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President Biden’s Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the Elon Musk-founded company. In its 13-page complaint, the Justice Department alleges that SpaceX “discriminated against asylees and refugees throughout its hiring process, including during recruiting, screening, and selection, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The case’s outcome will be a landmark in corporate, immigration and labor law.

The Justice Department contends that from September 2018 to May 2022, the privately owned space company discouraged asylees and refugees from applying for positions “by wrongly stating that SpaceX can only hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.” The department further argues that Space X’s illegal hiring policies were “routine, widespread, and longstanding, and harmed asylees and refugees.”

For its part, SpaceX countered that because the company designs, manufacturers and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, it can only hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, pursuant to U.S. laws and regulations. A complex series of federal laws and regulations govern SpaceX and its competitors. Known as “Export Controls,” the regulations are comprised of the ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) and EAR (Export Administration Regulations) and collectively administered by the Departments of Commerce, State and Treasury. Export Controls are “designed to prevent the spread of sensitive technologies to foreign actors that could threaten U.S. interests… [These] controlled technologies include defense articles, e.g., missiles, defense services, e.g., integration of a spacecraft onto a launcher, and dual-use items, e.g., commercial spacecraft and components.”

“Foreign actors that could threaten U.S. interests” deserves further analysis. Bona fide asylum seekers who filed an Application for Asylum, Form I-589, but have not received approval within 180 days, qualify for a work permit and employment despite potentially being in the U.S. illegally. Refugees admitted legally must apply for permanent residency within a year of arrival or are subject to deportation, but are immediately employable.

Through a non-lawyer’s eyes, Musk and his SpaceX legal team appear to have the stronger hand. In Musk’s defense and in support of hiring citizens only, recent asylees and refugees include foreign nationals from Syria, Afghanistan, Russia, Cuba, Iraq, Somalia and Iran, active or potential U.S. enemies. Furthermore, SpaceX contends it can’t hire non-U.S. citizens because it must comply with the above-referenced export control restrictions.

Musk also cited a current Executive Order 11935, and called upon the Justice Department to sue itself for its seemingly, in view of its suit against SpaceX, discriminatory hiring practices. As per the executive order, “only United States citizens and nationals” can be hired for federal jobs. As an example of the feds discrimination against SpaceX, a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, cited a tweet by economist George Mason University economics professor Alex Tabarrok, who pointed out that the job requirements for the federal Bureau of Prisons specify “U.S. citizenship is required.” Musk concluded, correctly, that DOJ’s action is “yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes.”

The most foreboding challenge SpaceX faces is the Biden administration’s contemptible disregard for immigration law. For nearly two years, Biden and his corrupt Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have unconstitutionally sanctioned granting parole, which includes work permission, to thousands of unvetted worldwide migrants.

In 1952, Congress granted the executive branch parole authority, which “should be surrounded with strict limitations … in emergency cases, such as the case of an alien who requires immediate medical attention … and a witness or for purposes of prosecution.” Instead of obeying congressionally passed law – the absolute minimum Americans should expect from their president – Biden has paroled en masse unvetted aliens who are inadmissible under any immigration category.

The sad but unsurprising truth is that, given what’s known about Biden and his anti-American agenda, the Justice Department is suing SpaceX because Musk’s company wants to hire U.S. citizens.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Survivors of the deadly fires in Maui are being offered a $700-per-household payment by FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and temporary shelter.

But in Maui, $700 doesn’t go far. Estimated monthly living costs for a family of four are $7,203. The token $700 represents less than 10 percent of a family’s living costs, an insult to the suffering residents who have, in some cases, lost everything they own.

Public outcry over the First Family’s perceived indifference has more or less forced Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, to visit Maui.

But for Afghanistan and the Ukraine, the Biden administration can’t shell out money fast enough, with no limit to its wasteful ways. In early August, Biden asked Congress for about $40 billion in new spending to support the efforts of the Ukraine to beat back invading Russia. In its letter to lawmakers, the White House Office of Management and Budget asked for $13 billion in new military aid and $8.5 billion in additional economic, humanitarian and security assistance for Ukraine and other war-impacted countries.

