The 10th Justice

I’ve been pretty much silent about he impeachment process. The refusal of Republicans to admit Trump committed crimes against America is so appalling that it makes me wonder if democracy can survive. This blog is named for Judge Learned Hand. He said that democracy rested on the principle that new facts could change one’s opinion on an issue. He always attempted to make the best decision given the facts available to him So, in respect to his memory, I have not written much about this painful process of impeachment. The Republican Party is not the party of Judge Learned Hand. However, I discovered a book by the sports writer Rick Reilly entitled Commander in Cheat: How Golf explains Trump. My new strategy to win the 2020 election is to recommend this book to anyone who supports Trump and plays golf. Most people who play golf respect the game. Reilly says that 90% of golfers report their scores honestly and self police on the course. Trump is not one of these. In golf as in politics...

The 2020 presidential election is an election between democracy and authoritarianism, not between Republican and Democrat. We have moved beyond just policy here into a political arena where the heart of America is the prize. Will it be a heart filled with hate, ignorance and greed or will it be a heart filled with tolerance, fairness and information. This is the year to ACT to elect a democratic president - democratic with a small 'd'. If you have 8 hours and want to spend it well, watch David Domke's five part lecture series "How to beat an American Demagogue: Donald Trump and the future of democracy." The links are: Lecture 1 - https://youtu.be/AG0FNyVI-cE Lecture 2 - https://youtu.be/qr0rIHb2FAE   Lecture 3 - https://youtu.be/7WiTcyX8FP0   Lecture 4 - https://youtu.be/PUOv8DNxKgY   Lecture 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD2kKSXFPTg But if you don't have time for the whole lecture series read this blog. David Domke is a professor of Communic...

Trump is going to school. Last week he joked with Putin about not interfering in the elections in the United States, essentially asking Putin to keep up the good work. He has learned from Putin how to send messages in public that are clearly illegal and antidemocratic. Conspiracy requires secrecy and intent to do harm. Trumps interaction with Putin was not done in public and the face-value message was legal. No law covers joking as as a way of reversing the meaning of his statement. But never the less, his interaction with Putin was conspiracy in plain sight. This week he is in North Korea visiting Kim Jong Un. His stated reason for going to North Korea is to convince the North Korea to stop making nuclear weapons and get rid of the ones they have. His real reason is to get a first hand look at how to run a country without the intervention of the people. How much easier Trump's job would be if he didn't have to run for election or talk to Nancy Pelosi! Next we'll have McC...

There is an old Buddhist kōan in which a student asks his teacher 'what is the moon' and the teacher simply points to the moon and says, 'do not mistake my finger for the moon'. Analog and digital are similar. Here's how this helps us understand how we ended up with Donald Trump as president. Two technologies, television and the Internet, helped elect Trump. Not with ads and not with fundraising or social media manipulation by the Russian, though these helped. The real influence on the American public has been years of watching television. When television first began the shows were written to emulate modern American life and to entertain. People loved television and still do. They watched more and more. The shows got more and more entertaining with more exaggerated plots, language and situations. Do you ever feel, after you have just seen a really engaging movie, that you find yourself talking like the characters, or feeling similar to how the character felt? It m...

Let's follow the news for signs the Republican party is abandoning democracy and the rule of law for authoritarian rule. Scott Walker, always against the best interests of the people of Wisconsin, just signed a bill stripping the incoming Democratic Governor of most of his power. The people of Wisconsin just elected the new governor to govern their state, as Walker had before him. They elected him to change the policies of the past governor. So, against the wishes of the people of the state, the outgoing Governor and the Republican legislature changed the rules of what a governor can and can't do. The Republican are losing so they are changing the rules in their favor. When you can't give a rational, convincing argument to support your position you can either resort to cheating or be a good loser and try to defend you opinion in the next round of elections. Because the Republicans have chosen to cheat means they are have to arguments to support their position and therefo...

