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In 2010, after thirteen marathons, hundreds of road races and countless training miles, I had my right knee replaced.

Due to complications from the anesthesia, I would up spending almost three weeks in the hospital.

It gave me time to think about life and I decided to learn to trail ride.

It was such a big part of Terri’s life that I thought I should share it too.

After being discharged I had months of rehabilitation and exercise ahead of me and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly.

I even missed a whole season of golf although I don’t think the sport suffered from that.

In April 2011, Terri said to me, “I got you a wedding anniversary gift.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a nice little female mule,” she answered, “she’s a cross quarter horse cross and her name is Tulip.”

I was silent for a minute while all of that sunk in.

“Terri,” I said, “Do you know what the guys at the bar in Knoxie’s will be saying about me if I’m riding around on a little female mule named Tulip. I appreciate the thought but I don’t think that is going to work.”

Our summers, since moving to the country, had been spent with her trail-riding with her girlfriends and me trying to improve my golf game.
Terri was enjoying trail-riding but my golf game wasn’t improving.

I had the highest golf handicap at the Pompey Club and still do.

Shortly after our conversation, Tulip arrived at our friend Leona McGinnis’s barn while Terri was building her barn.

Terri had bought her from a family in the southern tier and they had primarily used her for coon hunting at night.

At that point I had never ridden a horse, never mind a mule. It would be an understatement to say that Tulip had no manners. The first time Terri got on her, Tulip took off at a gallop and Terri had to turn her towards a tree to get her to stop.

Needless to say, if that had happened to me, my image at Knoxie’s would have been burnished even more.

“I think I need my own mule,” I told Terri, “one that is a little calmer.”

After searching the internet for a few months, I found one on Craigslist that was located just over the border in Pennsylvania.

Terri and I drove down to look at him with Leona.

We found a mule standing in a stall in about a foot of manure.

He had come from a resort in the Catskills and was the last of the group purchase. His companion had been sold separately and he was the saddest animal I had ever seen.

The owner, who claimed to be a “rescue” person brought him out and had one of her employees ride him.

After a couple turns in the round pen, she returned him to the stall.

“How much do you want for him?” I asked her. “Seven-hundred and fifty dollars,” she replied. I told her I would be back with a trailer and a check for her but I wanted a veterinarian check before the deal was done.

Terri and Leona asked me, “Are you sure he’s the mule for you?”

“I don’t know” I answered “but I couldn’t forgive myself if I left him here.”

The vet check was being done by her vet since we didn’t know any in the area and he reported that the mule, whose name was “Harry” was sound and was approximately fifteen years old.

Leona was kind enough to volunteer to trailer him back to Central New York and we drove down to get him.

The trailer ride back home showed me what kind of shape he was really in. He was having difficulty standing for the whole ride and worked himself up into a real lather.

At the time, I was taking lessons from Nancy Cerio and she agreed to board him while the barn was being built.

Nancy was a very knowledgeable teacher and I overcame my apprehensions about riding.

Her lesson horse was pretty knowledgeable too, especially when it came to me.

If he felt like cooperating, he would. If he felt like playing head games with me, he would do that too. Every lesson was interesting.

While I was taking lessons, I took the time to bond with my new mule.

I visited him every day, took him out on a line and gave him apples and other treats. I also changed his name to “Donovan.”

While we were bonding, Donovan gained over three-hundred pounds which he badly needed.

After a couple of months, Nancy suggested we take him out for a trail ride. We went out for an hour and he couldn’t have been easier to handle.

All those years on a hack line in the Catskills made him push button.

My decision to buy him was one of the best decisions I ever made.

More to come next week.

This past week, I had lunch with a good friend, who asked, “What is Terri up to?” “She bought a new horse,” I replied.

He laughed and said, “How many animals does this make?”

“We have two mules, two horses, two dogs, two barn cats and three chickens,” I told him.

The topic immediately turned to the subject of the mules and the horses as it usually does.

We moved out to Pompey in 2006 and the first mule arrived in 2008
.
I didn’t know anything about mules when Terri bought her first one at an auction.

She asked me to think about a name and, being a lifelong Democrat and remembering that the mule was the symbol of the Democratic Party, I suggested Franklin or Lyndon.

The name Franklin won the day with her.

When our veterinarian, Ben Turner, came to check Franklin out, we learned a lot more.

“I’m going to tell you three things about this mule,” he told Terri. “First, they are ten times smarter than a horse. Second, they are three times stronger than a horse. Third, they have impeccable memories. Don’t ever be mean to it because it will wait six months and when you least expect it, it will kick you right in the head.”

That last point was worth remembering, I thought.

Terri, of course, would never be mean to any animal as she loves all of them.

I would never be mean to one either but gave some serious thought to buying Franklin flowers once a week, just to make sure he knew I liked him.

Doctor Ben also advised her, “If you don’t bond with this mule in six months, sell him, because you never will.”