The White House’s funding request also includes other forms of assistance for Ukraine, including more than $12 billion for disaster relief and for other emergency domestic funds, like hurricanes, as well as tens of millions of dollars to boost pay for firefighters battling the wildfires that have hit many parts of the country.

In Biden’s mind, wildfires in Ukraine are a more urgent concern than the Maui wildfires that destroyed the town of Lahaina and took the lives of at least 114 people, with 1,000 missing at the time of this writing.

In total, the U.S. has sent more than $100 billion to Ukraine. Displacing millions of people, the 18-month-old proxy war has left a reported 500,000 dead or injured. And there is no end in sight. Biden said that the U.S. will remain committed for “as long as it takes,” which means that taxpayers will continue to fund a war in which they have no stake.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. is supporting the Taliban-controlled government with more than $2.35 billion since the botched 2021 withdrawal. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, admitted in his April report to the House Oversight Committee that he “cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban.” Further, he said the Biden administration has blocked any and all investigative efforts as to whether American dollars sustain the Taliban or “other nefarious groups” like ISIS.

While neglecting the home front, and funding corrupt foreign countries, Biden also has provided for them on U.S. soil. Programs such as “Uniting for Ukraine” and “Operation Allies Welcome” have made available resettlement benefits and parole – an immigration status that includes work permission – to many thousands of foreigners. Additionally, more than 70,000 Ukrainians have not arrived via Biden’s official program but rather have come illegally through the Southwest border. Thousands of Afghans have been successfully resettled since America’s hasty and ill-conceived Afghanistan withdrawal.

Both Afghan and Ukrainian nationals have been granted Temporary Protected Status, which officially protects them from removal even though such an action would be unlikely under all but the most extraordinary circumstances. The status also includes employment authorization. With that, program recipients can compete with citizens or other legal immigrants for jobs.

The Biden administration’s multi-billion-dollar outlay to Ukraine and Afghanistan and its red-carpet acceptance of those countries’ nationals, with minimal vetting, proves that no matter how dire conditions may be for U.S. citizens, e.g., Hawaiians, foreign governments receive priority, despite their crooked backgrounds.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

On August 1, the rating agency Fitch dropped the U.S. government’s long-term credit rating from AAA to AA+.

Fitch said the downgrade “reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next two or three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance.”

The surprise is that, in light of Fitch’s concern about how the Biden administration manages the federal government, the rating agency didn’t downgrade further. Save for the detrimental effect a further downgrade would have on the markets, a bigger lowering is justified.

In a Fitch statement, the agency said: “There has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters. The repeated debt limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.”

U.S. debt has surpassed $31 trillion and is expected to reach $52 trillion in 2033. Rising interest rates, as the Fed attempts to cool down inflation, have fueled Fitch’s concerns about the overall debt burden. The prediction of the Congressional Budget Office that the ratio of federal debt-to-GDP would nearly double from 98 percent in 2023 to 181 percent in 2053 is a nightmarish worry.

In an alternative but more troubling scenario drafted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the debt-to-GDP ratio could soar even higher, hitting 222 percent of GDP by 2053. In the past 17 months, the Federal Reserve has hiked its overnight bank lending rate 11 times. More increases are certain. Analysts predict the obvious – that the U.S. is on a course of “drowning in debt.”

When Fitch refers to “the erosion of governance” – meaning bad governance – surely those who pass judgment on the U.S. debt must have in their minds the wild, imprudent spending spree that the Biden administration immediately embarked on.

A sampling: the “American Rescue Plan,” a $1.9 trillion bill disguised as a COVID-19 relief package; second, the “American Jobs Plan” at $2.3 trillion, falsely advertised as legislation that would upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, and third, the “American Families Plan,” $1.8 trillion in spending that’s vaguely defined as a bill to expand access to education, reduce the cost of child care and support women in the workforce.

In total, the Biden administration has laid out $6 trillion that it doesn’t have for bills with questionable purposes that will produce dubious results, if any.

Also raising eyebrows over at Fitch regarding sound governance must be the White House’s determination to support Ukraine in its endless war against Russia. Ukraine is now the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid, and the White House has poured more than $75 billion into a corrupt country’s coffers without any accountability for how the funds have been disbursed. The consensus opinion is that the war has no end in sight and may drag into 2025, thereby sucking up more U.S. taxpayer money.

