Cagle World

Of the 1,287,891 Arizonans who cast their 2022 gubernatorial votes for Democrat Katie Hobbs to replace termed-out Republican Doug Ducey, at least 25% would likely want to take their votes back. Hobbs has proven to be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, a viable threat to national security.

Hobbs’ latest gubernatorial action, consistent with her apparent indifference to Arizonans’ well-being, was to veto a bill intended to prevent nationals from the People’s Republic of China from purchasing Arizona property. The measure sought to add Arizona to the growing list of states that, because of national security concerns, ban the communist nation from acquiring U.S. land.

In her veto message, Hobbs stated that while protecting infrastructure is important, the bill is “ineffective at counterespionage and does not directly protect our military assets.” Senate Majority Leader Janae Shamp, who sponsored the legislation, slammed Hobbs for the veto and called out the governor for threatening state and national security. Shamp pointed to China’s recent effort to lease property near Luke Air Force Base in the west Phoenix suburb of Glendale. Luke serves as a primary training base for F-35 stealth fighter pilots from the U.S. and several allies.

The bill also applied to Chinese citizens unless they are permanent U.S. residents. The only exception was for homes on less than two acres located at least 50 miles from a military base or 25 miles from a military practice range—meaning not in Phoenix, Tucson, Yuma, Flagstaff, or Sierra Vista.

The “veto queen”

Around Arizona, Hobbs has earned the nickname “Veto Queen.” She has already smashed the Arizona veto record during her first two years as governor, killing 216 bills: 143 in 2023 and 73 in 2024. Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano previously held the record with 181 bills vetoed from 2003-09. Hobbs is running up her winning margin, with 138 vetoes so far this year, as she approaches surpassing her 2023 record.

In defiance of the Department of Homeland Security, Hobbs has vetoed multiple Republican-backed bills that would have forced cooperation with federal immigration and deportation efforts, including three border-related bills on May 12. The Democratic governor’s vetoes demonstrate that she will not embrace federal immigration law, even as the Republican-majority Legislature advances the Trump administration’s priorities on enforcement and deportation. Hobbs frequently states that Arizonans will determine Arizona’s future, not the federal government — a position that could put her on the Department of Justice’s list of states that defy the Supremacy Clause.

Questionable campaign and early actions

Hobbs’ 2022 candidacy raised ethical questions. As the then-Secretary of State, Hobbs was responsible for certifying the gubernatorial election results — a clear conflict of interest since she was in a tight race against Kari Lake. Once she won the nomination, Hobbs ran a Biden-like campaign: she refused to debate Lake and avoided reporters and their questions. Immediately after Hobbs’ paper-thin victory, inquiries arose about Maricopa County’s malfunctioning electronic voting machines and mail-in ballot validity. Maricopa is Arizona’s largest county and leans Republican.

From the start, Hobbs proved herself an open-borders advocate. In her 2023 inaugural address, she promised to extend the Arizona Promise Scholarship Program to illegal aliens attending state universities and colleges. Before Title 42 ended, Hobbs established five new bus routes from border communities to Tucson, overwhelming the city to accommodate undocumented immigrants.

Ongoing legal and financial issues

The governor’s problems are ongoing. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Hobbs violated state law when she appointed 13 de facto state agency heads to sidestep the Senate confirmation process. This judicial rebuke represents only the tip of the iceberg regarding Hobbs’ legal troubles.

Her $2 million taxpayer-funded Super Bowl LVII celebration included open-bar parties, 70 hotel rooms at the high-end Arizona Biltmore, sponsorships, and free tickets valued at between $4,000 and $40,000 for teachers, staffers, and political allies. This extravagance drew criticism in a state struggling to provide essential services like helping the homeless and funding responses to the growing illegal alien immigrant presence at Arizona’s southern border.

Pay-for-play allegations

The most serious charge against Hobbs involves alleged pay-for-play schemes. Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Thomas Shope demanded an investigation after reports emerged that Sunshine Residential Homes, which donated $400,000 to Hobbs, received an exclusive daily care rate increase from Hobbs’ Department of Child Safety (DCS). The reports alleged that Sunshine’s daily rate increased from $149 to $195 per child while DCS denied rate increases to similar service providers. The Democratic Attorney General has acknowledged that her office has begun an investigation.

