Author: admin

One hundred years ago, this weekend, the men and women of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were occupying the General Post Office in Dublin in the “Rising” for Irish independence from Britain.

It wasn’t the first “rising” of that sort. The Irish had attempted to throw off the cloak of British oppression on an almost regular basis every fifty years.

The previous one had occurred in 1865 and 1867 and had a unique twist to it. Many of the participants had just returned home from fighting in the American civil war where they had fought either for the Union or the Confederacy. Some of them had gone to America for the sole purpose of learning military skills they could utilize in this quest for freedom.

That the British ultimately put down that rising and either executed or imprisoned the rebels did not stamp out their efforts to achieve freedom. The Fenian movement lived on and one of its most fervent champions was Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Rossa had been prosecuted for Treason and sentenced to life in prison. He was later paroled and exiled from Britain to America and would write of the horrors he endured in the British jails.

Despite being barred from Britain for twenty years, he worked tirelessly, utilizing all means, legal and illegal to wage war on the British Empire. He died in Brooklyn, New York on June 29, 1915 and his body was returned to Ireland where the largest funeral procession to that day was held.

On August 1, 1915, at Rossa’s grave site Padraig Pearse, uttered these words;
“Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a younger generation. And the seed sown by the young men of ’65 and ‘67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of the Realm had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in in secret and in the open. They think they have pacified Ireland They think they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think they have foreseen everything, they think they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!-they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

Six months later on April 16, 1916 Pearse stepped out of the Dublin General Post Office and read a proclamation declaring Ireland to be free and independent.

In a few days, the rising was put down and its leaders, including Pearse, were executed but the people in Ireland and the Irish in America would not accept that Ireland was not free and independent.

Many battles would be fought and many lives would be lost as the Irish fought the British and each other to obtain freedom and independence.

Ireland would be known as the “Free State,” a twenty-six county Dominion in the British Empire from 1922 until 1937 when Eamon de Valera abolished the Oath of Allegiance and began an economic war with England.

In 1937, de Valera wrote a new constitution adopted by referendum and the Republic of Ireland was officially born. Although from the day that Pearse had proclaimed a Republic in front of the General Post Office, it had existed in the hearts and minds of the men and women who worked tirelessly, many giving their lives, to bring it into existence.

Another six decades would pass before the sectarian violence that continued in Northern Ireland would subside and the island would be at peace.

As we look around the world and see the many places torn apart and ravaged by sectarian violence and atrocities being committed in the name of religion or economic oppression, it is well to remember that if peace can come to Ireland after centuries of strife, it can happen anywhere.

On June 26, 2015 the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, decided that same sex marriage was a constitutional right and ordered the states to issue marriage licenses to all couples applying for one.

In the wake of that decision we have seen repeated attempts by some states and public officials to frustrate and, in some cases, defy the Court’s mandate.

In Kentucky, the Rowan County Clerk, Kim Davis, refused the issue the licenses and was ordered to jail by a United States District Court judge for five days until she relented and authorized her staff to issue the licenses.

In Alabama, the Chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore, who is renowned for erecting monuments to the Ten Commandments in State courthouses, ordered the lower court not to issue licenses to same sex couples. A number of lower court judges refused to abide by the ban and issued licenses in accordance with the Obergfell decision but the ban continues to be a subject of continued litigation. One can only hope that Moore, a committed homophobe, gets a dose of the Davis treatment.

We have gone a long way down since President John F. Kennedy eloquently made the case for the separation of church and state and discrimination based on religion before the Houston Ministerial Alliance during the 1960 Presidential election.

Perhaps more subtle but equally egregious are the laws that have been enacted or considered by several states which would permit businesses to refuse services to same-sex couples and bar transgendered people from using rest rooms according to their gender identity.

Last month, when I was in Asheville, North Carolina, the state legislature passed a law that invalidated the city of Charlotte’s local law prohibiting discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) people. Charlotte’s local law also permitted transgendered people to use facilities based on their gender identity. This state ban was signed by Governor Pat McCrory, who had been elected on a platform of returning power to the state’s localities.

In the aftermath of its passage some of the state’s largest employers such as Pay Pal, Google Ventures and other businesses have announced that they will no longer invest in expanding their businesses in the state.
The NBA is considering whether it will move next year’s championship game from Charlotte to another state and is being encouraged to do so by former NBA star Charles Barkley.

