Author: admin

Two weeks ago, on Easter Sunday, my sister Mary passed away.

Easter is not a good holiday for my family.

Four Easters ago, my sister Jane, informed us that she had stage four Melanoma.

Despite putting up a heroic struggle, she was gone by that Christmas.

Mary’s death from a severe stroke was both sudden and unexpected.

It left all of us family members in a state of shock.

As we met that week to plan her services, I recalled that after Jane’s funeral she had asked if I would say a few words about her too.

This memory was no sooner out of my mouth, when my daughters, Meghan and Kate said, “Dad, we’d like to do it.”

I agreed and during the next few days and her calling hours, they obtained stories and thoughts about her that they wove into a beautiful eulogy.

I’d like to share it with you, so here it is.

Meghan: If my Aunt Mary were to describe her upbringing, she would probably have said that she was a “Prisoner of War.”

Katie: And she would have been right.

Meghan: Unfortunately for her, she was the first girl born into an Irish-Catholic family and had three older brothers who would tease her mercilessly.

Katie: She told me on one occasion, that the three boys locked Mary and her sister Jane in their bedroom, and then couldn’t get the door unlocked to let them out.

Meghan: They finally gave up and took the door off the hinges.

Katie: Aunt Mary was a gifted person, who could read music more easily than most people can read the newspaper. Everything seemed to come to her easily.

Meghan: She had an extensive vocabulary, and there were some words she used more than others, one in particular that she favored…which, ah, began with the same first letter as her last name.

Katie: She was a gifted pianist, a talented actress, and a straight A student. Her parents never knew about the straight A’s though, because her brothers would pay her to not show her report cards to her father.

Meghan: They knew that he’d want to see theirs next.

Katie: Her piano recitals were always on a Sunday afternoon.

Meghan: Her father, to his credit, would give up watching his New York Giants game to attend.

Katie: He was the guy you saw sneaking out in the dark as soon as she was done playing.

Meghan: As a Drama student at Buffalo State, she performed in some interesting plays.

Katie: In one, titled “Bird Bath,” she and the other performers flapped around the stage for an hour without any dialogue.

Meghan: Her brothers went to see it, but not because they were interested in the play.

Katie: Because they wanted to watch their father sit through it.

Meghan: His reaction was much more entertaining.

Katie: After graduation, she took a staff position with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Meghan: She loved to recall how the actor, Clint Eastwood, who was a board member, was so very short when you saw him in person.

Katie: She then enrolled at the University at Buffalo Law School, where she was a talented and brilliant writer on the Law Review.

Meghan: She was enormously proud of an article she wrote about the Constitution’s double jeopardy clause, which was ultimately cited as authority by United States Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens.

Katie: After graduation, she served as a law clerk in the Appellate Division Fourth Department, where she made friendships with other law clerks and judges that she cherished for the rest of her life.

Meghan: She had the experience of working for a large law firm on Wall Street in New York City for a number of years before the tug of her family and home town brought her back to Syracuse. I was still a young kid when she moved back, and I remember that every year for my birthday, she would make a special date with me to take me out to lunch and the movies to celebrate.

Katie: Every year for Christmas, Aunt Mary would tell her nephews, Conor and Ryan Suddaby, to name three famous athletes from whom they would want autographs. Every year, she would manage to get a personalized and certified autograph from one of the three for each of them. They still say they had the best autograph collections of anyone they knew growing up.

Meghan: One year, my Aunt Jane and Uncle Glenn wanted to go away overnight for their anniversary. I often babysat for Conor and Ryan, but I wasn’t old enough to stay overnight without an adult present. So Aunt Mary happily agreed to be the responsible adult for the evening. Everything was going great, and Conor and Ryan were each asleep in bed for the evening, when Aunt Mary decided she wanted to go out in the garage to have cigarette. I walked out there with her, and the next thing I knew the door had slammed shut behind us and we were locked out of the house. We looked all over for a spare key and couldn’t find one, so Aunt Jane and Uncle Glenn had to drive back from Cazenovia to let us into the house. After that, every babysitter was provided with a spare key.

Katie: While I was in college, Aunt Mary took me to New York to see some shows and to introduce me to her college boyfriend Tom Fontana. We had a blast! Tom is a very successful Hollywood writer with a laundry list of accomplishments – but what Aunt Mary always wanted everyone to know about him MOST was that this was the guy whose glasses flew out of a dorm room window because she slapped him so hard for kissing another girl. You don’t mess with Aunt Mary.

Meghan: Aunt Mary had many, many talents, however, she was the first to tell anyone that domestic tasks were not one of them. My friend Justin Coyne managed her household for many years and was wonderful to her. At one point she told Justin that her future headstone should read: “She knew how to delegate.”

