John Steele's Top Ten Legal Ethics Issues 2012

John Steele’s Top Ten Legal Ethics issues - 2012

Here they are - Letterman style.  For the story behind the headlines and helpful links go to the post above.  And follow the stories at  Legal Ethics Forum.  John is the driving force there.  And a great resource it is.  - GWC

THE TOP TEN

1. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) expanded its application of constitutional standards in the context of critical pre-trial processes in criminal matters, such as plea bargaining and discovery.

2. The ABA’s 20/20 Commission proposed several amendments to the Model Rules and related policies in August, and the House of Delegates approved all of them.

3. The outside ownership of law firms took a big step forward in the UK but stalled in the USA.

4. Politics continued to swirl on the issue of recusal by SCOTUS justices.

5. Our legal education system saw even more turmoil this year as it adjusts to the new normal.

6. Ethics issues kept arising in the criminal prosecution of George Zimmerman.

7. In about 300 jurisdictions, debt collectors used the local District Attorney’s stationary to send out legal warnings and demand payments.

8. There was continued fall-out from the implosion of the Dewey law firm.

9. Prosecutorial misconduct was in the headlines.

10. Congress cited the Attorney General, Eric Holder, for contempt after the assertion of privilege as to documents related to the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operation.

National People’s Congress Standing Committee Decision concerning Strengthening Network Information Protection | China Copyright and Media

The new Chinese internet control measure is in English.  Global times reports on the NPC decision as one to strengthen privacy.  It appears to do that.  But its measure compelling shutting down illegal content will prompt fear in many that discussion of "sensitive" topics will be more vigorously quashed.  The measure states that network service providers "upon discovering the issuance or transmission of information prohibited by law or regulation it shall immediately cease transmission of said information, and adopt measures to dispose of it, such as removing it, retain relevant records, and report it to the relevant agency."  The language is  harmless.  It is the breadth of information that may be "prohibited by law or regulation" that inspires concern.  The CP's prime self-inflicted wound, in my opinion,  is its penchant for secrecy which obstructs the ability of citizens to participate knowledgeably in the affairs of the country. - GWC
National People’s Congress Standing Committee Decision concerning Strengthening Network Information Protection | China Copyright and Media: 
A translation and the original text are provided HERE by Fei Chang Dao, a pro-free speech website.
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Obama wins reelection with 5 million vote margin 51% - 47% - Cook Political Report

President Obama won re-election by a 4 % margin (51-47) in the popular vote total.  That's a bit shy of 5 million votes over challenger Mitt Romney (65 million to 60 million +/-).  For details go to The Source: Dave Wasserman - Cook Political Report 2012 National Popular Vote Tracker - Google Docs 'via Blog this'

Tragedy's Legacy — New England Journal of Medicine

Tragedy's Legacy — New England Journal of Medicine :

by Garen J. Wintemute, M.D., M.P.   December 26, 2012

"Sandy Hook, Oak Creek, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine: “it can't happen here” places where terrible things did happen and 95 people died. Contrary to widespread perception, however, such events are uncommon. Their frequency is not increasing, and they account for only a small fraction of firearm-related deaths and injuries. On average, 88 Americans died every day from firearm violence in 2011, and another 202 were seriously injured. In 2012, for the first time, there will probably be more firearm-related homicides and suicides than motor vehicle traffic fatalities.
The United States has become an extreme example of what could well be termed “global gunning.” With less than 5% of the world's population, we own more than 40% of all the firearms that are in civilians' hands: 250 million to 300 million weapons, nearly as many as we have people, and they are not going away anytime soon. We have made social and policy decisions that, with some important exceptions, provide the widest possible array of firearms to the widest possible array of people, for use under the widest possible array of conditions.
The most egregious policies have been enacted at the state level — “Stand Your Ground” laws, for instance, which have been used to legitimize what many people still call murder. Justice Louis Brandeis rightly praised the states as the laboratories of our democracy, but in some of them, experimentation with firearm policy has taken a frightening turn.
We are paying the price of those decisions. Too often, our children and grandchildren are paying it for us. Payments will continue. Can we do anything to reduce them? I believe the answer is yes."

