Month: August 2016

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.