Month: May 2016

This past week two radio show hosts posted a screen shot from a Facebook page on which the poster shared a photograph she had taken of a severely damaged automobile and a stretcher lying near it. It was accompanied by her comment complaining about the delay the volunteer fire department members were causing in directing traffic, referring to one firefighter in the picture with a vulgarity. After the public began expressing its outrage about the posting it was deleted but not before the poster commented “Apparently, I was insensitive. Oops. Am I supposed to care? “

We have a presumptive presidential nominee of one party who regularly insults women, ethnic and religious groups, rival candidates and anyone else who challenges or angers him on Twitter with no apparent repercussions. Indeed, his supporters appear to relish his vitriol.

Three decades ago, when I was practicing law, New York experimented with allowing cameras in the courtroom to permit filming of trials and other court proceedings. I was an advocate of this because I thought it would allow the public to view the trials firsthand and not rely on a reporter’s viewpoint or have to speculate about what was occurring.

When I became a judge, the experiment was over and it fell to each of us on the bench to decide whether and to what extent cameras would be allowed. I permitted two trial to be filmed in their entirety with the consent of the lawyers on each side. I also allowed sentencings to be filmed over the objections of the lawyers because I felt that we were at a stage where no prejudice to the defendant could occur and the public had an interest in seeing the final outcome in the cases.

That changed a few years before I retired.

News coverage went increasingly from print to digital and readers were allowed to post comments anonymously about the defendants and the proceedings.

I soon discovered that if the defendant was African-American there would appear to be a virtual Ku Klux Klan meeting in the comment section of the news article. If the defendant was an unattractive woman, there would be sexist and misogynist postings. Often the prison sentence would discussed in hateful and homophobic terms. The vile and the vitriol soon outweighed any meaningful discussion that the news article might have inspired. Since there was no way in which the anonymous comments could be policed until after they were posted, I prohibited filming in the courtroom at all proceedings.

The Buffalo News, faced with this problem, changed its policy concerning comments on their website. It required the poster to provide their name and town along with the comment. The racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic postings disappeared and traffic on the website quickly returned to normal.

I suppose the lesson here is that anonymous haters wear a virtual sheet but when the anonymity is stripped away they slink away perhaps crawling back under the rock.

Obviously, it is almost impossible to set standards for decorum on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a parent, we are constantly warning our children about the content of photos and comments they post on their pages, especially when they are entering the workforce and prospective employers are scrutinizing social media in the same way they do references. In the digital age, what is posted online lives forever.

Regrettably media outlets that market their sites for advertising by counting the number of visitors who click on the site find this consideration to be a secondary one.

We seem to be loosening and coarsening our standards about what is permissible commentary and conduct. It appears to be the new normal.

It’s not good.

145 days ago I took a major step on the road of life. I retired from my position as a County Court Judge here in Onondaga County. Much to the surprise of many, I left one year before my term was up. I’ve been asked by many people if I have any regrets about doing so?

I don’t, but the best way to answer that question is to share the decision making process and what the last several months have been like along with what might be valuable to others my age who are contemplating the same decision.

I retired at age 66, the same age my father should have. He had been a Syracuse City Court Judge for over sixteen years. He had just been re-elected to a new ten year term although like me, he would have only been able to serve until he was 70. Instead of retiring before his last election, he chose to seek another term because he wanted to boost his pension since the judiciary had gone a long time without a raise. (Yes, Virginia, history does repeat itself!) In 1981, the year after he had been re-elected, he suffered a stroke in his chambers and was dead a year later.

So, being the same age, I took stock of where I was in life. I was and am healthy. I have a beautiful wife and best friend, Terri, whom I adore and would like to share many happy years and experiences with. I have two very talented, successful, lovely daughters Meghan and Kate, with whom I enjoy every minute I spend with them. I have a three year old granddaughter, Claire, who is the light of my life even though she prefers Terri to me. I want to share as much life with them as I possibly can while I can. That made the decision easy.

You can’t retire without a plan and I don’t mean just a financial one. You have to have interests and give some thought to what you will do each day. To that end, Terri bought me a book entitled “How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free,” which is an excellent guide to planning your retirement routine and putting together a “bucket list.”