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Remarks by the President at the Funeral Service for Senator Daniel Ken Inouye | The White House

President Obama's eulogy for Senator Ken Daniel Inouye was remarkable for its personal character.  He tells of the influence Sen. Inouye had on him as a young boy.  raveling on "the mainland" with his mother, stayiing in motels, his mother was glued to the Watergate hearings.  Sen. Inouye played a prominent role and he impressed the young Obama.  - GWC
Remarks by the President at the Funeral Service for Senator Daniel Ken Inouye | The White House:

I think it's fair to say that Danny Inouye was perhaps my earliest political inspiration.  And then, for me to have the privilege of serving with him, to be elected to the United States Senate and arrive, and one of my first visits is to go to his office, and for him to greet me as a colleague, and treat me with the same respect that he treated everybody he met, and to sit me down and give me advice about how the Senate worked and then regale me with some stories about wartime and his recovery -- stories full of humor, never bitterness, never boastfulness,  just matter-of-fact -- some of them I must admit a little off-color.  I couldn’t probably repeat them in the cathedral.  (Laughter.)  There’s a side of Danny that -- well.
Danny once told his son his service to this country had been for the children, or all the sons and daughters who deserved to grow up in a nation that never questioned their patriotism.  This is my country, he said.  Many of us have fought hard for the right to say that.  And, obviously, Rick Shinseki described what it meant for Japanese Americans, but my point is, is that when he referred to our sons and daughters he wasn’t just talking about Japanese Americans.  He was talking about all of us.  He was talking about those who serve today who might have been excluded in the past.  He’s talking about me.
And that’s who Danny was.  For him, freedom and dignity were not abstractions.  They were values that he had bled for, ideas he had sacrificed for, rights he understood as only someone can who has had them threatened, had them taken away.
The valor that earned him our nation’s highest military decoration -- a story so incredible that when you actually read the accounts, you think this -- you couldn’t make this up.  It’s like out of an action movie.  That valor was so rooted in a deep and abiding love of this country.  And he believed, as we say in Hawaii that we’re a single ‘ohana -- that we're one family.  And he devoted his life to making that family strong.

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The N.R.A. at the Bench - Linda Greenhouse - NYTimes.com

The NRA has effective veto power over federal judges

If you have any doubt about the NRA's clout in blocking federal judicial nominees not likely to do its will, read this account by Linda Greenhouse.  Minority leader Mitch  McConnell uses their ratings as a wedge to control his members by threatening their NRA seals of approval.  - GWC
The N.R.A. at the Bench - NYTimes.com: by Linda Greenhouse

"It is totally unacceptable for the N.R.A., desperate to hang on to its mission and its members after achieving its Second Amendment triumph at the Supreme Court four years ago, to be calling the tune on judicial nominations for an entire political party. Free the Republican caucus. Follow Lisa Murkowski’s lead. Recognize a naked power play for what it is. Voters who think they care about the crisis of gun violence in America are part of the problem, not the solution – they are enablers if they aren’t willing to help their elected representatives cast off the N.R.A.’s chains. Call for an end to the cowardly filibuster against Caitlin Halligan, whose nomination the president resubmitted in September. The next time a senator announces opposition to a judicial nominee, demand something other than incoherent mumbo-jumbo. Tell the senator to fill in the blank: “I oppose this nominee because ____.” If there’s an answer of substance, fine. That’s advise-and-consent democracy. But if, upon inspection, the real answer is “because the N.R.A. told me to,” we have a problem. Based on these last few years, I think we do." 'via Blog this'

JAMA: End Ban on CDC Gun Control Studies

 I am shocked to learn that Congress has blocked  CDC  funding of studies on gun control. Read this JAMA opinion piece.  Willful ignorance obstructs effective regulation.   - gwc

Viewpoint

Silencing the Silence on Gun Violence

Arthur L. Kellermann, MD, MPH; Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH

Journal of the American Medical Association -  December 21, 2012

"Injury prevention research can have real and lasting effects. Over the last 20 years, the number of Americans dying in motor vehicle crashes has decreased by 31%.¹ Deaths from fires and drowning have been reduced even more, by 38% and 52%, respectively.¹ This progress was achieved without banning automobiles, swimming pools, or matches. Instead, it came from translating research findings into effective interventions.