Katie: But there was no area of the law that she couldn’t master, from election law, to discrimination law, to criminal law. Over the course of her legal career, she served as an assistant district attorney for Bob Wildridge, and as a law clerk for Judge Stewart Hancock.

Meghan: She eventually worked in the Onondaga County Attorney’s Office, where she shared an office with Al Julian. This pairing may have been a strategic move by their bosses, as they both liked to yell, and we think what they meant to say was FAHEY, out loud, but in their excitement they confused it with another F-word. PAUSE. She was very happy as she finished out her career there. And I’ve heard that at one point, her colleagues even got her cake to commemorate her ability to use that other F-word so many times in the same sentence.

Katie: After Aunt Mary retired, a very kind and thoughtful neighbor started helping her with yard work and occasional maintenance items around her house, refusing to accept any payment for his help. She noticed that he often referred to her as SISTER Fahey, and assumed he had simply forgotten her last name. Imagine her surprise when she learned he had mistaken her for a nun! Never one to miss a chance for a little humor, including at her own expense, she chalked up the mistake to her own lack of fashion sense, and insisted that while she might not be a “frequent flier” at church, she DID have a relationship with God, which consisted of her frequently taking His name in vain.

Meghan: She was a fearless advocate for her clients. No one, and I mean no one, could intimidate Aunt Mary. She was also a loving and protective aunt for her nieces and nephews. Woe to the person who attacked or hurt a family member, because she had an elephant’s memory and never forgot them.

Katie: I guess you could say she had Irish Alzheimer’s before anyone knew it existed.

Meghan: At the same time, she was incredibly generous, and always willing to help others who were less fortunate than her. She would help out with legal issues for free, and would even purchase and give away laptops, furniture, and other gifts to people she knew could not afford them. She sent many care packages to soldiers over in Afghanistan, and seemed to really enjoy being there to support people during hard times and trying help them in whatever way she could. When people close to her needed a place to recover from surgery, she would open her home, give up her bed, and sleep on the couch until they were whole again.

Katie: She was intelligent, tough, incredibly loyal, funny, talented, supportive, generous, irreverent, and compassionate. As many of you have said over the last few days: “She was a gem.” Thank you.

At the end of it, I can honestly say that I learned about her generosity to others that she knew and didn’t know and which she never talked about.

I’m certain that she would have loved the memories and anecdotes that her nieces recounted and shared.

I love their eulogy and, more importantly, I love them for doing it.

During the almost two decades I spent on the County Court bench, I witnessed some pretty horrific episodes of man’s inhumanity to man.

Some of the worst episodes involved defendants who were being prosecuted as “Juvenile Offenders.”

A juvenile offender was a defendant who was age thirteen and charged with murder as a sexually motivated felony or a fourteen or fifteen year old and was charged with certain very serious violent felonies.

A juvenile offender was eligible to be prosecuted in County Court as an adult rather than Family Court.

The principal difference between a juvenile offender and an adult, a person over the age of sixteen, was the severity of the sentence that could be imposed.

Sentences for an adult were determinate sentences for which the defendant had to serve 6/7 of the sentence imposed followed by a period of post release supervision during which the defendant could be returned to prison if conditions of release were violated.

An adult charged with a violent sex offense could be sentence up to twenty-five years, in some cases, and was not eligible for release until more than twenty-one years had been served.

A juvenile offender, convicted of the same offense, would have an indeterminate sentence imposed with a minimum and maximum range. Once the minimum sentence had been completed, the defendant was eligible for parole and had to be released after serving 2/3 of the sentence.

The other distinction between an adult sentence and a juvenile offender sentence was that the minimum and maximum sentence for a juvenile offender were much less.

An adult convicted of Robbery in the First degree could be sentenced to a determinate sentence of between five and twenty-five years. If sentenced to the maximum, twenty-five years, the inmate would be required to serve over twenty-one years with post release supervision.

A juvenile offender convicted of the same crime could not be sentenced to more than ten years and the minimum period of that sentence had to be 1/3 of the maximum.

Thus, the harshest sentence that could be imposed was a maximum of ten years and the minimum that had to be served was three and one-third years when the juvenile offender became eligible for release.

Two weeks ago, as part of the state budget approval, legislation called Raise the Age was passed and signed by the Governor.

It dramatically will change the way criminal prosecutions will be handled in New York’s courts.

The major change is that it raises the age of criminal responsibility from sixteen to eighteen.

All misdemeanors and violations will be handled in Family court rather than in City Court or Justice Court.

Almost all non-violent felonies will be prosecuted in Family Court too, since they would be transferred to Family Court after thirty days unless the District Attorney can demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances” which have yet to be defined.

The law further provides that these defendants may not be questioned without the presence of a parent.

It establishes a “Youth Part” in County and Supreme Court where prosecution of these most serious crimes will be conducted.

The most serious and questionable change, in my opinion, is that sixteen and seventeen year old defendants charged with violent felonies, will be treated the same way that thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year old defendants are.

