The Valley Viewpoint

Fuming from the stunning decision by prosecutors to drop charges in the “hoax” attack case against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the move Wednesday, saying all the evidence police collected against the TV star should be unsealed as the FBI opened a review of the disposition of the case.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of the criminal charges against Smollett, two law enforcement sources briefed on the matter told ABC News on Wednesday. The sources insisted it is not an investigation, but a “review.”

“He’s saying he’s innocent and his words aren’t true,” Emanuel told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America.” “They better get their story straight. This is actually making a fool of all of us.”

But Cook County State Attorney Kimberly Foxx, whose office dismissed the charges against Smollett, insisted that the actor did not receive any special treatment. She said Smollett was allowed to dispose of his case through an alternative prosecution program, just like 5,700 other people her office has charged with low-level felonies over the past two years.

In an interview with ABC News, Foxx said Smollett qualified for alternative prosecution because he doesn’t have a history of violence, lacks a criminal record and was charged with a class four felony, which is one step above a misdemeanor. She said her office would rather put resources towards prosecuting violent criminals.Smollett is African-American and openly gay. As soon as he reported his attack, members of the African-American and LGBT communities jumped to condemn it. Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris both called it “an attempted modern day lynching.” GLAAD issued a statement: “We condemn these despicable acts, as well as the racism and homophobia that drove them.”

Everyone is using their identity politics to frame this story for their own purposes, instead of pointing out the real rotten tooth in this national grimace.

Lying.

Bold, bald-faced, bang-your-fists-and-swear-it’s-real lying.

The biggest victim here isn’t race, sexual preference or a political party. The biggest victim is the truth.

Advocacy organizations, politicians and fellow actors who were loudly holding up Smollett to bolster their positions and are now saying, essentially, “Well, whatever he did, let’s not lose sight of the real issues …” have already lost sight of the real issue.

We can’t lie like that. We can’t abuse people’s trust like that. In a world where video can be edited, sound can be deleted, and we increasingly cannot believe our eyes or ears, the real issue, the greatest threat of all, is when we cannot believe each other.

I just finished reading a book of poetry, ‘Major and Minor Chords – My Life in Poetry’ by Jesuit PJ Murray.
Now, if you’re anything like me, reading poetry, when I was in school, was akin to trying to mix cement with my eyelashes. Then, I discovered this wonderful collection.
Literature; well written words, not only need to be read, they must be shared. Pick up this book, it’s well worth it.

Of all the titles that I’ve had, the one that I’m most honored to have is ‘Dad’.

For all the guys out there who are lucky enough to be a Dad; particularly a Dad to sons, this article, by Emilie Kao of the Heritage Foundation is worth reading.

