vote, or express themselves in polls, “We, the People” overwhelmingly vote against such secular extremist lawyer-judge interpretations of the Establishment of Religion Clause of the Constitution that result in banning prayer from schools, banning the Ten Commandments from all government related spaces, banning even crosses honoring the service and sacrifice of veterans at war memorials.
But what “We, the People” believe doesn’t matter. Lawyers decide otherwise, and impose those decisions on “We, the People” as if we are sheep, dictating what they say the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment means no matter how contrary their interpretation is to what the Founding Fathers intended or what “We, the People” have expressed contrary to the views of the elitist, liberal lawyers and lawyer-judges.
Does any non-lawyer American really think that Gen. George Washington, President of the Constitutional Convention, the First President of the United States, the “Father Of Our Country,” and the other Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, really believed that the Establishment of Religion Clause they wrote into the First Amendment of the Constitution was intended to create a “wall of separation” of church and state that would ban prayer from schools, ban the Ten Commandments from government spaces, or ban Crosses honoring veterans at veterans war memorials? Only modern lawyers like those of the ACLU and other liberal law centers, and like-minded lawyers sitting as judges, could do that in their elitist arrogance.
Americans need to know what Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers meant and intended in establishing the Constitution, in order for “We, the People” to preserve the Constitution the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. We need to fight back against these elitist, arrogant, lawyers epitomized by the secular extremist ACLU. They can and should be beaten. Consider that veterans fought for ten years to save the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial Cross in 2012, and for 27-years to save the Mt. Soledad National Veterans Memorial Cross in 2016, refusing to surrender to the fanatical cross-destroying litigation of the secular extremists of the ACLU.
Photo Credit: 4bp Blog
That struggle of the veterans against the ACLU to save the Crosses honoring veterans at the Mojave Desert and Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorials is discussed in what I consider the best single book on the Establishment of Religion Clause — a book intended to be read and understood by “We, the People” and not just lawyers: It is author Steven Mansfield’s “Ten Tortured Words: How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America and What’s Happened Since.”It should be in every veteran’s, every American’s, home in order to make the fight to conserve and preserve the Constitution of the Founding Fathers, not the modern liberal Constitution by which elitist lawyers have amended the Founding Fathers’ Constitution by judicial decisions, not vote of the people as provided for by the Constitution itself.
The idea that lawyers have conned Americans into accepting the premise that “Only Lawyers Must Decide What The Constitution Means; And All Others Must Obey,” must end. There is no reason other Americans should be barred from serving in the judicial branch, just as all Americans who meet age and citizenship requirements can serve in Congress or in the Presidency.
Indeed, there is no reason to believe that lawyers are more honorable, more fair, more just, more intelligent than other Americans. Indeed, there are many reasons to believe to the contrary based on experience of lawyer abuses of power, a class of Americans to which the word “shyster” has attached. How many non-lawyers do not shudder at the prospect of having to deal with “lawyers”? There is a reason that Shakespeare’s King Lear opined more than 500 years ago that in forming good government: “First, we kill the lawyers.”
It is only “We, the People,” who can stop them, the lawyers of the contemporary judicial tyranny. To do that, we have to know what Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers really meant by the “Wall of Separation” metaphor, “separation of church and state,” and the Establishment of Religion Clause.
“We, the People” should not continue to allow the lawyers who have usurped the judicial branch, one third of our Tri-partite federal government, to dictate to us what the Founding Fathers meant. A good place to start is author William J. Federer’s www.AmericanMinute.com (1/1/17).
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY FOREVER; SURRENDER TO TYRANNY– INCLUDING JUDICIAL TYRANNY BY LAWYERS — NEVER!
(Rees Lloyd, longtime California civil rights attorney and veterans activist, is a member of the Victoria Taft Blogforce.)
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