Poppies And Other Anchorage Garden Tour Shots And Thoughts

This morning started with an airport run and a goodbye to our daughter and granddaughter who were here for a few days.  My three and a half year old sweetie helped me out in the garden while she was here.  Such a joy.

Then we realized, oh yeah, today's the garden tour, something that always stirs the gardening juices and gives me at least a few new ideas.

This year's tour was different from past tours.

First, there were four gardens in Eagle River (about 15 miles out of town) and three in east Anchorage.

Second, there was an institutional garden unlike any I've seen in Anchorage.

We decided to shoot out to Eagle River and then hit the ones along Muldoon.

Our first stop had a bad start.  There was a big red political sign for a representative who was too conservative for the Republican Party's taste.  (They kicked her out of the majority.)  But I think any political statement like that, no matter the party or candidate, is out of place.  Yes people have the right to put up signs, but the garden club has a right not to use their home if there is a sign.  The homeowner can take the sign down for five hours or choose not to participate.

The Eagle River gardens had some interesting features - a big rock covered hill in one, a formal set of
landscaped walls that the garden club rep said was build to keep the driveway from collapsing, some windows place here and there in the garden, and the POPPIES.  The poppies were in our last ER garden.  The individual flowers were so light and graceful and delicate and the colors were wonderful.  But you can see for yourself.

 They were perfect.  The shapes, the colors, the folds, and curves.  Looking at them was like a meditation.

The poppy yard - these were actually only a small portion of the garden - was my favorite of the Eagle River gardens.  This wasn't a show garden, but a garden of love.  We talked to the gardner and it was clear that she just liked making all this stuff flourish.  She wasn't spending lots of money, but she was rescuing and rehabilitating.  My kind of garden.

And then we headed back to town.  The first stop was just off of Muldoon - the inner courtyard at St. Patrick's Church.

Or, as the brochure says, "The Cloister at St. Patrick's."

This is a place you would never bump into.  You almost have to already know where you are going.

That brochure also says:

"The Cloister is intended to be a place of pilgrimage for all Christians - and for anyone who is seeking a place of prayer and inspiration, a place of peace in the midst of life's struggles, or a place where they can more deeply encounter the living God - who is love."

The Cloisters, as you can see, are angular and the gardens confined within this elegant concrete and glass space.  There are several water features. The brochure calls them  'fountains' which conflicts with my notion of water shooting up.  Here it moves horizontally and down.  Being able to say "The Holy Spirit has called the people of St. Patrick's  to undertake a major building project . . ." surely must have helped when raising the money to build this space.

You can also spend eternity here.















I'm glad we save the Cloister and the two houses east of Muldoon for last.  They were both unique gardens that looked like everything had been there a while.  They combined local plants and settings with more traditional garden varieties.  One had recycled mirrors all around the backyard which gave guests extra views of the plants.   And other stray items, like bowling balls.


The last house we visited, a few doors past the mirrors, was a quiet and lovely garden that backs onto the military base forest.  I was taken by the leaves on the false sunflower - which turned out to be Sunburst Heliopsis.

A thought that's been bubbling to the surface these last couple of years is for the garden club to change the date of the tour in the future.  By always being at the end of July/beginning of August, the tour highlights the same flowers and neglects those flowers that bloom earlier in the summer.  But I also realize that more things are likely to be blooming now.  Perhaps and end of June preview for the big tour.

Blueberry Picking Near Powerline Pass

My daughter, granddaughter, and a friend went blueberry picking near the bottom of Flattop.  Here are a few pictures.  My family prefers not to be pictured on the blog, so you only get one of the most beautiful spots in the world.

These are crowberries.  They aren't as tasty, but they're sometimes used as filler with the blueberries.

Some interesting lichen I found on a rock.

Down below we could see the contrails of the jets at the air show at JBER (Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson).  There are four or five jets flying in formation there.  Note:  I'm not promoting military air shows like these.  I've posted on the cost of air shows and I have questions about these as promotional events for military might.  Fortunately, we didn't really hear the terrible, obliterating roar of the jets from where we were.

