My Father Receives His Just Reward and Recognition!

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Time for some humor:

Wife: 'What are you doing?' 

Husband: Nothing.

Wife: 'Nothing . . . ? You've been reading our marriage certificate for an hour.'

Husband: 'I was looking for the expiration date.' 


A newly married man asked his wife, 'Would you have married me if my father hadn't left me a fortune?'

'Honey,' the woman replied sweetly, 'I'd have married you, NO MATTER WHO LEFT YOU A FORTUNE!' 

A wife asked her husband: 'What do you like most in me, my pretty face or my sexy body?' 
He looked at her from head to toe and replied: 'I like your sense of humor!' 
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Sowell on thinking becoming obsolete. (See 1 below.)
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 'Obamascare's' benefits/lies becoming evident. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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We Americans are so tired of being thought of as dumb-asses by the rest of the world that we went to the polls last November and removed all doubt." __Clint Eastwood
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But then, how dumb are we?  (See 3 below.)
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I have just returned from Birmingham where the Local Bar Associations  honored my father and other lawyers and judges, living and deceased, for their efforts to end segregation and rid the city of Bull Connor, the racist police chief who controlled Birmingham's destiny for many, many years..  It was a memorable evening and I am posting an article written by one of my father's partners, Chervis Isom, explaining why they retained my father's name on the firm's masthead after it merged with Senator Baker's firm.

Birmingham Office Born From Civil Rights Movement

January 4, 2013

Author

H. Chervis Isom

In 2003, the Birmingham firm of Berkowitz, Lefkovits, Isom & Kushner merged with Baker Donelson and, though Mr. Berkowitz had died in December 1985, the addition of his name to the surviving firm was a matter of grave importance to the shareholders of the Birmingham office.

So the question presents itself: why did the name of a man dead for almost twenty years at the time of the merger continue to carry such importance? The answer to that question takes us back into the events in Birmingham of 1962 and 1963, a time referred to as the Civil Rights Movement, events in which Mr. Berkowitz was deeply committed and involved.

Mr. Berkowitz had practiced law in Birmingham since 1928 at the age of twenty. His first legal action was a petition to have his disability of non-age removed. He practiced alone during the years of the Great Depression. Arnold Lefkovits joined him in 1950, and they practiced together for many years. But in late 1963, their small firm of two lawyers admitted three additional partners and became known as Berkowitz, Lefkovits, Vann, Patrick & Smith. The reason they came together as partners is intertwined with the history of Birmingham.

The City of Birmingham was governed by a three-person commission, one of whom was Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, who had become a virtual dictator. Under his leadership, Birmingham's reputation had suffered nationally and internationally as he and his all-white police force attempted to enforce the Jim Crow laws of Birmingham and the state of Alabama. In May 1961, Birmingham became an international pariah as the consequence of the attack, without any police intervention, by a mob on a busload of Freedom Riders.

Soon after, the Birmingham Bar Association appointed Abe Berkowitz to head a committee of lawyers to study the three forms of city government authorized by the state constitution and to recommend which would best serve Birmingham. Mr. Berkowitz understood that the real but not verbalized reason was to displace Commissioner Connor. The Bar committee recommended in February 1962 a change from the commission form of government to a mayor-city council form. But the question was, how to effect the change? Members of the committee understood that the Commissioners, particularly Bull Connor, would oppose any attempt to change the form of government.

An election had been called in August 1962 for ten new legislators representing Jefferson County pursuant to the "one man – one vote" case, Baker vs. Carr, which had been decided by the United States Supreme Court. David Vann, an attorney with one of Birmingham's largest law firms at the time, had been one of the attorneys who filed the action. He discussed with Mr. Berkowitz his idea of how to obtain the requisite number of signatures to call a referendum on the mayor-council form. He suggested that it could be accomplished simply by setting up booths at each polling station on the day of the election and getting the signatures in one day, before Connor could mobilize resistance. But it was then only ten days before the election. They arranged a committee to implement the plan. Serving on that committee were Abe Berkowitz, David J. Vann, J. Vernon Patrick Jr., Erskine Smith and others. It's a long story, but the plan worked, the required signatures were obtained and an election was set in November 1962 for the adoption of the mayor-council form of government, which won by a slim margin. Then in April 1963, Albert Boutwell was narrowly elected over Connor for mayor of the city. Litigation ensued, and eventually Connor was forced from office, but not before Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Project C (Confrontation) to Birmingham.