Fitch must also interpret the unprecedented Southwest border invasion as poor governance. The arriving migrants are mostly poor, undereducated and therefore likely to become government assistance-dependent.

Estimated at more than 5.5 million since Biden’s inauguration, the migrants’ presence has disrupted major cities, including New York City and Chicago, as well as many Texas border communities. Because the migrant crisis is so severe and far-reaching, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy has asked Bay State residents to house Haitian and Central American illegal aliens. The invasion costs taxpayers billions of dollars, and the costs are mounting. Since no one truly knows the migrants’ backgrounds and intentions, or what their total number may eventually reach, Fitch analysts must view the open border with skepticism, another example of misguided governance.

Finally, looking ahead to 2024, Fitch must look askance at the prospect of either former President Donald Trump, who will be 78 on Election Day, or Biden, who then will be 82, in the White House. Whoever wins, four more years of divided government is assured.

Looking at the whole disheartening picture, Fitch’s AA+ grade is generous. The piling of more debt onto the mountain of existing debt, the unnecessary and expensive entanglement in a foreign war that has no bearing on the U.S., an open border – an obvious national security threat – that’s given entry to known terrorists and enabled drug and human trafficking, and a contentious federal government at least until 2028 are all huge waving red flags.

The agency’s declaration that the outlook for the U.S. is “stable” is highly doubtful.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Actor Charles Durning’s D-Day memories were so painful that for decades he suppressed them.

Drafted at age 20, Durning eventually earned a Silver Star for valor, a Bronze Star for meritorious service in a combat zone, and three Purple Hearts, given in the president’s name to those wounded or killed in military service. Just out of high school, which he didn’t complete until the war ended, Durning was the only survivor in a unit that landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

Durning’s World War II experiences are unfathomable, and his actions in defense of his fellow soldiers, selfless and heroic. During the Normandy battle, Durning killed seven German gunners, but suffered serious machine gun wounds to his right leg and shrapnel wounds throughout his body.

After a six-month recovery in England, Durning was rushed back to the front lines to fight against the German Ardennes offensive. During the Battle of the Bulge, Durning suffered more wounds, this time in hand-to-hand bayonet combat when he was stabbed eight times. Despite the vicious assault, Durning summoned up the strength to kill his attacker with a rock, which earned him a second Purple Heart.

Soon after, his company was captured and forced to march through the Malmedy Forest. In the ensuing “Malmedy massacre,” German troops opened fire on the prisoners, and Durning was among the few who escaped.

Durning would earn his third Purple Heart when, in March 1945, he moved into Germany with the 398th Infantry Regiment, where he was severely wounded when a bullet struck him in the chest. Private First Class Durning was evacuated to the U.S. to spend the remainder of his active Army career recovering until he was discharged in January 1946.

Born in 1923, Durning grew up in Highland Falls, N.Y., near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His father, James, an Irish immigrant who had joined the Army to gain U.S. citizenship, lost a leg during World War I and died when Charles was 12. James’ widow Louise supported her five children by working as a laundress at West Point. Four other children died from scarlet fever.

After the war, Durning used dance as physical therapy to strengthen his badly injured leg and speech therapy to smooth out a stutter that had developed. He began training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was told he lacked talent. Undeterred, he took small roles with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Company and taught ballroom dancing at the Fred Astaire studio.

Eventually, Durning achieved his lifelong goal when he landed parts in television and the movies. His most memorable silver screen appearances among his 200 films include “The Sting,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “Tootsie.” His significant honors include numerous Academy, Emmy and Tony Award nominations.

Reluctant to visit the site where so many of his comrades lay, Durning returned to Normandy only once after the war ended. Looking back during a 1994 Memorial Day service to recognize the invasion’s 50th anniversary, Durning noted remorsefully that the U.S. had engaged in at least five wars since World War II – Korea, Desert Storm, Panama, Grenada and Vietnam. He said that each war is pertinent to only the individual who was there.

