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Marsico, Rozman and Morris for Dauphin County Judge

If you consider experience and qualifications alone when selecting a county judge, then there are only three logical people to get your vote on May 16th, 2017:

Ed Marsico

Michael Rozman

Royce Morris

Ed Marsico has been Dauphin County’s district attorney for a long time, so long that I have lost count of the years. During his time as the chief law enforcement official for Dauphin County, Ed has always struck a balance of fairness and restraint, when lesser people would have given in to anger over some of the heinous crimes committed in the Harrisburg area. That always struck me as the sign of a well developed personality, because man, I did not feel that way about some of the scumbag criminals he prosecuted. I wanted a public stoning. Ed pursued justice. Without any stain on his long career as a visible and scrutinized public servant, Ed Marsico is the most qualified candidate for county judge in this race and one of the most qualified we have ever had. He has earned your vote. (Ed has done a great job as DA, and I and many others would have liked to have had him run for Pennsylvania Attorney General, but Ed is devoted to Dauphin County).

Michael Rozman has served as deputy district attorney under Marsico for a long time. Often laboring away out of the limelight, Rozman has racked up some of the greatest experience any lawyer can have. Rozman’s mastery of forensics, crime scene investigations, police interviews and interrogations, and knowing how to distinguish a bad boy from a true bad guy puts him head and shoulders above any of the other candidates, except for his boss, Ed Marsico. Again, if experience and outstanding qualification matters to you, if you want justice and not politics in the court room, and if you want to be judged by someone who has had decades of experience dealing with courts, criminal matters, justice, and police work, then Michael Rozman has earned your vote.

Royce Morris is also exceptionally qualified to be judge, and he is the Yin to the Yang of Marsico and Rozman. Morris has been one of Central Pennsylvania’s leading criminal defense lawyers for a long, long time. His view of criminal law is seasoned with the understanding of the behavior and reasons why certain bad things happen and how people either purposefully or mistakenly end up in the criminal justice system. Royce has received accolades from judges, jurors, prosecutors, defendants and police officers for the careful way he has handled some of the region’s toughest defense cases. Again, if experience is what you care about, and you want to be judged by someone who is not a party hack or a devotee of political climbing, then Royce Morris earns your vote.

It is true that there are other candidates for the three vacant seats on the Dauphin County court. But none of those candidates has anywhere near the hard-bitten experience dealing with tough crimes and careful analysis like Marsico, Rozman, and Morris have had.

The quality difference between the top three candidates and the others is measured in light years, which is to say an enormous gap, not even close.

Yes, it is true that a Republican political endorsement was made for this seat, which benefited one of the other candidates, and while I am no fan of political endorsements in general, if there is one place where a political endorsement does not belong, where it actually indicates weakness and not strength, it is during the selection of a judge. Politics has no business entering the court room or the judge selection process, and only you, the informed voter can stop it.

About eight years ago now-Judge Andrew Dowling was not endorsed by the Dauphin GOP, and he was told not to run, and yet he went on to win his seat on the court, overcoming what is obviously a very shallow and judicially meaningless political process. A better process would be to rank judicial candidates by a letter system, or by gradations of qualification (e.g. Highly Qualified, Qualified, Not Qualified). That election, when Dowling overcame the political hackery, was a refreshing reminder of the wisdom and power of the citizen voter.

Three years ago outstanding judicial candidate Bill Tully was passed over by the Dauphin GOP, and another, very young and less qualified candidate was endorsed. He was closer to the political establishment. The voters rejected that set-up, too, and sent Tully to be the next Dauphin County judge. That election, when Tully overcame the political hackery, was a refreshing reminder of the wisdom and power of the citizen voter.

Readers may ask why I write these essays about candidates and politics, and I will tell you it is simply because I have always had a passion for good government and fairness. Believe me, I make no friends writing these things, I receive no money and actually have lost business because of my opinions. And I have garnered some enemies along the way, too. But if Americans are not brave enough to stand up for what they deserve, then they get really bad government filled with political hacks who care nothing for the welfare of their fellow citizens. Maybe I am brave, maybe I am foolish, but I stand up nonetheless, and I tell it like I see it, and I tell it from the perspective of the person in the street.

Vote for Marsico, Rozman, and Morris, and you will get judges we can be proud of. That is my opinion.

New York Times Invents Time Machine

The New York Times was once the flagship news source in the whole world. It was the standard by which all other news sources and newspapers were judged.

What happens when a trusted news source becomes an active partisan in politics is inevitable: The credibility banked over decades is spent in a fury of attacks, which then blow away like dust after the contest is ended.

Partisans of all sorts inevitably find themselves clawing for survival, as it is the nature of choosing artificial sides in a world of holism. Sliding over the cliff, partisans act like a drowning victim on the way down. They’ll do anything to keep from going under, no matter how futile or self-defeating. It’s like using the wood from your home’s walls to run the fireplace.

So back in January of this year, the NYT ran headlines about how Trump was wiretapped. Why not? The NYT was one of the partisan proponents alleging an official investigation into Trump, and wiretaps are part of those kinds of investigations. The NYT was doing its best to damage Trump’s credibility, his standing, his ability to act as president. The NYT was trying to delegitimize Trump, and reporting that he had been wiretapped had all the trappings of a bad guy being surveilled by official law enforcement good guys.

Fast forward a couple months, and now “wiretap” has a whole new meaning: Today it means that the Obama administration illegally wiretapped and conducted illegal domestic spying against political candidate Trump. We now know there was no investigation of Trump, ever. But we also know there was eavesdropping aka wiretapping of Trump. The leaked transcripts of his calls prove it.

In this context, “wiretap” sounds awful, even damning when an Obama ally like the NYT reports it, and if you are in the business of bashing Trump and protecting Obama, which the NYT is, then you certainly don’t want to support evidence of the greatest political scandal since Watergate.

So the clever NYT invented a time machine. They went back in time to their January 2017 headlines that screamed “WIRETAP” and digitally altered them, on their website. No kidding. I do not lie. Check it out.

They “fixed” the NYT headlines, which might have a double meaning that applies here quite well. The NYT “fixed” its own headlines from months ago, so that going forward it would appear that the NYT had never said that Trump was wiretapped by Obama. Because now that sounds like an admission that Obama was conducting his illegal domestic spying on a US citizen and politician. The NYT retroactively changed its own history to support the narrative it currently promotes.

Being partisan, and not a news organization, the NYT will do whatever it can to support its allies (Obama) and damage its enemies (Trump, America, traditional values, Christianity, etc.), so the record has been forged to preserve a current version of events that are most favorable to Obama.

Now the forged January 2017 NYT headlines say that Trump’s name came up in “data intercepts” conducted by the NSA while spying on Russian officials stationed here in America.

Data intercepts. Doesn’t that sound a lot more acceptable, more palatable? A lot less invasive? A lot more normal than the actual spying via wiretaps we witnessed going on against Trump by the US government under Obama’s stewardship?

Like a drowning man, the NYT is going down the tubes. Its credibility is shot, gone, spent wildly like a drunken sailor during the recent political contest which saw Trump elected over the NYT’s favored Clinton. Trying to alter what it wrote months ago is simply fakery, forgery, really, and the NYT has been caught red-handed doing what it would never allow anyone else to do: Go back in time and re-invent reality to fit today’s immediate purposes.

If this isn’t fake news and alternative facts, then what is? But this is surely news.