Yesterday, the iconic rock star, Bruce Springsteen, cancelled a concert scheduled for April 10 whose venue was Greensboro, North Carolina.

Governor McCrory remains obstinate about repealing the measure and the world awaits the state’s plan on how it will enforce the restroom portion of the ban.

Mississippi enacted and even more aggressive anti-LGBT law called the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act which allows individuals to refuse services to LGBT individuals, same sex couples and single women who offend their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Somehow single men were omitted from the class who could be discriminated against.

It remains to be seen how the law will affect tourism and convention traffic to the cities and casinos on the Gulf Coast.

Other states have considered such laws but cooler heads have prevailed.

The Georgia state legislature passed a “religious liberty” bill that would enshrine the right to discriminate against LBGT people but it was vetoed by the Governor after outcries from some of the State’s largest employers including Apple, Disney, Intel and others and after the NCAA and NFL suggested it could hinder the state’s prospects of hosting championship games. Business leaders in Indiana forced a revision to similar legislation although the failure to repeal it entirely did not satisfy the employer, Angie’s List, which put an expansion of its facility in Indianapolis on hold.

It is often said that money can’t buy love or happiness.

That is undoubtedly true.

An economic boycott and the withholding of money that promotes or achieves equality and tolerance is good.

My wife, Terri, and I spent this past month of March in Asheville, North Carolina. It was the second time we had been there. Three years ago we had visited Asheville for a week.

I had graduated from the University of Tennessee thirty-five years before our stay. Asheville is eighty miles to the east of Knoxville, Tennessee. During the period when I was attending U-T, as the University is known, Asheville was a decrepit, decaying city replete with empty buildings in the downtown area and had no manufacturing or industry to speak of.

Asheville did have the Biltmore Estate and the Grove Park Inn as its two major tourist attractions but little else to offer. It also had a literary history as the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe and the residence of F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived at the Grove Park Inn for two years while his wife Zelda was treated at a local insane asylum.

Four decades later, Asheville has become a jewel of the South. It is home to the University of North Carolina-Asheville which offers courses and programs to retirees. The downtown area boasts plenty of stores, shops and eclectic restaurants catering to every taste.

The area known as the “South Slope” is home to almost twenty craft breweries that serve delicious meals. Adjacent to the South Slope is the River Arts district in which many of the old abandoned factories now house artist studios of every kind.

The Biltmore Estate, built by George Washington Vanderbilt at the end of the 19th century remains a major tourist attraction. Set on 8,000 acres the mansion has two-hundred and fifty rooms still utilized by the family today. Visitors see the Gilded Age in all of its glory. The Estate has its own winery and a high-end restaurant in what were formerly stables.

The Grove Park Hotel is now owned by the Omni Chain. It has terraced balconies where you can watch spectacular sunsets over the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Asheville skyline. Ten U.S. Presidents beginning with William Howard Taft up through President Obama have been guests there along with countless other celebrities.

During the month we lived there, we rented a small house in the North Asheville neighborhood which allowed us to walk to the center city every day. North Asheville was, at one time, a crime infested neighborhood but today is in the throes of gentrification. Renovated houses are selling for over three-hundred thousand dollars. Like the rest of Asheville, it is becoming a much sought after place to live.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously observed in his work The Last Tycoon that “There are no second acts in American lives.”

He might have thought twice about that if he could see the city of Asheville today.

To see some photographs I took at the Biltmore Estate and the sunset at the Grove Park Inn, go to my Facebook page and click on “Photos” and “Your Photos”.

Several weeks ago, during one of the Republican Presidential debates, Senator Marco Rubio was asked about an endorsement he received from the Mayor of Miami, Florida that was accompanied by a plea from the Mayor that Rubio advocate a climate change policy which would curtail the flooding in that city.

In response, Rubio gave the standard answer of the climate change deniers, saying; “The reason the climate is changing is because the climate has always been changing. The climate’s never been the same it’s always changed. I don’t believe that human activity is the cause of all of these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. And then, in any case, there is no law that can be passed that would have any effect on climate change. But I can tell you right now that I’m not going to destroy our economy.”

