GAZETTE COLUMN: HONOR THY FATHER! by John P. Flannery

Dad (and Mom)

As a young Irish Roman Catholic kid in St. Thomas Aquinas parish in the South Bronx. the symbolic end of your childhood, your initiation into young adult life, was confirmed in your early teens by a slight symbolic slap to the cheek by a Bishop standing at the altar in a marble floored church filled with families, candles and clouds of incense.

The sacramental slap symbolized that life may be harsh.

The truth be told, however, I learned most about how to navigate life and death from my father – not that I didn’t also learn from Fathers Byrne, O’Brien, Shea and McDonald (as well as Sister Augustine from the Dominicans and other religious who were not so Irish).

My father subscribed to Proverbs (22:6), “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” 

The way he said it to me was I should do better than he did.

When I was about 5 years old, “Johnny up stairs” beat me up.  I ran to our fourth floor tenement apartment and asked my father to beat up little Johnny, never thinking for a minute that adults shouldn’t be beating up little children.  

My father got down on his knees on the linoleum in our hallway and had me punch his hands, left-right-left, first one, then the other, correcting my pug moves until I said, “This is fine Dad but when are you going to take care of Johnny?” 

My father said, “You have to fight your own battles,” and sent me on my way back downstairs.  

I didn’t believe I could go home if I didn’t beat up Johnny.  Fact is our sparring session was quite effective.  I bested Johnny, learned something both useful (and necessary) to survive in our neighborhood, how to stand up for yourself, for what you believe, and how to fight for others you care about.  I marvel that these days we can’t figure out how to handle bullies, young or old.

I was good at basic Science and Math.  It was because my Dad sat at the kitchen table going over and over math that we weren’t yet doing in school, fractions and decimals especially.  I’d cry literally trying to understand what he was teaching.  He was always patient.  In a way, that made it more important that I “get it.” Soon, I was correcting teachers in class (at some serious disciplinary risk but luckily my math was always right).  When I got to High School I was chosen to study Calculus at Fordham College.  I asked my Dad one night to help me understand a calculus assignment.  He said he didn’t know anything about calculus but was so proud that I was studying something that he knew nothing about.

One evening back from College, my Dad asked me to fix the TV set.  It was one of those consoles with a big tube that had a green tint when on but it wouldn’t go on.  I said, “Dad, I don’t know how to fix a TV set.  He said, “But, you’re studying Physics.”  I said, “It’s not that kind of Physics.”  Dad said, “So what good is it?”  I got mad and slammed my hand down on the top of the TV, jiggling the tube, and the picture flashed onto the screen.  My Dad said, “What have you done?”  I said, “There I fixed the set.”  My Dad laughed, asking “So what principle of Physics allowed you to do that?”  Gamely, I said, “Newton’s law, that is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  I’d catch my Dad telling his buddies afterwards about his son, “the Physicist” and “how he fixed the TV by punching it.”

My Dad was surprised when in Grammar School I started competing in oratorical contests.  But both my Dad and Mom encouraged that I participate in conversation when adults gathered in our home and they gave me the floor to tell a story or make a point that probably, looking back on it, was more cute than competent – but gave me the confidence ever after to speak publicly.

My Dad always discouraged me from smoking, although he did.  When, at 68, he was dying of lung cancer, I asked him if he regretted smoking.  I hated myself for asking the question the instant the words escaped my mouth but I hadn’t said it harshly.  Nor did my Dad take it badly.  He said, “We were like cars, although we lasted a lot longer.  Sooner or later a fender comes off or the engine fails.”  He was at peace with his imminent death.  He gave me a gold ring my Mom gave him.  The best gift he gave, however, was his example of how to die after having spent so much time instructing me how to live. 

What more could a Dad do for a son?

GAZETTE COLUMN: "Mind if I search your car for Drugs?" by John P. Flannery

Too many teenagers and young adults in Loudoun County and across the nation are stopped and asked, "May I search your car for drugs?"  

incidentally, this appears to affect disproportionally those who are Hispanic or Black.

You may know the drill but, if not, you should.

State and local police loiter near bars and restaurants and movie theaters late at night, watch who leave, and follow them when they leave. 

