Author: admin

Every Presidential election I caution people not to turn the television on after Labor Day to avoid seeing what is going on the campaign trail.

Neither the ads run by the candidates nor the super pacs are good for the faint hearted.

This is particularly true this year as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump enter the final lap of the election cycle post Labor Day. There will be nothing that they won’t blame on each other going back to the biblical plagues and do it in thirty second segments.

I do have to confess to getting an early surprise this year when I turned on the television before Labor Day and was confronted with the situations that Maine Governor Paul LePage and former Congressman Anthony Weiner found themselves embroiled in on the same day.

LePage, a Tea Party Republican, is in his second term as Governor of Maine. Mercifully, he can’t run or a third term.

Throughout his six years in this position he has repeatedly made racially charged comments about the causes of crime and drug trafficking in the state. He claimed that ninety-percent of the drug dealers from other states were African-American or Hispanic and came to Maine to get “young white girls” pregnant. He went on to state that he kept a three ring binder with the photos of the drug dealers to back up his claim.

FBI statistics show that 7.4 percent of those arrested for drug sales in Maine were African-American. The Bureau does not keep statistics regarding Hispanic origin.

When LePage’s remarks were challenged as racially insensitive by a Democratic state legislator, LePage left a profanity laced telephone message on the legislator’s answering machine and told him he was “coming after him.” He later said he’d like to duel with the legislator with pistols.

In the past, LePage has said he’d like to tell President Obama to “go to hell” and said that the President “doesn’t like white people.”

After hinting that he might resign his office in the uproar that followed his remarks, he decided that he would finish out his term.

What the future holds for the Governor is uncertain but Donald Trump has stated there would be a place for LePage in a Trump Administration.

Secretary of State LePage? Secretary of Defense LePage? Chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission?

The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Anthony Weiner, of course, needs no introduction. He resigned from Congress in 2011 after sending a sexually suggestive picture to a twenty-one year old woman in Seattle, Washington.

In 2013 Weiner ran for Mayor of New York but in the middle of the primary campaign, he was unmasked as “Carlos Danger” who had sent more sexually suggestive photos and “sexted” with a twenty-two year old woman and admitted to the same conduct with three other women.

One might have expected that the angriest person would have been his wife, Huma Abedin, who, to her credit chose to stay and work on their marriage.

I suspect that the truly angriest person was former Governor Eliot Spitzer who was attempting a political comeback in the primary election for City Comptroller after having resigned as Governor when it was discovered he was visiting prostitutes. The last thing Spitzer needed was “Carlos Danger” dredging up memories of both of their sexual escapades. Both he and the would-be Mayor would defeated in their races.

On August 28 of this year, we learned that Weiner was sexting again. He sent a sexually suggestive photo to another woman in 2015

. Just two weeks before the magazine Vogue ran a profile of Huma Abedin in which she praised Weiner for being a full-time stay at home father who gave her the freedom to devote herself to the Clinton campaign. Needless to say, this left Weiner with too much idle time on his hands. Abedin understandably announced that they were separating.

What does the future hold for Anthony Weiner?

Well, he clearly loves politics and the limelight.

Maybe he could get on a future Presidential ticket with Paul LePage.

They could run on the slogan “Giving new meaning to Show and Tell.”

One of the beauties of being retired is the freedom to go anywhere at any time of your choosing.

That, of course, is contingent on being able to arrange for the care of three mules, two dogs, two cats and five chickens. Okay, so it takes a little foresight and planning.

Two weeks ago Terri and I were invited to visit her cousin and her husband at a home they had just purchased on the Jersey Shore. Neither of us had ever been to the Jersey Shore. We have a number of close friends who had rented vacation homes there, year after year, and raved about it.

Terri’s cousin had just reached the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven at one of the Federal law enforcement agencies. Yes, you read that correctly. The mandatory retirement age is fifty-seven. Her husband, who is my age, had reached the mandatory retirement age and retired from the same agency ten years ago.

Both had careers in law enforcement spanning three decades and each had a distinguished career rising to the top level of the agency they were employed by.

My feelings about mandatory retirement ages have evolved over the years. At one time, I would have liked to serve on the Federal bench where an appointment is for life but in retrospect I’m glad it didn’t come to pass because the temptation to work forever might have been too much. I’m very comfortable with the decision I made to retire at sixty-six rather than seek another term this November, which would have been limited to three years. After all, if I had done that I wouldn’t have the freedom to pick up at a moment’s notice and go off to the Jersey Shore. I do, however, have to wonder about the wisdom of putting people out to pasture at age fifty-seven when they have acquired the knowledge and experience to contribute to public safety for at least another decade. But, I’m digressing.