I found a couple of king boletes, which will make a wonderful mushroom soup.

Lots of gentian blooming.

Some of the hemlock had lots of new cones.













And then we wandered down to Powerline Pass.

My First Sweet Pea Is Pink

Back on May 2 this year, I posted a picture of my first sweet pea shoots popping out of the soil.  Or so I thought.  It soon became apparent that I'd mixed up the sweet pea and nasturtium seeds.  The nasturtiums have been blooming a while.  I planted more sweet peas right away, and apparently there were some sweet pea seeds planted around the time I planted the nasturtiums.  Anyway, I'm glad the sweet pea is blooming while my granddaughter is visiting for a quick trip with her mom.

I'd like to note how spectacularly beautiful and pleasant the weather has been, but non-Alaskans read this too and I wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong impression and think about moving up here.  Though I suspect with global warming and summers south of here getting seriously hot, there are people who will figure out that we're getting the best weather they used have to have.  And while we may be running out of oil, we're going to have the best weather on the planet before long.  So maybe the folks who came here to get rich will go home, and the rest of us can enjoy Alaska for what it is.

"Leave My Damn Dividend Fund Alone" Ignorance, Greed, and The PFD

I've passed this sign a few times and it seems to beg for comment.

This is a big sign.  Someone really wanted to make a statement about how he felt.

But if I were doing this, I'd try to get my facts straight.

There is no 'dividend fund.'

There's an Alaska Permanent Fund, from which Alaska residents get dividends.  The governor and others have outlined why the current budget shortfalls cannot be solved by simply cutting the budget. There have to be additional revenue sources.  One source the governor has identified, and the only source the legislature has followed up on, was the money set aside for Alaska Permanent Fund dividend checks.  He also asked to radically change the subsidies to the oil companies, and for an income tax and sales tax.


It's NOT 'your' fund

It belongs, according to the Permanent Fund Board website, to the State of Alaska.  And

"The Alaska Constitution says that the principal may not be spent. The earnings in the earnings reserve may be spent by the Legislature for any public purpose, including the Permanent Fund Dividend distribution."

It was NOT set up to give everyone a dividend check each year.  That was added later.  

It's a collective pool of money for the benefit of people who live in Alaska, now and those who will live in Alaska in the future.  So, for Alaska residents, 'our' might be acceptable, but not 'my' fund.  


What does this sign tell us and what doesn't it tell us?

1.  This person (let's call him Sam) is imprecise, since he's gotten the name of the fund he's so exercised about wrong.  We don't know if it's

• ignorance (he doesn't know there is an Alaska Permanent Fund, he just thinks there's a dividend fund), 
• carelessness (he knows, but wrote this quickly and didn't check), or 
• greed (he just wants free money and doesn't care what it's called.)

2.  Sam  doesn't seem to grasp the perilous state of the Alaska budget as described in the link above.  And probably doesn't have a clue about all the ways he benefits from state spending - on roads, parks, schools, law and order, etc.  And how, if we don't find a way to fund the state budget, he'll probably lose more than he would get from the part of his dividend the governor has vetoed.

3.  Sam has a short-term horizon, not a long-term view.  Actually, I don't have enough info to know this for sure.  There are questions that could move us along to finding out.