Those case will remain in the Youth Part but could be removed to Family Court if no serious physical injury occurred, no weapon was used and no sexual conduct was engaged in.

If convicted of a violent felony offense, defendants under eighteen will be sentenced pursuant to the Juvenile Offender Law.

The New York Times reported that these cases number approximately 20,000 and amount to one percent of the cases affected.

That figure sounds light to me.

The law also raises the age for which a person could be adjudicated a Youthful Offender and have the records of any conviction sealed from nineteen to twenty-one.

The law has some ameliorative impacts that have merit.

Imprisoning youthful defendants in maximum security prisons with adults could have and should have been prohibited a long time ago.

Defendants that are less than eighteen should not be saddled with a criminal record for a violation, misdemeanor and some non-violent felonies but other feature fail to appreciate the current social climate.

We are living during a time when the cities are plagued by gang violence and increased shootings.

It isn’t hard to predict that when these changes take effect, those doing the killing will have less incentive not to take lives because they recognize they will be imprisoned for less time and will be back on the street much sooner.

One of my most memorable and horrific cases involved a fifteen year old who, over the course of several months, physically beat and tortured his pregnant girlfriend’s toddler to death on the pretext of imposing “discipline.”

I received a lot of correspondence from people that were experts and not experts, who urged me to take his age and immaturity into account when sentencing him.

There were two factors I took into account.

The conduct he had engaged in was so palpably wrong and sadistic that anyone would have appreciated it was not acceptable or normal.

I could not ignore that even in the animal kingdom, the young are not killed by the parent animals.

I also took into account that when I sentenced him to the maximum of ten years to life, he would be parole eligible at the age of twenty-five if they released him.

He would be able to start another relationship, father more children, and engage in this abuse all over again.

I also cannot help but reflect on the fact that if this law had been in effect when Police Officer, Wally Howard, had been murdered by a sixteen year-old gunman, that killer would have been back on the street a long time ago.

When I ponder these changes and Governor Cuomo’s celebration of them, I can’t help but remember something my mother used to say.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

I’ve heard it said, that when you turn over a rock, what you will find isn’t pretty.

This past week, it was reported that Fox news commentator, Bill O’Reilly, and Fox News have paid out millions of dollars to settle claims of sexual harassment brought by several women against O’Reilly.

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have both reported that O’Reilly and Fox have paid thirteen million dollars to settled claims brought by five women since 2002.

Late last year, Fox had to pay former anchor, Gretchen Carlson, twenty million dollars because of sexual harassment from its News Chief, Roger Ailes.

Anyone who has ever seen Roger Ailes would recognize that Fox paying someone twenty million dollars because they had to entertain the prospect of having sex with him got off pretty cheaply.

I don’t mean to imply that being sexually propositioned by O’Reilly is worth less.

Ailes has since been accused of sexual harassment by nine other women who worked at the network.

One of his accusers is Andrea Tantaros who appeared on a Fox Program called “Outnumbered.”

On one episode of the program, their guest, Keith Ablow, mocked and mimicked Vice-President Joe Biden’s public, tearful expression of grief over the death of his son Beau.

Ablow is an expert contributor to Fox News on the subject of …………………………Psychiatry.

Apparently, he skipped the training in grief counseling during medical school.

After watching that segment, it is difficult for me to summon any sympathy for Tantaros.

To no one’s surprise, the groper-in-chief that currently resides in the White House declared that he doesn’t think that O’Reilly has done anything wrong.

That is not hard to believe, if you have listened to the Access Hollywood tape on which he and Billy Bush describe their right to man-handle and grope women.

Some might wonder whether I would criticize Bill Clinton in this fashion.

In earlier blog posts I have said that if I were Monica Lewinsky’s father, Clinton would have needed dental work a long time ago.

The United States Department of Justice is investigating the propriety of the corporate monies used to settle the Fox News sexual harassment claims.

Sexual harassment isn’t the only offensive conduct under scrutiny at Fox News.

Fox News fired a financial executive in the accounting department after she made repeated racist derogatory comments about African-Americans while overseeing a department that has a large number of African-American employees.

Two of the employees have brought suit against Fox in New York State Supreme Court.

O’Reilly, not just content to be sued for sexual harassment, is also fending off claims that he made a racist comment for describing an African-American Congresswoman’s hair as resembling a “James Brown wig.”

In the wake of the Carlson multi-million dollar settlement, sexual harassment claims against Ailes are cascading.
Others making such claims include Megyn Kelly.

Ailes is probably sleeping soundly at night since Fox reportedly payed him forty-million dollar as part of his severance package.

In the meantime, a well-organized boycott has cost O’Reilly over fifty advertisers.

Major advertisers such as Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, All State and Angie’s List have pulled their ads.