Since I’ve never driven to the Jersey Shore, I decided to rely on Google maps on my mobile phone for directions. It gave us an estimated travel time of five and a half hours.
It became apparent that when it gave us this estimated travel time that it left out the state of Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania has never started an interstate construction project that it intended to complete.
At first I was delighted that Google maps directed us to the 476 bypass which would avoid Scranton. My delight ended when I discovered that Pennsylvania was in the middle of interstate construction on this highway too. Rather than continue us on the bypass, Google directed us onto Route 76 which took us through downtown Philadelphia as rush hour traffic was beginning. We arrived at our destination almost eight hours after we left home.

Terri’s cousin and her husband had chosen the perfect weekend retirement getaway on the Jersey Shore. They were half a block off the main street and in walking distance of all of the shops and restaurants in the town. They were also two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. The town had a boardwalk and beautiful beaches that ran for miles that made for a beautiful early morning or evening walk. The condominium that they had purchased had two bedrooms and a bathroom off the entrance way, the second floor had the living area, kitchen and another bedroom. Best of all it had a roof top porch where you could sit, have a cocktail and read or watch the sunset. It was a place made for relaxation and it was impossible not to relax. We spent two days with them enjoying the Shore and, most of all, their company.

On the third day it was time to leave and return to the menagerie.

To avoid the return trip through center city Philadelphia at rush hour on a Friday, we mapped out a different route home in which we picked up the 476 bypass upon entering the southern border of Pennsylvania. The trip was smooth sailing until I prematurely exited the bypass just south of Scranton.

I believe that Pennsylvania has been doing interstate construction in Scranton since I was born. In fact, I’m quite certain that the construction of the pyramids in Egypt took less time. Whatever time we were saving by missing Philadelphia was now being lost as we sat in Friday night traffic on Route 81 in Scranton.

After a couple of deep breaths and reminding myself that, now that I was retired and I had all the time in the world, I sat and concentrated on the audio book we were listening to.

We arrived home in about the same length of time it took us to get the Jersey Shore.

As Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz says, “There is no place like home.”

Eespecially if you have to travel through Pennsylvania to get there.

It’s almost Labor Day and I’m wondering where the summer went, let alone the year.

It’s my first year of retirement and it seems to be sailing past.

As we all know, we probably had the mildest winter in a lifetime. The lack of snow seemed very appealing at first but, as I would learn, the lack of precipitation would have consequences later on.

Terri and I had decided to get away from upstate New York for part of the winter. The past couple of years I had rented a condo in North Myrtle Beach and she visited the middle two weeks of the month I was there. I loved the daily routine of walking thee beach for an hour each morning with a cup of coffee while listening to NPR. I would have breakfast, go to the gym and read on the beach for the rest of the day. Listening to the waves crash on the beach all night was pretty tranquil.

This year we decided to try another location and settled on Asheville, North Carolina. Set in the mountains on the North Carolina-Tennessee border it afforded some great hiking opportunities. Asheville is a pretty compact city. We rented a house in North Asheville and were able to walk into the city each day for breakfast or lunch depending on what time we got moving.

Asheville has a neighborhood called the “South Slope” which is home to 19 craft breweries and barbecue places all within walking distance of one another. Adjacent to that neighborhood is the “River Arts District.” In which a number of warehouses have been converted to artist studios. It also has the Vanderbilt Estate with its mansion and miles of beautifully kept walking, biking trails and bridle paths.

The University of North Carolina-Asheville caters to retirees, offering a number of educational courses and programs geared to their interests.

Terri and I agreed that if our children and grandchild were not living in Central New York, it would be a tempting place to relocate in retirement.

Returning home in April, it seemed summer was here.

If the winter seemed barren of snow, the summer was the hottest and driest that I could remember. It was ideal for golf although I can’t say that my game has approved measurably. After a few initial cuttings, the lawn didn’t need much mowing.

We live on a well and it didn’t occur to me that we might have a problem until Terri filled the 100 gallon water trough that the mules drink from and I went to get a drink of water and nothing came out of the tap. Fortunately water came back after a half an hour and the water conservation light bulb went on in my head.