Parsing Rubio’s answer is interesting since the answer contains an acknowledgement that there have been “dramatic changes” in the climate which he attempts to assert are natural. In taking this position, Rubio has joined the ranks of climate deniers seeking the Presidency and senior members of his party. Both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are firm climate deniers. The former would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. The latter would abolish the Department of Energy and has voted against every environmentally sound proposal. They join Senator James Inhofe R-Oklahoma. Inhofe is one of the most famous climate deniers, even writing a book claiming that the scientific evidence in support of climate change is a conspiracy to destroy the business economy. He is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He has compared the EPA to the Nazi Gestapo and its Administrator to the Japanese World War II propagandist, Tokyo Rose.

How did we get to this place?

The answer is simple. The United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions involving campaign financing has turned the American political system of campaigning into a giant cesspool. The Koch brothers, Koch industries and a network of wealthy like-minded donors have been allowed to secretly fund entities like Americans For Prosperity, the Club For Growth and create a number of tax deductible think tanks that specialize in specious research designed to oppose and weaken any regulation that threatens it’s business interests regardless of how sound the regulation is or the damage their corporate activity will cause to the environment. An excellent history of this activity is contained in Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right .
The ironic part of all of this is that some of best scientific minds in America saw the crisis we would face decades ago.

As early as 1968 the scientist David M. Gates warned about global warming declaring that “We will go down in history known as an elegant technological society which underwent biological disintegration for lack of ecological understanding.” He painted a grim picture for the future of the planet that would become “half-starved, depressed billions gasping in air depleted of oxygen and laden with pollutants, thirsting for thickened blighted water.”

By 1977, Gates was sounding the alarm about fossil fuels saying that their continued use “…would mean warmer global climate, raise ocean levels.”

The question posed to Marco Rubio inn the Republican Presidential debate was predicated on a request by twenty-one mayors in Florida to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the issue of climate change be included in the debate because of rising sea levels. In the past year and a half the seal level along the Atlantic coast has risen five inches. The city of Miami Beach has spent 100 million dollars on sea defenses.

Maybe Rubio and his fellow climate change deniers are right. Maybe the science supporting global warming is unsettled.

Maybe the theory that the earth is round is unsettled too.

There are certain events that occur during your lifetime about which you will always remember where you were and whom you were with when they occurred. The attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the airplane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 is one. If you’re old, like me, you remember where you were on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was killed. So, the recent reports that a knife had been found on the former estate of OJ Simpson that could be the murder weapon, caused memories of that trial and verdict almost twenty-one years ago to come flooding back into my memory.

The discovery of the knife was as bizarre as almost everything else associated with the trial. A construction worker during the demolition of the Simpson estate allegedly found the knife and turned it over to a Los Angeles police officer. That officer, rather than turning the knife in to the department, kept it as a souvenir. This year, after trying to learn the Simpson case number which he was going to have engraved into the knife, it was confiscated by the department for testing.

The not guilty verdict in the Simpson case was initially stunning. The trial had lasted almost one year but jury deliberations took less than one day. In my view, it was the only criminal trial I watched in which there was not a single piece of exculpatory evidence. The swiftness of the deliberations led the world to assume that Simpson was about to be convicted. The verdict was also one of the most racially polarizing issues the nation had seen although recently, the Washington- Post reports that a majority of the African-American community now believes that Simpson was guilty.

With the benefit of two decades hindsight, it is easier to understand why the verdict was reached.

The trial judge was caught up in his own newly found celebrity and completely lost control of the trial. The prosecutors were totally inept putting a racist cop on the stand to account for the recovery of a key piece of evidence, a bloody glove allegedly worn by Simpson. To compound this error they allowed the witness to deny his racist views only to have them revealed in all their ugliness on tapes of interviews he had given to a writer. Moreover, the racism displayed in the tapes was emblematic of the culture that permeated the Los Angeles Police department which patrolled African-American and Latino neighborhoods like an army of occupation without any pretense of protecting and serving.

And of course there was the “Dream Team” of defense lawyers and experts who played to the antipathy that the minority members of the jury had for the Los-Angeles Police Department and the ugly racist sentiments expressed by the detective who discovered the glove. Of course, you couldn’t have a “Dream Team” that didn’t have a Kardashian on it. This was the genesis of the national affliction we are forced to bear by the incessant self-promotion of this family.

Most recently the Los-Angeles Police Department announced that the knife is unconnected to the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman but not before the Los Angeles Times reported that Simpson was “nervous” about the knife’s discovery and how it might affect his chances for parole in Nevada. Also, this week Alan Deshowitz, one of the members of the “Dream Team,” declared on CNN that it is possible O.J. Simson was both guilty and framed by the Los-Angeles Police Department.