In the wake of the Parkland massacre, the age-old question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” has a newfound relevance.
As another mass school shooting stunned Americans, it is time to talk about not just how to protect students from shooters, but also about what must happen so that fewer students become shooters in the first place.
It is crucial to talk about how more American children can grow up with the emotional, psychological, and spiritual security that comes from relationships where one is deeply cared for, connected, and known.
For what lies inside so many school shooters is a deep void of identity and relationship that they tragically seek to fill through nihilistic violence.
There is a sobering theme repeated over and over in the biographies of school shooters—the fatherlessness of a broken or never formed family.
Among the 25 most-cited school shooters since Columbine, 75 percent were reared in broken homes. Psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, a pre-eminent expert on school shooters, found that most came from incredibly broken homes of not just divorce and separation, but also infidelity, substance abuse, criminal behavior, domestic violence, and child abuse.
After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, scholar Brad Wilcox called attention to the work of criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, which found the absence of fathers to be one of the “most powerful predictors of crimes .” He explained that fathers are role models for their sons who maintain authority and discipline, thereby helping them develop self-control and empathy toward others, key character traits lacking in violent youth.
The late rapper Tupac Shakur said, “I know for a fact that had I had a father, I’d have some discipline. I’d have more confidence. Your mother can’t calm you down the way a man can. You need a man to teach you how to be a man.” Shakur, who was murdered in 1996, started hanging out with gangs because he wanted to belong to a family.
In addition to structure and discipline, a boy’s relationship with his father can be a profound source of identity—or not. Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the “The Boy Crisis,” says that when a boy asks “Who am I?” the answer is that his identity is comprised of half his dad and half his mom. If he thinks his father has abandoned him, he fears he is not. Boys who do not have a strong relationship with their fathers may lack a model of healthy masculinity. Many of the school shooters struggled with a sense of “damaged masculinity” and sought to become “ultramasculine.” Langman says that at the end of this spectrum is “getting a gun to suddenly have power.”
In fact, the fathers of three of the most infamous school shooters were absent from their sons’ lives. The father of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, had not seen his son in two years and later told reporters he wished his son had never been born. The adoptive father of Nikolas Cruz died when Cruz was 5 years old. And the father of 6-year-old Dedrick Owens, the country’s youngest school shooter, was in jail when his son killed his first grade classmate. Dedrick Owens’ father has said that he suspects his son’s crime was a reaction to his absence.
Since the 1965 Moynihan report, the breakdown of the American family has been hotly debated. Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s finding that fatherlessness would lead to poorer outcomes for African-American children was published at a time when only 25 percent of African-American households were led by a single parent. Today, 24 percent of white non-Hispanic families are headed by a single parent and the rate has reached 66 percent among African-Americans. If we don’t reverse current trends on marriage, the number of fatherless children will only grow.
Ultimately, if we make fatherlessness and family breakdown a partisan issue, we all lose. Both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush promoted a National Fatherhood Initiative in their administrations. Because strong marriages promote strong bonds between fathers and their children, the Trump administration should emphasize both.A good starting place would be to reduce the marriage penalties that have been built into our welfare system. A next step would be to elevate the contributions of ordinary men doing the extraordinary work of fathering. And if we directed 1 percent of the attention and media coverage we give to athletes, musicians, and movie stars toward fathers, perhaps more boys would grow up seeing them as role models. President Donald Trump, his Cabinet, Congress, and other leaders can also use their bully pulpits to lead in this direction.
And the good news is that communities are devising creative ways to help make up for the absences of dads. One example is in Dallas, where Billy Earl Dade Middle School held its annual “Breakfast with Dads.” To ensure that all 150 male students who wanted a mentor would have one, an organizer put out a request on a Facebook page for 50 “volunteer fathers.” Nearly 600 men from all different walks of life and careers answered the call.
We cannot provide every fatherless boy with a dad, but we can start by respecting the unique role that fathers play in the lives of boys and encouraging more men to step into the lives of children who need a male role model.
To understand the brokenness of our children, Americans must take a deeper look at the brokenness of our families. We must do this together. We must be the keepers of all our country’s sons so that they can grow up to be one another’s. If we are going to prevent the next Parkland, we need to take seriously the need all our young boys and men have for a dad.

https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-crisis-fatherless-shooters

The column, written by George Will,  has to be read.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/will031419.php3?fbclid=IwAR2o4S3phooNUEx7FI9gdUyHIbwj42zEcNV9WaREouMP2pu-H0QNuan7pP4

So today, my daughter decides to prank me while she is on a business trip in Amsterdam. Prior to her leaving, I ran through the list. Where are you staying? What’s your schedule? Don’t go alone to the city’s Red Light district………now, Jen has lived in Europe when she was a college student….the closest I’ve ever been to Europe was the last time I was on the No. 7 train out of Flushing. ‘Relax, Dad’ was all she said. I smiled but still tried to adjust my schedule to hers, so I could ‘keep track’ of her. Today, my phone rings. ‘Dad,……..I’ve been TAKEN’….”. While my heart jumped through my chest, Jen laughed hysterically and said that I’m no Liam Neeson.
Very funny…..
Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Jen was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything. As a parent, you experience the most of everything. The most love, the most fear, the most hurt and the most tired, the most of every emotion. One, day, my daughter will know all about this when she has a kid. Now, all I have to do is wait for her return flight….and not watch TAKEN 2……