On the government website concerning the laws about truth in advertising it says: When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. What constitutes an ad? According to the website of legal definitions: Advertising is the act or practice of attracting public notice and attention.  So where is the Federal Trade Commission when we need them? The newspapers have been filled with evidence of false claims that are attempting to attract the attention of voters. Anyone who claims that politics is not a business needs to explain the enormous amounts of money that are being spent in electing officials who will carry out an agenda helpful to donors. Where do we see false claims that are attempting to attract our attention. Well, let's start at the top. Trump says things that are false virtually everyday. Accor...

As a doctor I am prescribing a new therapeutic tool to counteract the mental havoc caused by Trump: the book These Truths by Jill Lepore. Dr. Lepore is a chaired professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker. These Truths is a narrative history of the United States written like one of those tremendously engaging New Yorker articles about a subject you never even thought about but the writing is so powerful it pulls you so deeply into the world of orchids or artisanal iron work construction that you want to change careers. Except These Truths is nine hundred pages long. There are a hundred pages of notes, however, as support and amplification of any subject that comes up. That in itself is such a pleasant change from Trump who, not only lies about whatever suits him, offer no supporting evidence for anything he says, lies or not. These Truths calmed me down. To begin with, the Trump/populism thing has happened many times in this country and our dem...

When the laughter at Trump's bragging to the UN General Assembly died down, a faint droning began - deficit...deficit...deficit - it got louder and louder than faded into silence as profound as Paul Ryan on the subject. Where are the deficit hawks now? Where were they when the tax cuts were voted into law? If the states are supposed to be laboratories for policy experiments, what happened to the results of the Kansas experiment? In the Kansas experiment, once again, massive tax cuts caused no massive increase in business but an implosion of school and public service funding. Every time tax cuts have been tried as a stimulus to the economy, it has failed. Reagan was the biggest example until Trump. Reagan, like all decent Republicans, couldn't bring himself to make any spending cuts that would harm anyone.  This year the interest on America's debt will be $390 billion. The deficit this year will be close to a trillion dollars. Once again the national debt and the annual bu...

Trump biggest lie is his repeated use of the term 'fake news' to refute negative stories about him. I have written about this previously but two items that I saw today need to be shared with my readers. First, the front page story in the New York Times that chronicles and simplifies the story of the Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump has called this story a fake repeatedly. He has called the investigation of the story a witch hunt. He has presented no evidence that either of these allegations are true. He uses an old technique; if you say it often and loud enough people start thinking its true - until you go to court. The New York Times article can be found at:  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage This article is long. Most of the names we have read about in the ongoing coverage of this issue appear and their roles explained. Begin...

When I read that yesterday Trump said, ‘I don’t have an attorney general’ I was torn between the laughing and recoiling in horror. The humorous take on this statement asks: Does Donald finally realize that winning the election did not mean that he won America as his prize? Perhaps he thought that winning America meant he would have his own Attorney General as well as his own House of Representatives and his own Senate. Did he finally have realized his error? Did you ever wonder why he never said, "I don't have an Intelligence Community?" Because it sounds too much like "I don't have intelligence." The reason he disagrees with the intelligence community so often is because they are just what their name implies: an intelligence community, in contrast to an ignorance community. Or a community of greedy bigots. Trump belongs to both those communities as well as the community of liars: himself, Manafort, Gates, Kelly, Sanders, et al. The Intelligence Commun...

How can America have elected a president who is a liar? My blog, as I have said several times, is named for Judge Learned Hand. He said in his Spirit of Liberty speech that freedom means never being too sure you are right. Freedom is being able to change, to do new things based on new information, to think rationally about the world and one's own circumstances and use information to make things better for yourself and those around you. Trump takes no information into consideration when making decision. The George Washington University School of Public Health did an independent survey of deaths in Puerto Rico after and hurricane  found that the 3000 people died as a direct result of the hurricane. Here is Trump's tweet: Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump  3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time lat...

In an interview yesterday on Fox News, our president said the following about Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, “And by the way, he was on the campaign,” Trump said on Fox. "You know, the only reason I gave him the job is because I felt loyalty. He was an original supporter.”  In the same interview Trump also said, “Jeff Sessions recused himself, which he shouldn’t have done, or he should have told me,” Trump said. “He took my job, and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of man is this?’ ” For these two statements alone Donald Trump should be kicked out of office. In the first statement Trump admitted that he had not appointed Sessions because he thought he was the best candidate for the job of attorney general but because he was loyal. The appointment of Sessions was a payback for support during the campaign. I know that all politicians appoint like-thinking persons to positions of power. However, the fir...