Franklin has proven to be Terri’s go to mule.

In the nine years they have been together, they have gone on hundreds of rides locally and around the state.

It’s important to know, that when you buy a mule or any equine, a lot more comes with it.

Terri designed, oversaw and paid for the construction of a three stall barn.

Next came a Ford F-250 pickup truck and a two horse trailer.

You can’t have a barn without tack, feed and hay.

I’m impressed every day with how she manages it and the care she takes in the feeding of the equines and the cleaning of them and their stalls that she puts so much time into summer and winter
.

One of the things that I was glad to learn about Franklin was that the reputation they have for being stubborn, while well earned, is an asset.

Unlike a horse, you cannot get a mule to do anything that it perceives is dangerous to itself.

If you’re on a trail ride and you come to a clearing or a bridge and the mule stops and refuses to move forward, it is because it senses that there is something amiss.

Several times I’ve been on a ride and the mules will stop at a clearing and stand stock still. You sit there and wait, watching their ears point in all directions and, inevitably, a bird or other creature will flush from the foliage and the mule will, only then, resume the ride.

Our friend, the late Judge Jeff Merrill, who famously kept reptiles and rodents in his chambers, was fascinated by the mules.

When people would ask why we had mules, Jeff would tell them that we breed them.

Since mules are a cross between a donkey and a horse, two different species whose chromosomes don’t match, they are sterile.

The other interesting feature about mules is the incredible endurance they possess.

One of our friends won a fifty mile endurance race by almost an hour because her mule didn’t need to stop and rest at the same frequency as the horses.

There are number of classification in mules that depend on what type of horse the donkey is bred with.

We have had all three. Franklin is a thoroughbred cross and possesses some of the characteristics of a thoroughbred race horse, hot blooded, high-spirited, agile and fast.

One spring day, we were in the Craftsman Inn when the Kentucky Derby came on. As the winner galloped to the finish line, I remarked, “Franklin could have won that.” A guy at the bar asked, “Who is Franklin?” “My wife’s mule,” I answered. He looked at me like I was out of a psychiatric center on a day pass. If he only knew.

The other characteristic franklin possesses is that he is very dominant. In fact, it would be fair to say that he is the king of the barn, something he lords over the other mules.

I’ll get to them next week.

v

This morning the Syracuse Post-Standard published a story about a couple whose possible deportation to Guatemala became the ongoing nightmare in their lives.

According to the news account, the couple fled violence in that country and entered the United States illegally.

They have been living here with the knowledge of Immigration Control Enforcement (ICE) authorities and have been allowed to stay as long as they checked in with that agency and stayed out of trouble.

They have three children, age’s elven, nine and seven, who, because they were born here, are United States citizens.

The father is a painter, the mother cleans houses and they pay taxes and have stayed out of trouble.

Their lives changed dramatically after Trump was inaugurated.

The husband was taken into custody by ICE a few days before Christmas in 2017 outside their home in Syracuse.

He spent two months in detention and is now free on $5,000 bond.

His wife, who has been reporting to ICE in Syracuse faithfully since 2013, has now been ordered to report to the ICE facility in Batavia, New York which has a detention facility and court to process deportation cases.

Neither parent knows when they might be taken into custody there, be separated from their children and removed from the country.

Also this week, we witnessed the deportation of Miguel Perez, a United States Army veteran, who served two tours in Afghanistan to Mexico.

Perez’s case involves a denial of an application for citizenship due to a felony drug conviction following his military service.

He attributes his conviction to drug and alcohol addictions that were a product of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that he suffered resulting from his combat experiences.

Now, age thirty-nine, he entered the United States at the age of eight and has lived here continuously.

His parents, sibling and two children are all American citizens.

There are several facts that are undeniable in both these cases.

In the first case, Guatemala is and was a violence wracked country and the home to some of the deadliest gangs and cartels in the world.

It is little wonder that people fled without waiting to go through all of the bureaucratic channels necessary to enter this country.

In the second case, it is undeniable that thousands of veterans who served not just one tour but repeated tours of combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are suffering from PTSD and its attendant consequences of drug and alcohol addiction.

It is equally undeniable that the Veterans Administration has been woefully inadequate providing treatment for these condition as far back as the Vietnam War.

According to the Post-Standard article, in 2016 there were 1,103 arrests by ICE in the Buffalo region which serves Syracuse. 160 involved non-criminals.

In 2017 there were 1494 arrests and 396 were non-criminal.

There is one fact that seems to cloud the debate over how these cases should be treated.
It is that entering the United States illegally or overstaying a visa is not a crime but rather a civil violation of the immigration Law.

Re-entering the country after having been deported is a crime.

According to the2019 Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Control Enforcement Budget Overview, more convicted criminal illegal immigrants were removed each of the last three years of the Obama Administration than during the first year of the trump Administration.

