CDFCU Board Strategy Meeting

The membership of the Coulee Dam Federal Credit union met this weekend to discuss long term strategy for the community financial cooperative.  Jo Ann Eagle who caters the mettings came up with some particularly delicious items, the first one is a French Toast recipe which was absolutely fabulous, the second a Wild Rice Soup.  Jo Ann shared, and I’m passing it on.

NUTTY FRENCH TOAST

10-12 slices French bread (1″ thick)
8 eggs
2 cups milk
2 tsp
vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Place bread in greased 9×13 pan.  Beat eggs,
milk, vanilla and cinnamon and pour over bread.  Cover and refrigerate
overnight.  Remove from refrigerator 30 min before baking.

3/4 cup
butter softened
1 1/3 cup of brown sugar
3 TSP corn syrup
1 cup pecan
(chopped)

Mic butter, sugar and corn syrup, spread over bread.  Sprinkle
with nuts, bake uncovered 1 hr at 350 degrees.

Try butter flavor vanilla.

Oma’s Wild Rice Soup

Personal the wild rice until just barely done.  This will be done well in
advance.  You will need 2C cooked rice for this recipe, but it can handle more.
It makes about 6C of soup but the recipe can easily be doubled or
triple.

6TBs butter
1TB minced onion
1/2 cup flour
3 cups
chicken broth

Melt butter and sauté onion until tender. Blend in flour
and then gradually add chicken broth.  Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture
comes to a boil.  Boil for 1 minute and then add the following.

2 cups
cooked wild rice
1/3 cup minced ham
1/2 cup finely grated
carrots

Bring to a simmer and heat for 5 minutes.  At this point, if you
are making this ahead of time or making this to freeze STOP.

Before
serving bring back to simmer and add

3 TB chopped, slivered
almonds
1/2 tab of salt
1 cup half and half
2 TB dry sherry

Heat
to serving, garnish with parsley and serve.  It is the last three ingredients
which makes this soup so don’t omit them.  You can change the amount office,
veggies or ham to make it a very thick and hearty soup.

Anyone for a game of Chicken?

The latest polls indicate that the majority of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling – 63% oppose to 27% in support.  A whapping 83% if you look to Republicans but what is the right thing to do?

The Congressional Research Service puts this all in perspective.  We need to cut spending or raise taxes by $738 billion dollars in 6 months to pay all our bills for the remainder of 2011. 

What does that really mean though – well we could:

• Eliminate all discretionary spending, including defense, and then look for another $50 billion of change in the sofa OR
• Cut nearly 70% of outlays for mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security OR
• Increase tax revenue by nearly two-thirds OR
• Some combination of the above.

And that’s just for the rest of this fiscal year!  Yes, serious stuff isn’t it?  Probably not something we should play games like chicken over either.

Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary has clearly indicated to Congress the need to raise the debt limit by mid-May for the US to meet it’s fiscal obligations, and the Republican House is leveraging their votes to gain spending cuts.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has called the possibility of not raising the ceiling a “catastrophic folly.”  However what does not raising the debt limit really mean?  Some would have us think that raising the debt limit really means we are just authorizing borrowing more from “Asia”  The US Government however owes money to foreign investors for sure, but it also owes debt to US pension funds and various government programs, programs essential to our parents. 

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman also warns the consequences of the event would be catastrophic, interest rates would soar but most significantly the US would for the first time ever – default on its loans, it’s credit rating would take a hit just as yours or mine would and high-value investors would look to the Eurozone and Asia for investments leaving the US cash strapped and with poor credit.

On a personal note – I would benefit greatly from a failure to raise the debt ceiling, assuming I was able to keep my job so my rock bottom interest rate mortgage could be paid.  The interest rates in the US would soar, while the US dollar would decline sharply, a perfect condition for me.  I’m just waiting for the dollar to drop against the pound as I have money in the UK I want to move to the US.  Combine the dollar decline with soaring interest rates offered to invest that money in the US and I could potentially realize a 20-25% gain on capital in the course of a year.  However what’s good for me isn’t good for almost anybody else.