Political future in question

Hobbs often boasts that she has never lost an election. However, with border politics likely to be at the forefront of voters’ minds and state issues close behind in her now-long-shot reelection bid next year, the question more commonly heard around Arizona is: “How can she win?”

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Trump is spot on in his decision to slow the arrival of foreign-born students to universities in the U.S.

The administration has halted scheduling of new student visa appointments at U.S. embassies abroad as the State Department prepares to expand social media vetting of foreign students. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced the U.S. would “aggressively revoke” some Chinese students’ visas, especially those enrolled in sensitive courses of study or with ties to the Communist Party of China.

Immigration officials are revoking dozens of student visas, with many more cases going unreported at small colleges anxious to avoid federal scrutiny.

The battle between the Trump administration and America’s oldest university has entered a new front.

At Harvard, about 27% of the student body (about 6,800 students) is foreign-born, a point of pride at the elite Ivy League institution which promotes diversity, equity and inclusion.

Last month, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem ordered her department to “terminate the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification”, citing that “Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals.” This action would have meant the school could no longer enroll new foreign students, and that current foreign students must either “transfer or lose their legal status.” However, a federal court has temporarily granted Harvard’s motion, allowing the university to continue enrolling international students and scholars as the case proceeds through litigation.

President Trump’s proposed 15% cap on Harvard’s foreign-born students as a percentage of total enrollment may not be sufficiently restrictive. The time is overdue for a complete recalibration on U.S. visa policy. The administration’s goal should be to return the F-1 visa to its original guidelines, which allowed foreign students to study in the U.S., but with a requirement their visas be renewed every year. Such a condition would tamp down on violent anti-Semitic rioting.

International student increases were most pronounced at public colleges and universities, which faced budget cuts during the Great Recession and began to rely more heavily on tuition from foreign students. With visa policies tightening under the current administration, consular officers are expected to be more cautious in approving applications, and visa denials are expected to rise in 2026.

Because employers don’t have to pay FICA or Medicare taxes on employees working on a student visa, they save roughly 8 percent in payroll costs when they hire a foreign national instead of an American. These workers often hold jobs that range from $60,000 t0 $100,000 a year, but they cost Social Security and Medicare about $4 billion dollars annually. Statisticians predict that, at their current pace, Social Security and Medicare might go bankrupt by the mid-2030s.

President Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services nominee, Joseph Edlow, supports ending this so-called Optional Practical Training. During a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Edlow said the program has been “mishandled” in recent years and that F-1 employment authorization should not extend past the period that students are enrolled. Edlow’s comments, practical though they are, shocked universities and immigration expansionists.

All in, when comparing 2007 to 2023, an enormous 320 percent increase occurred in the number of foreign students who obtained work authorization through some form of practical training. This program violates federal immigration law, and ending it should not be a partisan issue.

Republican and Democrat administrations have consistently ignored the obvious threat international students represent to national security. In early May, Stanford University discovered a Chinese agent disguised as a student but who was engaged in espionage. A Stanford Review investigative journalist concluded that China is orchestrating a widespread intelligence-gathering campaign at Stanford. Also consider that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s only daughter Xi Mingze, a 2014 Harvard graduate who enrolled under an assumed name, is believed to still be living in the U.S., possibly in Cambridge.

No one knows who the unvetted Xi Mingze knew at Harvard, what secrets she may have uncovered – remember U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s tawdry romance with Fang-Fang – or what confidential information she may have shared with her powerful father.

The dangerous truth is on national security, China is a serious and powerful country, while the U.S. is frivolous and unconcerned about self-preservation.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

During World War I, four of baseball’s most accomplished, most celebrated Hall of Famers volunteered in The Great War, specifically in the Chemical Warfare’s “Gas and Flame” division.