“I don’t know what they went through; they don’t know what I went through,” said Durning. “Each person fights his own war. Each person is on a one-to-one basis with whoever’s opposite him.” Durning added: “That war changed history as we knew it. It was the greatest armada that ever hit any country, anywhere, anytime in the history of mankind. No one will ever see anything that enormous again.” World War II was, Durning said, the last war that had a well-defined purpose.

In January 2008, Durning was honored with the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and his star was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame adjacent to the actor he most admired, Jimmy Cagney. Durning died of natural causes at his Manhattan home on Christmas Eve December 24, 2012, aged 89. Two days later, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights in his honor.

Durning is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the ultimate tribute to an American hero.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Good news for the agricultural industry. Robotics have become more affordable, smarter and easier to operate. Soft fruits like strawberries can be picked mechanically now.

Florida-based Harvest CROO has developed technology that can pick ripe strawberries without damaging the delicate fruit. A primary goal of the company is to help reduce U.S. obesity by keeping the supply of “super foods” like strawberries readily available and reasonably priced. A related benefit is that growers who opt for Harvest CROO’s technology won’t have to worry about labor shortages and will no longer have to rely on tedious back-breaking stoop labor.

In California’s Salinas Valley, Taylor Farms manager David Offerdahl demonstrated his Automatic Romaine Lettuce Harvester to CBS News. The harvester uses a high-pressure water stream to cut five heads of lettuce at a time. Workers then pack the lettuce into boxes while standing under a shaded canopy, thus ending stoop labor. Offerdahl said that the robot can harvest twice the lettuce in half the time. As well, for every two low-paying jobs mechanization eliminates, one higher paying job is created.

The term to describe the increasingly popular transition to robotics is “precision agriculture,” which means applying new technology to increase crop production while reducing waste. The market for advanced farming tools was estimated to be about $7 billion in 2020, but projected to reach $12.8 billion over the next four years.

Despite the obvious advantages robotics presents, Congress remains stuck in the technological dark ages and heeds the industry’s annual laments about worker shortages. Harvest CROO and the Automatic Romaine Lettuce Harvester have proven that technology is a better way to go than temporary employment visas.

Nevertheless, in early July, Congress did what it does most effectively and most consistently – rejected 21st century solutions and, at the same time, undermined American workers by approving unnecessary work visas. After markups and hearings, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee approved a $91.5 billion Department of Homeland Security spending bill. But a portion of the bill had nothing to do with defending the homeland.

Tucked away in the DHS legislation are provisions that would greatly expand the H-2A visa for agriculture workers, which allows employers to hire foreign-born laborers, and the H-2B visa for non-ag workers. Originally, the agricultural employment-based visas were temporary in nature; the employee had to return home when the season ended. But the language describing the H-2A that permitted the worker to remain for up to three years will be rewritten, and the jobs will no longer be classified as seasonal. The worker will be available for continuing and perhaps continuous employment.

The H-2B visa program allows U.S. employers to import about 66,000 foreign workers for seasonal nonagricultural jobs in industries like construction, landscaping, hospitality and food services. These industries are chronic complainers that a labor shortage puts their companies at bankruptcy risk. A new wrinkle written into the DHS spending bill which would expand the H-2B visa program will exempt foreign-born workers who arrived on H-2B visas during the last three years from the annual cap, a provision that could result in at least 200,000 additional H-2B workers.

On the plus side, the GOP-led Appropriations Committee, which has a 34-27 majority, drafted a bill that ramps up border security and interior enforcement. The bill also cuts taxpayer dollars used to allocate cash to open border-supporting NGOs. On the downside, the work visa totals will increase, obviously needlessly, as millions of low-skilled migrants, mostly employment-authorized through their parole status, pour across the border.

Big ag has gotten away with relying on cheap labor for decades. Instead of encouraging continuous dependence on low-cost imported labor by providing more H-2A and H-2B visas, Congress should demand that employers invest in proven robotic harvesters that can work 18 hours a day, never call in sick and, within a short time, pay for themselves.

The H-2A has a long, documented history of fraud and abuse that includes a recent lawsuit. which charged a western Michigan farm of trafficking foreign-born H-2A visa workers into blueberry picking jobs where they were paid slave wages and housed in squalid conditions with other exploited workers.