One of the items on my bucket list, being a political junkie, is to visit every Presidential Library in the country. My friend and colleague Tom Miller suggested attending a baseball game in every stadium in the country. That, alone, would promote longevity.

Another way to keep my brain active is learning to play the piano. I thought it would be easier than learning a foreign language. It is, but not much. There will be no concert tours.

Posting on this blog once a week requires me to think too.

I also vowed to play more golf and get my handicap down from 39 to say……37.

Daily routines involve a trip to the gym with Terri and whatever we decide to do for the rest of the day. During the winter I plow out the driveways but have the luxury of staying in bed until it stops snowing. With the weather getting warmer I am mowing and clearing the 19 acres we have on a zero turn mower. Sometimes I stay in bed until the grass stops growing.

We have vowed to do more traveling whenever the mood strikes us. We spent this past March in Asheville, NC which was the subject of an earlier blog post.

People ask if I miss being on the bench or in the legal world. I do miss my day to day interactions that I had with Cathy, Kelly, Lisa and Bob whom I consider to be part of my family and worked and laughed with every day. I miss those same encounters with the lawyers, ADAs, court reporters and court security, clerks and personnel, whom I also established friendships with and also my colleagues on the bench.

I don’t miss the defendants.

My good and close friend, the Rev. Denny Hayes, always concludes Mass with the declaration “This is the day we are given, rejoice and be glad in it.”

I do.

Four months ago I published an op-ed piece in the Syracuse Post-Standard and on Syracuse.com about the dysfunctional nature of our State Government decision making in Albany commonly called “three men in a room.” (http://www.syracuse.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/01/who_needs_a_legislature_when_its_three_men_in_room_deciding_laws_commentary.html)

I recounted how during the past fourteen years twenty-two members of the Legislature had been convicted of political corruption felonies while serving in that body. Four of them were Majority Leaders of the State Senate and one had been Speaker of the Assembly.

Shortly before that article appeared, Governor Andrew Cuomo had prematurely closed down a Moreland Commission he had commissioned to investigate corruption in Albany. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bahara, stepped into this breach and seized all of the material that the Moreland Commission had gathered. He then indicted Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos for crimes involving political corruption. At the conclusion of their respective trials, both men were convicted. Silver was sentenced to twelve years in prison and Skelos to five.

It now appears that Bahara is on the verge of completing a trifecta.

The U.S. Attorney is probing the Governor’s office and the way in which it awards public works contracts to favored developers and others who make generous contributions to the Governor’s 2018 re-election committee and employ lobbyists close to Cuomo.

Two subjects of the probe are Joseph Percoco and Todd Howe. Cuomo has denied any knowledge of wrongdoing by Percoco and postures that he barely knows Howe. The credibility of these claims should be weighed in the context of each man’s history with the Governor and his father, Governor Mario Cuomo.

Percoco’s relationship to the Governor goes back to his employment by Mario Cuomo. He joined Andrew Cuomo’s staff in 1999 while Cuomo was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. At the time Todd Howe was Cuomo’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Percoco was involved in Cuomo’s unsuccessful campaign for Governor in 2002 and his successful campaign for Attorney-General in 2006. Percoco has been Cuomo’s campaign manager in his last two campaigns for Governor. Until last year, he served as Cuomo’s Deputy Executive Secretary. To some he is feared as Cuomo’s “political enforcer.” To all, he is considered Cuomo’s closest confidante. During the Governor’s eulogy to his late father, he referred to Percoco as his father’s “third son who sometimes, I think, he loved the most.”

Howe, the man Cuomo barely knows, also started his career with Mario Cuomo. When Andrew Cuomo became Secretary of HUD, Howe went with him to Washington and was responsible for Percoco joining the staff. He told the New York Times, “we brought him down, sat him down and basically said,’ Hey Joe, here’s what we need done….And Joe basically stepped into the fray.’” It’s no accident that he headed a lobbying concern at an Albany law firm that represented developers and other favored firms that received millions of dollars for projects that are part of the Governor’s “Buffalo Billion” and other upstate economic revitalization programs.

During the Watergate scandal it was asked; “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The men who carried out the Watergate burglary were essentially strangers to President Nixon having no personal or professional history with him. Even so, the trail of corruption led back to him.

In this instance, one would have to be incredibly naive to believe that Cuomo was unaware of his closest confidante’s activities and the other man who made them possible. Preet Bahara doesn’t strike me as naïve.