So this afternoon, at work, my colleague Jessica asked how long it’s been since I graduated high school. “43 years”was my reply, quickly followed by my statement that there are more shorter days ahead of me than the longer ones from my past. She was more than kind and told me that wasn’t so until I reminded her that in 43 years, if I’m still around, I’d be a young 103 year old. I got to thinking about my age now. Sixty is a big round number, seeming to mark, once and for all, the difference between middle age and the thing that comes after that. Who else turned 60 last year? Madonna, in August. Prince and Michael Jackson would have, too, if they’d made it. As for me, I had always hoped I would arrive at this age with equal measures of joy and acceptance — grateful for what has mostly been a happy life, even if wistful that there are surely more days behind me now than ahead. I had imagined myself being 60 sitting in an Adirondack chair, listening to all my intolerable 1970s music while my loved ones expressed their adoration, Cat Stevens-rock notwithstanding. I offer the following additional observations about what it means to be 60 now.   First off, siblings are great, but never forget that sometimes what you need most are your cousins.  Dogs continue to amaze me. A dog loves a person the way people love each other only while in the grip of new love: with intense, unwavering focus, attentive to every move the beloved makes, unaware of imperfections, desiring little more than to be close, to be entwined, to touch and touch and touch.  Nothing tastes as good as being healthy feels, except for maybe fresh pizza hot out of a wood-fired oven, garnished with kosher salt and freshly chopped basil leaves.  It is unlikely you will ever speak a foreign language as well as you did in high school. ( Father Aracich, my Jesuit Italian teacher from high school, would tell you that I never could speak ANY language).  It costs nothing to forgive people who have wronged you. Forever bearing the burden of anger, on the other hand, will eat you alive.  It is impossible to lose weight unless you also stop drinking or get really sick. If you have writer’s block, lower your standards, and then revise.  You never stop missing your parents, no matter how old you get, no matter how long they have been gone. Or, for that matter, your children.  Admit when you are wrong. The older you get, the more frequently you’ll have the opportunity.  Have a sense of humor about everything, including the things that are the saddest.

And Jessica, you’ll be a ‘young 80’ in just 43 years!

Jefferson Crowther, the father of 9/11 hero Welles Crowther, a Boston College graduate, known as “the man in the red bandana,” died Feb. 13. He was 73. The cause was prostate cancer, said Alison Crowther, his wife of 47 years. He is also survived by his daughters, Honor Fagan and Paige Charbonneau, and their families. Jeff and Alison Crowther repeatedly shared their son’s story of heroism on Sept. 11, 2001, to inspire leadership and character development. Welles Crowther died in the Sept. 11th attack on the World Trade Center. They helped establish the Red Bandanna Project and a family foundation, the Welles Remy Crowther Charitable Trust, toward that mission.

“He was a great protector,” Alison Crowther said of her husband.”He was always taking care of me and our family, a wonderful father and husband. He was a gentleman with a wonderful sense of humor, which is what attracted me to him. He was very funny.”

Tom Sipos of WKIP and I had the opportunity of interviewing Alison Crowther, the mother of Wells, who was a 9/11 hero, on Tom’s Hudson Valley Live Show last year. With the news  of the death of Well’s Dad, I wanted to attach our interview here. Give it a listen and say a prayer for Wells and his Dad. The heavens are rejoicing with the reunion of Wells and his Dad.

Well, St. Patrick’s Day is almost here. My grandfather, Patrick McLoughlin, left Ireland as a young man to seek, what he felt, would be a better life here in the US. Family stories, told to me as a child, portrayed a young man, the eldest in his family, being walked to the train by his mother who watched him depart. He would return to Ireland just once more many years later. What must the day he first left been like? My grandfather never talked about it. For he had an immigrant’s heart. That heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland. Still, this St. Patrick’s Day, I wonder what that day at the train station was like for a mother and for a son. My friend, Chris Brown, sung about this and today I want to share it because I think it’s what my grandfather’s family said to him the day he left Castlebar. Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody!

