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Anwar Al-Awlaki is generally regarded as the most effective recruiter of Jihadist terrorists the west has ever seen.

Awlaki, a United States citizen born in New Mexico, was responsible for radicalizing and recruiting the Fort Hood shooter, Nadal Malik Hasan, the 2009 Christmas Day “underwear bomber,” Umar Farook Abdulmutallab and preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers at his Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia and was a spiritual advisor to another at his Mosque in San Diego. He is believed to have been the inspirational leader for numerous other terrorist plots in Britain, Canada and the United States.

In 2010 Awlaki was placed on a list of terrorists targeted for killing by the Obama Administration.

Awlaki’s father sued the Administration and sought an injunction preventing them from carrying out the killing on the ground that it denied Awlaki his right to “due process of law.”

The lawsuit was dismissed by the United States District Court Judge because Awlaki’s father lacked standing to contest the Obama Administration decision.

On September 30, 2011, Awlaki was killed by a drone missile. Samir Khan, another American and the Editor of Al-Qaeda’s English language web magazine was killed with him.

Since the mass murder at the Pulse night club in Orland, Florida, the Congress has refused to enact any gun control measures including prohibiting the sale of guns to people on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) commonly known as the “watch” list.

The ostensible reason for opposing this measure is that it could deprive citizens of their Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm without “due process of law.”

Never mind that someone on the “No Fly List,” a subset of the TIDE List, can’t get on an airplane.

It is hard to see how prohibiting the purchase of a firearm by those on the lists is a significant burden or deprivation outweighing public safety when only 15,000 of the 1.5 million people on the TIDE List are Americans and only 1,000 of the 81,000 people on the No Fly List are U.S. Citizens.

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas offered a tepid solution, proposing that if the Justice Department was notified that someone on either list was trying to purchase a weapon, it would have 72 hours to go to court and try and block the sale. How that could be accomplished in 72 hours, especially if a weekend were involved is, at best, puzzling.

This too was opposed by the National Rifle Association and rejected by the United States Senate.

Frankly, if I were on either list, my priority would be trying to get off the list rather than buying a gun but that apparently hasn’t occurred to the Congress or the NRA which staunchly defends this position.

It’s heartening to know that if Anwar Al-Awlaki hadn’t been killed by a drone, the Republican led Congress and the NRA would protect his right to purchase a firearm, indeed, even an assault rifle where purchases are legal.

I can’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t be able to purchase one.

Can you?

Last weekend a gunman entered a night club with an assault rifle in Orlando, Florida and killed 49 people and injured 54 more.

On December 2, 2015 a couple in San Bernardino, California killed 14 people and injured 70 others with an assault weapon.

On July 16, 2015 a gunman in Chattanooga, Tennessee killed five people and injured 3 with an AK 47 assault rifle.

On July 20, 2012 a gunman entered a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado with an assault rifle and killed 12 people and injured 47.

On December 14, 2012 a gunman entered an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and killed 20 children who were 5 or 7 years old and 6 adults with an assault rifle.

On January 8, 2011 Jared Loughery killed six people and injured 11 including Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford.

On November 5, 2009 a gunman at Ford Hood, Texas killed 12 people and wounded 30 more with a semi-automatic pistol. In the few weeks before the shooting he bought 3,000 rounds of ammunition.

After the murder of the children in Sandy Hook, Wayne LA Pierre of the NRA offered this pithy comment; “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

So, I have a question. Where was the “good guy with a gun” to stop the murders in all of these shootings? It certainly wasn’t Wayne LA Pierre who is paid almost a million dollars a year and provided his own private security so that he can shill for the gun manufacturers. The same Wayne LA Pierre who criticized the President for providing Secret Service protection for his daughters.

In 1994 the Public Safety and Recreational Use Protection Act was enacted which made it unlawful to manufacture for civilian use semi-automatic assault weapons and large capacity magazines. Regrettably, it had a ten year sunset provision and it expired in 2004. In the wake of the Sandy Hook murder of children, Wayne LA Pierre and the NRA renewed its vigorous opposition to renewing the ban on civilian use of assault weapons and large magazines. This speaks volumes about the NRA’s priorities and its allegiance to the gun manufacturers rather than the safety of the public.