In response, Connor, who continued in office under an appeal bond, led the police and fire departments in resistance to the civil rights marches in Birmingham during the spring of 1963, in which police dogs were used to intimidate the protestors and fire hoses were used to rout the children's protest, including the jailing of over one thousand children. Abe Berkowitz and David Vann were deeply involved in mediations among Department of Justice officials, department store owners and leaders of the African American community to resolve the racial injustices that brought about the marches. Many of those meetings occurred in Mr. Berkowitz's office.

The violence culminated on September 15 with the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls. 1963 was a pivotal year in the history of Birmingham and in the history of civil rights in the United States. And as that pivotal year come to a close, David J. Vann, J. Vernon Patrick Jr. and Erskine Smith all lost their jobs at law firms, paying for their support of civil rights in Birmingham. It was Abe Berkowitz, their elder guru, who gathered them in like a mother hen and gave them a home.

David J. Vann, J. Vernon Patrick Jr., Erskine Smith: these were the partners in the firm. Joining them of counsel was Charles F. Zukoski Jr., the sixty-five year old head of the Trust Department of the First National Bank of Birmingham, who had been pushed into retirement because of his civil rights activities. The name of the new firm was Berkowitz, Lefkovits, Vann, Patrick, & Smith, a firm actually born out of the Civil Rights Movement.

This is the firm I joined following law school in May 1967. Though Mr. Berkowitz died in December 1985, the firm continued to be identified by his name. Forty years after the founding of the firm, it merged in 2003 with Baker, Donelson, Bearman and Caldwell, P.C., a large firm with Tennessee roots. Because the continuation of the use of his name was imperative to us in Birmingham, the surviving firm added Mr. Berkowitz' name to its title and the firm continues to this day to be known as Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, P.C., a Firm with over 630 lawyers and public policy advisors conducting a national and international law practice.

This is a summary of a longer article written by Chervis Isom, which is available for review upon request.

Attachments

Diversity Matters Newsletter - Winter 2013

My father was fearless and outspoken  when he perceived an  injustice and many in the audience of seven hundred came up to me Saturday evening and related stories about my father and their relationship with him etc.. 

Dad was a rational liberal and people often remark since apples  fall close to the tree why was I not liberal.  I reply my father was liberal at a time when it was the right course but he was not stupid and I daresay he would be thinking much as I do in view of the radical shift our nation has taken.

Though he was unalterably opposed to segregation and believed black citizens deserved their civil rights, I also doubt he would be pleased with what so many black citizens have done subsequently.  He would be terribly disappointed, after gaining their civil rights, they now find themselves in their current plight of dependency, conflicted by a high rate of unwed mothers, their violence towards their own people and you know the rest.  

I daresay my father would be chagrined that so many of Martin Luther King's dreams have turned into nightmares and fallen far short of what every decent person had hoped and wished.

It is problematical whether he would have voted for Obama the first time but for sure would not have done so the second. Why do I say this? Because my father revered the Presidency and would be highly unlikely to vote to place a person in that office who was so unaccomplished and unqualified.

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Victor Hanson finds the Middle East boring and becoming irrelevant.  Israel finds it dangerous  and challenging and unlike our president does something about it.  (See 4 below.)

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Dick
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1)Is Thinking Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell

 While it is not possible to answer all the e-mails and letters from readers, many are thought-provoking, whether those thoughts are positive or negative.

An e-mail from one young man simply asked for the sources of some facts about gun control that were mentioned in a recent column. It is good to check out the facts -- especially if you check out the facts on both sides of an issue. By contrast, another man simply denounced me because of what was said in that column. He did not ask for my sources but simply made contrary assertions, as if his assertions must be correct and therefore mine must be wrong. He identified himself as a physician, and the claims that he made about guns were claims that had been made years ago in a medical journal -- and thoroughly discredited since then. He might have learned that, if we had engaged in a back and forth discussion, but it was clear from his letter that his goal was not debate but denunciation. That is often the case these days.

 It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously, but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down. There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument. Decades of dumbed-down education no doubt have something to do with this, but there is more to it than that. Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions. If our educational institutions -- from the schools to the universities -- were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences. Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness.

 Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil -- whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever. A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas. One sign of this sense of moral monopoly among the left intelligentsia is that the institutions most under their control -- the schools, colleges and universities -- have far less freedom of speech than the rest of American society. While advocacy of homosexuality, for example, is common on college campuses, and listening to this advocacy is often obligatory during freshman orientation, criticism of homosexuality is called "hate speech" that is subject to punishment. 