• Sam has heard that come October, he'd get about $1000 less this year than he would have, if the governor prevails on this, and doesn't like that.  
• Sam doesn't understand that the Alaska Permanent Fund was set up originally to preserve the oil earnings for future generations on the grounds that the oil is a non-renewable resource and no single generation should use the wealth it generates and leave nothing to future generations.  The dividends were an afterthought, a way to keep Alaskans interested in the fund's performance.  They were not the purpose of the fund.  The intent . . . well, there were many intents mentioned as it was being debated and it seems each Alaskan picks the intent that fits their interest best.  For me, the intent was a fund that could provide future Alaskans an annual annuity toward the state budget, supplemented by other income as needed, like an income tax.  By investing the extra oil money into a permanent fund, Alaskans, like wealthy families, would be able to take a portion of the annual earnings and spend it on government when the oil was gone.   If you can have enough self control, the fund will keep earning money into perpetuity.  But that means not killing the goose that lays the golden egg.   That way the oil wealth wouldn't disappear when the oil disappeared and future generations would benefit.  That could happen.  As I write, the fund is worth $54.608 billion.  
•  Sam understands all this, but just doesn't trust any government, now or in the future, to use the money wisely and thinks he's better off using the money himself than letting the legislature spend it.  Given the current legislature, he may well be right.  But that's why the Constitution prohibits the legislature from using the principal of the fund.  The most they can waste is the annual earnings.
• Sam has no idea of all the ways he benefits from government spending, he just takes these things all for granted, without realizing that government provides them.  So he doesn't know how his life would take a turn for the worse if it got cut even more.  Or how much more it would cost him than the $1000 he stands to lose now. 

Sam displays a sense of entitlement to his PFD check that other Alaskans also seem to have.  They deserve it for some reason.  Technically, yes, as Alaskans we are all eligible for the check, but I feel like we're pretty much getting something for nothing.  People in other states don't get checks like these.  And the amount we get is a lot more than most people would get if the formula hadn't been changed.

Originally, the dividends was set to be $50 per year of Alaskan residence back to the beginning of statehood.

Under that formula, only people who have lived in Alaska continuously for 25 years would have gotten the full $1281 last year.  Which would mean that for someone who came to Alaska five years ago, the dividend check would be $250.  Those who have lived here longer would have gotten more.

It got changed to the current formally due to a lawsuit that successfully challenged the formula on the grounds that it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The state would be paying much less in dividends today had the original formula held.  How much less is tricky to calculate without knowing how long every Alaskan has been in the state,  and I couldn't find that kind of information quickly online.

I did find a Report on Alaska mobility that shows from IRS data that between 2000 and 2010, 25,000-30,000 people moved to the state per year.  So in 2010, there were about 250,000 people who had come to the state in the last ten years and since the annual change was evenly distributed over those ten years, we can say that there were about 250,000 who'd been in the state about five years on average.

Based on the original dividend payout plan ($50 per year of residence) those folks would only have been eligible for (on average) Based on the original dividend payout plan ($50 per year of residence) those folks would only have been eligible for (on average) $250 instead of the $1281 payout everyone got.  So instead of those 250,000 people getting $1281 last year for a total of $320 million, they would have gotten $62 million and the state would have saved about $250 million, just on the people who came to Alaska in the last ten years.  That doesn't count all the people who were in the state less than 30 years.  The number of folks who have been here since statehood is rapidly declining, so while they would be earning quite a bit more, there aren't too many of them.


So, I really don't know who Sam is or why he's put up this sign.  I don't know if he's been here five years or fifty.  I don't know if he uses his dividend to pay off accumulated bills or on a Hawaiian vacation, if he supports Clinton or Trump.  Nor do I know the folks who have written letters to the editor voicing the same sentiment.  It would be interesting to actually meet these people and find out what their actual motivation is.  Until then, I'll resist the temptation to make assumptions about them.

Putting The Putin Puzzle Pieces Together

Original image (pre-puzzle) from Esquire

The way I see it, Putin is on a roll.

He's kept Asad in Syria.  He's helped send half the population out of Syria, many as refugees to Europe, where the sheer number of them is straining Europe's capacity to handle them.  And it's straining Europe's ability to work together.  His machinations probably helped the Brexit vote.

And all that means that Europe's attention is on refugees and [not on] their ability to monitor and respond to his interference in former Soviet nations.

I have little doubt that the Russian government is doing what it can to help recruit young men in Europe and the US to commit terrorist acts.  He's probably not directly supporting ISIS, since Russia's had its own issues and terrorists out of Chechnya, but he surely benefits, in the short term anyway, from a European population that is more focused on internal threats than Russian threats.

His fingerprints are reported to be on the hacked emails of the Democratic National Headquarters and we don't know how else he's working to get the Republican nominee for president elected.