My mother and father in law would see their investments shrink again.  Combine that with the talk of putting them on vouchers for Medicare and at 83, with a few strokes behind him, my father in law will finally change his opinion on nationalized medicine as he watches his ability to obtain or afford insurance vanish before his eyes.

My friends with small businesses and some of the small businesses I love and rely on will become as cash strapped as our country and all for what?  So politicians can play chicken with our economy?  What of US Treasuries the mainstay of our economy, when markets lose faith in them it puts all future investment at risk and hurts US Business – large and small.  Alan Greenspan was just discussing this possibility with Charlie Rose and predicted the strong possibility of a worldwide financial crash and a longer recession than we’re just climbing out of.

“Just like households have personal obligations that they have to meet, the federal government needs to meet its obligations as well. I think that not raising the debt limit would have serious, very serious implications for the worldwide economy and jobs here in America,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Monday. “But having said that, we’re just not going to do the typical Washington thing, roll over, increase the debt limit, without addressing the underlying problems.”

All this is happening while as ABC news reports “Republicans leaders are reportedly acknowledging behind closed doors that they will not let the United States fall into default” but will parlay their votes into demands for a balanced budget amendment to demands for statutory spending caps to a 2/3rds voting requirement to increase taxes.

We most certainly do need to create spending cuts – and what has now been dubbed “Obamacare” was intended to do just that.  What we need is to educate ourselves, educate ourselves so we can’t be bullied, buffaloed or tricked into falling for false solutions. We could all take an hour – just one, and learn.  Please check the information out at the Peter G Peterson Foundation.  They produced a brilliant documentary I.O.U.S.A and now have one proposing some solutions.

In the Courts of the Conqueror

At the 2nd annual Indian Law conference sponsored by the Spokane County Bar Association, Indian Law Section one of the speakers was Walter Echo-Hawk.  Walter also gave a lecture the evening before at Gonzaga Law School, but I was not able to attend that.  At the conference however Walter spoke on the role of culture and tradition in practicing law in Indian Country.

I must confess to being a little disappointed by the presentation, however I wanted to know more and so I took advantage of the fact that they distributed his email address and shot him a short note on my Blackberry while he was talking – asking for a time to contact him when he wasn’t “on the road” but back at his offices with a little more time to spare.

Later in the week I bought the book he recently published “In the Courts of the Conqueror – the 10 worst Indian Law cases ever decided.”  I am about 1/2 way through at this point and decided to suspend calling Walter until I was finished so I could avoid asking questions which may be answered in the book itself – I’m so very grateful for the book.  Rarely have I read anything which within a few hours changes my perceptions, refines my perspective and informed me as much as the first few chapters of this book.  Amazingly enough I’ve been practicing law on an Indian Reservation for a year and a half now and while I realized that the Tribes treasure their sovereignty, I don’t think I really understood why in anything but a very abstract sense.

In the lecture Walter conceded that our American legal system frequently is just and founded upon sound logic and reason he cited Brown v. Board of Education, Wisconsin v. Yoder, and Worcester v. Georgia.  But he added that justice only truly occurs “when the law reflects and protects the needs and values of all segments of society.” and pointed out some of it’s failures:  Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States.

In his book he covered Johnson v. M’Intosh, through which the Supreme Court used a legal fiction—the “act of discovery”—to deprive Native Americans of legal title to land they had occupied for generations.  This was for me the missing link – of course I knew that this land was occupied by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Europeans appeared, but I had never given a second thought to how the title to this land was legally removed and vested in the conquerors – or of how twisted the legal justifications upon which these decisions were based actually were.

Of course, now I see that the conflict between Euro-American law and traditional notions of cultural and traditional justice are not just in conflict on a values level.  There is also a strong historical-cultural-emotional component involved that is rooted in the fact that the very system which the Colville Tribal Court is based upon is the same system that forced some bands from their ancestral lands, the same system that invaded families and stole away their children and the same system that justified the genocidal practices which punctuated the history of relations between the US government and Indigenous Americans.

Sushi.Com Spokane

Lisa and I stumbled upon Sushi.Com in Spokane about a month ago.  We were looking for a snack while waiting for our son and girlfriend to be available for dinner (West Wing, on Spokane’s South Hill but that’s another story) so we dropped in for a Sake and to share a small sushi plate.