While spokesmen for various racial or ethnic groups are free to vehemently denounce whites as a group for their past or present sins, real or otherwise, any white student who similarly denounces the sins or shortcomings of non-white groups can be virtually guaranteed to be punished, if not expelled. Even students who do not advocate anything can have to pay a price if they do not go along with classroom brainwashing. The student at Florida Atlantic University who recently declined to stomp on a paper with the word "Jesus" on it, as ordered by the professor, was scheduled for punishment by the university until the story became public and provoked an outcry from outside academia.

 This professor's action might be dismissed as an isolated extreme, but the university establishment's initial solid backing for him, and its coming down hard on the student, shows that the moral dry rot goes far deeper than one brainwashing professor.
 The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.
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2)Obamacare’s ‘Benefits’ Are Gradually Becoming Apparent
 By Michael D. Tanner

At his press conference Tuesday, President Obama assured Americans that, “To the 85-90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance: They’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don’t know it.” Those benefits apparently include higher premiums.

According to the Wall Street Journal, insurers are warning that premiums in the individual and small-group markets could double in the next few years. Already, they are well on their way. For example, California health insurers are proposing increases for some customers of 20 percent or more: 26 percent by Blue Cross, 22 percent by Aetna, and 20 percent by Blue Shield. In Maryland, Care First, the state’s largest insurer, has proposed a 25 percent increase for next year.

 Younger and healthier Americans can expect to pay even more. According to a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging as much as 169 percent. “Insurers are warning that premiums in the individual and small-group markets could double in the next few years.” While it is always difficult to pin down the exact reason for premium increases, a large portion is traceable to the new health care law.

According to a recent study by the American Society of Actuaries, Obamacare will increase health insurance claims costs by 32 percent because of increased adverse selection in the insurance pool. That is, the law’s prohibition on medical underwriting will bring more older and sicker people into the insurance pool, while higher premiums will encourage the young and healthy to forgo insurance until they get sick. (The penalty under Obamacare’s individual mandate is low enough so that it will generally be cheaper for healthy people to “pay,” rather than “play.”) In addition, Obamacare requires all health insurance plans to provide more benefits and have lower deductibles and co-payments than they do today. Not to worry, say the law’s supporters, people may be paying more but they will have better insurance — whether they like it or not.

As Secretary Sebelius puts it, “These folks will be moving into a really fully insured product for the first time, and so there may be a higher cost associated with getting into that market.” In fact, a recent study of more than 11,000 plans on the individual market found that less than 2 percent of existing plans are fully in compliance with the law’s benefit requirements. No doubt the new insurance will be more comprehensive, required to cover such things as drug and alcohol rehabilitation and contraceptives, but one does recall that the president once promised, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” Apparently not. Current plans are technically grandfathered in, allowing people to keep them for now, though any change in the plans requires that their coverage be brought into compliance.

Moreover, because non-compliant plans cannot enroll new members, most of the existing plans will eventually disappear. Just another benefit that the American people aren’t aware of. Americans may also not know that it may soon become harder to continue seeing the doctor of their choice. A recent survey of physicians conducted by Deloitte found that 59 percent of them expect some of their colleagues, fearing reduced payments and increased government interference in their practice, to retire early as a result of the health care law, and that others will scale back their hours. No doubt Americans are also failing to appreciate the more than $1 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years that were put in place to finance the new law.

If they don’t understand it yet, they will soon: many of those taxes kick in this year. Of course, since the law will also add at least $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, taxpayers will have many future opportunities to understand the benefits of higher taxes. Then again, maybe Americans understand more than the president thinks.

This week the Kaiser Foundation released a new poll, showing that just 35 percent of Americans approve of the law.

 Once again, President Obama may have underestimated the intelligence of the American people.


2a)Seven Lessons of the Obamacare Ignorance Poll

By  Stanley Kurtz

Earthquakes happen. Yesterday’s revelation that 42 percent of Americans don’t even know that Obamacare exists gives pause for reflection. Here are some lessons.

Lesson One: When they say low-information voters, they mean low informationvoters.

