Month: May 2017

If I didn’t know better, I would think that the Trump Administration was an invention of Lewis Carroll.

The only question I mull over is whether it more nearly resembles “Through the looking Glass” or “Alice in Wonderland.”

The latest thought provocation on this topic occurred yesterday when former CIA Director, John Brennan, testified before Congress that by August 2016 he had determined that Russian intelligence agencies were meddling in the election and trying to aid the campaign of Donald Trump.

Trump continues to insist that these claims are “Fake news” yet he fired the FBI Director, James Comey, who was leading the investigation and tried to enlist Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence and Admiral Michael Rogers, the National Security Agency Director, to publicly deny that there was any evidence of cooperation between the Russians and his campaign.

To both men’s credit, they refused to do that.

You have to ask yourself, if it’s fake news, why would you fire the FBI Director and try to involve the heads of two of the major intelligence agencies?

More fantasy is found in Trump’s first budget.

This week Trump proposed a 4.1 trillion dollar budget that would devastate the safety net and amounts to a war on the poor.

It would cut Medicaid by 800 billion dollars, cut nutritional assistance by 192 billion, and reduce other welfare programs by 272 billion. Likewise, it would cut disability benefits by 72 billion.

It would eliminate subsidized student loan programs available to poor college students and those who take jobs in government or not-for-profit organizations.

Food Stamps would be cut by 194 billion dollars and a household’s allowance for Food Stamps for children would be limited to six children.

The seventh child would have to fend for itself.

The budget also includes draconian cuts to such programs as Children’s Health Insurance Program, Meal on Wheels and almost every aspect of medical and scientific research. Even some of the far-right Tea Party “Freedom Caucus’ members are balking at it.

Trump’s budget would eliminate outright the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He would also eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Science and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is responsible for National Public Radio and Public Television that provides 1,200 hours per year to children’s programming with shows like Sesame Street.

These organization, which have been part of our life since the mid-1960s, amount to >02% of the Federal budget.

There hasn’t been a wholesale assault on culture like this since ISIS and the Taliban destroyed the ancient cultural artifacts in the territories that came under their control.

The other head scratcher that was revealed this week was Trump’s telephone call to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. Under Duterte there have been over 6,000 people killed by police and vigilantes because they were suspected of drug dealing. The extrajudicial killings are being carried out without the benefit of an arrest or any evidence that the victims were, in fact, dealing drugs.

Duterte has obliquely hinted that he has been personally involved in the killings that took place when he was Mayor of Davao and boasted that he personally killed three kidnapping suspects during that period.

On Friday, Duterte placed the island of Mindanao under martial law and declared that he would support his troops even if they raped the women on the island under their control.

During the Trump initiated phone call, Trump praised Duterte for the “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

Trump went on to ask Duterte whether he thought Korean dictator, Kim Jung Un, was “stable.”

Duterte confirmed that Kim was “not stable,” which is somewhat like being called ugly by a toad.

Trump went on to disclose that the United States had two nuclear powered submarines in the area, which caused a considerable amount of consternation at the Defense Department.

After inviting Duterte to the White House, Trump closed the conversation by telling Him to “keep up the good work, you are doing an amazing job.”

It will be interesting to see if Trump offers Duterte a position in his administration, perhaps, Director of the FBI.

That would certainly keep Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller in line.

It has been a little more than a hundred days since the start of the Trump Administration, yet it seems like a hundred years.

Much has been attempted but little has been accomplished and there is a reason for that.

Much of what they have attempted to do goes against the grain of our basic core values.

They led with the travel ban on Muslims only to find it blocked by the courts that correctly recognized it as discriminating against an entire religious sect.

One would have thought that some of the humanitarian horror stories that grew out of its initial implementation would have given them pause.

Indeed, one of the individuals who became a plaintiff in the law suit contesting the ban had served as an interpreter for American troops in Afghanistan and had been hunted by Al-Qaeda and Islamic State killers.

Rather than withdraw the ban, the Trump Administration doubled down on it and issued a second modified version of the ban which also was enjoined by the courts.

From there, they moved on to the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. That one fell flat too.

Every time they tried to satisfy the “Freedom Caucus,” a collection of far right Tea Party members, by restricting coverage and benefits, they lost votes from the “Tuesday Group,” a group of more moderate and main stream Republicans.

Much to the consternation of the human amoeba, Paul Ryan, the legislation had to be withdrawn and twenty-four million Americans kept their health care coverage.