Both Jared Loughery of the Tucson shooting and Adam Lanza the Sandy Hook Elementary School killer had history of mental illness. James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Yet, Wayne LA Pierre and the NRA also oppose expanded background checks.

Last year, as I was leaving my position as a County Court Judge who had presided over thousands of criminal cases, I wrote an op-ed piece setting forth what I believed were some common sense proposals involving gun regulations. It produced an outpouring of vitriol from commenters whose courage in expressing their opinions was enhanced by their anonymity. Nevertheless, I will propose them again.

No one needs to own an assault rifle or high capacity magazines.

No one needs to have access to “cop-killer” bullets.

This is an election year. We will elect a new President, one –third of the Senate and the whole House of Representatives will also stand for election. If we are going to have some sanity restored to the use and possession of firearms it will have to come at the ballot box.

Yesterday, the President, commenting on this particular subject observed that “We have to decide if that is the kind of country we want to be. To actively do nothing is a decision as well.”

Richard Nixon campaigned on the slogan “This year vote like your whole world depended on it.” That is something to think about too because the way these events keep occurring, it could.

We met in 1984. I was thirty-five and Steve was twenty-eight. My cousin, Jack McAuliffe introduced us. I had been practicing law and my friend, Larry Kirwan, who would become the New York State Democratic party Chairman, had talked me into running Walter Mondale’s Presidential campaign in Central New York.

Steve was a native Syracusan, coming from a large family that lived in the Winkworth section of the City. He had graduated from Bishop Ludden High School, the University of Rochester and Syracuse University College of Law. He had been admitted to practice in New York and Florida where he’d spent a few years practicing law and involved in several statewide Democratic political campaigns. On election night 1984, Steve, Larry Hackett and I stood on the deck in the face of Mondale’s Titanic loss to Ronald Reagan and went down with the ship.

Out of that experience the three of us had formed a deep friendship. They would be with me throughout my two campaigns for Syracuse Board of Education, my unsuccessful 1993 Democratic Primary campaign for Mayor of Syracuse and my two campaigns for Onondaga County Court Judge. They were largely responsible for the successes and I was responsible for our one defeat.

During the 1980’s and 90’s we tried some criminal cases together. I learned that he had great courtroom poise and skills. He managed to be positive and upbeat no matter how dark the facts of the cases we were presented with and, indeed, some were pretty dark. He brought that same calm equanimity to all of his clients as his practice evolved into other areas and they confronted other kinds of life decisions such as buying homes, getting divorced and other kinds of life crisis.

Between campaigns we had a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time at my summer place on Wellesley Island and on Steve’s boat in Alexandria Bay. Nobody liked to have fun or was more fun to be with than Steve Snyder.

He was extraordinarily generous, providing whatever was needed to those who sought his help and never asked anything in return. If someone wronged or disappointed him, he was quick to forgive and forget without holding a grudge.

Women of all ages fell in love with him. When my two daughters were children, he showed up on Wellesley Island one summer day with his puppy “Wags” and asked them to play with the dog while we went off somewhere, a memory they carried with them this past week. When the romance ended in his various relationships he always remained close, loving and supportive of the other.

I don’t mean to suggest that he was perfect.

He wasn’t.

None of us are.

He was, however, one of the most good and decent people that God ever made.

As I learned of his passing I was reminded of a verse by the poet Sam Walter Foss;
“Let me live in a house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by-
The men who are good and the men who are bad
As good and as bad as I
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat
Nor hurl the cynic’s ban-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.”

That is the way he lived for an all too brief time.

We were blessed to know him and are much poorer for his passing.

Donald Trump and Immigrants.

He’s obsessed with them.

He’s going to build a wall across the southern border to keep Mexicans out because they are “criminals and rapists.” He’s going to ban all Muslims from entering the country. He’s going to deport eleven million undocumented aliens.

He led the “Birther” movement that wouldn’t rest until the President of the United States released his birth certificate proving that he was born in the United States. Of course, some of his followers believe it is a forgery. Some of them just can’t be convinced.