Fox should probably consider changing its slogan from “Fair and Balanced” to simply “Unbalanced.”

It would be more accurate and nobody could call it “Fake New.”

There are two species that I’ve always found to be entertaining throughout the course of my life.

The first is a really good con man.

The second is a hypocritical politician.

During my years doing criminal defense work, I represented a fair number of con men.

During my years on the bench I encountered even more.

A really good con man leads you to believe in the validity of the con itself. They are convinced that if they can “just explain it” to you, you’ll understand why it’s not a con.

I once sat through an eight week mail fraud trial with a defendant who kept repeating, “If I could just talk to those jurors, they’d understand.”

Since failing to take responsibility usually led to an enhanced sentence, I wouldn’t let him “talk to those jurors.” Instead, he got a chance to “just talk” to the judge at sentencing.

It didn’t help him a bit.

As a judge, I sometimes agreed to a specific sentence if making restitution to the victim before sentencing was a part of the agreement.

Occasionally that led some con men to perpetuate another con to fulfill the restitution requirement.

When that was uncovered, the defendant found that it didn’t help him at all.

Politicians caught up in hypocrisy seem to bear many of the same traits as con men.

They spend their careers adamantly proclaiming the virtue of their beliefs only to discover that the stench of hypocrisy doesn’t ever completely wash off.

Two examples of this come right to mind.

Former Louisiana Senator, David Vitter, is one.

Vitter was part of what I often call the “American Taliban,” politicians who feel it is their duty to legislate extreme morality.

Thomas Babington Macaulay once said “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Think Ted Cruz.

Vitter was every bit as judgmental and rigid as Cruz. He opposed gambling, teaching evolution, sex education, abortion and Louisiana’s Child Health Insurance Program. He was a big proponent of prayer in public schools.

But, like many political Pharisees, he had his secrets.

His became public when his name turned up in the address book of the DC Madam that was running a prostitution ring.

Another was former Senator Larry Craig of Idaho.

Craig was an outspoken critic of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

He supported legislation that would prohibit federal benefits to same sex couples.

He voted against legislation that extended the definition of a hate crime to include sexual orientation.

So, it came as a bit of a surprise in 2007, when Craig was caught soliciting sex in the Men’s Room of the Minneapolis –St. Paul Airport.

We could debate whether the current occupant of the White House should be included in the category of con man or political hypocrite or both, but that is not the subject of this blog post.

It was reported last week that a defendant who is being prosecuted by the United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York for violating the law prohibiting dealing with Iran has hired a new legal team.

He has hired former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, also a former United States Attorney for that District, and former Attorney-General Michael Mukasey.

We will put aside the fact that Mukasey’s son is expected to be nominated to fill the position of United States Attorney, formerly occupied by Preet Bharara and is currently a partner in Giuliani’s law firm.

Giuliani has also been paid to represent the Peoples Mojahedin Group of Iran that the U.S. State Department once listed as a terrorist organization.

In the wake of the September 11th attack on New York City, Giuliani became known as “America’s Mayor.”

Giuliani loudly criticized President Obama for easing sanctions that were imposed on Iran.

This past year, he campaigned for Donald Trump, leading chants of “lock her up.”

Two decades ago, Mayor Giuliani, famously ejected PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, from a concert being held to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations being performed at Lincoln Center.

If that concert were being held today, all Arafat would have to do, is write Giuliani a sizeable check and he would be able to enjoy the music.

The death of Martin McGuinness this past week led me to ponder some thoughts about Ireland that I’ve had over the years.

McGuinness led a truly transformative life when it came to bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

A native of Derry (what the British call Londonderry) and a year younger than I, he became the Deputy Commander of the Provisional Irish Republican Army at the age of 21.

Unlike many IRA “Provos” he did not hide behind a mask when it came to stating the IRA’s positions during press conferences.

McGuinness would follow a path in the “troubles” that many Irish leaders, like Michael Collins, had trod before him.

He would enter into secret talks with the British, along with other IRA leaders and when the talks broke down, he would become a fugitive and guerrilla leader again. He planned and led some of the IRA’s most devastating operations and was responsible for many lives being lost.

To understand McGuinness’s life requires an understanding of Ireland and Northern Ireland’s history.

From the late eighteenth century forward, Ireland had a “Rising” about every fifty years.

They occurred both before and after the “potato famine” which the leaders and writers both then and now recognize as “ethnic cleansing” a form of genocide.

I learned much about this history while writing the biography of my great-uncle, James K. McGuire and came to appreciate the role that Americans like him and others played in bringing about the historical war for independence that the IRA and its forerunner the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) waged against the British into the early twentieth century.

Throughout those years, Irish rebels and the Irish people were subjected to every oppression and indignity that the British Empire could inflict upon them and the other colonies that they held.

It was once said that “the sun doesn’t set upon the British Empire” and it wasn’t a friendly, welcoming or warm sun.

