James M. Redwine

News Media

The Public Forum

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I have subscribed to The Posey County News and its progenitors for about forty years. At the request of the then editor and owner, Jim Kohlmeyer, in 1990 I began writing “Gavel Gamut”. Current editor Dave Pearce continued to publish my column after he and his wife Connie took over the paper. Neither Jim nor Dave nor Connie ever sought to censor any of the more than 1,000 columns I have written.

Gentle Reader, you are undoubtedly aware of how rare it has become for news outlets to provide a true forum for the exchange of differing views. The Posey County News provides such a forum. The Posey County News is a beacon to the First Amendment at a time that such beacons of illumination are under attack from several powerful and diverse sources. Our republic will not survive as the America our Founders envisioned if our citizens cannot freely express conflicting views, especially on deeply felt issues. As newspapers throughout our country continue to be subsumed by major news outlets, we need more than ever the courage of such local papers as The Posey County News.

Our republic’s free flow of ideas has been the major driver of our desire for “a more perfect union”. There was a time only 21-year-old, white, male citizens could vote. Due to the most vigorous of public debates, now 18-year-old citizens can not only be sent to war, they can vote on who sends them. My first vote for president was when I turned 21 even though I had already earned my honorable discharge from the Air Force.

My grandmother could not vote until 1921 after millions of Americans had demonstrated for her right to do so. It took a Civil War to get Blacks citizenship and many Native Americans are still in a struggle for the right to self-determination; but public outcries are forcing progress.

Therefore, when I opened my October 15, 2025 edition of my Posey County News and saw that Reverend Norman Martin had written a respectful and measured disagreement to one of my columns I was elated. There were no aspersions or threats, just calm opposing views. Thank you, Reverend, for reading my column. I am truly grateful you and I both have the right and, thanks to The Posey County News, the ability to publicly state our views without fear or expectation of favor.

We are all aware of our current climate of uncivil behavior among citizens of differing viewpoints. It may just be my age but I believe our culture was at one time able to discuss without cussing and disagree without canceling. Reverend Martin and I may never have the opportunity to have a cup of coffee and vigorously and respectfully exchange views, but thanks to one of America’s bedrock institutions, The Posey County News, if we ever have the chance, I bet we can do so.

News On Our Doorsteps

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According to our new Bible, the Internet, local, independent newspapers are rapidly going the way the American bison did in the 19th century. I researched these facts via the Internet. The last time I entered a public library was about the time Ted Turner unleashed CNN in 1980. However, the last time I received a non-amalgamated view of the news was only today when my October 01 and October 08, 2025 editions of The Posey County News arrived in my post office box.

Some cynics might opine that my view of our fine local newspaper is colored by the fact this column appears every week. Maybe so, but I submit my long-time personal friends, Editors and Owners Connie Redman Pearce and Dave Pearce, are upholding one of America’s essential building blocks of our republic.

At a time when Rodney King’s 1992 plea of, “Can’t we all just get along?”, is belied by the facts of societal anger and hate-speech, America needs its local newspapers to help bind us together in spite of strongly held opposing views. Talking heads on television or Facebook might as well be artificially unintelligently generated. We do not know nor can we evaluate their information. But in local newspapers writers are both known and accountable. We can weigh the pros and cons.

I have been writing the “Gavel Gamut” column since 1990. Over 1,000 of my columns have appeared in Dave and Connie’s paper and not once have they censored, or approved of, one word. I write what I think and it appears for the reader’s analysis, acceptance, rejection or lack of interest.

On the Opinion Page, Dave and Connie explicitly state the content of the columns and cartoons are solely those of the contributors. When I saw the cartoon by Joe Heller in the October 08 edition about “local news” and “community spirit” and the October 01 cartoon by Andy Singer about America’s shameful abetting of the Zionist genocide against Palestinians, I knew the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and Will Rogers was still vibrant.

Thank you, Connie and Dave, for helping to preserve one of our essential liberties!

Presumed Mentally Ill

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Luigi Mangione is presumed by the Manhattan New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg to have murdered United Healthcare Chief Executive Officer Brian Thompson and has had him indicted by a Grand Jury for First Degree Murder. If the state does not presume Mangione guilty, it should not have charged him. Of course, the generic legal system is supposed to presume Mangione innocent, good luck with that, but it’s a good theory.

As for me, I know only what CNN, MSNBC and FOX News tell me about the case of December 04, 2024. Therefore, based on my experience with cable news, I conclude I should not presume anything except that Mr. Thompson was shot in the back by a masked person; after all, I have seen that in countless showings on television with my own eyes. And even Mr. Thompson’s identification, medical condition and employment are only known to me via hearsay. Now with AI, even my eyes cannot be afforded unquestioned reliability. The general public has no legal obligation to presume anything unless they happen to be selected to serve on a jury that may eventually try Mangione.