Ty Cobb was a captain who served under Army Maj. Branch Rickey, a former baseball player and manager. Two other famous baseball players were in the unit, including Army Capt. Christy Mathewson and Army 1st Lt. George Sisler.

Soldiers were prepped to advance across no-man’s land, under cover of an artillery barrage as they sprayed liquid flames from tanks strapped to their backs and tossed gas-filled bombs like grenades into enemy trenches. Mathewson, Cobb, Rickey and Sisler were also trained to endure the potential horror of deadly phosgene and mustard gas attacks that paralyzed, then brought on a slow, agonizing death.

All four volunteered, spurred on by a deep, abiding patriotism. Rickey was 38 years old and the sole support of four young children. Matty, who had already retired from baseball after notching 373 victories, was also 38 with a family. And Cobb, fresh from leading the American League in batting, a feat he would do more often than any man in the history of the game, was the “youthful” age of 32. He too was his family’s only breadwinner. Sisler, 25, was an enlistee preparing to go overseas until the war ended November 11,1918, relieving him from his military obligation.

“The Gas and Flame Division” was created at the height of the war to subdue mounting public alarm as news of gas attacks began to filter home when soldiers on the front lines wrote home. Gas attacks were a deadly and virulent horror of war that the German’s introduced to the battlefields in the war’s early stages. At first, soldiers were given simple gas masks to carry as potential protection, but the masks were cumbersome, ineffective, and required the men to breathe through large unwieldy tubes.

By 1918, the military was increasingly concerned and re-doubled its efforts to repel the gas threat. Eight million military and civilian personnel had died during the bloody war in just four years. During the summer of 1918, the military brass hatched a plan, secret at first, to repel the attacks with a new elite fighting unit officially named “The Chemical Warfare Service,” more commonly known as “Gas and Flame.” Choosing Washington D.C. as a backdrop to heighten the importance of the plan, they gathered the most influential members of the press to break the news. The war department wanted news of the unit to receive the maximum amount of coverage possible not only to scope out men of extraordinary leadership capabilities, but to inform the public that they would stem the frightening consequence of the German gas attacks in a most effective way.

The new unit was still undergoing training when Cobb arrived. He and his baseball mates served as instructors, conducting realistic readiness drills, one of which sent soldiers into airtight chambers where actual poisonous gas was released. One day the drill exploded into turmoil. Several men – including Cobb and Mathewson – missed the signal to snap on their masks. Cobb finally donned his mask and groped his way to the door past a tangle of screaming men and thrashing bodies. “Trying to lead the men out was hopeless,” Cobb said. “It was each one for himself.” Eight of Cobb’s fellow patriots died that day, their lungs ravaged by the gas. Eight more were crippled for several days. Cobb felt that, in his words, “Divine Providence” had spared his life.

Mathewson was not as fortunate. “Ty, I got a good dose of the stuff,” Matty told Cobb. “I feel terrible.” His respiratory system was weakened from his poison gas exposure, which led to tuberculosis, from which he died on October 7, 1925 in a Saranac Lake, New York sanitarium. The following day, before the second game of the World Series, players from the Pittsburgh Pirates and Washington Senators wore black armbands to honor Mathewson. The 44,000 fans at Forbes Field stood while the flag was lowered to half-mast, and all sang “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Mathewson, who never pitched on Sundays because of his Christian beliefs, established records that will never be broken, including hurling three complete game shutouts in the 1905 World Series.

Cobb attended Mathewson’s funeral two days later in Lewiston, Pa. The Pennsylvania native was laid to rest in a cemetery next to his alma mater, Bucknell University, where Mathewson had starred for both the football and baseball teams.

“He looked peaceful in that coffin,” Cobb said. “That damned gas got him and nearly got me.”

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Copyright 2025 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].

In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s May 15 birthright citizenship review, consider that the Los Angeles Dodgers’ $700 million superstar Shohei Ohtani and his wife Mamiko Tanaka, Japanese nationals, just welcomed their first child, a girl.