On some days we were able to kill two birds with one stone by diving in our two acre pond to escape the heat with body wash and shampoo. Waiting until we had a full load before running the dish washer and clothes washer, along with other measures large and small.

I did learn that the five hens that Terri bought to add to her menagerie didn’t require much water. The only complication they presented was the mules sticking their heads into the chicken coop because they liked the chickens’ food. Go figure.

As the days got longer, hotter and dryer I found myself getting wistful about life in the city.

I also wanted to strangle anyone who denied the existence of climate change.

When we got a succession of thunder storms during these past two week I felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

Retirement is great. I enjoy it more with each passing day.

I have changed my outlook in one respect.

I was always saying that I wished the winters would slip by as fast as the summers seemed to.

It has now occurred to me that if that came true, I’d be dead in no time.

I’m looking forward to a real long winter and a lot of water next spring.

There is very little that the conservative columnist, George Will, and I agree on unless it’s baseball. Will, however, has raised an interesting theory about the reasons behind Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns.

It is worth noting that every Presidential candidate of either party has released their tax returns beginning with the election of 1976. Donald Trump flatly refuses to do so.

Initially, Trump claimed that he couldn’t release them because he was being audited by the IRS and left the possibility that he might release them when the audit was concluded. When it was demonstrated that an audit was no bar to disclosing the returns, he shifted his position to a blanket refusal which presently he adhere to.

Trump’s position, naturally, raised questions about what the tax returns might reveal.

Is he not as wealthy as he claims to be?

Did his charitable giving not measure up to his boasts about his generosity?

Whatever the reason behind the refusal, Trump and his advisers had to know that the refusal would simply raise more and more questions about what he is trying to hide.

George Will has raised a new, very plausible, explanation.

Trump is trying to avoid having to reveal the business ties and ventures he has to Russian oligarchs and their patron, Vladimir Putin.

Several months ago it was disclosed that the Democratic National Committee’s computer network had been hacked. On the eve of the Party’s Convention almost twenty-thousand e-mails were posted on WikiLeaks. The e-mails revealed that the DNC staff was not neutral during the Party’s Presidential primary contests but had been working to promote the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and undermine the candidacy of her rival for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders.

This past Friday more e-mails were posted on WikiLeaks involving donors and personal information about staffers and Democratic officials was disclosed.

It is no surprise that the e-mails were posted on WikiLeaks site since its founder, Julian Assange, is hostile to Hillary Clinton. He believes that she has advocated his extradition from Britain to Sweden where he faces criminal charges involving Rape. He has been holed-up in the Ecuador Embassy avoiding extradition since 2012.

The more interesting question is who was behind the hacking operation and why.

Law enforcement authorities investigating the hack, lay responsibility at the feet of Russian intelligence services. Was Vladimir Putin attempting to injure the Clinton campaign and tip the election to Donald Trump?

Since the beginning of his campaign, Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Putin and has declined to criticize any of his foreign or domestic policies. Up to know this “bromance” has been the subject of late night talk show host monologues and other pundits who find Trump’s admiration of Putin somewhat amusing.

A look, however, at the person running the Trump campaign should give us some pause from treating this as harmless.

In March 2016 Trump hired Paul Manafort to advise his campaign on delegate selection and in June gave him the role of Campaign Manager. He is now the person in charge of the Trump campaign.

Manafort’s history includes working with Russian and Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs and was deeply involved in a disputed election in the Ukraine for a Putin protégé. He has also, reportedly, been intimately involved in a number of financial ventures with the same oligarchs in that country.

Shortly after Manafort joined the Trump campaign, Trump reversed his stand on Russia’s annexation of Crimea now finding it acceptable.

Trump has taken a number of other stands that could only further the desire of Putin for a Trump victory including sending the Russian leader a signal that he might not fulfill this country’s treaty obligation as part of the NATO alliance.

A former Acting Director of the CIA, Michael Morell, has called Trump an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

It’s disturbing that a Russian despot and a fugitive sex offender would, hand in hand, try to influence the outcome of an American Presidential election.

Has Trump, Like Manafort, been involved in financial ventures with the same or similar Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs during his career?

Are any of the deals alive or dead?

Would his allegiance be to those deals trump his allegiance to the United States and its allies were he to become President?

Those are all legitimate questions.

Some or all of them could be answered if Trump were to disclose his tax returns.