More than three decades of Mafia peace has been shattered by the murder last night of Gambino crime family boss Francesco ‘Franky Boy’ Cali. Cali, 53, was shot six times and run over by a pickup truck outside his redbrick house in the upmarket Todt Hill neighborhood of Staten Island. His wife and young children were inside the house and one man, believed to be a family member, ran outside, collapsed and cried, ‘Papa! Papa!’ The media is a buzz with this news. Cali’s murder is the first hit on a Mafia boss since John Gotti arranged the assassination of then-Gambino head Paul Castellano in 1985. Oh, boy, a Mafia war is back after a 30 year hiatus. This love affair with ‘all things gangster’ is a phenomena that fascinates me. When I was a kid, the word was “hoodlum” or, depending on when you grew up, “mobster” or “gangster” or “crook.” It was uttered in anger by your mother (“Don’t talk like a gangster”) or your father (“Do that again and I’ll smack you, you little hoodlum”). It was never a term of endearment. And never something to aspire to. That has changed. And while I can’t prove it, I’m pretty sure it started 45 years ago, when a movie called “The Godfather” was released. Suddenly, the bad guys were the good guys. The lowlifes led the high life. The dark and violent was the cool and interesting. I once knew a family from Mahopac who built their lives around this movie. To the point where their dog was named ‘Vito’ and Sunday night dinners at their house was recast as a dysfunctional brood with dialogue from this movie and “Goodfellas,” “Casino,” “Donnie Brasco,” “Scarface,” “A Bronx Tale,” “Analyze This,” being used to help them navigate through life. When many of us revere the “family” story of the mob, it’s something different. Remember, the love affair that began with “The Godfather” and continues on with these types of movies and TV shows overlooks one small but important detail: Given who they are and what they’ve done, almost everyone on these movies if they stepped out of the set and into the real world, would be in the same place. Prison. Sorry, my Mahopac friends, “I’ll never take sides against the family again.”

The college admissions scheme revealed Tuesday is the largest of its kind ever prosecuted, federal prosecutors said, and features 50 defendants across six states, millions of dollars in illegally funneled funds and a handful of the country’s most selective universities. But at its core, the alleged scheme is remarkably simple — and brazen. Cheat on standardized tests. Bribe the people who decide which students get admitted. All the while pretending that money was for charity. This story got me thinking. Last summer, I meet a high school senior named Samantha who was working as hostess in a restaurant that I frequent when I can get out. She noticed I was wearing a Boston College tee shirt. “Hey! did you go to BC?” “No, my daughter graduated from BC,” I told her. Samantha went on to say that BC was her top choice and that she really hoped to get in. I told her that Jennifer enjoyed her time in Boston and I really hoped that she would get to go there. We exchanged emails and I left the restaurant being caught up in her excitement. I received an email from Samantha telling me that she didn’t get in. She was crushed and her disappointment was heart wrenching. She also told me that she was accepted to other schools, but BC was where she wanted to go. I told her that she shouldn’t fret because her BC rejection letter came in a thin envelope. I reminded her, as best I could, that she will survive, maybe even prosper. It seems incredibly hard to get into colleges these days. You wouldn’t think so, given what they charge. You can run an airport on their room and board bills. Yet last year places like Princeton and Brown had nearly 20 percent increases in applicants from the year before. The University of Chicago jumped 42 percent. You’d think they were giving away diplomas, instead of asking for your house, your keys and your first-born. But even worse than the financial burden is the implied standards that this process is setting for kids like Samantha. Today, excellence isn’t enough. Gandhi would be put on a waiting list. When I was applying to college, I needed good grades, a decent test score, and one Jesuit willing to forget the time I pulled a fire alarm and write my recommendation. I was done with the application process in 15 minutes. Today, you need to cure cancer. Preferably before your junior year. And today’s application itself? Some universities use the “common app,” which permits millions of kids to stuff their credentials into the same essay question. But let’s talk about today’s application questions. They ask you to write about an experience that changed or influenced you. And instead of writing what really comes to mind (a first kiss after football practice; buying your first beer at a bar on 7th Ave before a high school dance; the time a wall collapsed on Luis Franco in history class at Xavier), kid’s today feel compelled to write about saving manatees from extinction off the Gulf Coast. Even if you never did save manatees. Because you heard about some kid who actually did save manatees, and he also carried 100 pairs of pajamas to victims of Hurricane Katrina, and he also plays jazz bass (upright) and in his spare time finished a sequel to “Catcher in the Rye.” Oh, and he scored 36 on his ACT. I guess I want to say to all the Samantha’s of the world – relax. Because here’s the thing. When you get older, you realize college doesn’t make you, you make college. Many an Ivy Leaguer is now lying on a couch, and many a community college grad is running a profitable company. Remember Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting” who taunts a Harvard student by saying in 50 years he’ll realize he “dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a (bleeping) education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library”? So believe in yourself. You can springboard from any decent school. Open those mailboxes. And if choice No. 1 doesn’t come through, just remember, even Michael Jordan watched two players picked ahead of him in the NBA draft. And, like me, you can always wear whatever college tee shirt you want to……I love my BC one and I’m saving up for a Stanford Rugby Shirt this fall.