And there is always the very real possibility of someone electronically stealing votes.  I've been assured that our Alaska machines aren't internet connected, so it's unlikely the Russian's will mess with our election.  And we do have hard copies of all ballots to compare the results against, but that only happens when there's a challenge, and the challengers have to pay for the hand count.  But any system that's connected to the internet is very vulnerable.  Here's more on these topics.


Back in December, Putin praised Trump:

"He is a bright and talented person without any doubt," Putin said, adding that Trump is "an outstanding and talented personality."

And in an interview Trump seemed to eat it up:

BRZEZINSKI: Do you like Vladimir Putin's comments about you?
TRUMP: Sure. When people call you brilliant it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.

[Note:  Putin said 'bright and talented' but Trump heard 'brilliant.']

Remember back what George W. Bush said about Putin? (From ABC News)

"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue," Bush said according a BBC account. "I was able to get a sense of his soul.

I suspect Bush's ability to assess someone's character is better than Trump's, yet his assessment was totally off.

While I was looking for that quote, I also found this one from Joe Biden in the same article:

Biden recalled visiting Putin at the Kremlin in 2011: "I had an interpreter, and when he was showing me his office I said, 'It's amazing what capitalism will do, won't it? A magnificent office!' And he laughed. As I turned, I was this close to him." Biden held his hand a few inches from his nose. "I said, 'Mr. Prime Minister, I'm looking into your eyes, and I don't think you have a soul.' " 

"You said that?" I asked. It sounded like a movie line. 

"Absolutely, positively," Biden said, and continued, "And he looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, 'We understand one another.' " Biden sat back, and said, "This is who this guy is!"

I'm guessing this is a joke off of Bush's encounter rather than an serious account of the Biden-Putin exchange.

But there are people who have studied Putin.  Several years ago, a friend lent me  a Putin biography  called "THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE:  The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin" by Masha Gessen, a journalist who holds both US and Russian passports.  From a Washington Post book review:

"Most prominent politicians had abandoned Yeltsin, and the remaining prospects were “all plain men in gray suits.” Boris Berezovsky, the wealthy oligarch and ambitious power broker who was close to Yeltsin’s team, personally recruited the largely unknown Putin, thinking he would be pliable. “Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power,” Gessen says, “is that the people who lifted him to the throne knew little more about him than you do. . . . Everyone could invest this gray, ordinary man with what they wanted to see in him.”

What Gessen sees in Putin is a troubled childhood brawler who became a paper-pushing KGB man and, by improbable twists and turns, rose to the top in Russia. He grew up fighting in the courtyards of St. Petersburg apartments. He became “a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper.” When studying at a KGB academy, he once got into a fight on a subway when someone picked on him. On the day of his inauguration in 2000, Putin’s stiff gait was “the manner of a person who executes all his public acts mechanically and reluctantly, projecting both extreme guard and extreme aggression with every step.” Putin, she concludes, is a “hoodlum turned iron-handed ruler.”

So far I'm just looking at puzzle pieces.  Some seem to fit together, but many don't yet, and others are missing.  So this is conjecture, but it's starting to feel chillingly probable.  Putin's destabilizing much of the world, including the US.  Trump may see Putin as just another narcissistic entrepreneur, but he's much, much more than that.  Russians play chess and he's half a dozen moves ahead of Trump.

[UPDATE July 26, 2016, 8:19pm:  Minutes after posting this, I opened Twitter and the first was a tweet linking to this article by Masha Gessen, responding to others comparing Trump to Putin or saying Trump was Putin's plant.  She doesn't agree.  And I want to be clear about what I was trying to say.  Not that Trump was, as someone wrote, 'the Siberian Candidate', or that he is a lot like Putin.  I was just saying that Trump would be more in Putin's interest (Gessen says Putin hates Clinton more than liking Trump).  And yes, there are similarities between Trump and Putin, but there are dissimilarities as well.]

Evening Stroll At Powerline Pass

My bookclub met on the Hillside last night, not far from the cutoff to Glen Alps and Powerline Pass.  It was a little after nine pm when we got out, so I turned right up the hill.  Here are some shots.  Since this is summer in Alaska, and as a recent guest remarked, "It's 9pm in the afternoon."  The last shot was taken about 9:45pm.