Until that happens, George Will’s concern remains an important and valid one.

Last week a United States District Court Judge ordered that John Hinckley Jr. could be released from confinement from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. because he was no longer dangerously mentally ill. Hinckley will be allowed to live with his mother in Williamsburg, Va. with restrictions.

On March 30, 1981, thirty-five years ago, Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan outside a hotel in the nation’s capital. The President, a Secret Service Agent and a Washington, D.C. police officer received gunshot wounds from which they recovered. Presidential Press Secretary, James Brady, was gravely wounded in the head and suffered severe brain damage.

Hinckley had bought his .22 caliber Rohm RG-14 revolver at a Dallas, Texas pawn shop using an alias, a false address and an expired Texas driver’s license in October 1980. At the time of the purchase, Hinckley was under psychiatric care.

Four days before the purchase, he attempted to board an airline flight in Nashville, Tennessee to New York City with three handguns and loose ammunition in a carry-on bag. On the same day, President Jimmy Carter was in Nashville and traveling to New York.

Hinckley was charged and tried for his attempted assassination of all four men. He was found not guilty by a jury in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. after interposing an Insanity defense.

In the uproar following the verdict, the jurors were compelled to testify before Congress about the reason they found him not guilty. This was unheard of up to that time.

At the time of the trial, Insanity was an “ordinary” defense. This meant that once the accused offered some evidence of a mental disease or defect, the burden of proof shifted to the prosecution to prove that he was sane beyond a reasonable doubt.

Congress promptly passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act which made the Insanity defense an “affirmative” defense and placed the burden on the defendant to prove a mental disease or defect by a preponderance of the evidence. A preponderance of the evidence means the greater weight of the evidence. Since the burden of proving this was “affirmatively” placed on the defendant, a jury, which determines the facts, was free to disbelieve the evidence no matter how much evidence was presented.

Most of the states followed suit with similar changes to the law and some, Montana, Idaho and Utah, abolished the defense altogether.

One would have thought that Congress would have moved just as quickly to remedy the flaws that allowed someone as disturbed as Hinckley to obtain a firearm.

Not so.

The Brady Handgun Violence Act, commonly known as the “Brady Bill” was not introduced in Congress until March 1991. It was never voted on and was re-introduced in 1993 when it passed and was signed by President Clinton becoming law in 1994, more than a decade after President Reagan, James Brady and the others were shot.

President Reagan said the Brady Bill “…can’t help but stop thousands of illegal gun purchases.”

While the law mandated the first background checks, it would not have prevented Hinckley from obtaining a firearm. The prohibition in the law applied to persons who had been previously legally committed to a mental institution or legally declared a mental defective which Hinckley, at the time he purchased the weapon, had not been.

The law had other loopholes and a three day window, in which the FBI could complete a background check, otherwise the gun sale had to be permitted. This particular time limit is still the law today and allowed Dylan Roof, who had drug charges pending, to obtain a handgun and murder nine people at Emmanuel African American Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina this year because the three days included a weekend.

As might be expected, the National Rifle Association (NRA) fought passage of the law from 1987 when it was first proposed and funded numerous unsuccessful court challenges to it.

In 1994 the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly referred to as the Federal Assault Weapons ban was enacted which prohibited the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms commonly called “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines.

The law was passed following a 1989 shooting in Stockton, California in which a teacher and thirty-four children were shot and five of the children died.

This law had a “sunset” provision which meant it automatically expired after ten years. It did so in 2004.

Since it expired, we have had the kind of assault weapons that had been banned, used in Columbine Colorado, Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, San Bernardino, California and Orlando, Florida and elsewhere with deadly results.

As we stop to consider the implications of Hinckley’s release from Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, we might also want to ponder what might have occurred if he had been able to obtain an assault rifle, the way other mass shooters are able to do today.

This past Monday, the Democratic Party Convention opened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The opening day was spent with the Party leadership having to deal with just what it didn’t need. Another e-mail scandal.

This time, almost nineteen thousand e-mails had been posted on the website WikiLeaks by hackers who appear to be affiliated with the Russian Government.

The e-mails were particularly embarrassing to the Party and the Chairwoman, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, because they revealed that throughout the primary campaign the Democratic National Committee had been clandestinely supporting Hillary Clinton.