During the first three months of this year, ICE deported 56,710 people.

Forty-six percent of them had not been convicted of a crime.

Like many of his claims, Trump’s claim that they are targeting and removing illegal criminals from this country that the prior administration didn’t, rings hollow.

This morning, Trump while entering Easter worship services, pronounced that DACA is dead.

There is one class of criminal illegal immigrants that hasn’t had to worry.

Nazis who entered the United States and who lied on their immigration applications are living and dying in the comfort of their homes in this country.

Jakiw Palij, who confessed to being a guard at the Trawniki labor camp where 6,000 people were exterminated in one day and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation was stripped of his American citizenship in 2004 by a U.S. District Court.

Yet, he remains living in his house in a Queens’s neighborhood in New York City.

His is not an isolated case.

John Klaymon, who served in a Nazi allied SS Ukrainian auxiliary police unit, was stripped of his American citizenship in 2007 and died at his home in Troy, Michigan seven years later.

ICE and the Justice department offer the excuse that Germany, Ukraine and Poland will not accept these criminals back although none of these countries are on a list of countries classified as “uncooperative” in these matters maintained by ICE.

One would think, that at a minimum, these war criminals would be in detention rather than living and dying in the comfort of their homes with their families.

We should ask ourselves what it says about us, that we have become a country that will break up families and remove people who have committed no crime other that fleeing the violence of gangs and cartels while tolerating the monsters living comfortably in our midst after exterminating millions of innocent people in the Holocaust. ?

During the past several weeks we’ve watched mushrooming legal disputes involving Trump and a number of women that he either had affairs with or defamed.

You can’t make it up.

First there was the affair with the porn movie actress, Stormy Daniels.

Next came the affair with a Playboy centerfold and model named Karen McDougal.

This week, a New York State court ruled that a defamation action brought by a woman named, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality television show, The Apprentice.

The facts underlying each of these disputes are fairly straight forward.

It is the legal machinations involving them that make them interesting.

In the Daniels case, she alleges that she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

She contends that Trump wined, dined and promised her an apartment and a place on the Apprentice.

In the Daniels case it appears that within days of the 2016 election, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged a payoff to Daniels in the amount of $ 130,000 to keep her quiet.

Cohen went to the trouble of forming a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) whose sole purpose, it appears, was to serve as a vehicle to launder the payoff money through.

In exchange for the payoff, Daniels had to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in which she had to refrain from ever discussing her relationship with Trump or providing any details about the affair including photographs and paternity information.

The agreement that was prepared by Cohen had an alias for Trump and an alias for Daniels which each was supposed to sign.

It was apparently signed by Daniels using the alias but not Trump, which has led Daniels to declare that it isn’t valid.

Cohen, moreover, claims that the money used to pay off Daniels came from Cohen’s home equity loan, not from Trump or the Trump Organization and that Trump had no involvement in the negotiations.

If that scenario is true, Cohen could find himself facing disciplinary proceedings in New York for ethical canon violations.

On top of that, the money paid could be viewed as an undisclosed and illegal campaign contribution designed to effect the outcome of the election since it came so close to the 2016 Election Day.

Trump’s attorney, Cohen, has attempted to drag the dispute into arbitration which would get it behind closed doors and out of the public’s view.

In doing so, he removed Daniel’s lawsuit from California State court to the Federal court there.

In order to do so, he had to file an affidavit from Trump revealing that he is the party in the case, which would seem to put an end to trump’s claim that he was not involved with Daniels and not the party to the NDA.

If the point was to shield Trump from this controversy, Cohen hasn’t accomplished much.

What makes the matter screwier is that Daniels gave an interview to a magazine years ago in which she disclosed her affair with Trump in some detail.

Last night, Daniels gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which she disclosed that she had a single sexual encounter with Trump.

Considering Trump’s history it seemed like an underwhelming revelation.

Thus the question becomes what is there currently to hide?

The legal wrangling in the Karen McDougal case is just as strange.

McDougal claims that she had an affair with Trump at about the same time as Daniels and that he made many of the same promises to her that he made to Daniels, an apartment, gifts etc.

In May 2016 during the election campaign, the affair was reported on social media and she decided to sell it to America Media Inc. (AMI) for $ 150,000.

AMI is the publisher of that journalistic gem, the National Enquirer.

Once AMI acquired the exclusive right the story, it promptly buried it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Why would AMI and more pointedly the National Enquirer spend $ 150,000 to bury the story?

It turns out that AMI’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, is a friend of Trump’s.

AMI contends it killed the story because it couldn’t verify some of McDougal’s claims after consulting with none other than Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney.

Sumner Zervos, a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, is one of the ten women who came forward during the campaign to report that Trump had sexually harassing her.

Trump, it will be remembered, declared that all of the women were liars and would be sued after the election.

