Brian Williams must go

Since 2003 Brian Williams has repeated bragged about being on a helicopter which was shot down in Iraq. Reporters for the Stars and Stripes have determined  that Williams was not on the helicopter which was shot down, but was on another helicopter which was not even in the area when the first chopper was hit by a rocket propelled grenade and crashed. Williams has confirmed this account and apologized. 

Journalism purports to be a profession, but when it comes to television journalism it is a sad reality that it is also entertainment. 

Years ago I tried a case involving a local news anchor in front of Judge Seitz. Sitting at the defense table was the VP and General Manager of a local television station. On the witness stand was a highly compensated "investigative reporter" whose testimony had been marked by a remarkable lack of candor, which had upset not just me, but also Judge Seitz. 

That reporter, whose credibility was questioned in front of her boss by a federal judge remained on the air for years until she showed up drunk on the air during a hurricane. I told the Herald reporter covering the trial  off the record that I had no doubt that if she were a Herald reporter and the Executive Editor witnessed what was going on, that she would be fired within hours. He agreed but said television was not journalism. 

Fifteen years later, the state of journalism is even more precarious. Newspapers, with a few exceptions are dying, and much of the nontraditional Internet reporting is without any accountability. Television news survives with a 24/7 news cycle and blatant partisanship because it is entertainment not news. 

Brian Williams has to go. One cannot lie for a dozen years repeatedly and then say how sorry he is. He committed professional fraud. I, for one, am not entertained and I only hope his boss won't let him work until the next time he gets caught in a big lie.

Greenberg Traugig must retract its opinion letter to Florida Clerks of Court

The Herald got around to asking Hilarie Bass the Greenberg Traurig chair about the firm's ridiculous opinion letter that Clerks of Court in Florida are free to enforce an unconstitutional law. 

Ms Bass, in a bit of corporate doublespeak, declared that her firm supports same sex marriage, but that its opinion, actually written by some undistinguished bankruptcy lawyers in the Tallahasse office, was "based on Florida law."

The problem of course is that the opinion letter is an open invitation to nullify in 66 counties a judgment of a federal court. Judge Hinkle held that the law law, actually a provision of the Florida Constitution, is in conflict with the Equal Protection clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Under the Supremacy Clause that means it may not be enforced. 

The Attorney General of Florida defended the Florida ban and lost. She is the one state official who is authorized to represent the interests of the state when a challenge to the constitutionality of a state law is made. 

According to the Tallahasse bankruptcy geniuses at Florida's largest law firm, 66 more clerks need to be sued before marriage licenses may be issued in every county.  

Ms Bass was given an opportunity to say that the firm was reconsidering its abysmal legal advice. Instead she obfuscated the issue and tried to portray her firm as the victim of the law itself. 

This is simply not acceptable. Most GT lawyers which include many of the best in this state know that the opinion letter is an affront to federalism and that its reasoning misstates the law. Enough is enough. 

Best op-ed paragraph in history

"One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole."

The Lost Island

The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Recipe for disappointment, August 12, 2014 This review is from: The Lost Island: A Gideon Crew Novel (Hardcover) Pour two cups of Homer into a medium saucepan Add a dash of King Kong. Sprinkle with the Origin of the Species. Stir. Set on medium heat for an hour. Allow to cool. Next mix in a tablespoon of James Hilton. Then add five pounds of pure baloney, finely chopped. Stir again and half bake at 350 degrees for the seven hours it takes you to finish reading this convoluted mess. Serve with embarrassment.

Religion and the Supreme Court

No Catholic served on the Supreme Court until 1836 when Chief Justice Taney assumed the bench. After his death in 1864 none were appointed again until 1894. Justice Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, was confirmed in 1916.

The present composition of the Supreme Court is six Catholics and three Jews. The problem isn't their religion it is that an alignment of five male a Catholic justices on an important Constitutional issue which happens to coincide with the traditional anathema of the Roman Catholic Church to contraception in the Hobby Lobby case undermines public confidence that the federal courts are judicial and not political institutions.