While Ireland went from being a “Free State” and a dominion of Britain to becoming a Republic, Northern Ireland remained a part of the British Empire after Britain, again, withdrew from the commitments it had made during the end of its war with the Irish Provisional Government in 1919.

For the Catholics in Northern Ireland, discrimination was a way of life.

The Protestant dominated government created a virtual caste system in which Catholics existed one rung above slaves.

Protestants controlled all levels of government and agencies. They gave preference to Protestant citizens in all services involving housing, employment and other government functions.

When the “troubles” exploded following the massacre of Catholic protesters on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” McGuinness was in the leadership of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army that became known as the “Provos.”

The “troubles” became a war between the IRA and British troops and the paramilitaries supporting each side.

For almost two decades, all sides inflicted terrible damage on each other and the people of Northern Ireland.

3,700 lives were lost and the world watched, in horror, as young men in British prisons starved themselves to death rather than submit to being treated as common criminals.

In 1998, former Senator George Mitchell, President Clinton’s envoy to Northern Ireland, managed to conclude the Good Friday Agreement bringing an end to the “troubles.”

Martin McGuinness was the chief negotiator for Sinn Fein the political party that represented the Irish Republican Army. He and Gerry Adams succeeded in persuading the IRA to decommission and dispose of its weapons.

McGuinness went on to serve in the home rule government that grew out of the Good Friday Agreement.

He served as deputy leader of Northern Ireland’s power sharing home rule government in which the Reverend Ian Paisley served as First Minister.

McGuinness’s willingness to work with Paisley was no small sacrifice, since for decades Paisley had led the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party that had been the chief oppressor of the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Together, they kept Northern Ireland from sliding back into sectarian violence and the country remains at peace today.

As someone who has followed the events in Northern Ireland closely since the start of the “troubles,” I can say candidly that I never thought I’d see the day that peace would come.

Ireland and Northern Ireland’s Catholics had been in conflict with Britain and its colonial government of Ulstermen for centuries.

I genuinely believed that peace would come to the Mid-East, a far shorter conflict, before it would come to Northern Ireland.

McGuinness’s life demonstrates that men of good will can make a positive contribution no matter what their history is.

If it could happen in Northern Ireland, it can happen in the Mid-East.

Anything is possible.

During the past decade I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think our government takes its men and women in uniform for granted.

I’ve written and published some articles about how deeply I feel about the loss of my best friend, Larry Hackett, who served honorably in the Vietnam War only to die from exposure to Agent Orange which was used by our government without any forewarning to our troops.

I’ve outlined the use of this chemical in previous posts and published articles and have made it clear that I view it as murder.

What I also found to be extremely galling was the government’s unwillingness to allow it to be held accountable in a court of law because it refused to allow itself to be sued.

It adhered to this position while courts dismissed class action claims brought by soldiers and their survivors against the chemical companies that manufactured this poison because they asserted the “government contractor” defense.

That means they only did what the government directed them to do.

I don’t recount this because I want to, but only to give this post some historical context.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War we have been embroiled in two wars that have continued in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade and a half.

In the earliest days in those wars, troops complained that they did not have the protection they needed from road side bombs and other attacks.

They were forced to scavenge to try and outfit their Humvees with armored plating to protect those inside.

Some troops actually had to resort to writing their family members and have them send them personal protection in the form of Kevlar to wear.

When they complained about this lack of support and supply, they were told, callously, by Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld that “You go to war with the army you have not with the one that you want.”

In order to avoid the renewal of a war time draft, which existed during the Vietnam War, both regular troops and state National Guard units were deployed and redeployed numerous times.

The successive redeployments caused the incidence of Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) cases to skyrocket and the suicide rate among those who survived skyrocketed too.

Reports of inadequate health care, excessive wait times for appointments and a lack of counseling services for the mentally ill didn’t improve the situation.

All of this led me to a grim and depressing conclusion.

The United States Government has one interest only.

That is getting all that it can out of its combat troops and when that is done, they are expendable.

Over the course of the last presidential campaign, we heard a lot from Trump about the shameful treatment veterans were receiving and all of the promises he made to change that.

To date, we have heard nothing more from him on that subject.

His decision to increase the Pentagon budget by fifty-eight billion dollars does not address the Veterans Affairs and is being balanced on the backs of the poor who are being helped by programs earmarked to disappear.

This past week, Trump issued his second travel ban.

Fortunately, three Federal courts rose to the occasion and enjoined its enforcement, like the first one, until the First Amendment issues can be more fully litigated.

I am very proud of the fact that the City of Syracuse has joined with the plaintiffs in challenging these two bans.

Even more disquieting is the effect his travel bans have had on those who risked their lives to aid us in the wars in these two countries.

The plaintiff in the first lawsuit involving the first travel ban is an Iraqi citizen named Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who worked as a translator for the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul and Bagdad.