While Trump hasn’t sued any of the women, Zervos has sued Trump for calling her a liar.
Trump’s lawyers lost a round in New York State Supreme Court where they tried to argue that Trump was immune from the lawsuit because he was President of the United States.

Alternatively, they argued that the lawsuit should be postponed until after Trump left office.

Their objections were bizarre since their client had brought none other than Paula Jones to the Clinton-Trump debate in 2016.

Jones was the litigant who successfully brought an action against President Bill Clinton for sexually harassing her while he served as Governor of Arkansas before he was President.

The Supreme Court ruled that Clinton was not immune from being sued for something that occurred before he was President and that defending the lawsuit, while he was President was not unduly burdensome.

While being deposed by Jones’s lawyers, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and, as they say, the rest is history.

This past week a lawyer for the woman accusing failed Alabama Senate candidate of pedophilia came forward to report that two Moore supporters offered him $ 10,000 to drop the woman as a client and declare that he didn’t believe her.

In addition to the money he would be introduced to Steve Bannon.

One circus leaves and another one comes.

I have a confession to make.

Winter weather, snow, follows me.

Fortunately, it doesn’t happen in the summer months but it is pretty much a constant when winter begins.

This past February, I drove to Florida.

A friend let Terri and I use her condominium for the months of February and March and we, gladly, took her up on the offer.

The plan was for me to drive down with all of our clothes and Terri would fly a few days later.

I don’t fly anywhere that I can drive since having a knee replacement a little over ten years ago.

It wasn’t the marathons and road races that did me in or even the sixty or so miles I ran each week.

No, like a moron, I took up skiing at the age of forty-nine.

During my second season, I fell, got up the wrong way and that was the end of my right medial meniscus.

I went bone on bone for another ten years until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had the knee replaced.

Now, if I go to the airport, I set off the metal detector and TSA assumes they have found the second coming of Osama Bin-Laden.

The friendly skies of United aren’t that friendly anymore, so I drive.

I snuck out of town on the 1st of February and winter didn’t notice because a Nor’easter hit after I was gone.

Poor Terri was faced with plowing out several times a day just to get to the barn to feed her menagerie.

When I arrived in Florida, the weather was beautiful and warm but, as usually happens, the temperatures got cooler there and the snow stopped here as the temperatures started to climb.

This is not some paranoid weather fantasy, I have a proven track record.

A number of years ago, Terri decided that we would get away from the winter and made travel plans for us to visit New Mexico.

It was pleasant when we arrived in Albuquerque, much cooler when we made it to Santa Fe and we arrived in Taos in time for a snow storm.

A couple years later, I proposed renting a place in Florida for a couple of weeks.

Terri is not a big fan of Florida since she lived there for a year and found it too flat, hot and humid. My entreaties that it would be different in the winter fell on deaf ears.

“Can’t you find another warm weather destination?” she asked me.

The light went on in my head. I am a graduate of the University of Tennessee and I recalled how my friends raved about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

I rented a beach house on the Gulf just outside Ocean City, Mississippi a few miles from Gulf Port.

When you walked out the front door, you were feet from the Gulf water.

We were there two days, when it snowed.

We were told that it was the first time it had snowed on the Gulf Coast in one-hundred and seventy-five years.

Of course it was.

In the aftermath of that experience, I have toyed with the idea of visiting Hawaii or Cuba to see if it will snow there.

I have since vacationed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Asheville, North Carolina in March where the snow dutifully arrives during my stay. It’s not much but there is always some.

Not long after I arrived in Florida, the temperatures started to cool.

It seemed imperceptible to me but the natives remarked how unusual it was.

Terri arrived a week after me and we had a great time.

She flew home after ten days and the plan was for her to come back in the middle of March.

The day after she left, my daughter, Kate, and her husband, Ben, arrived for five days.

We had a lot of fun, went to the beach, took a dolphin cruise and ate out every night.

The weather was pleasant but it was still too cold to swim in the ocean.

You’re probably wondering did it snow.

It didn’t.

After Terri returned home, she discovered our two old dogs missed her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to leave them in March.

A week later Kate and Ben left, I decided to cut my stay in Florida short and return home.

Florida was fun but I missed Terri.

I took three days to drive home and the weather got progressively cooler.

I saw my first snow in southern Pennsylvania.

A day after I arrived home we had another Nor’easter.

They are forecasting another for next week.

Yes, I brought it with me.

If you are sick and tired of it, I have a suggestion.

Start a Go Fund Me page and I’ll go wherever you send me until spring.

This past week, the trial of Joseph Percoco and two others, in New York City continued with jury deliberations after almost seven weeks of testimony.

The trial revealed the all too common pay to play system that has come to embody Albany involving bribes and extortion that play an integral role in the awarding of lucrative contracts for economic development projects and public improvements.

It opened a window into the way contractors and developers obtain access to the public officials and their appointees who have the power to reward contributors to their political campaigns.