In the end, it appears that O.J. may be the only inmate in the country who is serving a lengthy prison sentence in one state for a crime that he was found not guilty of in an another state.

God sees.

Last month in a post entitled ”Where Have You Gone Joe Dimaggio,” I discussed the civility that Senator Bernie Sanders has displayed in his contest with Hillary Clinton. That same characteristic is on display in the Republican match-up in the way in which Governor John Kasich has conducted himself.

The Republican candidates have had twelve debates. Despite being an admitted political junkie, I stopped watching them after the seventh one. My curiosity got the better of me before the eleventh and final one so tuned in. The reason why I missed debates eight through ten immediately reoccurred to me as the dialogue degenerated into a discussion of the size of Donald Trump’s hands and other anatomical appendages. Rubio became “Little Marco” and Cruz became “Lying Ted.” Alone on the stage attempting to inject some intelligent discourse into the event was the Governor of Ohio, John Kasich.

Kasich refused to engage in the name-calling and shouting that Trump, Cruz and Rubio incessantly resorted to. At one point, moderator, Chris Wallace, aired a somewhat humorous political ad that Kasich’s super PAC had run comparing Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked Kasich if he really thought the comparison had merit. Kasich responded by telling Wallace that he “wouldn’t bite “on that question.

Reflecting on that debate, I was struck by how little time or attention that Kasich received from the moderators. Almost the entire debate was focused on the mud-wrestling Trump, Cruz and Rubio were engaged in. That mirrored what had occurred in the first seven debates that I watched. Those who received little attention inevitably sank in the polls and withdrew from the race. Most of them were far more experienced and credentialed than the three who received the time and attention.

It is clear that the various networks sponsoring the debates have committed an extraordinary amount of time and money to covering the 2016 race for the White House. They have a vested interest in insuring that they obtain the highest ratings for these debates in order to boost advertising revenue and recoup their investment. In doing so, they have skewered the outcome of the nominating contest on the Republican side by driving the adults in the room from the race.

This year we seem to have a penchant for Bullies.

The political rhetoric is abundant with calls for torture, waterboarding, carpet bombing and any other use of extreme and, perhaps unlawful, force against America’s enemies.

Actual violence has even broken out at some political events.

At a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama a Black Lives Matter protester was beaten and ejected from a Trump Rally. Asked to comment on it, Trump opined that “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” The following month at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump said he would like “punch in the face” a protester that was escorted out of his event.
Trump’s rhetoric encouraging such mob violence has been escalating since earlier events held in other locales such as his Miami Doral Resort. No one should be surprised at these turn of events since Trump has used bullying language to insult Mexicans, Muslims and the Disabled.

Trump, however, is not the only bully on the political stage.

Governor Andrew Cuomo is not above using bullying tactics to upstage his perceived rivals and those who disagree with him on public policy.

One would have thought that Cuomo and New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, would have been natural partners, both having served in the Bill Clinton Administration. Yet the Mayor was barely in office when Cuomo undercut his State legislative agenda which included tax abatement for affordable housing and a renewal of mayoral control over the New York City schools. The Mayor commenting on Cuomo’s actions said that “if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows.”

No one knows that better than Syracuse Mayor, Stephanie Miner, who was on the staff of Governor Mario Cuomo.

When Cuomo proposed that municipalities could defer pension payments into the future to avoid borrowing and balance their budgets, Mayor Miner wrote a well-reasoned op-ed piece in the New York Times disagreeing with the wisdom of the plan. Time proved Mayor Miner right.

Since that article appeared the Governor rejected providing any assistance to help Syracuse repair its aged and crumbling water pipes, responding; “Fix your own pipes.” Apparently he believe the money would be better spent on a lake side amphitheater on Onondaga Lake or building a new football stadium for Syracuse University, a private educational institution.

Indeed the Governor has expressed his pique by refusing to set foot inside the city in all of his visits to Central New York since the article appeared. It leads one to wonder whether he is intent on setting a new standard for pettiness or is simply geographically challenged.

In the end these two bullies have two thing in common.

First is that they inherited highly recognizable names from their fathers.

Second, is that if they hadn’t been born with those names, they would both be homeless.

