As I see it

We all have one life

By Craig McKinney
Posted 3/19/20

I have watched the coronavirus from afar and then my brother, Bruce, called me to tell me that his daughter (my niece), Laura’s husband, Arno, had the virus, and likelihood had gotten it on a …

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As I see it

We all have one life

Posted

I have watched the coronavirus from afar and then my brother, Bruce, called me to tell me that his daughter (my niece), Laura’s husband, Arno, had the virus, and likelihood had gotten it on a plane. Laura and Arno, and their children, Stella and Oscar, live in Singapore, which in terms of the virus is far safer than the United States. It has been testing for three months.

When I talked to my brother, I could hear the fear in his voice. From the way he talked, I was afraid, we were going to lose Arrno. Two hours after I was stunned, I sent Laura, that Arno, she, and their children, Stella and Oscar, were in my prayers. I was especially concerned about Oscar and Stella, who at ages 11 and 9 could lose their father. I was very scared. The next day I got a Facebook message from Laura. Arno was home. He has had the virus and pneumonia. This was typical of the coronavirus.

My brother said of all, but thinking more about Arno, “You have one life.”

We were angry and this feeling was directed at Trump who had been briefed about the virus three months ago and then had done nothing except say that everything would work out okay. He was making in his view positive remarks about the virus, so it would not cost him votes from his base and Wall Street. The lives of Americans were not on his to do list. He did not want to act as if there was a problem but what about the lives of my family?

We had learned he had dismantled the pandemic, the first line of defense, and then proceeded to do nothing, like ordering testing equipment, masks, sanitizers, and alerting Americans of what could be a massive problem. When the media alerted us, he accused it of fake news and a hoax. That is what he calls anything to protect our lives, and my grandchildren, who are so dear to me.

My brother raised his voice.

What about his family?

We had trusted our lives with Trump.

Japan, South Korea, and Singapore China because they had moved so quickly after learning of the coronavirus will lose fewer lives on a per capita basis than the United States because they caught the virus so early. We had a head start. We were 10,000 miles away from China. How could we lose? We did because we trusted the lives with Trump.
It did not matter to him that you have one life to live, but it certainly matters to us.

Out of wedlock births are up in Ulster County
Out of wedlock births have been growing in the last 60 years with money playing a major role in the decision. In 2017, the last year the state has data, there were 1,468 births of which 676 have one listed parent and 782 have two listed parents. This does not mean that the child with one listed parent, does not have two living together with the child under the same roof.

A reason is that since 1980 middle family income is down, and when it drops the number of couples getting wed slides down.
In the last 60 years there has been a huge change. Between 1965 and 1980, and again between 1991 and 1996 there were major runs on divorce.

A usual fact today is a person with a job with fringe benefits is far more likely to marry than a person, who has a job without benefits. Thirty years ago, IBM employed 30,000 in the Hudson Valley, and today, fewer than 7,000. That may account for the increase in Ulster County.


One of the nation’s top judges calls out Roberts for a runaway Supreme Court
On Wednesday, March 11 Judge James Dannenberg tendered a letter of resignation from the Supreme Court Bar to Chief Justice John Roberts. He has been a member of that bar since 1972. In his letter, reprinted in full below, Dannenberg compares the current Supreme Court, with its boundless solicitude for the rights of the wealthy, the privileged, and the comfortable, to the court that ushered in the Lochner era in the early 20th century, a period of profound judicial activism that put a heavy thumb on the scale for big business, banking, and insurance interests, and ruled consistently against child labor, fair wages, and labor regulations.

Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

I hereby resign my membership in the Supreme Court Bar.

This was not an easy decision. I have been a member of the Supreme Court Bar since 1972, far longer than you have, and appeared before the Court, both in person and on briefs, on several occasions as Deputy and First Deputy Attorney General of Hawaii before being appointed as a Hawaii District Court judge in 1986. I have a high regard for the work of the Federal Judiciary and taught the Federal Courts course at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. This due regard spanned the tenures of Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist before your appointment and confirmation in 2005. I have not always agreed with the Court’s decisions, but until recently I have generally seen them as products of mainstream legal reasoning, whether liberal or conservative. The legal conservatism I have respected– that of, for example, Justice Lewis Powell, Alexander Bickel or Paul Bator– at a minimum enshrined the idea of stare decisis and eschewed the idea of radical change in legal doctrine for political ends.

I can no longer say that with any confidence. You are doing far more— and far worse– than “calling balls and strikes.” You are allowing the Court to become an “errand boy” for an administration that has little respect for the rule of law.
The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.

Without trying to write a law review article, I believe that the Court majority, under your leadership, has become little more than a result-oriented extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, as vetted by the Federalist Society. Yes, politics has always been a factor in the Court’s history, but not to today’s extent. Even routine rules of statutory construction get subverted or ignored to achieve transparently political goals. The rationales of “textualism” and “originalism” are mere fig leaves masking right wing political goals; sheer casuistry.

Your public pronouncements suggest that you seem concerned about the legitimacy of the Court in today’s polarized environment. We all should be. Yet your actions, despite a few bromides about objectivity, say otherwise.

It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.

I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.

The Supreme Court of the United States is respected when it wields authority and not mere power. As has often been said, you are infallible because you are final, but not the other way around.

I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.

Please remove my name from the rolls.

With deepest regret,
James Dannenberg

The Roberts conservative Republican court consists of Brett Kavanagh, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. They almost always vote as a block. They have postponed until after the election votes on declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, and Trump’s tax returns. Kavangh and Gorsuch went to the same private school, while in high school.