It’s no wonder that he has the support of Klan leader, David Duke, and the endorsement of the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, who has been repeatedly held in contempt of court for illegally stopping and detaining Latino people whom he suspects might be illegally in the country based solely on the fact that they are Latinos.

It now appears that the Mexicans are responsible for more of his legal woes.

Trump’s scam called Trump University has been on the losing end of a series of court rulings in a case pending in in the United States District Court in San Diego, California in which it is a defendant. In his view the reason that he is losing in court, isn’t because his business is a scam, it is because the judge presiding over the case, Hon. Gonzalo Curiel, is Mexican.

Never mind that the Judge was born in Indiana. Who knows? That birth certificate could be a forgery too.

Never mind that the judge was a federal prosecutor who was on the Kill List of a Mexican drug cartel. He must be biased against Trump because he is a Mexican….even if he’s not.

This morning, he expanded the class of judges who couldn’t be fair to him to include Muslim judges too.

Trump, however, isn’t biased against all immigrants. He has been married to two. His first wife, Ivana, was born in the Czech Republic when it was still part of the Soviet bloc. His current wife, Melania, was born in Slovenia when it was part of Yugoslavia. This may explain Trump’s apparent crush on Vladimer Putin.

One would expect that being an immigrant herself, Melania Trump would have some sensitivity about where people were born. No so. In a recent interview with New Yorker Magazine, Mrs. Trump’s appearance on the Joy Behar Show in 2011 was recounted in which defended her husband’s ridiculous “Birther” campaign against the President and insisted that the President’s birth certificate was not real.

After observing and participating in politics for most of my life, I have one unwavering belief.

It is that there is nothing more entertaining in the political world than a 24 carat hypocrite.

This past week two radio show hosts posted a screen shot from a Facebook page on which the poster shared a photograph she had taken of a severely damaged automobile and a stretcher lying near it. It was accompanied by her comment complaining about the delay the volunteer fire department members were causing in directing traffic, referring to one firefighter in the picture with a vulgarity. After the public began expressing its outrage about the posting it was deleted but not before the poster commented “Apparently, I was insensitive. Oops. Am I supposed to care? “

We have a presumptive presidential nominee of one party who regularly insults women, ethnic and religious groups, rival candidates and anyone else who challenges or angers him on Twitter with no apparent repercussions. Indeed, his supporters appear to relish his vitriol.

Three decades ago, when I was practicing law, New York experimented with allowing cameras in the courtroom to permit filming of trials and other court proceedings. I was an advocate of this because I thought it would allow the public to view the trials firsthand and not rely on a reporter’s viewpoint or have to speculate about what was occurring.

When I became a judge, the experiment was over and it fell to each of us on the bench to decide whether and to what extent cameras would be allowed. I permitted two trial to be filmed in their entirety with the consent of the lawyers on each side. I also allowed sentencings to be filmed over the objections of the lawyers because I felt that we were at a stage where no prejudice to the defendant could occur and the public had an interest in seeing the final outcome in the cases.

That changed a few years before I retired.

News coverage went increasingly from print to digital and readers were allowed to post comments anonymously about the defendants and the proceedings.

I soon discovered that if the defendant was African-American there would appear to be a virtual Ku Klux Klan meeting in the comment section of the news article. If the defendant was an unattractive woman, there would be sexist and misogynist postings. Often the prison sentence would discussed in hateful and homophobic terms. The vile and the vitriol soon outweighed any meaningful discussion that the news article might have inspired. Since there was no way in which the anonymous comments could be policed until after they were posted, I prohibited filming in the courtroom at all proceedings.

The Buffalo News, faced with this problem, changed its policy concerning comments on their website. It required the poster to provide their name and town along with the comment. The racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic postings disappeared and traffic on the website quickly returned to normal.

I suppose the lesson here is that anonymous haters wear a virtual sheet but when the anonymity is stripped away they slink away perhaps crawling back under the rock.

Obviously, it is almost impossible to set standards for decorum on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a parent, we are constantly warning our children about the content of photos and comments they post on their pages, especially when they are entering the workforce and prospective employers are scrutinizing social media in the same way they do references. In the digital age, what is posted online lives forever.

Regrettably media outlets that market their sites for advertising by counting the number of visitors who click on the site find this consideration to be a secondary one.