He was targeted twice by terrorists for this service.

Upon his arrival at Kennedy Airport he was detained for almost a day and was nearly returned to Iraq until legal assistance was provided.

Last week, Trump’s State Department announced it would soon run out of Special Immigrant Visas for interpreters and others who assisted our troops in Afghanistan. The American embassy in Kabul has stopped interviewing applicants leaving them at the mercy of the Taliban and the other terrorist groups that they have assisted our troops in battle.

At the end of the Vietnam War, this country admitted over 800,000 Vietnamese refugees.

Many of them, like the current refugees, aided us in the fight against the enemy our troops faced in combat.

They started businesses, formed communities and enclaves, and contributed to the economy and the evolving culture of our country.

We didn’t suffer any terrorist attacks.

These bans do not represent the best that is in us.

It leads on to wonder, if another attack on America, like the one that occurred on 9/11 happened, would anyone come to our aid?

Oscar Wilde once said that “there are two great tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want, the other is getting it.”

From 2012, after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, Congress voted to repeal it over sixty times. It engages in this repeated fool’s errand, knowing that it lacked the votes to override President Obama’s veto.

Now, the Republican Party is in control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

As we used to say, when I was younger, it’s time to put up or shut up.

This past week, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, rolled out the Republican replacement for what they have commonly referred to as “Obamacare.”

It’s called the American Health Care Act and it provides anything but adequate health care.

While the proposal retains some of the more popular features of Obamacare, such as the continuation of coverage for children until they reach the age of 26 and the prohibition against denying coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, overall it will make health insurance more costly and less available for those who most need it and can least afford it.

“Ryancare” or “Trumpcare” as this dubious piece of legislation might come to be known guts two of the most important mechanisms that were used to implement Obamacare.

Under Obamacare the neediest individuals and families were provided subsidies to buy insurance. These subsidies are eliminated under the current proposal and what will replace them is still in dispute.

Ryan would like to replace them with “refundable tax credits” but the Tea Party members of his caucus object to them as constituting another entitlement program.

The other and more crippling change is the end of the expansion of Medicaid.

Thirty-one states took advantage of the expansion of Medicaid to make health care available to their residents. Some, like Ohio were led by Republican Governors, who’s Governor, John Kasich opposed the Affordable Care Act but believed that affording his residents health care trumped his philosophical opposition the Obamacare.

This expansion would end in 2020 when Medicaid would be converted to more limited block grants.

Under the Affordable Care Act insurers were allowed to charge senior citizens no more than three times the premium cost being offered to younger insureds.

The law would allow insurers to charge seniors five times more for premiums than younger members of the plan, drawing opposition from the AARP.

Does anyone think that it is purely coincidental that the maximum pain that will be inflicted on those who will lose coverage is being deferred until after the 2018 mid-term congressional election?

The present legislative schedule calls for a vote on the legislation almost immediately.

As a result of this timetable, the legislation will not be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. That means that members of Congress will be voting on the legislation without having any clue to how many people will lose coverage or how much it will cost taxpayers in the future.

Presently, almost twenty million people have coverage under Obamacare. Some Wall Street analysts estimate that at least ten million will lose coverage under the current proposal.

The proposal is also opposed by the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association and the insurance industry trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, but what would they know about providing health care?

There are two other features of the legislation that are worth mentioning.

Insurance companies will now be able to deduct the cost of their executives’ salaries without the $ 500,000-cap that existed under Obamacare.

We wouldn’t, after all, want to inflict pain on these neediest of individuals subject to the new law.

The legislation also includes a provision defunding Planned Parenthood. So, in addition to making coverage less attainable for the poor, the law will also eliminate all health care services that have been available to women before Obamacare even existed.

Another separate proposal being considered by the House Republicans is one which would allow employers to impose a thirty percent penalty on the cost of insurance premiums on those employees that refuse to participate in genetic testing as part of a “voluntary” workplace wellness program.

These are the people that thought Obamacare was a governmental “overreach.”

Paul Ryan celebrates these reductions and changes in health care as providing “Freedom.”

During the 2009 debate on Obamacare, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck all falsely claimed that the Affordable Health Care Act would spawn the existence of “death panels” that would decide who would live and who would die.

Well, this time there is a real death panel in existence.

It’s called Congress.

There is little doubt that Donald Trump and those serving in his administration are at war with the press.

Trump has said that the press is “the enemy of the people.”

Is it coincidence that he uses a characterization favored by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin ?

If there is one thing we know, it is that Trump has deep admiration for dictators and thugs.

Think, Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has declared the press to be the “party of the Opposition.”

Bannon, is the former chief of Breitbart News, which he admits is a platform for the “at-right.”