Given the chance, could researchers achieve similar progress with firearm violence? It will not be possible to find out unless Congress rescinds its moratorium on firearm injury prevention research. Since Congress took this action in 1997, at least 427 000 people have died of gunshot wounds in the United States, including more than 165 000 who were victims of homicide.¹ To put these numbers in context, during the same time period, 4586 Americans lost their lives in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.¹⁰

The United States has long relied on public health science to improve the safety, health, and lives of its citizens. Perhaps the same straightforward, problem-solving approach that worked well in other circumstances can help the nation meet the challenge of firearm violence. Otherwise, the heartache that the nation and perhaps the world is feeling over the senseless gun violence in Newtown will likely be repeated, again and again."

An Epidemic of Gun Violence - NJ Law Journal Editorial Board

Editorial, December 21, 2012
An Epidemic of Gun Violence
by the New Jersey Law Journal Editorial Board
(c) ALM Media, LLC  All rights reserved

In Heller v. District of Columbia (2008), a Supreme Court majority held that the Second Amendment protects "the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home." Unless we amend the Constitution that settles the question — the right is personal, no link to a militia required. Gun control skeptics were elated. Some — like 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner, a sometimes maverick conservative, have gone even farther. Recently he wrote for a divided circuit panel in Moore v. Madigan (2012) that a rational basis was not enough to save an Illinois statute that prohibits carrying a gun for self-defense outside the home. Of the Second Amendment, Posner wrote:

"[O]ne doesn't have to be a historian to realize that a right to keep and bear arms for personal self-defense in the eighteenth century could not rationally have been limited to the home. Suppose one lived in what was then the wild west, the Ohio Valley for example (for until the Louisiana Purchase the Mississippi River was the western boundary of the United States), where there were hostile Indians. One would need from time to time to leave one's home to obtain supplies from the nearest trading post, and en route one would be as much (probably more) at risk if unarmed as one would be in one's home unarmed."

Such thinking has brought us to the current pass: Our personal arsenals are built on a legal foundation devised for a state of war, to protect settlers committed to occupy the lands of an aboriginal people. The Illinois case is not over. The Legislature has been given 180 days to save its statute. It is imperative that we turn away from this constitutionalized state of war. It has made arsenals available to the criminal and the insane who have brought assault rifles to our classrooms, movie theaters and shopping malls. The legal foundation of a new approach is the police power, its name is regulation, and public health and safety is the objective. Gun safety, not gun control, is a good way to think about it. And it has worked before.

Much of the impetus for automobile safety in the late '50s and early '60s came from public health studies detailing and publicizing the carnage on the highways. In 1959, Dr. C. Hunter Shelden wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association: "The doors, seats, cushions, knobs, steering wheel and even the overhead structure are so poorly constructed from the safety standpoint that it is surprising anyone escapes from an automobile accident without serious injury."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a sociologist who had studied traffic safety — cited the study in his first published article, "Epidemic on the Highways." He combated the National Safety Council's safe-driver approach with a safer cars campaign. Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed, spurred popular calls for action. By focusing on safer cars rather than safer drivers, we made enormous strides in auto safety in the next decades. With legal innovations like strict products liability we spurred safer designs, legislation mandated advances like three-point seat belts, and penalties helped to change public behavior so that most people actually use them.

A strict ban on assault weapon possession other than by military forces is a good place to start a gun safety campaign. Possession does not make us safer. An until-now little noticed 2009 study by University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist Charles Branas and colleagues showed that in Philadelphia, individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession. Among gun assaults where the victim had at least some chance to resist, the odds increased to 5.45. In a civil society such an evidence-based approach can help to combat the magical thinking that more guns will make us safer.

We are no longer at war at home. We reject the state of war logic of Moore v. Madigan. Weapons must be "well regulated." We should be hard at work on effective regulatory strategies to reduce gun violence and to protect the public health and welfare. The problem is nationwide and calls for both state and federal responses. One immediate response is to restore and strengthen the federal assault weapons ban, limit large capacity magazines and tighten background checks.

Board chairman Rosemary Alito recused from this editorial.