Ohtani chose to have his child born in the U.S. instead of Japan because having American citizenship will be, over her lifetime, advantageous to his baby girl. Think of the foolishness of granting precious citizenship to foreign nationals residing in the country on work or tourist visas in relationships, new or established, that result in births and automatically conferred American citizenship.

Japan, a country whose immigration standards reflect how seriously the nation takes citizenship, has tighter oversight. The Japanese Nationality Law requires at least one parent must be a citizen for the child to qualify for citizenship. The U.S. Congress has written several bills with the same common sense citizenship requirement. None gained congressional support. President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” addressed the obvious flaws in the long-standing misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. The executive order, announced on January 20 and one of the first President Trump issued, spelled out what citizenship in the Trump administration would require:

“Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

A day after President Trump released his executive order, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tx.), Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, introduced The Birthright Citizenship Act to restore the 14th Amendment to its original purpose and end the misuse of birthright citizenship. Babin’s legislation aligns with the executive order and seeks a congressional remedy to the misreading and exploitation of the 14th amendment.

Center for Immigration Studies’ research found that one out of every ten births in the United States is to an illegal immigrant mother. Additionally, nearly 400,000 expectant mothers cross the border illegally each year, often with the sole intention to give birth in the U.S. Once granted automatic citizenship, these children can initiate chain migration, opening pathways for extended family members to gain legal residency.

This practice has also fueled a global birth tourism industry, which takes advantage of the current loophole in U.S. immigration laws. Birth tourism is a criminal enterprise that, for an enormous fee, openly allows worldwide temporary visa-holding foreign nationals to stay in their hotels until the women are ready to give birth to a new American citizen. Such hotels, their criminal proprietors, and their pregnant guests who committed visa fraud would be easy targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, ICE has winked at birth tourism hotels for years.

An intelligent overhaul of birthright citizenship is imperative. The Biden administration’s open borders admitted about ten million illegal immigrants and another estimated two million got aways. Those millions represent many more anchor baby citizens and eventual chain migration arrivals. Crossing the border illegally or as a temporary worker like Ohtani or a tourist and then giving birth on U.S. soil should not entitle the newborns to citizenship.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

In Tennessee, controversial bills allowing Tennessee school districts to deny enrollment to illegal alien students have taken another step toward becoming law.

The bills – House Bill 793 and SB 836 – would give permission to Tennessee schools to verify children are citizens or have legal immigrant or visa status before enrolling them. Schools could then deny enrollment to the children who cannot prove their status or charge them tuition.

The two versions differ in one key respect: the House bill makes it optional to check student immigration status. In the Senate version, immigration status checks are mandatory in Tennessee’s more than 1,700 public schools and all public charter schools.

The bills’ sponsors argued the legislation is needed to both quantify the number of illegal alien students attending Tennessee schools and to protect the state’s limited financial resources. Opponents claim the bill violates constitutional protections, particularly the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe, which guarantees access to public education regardless of immigration status.

On both sides of the aisle, passions ran high. State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Democrat, slammed the bill and repeated clichés like, “Our country has a broken immigration system” and that the bill is about “punishing innocent children.” Republican State Rep. Monty Fritts countered, “We’re not talking about immigrants, we’re talking about illegals. There’s a distinct difference. There is no greater act of rebellion in these U.S. than illegally coming across that border.”

In June 2024, the Federation of American Immigration Reform wrote that under Plyler v. Doe, local schools are obligated to provide illegal alien children with a taxpayer-funded K-12 education. The cost is staggering. The nation’s price tag for educating illegal aliens’ children in 2022 was $70.8 billion. The data preceded the historic illegal immigrant surge that began in 2021 when President Joe Biden took office. Using Florida Rep. Aaron Bean’s conservative estimate of 500,000 new illegal aliens in U.S. public schools, the recent influx has added at least $9.7 billion in additional taxpayer costs.

Parents’ frustration with the ever-expanding illegal aliens’ enrollment is understandable. Every teacher minute spent with a non-English speaking student, some of whom come in and out of the classroom depending on their parents’ work obligations, is one less moment spent with a citizen pupil. The Nation’s Report Card which showed sharp declines in reading and math scores for 9-year-olds, is attributable to, at least in part, the steady arrival of non-English speaking pupils.