Monk's Hood

Do I need to say anything about this?  After all these years I still can't believe I live 20 minutes from this other world.  

Cow Parsnip Seeds

I'm not sure what these are.  They were growing on a long dark purple stalk near the creek.  Click to focus better.  

Because The Conservative Machine Is Swiftboating Hillary Clinton, We Must Share Videos Like These . . .

[This post is about the video.  I encourage you to watch it.  The intro has gotten longer than intended, so skip it if you will and watch the video.]

Every time the Republican nominee tweets 'crooked' in front of our future president's first name, 'crooked' embeds itself a little deeper in people's brains. He knows that repetition of a lie eventually becomes truth for many people.

Benghazi hearings and email 'scandals' show how little the other side has on Clinton.  The 'crimes'  she's been accused of are, at worst, minor offenses compared to what the Bush administration did regularly.  They really have nothing serious on Clinton.  Well, being a woman is probably her most serious crime in many Republican eyes, but most know they can't say that directly.

All the attacks so far on Clinton are part of the political weaponry of the Republicans - honed by people like Roger Ailes, who has just stepped down as head of Fox News for decades of sexual harassment.

It is the vicious fabrication of lies to bring down an honorable candidate.  They took war hero John Kerry and 'swiftboated' him until their draft-dodging candidate beat him in 2004. Such irony!  The party of the military, the party that despises draft-dodgers, the party that exalts 'war heroes,' slandering a hero so their draft dodger president would win.

Swiftboating is now part of the American political lexicon, like gerrymandering. Wikipedia says:

"The term swiftboating (also swift-boating or swift boating) is a pejorative American neologism used to describe an unfair or untrue political attack. The term is derived from the name of the organization "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" (SBVT, later the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth) because of their widely publicized—and later discredited—campaign against 2004 U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry."

No candidate is perfect.  You can't reach the political level of a presidential nomination from a major party without having had made compromises along the way.  Nixon actually was a crook.  He authorized breaking into Watergate and physically stealing files from the Democratic party files and lied about it repeatedly.

Today, it appears Russian government sponsored hackers electronically broke into the Democratic party files and leaked them the day before the Democratic convention.  And the bigger fallout is on candidate Clinton, not on the Russians, or the Republicans who are hoping to benefit from this.

That's not to say Clinton is without flaws.  None of us are.  We have to weigh the strengths and weaknesses in each candidate and figure out who will be the best president.  The Republicans are swift boating her flaws into capital crimes.

But her opponent's flaws are so numerable and egregious and his strengths are so few that leaders of the Republican party - including former Republican presidents - stayed away from the convention.  Clinton is one of the best qualified candidates we've ever had, yet much of the American public thinks she's a crook, and  one delegate at the Republican convention called for  a firing squad.  (Does he know that we don't use firing squads any more?)

But I would argue that Hillary's skills, like any woman who reaches the highest levels in her field, are at least 50% better than most males at this level and her heart, as the video below demonstrates, is in the right place. (Her opponent's heart?  Does he even have one?)  Her fight with Sanders was mainly about policy, particularly about economic policy - PPT and regulations of the financial industry.  I lean with Sanders on those issues.  And even though the emails show bias against Sanders, it's nothing like the bias against Trump inside the Republican National Committee was.

What's probably most galling for the Republicans is that they FAILED to stop Trump even while trying to change the rules to do so.  Meanwhile the Democrats' SUCCEEDED in stopping Sanders because their rules already included super delegates.  What I've seen revealed in the emails so far happens in every campaign.  Newsflash:  People in DNC had favorites among the candidates.  Is anyone really surprised?  Officials have to appear neutral, but they mostly know who they favor.  It's no surprise.  What's surprising is that the media is treating this like a major scandal.    In any case, Clinton's the candidate now and has to be the choice in November for and people with the USA's best interests at heart. (I'll give a pass to people living in states like Alaska where the outcome is clearly red or blue already.)