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Letter of Resignation Sent by George H.W. Bush to Rifle Association - New York Times

Former President George H.W. Bush resigned from the National Rifle Association in 1995 - citing the organization's appalling response to the Oklahoma City bombing.  It is sobering to reflect on the power this extremist outfit has achieved. - gwc
Letter of Resignation Sent By Bush to Rifle Association - New York Times: 

"I was outraged when, even in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of N.R.A., defended his attack on federal agents as "jack-booted thugs." To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as "wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms" wanting to "attack law abiding citizens" is a vicious slander on good people...: George H. W. Bush, May 3 1995 'via Blog this'

Law School Marketing and Legal Ethics by Ben Trachtenberg :: SSRN

Law professors prepare students for a world in which the teacher has not succeeded.  The principal qualification of most law professors is to have been a good student.  Others - I include myself - had some impact in the practice of law.  My teaching and writing grows from that.  But neither credential represents success in the world our students will be entering.  I began my career with a debt of $1,500 (my parents paid for college, my Peace Corps termination pay paid for grad school, and law school at Rutgers was practically free), Then I entered a world of trade unions and community organizations in the days before cable TV, before the internet, before PC's or even fax machines.  
A community-based law practice was a practical, even obvious route for a man without a plan. So I achieved self-sufficiency quickly while self-employed in a world so different that it leaves me unsure how to advise students who will enter a world of virtual communication, where unions scarcely exist, and promotional messages are tweeted rather than mailed, where people text rather than call, and personal injury, workers comp, SSD, house closings, and advice to community groups and small businesses are not likely to enable one to service a start-up debt of $125,00.

In these circumstances it is important to the students, and the profession, that law schools be scrupulous in reporting their graduates post-graduate paths.  In this heated debate about the economics of legal education there are careful commentators like Brian Tamanaha in Failing Law Schools, and intemperate voices like Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam.  By what standard should the professoriate be judged?  By that of  lawyers' rules of professional conduct governing attorney advertising, says Ben Trachtenberg, a professor at the University of Missouri law school.  Sounds right to me.  - GWC   h/t Steven Gillers at Legal Ethics Forum
Law School Marketing and Legal Ethics by Ben Trachtenberg :: SSRN:
Abstract:      

Law schools have misled prospective students for years about the value of legal education. In some cases, law school officials have engaged in outright deceit, knowingly spreading false information about their schools. More commonly, they have presented statistics—especially those concerning the employment outcomes of law graduates—in ways nearly guaranteed to confuse readers. These deceptions and sharp practices violate the norms of the legal profession, a profession that scrupulously regulates the advertising of legal services. The deceptions also violate ethical rules prohibiting lawyers from engaging in dishonesty, misrepresentation, and deceit.
This article exposes how pitches aimed at prospective students, including the seemingly straightforward recitation of statistics on law school websites, still paint an unduly rosy picture of the legal employment market. Focusing on Rule 8.4(c) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the article explains that law school officials have exposed themselves to professional discipline, which may offer a solution to the pervasive problem of misleading law school marketing.

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Mass Shootings: The Lynching Parallel - Readers messages - James Fallows - The Atlantic

James Allen's Without Sanctuary is a powerful photo history of lynching in America, those eruptions of murderous rage and morbid curiosity that took the lives of some 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites who were lynched between 1882 and 1968.  That was the Strange Fruit that grew on Southern trees.   James Fallows has given this post over to a reader's powerful piece comparing today's mass shootings to lynchings in the Jim Crow era. 

Below is just a lede.  I am not sure what to make of the comparison - but READ the piece.  It is compelling. - GWC

Readers on Guns: The Lynching Parallel - James Fallows - The Atlantic:
"Let's begin with a comparison to a previous "uncontrollable" phenomenon of mass American violence: the wave of lynchings in the early 20th century. From a reader in Florida. Emphasis added. - JF

 If you look at the yearly death tolls for mass shootings over the past three decades, they look an awful lot like the yearly death tools from lynchings from, say, 1900 to 1935. They ping pong around from as few as 10 to as many as 100, averaging 40 or 50. The Tuskegee Institute's count is my source for lynchings. Here is the source I used for mass killings. I think you'll find many parallels between lynchings and mass killings. First and foremost is the irrationality of the violence, the notion that it's a uncontrollable condition that comes over the killer or killers. Both are a subset of violence in a violent culture carried out by people not considered professional criminals.  "

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Retire Mandatory Judicial Retirement - NJ Law Journal Editorial Board

Raise the mandatory retirement age to seventy five urges the  Editorial Board of the New Jersey Law Journal.  The State's judiciary has been discouraged by Gov. Chris Christie's setting a political litmus test for nominations for tenure after a seven year term; and by the Republican Governor's unity with the Democratic legislative majority to put on the ballot an amendment to the state's constitution to reduce judicial take-home pay by marked increases in pension and health insurance deductions.  The measure won 80% of the vote in November. - gwc