As for Mr. Mangione’s new attorney in his New York case, she has been described by the media as “high powered” and high profile. Attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo is either Clarence Darrow or Shakespeare’s Shylock if one pays heed to the national media. Regardless, before she agreed to represent Mangione she had publicly opined on mental illness as a defense Mangione might advance. Now, should she decide to appear in Court for Mangione, she might advance in the case the theory that Mangione suffered from mental illness at the time of the shooting; i.e., that the evidence proves it is more likely than not at the time of the shooting Mangione suffered from a mental illness and the shooting was done as a result of that mental illness.

I, nor you either Gentle Reader, is in a position to assign legal liability to Mangione. Under our system of justice as governed by the law of New York state, a judge or jury may end up deciding whether Mr. Mangione is legally responsible for Mr. Thompson’s death. Each of our fifty states has its own statutory scheme to address criminal liability for those who claim their otherwise criminal actions should be processed as a case of diminished responsibility. Each state’s system is both factually and medically sensitive and requires that one charged with a crime first raise the defense of diminished capacity via a pleading filed before the Court and then carry the burden of proving that defense by a preponderance of the evidence.

The presumption in criminal cases is that one charged with a crime did not act as a result of diminished responsibility and that the defendant did understand what they were doing and had the mental ability to conform their actions to the law. The burden of proof on the issue of diminished responsibility, by a preponderance of the evidence, is upon the defendant. The law’s requirement that a possibly mentally ill person must prove his or her mental illness, is the only way our law has so far found to process the mental illness defense. I confess I do not see how society could carry such a burden and still process the countless cases such a defense might engender. Therefore, the burden to prove mental illness at the time of the crime must rest on the defendant.

If Mangione should be found by a Judge or Jury to have committed the shooting and that he was of legally diminished capability when he did so, the State of New York will have the burden of incarcerating him in a medical facility until he is “cured” or until he passes away. Regardless, the legal system will be obligated to process the case pursuant to legal and medical statutory requirements. Also, no matter how the case is finally resolved, I predict about as many people will be aggrieved as will be happy.

The Crusade Charade

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The Crusades were the outgrowth of many factors but they are generally categorized as a series of wars between European Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims occurring from 1096 to 1291 AD involving competing claims over the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem. The catalyst for the first Crusade was a call to Christians made by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in France in November 1095. Urban declared that God had willed Christians to oust Muslims from the sacred sites. Urban promised remission of sins for any Christian who died in this vital service of Christ. Thousands of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and others “took up the cross.”

Later in the New World, priests, clerics and politicians and plain Americans have spent from the 15th century to 2024 spreading the gospel at home and continuing to attempt to control the beliefs and behaviors of Middle Easterners. Manifest Destiny was based on the premise that the god of Christians had ordained that America must eliminate paganism and not commit the sin of omitting to develop the land. Such “crusades” as the Trail of Tears were the outgrowth of European immigrants and their descendants’ beliefs that their god had ordained that America was the Promised Land for Caucasian Christians and that Native Americans had to be evicted, killed or converted to Christianity. This ingrained racial memory from 1492 until today may influence the justification for our invasions into the Muslim Middle East. Just as Native Americans had to be destroyed to save them, Muslims are still the enemies of Christ who must be saved from their misguided faith.

Most recently the United States has continued the tradition of the Crusades by invading Iraq twice and belligerently engaging Iran and such groups as ISIS, Hamas, Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others. America designates these groups as terrorists but they claim to be part of a resistance movement. These organizations are generally Islamic in their religion as were the native Arabs and Persians during the original Crusades. There were Jewish populations in the Holy Land during the time Christian Europeans were seeking to take over the Middle East, but they were a small minority and could not mount an effective resistance to the Crusades.

Today, due to the world’s post-holocaust revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and the beliefs of many American fundamentalist Christians, such as dreamers in the Rapture, the United States is defending Israel’s aggression and is allied with the Zionists against Muslims, especially Iranians. Many of our politicians and much of the national media are on a crusade to support the hegemony of Israel under the guise of its self-defense. Israel has nuclear weapons it developed by spying on the United States and has an extremely modern and powerful military. It has nothing to fear from the rag-tag Muslim militias even if they are backed by countries such as Iran, China and Russia. Israel does not need our military support. And its current aggression in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, to say nothing, as most media does, about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, clearly proves Israel does not deserve our support.