The faithful's minds are set - on all sides.   But the undecided and leaning folks are reachable.  . So while the Republicans make foibles into indictable offenses and launch a fleet of swift boats against Hillary Clinton, we need to share those tributes that show a different Clinton than the Republicans would have voters believe.  I urge you to watch this video and share it.



Meryl Streep tells us of the side of Hillary Clinton that we normally don't hear about - how she visits women leaders of grass roots organizations in all the countries she visited as Secretary of State, and how important that was for women everywhere.

[I proposed in a previous post that the Republican candidate's name should not be voiced at the Democratic convention this week.  I'm going to try to follow that suggestion here this week as well.  Nothing could disturb him more.]

[Sorry, reposting - Feedburner stuff.]

Trying To Catch The Rain

A brush fire was growing last Wednesday and folks living on the southern edge of town were starting to pack things as they cleared the brush around their homes and made other preparations to protect their homes.

Thursday morning we could smell the smoke in midtown Anchorage.  But it also rained some.  It rained again on Friday and Saturday.  But there wasn't a lot of rain.  Enough to give fire fighters the edge.  Today it rained on and off all day, some of the time hard.

And I tried to catch some of that hard rain with my camera.  Not very well.  Mostly after it hit the table on the deck.   But here's the evidence and one day I hope to show that I can look back with satisfaction when I've learned to do this better.  It gets a little  sharper if you click on it.

How About A Trumpless Democratic Convention?

I have two suggestions for the Democrats as they prepare for their convention next week.

1.  Go Trumpless

Trump has managed to get hours and hours of free media coverage for the last year.  The media has found his outrageousness both irresistible and profitable.

The Democrats shouldn't continue that.  'Trump' is a word that shouldn't be uttered once.  They can talk about about what they would do and how they would do it.  They don't have to spell out how different their vision is from Trump's.  Trust the viewers to fill it in themselves.

You know, nothing would upset Trump more than being totally ignored.  Well, they can't ignore him, but they don't have to mention him and that will have the same effect.  A Trump free media week will show Americans how wonderful that is.  Though by Thursday night, probably Trump will be trying to crash the convention just so someone has to say his name.


2.  Include the lowliest delegates in the prime time programing.

Trump said

"I alone can fix it."

Clinton belittled that idea today when introducing Tim Kaine.  Well, her nominating convention should demonstrate she really means it.  

I'd also suggest that instead of non-stop celebrity talking heads, they also let the convention delegates  be more than a mindless crowd of extras that cheers, boos, holds signs, and chants slogans.


Take some of that prime time to put the delegates in the spotlight.  Let them form small discussion groups and have the cameras follow real discussions of real issues by real people.  Highlight the voices of the people who are Clinton's partners in getting her elected.

Judge to defendant: "Come on. Jack off."

This fits in the "Not sure what to do with this" file.  I'm sure there are defiant and abusive defendants in court every day.  But this judge needs to real help.  The defendant is doing all he can to have some power in this situation and carrying it off.  What's the judge's excuse?


The defendant tells the judge he wants a new public defender because the one he has won't properly defend him unless the defendant lets the public defender give him a blow job.

From transcripts pp. 6-7

Most people would probably dismiss this as the defendant being disruptive, punishing his public defender, and making it up to get a different public defender.  And that might be the case in many even most cases like this.  (Actually, I have no idea how often something like this happens.)  But it seems to me that when someone makes a claim like this, it's up to the court to check.  We know that women's and children's claims of sexual abuse and  are true much more often than not.  The movie Spotlight highlights the investigation of the allegations of sexual abuse by the Catholic church in Boston.  If priests can abuse people in their care, why shouldn't a public defender?

And I realize that if the judge gives a week for an investigation, there will probably be a lot of defendants making similar kinds of claims.  But the American system of justice is supposed to be fair, and the right to an attorney shouldn't be dependent on sexual favors from the defendant.  Wealthy defendants' attorneys find all sorts of ways to delay proceedings.  The defendant's claim shouldn't just be dismissed.  Courts will just have to develop ways to vet their public defenders and to find ways to determine if defendants' claims are valid.  Maybe let defendants tape interactions with the public defender. (I know that will raise other issues, but I'm just brainstorming here.)