They let them go through an intersection and stop them for a rolling stop instead of a full stop, or a license plate light that's out. 

The persons stopped often insist the alleged violation was false and only a pretext for stopping the vehicle.  In other words, the stop was a fishing expedition to see what the police might find.

The driver may be your son or daughter.

The officer asks, "Mind if I search your car for drugs?"  He may say, "I smell pot," whether or not he does.  The officer is trained to lie to provoke a response.  He's encouraged to lie to obtain an admission.

If your son or daughter says, "No, officer, it's late and l want to get home," the police officer says, "what's the matter, you got something to hide?"

The car is usually held by the side of the road while other officers are called to the scene and a K-9 unit is called.

This dog is led around the car and an officer decides the dog "alerted" on the car, meaning the dog suspects drugs are in the car. 

You can see what an ensemble of officers and time and resources are involved in a single stop of this kind.

The officers then toss the car, search it, and, if they find nothing.  When this happens, we don't get to hear about the "false alert" - that the sniffing dog got it wrong - as the motorist goes on his way, perhaps with a ticket for a broken tail light.

If they find something, they assert they had probable cause, for example, to unearth a joint under the front passenger seat - as indicated by the sniffing canine.

Then they closely question your son or daughter, "tell me is that your pot?" 

You may say they should be advising your son or daughter he or she has a right to remain silent.

But, they don't because, most often, they insist, your son or daughter is not in custody. 

Miranda says you have to be in custody to be warned.  But who thinks, when stopped by the police, with other squad cars on the scene, and police dogs, and officers crawling in your car, searching it, that you are not in custody, and that you are free to go on your way?  No one I've ever met!

At the end of this drill, your son or daughter is arrested for possession of some insignificant amount of marijuana.

What's wrong with this picture?

Several years ago, California Governor Arnold "the Terminator" Schwarzenegger sought to terminate misdemeanor marijuana possession prosecutions  asking why California spends such resources on an offense that should be an infraction with a fine instead of being treated as a crime.

Only days ago, New York Governor Cuomo asked the State Legislature to decriminalize marijuana possession in his state.  He was responding to stop-and-frisk practices by the New York police, asking individuals to empty their pockets and then prosecuting them for misdemeanor possession when they had a joint or any marijuana in their pockets.  This is not so different from the practice in Virginia of stopping cars on traffic violations when really they are looking to make pot busts.

Cuomo objected that these aggressive tactics result in the life-altering trauma of arrest, create arrest records for young people who are often minorities, who had no prior record, requiring them to retain or have counsel appointed, and suffering a stigma that may follow them their whole life long no matter what else happens, compromising their education and employment opportunities.

Cuomo was emboldened by the fact that a dozen states have decriminalized possession.

I was a federal drug prosecutor in New York City in the war on drugs in the 70s and we prosecuted organized crime syndicates bringing hundreds of kilos of pure heroin from Thailand and France to New York.  We seized the drugs, arrested the conspirators, got million dollar bail amounts from the court, convicted drug kingpins, garnered front page headlines, got them long sentences in miserable prisons, and, looking back into the rear view mirror today, it made hardly any difference at all. 

In the intervening years we are always re-declaring this never-ending war on drugs but to little good effect.

Whatever it is that we must do to reform our nation's drug policy to make any sense at all, one thing is clear, we shouldn't be trashing the lives of our young with penny ante pot possession charges.

GAZETTE COLUMN: DO WE KNOW AN UNJUST PROSECUTION WHEN WE SEE ONE? by John P. Flannery

We all know presidential candidate, former Senator John Edwards, had an affair with self-styled avant-garde film-maker, Rielle Hunter, that they made a baby while Edwards’ wife was battling cancer, that Edwards first denied it was his child, that Edwards’ loyal friend, Andy Young, said it was his, and, finally, Edwards admitted, yeah, that’s my child.  Thus have we removed all doubt that Edwards is a despicable human being

But was any of this a crime?  More to the point, was it a federal campaign violation because monies were received and spent to hide this affair and the Hunter love child?  In order to be a campaign funding violation, according to the law, the money had to be given “for the purposes of influencing any election for federal office.”  In addition, Edwards had to know it was a violation and intend to violate the campaign finance laws.  He had to act “knowingly and willfully” to be convicted of such a crime.