This was the best restaurant discovery for a long while not only because of the quality of the food, but because of the friendly atmosphere and fantastic prices as well.  Sushi.Com is located at 430 West Main, Spokane (509) 838-0630.  Just across from Huppins.  On our first trip it seemed we were sitting next to one of the chef’s sisters and so we assumed the first name basis and warm conversation between the chiefs and patrons was on that basis.  On subsequent visits, however, it was clear that the friendly first name approach was something they just do at Sushi.Com.

As I mentioned before one of the principal reasons we’ve come to like Sushi.Com so much is the reasonable pricing.  The Sushi menu ranges from about $5 to $17 for rolls, dinners from $8 to $15.  You can have a full mean of assorted sushi rolls accompanied by two teenaged boys (and their appetites) for under $60 which, the last time, also included a large sake.  As a final point their house sake is worth noting.  The sake was fragrant, tingly, light and elegant, served at what seemed to be a perfect 105 degrees.

So in closing, borrowing from Siskell and Ebert – Sushi.Com Two Thumbs Up!

Leasing a car? Think again.

I have a good friend who is on the verge of leasing a car.  As giving unsolicited advice is a good way to lose friends, I hope they may read this.  Car leasing has become incredibly popular in the past 15 years.  Sellers hook you onto a monthly payment, while they keep the car as their asset.  The leased car is never YOUR asset though unless 1] the lease period is up and 2] you choose the option to buy the car.  A car payment that would normally be $399 a month may be $249 a month but leasing a car is ALWAYS a bad deal:

1. If the vehicle is totaled in an accident, you are still responsible to pay back the full lease contract amount.  All of it, even if the insurance company gives you back less than what you owe to the dealership.  If you do go with a lease, expect to pay the additional fees for “gap” insurance which covers you for that difference between insurance reimbursement and the amount that you owe to the dealership.
2. Many times, the lease agreement will be for 5 years/60,000 miles. So, if you go over that 60,000 and keep it until the 5 years is up, you’ll pay a penalty for every mile over 60,000 miles.  Think about how many miles you put on a car each year.  Most people use well over 12,000 per year.  I bought my truck in April 2010, it’s now April 2011 and 33,000 miles later!  At a conservative $0.15 per mile that’s 21,000 miles over the 12,000 mile standard allowance or $3,150 for this year’s excess mile charge!
3. If you lose a job or experience a heavy time of financial hardship and cannot afford the payment anymore, the dealership will recover the car, sell it an auction, and if they sell it for less than you owe for the lease agreement, you will be legally responsible to pay the difference. Though this is also true for purchase contracts as well with a purchase contract you are usually not so “upside down” because of your down payment.
4. The car is never yours until the lease period is up and you chose to buy the car.  All the maintenance expense you incur is to maintain somebody else’s vehicle.
5. The car cannot be counted as an asset on a net worth or credit calculation. It is still an asset of the dealership that leased it to you.
6. Let’s look at the lifetime cost of lease versus a purchase.  Say you buy a good used vehicle at $350 a month on a 48 month contract.  Now assume the vehicle lasts you 10 years.  Your cost is $16,800.  Now multiply that by 3 for the 30 years you’ll probably regularly use a car, that’s $50,400.  Now imagine if, instead, you decide to lease a car for the entire 30 years paying $350/mo at first you’d think the cost is just $126,000 (350x12x30) or a little over double that of purchasing – you’d be wrong. If you put $350 a month in a mutual fund that made 10% for 30 years you’d have $791,171 in 30 years.  Subtracting the cost of purchase ($50,400) from the potential investment earnings ($791,171) is $740,771. Are you willing to pay 0.74 million dollars for the warm fuzzy feeling of always driving a new car? I’m not.
7. If you decide to take the option to buy the car at the end of the lease term, you’ll have paid much more than the cost of the car even if you had financed it and the cost over a lifetime of driving is staggering.

Warren Buffet drives around a used pick-up truck during much of his personal time. He has lived in the same house that he bought about 30 years ago. Wealthy people know that possessions are a horrible investment that never buy the happiness they promise and spend accordingly.