Retire Mandatory Judicial Retirement:

 ""[J]ustices and judges shall be retired upon attaining the age of 70 years." — N.J. Const. art. VI, §VI, ¶3 

 Why should that be? The citizens of New Jersey have just amended the state constitution to say that judges, like other state employees, should have their pay cut to ease the burden of benefit costs on taxpayers. We opposed the measure but voters had the last word. If judges are to be treated like other employees, perhaps they should be terminable at the expiration of a term or for cause but not compelled to leave the bench upon reaching age 70." 'via Blog this'

Fed Judge: The conservative case for an assault weapons ban - latimes.com

An AR 15 similar to that used in Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown

Larry Burns is a United States District Judge in Arizona.  He sentenced the shooter of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and others in Tucsom. -  GWC
The conservative case for an assault weapons ban - latimes.com: 
By Larry Alan Burns December 20, 2012

 "Last month, I sentenced Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in federal prison for his shooting rampage in Tucson. That tragedy left six people dead, more than twice that number injured and a community shaken to its core."
Loughner deserved his punishment. But during the sentencing, I also questioned the social utility of high-capacity magazines like the one that fed his Glock. And I lamented the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004, which prohibited the manufacture and importation of certain particularly deadly guns, as well as magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.The ban wasn't all that stringent — if you already owned a banned gun or high-capacity magazine you could keep it, and you could sell it to someone else — but at least it was something.And it says something that half of the nation's deadliest shootings occurred after the ban expired, including the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. It also says something that it has not even been two years since Loughner's rampage, and already six mass shootings have been deadlier.I am not a social scientist, and I know that very smart ones are divided on what to do about gun violence. But reasonable, good-faith debates have boundaries, and in the debate about guns, a high-capacity magazine has always seemed to me beyond them...."

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Robert Bork (1927-2012)

Bork as solicitor general executed Nixon's command
to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox

Robert Bork, Circuit Judge and defeated Supreme Court nominee is dead.

"It was a very small [poll] tax, it was not discriminatory, and I doubt that it had much impact on the welfare of the nation one way or the other…" - Robert Bork defending a poll tax at his 1987 confirmation hearing - speaking to Sen. Edward Kennedy
Former U.S. Circuit Court Judge Robert Bork was a moralizer given to self-righteous morbid laments.  The West was going to hell - Slouching Toward Gomorrah, America becoming "A country I don't recognize", due to the "Tyranny" of  liberal judges - to cite some of his book titles.  He believed he had been "borked" - savaged like a modern day Thomas More in the Senate Chamber rather than the Tower.  He was Nixon's hatchet man who fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.  As Solicitor General he demonstrated that he would do the state some service if only the Crown would ask.  

The year his Supreme Court nomination was rejected - 1987 - was also the year of the Iran-Contra Arms for Hostages hearings at which Senators Warren Rudman and Daniel Inouye (both deceased this year)  confronted Col. Oliver North a White House black operative who celebrated his law-breaking as part of the patriot game.

At Bork's confirmation hearings he was memorably confronted by Edward Kennedy who renounced Bork's opposition to civil rights and women's rights.

A short course on what we have been spared by the election of Barack Obama rather than Mitt Romney to whom Bork was senior judicial advisor may be gleaned from this obit by Jeffrey Toobin. - GWC

Jeffrey Toobin - on Robert Bork - New Yorker

"Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed."

h/t to Brad Delong for both leads

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Loose lips - Michelle Bachmann "loves" the AR 15 used in Newtown

"That is a great gun...I love it...What's wrong with a little firepower?" Michelle Bachmann back in the day before her Presidential campaign misfired speaking of the AR 15 Bushmaster - the combat weapon used in the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre.

Pew: Gun control and the gender gap

Machismo lives, the Pew Center reports:

"Women, by 54% to 37%, say that Friday’s shootings at the elementary school reflect broader problems in American society. Men express the opposite view: 51% say that shootings like this are just the isolated acts of troubled individuals.

College graduates (54%) are more likely than those with no more than a high school education (42%) to say that the massacre reflects broader societal problems.
There also are partisan differences in reactions to the tragedy: Democrats, by 54% to 39%, say the shootings reflect broader societal problems. Republicans are divided, with 49% saying such incidents are the acts of troubled individuals, while 45% say they reflect broader problems.
People who have followed news about the shootings very closely are more likely than those who have not to say that they represent broader problems in society (51% vs. 40%)."