We seem to be loosening and coarsening our standards about what is permissible commentary and conduct. It appears to be the new normal.

It’s not good.

145 days ago I took a major step on the road of life. I retired from my position as a County Court Judge here in Onondaga County. Much to the surprise of many, I left one year before my term was up. I’ve been asked by many people if I have any regrets about doing so?

I don’t, but the best way to answer that question is to share the decision making process and what the last several months have been like along with what might be valuable to others my age who are contemplating the same decision.

I retired at age 66, the same age my father should have. He had been a Syracuse City Court Judge for over sixteen years. He had just been re-elected to a new ten year term although like me, he would have only been able to serve until he was 70. Instead of retiring before his last election, he chose to seek another term because he wanted to boost his pension since the judiciary had gone a long time without a raise. (Yes, Virginia, history does repeat itself!) In 1981, the year after he had been re-elected, he suffered a stroke in his chambers and was dead a year later.

So, being the same age, I took stock of where I was in life. I was and am healthy. I have a beautiful wife and best friend, Terri, whom I adore and would like to share many happy years and experiences with. I have two very talented, successful, lovely daughters Meghan and Kate, with whom I enjoy every minute I spend with them. I have a three year old granddaughter, Claire, who is the light of my life even though she prefers Terri to me. I want to share as much life with them as I possibly can while I can. That made the decision easy.

You can’t retire without a plan and I don’t mean just a financial one. You have to have interests and give some thought to what you will do each day. To that end, Terri bought me a book entitled “How to Retire Happy, Wild and Free,” which is an excellent guide to planning your retirement routine and putting together a “bucket list.”

One of the items on my bucket list, being a political junkie, is to visit every Presidential Library in the country. My friend and colleague Tom Miller suggested attending a baseball game in every stadium in the country. That, alone, would promote longevity.

Another way to keep my brain active is learning to play the piano. I thought it would be easier than learning a foreign language. It is, but not much. There will be no concert tours.

Posting on this blog once a week requires me to think too.

I also vowed to play more golf and get my handicap down from 39 to say……37.

Daily routines involve a trip to the gym with Terri and whatever we decide to do for the rest of the day. During the winter I plow out the driveways but have the luxury of staying in bed until it stops snowing. With the weather getting warmer I am mowing and clearing the 19 acres we have on a zero turn mower. Sometimes I stay in bed until the grass stops growing.

We have vowed to do more traveling whenever the mood strikes us. We spent this past March in Asheville, NC which was the subject of an earlier blog post.

People ask if I miss being on the bench or in the legal world. I do miss my day to day interactions that I had with Cathy, Kelly, Lisa and Bob whom I consider to be part of my family and worked and laughed with every day. I miss those same encounters with the lawyers, ADAs, court reporters and court security, clerks and personnel, whom I also established friendships with and also my colleagues on the bench.

I don’t miss the defendants.

My good and close friend, the Rev. Denny Hayes, always concludes Mass with the declaration “This is the day we are given, rejoice and be glad in it.”

I do.

Four months ago I published an op-ed piece in the Syracuse Post-Standard and on Syracuse.com about the dysfunctional nature of our State Government decision making in Albany commonly called “three men in a room.” (http://www.syracuse.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/01/who_needs_a_legislature_when_its_three_men_in_room_deciding_laws_commentary.html)

I recounted how during the past fourteen years twenty-two members of the Legislature had been convicted of political corruption felonies while serving in that body. Four of them were Majority Leaders of the State Senate and one had been Speaker of the Assembly.

Shortly before that article appeared, Governor Andrew Cuomo had prematurely closed down a Moreland Commission he had commissioned to investigate corruption in Albany. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bahara, stepped into this breach and seized all of the material that the Moreland Commission had gathered. He then indicted Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos for crimes involving political corruption. At the conclusion of their respective trials, both men were convicted. Silver was sentenced to twelve years in prison and Skelos to five.

It now appears that Bahara is on the verge of completing a trifecta.

The U.S. Attorney is probing the Governor’s office and the way in which it awards public works contracts to favored developers and others who make generous contributions to the Governor’s 2018 re-election committee and employ lobbyists close to Cuomo.