HL actually presents an expansion of First Amendment rights which I might have welcome in another context. However, in thee context of religious zeal today, it will spawn litigation whose aim is to authorize discrimination against gays, women, Muslims, and even Jews. Like Citizens United, another opinion radically upending traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, HL was a mistake for which our nation will long suffer the consequence.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Why I do what I do for a living

A friend of mine posted on Facebook an account of a young fellow South Floridian who is graduating from college and high school this weekend at age 16. She is African-American and has somehow become an iconic figure among conservatives. What I objected to was my friend's use of her achievement to claim that "liberals" a group which includes me apparently, think that Aferican Americans are victims who have no capacity to achieve success on their own. 

This is my response:

What I have fought for is equal opportunity. I have seen that no matter one's race, creed, color, sexual orientation, disability, or  gender we all pretty much aspire to the same things-good jobs, good educations for our children, comfortable homes, and respect from our neighbors. 

The problem is that doors open easier if you are a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male like you and I are. I usually refer to people like us as having been given the keys to the Kingdom.  

When an individual can achieve something special in spite of having to pull harder to open that door or having to kick it in, I always wonder what he or she could have achieved without such obstacles. Some, I am convinced, would achieve far less for the struggle against discrimination may have inspired them onward. For many however, our society is lesser for we have prevented our fellow Americans from reaching their true potential. 

So please do not presuppose that my commitment to justice and opportunity is because I lack faith individual achievement. Rather I mourn its suppression. That is why I have spent my professional career helping fellow human beings kick doors down.

Slogans

We often credit slogans more than thought itself. The reason for that is that they contain elements of truth. Here is a discussion with my boarding school roommate Bill about how freedom is maintained.

 

Blood and freedom

• Bill Watson Let's hope we stay that way, but that type of freedom has always been purchased and maintained with blood. I wonder if it will always continue to be.
  
• Ware Cornell That expression about purchasing and maintaining freedom and blood strikes me as a slogan which overstates the value of armed conflict and understates the value of the third branch of government. I actually work to maintain freedom. Our system of laws and our adherence and respect for those laws puts everybody on the same page. The fascists gave lots of blood for their cause. The Russians lost 20 million citizens and did not gain freedom until 1989. Very few died then.
• Bill Watson Yes, but there will always be the Adolph Hitlers who can be defeated no other way but by the shedding of blood. You cannot assume that everyone will always have adherence to and respect for law. It they did, there would be no need for a military or, indeed, a domestic police force. You can make all the laws you want, but when it comes down to brass tacks, a willingness to shed blood to protect those laws must be in place or the law is nothing but a piece of paper. That's just the way it is.
  
• Ware Cornell Bill, my point is that it's just a slogan. The Soviets had very advanced written Constitutions and their laws were scraps of paper when it came to individual liberties. But they also fought furiously against the Germans in World War II. It wasn't that blood that made their laws meaningless, and we cannot brush off the patriotism of the Russian people. The reality is that it is something far more complex than the text of laws or the patriotism of a people that will determine whether laws and liberties will be respected.
  
  In America I point to the Civil War. We in the South believed that the danger to our way of life was in Washington and we separated from the Union and as a result over 600,000 of of countrymen died. That bloodshed, futile from the Southern cause's perspective, was in fact necessary to cement the Union. Within ten years of the end of the Civil War we were truly one nation, a nation which sixty five years later, along with our Allies including Russia, would save the world.
  
  The Civil War settled in blood a Constitutional question: is this country one sovereign or is it a compact amount fifty sovereign states?. This is why I get so upset with people like Rick Perry, who try to stir up the "base" with talk about secession when he doesn't like certain laws. john C Calhoun tried this and thirty years later we paid dearly for that arrogance.
  
  The Civil War also undercuts your hypothesis somewhat. Lincoln had to fight. There was no other choice once Beauregard shelled a federal fort. But our ancestors did not have to fight. Our insistence that laws were pieces of paper had tragic consequences. What of the blood of our mistaken ancestors? Inadvertently, it advanced our freedom. Out of it we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, without compensation. We also got the Fourteenth Amendment which applied the Bill of Rights to the states.
  
  This is America and we are governed by laws which our federal and state legislatures have passed. They are not pieces of paper. They are the collective will of our fellow citizens and it is our courts, not a bunch of self-sytled "patriots", which stand to protect us from tyrannical acts of the majorities.

Posted with Blogsy