Plyler v. Doe must take into consideration the nation’s current population levels. In 1982, the year SCOTUS handed down its ruling, the U.S. had 232 million residents, including roughly sixteen million legal and illegal immigrants. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis showed that government’s January 2025 Current Population Survey fixed the foreign-born or legal and illegal immigrant population at 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population — both new record highs.

Unlike border statistics, the survey measures the number of immigrants in the country, which is what determines their impact on society. Without adjusting for those the survey missed, the estimated illegal immigrant population accounted for 5.4 million, or two-thirds of the 8.3 million increase in the foreign-born population since January 2021. The Center for Immigration Studies’ best estimate is 11.5 to 12.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settled in the country in the last four years.

Given the dramatic illegal immigration surge over the last 40 years, a request to reevaluate Plyler v. Doe is a modest proposal. States spend billions to educate Limited English Proficiency students, while the children of American citizens get less of their teachers’ attention.

In the meantime, while the Plyler v. Doe review plays out in the courts, the federal government, which writes and approves immigration law, should pay for states’ illegal aliens’ education, an unfunded mandate. On Limited English Proficiency programs, Congress contributes barely 1 percent of the cost, despite the federal requirement for states to educate the children of illegal aliens.

Congress’ indifference to citizen children’s diluted education while it funds an ongoing illegal immigrant surge into already overcrowded classrooms represents yet another America last policy.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

In his nakedly shameless bid for the 2028 presidential nomination, California Gov. Gavin Newsom will need all the luck he can muster.

Newsom’s biggest political headache cannot be resolved – it’s Newsom himself. The internet has stored 20 years of his out-of-the-mainstream policy positions, providing his fellow Democratic nomination seekers with a treasure trove of fodder to use against him. And in the unlikely event he can outperform Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, or Maryland’s Wes Moore, Newsom’s two decades of failure will be his undoing.

Whoever survives what promises to be an expensive, bitter Democratic campaign would face an uphill race against Vice President J.D. Vance or Florida Gov. Ron de Santis in 2028.

Newsom’s newly launched podcast “This is Gavin,” which features conservative guests that he often purports to agree with, cannot resolve the formidable challenges he faces from within his own party and against Republican opposition.

Beginning in 2004 when, supported by prominent national Democratic Party partisans that included Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson and California’s most powerful politician, Willie Brown, Newsom breezed into the San Francisco mayor’s office. During his 2004 election campaign and his 2008 re-election bid, Newsom promised to fix California’s homeless, affordable housing, and public education problems.

Two decades after Newsom made his 2004 promise, California’s homeless population grew more than any other state’s. While the national homeless population decreased by 18% between 2010 and 2020, California’s increased by 31%. The troubling trend continued from 2020 to 2022, when California’s homeless population grew by 6% while the rest of the country saw an increase of less than 0.5%.

California spent a stunning $17.5 billion trying to combat homelessness over just four years. With $17.5 billion, California could have, theoretically, paid the rent for every homeless person in California for those four years, even at the state’s high home costs. Despite the massive outlay to end or at least abate homelessness, the state’s street population grew. More than 175,000 homeless people now live in California, a total which remarkably could represent an undercount that misses residents sleeping in their cars or who are huddled away out of view.

With just 22 months remaining in his governorship, Newsom knows two interrelated promises he made to voters seven years ago — to erase or at least lessen the state’s chronic housing shortage and its extremely high homelessness rate — will not happen before he leaves Sacramento. His pledges were foolish campaign posturing. State government has little ability to build housing or upgrade homelessness’ economic plight.

The third of Newsom’s campaign vows, to improve the results of California’s public-school students, could be his biggest failure. From a parent’s perspective, public education is a catastrophe. California’s Department of Education has done some fancy footwork to put a positive spin on how students are evaluated, changing the labels for the different levels measuring students.