Ho hum, another massacre, it's Saturnalia at the Volokh Conspiracy

Today, December 17, 2012 the first of 27 victims funerals began in Newtown, Connecticut.  Leaders all around were reacting to the massacre with pledges to "do something".  But at more guns more safety blogs like the Volokh Conspiracy it was ho hum, just another day at the morgue.  They were celebrating a Volokh tradition - Saturnalia.  Volokh himself was  speculating casually about whether an armed citizenry really can respond to surprise attacks by armed madmen bent on mass murder.  It's just another massacre, after all, nothing really special - especially when compared to the run of the mill shootings in the ghettoes.  Those are surely beyond the reach of the gun control crowd now that the Supreme Court has declared in D.C. v. Heller that possession of a handgun is a personal constitutional right, and Judge Posner in Moore v. Madigan has declared the right to go armed on the streets of Chicago.

Daniel Inouye, 1924-2012 | TPM Editors Blog

Daniel Inouye, 1924-2012 | TPM Editors Blog: A winner of the Congressional medal of Honor. (Read about that at TPM above). The 1987 Iran Contra scandal  hearings were a defining moment in deflating the Reagan myth, exposing a bizarre and lawless operation run from the White House to evade Congressional prohibition of funding for the right wing Nicaraguan guerillas lionized on the right.   I remember when Inouye  stood up to the super-patriot tough guy Col. Oliver North, a key White House operative.  The Senator closed the proceedings, like Mack the Knife he left not a trace of red, as he eviscerated the right wing icon of the moment.   Inouye's closing statement is masterful ironic denunciation.  He began with praise and then proceeded to express his deep disappointment that this "new American hero" had violated his oath "a Cadet does not lie cheat or steal". - GWC
Inouye begins his closing statement.

Chairman INOUYE: I believe during the past week, we have participated in creating and developing, very likely, a new American hero. Like you, who as one has felt the burning sting of bullet and shrapnel and heard the unforgettable and frightening sounds of incoming shells, I salute you, sir, as a fellow combat man. And the rows of ribbons that you have on your chest will forever remind us of your courageous service and your willingness—your patriotic willingness to risk your life and your limb. I am certain the life and burdens of a hero will be difficult and heavy, and so, with all sincerity, I wish you well as you begin your journey into a new life.
However, as an interested observer, and as one who has participated in the making of this new American hero, I found certain aspects of your testimony to be most troubling.

The full text and video are HERE.

Ken Burns interviewed Senator Inouye about the war and the japanese internment for his 2007 movie The War.

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Joe Scarborough - let Newtown be the turning point

MSNBC's Morning Joe Scarborough, a conservative former Congressman with a 100% NRA rating is jumping ship.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Bracing Political Reality of Gun Control - Jonathan Chait- New York Magazine

Gun violence is a broad epidemic enabled by the fact that so many Americans consider gun possession to be a human right.  And they are backed by he Supreme Court and a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.  Prepare for the long haul.  - GWC

The Bracing Political Reality of Gun Control
by Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine

 I fully share the utter emotional devastation that is naturally metastasizing into broad hopes of political reform. It is natural to think that the emotional magnitude of the massacre must therefore have some proportion to its magnitude as a political event. But this is just as untrue as the comforting fallacy that every great tragedy must do some good. Some things have changed since Friday, but most have not.

The first obstacle still standing is that the vast bulk of American gun violence would not be stopped by banning military-style weapons, but would require not only halting the sale but probably also confiscating regular handguns. (Rifles of all kinds accounted for just 323 of the 12,664 murders victims last year.) Such a step would run into a wall of massive opposition from the public, which opposes a general handgun ban by about a three to one margin, but also the Supreme Court, which has interpreted the Second Amendment not as the preservation of militias but as a right to private gun ownership, and has thus struck down handgun bans.

So we’re left for the foreseeable future with far more limited measures, like more extensive background checks and bans on semiautomatic weapons or large ammunition clips. Such steps command strong public support. But, worthwhile though they may be, we are not even talking about ending mass shootings but attempting to make them a less frequent and a bit less deadly — worthwhile reforms, but not transformative ones.