Lesson Two: The press isn’t doing its job. Even today, the New York Times buries its piece on the president’s weak response at yesterday’s press conference to predictions of an Obamacare implementation “train wreck” on page 15. That piece fails to draw on comments by supporters or critics of the president’s remarks. TheWashington Post’s tiny article by Sarah Kliff on page twelve doesn’t even mention the president’s scarcely credible press-conference response. Instead, Kliff’s piece touts a streamlined new Obamacare application form, essentially echoing the administration’s own talking points while reporting only praise for this alleged bureaucratic coup. The sensational poll findings on the public’s continuing ignorance of Obamacare’s existence should have prompted Page One stories on the issue, with a focus on Obama’s highly debatable response to the “train wreck” charge, and comments from administration supporters and critics alike. Is the press covering for Obama? Sure, but at this point even digging up buried Obamacare stories is a challenge. No wonder the public’s out of the loop.

Lesson Three: Last year’s election results may be a lot less troubling than Republicans thought. Sure, there are problems, especially with the Millennials. Yet a public that barely even knows that Obamacare exists cannot be viewed as having endorsed it — or its author. Which leads us to . . .

Lesson Four: John McCain’s “celebrity” attack ad may have been the ultimate commentary on the Obama presidency. The public feels good about supporting Obama, and so doesn’t want to be troubled by the unpleasant reality of the president’s actions. It must be dry this year in the land of the Brotherhood, because denial is a 3,000-mile-long river delta that begins to spread just outside the Beltway. All those polls showing the president’s personal popularity higher than the popularity of his policies — not to mention the way his support kept tanking whenever he made speeches about Obamacare — it all makes sense, and it’s still going on.

We’ve reelected a president we’re so desperate to like that we’ve made his signature policy accomplishment disappear. Is the claim of press malfeasance incompatible with the notion of a public in denial? Not at all. The public wants to forget about Obamacare, and the press is pleased to oblige.

Lesson Five: There’s an important kernel of truth in this ignorance. Obamacare doesn’t really exist yet. In fact, much of Obama’s first term has yet to happen in any real sense. Obama understands that the public likes its thoroughly idealized idea of him much better than reality. That’s why he postponed full implementation of so many of his policies until after his reelection. At base, this is a deceptive and anti-democratic procedure. The public ought to have voted on the president’s policies as actually experienced. They ended up voting on their image of Obama the celebrity instead, largely because Obama himself gave them little else to go on.

Lesson Six: Obama is still telling pretty lies about Obamacare, claims designed to make it disappear in the public mind. At yesterday’s press conference, Obama said that people who already had health insurance could pretty much ignore Obamacare-implementation issues from here on. In effect, he’s still peddling the claim that if you like your current insurance, you can keep it. Although rate shock, employer-based-insurance dumping, and changed hiring practices may soon push millions of policy holders into the exchanges, Obama pretends that there’s nothing to see here. And contrary to the president’s claims at the presser, the exchanges are far from the only parts of Obamacare that remain to be implemented. There’s also the infamous IPAB health-care rationing panel (and yes, despite denials, it’s effectively a rationing board). Implementation of IPAB is being held back by Obama for political reasons. The administration’s failure to move on IPAB is anther reason why Obama himself can be blamed for the public’s ignorance of the law. Timely nominations for this controversial panel would have put Obamacare in the news every day, and every day the news would have been bad. So even though IPAB is law, why shouldn’t Obama just pretend it doesn’t exist?

Lesson Seven: Obama is vulnerable, very vulnerable. When something the public doesn’t know exists — and doesn’t want to know exists — actually turns out to exist, people are going to get angry. Even the president now calls it Obamacare. Good luck with that.

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3)      How Dumb Are We???

 So now we find out that the entire Tsarnaev  family

(Dad, Mom, 2 sons & 2 daughters) started receiving 

government assistance as soon as they set foot in
our country. As political refugees they were entitled to
settlement assistance from  day one.  (Section 8 Housing,
public healthcare,  food stamps etc.)

Then  their  stellar  older son impregnates and marries the 

daughter of a doctor, and this new little Muslim family

receives 18  months of government assistance.  They only

came off welfare  after the naive young wife starts working

70 hours a week while  husband Tamerlan  stays home and

builds bombs and plans to kill and injure the very  Americans

who have paid for his pathetic existence for the past 12  plus years.     

 A Breakdown of your and my investment into the Tsarnaev 

 Family:  Section 8 housing Free public healthcare Food stamps

and other EFT transfer payments Federal Pell Grants for both
sons and most likely their daughters as well. (That is $5200.00 per

 year for each son or daughter who attended a college  City of

 Cambridge also awarded a $2500 per year scholarship to the

younger son.

Younger  son also reportedly was receiving state college scholarship.
What did we receive for our investment:  Older  son was arrested
for domestic battery on a former  girlfriend.