This collection of neo-Nazi’s, Ku Klux Klanners and other haters, celebrated the Trump inauguration in a Washington, D.C. convention where they were led by Richard Spencer in chants of “Heil Trump’ with the right arm extended Nazi salute.

In Bannon, Trump has his own Joseph Goebbels.

Trump’s war on the press has manifested itself in various ways.

His press secretary, Sean Spicer, recently barred reporters from CNN, the New York Times and other media outlets it views as critics from a White House news conference.

Trump repeatedly accuses a wide variety of news outlets of peddling “fake news” when they report facts that are critical of him or about his campaign.

Nothing seems to set him off more than the reports of the campaigns increasingly apparent involvement with the Russian Government at the height of its hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign this past year.

In the wake of President Obama’s imposition of sanctions on the Russian Government for the hacking, Trump’s National Security Adviser designee, Michael Flynn, discussed the sanctions with a Russian official and then lied about it, apparently to the FBI and Vice-President Pence.

When Flynn was fired, it was not because he discussed the sanctions at a time when he was not allowed to, but because he lied about it to Pence and embarrassed the Vice-President.

Most recently, Trump’s Attorney General has been accused of being untruthful during his confirmation hearing, when he told Senator Al Franken that he had not had any contact with any Russian officials.

It turns out that Sessions met with the Russian Ambassador to the United States twice during the 2016 presidential campaign and one of the occasions was during the period that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

Sessions, who has finally and correctly recused himself from conducting any investigations into the issues surrounding the campaign, has decided to “clarify” his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a written statement.

When it comes to lying to Congress, this isn’t Sessions first controversy.

In 1986 his nomination for a Federal Judgeship was rejected when it was disclosed that he had made racist comments while serving as the United States Attorney in Alabama. Sessions denied making the comments but his nomination was withdrawn after Alabama’s Senior Senator, Howell Heflin declared that there were “reasonable doubts” about whether Sessions could be “fair and impartial.”

Trump continues to have confidence in Sessions and sees no reason for Sessions to recuse himself in conducting the investigation into the Russian hacking.

It isn’t a surprise that Trump would want his hand-picked Attorney-general to conduct the investigation.

Trump denies that anyone in his campaign had anything to do with the hacking, even as the evidence mounts that his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had numerous contacts with Russian officials throughout the campaign.

Indeed, Trump blasts the disclosures about evidence of the hacking as “fake news” while he claims to have won the popular vote only to have been cheated out of the victory because “millions” voted fraudulently for his opponent.

Trump now maintains that President Obama is behind the thousands of demonstrators who turn out to protest his policies without a shred of evidence.

Even more recently, he accused the former president of wiretapping his campaign at Trump Tower.

There are no boundaries for his madness.

Like most Trump claims, he offers no evidence to support them.

Trump continues to claim that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government.

He claims he inherited an economic mess despite the fact that unemployment dropped from 7.8% to 4.8% during the Obama Administration and the stock market recovered to levels greater than existed when Obama took office.

He claims that millions of people lost health coverage under the Affordable Care Act when, in fact, 20 million gained coverage and the uninsured rate has dropped to 10.9 %.

He claims that his deportation policy is directed at criminals and “bad hombres” when, in fact, thousands of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record and their children who entered the country with them, are being swept up, detained and deported.

Trump held up Sweden as an example of a terrorism target due to unrestricted immigration.

The only problem with that claim is that there have been no terrorist attacks in Sweden.

This past week, I happened to strike up a conversation with an engineer from Sweden who was working in this country. I asked him if he knew what Trump was talking about in Sweden.

He told me that he had no idea and neither did anyone that he spoke to in Sweden.

The ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, declared “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

We’re six weeks into the Trump Administration and he and his appointees have massacred the truth.

It’s a shame that it’s not a war crime for which they could be held accountable.

During my career I’ve seen a fair number of, what I refer to as, “bad gene pools.”

In the two decades I spent as a criminal defense lawyer, I represented a number of defendants who seemed genetically unable to stay out of trouble.

During the almost two decades I spent as a judge in county court, I encountered the children and even grandchildren of people that I had represented early in my career.

Recently, however, I have become a believer in the theory that there is a “messy” gene.

I clearly possess such a gene.

I can live and work in the messiest, chaotic conditions.

At least one of my siblings, my brother Chuck, possessed it at one time. I can still recall sharing a bedroom with him and every Saturday morning my mother would pound on the door and demand that we clean our room. Chuck would lean against the door, holding it shut until she gave up in frustration and went away.

When I was in elementary school one of the nuns made me bring my father to school so she could show him how messy my desk was.

There was nothing more terrifying at the time than having to bring my father to school.

He came to the classroom, looked at the desk and told me to try and keep it neater.

I realized later that he had given me a pass because he realized I had inherited the gene from him.

Once, when I was in college at the University of Tennessee, my younger sister Jane came to visit. She was in the apartment for about half an hour, when she said, “Don’t you think you could have cleaned a little bit before I got here?’