Senator Bernie Sanders had been making this accusation for some time, claiming that the process was “rigged.” Any astute observer of the primary campaigns could see that Wasserman-Schultz was not being neutral throughout the process but the scope and depth of the DNC support for Clinton was disturbing.

Wasserman-Schultz agreed to resign as Chairperson of the Convention but wanted to open and close the Convention against the wishes of everyone who had a stake in its success. Only after she had been booed by her own delegation did she see the wisdom of abandoning this course and returning to Florida immediately.

The convention proceedings got off to a rocky start with booing coming from the Sanders delegates and supporters each time Clinton’s name was mentioned. Sanders, himself, was booed when he attempted to calm the situation by reiterating his support for Clinton.

As the evening proceedings progressed with speeches by Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Sanders, the booing and cat calls subsided and decorum appeared to be restored.

The First Lady’s speech was eloquent and revealing about her time in the White House and is credited with changing the tone of the convention.

The second day featured the nomination of Hillary Clinton. Whatever one might think of her, it was a historic moment as a major party nominated its first female candidate for President of the United States. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton spent forty minutes revealing why he fell in love with her and extolling her as a “change maker.”

I felt that the two most significant speech of the night came from former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright and New York Congressman Joseph Crowley.

Albright told of her own immigrant journey to the United States and the danger a President Trump would pose to the United States and our allies because of his strange attraction to leaders like Vladimir Putin and Sadaam Hussein.

Congressman Crowley revealed that in the aftermath of the September 11 attack, Trump took advantage of monies appropriated for rebuilding lower Manhattan involving properties he owned that were not damaged or affected at all by the attack. He contrasted Clinton’s efforts in securing the funds and what he termed Trump’s “cashing in” on the tragedy.

The third night was filled with speeches by former new York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, Vice-Presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, Vice-President Biden and President Obama.

Mayor Bloomberg’s speech was intriguing because he noted that he was an Independent and did not intend to endorse the Democratic Party platform. Indeed. He declared that there were portions of both parties’ platforms that he both agreed and disagreed with. His purpose in speaking at the convention was to warn against the election of Donald Trump whom he labeled a “con man.” He pointed out Trump’s multiple bankruptcies, plethora of lawsuits and contractor that had been “stiffed” by him.

Senator Kaine introduced himself to the world by sharing his life story including his mission to Honduras during his college years where he taught carpentry and plumbing and learned to speak Spanish fluently.

Both President Obama and Vice-President Biden contrasted the conflicting messages of the Convention in Cleveland and that in Philadelphia. The President not only vouched for Clinton’s judgement and experience but went so far as to label Donald Trump a “home grown demagogue.”

The last night centered on Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech. Where Trump had portrayed America as a dark and troubled place that only he could fix, she spoke of it as an inclusive place, in which all people should be welcome and whose best days are yet to come.

The two conventions were as different in tone and theme as two gatherings could be.

The Republicans left Cleveland with significant divisions in their party. Ted Cruz, the runner-up in the nominating contest, refusing to endorse Donald Trump and the last two Republican Presidents and the last two nominees were nowhere to be seen or heard.

The Democrats left Philadelphia seeming to be unified with a President, Vice-President, former President, Senator Sanders and a whole host of talented surrogates ready to campaign.

Whether that unity remains lasting remains to be seen. If, for example, Hillary Clinton were to become engaged in the Democratic primary contest that Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is involved in against a Bernie Sanders supporter, the party rift could re-open and doom her campaign
.
Only time and the next one-hundred days will tell.

They come once every four years. They last no more than four days. They are usually only weeks apart. They are the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.

I, being a political junkie, am glued to the television. I’ve often said that there are only two things I would bet on, prize fights or a political race. The reason is because in either, anything can happen.

This past week, the Republican Party held its convention in Cleveland and I wasn’t disappointed. That, which I didn’t expect to happen, happened.

It started from the opening invocation, when the minister told the assembled delegates that; ”Our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.” So much for Christian charity and the milk of human kindness.

The first night of the Convention featured the speech of Melania Trump, the wife of the Party’s nominee for President. Her speech was destined to be a success since portions of it had been delivered before by Michelle Obama whose husband went on to be elected President

I do have to confess that I remain somewhat puzzled about why the Trump campaign would lift portions of a speech for Melania Trump from one given by the First Lady, since Donald Trump and the Republican Party clearly view the President as a foreign born Presidential usurper if not the Anti-Christ.