Given the H-2A’s past track record that includes criminal wrongdoing, Congress should use its power to demand that farmers, within a reasonable time period, mechanize. Out with slave labor and in with efficient, humane and modern farming practices.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

With the Hall of Fame induction ceremony set for this weekend, here’s a baseball quiz. The question: What do Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Scott Rolen and Fred McGriff have in common?

Although Ruth, Cobb, Rolen and McGriff have widely different skill levels, all four are Hall of Fame inductees. In many scribes’ minds, the vast talent gap between the enshrined great and the very good is proof that the institution has lost its exclusivity. In too many cases, induction isn’t warranted.

Ruth and Cobb are baseball titans elected along with Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson in 1936 in the first-ever Hall of Fame class. Meanwile, it took Rolen six ballot appearance before he was able to squake into the Hall with 76.3 percent of the vote, barely over the minimum 75 percent required.

McGriff took a more circuitous route. After failing to reach the mandatory 75 percent for 10 consecutive years, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, as per its rules, dropped McGriff’s name from the ballot. A few years later, McGriff reappeared on the Contemporary Era committee where he was unanimously elected. The Contemporary Baseball Era includes players from 1980 to the present day, while the Classic Baseball Era spans the period prior to 1980 and includes Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues stars. In other words, just because the Baseball Writers’ Association of America initially rejects a player – and in some cases, resoundingly rejects – doesn’t mean that he won’t reappear on either Classic or Contemporary Era ballot.

Rolen and McGriff are very good players and would be welcome additions to any roster. But they’re not Hall of Fame worthy. Without getting too deeply into sabermetric weeds, McGriff in his 19-year career notably hit 30 home runs or more 10 times and led the league in that category twice. But McGriff never finished higher than fourth in Most Valuable Player award voting, a telling evaluation of his overall value to the six teams he played for. Many feel that Hall of Fame inductees should be the dominant players of their era, not merely key contributors.

Rolen’s Hall of Fame credentials are less persuasive than McGriff’s. Like McGriff, Rolen never finished higher than fourth in MVP balloting, but he had no league-leading categories, and was elected on the basis of his eight Gold Gloves – nice, but not Hall of Fame stuff.

The moment a debate about a candidate’s credentials arises, he’s probably not Hall of Fame material.Center field: Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio; Right field: Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson; Catchers: Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Bill Dickey, Pitchers: Bob Feller, Tom Seaver, Whitey Ford – no one argues about their top place among the greats. But when five failed ballots have been cast, and on the sixth, the player gets elected by the slimmest margin, as is Rolen’s case, he doesn’t belong.

The solution: eliminate the extra committees designed to expand the total inductees, reduce the ten-year eligibility to three years, and increase the approval margin from 75 percent to 90 percent. The truly great will easily reach the 90 percent plateau, while those who fall short will remain on the outside looking in.

Baseball will never see another class like 1936, but the Baseball Writers’ Association of America should keep Cobb, Ruth, Wagner, Johnson and Mathewson’s greatness in mind when they vote.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

There was a time when the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was a special event.

Fans were eager to see the superstars of the National League and American League compete on one field in one special game. But interleague play, which began in 1997, put the kibosh on that.

Here’s Philadelphia Phillies’ outfielder Ron Gant’s reaction, shared by many, to interleague play: “To match the Phillies and Orioles in the regular season is to store your milk in the cupboard. The game is curdling. It has already curdled! What once was a special pastime is now a soulless contrivance….”

Interleague baseball killed the All-Star Game, and the commissioner’s office buried it with pointless add-ons like the Futures Game, the Home Run Derby and poor taste’s nadir, the Red Carpet Show. None of the gimmicks that segue into the game help viewership which has been in freefall for years. The 2022 Midsummer Classic drew an all-time low of 7.5 million viewers. During the 1990s, the television audience routinely exceeded 20 million.

Fans disappointed in Commissioner Rob Manfred’s heavy-handedness in altering how the traditional game had been played for decades – the universal designated hitter and the ghost runner in extra innings are two glaring examples – should brace themselves. Within the next few years, Manfred, determined to drive a stake into traditional baseball’s heart, envisions a complete MLB overhaul.