This corruption probe is getting closer to home in Central New York. I’m betting that Bahara will complete his trifecta and will have unmasked a magnet for sleaze.

This past Tuesday Donald Trump was poised to win the Indiana Republican Presidential Primary and vanquish his closest rival for the nomination, Ted Cruz. Trump had been on a roll since sweeping five eastern state primaries the week before and was already heralding himself as the “presumptive nominee.” So it came as something of a surprise, when on the day of the Indiana Primary, he accused Cruz’s father of being involved with Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated President John F. Kennedy fifty-three years earlier.

Trump based this charge on an article in that paragon of investigative journalism, the National Enquirer. Trump made the accusation in an interview on Fox News, a network which competes with the National Enquirer in a contest to see which one can invent the most sensational stories. Trump declared; “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being-you know, shot I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. I mean what was he doing-what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

Cruz, whom Trump refers to as “Lyin Ted,” called Trump “a pathological liar” and declared; “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies, practically every word that comes out of his mouth.” He went on to denounce Trump as “…utterly amoral, morality doesn’t exist for him.”

For good measure, he reminded us that the National Enquirer had endorsed Trump. Clearly, an endorsement that will sway the electorate like no other.

There is probably no event in history that has been examined more often and in more detail than the assassination of President Kennedy. In addition to the Warren Commission Report there have been countless books published about it. Conspiracy theories abound including some that place assassins on the “grassy knoll” on the motorcade’s route, in addition to Oswald in the Texas Book Depository. None of these books or theories have, heretofore, included Rafael Cruz.

So, it leads one to wonder, why, as he is about to clinch the Republican nomination and needs to unify the Party, would Donald Trump make such a preposterous accusation?

I’m not one who likes to put politicians on the couch and delve into their innermost thoughts and motivations. I can’t imagine trying to do it with Donald Trump but it does make me wonder whether he sometimes secretly hopes not to be the nominee.

I wonder whether he is most interested in winning the primary contests and avoiding the awesome responsibilities that come with being President. It’s clear that he hasn’t given any thought to serious policy positions, assembling a deep bench of policy advisors or governing at all. It does make one wonder what the fall campaign holds for us.

Maybe we’ll learn that Chelsea Clinton was involved in the Watergate burglary or that Bill Clinton was the mastermind of the 9/11 attack.

Only time and Donald Trump will tell us.

This past Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, announced that, if he were nominated by the Republican Party for President, he would choose Carly Fiorina to be his running mate and candidate for Vice-President.

What Cruz hoped would look like a bold move actually looks like a fool’s errand since he has no mathematical path to the nomination and lags far behind Donald Trump.

Fiorina was a candidate for President herself from May 4, 2015 until February 10, 2016 when she suspended her campaign after finishing seventh in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. During that period she presented herself as the “anti-Hillary” boasting that she had more experience in world and foreign affairs than the Secretary of State. She argued that she could challenge Clinton more effectively on the debate stage than the male candidates and touted her rise to the top of the Hewlett-Packard Company.

What she did not tout was that under her leadership the company laid off 30,000 employees and she was forced to resign after the company lost half of its value.

In 2010 she ran for the United States Senate in California and was defeated soundly by Barbara Boxer.

As a Presidential candidate she advocated defunding Planned Parenthood based upon a widely discredited video made by an anti-abortion organization purporting to show organs being harvested from live fetuses. She continued to use the video as the basis of her proposal long after it had been discredited.

Ted Cruz like to fashion himself as being the second coming of Ronald Reagan even though his views are more aligned with the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. In choosing a running mate while the primary campaign is still in progress, he has taken a page out of the Gipper’s playbook.

During the 1976 campaign, when Reagan was trying to wrest the nomination from President Gerald Ford, Reagan named a prospective running mate, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. The difference was that Schweiker was a liberal Republican whose selection was designed to broaden Reagan’s appeal. Philosophically, Fiorina is Ted Cruz in a dress.

In January of this year, Fiorina told the Boston Herald Radio that; “Ted Cruz is a lawyer and a politician. He has never made an executive decision in his life. He has never created a job, he has never saved a job.”

Cruz might be better served if he chose Mullah Omar as a running mate.