Israel is conducting its own crusade against Muslim countries in the Holy Land. If the United States cannot find the moral courage to confront this decades long injustice, we should, at least, not supply it with weapons and diplomatic immunity. It is long past the time America atoned for its own sins against our native population and that we not repeat those sins in the Middle East. To do so, all we need is to be guided by those principles of our Constitution and the philosophy of that Christian faith many Americans profess. Perhaps, if we make a good faith effort to act in the Middle East as the country we claim to be, we will not be misled by the Zionists among the Israelis into the same type of disaster those holier than thou European Crusaders had to endure a thousand years ago.

 

It Is Time

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Sunday, June 18, 2023 Fareed Zakaria on his CNN show, The Global Public Square, introduced a segment about the United States Supreme Court by stating, “The Supreme Court is supposed to be the ultimate, safeguard of our democracy, but has the Supreme Court itself become a danger to our democracy? Is the Court today acting as a defender of democracy or a threat to it?”

Fareed’s guest was Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Waldman’s book, How the Supreme Court Divided Our Country, sets forth a central thesis: nine unelected, life-tenured people on the Supreme Court hold too much power for too long and they have become “very, very activist and extreme in their rulings”. Waldman’s position, and mine, is that the U.S. Constitution was designed to adapt to changes in our society and it is critical that the Supreme Court change also.

Zakaria and Waldman advance the idea that the justices’ terms should be limited, Waldman suggested a one-term term of eighteen years. I have long called for term limits for all federal judges plus revamping their selection process to popular elections, not appointments that involve only the president and the senate. I think eighteen years is too long. I suggest if our elected president can only serve eight years that a ten- or twelve-year term for judges is reasonable.

In order to encourage people to run for federal judgeships it seems to me it is in the country’s best interests that once a judge has served her or his term the retired judge continue to receive all pay and benefits during their lifetime as long as they do not seek another judicial position.

Judicial offices could appear on the normal ballot as a non-partisan position as needed. There should be minimum qualifications required, such as graduation from an accredited law school, passage of a national Bar Examination, an age of at least 35, the same as the president, and a clear record as to ethical matters. As in all contested elections the relative merits of the judicial candidates could be brought out by the candidates themselves, their supporters, their opponents and the media.

Surely when our Supreme Court is being accused of “holding too much power for too long” and of being “a threat to our democracy”, it is essential we make some fundamental, Constitutional adjustments. America may not yet be on the brink of disintegrating into legal and political chaos, but when that possibility is bantered about blithely on Sunday news programs, it is time to act.

Lip Service

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Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia and some other members of Congress took a fifteen-minute recess from regular duties to raise money for the National Republican Committee. One hundred thousand dollars was raised in a quarter of an hour when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy pulled out his tube of used cherry flavored Chapstick and auctioned it off. McCarthy is from California so such economic disequilibrium is not surprising to Americans who follow reports of calls for five million dollar per person reparations in San Francisco and especially when Georgia’s Greene was the winning bidder.

This impromptu fundraiser took place in the halls of Congress on Tuesday, May 23rd. Such tangential matters as the then impending default on our 31 trillion dollars national debt and the 30 billion dollars worth of military armaments we have given to Ukraine pale in significance to the issue of chapped lips. Perhaps fifteen minutes spent on funding social security or avoiding a nuclear war with Russia could be squeezed into Congress’ agenda. It is certainly impressive how the essential matter of financing political campaigns could be so quickly addressed by our politicians.

Of course, America is not the only country that pays lip service to grave matters while politicians and the news media, including newspaper columnists, concentrate on bruised lips and egos. Meghan Markle sought to bring down the British monarchy before she had even joined it by demanding to use Kate Middleton’s Clarins Natural Lip Protector during a February 28, 2018 meeting of the Royal Foundation Forum. Kate and William were shocked and Meghan and Harry were offended that Kate and William were shocked. A toppling of the throne was averted by Meghan squeezing some balm out of the tube onto her finger instead of applying it directly to her lips.

The backdrop for Meghan’s royal faux pas was the first public event to initiate the Royal Foundation Forum which was established to help fund charitable causes such as mental health needs. Naturally, the failure of British etiquette by the plebeian American received more coverage than the fund raising. Harry even saw fit to highlight it in his family confessional book, Spare.

I suppose it is too much to expect the British public to be less concerned with the battle among the royals over lip gloss than the Battle of Hastings. Nor should we be surprised if our Congress can find time to quickly fund political campaigns but not the national debt. But, Gentle Reader, wouldn’t it be refreshing and bring smiles to our faces if such topics were the fodder of columnists instead of chapped and colored lips?