The San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers would no longer be in the same division. Ditto the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles. Manfred’s scheme is dependent on the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas and Tampa Bay building a new stadium. Once those two steps are completed, Charlotte and Nashville will be awarded new franchises. They’ll be uncompetitive for years.

As Manfred sees baseball, revenue is everything, and the game’s rich history is inconsequential. The average team’s value is $2.1 billion; the New York Yankees’ value tops the list at $6 billion.

To appreciate lost history, turn the calendar back to 1946 when a baseball-starved nation welcomed back World War II heroes, many of them future Hall of Famers, who would play in Fenway Park’s All-Star Game, the site of the canceled 1945 tilt. The National League’s squad included Johnny Mize, Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter and Pee Wee Reese. On the American League roster were the DiMaggio brothers – Joe and Dom – Bob Feller and Ted Williams.

All 35,000 eyes were on Williams, a Marine Corp Naval Aviator. Fans wondered if “The Kid,” Williams’ preferred nickname, could pick up where he left off in 1942, his last year before his active service began. Williams went four for four in that All-Star Game, and became the first player to drive in five runs in a single game as the American League dominated, 12-0.

The Kid’s two home runs, two singles and a walk accounted for 10 total bases, a still-standing All-Star Game record. One of Ted’s blasts came off of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Rip Sewell’s eephus pitch, a soft, parabolic lob that soared 30 feet off the ground before it floated back to earth. Sewell’s pitch and Ted’s homer provided the fans with comic relief during the rout.

Out in Ted’s hometown of San Diego, his mother May and her Union Street neighbors listened to Mel Allen call the game. When asked how she felt about her son becoming the first player to drive in five runs in an All-Star Game, the devoted Salvation Army volunteer said: “All my prayers were answered. The game was perfectly marvelous…Ted’s a wonderful boy.”

May’s prayers, however, didn’t prevent 1946 from ending on a sour note for the Red Sox and Ted. In the World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals bested the Sox 4-3, and in his only World Series appearance held The Kid to a measly .200 batting average.

A humiliated, humbled Williams looked back on the World Series as the lowest point in his otherwise glorious career.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers’ Association member. Contact him at [email protected].

George M. Cohan, the son of Irish immigrants – often described as the man who owned Broadway – dominated American theater from 1901 until 1940.

During that four-decade period, the man born on the Fourth of July produced 80 Broadway shows and wrote more than 1,000 songs. Although Cohan liked to describe himself as “just a song and dance man,” he was a skilled actor, playwright and a director who once advised Spencer Tracy: “Spencer, you have to act less,” counsel that guided the great screen actor to his many understated performances.

Cohan got his start as one of the four Cohans, a late 19th century vaudeville act that included his father Jere, mother Nellie, George’s sister Josie and George. First carried onto the stage when he was four months old, in 1900 George and his family left hometown Providence, R.I., and headed for Broadway’s bright lights.

Soon after, Cohan met Sam Harris, who became George’s friend and partner. For decades, the team paired up for dozens of unqualified stage successes, the first of which, Little Johnny Jones, came in 1904. The play opened in Hartford, Conn., where, upon hearing Cohan sing the words:

“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

A Yankee Doodle do or die

A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam’s

Born on the Fourth of July.”

The electrified audience jumped out of their seats, applauding feverishly. The patriotically stirring, flag-waving tune reflected Cohan’s unflinching devotion to his country. Cohan had three loves: his family, the theater and the United States.

In 1905, in his play “George Washington, Jr.,” Cohan wrote another American tribute, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” Sitting next to a Civil War veteran who had been active during Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Pa., Cohan listened as the old man, who tenderly stroked the U.S. flag he held in his lap, said, “She’s a grand old rag.”

Recalling the veteran’s words, Cohan originally named his song “Grand Old Rag.” But listeners, not knowing the backstory, objected, so he changed the title. In his lyrics, however, Cohan kept the reference intact:

“You’re a grand old rag, you’re a high-flying flag

And forever in peace may you wave

You’re the emblem of the land I love

The home of the free and the brave.”