In this case, the two developers that are charged with Percoco, during the past decade, contributed over five hundred thousand dollars to the Governor, state legislators and local public officials that are influential and instrumental in awarding these contracts.

While the contributions were apparently legal and don’t constitute the bribes charged in the indictment, the way in which they were made should draw some scrutiny and reforms to eliminate the mechanism that allowed them to go unscrutinized.

At the heart of the case is a disgraced lobbyist named Todd Howe.

Howe pled guilty to eight felonies in connection with the charges in the indictment and agreed to cooperate with the government and testify about the acts charged in the indictment in exchange for leniency.

It hasn’t helped his credibility that he got arrested in the middle of his trial testimony, after it was revealed that he broke the terms of his plea agreement, which required him to commit no further crimes. He attempting to defraud his credit card company during a trip to New York City to meet with government prosecutors to prepare for trial.

Howe advised the developers to make their contributions through a Limited Liability Corporation (LLCs) that did not contain the company name so that no connection would be apparent between the developers’ contributions and the contracts awarded to them by virtue of their “preferred developer” status.

In the midst of all of this testimony, it was disclosed that Cuomo, who has always claimed to champion closing the LLC loophole, that allows contributors to skirt the limits on individual contributions, additionally accepted $ 2.2 million dollars from state appointees in violation of an executive order barring this practice.

The order was first promulgated by Eliot Spitzer at the beginning of his Administration and was renewed by Governor David Paterson and Cuomo, himself, at the start of his first term as Governor.

When this issue was raised with the Cuomo Administration, they tried to re-interpret the order by saying that it only prohibited donations from state employees that could be fired by the governor.

When that explanation didn’t “play in Peoria” as John Ehrlichman like to say, they offered a new interpretation, claiming that it only applied to employees who had to file disclosure forms with the Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

Observers and critics have pointed out that this requirement is not mentioned anywhere in the executive order.

Cuomo is sitting on a re-election campaign fund that exceeds $ 30 million dollars.

Cuomo’s determination to retain these contributions is tone deaf at best and arrogant at worst, since this disclosure comes during the first of two trials of a bribery and extortion scheme that reaches to the highest level of his Administration.

Joseph Percoco, the lead defendant in the current corruption trial is Cuomo’s closest confidant, whom he described as “Mario Cuomo’s third son.”

Testimony in the trial also revealed that Percoco retained and utilized his state office adjacent to Cuomo’s despite having left state service to run Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Both of them apparently ignored a prohibition on utilizing state government resources for political purposes.

The New York Times, The Daily News and other newspapers have been highly critical of Cuomo’s shifting two-step as he tries to justify his questionable fundraising practices against the back drop of the first of the corruption trials.

When it was revealed that Howe had pled guilty to multiple felonies and was cooperating with the government, Cuomo tried to distance himself from him, claiming they weren’t friends and did not have a close relationship.

Like his tortured accounting of the executive order, history belied these claims too.

In e-mails introduced during the trial, Howe was included in the “brotherhood” of the Cuomo clan activated by Percoco as Cuomo began his 2010 campaign for Governor. He had worked for Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, when he was Governor, worked for Andrew Cuomo when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration where he hired Percoco.

Despite his self-styled persona as a “reformer,” Cuomo surrounds himself with the Howes and Percocos of the world where everything is measured by what it does to advance Cuomo’s career, whether it is legal or not.

I don’t know how the trial will conclude.

It could end in a conviction, an acquittal or a mistrial.

If it ends in a mistrial, it is likely to be rescheduled late this year, after the bid rigging trial scheduled for June.

If that happens, it may overlap this year’s primary and general election campaign for Governor, putting the issue of this Administration’s corruption front and center before the voters as they go to the polls.

One can only hope.

Tomorrow, the deadline that Trump imposed for Congress to enact “Dreamer” protection for those previously protected under the Deferred Action for Children, expires.

Deportations of these people, who were brought to this country as children and know no other home, are not expected to proceed until two federal lawsuits enjoining them are concluded.

Congress took no action because the U.S. Senate requires sixty voted to move the measure and three separate bills which would resolve this and other immigration issues have failed to pass.

Trump has been all over the landscape on these issues.

He proclaims his love for the “Dreamers,” yet abolished DACA by executive order.

He promised to sign any “beautiful” bill sent to him but then larded any proposal with so many demands and restrictions that its enactment was doomed.

He invited Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin to the White House to discuss their proposal, only to ambush them with a number of anti-immigrant supporters that culminated in his calling certain nations “shitholes.”

Trump’s xenophobic beliefs are never far from the surface.

His followers spring from that element that fell behind him when he championed the “birther” movement and his racist insistence that President Obama wasn’t born in this country and was an illegitimate president.

He insists that the country abandon its current immigration policy that allows citizens to sponsor family members from other countries, which he calls “chain migration.”

His record on allowing refugees from war-torn countries, many of which are in wars that we are a part of, who fear persecution and genocide is hard hearted and abysmal.