Two subjects of the probe are Joseph Percoco and Todd Howe. Cuomo has denied any knowledge of wrongdoing by Percoco and postures that he barely knows Howe. The credibility of these claims should be weighed in the context of each man’s history with the Governor and his father, Governor Mario Cuomo.

Percoco’s relationship to the Governor goes back to his employment by Mario Cuomo. He joined Andrew Cuomo’s staff in 1999 while Cuomo was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. At the time Todd Howe was Cuomo’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Percoco was involved in Cuomo’s unsuccessful campaign for Governor in 2002 and his successful campaign for Attorney-General in 2006. Percoco has been Cuomo’s campaign manager in his last two campaigns for Governor. Until last year, he served as Cuomo’s Deputy Executive Secretary. To some he is feared as Cuomo’s “political enforcer.” To all, he is considered Cuomo’s closest confidante. During the Governor’s eulogy to his late father, he referred to Percoco as his father’s “third son who sometimes, I think, he loved the most.”

Howe, the man Cuomo barely knows, also started his career with Mario Cuomo. When Andrew Cuomo became Secretary of HUD, Howe went with him to Washington and was responsible for Percoco joining the staff. He told the New York Times, “we brought him down, sat him down and basically said,’ Hey Joe, here’s what we need done….And Joe basically stepped into the fray.’” It’s no accident that he headed a lobbying concern at an Albany law firm that represented developers and other favored firms that received millions of dollars for projects that are part of the Governor’s “Buffalo Billion” and other upstate economic revitalization programs.

During the Watergate scandal it was asked; “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The men who carried out the Watergate burglary were essentially strangers to President Nixon having no personal or professional history with him. Even so, the trail of corruption led back to him.

In this instance, one would have to be incredibly naive to believe that Cuomo was unaware of his closest confidante’s activities and the other man who made them possible. Preet Bahara doesn’t strike me as naïve.

This corruption probe is getting closer to home in Central New York. I’m betting that Bahara will complete his trifecta and will have unmasked a magnet for sleaze.

This past Tuesday Donald Trump was poised to win the Indiana Republican Presidential Primary and vanquish his closest rival for the nomination, Ted Cruz. Trump had been on a roll since sweeping five eastern state primaries the week before and was already heralding himself as the “presumptive nominee.” So it came as something of a surprise, when on the day of the Indiana Primary, he accused Cruz’s father of being involved with Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated President John F. Kennedy fifty-three years earlier.

Trump based this charge on an article in that paragon of investigative journalism, the National Enquirer. Trump made the accusation in an interview on Fox News, a network which competes with the National Enquirer in a contest to see which one can invent the most sensational stories. Trump declared; “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being-you know, shot I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it. I mean what was he doing-what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

Cruz, whom Trump refers to as “Lyin Ted,” called Trump “a pathological liar” and declared; “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies, practically every word that comes out of his mouth.” He went on to denounce Trump as “…utterly amoral, morality doesn’t exist for him.”

For good measure, he reminded us that the National Enquirer had endorsed Trump. Clearly, an endorsement that will sway the electorate like no other.

There is probably no event in history that has been examined more often and in more detail than the assassination of President Kennedy. In addition to the Warren Commission Report there have been countless books published about it. Conspiracy theories abound including some that place assassins on the “grassy knoll” on the motorcade’s route, in addition to Oswald in the Texas Book Depository. None of these books or theories have, heretofore, included Rafael Cruz.

So, it leads one to wonder, why, as he is about to clinch the Republican nomination and needs to unify the Party, would Donald Trump make such a preposterous accusation?

I’m not one who likes to put politicians on the couch and delve into their innermost thoughts and motivations. I can’t imagine trying to do it with Donald Trump but it does make me wonder whether he sometimes secretly hopes not to be the nominee.

I wonder whether he is most interested in winning the primary contests and avoiding the awesome responsibilities that come with being President. It’s clear that he hasn’t given any thought to serious policy positions, assembling a deep bench of policy advisors or governing at all. It does make one wonder what the fall campaign holds for us.

Maybe we’ll learn that Chelsea Clinton was involved in the Watergate burglary or that Bill Clinton was the mastermind of the 9/11 attack.