The  mother was arrested last year for shoplifting $1600 in merchandise          

from a Lord & Taylor store.  Mother is facing immediate arrest for
failure to appear regarding this matter.

 Then  of course we know that the two sons combined to kill four people(3 Americans & a Chinese exchange student), severely injure 100 plus other people, carjacked another victim and only let him live when they found out that he was not an American citizen.

 Now  we have the two pathetic parents who have returned to Russia and

are claiming that their poor sons are innocent and are being framed by the       
same American government that allowed for their pathetic existence the
past 12 plus years When are we going to put a stop to this madness??

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4)The Monotonous Middle East
By Victor Davis Hanson
Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the trading nexus of three continents -- Asia, Europe and Africa -- and a vibrant birthplace to three of the world's great religions.

Middle Eastern influence rose again in the 19th century when the Suez Canal turned the once dead-end Eastern Mediterranean Sea into a sea highway from Europe to Asia.

With the 20th century development of large gas and oil supplies in the Persian Gulf and North Africa, an Arab-led OPEC more or less dictated the foreign policy of thirsty oil importers like United States and Europe. No wonder Centcom has remained America's military command hot spot.

Yet insidiously, the Middle East is becoming irrelevant. The discovery of enormous new oil and gas reserves along with the use of new oil-recovery technology in North America and China is steadily curbing the demand for Middle Eastern oil. Soon, countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran are going to have less income and geostrategic clout. In both Iran and the Gulf, domestic demand is rising, while there is neither the technical know-how nor the water to master the new art of fracking to sustain exports.

The recent Boston bombing reminded the West that nearly 12 years after 9/11, most terrorism still follows the same old, same old script -- committed by angry young men with Muslim pedigrees claiming to act on radical Islamist impulses, without much popular rebuke from the Muslim world.

There is not much left to the stale Middle East complaint from the 1960s that Western colonialism and imperialism sidetracked the region's own natural trajectory to democracy. After the derailed Arab Spring, the world accepted that the mess in the Middle East is not imported, but rather the result of homegrown tribalism, sexual apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, illiteracy, statism and authoritarianism.

Revolutionary theocrats always seem to follow the ouster of fossilized thugs. "Reformers" who were "elected" after the fall of the Shah of Iran and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt on spec conjured up the same old bogeymen as their predecessors, subverted the rule of law in the same old fashion, and wrecked the economy in the same old manner.

Barack Obama senses that there is no support for American intervention in the Middle East. Even his idea of "leading from behind" in Libya led to the loss of American personnel in Benghazi. After Iraq, the U.S. will not nation-build in Syria. Apparently, Americans would rather be hated for doing nothing than be despised for spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to build Middle East societies.

The U.S. still worries about tiny democratic Israel surrounded by existential enemies pledged to destroy the Jewish state. But Israel's own sudden oil and natural gas bonanza is enriching its economy and will soon offer a source of reliable fuel supplies to nearby Europe.

Most likely, Europe's past opportunistic disdain of Israel and fawning over Arab autocracies were based entirely on oil politics. In the future, the fair-weather European Union will as likely move away from the Middle East as it will pledge a newfound friendship with the once unpopular but now resource-rich Israel.

Visiting Persepolis, the Egyptian pyramids, Leptis Magna, or the Roman and Christian sites in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria is not worth the madness that is now the price of Middle East tourism. The European Union and the United States are tired of Middle East terrorism -- after 50 years of Yasser Arafat's secular brand and Osama bin Laden's Islamic bookend.

Europe's southeastern Mediterranean flank on the Middle East is a financial and political mess. Most of the West is as likely to shun bankrupt Greece as it is to be wary of Recep Erdogan's new Ottoman Turkey.

While the Middle East failed to transform its oil riches of the last half-century into stable, transparent societies, Asia globalized and embraced the free market.

The resulting self-generated riches in the Pacific do not derive from the accident of oil under the ground of Singapore, Hong Kong or Taipei, but rather from global competitiveness and internal reforms. If China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan 60 years ago were as poor as the Middle East, they are now the economic equals to Europe and North America. Their motto is to borrow from and then beat -- not envy or blame game -- the West.

For now, Western tourists and students still mostly avoid Amman, Baghdad, Benghazi, Cairo and Damascus. American soldiers are drawing down from the bases of the Middle East. And soon, huge American-bound oil tankers will not crowd each other at the docks of the Persian Gulf.

You see, the Middle East is not so much dangerous, challenging or vital to Western interests as it is becoming irrelevant.

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