In Edwards’ favor, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), when they reviewed Edwards’ campaign filings, didn’t require that these funds dedicated to covering up the affair be reported in the campaign filings as campaign contributions. 

The North Carolina federal jury heard the government’s evidence at Edwards’ trial and heard federal judge Catherine Eagles’ instructions on the law and the jury outright acquitted Edwards on one count of receiving illegal campaign contributions, and hung on the other charges, tilted, according to press reports, toward Edwards’ innocence of all charges, prompting Justice Department sources to say that there won’t be another trial.  Truth is, there never should have been a first trial.

Nor is this debacle an exceptional case of federal prosecutors over-reaching beyond the facts and the law compromising the justice system’s claim to being fundamentally fair. 

Another example of a federal prosecution gone awry, in Florida, five-month old, Sabrina Aisenberg, was kidnapped and the federal prosecutor indicted Sabrina’s parents on secret tape recordings that the prosecution claimed showed that the parents had kidnapped the child. 

The grand jury was told these statements were overheard on the tapes.  But, in truth and fact, there was no such statements on any of the tape recordings.  The court later found the probable cause to make these recordings was bogus as well.  The government was forced to drop the case because there was no evidence and the Judge awarded $1.5 million in legal fees to the Aisenberg family lawyers. 

As for the federal prosecutor, the Just Us Department suspended the responsible prosecutor for two days (a Saturday and a Sunday).  No, he wasn’t fired.  He was permitted to join another federal prosecutor’s office in Florida.  The family thought they had a slam dunk civil rights action; the court told them, however, that the prosecutor enjoyed immunity and dismissed the suit.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department admitted that its federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct in their prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens when they withheld vital evidence that “seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”  This all came to light afterwards.  In the meantime, Stevens was convicted, lost his re-election, and then afterwards his conviction was vacated for the government’s misconduct.

To show that this is not just a few random instances of misconduct, USA Today conducted an in depth  survey and found 201 federal cases across the nation involving prosecutorial misconduct punished by the court – prosecutorial abuses that put innocent people in jail, and others that prompted the court to let some who may have been guilty go free - http://projects.usatoday.com/news/2010/justice/cases/.

The power of a federal prosecutor is enormous.  The filing of an indictment naming anyone is a personal catastrophe – no matter what happens afterwards to the Accused.  We can’t afford to have prosecutors undermining the law by breaking the law themselves.  I know I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York at a time when we believed that constitutional rights were the rules of the road and any crime had to be construed strictly and could not be charged to scare someone into pleading to something else.  But more and more, prosecutors treat these powers recklessly.  This gross prosecutorial misconduct will not stop while prosecutors enjoy immunity from prosecution themselves, and are hardly ever disciplined or even criticized when they do wrong.

GAZETTE COLUMN: EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL – INCLUDING GAYS! by John P. Flannery

Delgaudio's on line photo album



Virginia may say it’s for lovers but oh how our elected officials love to hate.

We have an orange-hatted hate-monger, Loudoun County Supervisor Eugene “gotta go” Delgaudio, who spews poisonous epithets wide and far attacking any and all things gay, claiming to reach 300 million “love thy neighbor” Americans, because he’s afraid of the species that will evolve from gay marriages.  (Incidentally, I didn’t know that Delgaudio believed in evolution.) 

Delgaudio’s vehicle for distributing his propaganda, the Public Advocate, was declared an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Way to go, Gene!

When Delgaudio attacked the President for supporting gay marriage, Delgaudio charged that supporting same sex marriage “disrespects women.”  Somebody tell Gene that same sex marriage means women too. 

Delgaudio says that respecting gay men and women violates God’s values.  Really!  Is it the one that says love thy neighbor as thyself?  

Supervisor Delgaudio can’t sleep at night because there are 3,350 same-sex couples in Virginia raising more than 6,000 children.