Then there is his signature promise, “The Wall.”

His entire campaign was built around a promise that he would build a “big beautiful wall” and make Mexico pay for it.

Mexico, which was never consulted, understandably, has no intention of paying for it.

Interestingly, one of the demands he and his anti-immigrant coterie made during their session with Senators Graham and Durbin was funding for The Wall.

Since that demand undercuts his promise that he would make Mexico pay for the Wall, it seems like that would be any easy response for Senators Schumer, Durbin and others to justify the refusal to commit to it.

Trump’s myopic insistence that this fantasy would come true has now poisoned relations with Mexico and led to the cancellation of a visit by that country’s president this spring.

Never mind that they are one of our oldest and closest allies.

Never mind that they are one of our largest trading partners.

Trump’s own actions when it comes to immigrant labor are, to say the least, inconsistent with his expressed views.

Despite his “buy American, hire Americans” pledge, last October, Trump obtained visas to hire 70 foreign workers for the 2017-2018 season for his business at Mar-a-Lago.
This was an increase from the 64 he obtained for the 2016-2017 season there.

Trump’s antipathy for undocumented immigrants has never stood in the way of his willingness to use and abuse them when it is to his advantage.

Indeed, as far back as 1980, Trump employed 200 undocumented Polish workers to perform demolition on one of his work sites in Manhattan.

The workers were paid four dollars per hour, half the union scale, to work twelve hour shifts without gloves, hardhats or masks to protect them from the asbestos in the building.

Ultimately, Trump stopped paying them and when they complained, threatened to report them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The workers sued and eighteen years later Trump settled the class-action lawsuit for 1.375 million dollars.

But there is something to celebrate.

This past week, the Washington Post, reported that the country has two new permanent residents.

Viktor and Amalija Knavs received their green cards.

It is probably a mere coincidence that they happen to be Melania Trump’s parents.

Melania Trump became a citizen in 2006.

Trump and his anti-immigrant supporters would call this “chain migration” which needs to be outlawed.

Under Trump’s proposal sponsoring family members would be limited to spouses and children.

I guess there are situations when “chain migration” would be acceptable.

Like if you are married to a Trump.

Last week a former student brought an assault rifle to his school in Parkland Florida and murdered seventeen people.

In 2012, a gunman, using an assault rifle, killed twenty children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In 1999, two students murdered twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado armed with an assault rifle and a sawed off shotgun.

Last year a gunman opened fire at a concert in Las Vegas from a hotel room high above the concert venue. He used an assault rifle that had been converted to fully automatic, by using a “bump stock.”

He killed fifty-eight people and injured eight hundred fifty-one more.

In 2016, a gunman massacred forty-nine people and injured fifty-eight more at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida using an assault rifle and a semi-automatic pistol.

I could go on and on chronicling these episodes and totaling up the dead and injured.

In the wake of these massacres, Congress has taken no action to place any restrictions on these deadly weapons.

Indeed, it was unable to muster the courage to outlaw “bump stocks,” the device that allows a shooter to convert a semi-automatic rifle to fully automatic, as the shooter in Las Vegas did.

In the days following this latest carnage in Parkland, Florida, the best the politicians have been able to offer is their” thoughts and prayers.”

Trump’s weasel, Paul Ryan, thinks the best remedy to prevent a reoccurrence is “mental health treatment.”

The students who survived the attack at Parkland have vowed to confront the lack of action both by the Congress and the Florida State government.

I hope they are successful but I’m not optimistic.

The National Rifle Association, which is silent for the moment, owns both, lock, stock and barrel.

The NRA has spent over twenty-seven million dollars in support of U.S. Senators who opposed background checks for firearm purchasers.

Nine Senators, alone, received over twenty-two million of those funds.

Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, received $ 1,262 189.00.

Roy Blunt, Republican from Missouri, received $ 1, 433,952.00.

Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, received $ 1, 584, and 453.00.

Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, received $ 1, 968,714.00.

David Perdue, Republican from Georgia, received $ 1,997,512.00.

Bill Cassidy, Republican from Louisiana, received $ 2,687,074.00.

Joni Earnst, Republican from Iowa, received $ 3, 124,773.00.

Cory Gardner, Republican from Colorado, received $ 3, 939,199.00.

Tom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, $ 4, 418.033.00.

The NRA also spent over fourteen million dollars more to defeat candidates who favor background checks.

Then there is the thirty million dollars it spent to elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

By the end of the week, Trump’s proposed solution wasn’t to re-enact the assault rifle ban but rather to arm teachers.

Never mind the fact that teachers have declared that they don’t want to be armed.

Never mind the fact that trained police officers only hit their targets eighteen percent of the time.

It also didn’t take long for the leader of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, to come out from under his rock and join the conversation.

Wayne travels with his own security is apparently not the mythical “good guy with a gun” that would stop “bad guy with a gun.”