“We’ve been cleaning for two weeks,” I replied. She seemed to take it in stride and we had a nice visit.

One of my earliest clients recalled my cubicle at the legal aid society. “You had these two huge piles of files several feet high on your desk,’ he told me. “I was always amazed that you never lost anything. You’d reach into the pile and pull out whatever we needed.”

That, of course, was the trick.

When I was in private practice, my law partner, Chris Wiles declared that I couldn’t buy a sofa for my office “because you’ll just pile things on it.” Eventually, he relented.

Two weeks after it was delivered, it was piled high.

Once while interviewing a prospective client, he looked at the several hundred pink telephone messages scattered across the floor of my office. At the end of the interview, he said to me, “I’d really like to have you represent me but I have one question. Did you call any of these people back?” “Most of them,” I answered.

There was the occasional puzzling moment, when I would open a client’s file and the client would give me a quizzical look about the shoe print that was on a letter in the file. For the most part, the gene didn’t interfere with my practice.

The gene manifested itself during the nineteen years I was in County Court.

My friend and colleague, Bill Walsh, was the opposite. He was a true neat freak. I think it was a carryover from his military career. There was a certain Felix and Oscar quality to our friendship.

In his final year on the bench, he said to me, “You should move into my office when I leave, it’s larger.”

“Are you kidding me,” I replied, “I’d have to run for another term just to get packed up for the move.” I stayed where I was.

Every couple of years, my staff would organize everything while I was on vacation. For months, I couldn’t find anything and was afraid to look. At the end, I started packing about six months before my retirement date. I just barely made it.

Last weekend my four-year-old granddaughter was out for dinner with my daughter, Meghan.

“I’d like to see my room,” she announced. “Her room” has the closets and bureaus where my clothes are kept.

Before she and Meghan went down to it, I forewarned, “It’s kind of messy.”

They disappeared for about ten minutes. When she came back up, she marched over to me, looked me in the eye and hissed, “Clean it up!”

Over dinner, she announced that she would like to come out for a sleepover soon.

Since those are very precious times, I’m happy to report that the room is now neat as a pin.

When I was growing up, my father would frequently remark that “telephones were to make appointments over.”

He was a City court judge for sixteen years and I think this observation was the result of his having approved wiretap applications for the various police agencies.
They were usually utilized in bookmaking cases, which he viewed as pretty harmless and were usually resolved by a guilty plea and a fine.

He might even accompany the fine with a stern warning that might be heeded until the next Super Bowl or World Series.

During my years practicing criminal law, I would often give the same advice to clients who immediately disregarded it.

One client that remembered the warning was heard to say on a wiretapped call, “my lawyer said we probably shouldn’t talk on this phone because it might be t-a-p-p-e-d.”

As I listened to that brilliant observation with him seated next to me in court, I looked over at him and said, “I-t –w-a-s.”

With the advent of cell phones, taping calls became much easier for police agencies since the cell calls weren’t being made over a telephone wire. That, however, didn’t stop my clients from having phone calls that they shouldn’t have.

As a judge I couldn’t help but be mystified by the jail inmates that would make calls from the jail to witnesses, relatives, family members and assorted other parties to discuss both past and future criminal activity only to be interrupted every few minutes by a robotic voice that reminded them that the call was being tape recorded.

As the evangelist, Billy Sunday, once observed, “God can forgive sin, but stupid is forever.”

All of these memories came flooding back to me this week as I watched Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn’s stunning fall from grace.

Flynn’s demise is, ostensibly, the result of having lied to Vice-President Mike Pence, when he assured the Vice-President that he did not discuss the lifting of sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama Administration for their hacking and interference in the recent Presidential election during a pre-inauguration telephone call with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.

What seems mind boggling about Flynn’s conduct is that he apparently didn’t know that America’s intelligence agencies routinely monitor and record conversations being had with and by foreign officials on unsecured telephones, despite having held the post of Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Flynn’s legal problems aren’t likely to end any time soon.

It’s illegal for a private citizen, which Flynn was at the time of the telephone calls, to negotiate with a foreign government. While Flynn is unlikely to be prosecuted for that, he apparently lied to the FBI when confronted about the telephone calls.

Lying to the FBI is a felony carrying a prison term.

Trump, for his part, is not alarmed about any criminal conduct Flynn may have been engaged in.

Instead, he has asked the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute those inside the government and intelligence community that leaked the existence and content of Flynn’s telephone calls.

In Trump’s world that investigation is far more preferable than a full and complete investigation into which of his campaign officials knew about and were a party to the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton Campaign e-mails in the run up to the election.

The Administration is barely a month old but mark my words, not too far down the road, someone is going to ask that famous question.

What did the President know and when did he know it?

I’m betting that Trump will not like the answer.