At World War I’s outbreak, Cohan penned another patriotic song, “Over There,” the era’s most popular tune:

“Over there, over there

Send the word, send the word over there,

That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming

The drums rum-tumming everywhere.”

In 1936, Congress awarded Cohan the Congressional Gold Medal, not only because of his songwriting and acting talent, but also because his work instilled in Americans’ hearts a loyal and patriotic spirit and projected the grandeur that the U.S. represented to people around the world.

Six years later, in 1942, Jimmy Cagney portrayed Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” a role that earned him an Oscar for Best Actor.

The same year, surrounded by friends and family at his home, Cohan lost his battle with intestinal cancer. Cohan’s funeral, a Solemn Requiem Mass attended by thousands, was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the first time in St. Patrick’s history, the organist played a secular song. In a slow, soft funeral march tempo, “Over There” overwhelmed mourners who sobbed uncontrollably. The funeral procession up Fifth Avenue proceeded to the Bronx where Cohan was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery with his mother, father and sister.

The burial marked the last stop in the Four Cohans’ journey.

Toward the end of Cohan’s life, long-time friend George Buck reminded him that no one had ever matched George’s theatrical triumphs. “Doesn’t that make you proud?” Buck asked. Cohan replied: “No complaints, kid. No complaints.” His daughter Mary, at his bedside, said that she was certain that George M. died a happy man, a fitting final act for an artist who delighted so many for so long.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him at [email protected].

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most trusted barometer of children’s classroom progress, has just delivered bad but expected news. Post COVID-19 lockdown testing found that kids are going backwards in both reading and math.

Thirteen-year-olds who took the NAEP test during the 2022-2023 school year performed at lower levels in math and reading, basic but essential disciplines. In reading, the average scores for 13-year-olds declined 4 points and 9 points in mathematics, compared to the previous assessments administered during the 2019-20 school year.

Compared to a decade ago, average scores declined 7 points in reading and 14 points in mathematics. Even more troubling, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading, primarily during the 2020-21 school year – COVID-19’s onset.

Scores fell for kids at all percentiles, but declined most sharply for students already performing at or near the bottom. The across-the-board failures will be devastating – students in their early high school years won’t be able to do long division, or read and understand simple paragraphs.

Neither parents nor teachers should be surprised at the alarming results that two years of remote learning produced. “Learning” is defined loosely because early in the COVID-19 classroom lockdown, students obviously struggled not only with absorbing their lessons, but also with social and psychological barriers, the consequences of which are just now unfolding. A Pew Research Center report found that 40 percent of parents worry that their adolescent children struggle with depression, and a slightly lower percentage noted that their kids fear being abducted, beaten or bullied.

Going forward, children unfairly victimized by questionable school shutdown mandates will need their teachers’ full support, determination and dedication to bring the kids back to grade level on basic skills. But at the exact time when struggling students need their teachers’ undivided attention, public schools are coping, often unsuccessfully, with decades of loose border policies from both Republican and Democratic administrations. This has spiked legal and illegal immigrant enrollment in schools nationwide.

To deconstruct the status of public education as it relates to school demographics, the Center for Immigration Studies merged Census Bureau data with Google Maps API to provide a portrait of legal and illegal immigration’s effect on K-12.

Briefly excerpted from the detailed Center for Immigration Studies breakdown, researchers found that immigrant-headed households tend to have more students in school on average than households headed by U.S.-born citizens. A larger share of students from immigrant households also come from low-income families and speak a foreign language at home. This likely creates significant burdens for many schools, often located in areas that already struggle to educate students who come from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.

About 11 million students live in immigrant households, a significant share of the total 49.5 million enrollment.

Moreover, immigration has added disproportionately to the number of low-income students in public schools. In 2021, 21 percent of public-school students from immigrant households lived in poverty and accounted for 29 percent of all students who live below the poverty line. The significant influx of immigrant students and their learning needs add to the post-COVID-19 challenges with which teachers are coping.

