This is both unsurprising and misleading. It’s unsurprising because something about the Florida lifestyle seems to attract smooth-talking grifters (the less smoothing-talking ones go into local politics). But it’s misleading because it only measures garden variety consumer fraud; to do fraud on an epic scale requires a bank. Places like California (Wells Fargo) and New York (Wall St.) surely have us beat six ways from Sunday in that department. Unless of course the FTC counts those by victims too in which case we could well be #1 after all…
An experiment at the boundaries of AI and human collaboration.
We are all invited to
Donate a word to become part of an ever evolving collective poem and create your own POEMPORTRAIT.
So I went to try it. It starts by asking you to “donate” a word. At that point, philistine that I am, all I could think of was Groucho Marx on the old game show ‘You Bet Your Life’, which always began with Groucho telling contestants that “Say the secret word and a duck will come down and give you 100 dollars.” (Shockingly, there seems to be no ringtone online with Grouch saying that. So here’s a video clip instead:)
Anyway, back to Google. I gave it my word (“Discourse” of course) and it announced that “An algorithm trained on over 20 million words of 19th century poetry is generating your unique POEMPORTRAIT.” I declined the offer to have my picture taken, and…voilà:
The poem was
That discourse of the word, Spellbind the corn, sighing and streaming.
It offered me a chance to save the ‘portrait’ so I did. But this is how it came out:
I’m reassured to see that AI’s too can be dyslexic.
Update: Lest there be doubt, I mean astounding in a good way. Although I do worry a little about the ability of other local judges to try the case in a manner that would be immune to a claim that their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Maybe a change of venue is pending?
Michael Stern argues that maybe the Trump Family suit against the Family firms’ accountants might not be a clear slam dunk. But then, in an update, he mostly walks that back.
Digby says “Barr’s outrageous behavior and the White House attempts to stonewall all forms of oversight are pushing the Democrats toward impeachment, whether they want it or not.”
No word though on whether the strategy to trigger impeachment might be due to a political calculation that it would actually help Trump get re-elected. I don’t actually buy that, but I can see why it would seem like a way out an increasingly tight political box. Hey, it worked for President Clinton, didn’t it?
Some other online comment, Jonathan Chait, on the anti-subpoena strategy, “The first thing to understand about this legal theory is that it is not a legal theory. … Trump’s opposition to congressional oversight appears to be an extension of his business strategy of threatening counterparties with expensive, time-consuming lawsuits in order to shirk his obligations. … [T]he courts might take long enough processing the “arguments” that Trump can keep his scandals bottled up until after the election. []Trump’s extreme litigiousness is a natural extension of his general lack of shame.”
And Ian Millhouser at ThinkProgress, “Here’s a pro tip for lawyers: if you are going to ask a court to fundamentally alter the balance of power between the legislative branch and the judiciary, it’s a good idea to accurately describe any Supreme Court cases you rely upon. It’s a bad idea to tell the court that a case that absolutely eviscerates your legal argument is the best thing you have going for you.” That said, after a full-bore takedown of the Trump v. Deutsche Bank case, he ends with this warning, “There is always a risk, no matter how clear the law may be, that this Supreme Court will ignore it.”
Post-Mueller, the Trump Family1 has embarked on a novel litigation strategy: bringing really bad claims. Making terrible legal arguments is nothing new for the Trumps, but generally they’ve made those arguments as defendants, often while defending very amateurish and inept attempts to overturn Obama-era regulations. And almost universally, those lost.
What all these cases have in common is that the legal theories on which they are based are tenuous to non-existent.
What gives? These could simply be Hail Mary passes by the guilty: try this because you have nothing better. Or they could be plays to delay bad news, maybe even run out the clock until the next election with appeals. Or, worst of all, they could be a cynical calculation that some or all of them might find favor before an increasingly stacked judiciary, and a very pro-Trump Supreme Court. Or, why not, it could be all of the above.
All of these are bad answers.
I have decided that from now on I will use the Mafia term while blogging, rather than call it an Administration. [↩]
In the legal sense; in every other sense they’ve been there for quite some time. [↩]
…. in fraud. And according to a report from the Federal Trade Commission last year Florida was home to 18 of the country’s top 50 cities for consumer fraud.
I asked 
Post-Mueller, the Trump Family