Ryan’s anguish at having to withdraw the legislation was fueled by the savings that would result from denying Americans their existing health coverage and would have made huge tax cuts for the wealthiest possible.

As George Bernard Shaw once wrote; “The government that robs Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul.”

Paul’s dreams of paying Paul will have to wait.

Unable to accomplish anything legislatively, the Administration had to fall back on Executive Orders that gutted environmental regulations that prevented the Oil, Gas, Mining and Timber industries from polluting, strip-mining and clear-cutting.

While all of this was unfolding The Administration was confronting repeated ethical questions.

Kelly Ann Conway plugged Ivanka Trump’s fashion line on the Morning Joe Program and had to be “counseled,” whatever that means.

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump spent millions of dollars in taxpayer funded travel to go to South America and pitch hotel deals.

Jared Kushner’s sister pitches a family real estate project in New Jersey to potential investors in China by offering visas to anyone that could invest $ 500,000 in the project. She also told them that her brother, a senior adviser to his father-in-law, the President, was a big supporter of the project.

When word of this promotion got reported she quickly backtracked and said that she didn’t mean to be influence peddling.

Maybe she’d been “counseled” too.

Foreign dignitaries are wined and dined at Mar-a-Lago, the Trump club in West Palm Beach, Florida and stay at the newly opened trump hotel, which was a former post office in Washington, D.C.

The Administration declares, with a straight face, that this patronizing of the President’s hotels is not meant to curry favor or influence its decisions in any way.

We are told that it is purely coincidental that in the days after Ivanka Trump dines with the President of China, that she obtained valuable copyrights from that country for her products.

There is a clear message in all of this.

The Trumps believe that the rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to them.

Why shouldn’t they believe that?

Donald Trump was very clear in the days before his inauguration that the laws governing conflicts of interest don’t apply to him.

Clearly the Trump progeny are convinced that, by extension, they don’t apply to them either.

Like any three ring circus, there were still more side acts to follow.

Even before the inauguration, there has been suspicions that the Russian Government meddled in the election to aid Trump’s candidacy.

President Obama imposed sanctions on that country and Trump’s National security designee, Michael Flynn, discussed lifting them with the Russian ambassador before Trump had taken office.

Flynn supposedly lied to Vice-President Pence about having this discussion which ostensibly led to his firing.

Flynn wasn’t fired however until after “the lie” was published in the Washington Post, despite the warnings of the Acting Attorney General that Flynn had opened himself up to blackmail by the
Russians.
The subject of Russian interference and Flynn’s conduct has now become the subject of multiple congressional investigations and another by the FBI.

Whether Flynn actually lied to Pence remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, Trump is sufficiently concerned about Flynn’s future and fate that he attempted to persuade the FBI Director, James Comey, to drop the investigation.

He fired Comey when he didn’t fall into line.

Whether this amounts to Obstruction of Justice will be determined by the special prosecutor, former FBI Director, Robert Mueller.

Mueller was appointed despite Trump, Attorney General Sessions and the Republican leaders of Congress declarations that a special prosecutor wasn’t warranted.

Finally, the nation and Donald Trump will find out whether the rules apply to him.

Whenever I’m asked about the most significant scientific or technical advance during my lifetime, I immediately think of e-mail.

I find it incredible that you can log on to a computer and instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the world at no charge.

E-mail does have its dangers.

Before I discovered e-mail and I was irritated with someone, I would write a letter venting my anger and then tear it up or not mail it. You can do that with e-mail but you have to be certain that you hit the delete button and not the send button, otherwise there is no recalling it.

You also have to be sure that if you are on a group e-mail that you don’t refer to anyone else on the group e-mail in less than flattering terms when you reply to someone else, since they will be included in your response.

My late sister, Mary, once referred to the leader of a minor political party as an “expletive deleted” moron while replying to me on a group e-mail that he was also on.

My telephone rang instantly with the query “Am I the “expletive deleted” moron she is referring to?”

“No,” I replied, “there is another one.”

Since there were only the three of us on the e-mail, he was not convinced.

Clearly, he was smarter than Mary had given him credit for.
It took a lot of hand wringing and apologizing but eventually he was placated and I didn’t lose their endorsement.

Which brings me to the subject of Facetime calling.

Up until this week the only person I facetimed with was my four-year old granddaughter, Claire.

Claire started facetiming with people while riding in the car with her mother doing errands.

I always know it is her calling because she holds the phone in such a way that you can only see the top of her head from about half way up her forehead.