Public education bureaucrats and teachers are on the precipice. Not only do they have the uphill climb to catch their students up with the two years lost to COVID-19, but they must also educate students from around the world who may speak little, if any, English. For teachers, worse classroom conditions may lay ahead. Because of the lag in Census Bureau data collection, with the Biden administration’s agenda of not ensuring the security of our borders, which began in 2021, there may be worse to come in the data.

Teachers are fed up. They’re leaving their profession in droves. COVID-19 was mismanaged, which is too late to correct now. In immigration, however, time still remains to right the ship – or at least to keep conditions from worsening.

Numbers matter, and fewer entries through the border would be best for all of America’s students.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Only the most trusting among the general population believe a single utterance from establishment Washington, D.C. In fact, an inverse relationship exists between an issue’s importance and the likelihood entrenched D.C. speaks about it honestly. The more important, the less probable the public will hear the truth.

The best the populace can hope for is that decades after the damage has been done, architects of the ruinous policies will make half-hearted apologies. For example, in the mid-1990s, 20 years after 58,000 American soldiers died in Southeast Asia, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the war’s chief prosecutor, confessed, “We [President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara] were wrong, terribly wrong.” The war cost $168 billion, or adjusted for inflation, $1 trillion in today’s dollars

Then, in March 2003, speaking from the White House, President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly kept at the ready. Bush ominously added that those weapons could “kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.” But in January 2004, David Kay, a former U.N. Weapons Inspector, told Bush that his intelligence was wrong; Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and he resigned. Nevertheless, and largely on Bush’s bad information, the Iraq War lasted from 2003 until 2011, and cost $2 trillion. About 4,700 U.S. and allied troops were killed, as well as more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens.

In 2022, Bush sheepishly admitted that the Iraq invasion was “unjustified and brutal.”

The 20-year war in Afghanistan, 2001-2021, purportedly launched to beat back the Taliban, ended in a humiliating withdrawal, but not until the Department of Defense squandered $2.3 trillion, and 243,000 U.S. soldiers, allies and citizens died, exclusive of fatalities by disease, inadequate diet, dehydration and other indirect consequences. Two decades, apparently, isn’t long enough for Presidents Bush, Obama or Trump to apologize for their collective misjudgment in sustaining the Afghan war that the nation could never have been won.

The Biden administration has kept Washington’s commitment to dishonesty alive and well, this time as it mischaracterizes the Southwest border invasion. To hear Biden and Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas describe conditions, agents have operational control of the border, asylum seekers have been thoroughly vetted, and the president’s open borders largesse reflects Americans’ generosity.

The inconvenient truth is the opposite of the official narrative.

Since Biden took office, Customs and Border Protection has encountered 6.2 million illegal immigrants and released more than two million of them into the interior. Another estimated 1.5 million gotaways, those who escaped the agency’s detection, are also now part of the general population.

Although the official patter is that the border crossers are vetted, the statistics tell a different story. A significant portion of arriving migrants have criminal convictions for rape, assault and murder. A 2021 Department of Justice report revealed that 64 percent of federal arrests in 2018 involved illegal aliens, despite then comprising only 7 percent of the population.

Biden’s open border has lured hundreds of migrants to their deaths. For example, 38 illegal aliens were killed after a fire broke out in a Ciudad Juárez holding facility. Last year, more than 850 illegal aliens died while trying to traverse rough southwestern terrain into the U.S.

In 2022, fentanyl overdose deaths hit 110,000, a record, and are climbing daily. About 150 people O.D. every day from the drug that smugglers bring across the poorly defended Southwest Border. The administration’s welcome-the-world approach to immigration has spawned other crises – sex trafficking, migrant child labor abuse, overwhelmed school districts and hospital overcrowding.

Comparisons between the fallout from long foreign wars and today’s border crisis are not exact. But the similarity is that when a subject affects all Americans – wars and sovereignty-busting open borders – people are lied to. The border mess is still in its earliest stages; Biden has been in office 30 months with 18 months remaining, and possibly four more years if he is reinstalled for a second term.

The annual taxpayer cost per the ever-mounting illegal immigrant population including its U.S.-born children is $8,766 per illegal alien. Americans oppose everything about Biden’s law-breaking immigration agenda.

A quick rule of thumb: when the subject is immigration, the administration speaks in forked tongues.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].