Only time and Donald Trump will tell us.

This past Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, announced that, if he were nominated by the Republican Party for President, he would choose Carly Fiorina to be his running mate and candidate for Vice-President.

What Cruz hoped would look like a bold move actually looks like a fool’s errand since he has no mathematical path to the nomination and lags far behind Donald Trump.

Fiorina was a candidate for President herself from May 4, 2015 until February 10, 2016 when she suspended her campaign after finishing seventh in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. During that period she presented herself as the “anti-Hillary” boasting that she had more experience in world and foreign affairs than the Secretary of State. She argued that she could challenge Clinton more effectively on the debate stage than the male candidates and touted her rise to the top of the Hewlett-Packard Company.

What she did not tout was that under her leadership the company laid off 30,000 employees and she was forced to resign after the company lost half of its value.

In 2010 she ran for the United States Senate in California and was defeated soundly by Barbara Boxer.

As a Presidential candidate she advocated defunding Planned Parenthood based upon a widely discredited video made by an anti-abortion organization purporting to show organs being harvested from live fetuses. She continued to use the video as the basis of her proposal long after it had been discredited.

Ted Cruz like to fashion himself as being the second coming of Ronald Reagan even though his views are more aligned with the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. In choosing a running mate while the primary campaign is still in progress, he has taken a page out of the Gipper’s playbook.

During the 1976 campaign, when Reagan was trying to wrest the nomination from President Gerald Ford, Reagan named a prospective running mate, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. The difference was that Schweiker was a liberal Republican whose selection was designed to broaden Reagan’s appeal. Philosophically, Fiorina is Ted Cruz in a dress.

In January of this year, Fiorina told the Boston Herald Radio that; “Ted Cruz is a lawyer and a politician. He has never made an executive decision in his life. He has never created a job, he has never saved a job.”

Cruz might be better served if he chose Mullah Omar as a running mate.

Curt Schilling has stepped in it again. The former Boston Red Sox pitcher and ESPN baseball analyst posted a truly disgusting meme concerning the controversy involving laws enacted to prevent transgendered people from utilizing the rest rooms they identify with and added his own misanthropic bigoted commentary to the issue.

It’s not the first time that Schilling has stepped in it. Last August he was removed from ESPN’s analyst chair during the Little League World Series for comparing Muslims to Nazis. Whether that will result in his being named to Donald Trump’s team of National Security Advisers remains to be seen. On the other hand, Trump has endorsed the right of transgendered people to use the restroom of their choosing before changing his mind and declaring it should be left up to the states. So, he may view Schilling as being too extreme.

My initial reaction was that for Shilling, to have been caught up in two such controversies this close together, after the NBA and NCAA publicly announced they might move championship games out of states enacting such laws, tells me that he has the brains of a soil sample.

Schilling has sought to ameliorate his offensive postings by labeling them as his opinions. Implicit in this defense is the suggestion that he should not be sanctioned for expressing them.

This leads us to a larger question. What should be the consequences for posting or expressing truly bigoted, hateful views?

Schilling has a constitutional right to express his disgusting opinions but he does not have a right to sit in the ESPN analyst chair and be richly compensated by the network who must be concerned that their analyst’s views on social issues are anathema to much of their viewers. This past Wednesday ESPN fired Schilling.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

We have seen this debate emerge before. The Westboro Baptist Church claimed a constitutional right to picket the funeral services of dead soldiers carrying signs proclaiming that those dead were killed because God hates America because of gay rights. At another time The American Nazi Party litigated its right to march through the predominantly Jewish city of Skokie, Illinois. In each case both of these hate groups prevailed in court.

After giving it some thought, I think the way these groups were handled was wrong headed.

I think they should be informed that while they had a constitutional right to picket and march, they have no right to police protection. Our police departments have more important tasks to perform.

If Westboro offended the Hells Angels by their picketing or the Nazi’s offended a much larger group of Jewish citizens in Skokie or the Ku Klux Klan decides to march through Harlem and things get rough, well, perhaps they should have thought about that in advance.

On his blog, Schilling says “opinions are like buttholes.” He must have discovered that by looking in the mirror.

I love seeing people engage in self-awareness.