Nor is Delgaudio alone.  Delegate Bob Marshall can’t abide gays either.  Last week, Marshall led the legislative charge that blocked a Richmond prosecutor and former Navy vet from becoming a General District Court Judge because, in Marshall’s words, he was an “aggressive activist for the pro-homosexual agenda.”    Bile-meister Marshall insisted, “Sodomy is not a civil right.”  Can you feel the love? 

Some individuals like Delgaudio espouse religious views to support their discrimination; there are, however, religions and priests and ministers who sanctify same sex unions.

Some ask why isn’t it enough if we allow gay couples to have domestic partnerships?  What’s “separate” and different is not “equal.”  Partnerships lack the meaning conveyed by marriage signifying love and commitment.

In the California trial court decision, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, upheld on appeal, attacking Proposition 8 for insisting that the only valid marriage is between a man and a woman, U. S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker reviewed the arguments and evidence for discriminating against same sex marriage.

Kristin Perry, the lead plaintiff, explained that the law denied her the ritual and language necessary to define and acknowledge her familial relationship as a lifetime commitment – and as a part of the social fabric. 

Psychologist Gregory Harek testified at that trial that homosexuality is a normal expression of human sexuality, and that most gays and lesbians have little or no choice in their orientation, and efforts to change their orientation have been found to pose a risk of harm. 

Historian Nancy Cott testified that civil law, and not religious custom, has always defined marriage in the United States and, most significantly, she said, “one’s ability to consent to marriage is a basic civil right.” 

Marriage has shed other discriminatory practices since colonial days.  Race is no longer a valid restriction, no woman is subsumed into a male-dominated relationship, the spouse’s sex does not define that spouse’s work, births occur outside of marriage, adoption is accepted and even encouraged, and we have no fault divorce and a somewhat alarming divorce rate. 

Judge Walker rightly concluded that the prohibition against same sex marriage was a private moral view that did not advance any legitimate government interest, and the constitutional right to marry protects an individual’s choice of the marital partner regardless of gender.  Six in Ten persons under 30 years of age agree with this assessment.  More should respect this personal choice, even as it differs from their own, as this is truly nothing more than another discriminatory practice tardily headed to the dust bin of history. 

Delgaudio and Marshall embrace the darkness while we can hope society turns toward the light.

LECTURE: Injustice in America - save the date.

GAZETTE COLUMN: CONGRESSMAN RYAN – NOT FIT TO TEACH! by John P. Flannery

RYAN AS ATLAS SHRUGGING

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Chairman of the Budget Committee, apparently was never required to read the New Testament at whatever Roman Catholic Grammar School he attended.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote Congress on April 16, 2012, urging Congress to choose as a “central moral measure of any budget proposal” exactly “how it affects ‘the least of these,’” quoting the gospel of Matthew 25. 

The Conference of Bishops made it crystal clear, “the needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”  The Catholic Bishops insisted, “every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.”  The Catholic Bishops protested, “for moral and human reasons,” the “unacceptable cuts to hunger and nutrition programs” because they “hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment.”

Ryan nevertheless insists his budget is consistent with Catholic teachings even though it amounts to $5 trillion in cuts.  Ryan told the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) without any remorse that the government was simply not responsible for lifting its citizens out of poverty.

The Catholic Bishops told Congress that they feared reducing the deficit in this dramatic manner would wipe out Pell grants, workforce training and development, nutrition assistance, low income tax credits and safe and affordable housing for the less fortunate.

Ryan didn’t answer the charge; instead, he attacked the legitimacy of the Catholic Bishops to criticize him, saying, “These are not all the Catholic bishops.”  The Catholic Bishops explained that they did speak for “all” as they were “elected by their fellow bishops to represent all of the U.S. bishops…”

Ryan might have learned something as a child from the Dominican nuns that taught us kids the Sermon on the Mount.  Sister Augustine, God rest her immortal soul, would have cracked her long thin wooden stick across the palms of Ryan’s chalky crooked hands for his trash talk, advocating indifference to the poor and suffering.

Ryan believes Catholic “teaching” is what you say it is and took that message recently, on April 26, 2012, to Gaston Hall at Georgetown University to “teach” the Jesuits and their student body what it means to be “Christian.”