Claire doesn’t just limit her conversation to the person she has called. In my case, she will demand that I call Terri into the room along with our two dogs and assorted barn animals so that she can see and talk to them too.

I find the whole experience of Facetiming unsettling and distracting because it involves trying to carry on a conversation with someone whose face is staring at you out of the screen on your cell phone while your own face is staring and talking back at you out of a little tiny screen in the top right hand portion of the screen.

It’s enough to make one seek counseling or medication.

This past Tuesday, my phone rang and I was getting a facetime call from my friend and former law partner, Chris Wiles.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked as both of our faces stared up at me from the screen.

“Trying to learn how this phone works,” he answered.

“Well, hang up and call me back normally,” I replied, “this is too creepy.”

“Okay,” he said, and the screen went black but the line was still open.

“I thought you were going to hang up,” I said into the phone.

“I’m trying to,” he responded” but I don’t know how.”

After a minute, I heard him say to someone, “Can you show me how to end this call?”
The phone went silent.

A couple of minutes later he called me back without the Facetime feature.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I said.

“I won’t,” he replied.

“I don’t think either one of us has a face for Facetime,” I told him.

He agreed with that.

After we had a chance to catch up and set a date for lunch, we hung up.

On my way home, I stopped at the post office and bought two books of forever stamps.

There are many issues in politics that are referred to as the “third rail.” Issues that the political consultants and pundits always advise candidates to stay away from, lest their position result in the sudden death of their candidacy.

Social Security reform is the best example of these.

Office seekers are advised to comment on this topic only in the most general of terms otherwise they risk awakening the wrath senior voters, who fear any changes to this “sacred cow.”

The death penalty is another of these.

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was so arbitrarily and capriciously imposed that it violated the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution which prohibited the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. One justice likened it to being struck by lightning.

The death of capital punishment was short lived.

Over the next four years, thirty-seven states enacted new death penalty statutes and the Supreme Court restored viability to this punishment in 1976.

Even New York revived it. In 1995 the legislature passed a law, which Governor George Pataki signed, that was so complex and convoluted that supporters of the law predicted that no one would be executed.

They were right.

Although a number of defendants were sentenced to death, in 2004 the New York Court of Appeals in People v. Lavalle ruled that the law was unconstitutional and all of the sentences that had been imposed were invalidated.

Oddly enough, Lavalle had tried to waive his right to appeal his conviction and fire his lawyers because he wanted to be executed rather than serve a life sentence without parole but the Court ruled he couldn’t do that.

Another example that you don’t always get what you want in life.

When I was seeking election to County Court in 1996, this became the “third rail” issue in the campaign.

I was and still am an opponent of the death penalty. If, like many of the states in the south, the law allowed a judge to overrule a jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment and impose the death, I could not have held this position.

The New York law made the sentencing a pure jury decision, giving no discretion to the trial judge to impose a different sentence.

Under that scheme I would have no moral qualms of passing a sentence and could insure that anyone tried for a capital offense in my court would get the fairest trial possible.

As it turned out we had no capital cases during the time I was a judge in county court and was spared any moral or ethical dilemmas on this subject.

During my two terms in County Court I began to research the capital punishment cases following its restoration in 1976.
I read every United States Supreme Court decision through the years of the Rehnquist Court which ended in 2005.

As the makeup of the Court changed and became more conservative, imposition of the death penalty became more flexible and I arrived at the conclusion that it had returned to being arbitrary and capricious.

Whatever analysis and writing I was going to undertake would be incredibly confusing because the reasoning behind the court decisions expanding it was muddled to the point of being incomprehensible.

I gave up the research and moved on to other topics.

Last week I went to listen to lawyer and death penalty opponent, Bryan Stevenson, speak at the conclusion of the Friends of the County Library Series held at the Oncenter.

Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama that represents condemned prisoners and the author of the book”Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” which recounts Stevenson’s first death penalty case.

He is a gifted lawyer who was responsible for Supreme Court decisions that prohibit imposing the death penalty on people under eighteen or sentencing them to life without parole.

Another of his projects is establishing a memorial to document the almost four-thousand African-Americans who were lynched in the south between 1877 and 1950.

Stevenson spoke with a passion and eloquence that I have seldom heard about poverty, racism and the way it feeds into both the criminal justice system and perpetuates the conditions that lead to gang violence, random shootings and the adolescent crime that plagues our nation.

His challenges for the more affluent of us to address those issues was inspirational and restored my faith in the future and my belief that there are better angels that walk among us.