(This was written on August 18th. Today I see that Manafort was convicted of 8 charges so I think I should post it before it actually happens!) As I read about the Manafort trial and see the photos of him looking nicely dressed and unworried, I have a nagging concern. Today that concern increased when Mueller asked for six months jail time for Papadopoulos, who doesn't look worried either. Could it be that The Fix is in? Has Trump promised them all that he will pardon their crimes against America? He has even talked about pardoning himself. Certainly he will pardon Donald Jr. rather than letting him go to jail. And if this happens, how will the Republicans respond? Trump has already played with the pardon, one of his favorite presidential toys, just to see if and how it works. I think he is getting ready to use it in a more sinister way. The last test, his pardoning of Sheriff Arpaio was a politically controversial, and a build up to the next and most dangerous travesty. The trav...

Who knows what the future holds? An epidemic of ebola or some other uniformly fatal disease could kill half the world's population, or an astroid could hit earth and destroy most of the living things here. But assuming neither of those happen and that everyone continues on as they are at present, the population of the earth will continue to increase. What is the likelihood that everyone will stay in the country they were born into? Unlikely, is the answer. The world will eventually be one race, a mixture of black, white, red, yellow, and brown. When I was 14 years old, in 1960, and the civil rights movement was raging, I thought what an easy problem to solve: start a pro-miscegination league. Once everyone was intermarried who could be prejudiced? When Obama (half black, half white) was president, America was reaching out to the countries of the world to solve the problem of increasing population. He did not open the borders of America to unlimited immigration, in fact, Obama dep...

Trump's hands symbolize for me everything I hate about him, and it isn't their size. It is the fact that the most substantial thing they have ever held is golf club. His hands have never used a hammer, saw or shovel, they have never tied steel, baked a cake, poured concrete, planed a board, gutted a chicken, dug coal, sewed a sleeve on a shirt, or filed a book on the shelf of public library. They are the hands of a 'taker' as the Republicans like to call people on welfare. His hands take what other people do for him and he doesn't pay them for their efforts. His are the hands of a person who has no respect for the value that workers add to the world. What is my evidence for these statements? Trump has gone bankrupt six times. Did he suffer personally from any of these failed business ventures? No. The people who suffered were the men and women who work for him, the waitresses, the brick layers, the accountants. Sure bankruptcy is legal, but is it right to not pay ...

When I woke this morning I felt compelled to write about my fear of civil insurrection in America. At first I thought this essay would be a rant but as I began to really think about what to say I knew it would be a lament. Trump is ruining American unity. Growing up I worked. My father was an electrician who was raised on a south Texas dairy farm that was lost in the Great Depression. Like many people with similar stories he learned to value thrift and hard work and passed this on to me. I've forgotten a little of the thrift part over the years but the hard work part stuck. As a kid I worked part time jobs as a printer's assistant, movie theater ticket taker, photo technician, electrician helper during the summers, merchant marine seaman, and during medical school as a scrub nurse every fourth night. My medical career was spent in the emergency room in a big urban hospital seeing all comers, all classes, all types of problems; all unsorted, unplanned and distressed. As a resu...

After yesterday I feel the need to start speaking up to a broader audience than my family and friends: hence this blog. The title of my blog is The 10th Justice, a reference to Judge Learned Hand. Judge Hand sat on the 2nd Circuit Court for almost 50 years and an image of him stands on my desk. I keep him there to remind me of what America is all about. Hand said in his Spirit of Liberty speech that " The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right...". Right now our liberty is threatened by our own president. The partisan divide is widening. Maybe Judge Hand's neutrality, his careful consideration of the facts of the case can save us.  He was never appointed to the Supreme Court because he was not a partisan. In the fourteen presidential election in which he voted, six times he voted for the Republican, six times for the Democrat and twice for the independent. In this age of taking sides we need to get rid of sides and look at each issue with c...