Colville Court of Appeals adopts RCW 9.94A.505 (6)

Maurice Circle v Colville Confederated Tribes AP 11-006

Mr. Circle was convicted of an offense with a Domestic Violence enhancement.  The Tribal Code is stern on the issue of Domestic Violence, and has some stern provisions.  For example a person convicted of a domestic violence enhanced crime faces mandatory minimum sentences, the prohibition of good time credit to their sentences.  What it does not say is that a defendant is not entitled to credit for time served prior to sentencing.

Mr. Circle was convicted and at sentencing the Judge refused to grant credit for his pre-trial confinement.  On appeal the appellant pointed out that statutes are to be given their plain meaning in that when something isn’t mentioned in a piece of legislation one is compelled to assume that it was omitted deliberately.  In addition and perhaps more persuasively the appellant argued that to deny credit for time served has the effect of punishing the poor more than those who can afford pre-trial release.

As an example, say Bob is a wealthy farmer and Tony is an unemployed mill worker.  Bob and Tony are both arrested for a domestic violence crime on January 1 2011.  At arraignment they are both subjected to $5,000 bail.  Bob’s wife gets cash and bails him out, Tony sits in jail because all he can raise is $125.  Bob and Tony are sentenced on March 1st 2011 and both receive a 180 day mandatory minimum sentence.  When they are released 6 months later Bob the wealthy has served 180 days + the one day he served before being arraigned and bailing out.  Tony on the other hand serves 180 days + the 60 he served in jail because he was unable to make bail.

Washington avoids this issue by codification of the common law.

(6) The sentencing court shall give the offender credit for all confinement time served before the sentencing if that confinement was solely in regard to the offense for which the offender is being sentenced. RCW 9.94A.505(6)

As soon as the opinion is published the Tribal Members of the Colville Reservation will have one more arena in which equal protection is granted to them.

This entry contains no information protected by Attorney Client Privilege, every item of fact presented is a matter of public record.

A court sentence is a court sentence–nothing more and nothing less.

Franklin Lambert v Colville Confederated Tribes AP 11-004, opinion not yet published.

The appeal was on behalf of a Colville Tribal Member who had been sentenced to 180 days of which 90 was permitted to be served on electronic home monitoring (EHM).  In the Colville system as with all others, EHM has expenses and they are taxed against the defendant.  In this circumstance Mr. Lambert entered into some unwritten agreement with a former probation officer by which he could pay for the EHM at a later date but did actually serve the 90 days of home confinement.  However Mr. Lambert never did do the 90 days of jail time.

The Department of Probation and Parole asserted he had never paid for the EHM and argued that the 90 days of time served on EHM should not count.  When the matter came before the Trial Court the Court remanded him to serve all 180 days refusing to grant credit for the 90 days already served on EHM.  The waters were muddied by the fact that a court clerk had annotated Mr. Lambert’s judgment and sentence.

The Court of Appeals noted that there was nothing in the Judgment and Sentence which indicated he had any obligation other than to serve the 90 days on EHM which he had.  They pointed out that to impose an additional requirement afterwards violates due process and does not afford the defendant the opportunity to be heard on the issue.

Further the Court of Appeals suggested that the proper remedy would be a civil proceeding to obtain a judgment for the monies owed to the Probation and Parole department.

More details later then the opinion is issued.

The Appellate Court reversed and remanded so the Trial Court could issue an order which conformed to the appellate court’s ruling.  The Appellate Court showed considerable concern that the defendant be released immediately as they were concerned he was already serving the unauthorized portion of his sentence.  Melissa V. Simonsen, acting prosecuting attorney for the Tribes submitted a joint instruction to the Corrections Facility requesting Mr. Lambert’s immediate release.

It isn’t often a defense lawyer takes an issue to appeal and has it result in the immediate release of their client.  Credit goes to the concern of the Justices of the Court of Appeals.

This entry contains no information protected by Attorney Client Privilege, every item of fact presented is a matter of public record.

Cathy McMorris Rogers Congressional Spammer?

I’ve been trying for well over a year to be removed from Ms. McMorris’ email list (which I was lured into because it was an opt out when contacting her through her congressional website!).  I’ve sent mail via US Postal Service, I’ve emailed, I’ve called her Spokane and Washington DC offices asking to be removed.