I won’t miss Antonin Scalia.
What he brought to the American system of justice was neither fair nor just.
During my career as a trial court judge, I obtained an advanced law school degree in criminal law. The particular area I concentrated on was Constitutional Law.
I read every Death Penalty decision decided by the Rehnquist Supreme Court, which began at the same time that Judge Scalia became a member of that Court. The Rehnquist era lasted from 1986 to 2005.

Throughout that period Scalia almost never voted to reverse a death sentence. It didn’t matter what issues were raised even when accompanied by a claim of actual innocence. He almost always either affirmed when the appeal was denied or dissented when the rest of the bench voted to reverse. His opinions in support of what Justice Blackmun once described as the “machinery of death” were excessive to the point of being bloodthirsty. He erected or supported as many barriers as could be constructed, substantively or procedurally, to death penalty appellants challenging some fatally flawed trials and yet claim that there were no cases…” in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”

In Scalia’s world the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham never occurred and the fruits and successes of the Innocence Project did not exist.
I sometimes wondered how he would have reacted if one of his relatives or a grandchild had been unfortunate enough to find themselves on Death Row. Perhaps we might have found out what he was truly made of.

His disdain for the “damned and despised” as Clarence Darrow once described them, was not limited to death penalty appellants.

He railed against gay citizens in an opinion which struck down laws that criminalized sexual relations between consenting adults, proclaiming; “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

Last year he double-downed on that moral judgement in his dissent in the decision that affirmed the right of gay people to marry.

In a recent case before the Court involving what role affirmative action might play in the admission policies of the University of Texas, Scalia cited some dubious research in a brief that suggested that African-American students might not succeed in a challenging academic setting and observed; “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

Before he arrived on the Court, death penalty laws were evaluated by whether they were consistent with “evolving standards of decency’ and the Constitution was considered to be a “living document” capable of being applied to the changing standards of a modern world. Scalia rejected this concept and, instead espoused something called an “originalist” and “textualist” interpretation that required it be applied according to the intent of the founding fathers or those who when it was amended. In short, the Constitution would have no more relevance to current times than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There have been times throughout his career and in his opinions that he has sounded like Donald Trump in a robe with a pen. I’ve never expected much from Donald Trump, I did expect more from Scalia.

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I have been a political junkie all of my life. One of my constant refrains has been that the only two things in life that I will bet on are prize-fights and political races because anything can happen. That last statement seems like a bit of an understatement this year.
The Republican race for President, as I’ve said, resembles a demolition derby. The only thing that the candidates seem to agree on is that everyone else in the race is a liar. Indeed, some have characterized others as being “the biggest liar” or “the worst liar I have ever met.” For awhile, I thought there might be Guinness Book of Records contest going on this year in that category. It will be very interesting when the Party holds its Convention this July in Cleveland and selects a nominee and all of the candidates have to endorse him and proclaim that he is the only one Americans should believe in.
I thought I’d seen everything that could happen in politics and then Donald Trump decided to go to war with Pope Francis.
Some of his supporters will contend that the Pope struck first by impugning Trump’s genuineness as a Christian, however it was Trump who characterized the Pope as being a “political Pope” and suggested that the Mass he celebrated on the Juarez border was a prop staged by the Mexican government.
Once my shock at Trump’’s audacity had subsided I was able to give his tactic a more cold-eyed appraisal. It became clear to me that Trump saw this gambit as another way to appeal to Evangelical voters, who distrust the Catholic Church and in a state in which Catholics are a distinct minority.
The battle for Evangelical voters within the Republican Party has been going on for at least two decades. We are now into the second generation of Evangelical church leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, either endorsing a candidate or registering their flock to vote. Candidates this year are increasingly trying to pander to this voting bloc. Cruz is harping on Judeo-Christian values and using his Evangelical pastor father as a surrogate. Rubio trumpets the fact that he attends two churches, one is Roman-Catholic and the other Evangelical. Trump rails against Muslims, vowing to bar them from the country and has now taken on the Pope.
Forty-five years ago John F. Kennedy had to appear before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to defend his right, as a Roman-Catholic, to run for President. His eloquent exposition about the need to keep religious beliefs separate from the discharge of official duties should be required reading for anyone seeking public office today and in the future. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkhoustonministers.html
It might bring us back to time when the separation of Church and State is once again viewed not as a vice but a virtue. Miracles sometimes happen.