The second night New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, announced that he would prosecute Hillary Clinton for a variety of transgressions and the delegates could serve as a “jury of her peers.”

This was a particular treat because Christie has never been inside a courtroom.

After reading out a list of charges, Christie would ask the audience to shout out “guilty or not guilty.” To no one’s surprise the delegates pronounced her guilty on each charge.

If Christie had wanted to exhibit some real imagination, he could have asked them to return a verdict on the George Washington Bridge lane closings.

Day three of the convention featured the acceptance speech of Mike Pence, the anti-Gay Governor of Indiana.

I was initially puzzled about what the Trump campaign thought Pence brought to the ticket since Trump already had eighty percent of the evangelical vote and against Hillary Clinton seemed likely to pick up the other twenty percent. Then I realized that after Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich there were no other prominent Republicans willing to join the ticket. Considering the baggage that Christie and Gingrich carry, Pence must seem like a safe choice.

On the final night of the Convention Trump doubled down on his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, isolationist positions.

His ambivalence about our NATO obligations can only serve to give great comfort to Russia’s Putin.

Trump’s hostility to immigrants and Pence’s to Gays caused me to wonder about the message being delivered to the 65,000 foreign born men and women, the 5,895 Muslims, the 66,000 gay and 6,700 transgendered persons serving in the Armed Forces at a time when none of the Trump children have served.

In what seems to be a fitting coda to the Convention, the day after it concluded, David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate in Louisiana and declared;

“I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace the issues that I’ve championed for years.”

Pence, who describes himself as a “Christian, Conservative and Republican in that order will recognize this quote from Galatians, Chapter 6 verse 7;

“….for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.”

The past two weeks has been one of the most difficult and painful periods in America since the attack on September 11, 2001.

Two African-American men were killed during police encounters that were captured on cell phones. Five police officers in Dallas were ambushed and murdered by a gunman as they provided security to a peaceful march protesting the earlier shootings.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana this morning a gunman killed three police officers and wounded four others. At this writing, other than his age and identity, nothing about him or why he did it is known.

Additional protests during this period have led to scores of arrests in cities across the country. The atmosphere is tense, polarizing and is escalating.

Thirty-five years ago, as a criminal defense lawyer, I was involved in a case in which four Syracuse Police officers were charged with beating a Latino man in Upstate Medical Center parking lot while trying to arrest him. During the struggle to put handcuffs on him, he suffered a heart attack and died several weeks later.

The struggle to arrest him was being viewed by a security guard and hospital orderly on a grainy black and white television monitor whose camera was trained on the parking lot. These two witnesses claimed that the officers struck their suspect in the head with a nightstick.

The incident occurred in September 1980 and for the next nine months Syracusans were divided about what the outcome of the criminal proceedings should be. Public pressure exerted on the District Attorney’s office to indict by some groups in the community was intense and an indictment was returned charging them with a felony assault and lesser offenses.

The case went to trial before a jury in April and May of 1981. Medical testimony by Upstate physicians was conclusive that the deceased had suffered only an inch long cut on the head that was not caused by a nightstick and he had suffered two heart attacks previously.

The jury took less than half an hour to find all of the officers not guilty but the healing in the community and of the officers themselves took much longer.

My client, the only veteran of the force, vowed that he would never arrest anyone again.

He didn’t.

He spent the remainder of his career in the Records Division.

Another officer left the force entirely.

A third transferred to another department.

Thirty-five years later, we live in the digital age. Almost everyone has a cell phone with a camera capable of recording videos that can be uploaded to the internet. It is occurring with increasing frequency and the public is arriving at conclusions based on those videos even when the video is a partial one or incomplete. Protests are immediate, tensions are high and rhetoric becomes overheated.

The madman who murdered and injured twelve in Dallas , a city which had no connection to the shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, where the protest march was peaceful and the police a welcome presence, was inspired by the anger and rhetoric that was manifest following those shootings.

That is what happens when there are madmen among us.

There will always be mad men among us.

Black Lives do matter.

The right to protest peacefully is one that is enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution and should be celebrated rather than condemned.

We also need to have faith in the other institutions of government. We need to let them conduct the kind of thorough and complete investigation that is required of these tragic incidents and let them hold whoever needs to be accountable without rushing to judgement.

We need to talk to each other rather than over each other or past each other.

We need to stop and take a breath.