Oddly enough they have all referred me to the “unsubscribe link” in her email which, in reality, is just a link to the subscribe page for her email list.

If you try to leave a message via her website there is an unsubscribe options which – if you check it – guess what is at the bottom of the form?

Select unsubscribe and you receive a message to unsubscribe prior to sending your message?  How do you do that, the website won’t register anything unless you click “Send Email”

Thanks Ms. McMorris Rogers – for treating my email privacy no better than any internet marketer.

US Supreme Court turns Miranda "upside down".

The US Supreme Court, in what I consider to be a blindingly bad opinion, ruled yesterday that a criminal suspect must explicitly invoke the right to remain silent during a police interrogation, a decision that dissenting liberal justices said turns the protections of a Miranda warning “upside down.’’

The court ruled 5 to 4 that a Michigan defendant who incriminated himself in a fatal shooting after nearly three hours of questioning thus gave up his right to silence, and the statement could be used against him at trial.

“Where the prosecution shows that a Miranda warning was given and that it was understood by the accused, an accused’s uncoerced statement establishes an implied waiver of the right to remain silent,’’ Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s conservatives.

Suspect Van Chester Thompkins remained mostly silent for three hours of interrogation after reading and being told of his rights to remain silent and have an attorney. He neither acknowledged he was willing to talk nor wanted questioning to stop.  To my mind sitting mostly silent for 3 hrs of interrogation after having been told of his right to remain silent seems very unambiguous to me.

But detectives persisted in what one called mostly a “monologue’’ until asking Thompkins whether he believed in God. When asked, “Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?’’ Thompkins answered, “Yes.’’

The statement was used against him, and Thompkins was convicted of killing Samuel Morris outside a strip mall in Southfield, Mich.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said that Thompkins’s silence for two hours and 45 minutes of the interrogation “offered a clear and unequivocal message to the officers: Thompkins did not wish to waive his rights.’’

But Kennedy said it was not clear enough. “If Thompkins wanted to remain silent, he could have said nothing in response to (the detective’s) questions, or he could have unambiguously involved his Miranda rights and ended the interrogation,’’ wrote Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. “The fact that Thompkins made a statement about three hours after receiving a Miranda warning does not overcome the fact that he engaged in a course of conduct indicating waiver.’’

Kennedy said the court’s new rule — in the case of Berghuis v. Thompkins — was an extension of the logic in a previous case that said a suspect must affirmatively assert the right to counsel.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the sharpest dissent of her young career on the court, accused the majority of casting aside judicial restraint and creating a rule that marks “a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination’’ that Miranda established more than 40 years ago.

“Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down,’’ Sotomayor wrote. “Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent, which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak.’’

She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.

Elena Kagan, nominated by President Obama to join the court, sided with the police as US solicitor general when the case came before the court. She would replace Justice Stevens.  Of course as US Solicitor General it was her job to represent law enforcement – so I’m not sure how much that tells us about what she may have done were she already a sitting Justice.

The Constitution “does not require that the police interpret ambiguous statements as invocations of Miranda rights,’’ Kagan said in court papers. (in her role as US Solicitor General).

Financial Reform one step closer.

Despite huge opposition from the big Wall Street banks, financial reform has passed the Senate! This is a huge step toward creating a banking system that serves Main Street, not just Wall Street.

Here’s what the Senate bill will do if made law:

• Create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB will be a watchdog for consumers to make sure mortgages, credit cards and other financial products aren’t full of tricks and traps in the fine print.
• End the casino economy and bring sunlight to shadowy derivatives market. The $600 trillion derivatives market will now have the light of day shining on the market (with exchange trading) and be held accountable with capital requirements (with clearing).

Click here to thank your Senators for their vote on financial reform — or to tell them you’re disappointed.

Next up, the House and Senate will have a conference committee to hammer out the differences between their two bills.  (Read about the House version here.)  Once the committee agrees on a bill, it must be passed by a majority in the House and by 60 votes in the Senate.

Almost there – though the current bill is compromised somewhat by the well funded interests of the banking industry, every little bit helps.