With all the recent speculation about whether or not Joe Biden will run for president, I ran across this headline quote from my friend, the late Roger Ailes.

I met Roger almost 10 years ago through my work on a political campaign in Putnam County, NY. My candidate was in a nasty race and our campaign was placing many ads in the Putnam County Courier; a publication run by Roger’s wife, Beth. From time to time, I wrote some editorials that Beth was kind enough to publish. One Friday afternoon I, along with another campaign volunteer, Vinny, a retired NYPD officer, were at the paper talking to the editor. Vinny was trying to make a point that the opposition candidate was doing things that he felt the paper should be calling him out on. The conversation, at times, became heated and then the front door opened. ‘I saw the lights on and was wondering what was going on’, Roger said as he walked in. ‘What’s up?” he asked, walking into the office with his one security escort. Vinny, unbelievably, not knowing who Roger was, proceeded to grab Roger by the arm and promptly told him what he felt the paper should be doing. My eyes became wide when I saw Roger’s security escort begin to approach Vinny. Roger waived him off and proceeded for the next 40 minutes to engage Vinny in a conversation about our candidate’s campaign. He was animated, knowledgeable, funny, irreverent and completely down to earth. While Roger was completely engaged in this conversation, I grabbed the latest edition of the paper that had one of my editorials and I sheepishly asked Roger if he would be kind enough to autograph it for me. He did. I still have it. Vinny ended the conversation by saying something that I will always remember, ‘Roger, he said, ‘you just don’t F*^#Kin’ get it’…….Roger let out a howl of laughter and we left. A couple of weeks later I was called by the paper’s editor and told Roger wanted to meet me. I went back to the papers’ office and a friendship began. Over the next several years, Roger had me over for dinner, coffee in his office in NY and it was not unusual to get a phone call from him at my office which always had my co-workers in amazement when they would ask who was calling for me and he’d say, ‘It’s Roger Ailes’. He wanted to talk about local politics. Sometimes, it was just to extend an invitation for dinner. For a guy on the national stage, he took the time to know, and understand, the local issues. He loved Garrison. He loved taking his son, Zach, to local nurseries for plants and flowers. At the risk of embarrassing Zach, I once saw Roger give Zach a kiss goodnight and heard him say, “I love you, Peanut”. He knew that I had a friend who lost a son in the 9/11 attacks and once, when this friend was invited to the White House during the beginning days of the Obama administration, Roger wanted to know what went on. He wanted the story. ‘What did Obama say…what did Holder say?’ I think he got a kick at still being able to deliver a news story like the best of those correspondents that worked for him. The one time I asked him for anything was when my daughter, in her 3rd year of college, needed an internship. Roger came through and Jenny began at Fox News. Jen still tells the story of being completely overwhelmed one day and running into Roger in the elevator. Stammering to introduce herself, Roger just looked at her as said. ‘I know who are you are. Keep up the good work’ as he got off the elevator. Later that summer, Roger got a kick out of my daughter making friends with the Fox News cafeteria folks who always, after swearing her to secrecy, would give her the same meals that Rupport Murdoch had them prepare for him. Buffalo Chicken Wings were his favorite. There’s so much that has been said and will be said about Roger Ailes. Once, I asked him why he continued to work so hard after having done it all. He looked at me and said the he wanted to show all Americans, simply, what their responsibility is to be Americans. We could all use Roger’s clarity these days.  I miss my friend.