When I was contemplating retirement a couple of years ago, my wife, Terri, gave me a book entitled “How To Retire Happy, Wild and Free.” The book is an excellent guide for anyone considering retiring because it addresses all aspects of retirement beyond just financial security.

It forces you to think about what your daily activities will be, how to establish a “bucket list” of all the things you want to do before you go on to your great reward.

In my case, I decided that I would visit all the Presidential Libraries, see different parts of the country, do more research and writing, post a weekly blog on whatever came to mind and regularly go to the gym to stay healthy among other things.

Some of these goals I’ve met, others I’m working on and some have yet to be started.

One of the activities I decided to do, was learn to play the piano. So, I went out and bought a keyboard and found a piano teacher and started taking lessons.

I thought this might be easier than learning a foreign language since I never passed a foreign language course in high school and had to fall back on the Latin I had learned in parochial school to meet the foreign language requirement in college.

I still had some memories of the piano lessons I took in grade school from a Roman Catholic nun and the lingering pain I had on the back of my head when I didn’t play well for her, but I managed to repress them.

I’m able to report that learning to read music and play the piano is no easier than learning a foreign language but I am persistent.

This past 4th of July my three year-old granddaughter, Claire, was visiting. She enjoys playing with our two dogs, Sinead and Georgia, whom she calls “Georgia Peaches” and visiting the mules, cats and chickens out in the barn.

While I was practicing the piano, I heard her ask her mother; “Who is playing that yucky music?”

A few minutes later, as I was coming up stairs, she asked; “Who is coming up the stairs?”

“The man who was playing the yucky music,” I replied.

“We were hoping you hadn’t heard that,” her mother said. “Actually, I agree with her,” I replied.

About an hour later, we were in the driveway getting ready to leave for a 4th of July party. Like all kids, she was getting impatient and asking when we were going to the party.

“Well,” I said, “we could stay here and listen to more yucky music.”

“I didn’t say it was yucky,” she told me.

“You didn’t,” I asked, “then who did?”

“Georgia Peaches said it,” she replied.

I guess I’ll have to practice more.

For several years I have suspected that the Justices of the United States Supreme Court are a group of very well educated people who are bereft of common sense.

I first began to have this suspicion in 2010 when it handed down the Citizens United decision in which it declared that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose a candidate or ballot issue because it constituted “Free Speech.”

In short order there was an explosion of nonprofit “social welfare” or “trade association” groups who could accept unlimited donations and did not have to disclose the donors. This led to the term “dark money” being coined to describe such contributions.

The flood of “dark money” into these organizations on both sides has turned the American political world into a giant cesspool.

It is estimated that a successful presidential campaign will need to raise one billion dollars for the 2016 campaign. Much of that will be “dark money” going from the non-profit “social welfare” or “trade association” groups to super-pacs supporting the various candidates.

Needless to say, this limits the field of potential candidates either to the wealthiest who can self-finance or those willing to do the bidding of the “dark money” donors. The day in which “anyone could grow up to be President” untarnished, is past.

What ultimately confirmed my suspicion about the Supreme Court occurred this week when it decided the case of McDonnell v. United States. The Court unanimously reversed the public corruption conviction of Robert McDonnell, the former Governor of Virginia, who had accepted $175,000 in loans, gifts and other benefits from Jonnie Williams. Williams was a businessman who owned a herbal supplement that he wanted research tested by the Virginia public universities and McDonnell arranged meetings between Williams and the state officials including hosting them at the Governor’s mansion.

A jury convicted McDonnell after a five week trial during which it heard the circumstances surrounding the gifts and the arranged meetings on counts of bribery and honest services fraud. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction.

In reversing the conviction, the Supreme Court found that arranging the meetings did not constitute an “official act” by the Governor because they did not require the Governor to use his authority to make a decision or exert pressure on another public official to do so. It went on to conclude that setting up constituent meetings was a routine function of public officials and did not constitute an official act.

It’s hard to see Jonnie Williams as nothing more than Santa Claus.

It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that this restrictive interpretation will make it more difficult to prosecute public corruption.

Lyndon Johnson once extolled the backgrounds and talents of the various members of John F. Kennedy’s cabinet to House of Representatives Speaker, Sam Rayburn, calling them the “best and the brightest the country had to offer.” Rayburn is said to have replied; “That may be true, Lyndon, but I’d feel a little better if one of them had run for sheriff once.”

That might not be a bad qualification for the next Supreme Court Justice.