The defendant in this case remained relatively civil until it becomes clear the judge is not going to give him a different public defender or even take his claims seriously at all.  At the bottom of page seven he finally gives up on his request and responds to the judge with "Fuck you."  The judge finds the defendant in contempt and sentences him to twenty days in prison.  Then forty.  And then everything falls apart.

From transcripts page 8

Things deteriorate badly.  The defendant and the judge talk about dicks and butts and and various sex acts.  The judge tells the defendant he "looks like a queer" (page 10).

And here's the section quoted in the title.

I did check to see if this was for real or not.  There are a number of legitimate sites that have reported it.  Here's from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

I also tried to find reports of what has happened since this June 23, 2016 incident, but found nothing except reports on that day in court.  Though there was this plea from an attorney's website:

"The hearing escalated into murder threats against Judge Durham and his family, and unfortunately for the jurist, he made some comments that could land him in hot water with Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission. I truly hope nothing bad comes from this exchange. We’re all human, and when provoked by stupid, humans are prone to say stupid things and take stupid actions. As Judge Durham Jr. muses in the hearing, “You have a constitutional right to be a dumbass.” Both men were at somewhat less than their civil best last week while exercising this right. Let’s hope this moment of incivility doesn’t tarnish an otherwise fine judge’s career or cost him his job.?

The author of this piece is an attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is about 170 miles from Rome, Georgia.  Perhaps he's a friend Judge Durham, perhaps he just knows about him, perhaps he knows nothing about him and this is just a defense of judges in general, who, the author reminds us, are human beings and this one was pushed pretty hard.

I'm afraid this is more than a bad hair day.  I suspect there's more going on in the judge's life than has been apparent.   The judge was provoked, but judges are supposed to be trained in how to maintain decorum in the chambers.

And sometimes it's only when someone is under pressure that we see what they are truly like.  Sometimes.  I'm not saying that's true in this case.

Less than a month before this courtroom exchange, The Rome News Tribune had an upbeat article on Judge Durham, reflecting on his recent unopposed reelection and on the next four years on the bench.  It turns out Durham spent much of his childhood in Nigeria where his parents were missionaries. He was also asked what he liked and didn't like as a judge.

"Family violence restraining order petitions are generally his least favorites, because he’s seeing either a seriously bad situation or people stretching the truth just to get back at someone. “I’ve been known to call Thursday mornings the Jerry Springer Show,” Durham said about the slot earmarked for family violence hearings. He said he enjoys most of the other work, especially trials, because there is always something new that is going to walk in the door. Laughing again, Durham said that he enjoys trials because he doesn’t have to do as much work as the attorneys." 

NOTE:  This hearing was on June 17, 2016.  A Friday, not a Thursday.

Here's the whole transcript.   Based on the times listed on the transcripts, this all took place over eleven minutes, from 2:08 pm to 2:19 pm.

There is a section where the court reporter writes:

"THE COURT:  Yelling.  Yelling."

Not sure what that means.  I'm guessing the words were left out and she just wrote in that he was yelling.  Which does suggest that the transcripts tell us very little - we don't know how calm or excited either part is for the most part.  Though there are times when the judge seems to be stuttering and the defendant interrupts him.

I suspect this case will become a classic law school case study for maintaining courtroom decorum.  

Some of you are probably wondering why I'm even posting this.  As the first line says, I'm not quite sure what to do with this, I just know it's very significant.   I'm sure this is, in its outrageousness, an extreme example of poor judge courtroom control.  But I also suspect that this is not the only judge who's abusive in court.  And I suspect defendants represented by public defenders are more likely to experience such behavior than those represented by well paid attorneys.  As I say, I'm not sure what this all means, but I think documenting it is important.  And, no, I don't think it's because it gives me an excuse to delve into a sordid situation.   It's more the fact that this sort of language and exchange took place in one of the last bastions of civility and decorum in the US.