88 Jesuits, faculty and staff welcomed Ryan in a short letter, “challeng[ing]” his “continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.”

They noted that Ryan claimed to be inspired by the late Ayn Rand.  Ryan reportedly said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”  Ryan reportedly instructed his Hill staffers to study Rand’s elitist philosophy with its felicific calculus favoring the wealthy, and declaiming the parasitic middle class and the poor.

The Jesuits and faculty wrote Ryan that his budget appeared to “reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  They explained that Rand’s “call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”

Unbowed, once at the University, Ryan invoked Pope Benedict XVI but blithely disregarded what Benedict wrote in his very first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), that taught that three things made the Church the Holy Roman Catholic Church and one was caring for the poor, because “love of God and love of neighbor have become one: In the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God.”

Ryan, however, is as indifferent to the poor as his inspiration Rand was, and that puts him in opposition to the teachings of Jesus and Christ and Pope Benedict as well.  

GAZETTE COLUMN: SMOKIN' by John P. Flannery

County Fire Marshalls spread the alarm last week that lit or smoldering cigarette butts can cause disaster and have.  For instance, a cigarette left in a plastic container damaged 13 apartments near the Algonkian Parkway, costing $2 Million.

As absolutely terrible as this is, we are skirting the even worse disaster that those who are smoking, inhaling these cancerous cigarette fumes, are killing themselves, and putting nearby friends, family, children and workers at risk, and the only saving grace is that smoking is an awful lot slower way to die than a full blaze five-alarm fire.

My Dad got cigarettes for free in the service, during World War II, as did many others in the armed services, then and since.  My Dad smoked his whole life after the service, the smoke traveling down his trachea, through his bronchial tubes until the cell lining became cancerous and turned his lungs into a hideous fleshy black and white cellular soup that cost him his life at 68.  He never suspected his addiction.  He just smoked.  My mother smoked because my Dad did.  I now visit the crypt their ashes share at Arlington National Cemetery.  The only saving grace about cancer is that you get to have those last words with those you love but you also watch them suffer.

These machines that are our bodies that carry around our consciousness work longer than any mechanical machine we use on a daily basis but smoking causes not only cancer but also heart disease, stroke and a variety of lung diseases that cut our lives short.

46 Million Adults are smoking on a daily basis as I write this.  88 million non-smoking Americans are being exposed to cigarette smoke, and here’s a real heart breaker for all responsible adults, 54% of children, ages 3 to 11 years old, are exposed to second hand smoke.

About 443,000 men and women nation-wide will die prematurely this year from smoking or from exposure to second hand smoke. 

I had a football coach in High School who told us that his pipe made him safe, as he sucked on it walking up and down the side lines at practice, but it took him (whom we trusted) years to find out that there are larynx, esophageal and oral cancers for those like our coach who thought smokeless tobacco, cigars and pipes were safe.

As for that hew and cry about jobs in America, we’re losing $97 Billion a year in productivity because of smoking.

Some can’t comprehend all this fuss about health care, even though smoking costs us about $96 Billion a year in medical costs. 

In Virginia, we live in one of the states that brought us tobacco – and, oh yes, slavery, so that the tobacco industry could be economically feasible when getting its “start;” now they keep costs down by banning collective bargaining, the workers banding together for better working conditions and wages.

You may remember that amazing scene, when seven Tobacco Executives appeared before Congress, raised their right hands and swore that “nicotine is not addictive.”  One executive who supported this junk science insisted that cigarettes were no more addictive than coffee, tea or Twinkies.  Congressman Henry Waxman dusted him with the rejoinder, “The difference between cigarettes and Twinkies is death.”

We are concerned as a society about a shooting in Florida.  We don’t, however, seem to care about the hundreds of thousands of others who die yearly from cigarettes, not the billions in wasted productivity, not the billions more in medical expenses, not the innocent bystanders including children whose only mistake was being near smokers.

We are going to have to save ourselves, our family, our children, and friends ourselves from this plague.  The tobacco industry is only concerned about its bottom line.  They are never going to do it.  In the meantime, while you are still smoking, figuring out how to quit, and save yourself, put out those butts so you don’t burn down your home – or your neighbor’s home either.