LaPierre accused the media of profiting from the school shootings. In his warped mind, they may have even staged them too.

His solution was, of course, more guns.

Guns for teachers, guns for armed guards, no matter what the situation, more guns is the solution.

My guess, is that if he were anywhere near a school shooting he’d be hiding in the nearest hidey hole too.

Neither Trump nor LaPierre offered any proposal about how armed guards in schools would be funded.

It would be interesting to see how they and their supporters would feel about funding it with a tax levied on assault rifle owners and assault rifle manufacturers.

` After all, why should the rest of us have to bear this cost, when the simple solution is to ban the weapon?

Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott and the State legislature are clearly under the thumb of the NRA.

Scott has signed more pro-gun legislation into law in one term than any other Governor in Florida history.

In Florida, you must be twenty-one to purchase a handgun, for which no permit is necessary, but you can purchase an assault rifle at age eighteen, like the Parkland high school shooter did.

See if you can understand the logic of that legislative scheme.

At this writing, the Florida state legislature has shelved legislation that would allow gun owners to carry their firearms into school buildings.

Don’t be surprised if that passes later this year.

Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year, Pew Research reported that 68% of Americans favor a ban on assault rifles and 64% favor a ban of magazines which hold more than ten rounds.

The students that survived the Parkland high school shooting last week have made it very clear where politicians can stick their “thoughts and prayers.”

I’m with them on that one.

Former Georgia Congressman, Jack Kingston, a Trump shill who appears on CNN has sunk to a new low by accusing the surviving students of the massacre of being pawns of George Soros.

The talk about more mental illness programs rings a bit hollow since Trump repealed an Obama era regulation that would have authorized background checks for people receiving mental health benefits seeking to purchase a firearm.

If these politicians are such Second Amendment purists, then why don’t they repeal the laws that prevent people from bringing firearms into the halls of congress and the state legislatures?

The primary reason I am not optimistic about any prospect of an assault ban being enacted is this.

This past June, a gunman opened fire on a group of republican congressmen practicing for a charity softball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

Republican House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, was seriously injured.

In the wake of that attack the Republican Congress still would not enact any gun measures.

Maybe that suggests that Paul Ryan is right.

It is about mental illness.

It’s about insanity.

In this case, the insanity is the failure to do anything over and over again and expecting a different result.

During my first year of law school, one of the required courses was Constitutional Law.

We spent a lot of the semester learning the protections and guarantees of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion.

We spent no time studying the Second Amendment since, at that time, the right of the government to impose reasonable restriction on firearms had been well settled for over half a century.

Of course, that was long before the rise of Antonin Scalia and the death of common sense on the United States Supreme Court.

One of the more controversial First Amendment cases that arose at that time was one involving the American Nazi Party’s seeking a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois.

When the City of Skokie denied the permit, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the City on behalf of the Nazis and Skokie was ordered to issue the permit and allow the march based on the Nazis right to freedom of Speech.

` The Nazis didn’t pick Skokie as the sight of their march because it was scenic or a media magnet.

They picked Skokie because it had the highest concentration of holocaust survivors as residents anywhere in the United States.

The Nazis intent wasn’t to parade, it was to provoke and traumatize.

We have seen this repeatedly since then.

The Westover Baptist Church whose membership is composed of the Phelps Family insist on demonstrating at the funerals of military veterans killed in combat proclaiming these dead heroes were punished by God for America’s sins.

They also attempted to protest at the funerals of the victims massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

There is nothing “Christian” about inflicting pain on people during their worst moment in life.

As these pests persisted in there cruelty, the Hells Angels motorcycle gang volunteered to act as a security buffer to keep them away from the mourners.

Most recently, we saw this in Charlottesville, Virginia this past summer, when a collection of Nazis, white supremacists and other reprobates, that we euphemistically call “the alt-right,” marched through the streets of the University of Virginia Campus, carrying torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” “Blood and soil” and other racist and Nazi chants.

In the ensuing clash with counter demonstrators, one of the Nazis drove his car into a crowd, killing an innocent young woman.

Unlike Trump, I don’t believe that there were “many good people” among that group or that their motives in marching through Charlottesville carrying torches and chanting those slogans were pure.

We are about to find out much more about that.

This past October a civil conspiracy lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, on behalf of nine people who were hurt in the violence, against the organizers of the demonstration seeking to hold them responsible for the injuries they sustained.

The name of the case is Sines v. Kessler.

The lawsuit contends that the violence that erupted was no accident.

Pre-trial discovery has revealed numerous postings on various social media web sites in which participants in the march proclaimed their readiness to “crack skulls” and bring firearms that ”could shoot clean through a crowd at least four deep.”

Others proclaimed their intent to bring “wrenches, pipes and wooden sticks.”

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit is Richard Spencer, who rose to fame by leading a room full of supporters in the chant “Heil Trump,” at a gathering in Washington, D.C. close to Trump’s inauguration.

