Harwood "Bill Bannister died Tuesday February 9th. He was 95 years old and my former law partner as well as my mentor. Bill had been in a major Seattle law firm and he and his attorney wife Nancy, decided to move to Skagit County. He ran for county prosecutor in 1948 and always said how thankful he was that he lost the race because it gave him free publicity and he wouldn’t have liked the job had he won. He…
The Player by Philip Seib is a book about Christy Mathewson (1880 – 1925) who is regarded as baseball’s first superstar. This turn of the century player was among the initial group of five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. The others were Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson. He played over ninety years ago but there are sports historians who still write about him. They called him "Big Six (six feet tall…
Peter J. Daly is a Catholic priest, in Prince Frederick, Maryland who recently wrote about what he had learned after twenty four years of being a priest in the Catholic Northwest Progress newspaper http:www.seattlearch.org Here is part of what he had to say about what he had learned: "I’ve learned to be more accepting of people.I take them as God sends them. We are all works in progress. This insight has made me more compassionate. Twenty five years ago I…
The 1948 presidential election is considered by most historians as one of the greatest upsets in American presidential history. Harry Truman defeated the highly favored Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The surprise victory happened after Harry started a 31,000 mile train trip across the country in an effort to defeat the clear front runner Dewey. Truman delivered hundreds of "off the cuff" talks to crowds along the trip. He was often greeted with cries of "Give ‘em hell, Harry" after…
Alison Kairis is my grand daughter who is in her second year at Gonzaga University. She is an outstanding athlete, a great student and an outstanding human being. You can take it from me as a very unbiased and objective source of information. So, you'll understand and forgive my adding the following to this blog….. AREA RESIDENT NAMED TO PRESIDENT’S LIST AT GONZAGA UNIVERSITY Alison L. Kairis, a Sophomore from Bellevue, WA, was among the 987 undergraduate students named…
How should Americans and, in particular, lawyers, react to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Alito shaking his head and clearly mouthing the words "It’s not true" during the State of the Union Address by the President of the United States? It happened when the President said "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests….." Suppose you and I were in the…
Jason Linkins has a great post in the Huffington Report "Comic Strip Artfully Dissects The Media's Obsession with Polls" posted January 26th. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/comic-strip-artfully-diss_n_437345.html . The comic strip which clearly illustrates what is wrong with almost all of media political "polls" can be found at this link. Thanks to PhDcomics.com for creating it. Volume 44 Number 2 International Society of Barristers Quarterly has reproduced a talk given by Will Durst, political humorist. Here are just a few of his comments: "We have to remember William Henry…
The classic 1966 movie Faherheit 451 is based on the novel by Ray Bradbury and is being replayed in real life in Ashville, North Carolina. According to The American Trial Lawyer Magazine, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church held a book burning on Halloween. They decided they would burn "Satan's works" and burn the evil books no one should read. These books, however, included many Bibles that were not the King James Version (described as "Satan's Bible's"), books of "heretics" like Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and Catholic popes as well as many…
We flew to Scottsdale on Thursday. It wasn't too bad coming in, just a little bumpy, but there was a down pour of continuous rain once we were on the ground. Our friend, Art Swanson, was driving over from the Palm Springs area to go with me to the car auctions this weekend. When he arrived, he looked like someone who had faced death and survived. Highway 10 from California, he said, was just plain awful. He went through high winds that moved his car (and…
Permit me one more comment about the Massachusetts election. Drew Westen has artfully expressed exactly how I feel right now about President Obama's refusal to put on the political gloves. Here's part of what he writes in the Huffington Report http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ and I think he says it so well: "The President's steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in…