Fittingly, Spencer can’t find a lawyer who will represent him in this lawsuit, so he is representing himself.

I suspect he will inject new vitality into Clarence Darrow’s observation that “A man who represents himself has a fool for a client.”

In normal times, one would expect the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department would have investigated and sued the defendants that organized the March and violence.

Regrettably, there is nothing normal about having Jeff Sessions in charge of the Justice Department.

My older brother Jim is fond of saying that “the right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.”

The wisdom in that observation is self-evident.

As I thought about the Nazi march in Skokie and Phelps family harassing the bereaved at military funerals, it dawned on me that while there might be a constitutional right to free speech, there is no constitutional right to police protection.

So, if you insist on marching through Skokie or harassing people at funerals, you might discover that there are consequences that you haven’t thought about.

At this writing the white supremacists that are being sued in Charlottesville, are whining that the purpose of the lawsuit, is to “silence them and destroy them financially.”

I’ll settle for that.

When John Kelly was appointed White House Chief of Staff this past July, most people in Washington breathed a sigh of relief.

Kelly, who was serving as Secretary of Homeland Security had impressively served this country in the United States Marine Corp. for most of his adult life.

He rose through the ranks to General having served in a variety of positions both at home and abroad and along the way saw combat during the Iraq war.

Kelly knows the sacrifices of war on the most personal level. In 2010, his oldest son, a First –Lieutenant in the Marine Corp was killed in Iraq when he stepped on a land mine.

Kelly became the highest ranking officer to lose a child in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His other son, John Jr. Is a Major in the Marine Corp.

When Kelly arrived at the White House his earliest personnel changes were impressive.

He showed Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci the newly appointed Director of Communications and a bully, the door.

He ended the chaotic access that everyone had to Trump by requiring everyone to get his consent before seeing him.

He ultimately cashiered Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist and personal Rasputin.

When Trump found moral equivalence between protesters and alt-right white supremacists in Charlottesville, Kelly was seen standing by staring awkwardly at the floor. The impression he left was that he shared the embarrassment of the others surrounding Trump.

So, it came as a surprise to me the way in which he dealt with the dispute that erupted over Trump’s callous treatment of the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.

When Trump disputed the account of his conversation given by Congresswoman, Fredrica Wilson, who was in the car with the widow, the White House, sent Kelly into the press room to vouch for Trump’s version of the telephone call.

Trump’s defense also encompassed a claim that President Obama had not made calls to the families of fallen soldiers and cited Kelly as an example.

Thus, when Kelly was forced to defend Trump, he also had to address the loss of his own son.

As it turned out, Trump’s claim about Obama’s failure to call the families of casualties and also express his sorrow to Kelly about his loss turned out to be a lie.

I fully expected that Kelly would refuse to be used in this manner again.

That turned out to be wrong.

Kelly attacked Congresswoman Wilson as a grandstander, who falsely claimed that she had obtained the funding for the construction of the FBI building in Tampa, Florida at its dedication.

When an audiotape of her remarks revealed that his accusation was untrue, Kelly refused to apologize.

Kelly, it has turned out, seems to hold many of the same alt-right views that Trump’s domestic adviser, Stephen Miller and Miller’s mentor, Steve Bannon hold.

On the subject of the Civil War, he praised Robert E. Lee and attributed the cause of the war to “a failure to compromise” apparently on the issue of slavery.

Recently, when Senators Richard Durbin and Lindsey Graham brought an immigration proposal to the White House that would resolve the DACA issue and protect the “Dreamers,” Kelly, along with Miller scuttled the deal, which Trump had signaled he would accept.

In the aftermath, Kelly has made it clear that DACA would not be extended beyond Trump’s March 5, deadline and has said the fault lies with “Dreamers” who didn’t “get off their ass” and register under it.

Mark my words.

McConnell may hold a vote on the issue and if anything passes, Ryan and his House members will not pass it and if anything does pass, Trump will veto it.

We are going to see deportations.

This past week, it was disclosed that Kelly’s deputy, Robert Porter, was a domestic abuser.

Porter beat and abused both of his ex-wives and the photographic proof of that is undeniable.

Kelly, Huckabee-Sanders and others in the White House came to Porter’s defense and urged him not to resign.

Their defense of Porter was reminiscent of Trump’s defense of Roy Moore, the pedophile that they endorsed and campaigned for in Alabama last fall.

“He denies it,” they proclaimed.

Since Porter had not been able to obtain a security clearance following an FBI investigation, it is inconceivable that Kelly didn’t know about Porter’s history.

Nevertheless, he described Porter as “a man of integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”

John Kelly spent most of his life in honorable service to this country. His sacrifices are undeniable.

The tragedy is that his legacy will be his role as another of Trump’s apologists and enablers.

Trump inevitably tarnishes everyone who serves him.