Rob Manwaring, a senior adviser to the advocacy group Children Now, said the new labels would feed the “reality gap in the perceptions of parents that their kids are doing better than they are” in school. Regardless of the terminology used, California ranks next-to-last, 49th, among the states in college preparedness as measured by high school seniors scores on the ACT and SAT tests.

Newsom’s record on his biggest campaign promises is zero for thre – a strike out not only in baseball but also in politics. This thumbnail summary is exclusive of California’s high living cost, where a $200,000 annual income is, in some areas, classified as middle class. The state is also suffering from rampant “smash-and-grab” robberies, his mangled handling of Los Angeles’ deadly wildfires, and sanctuary state status that now provides budget-busting Medi-Cal for all illegal aliens, a benefit that the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates will cost taxpayers $6.5 billion annually and “will only go up,” said Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones.

If Newsom can fashion a winning presidential campaign out of his dismal string of broken promises, then he is either truly a political magician or voters are blind to reality.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

For the lucky few of us who grew up during the 1950s in Southern California, the non-stop coverage of the massive wildfire was impossible to watch.

My thoughts took me back to when the state lived up to its golden image.

In their book “From Cows to Cement,” authors Rachel Surls and Judith Gerberk documented Los Angeles County’s agricultural history, which was once America’s largest farming county. Today, L.A., once a silkworm center, is the largest urban county in the U.S..

After World War II, around 1945, people moved to Los Angeles in waves to build factories, large office buildings, cookie cutter housing and other edifices that drove land prices ever-upward. Values slowly but inevitably rose; land boom followed land boom. As property assessments soared, farmers couldn’t resist the lucrative opportunity to cash in. A less esthetic L.A. survived, with farmland replaced by cement.

By 2023, Los Angeles County had become the nation’s most populous, with nearly 10 million residents, more than about 25% of California’s total population. In 1950, the county’s population was 4.2 million. Today, L.A. County is one of the nation’s largest, covering more than 4,000 square miles. If it were a state, it would be the country’s eighth largest.

Underneath Los Angeles’ urban cement nightmare lay thousands of acres of once-productive farmland. Farming was Los Angeles’ hub from its 1781 founding into the mid-twentieth century. Over the four decades between 1909 to 1949, Los Angeles grew from a farming community into an agricultural powerhouse. Farmers experimented with a multitude of crops, from fruits and vegetables, to hemp, cotton, and flowers. Livestock was important too, with major stockyards that competed with Chicago and Omaha. Hundreds of dairy and poultry farms flourished.

Intrastate transplants went west for more than business opportunities. The sunny and warm weather was a lure. To mid-western arrivals, the beaches were unparalleled. California’s coastline stretches over 840 miles and has over 420 public beaches, the star gem of which is Malibu. Beach Boys’ songs and movies like “Beach Blanket Bingo” drew a picture of non-stop fun in the sun. All age groups that in-migrated to California found their way to the beach to suntan, fish off the pier, dine in one of the popular just-caught fish restaurants or to hang out, but also to build homes as close to the beaches as their pocketbooks could afford. The celebrities and other wealthy elite built on the ocean’s edge unconcerned about the mudslides that heavy precipitation brings.

The recent Palisades fires, followed by pounding rains, have created an ecological threat to the Pacific Ocean. Debris and toxins released from the fires will damage kelp forests and lead to destructive algae blooms that snuff out ocean life. The much-needed rain will mark the beginning of the worst effects in the ocean.

“The Malibu coastline is extremely unique,” said Dan Pondella, Occidental College biology professor and Southern California Marine Institute research director, “It’s probably the highest density of fishes throughout Southern California.”

When rain mixes with debris from burn scars, a slurry of mud, rocks and rubble pour into ocean, which Pondella said acts like both sandpaper and a blackout curtain for the fragile kelp forests.

“You’ll see anything from reduced light, which limits photosynthesis in plant and algal growth, to reefs actually being completely buried in ash,” Pondella said.

The ash layer remains in the environment for a long time. When the Woolsey Fire tore through Malibu in 2018, it dumped thousands of tons of ash into the ocean, which Pondella’s team was still finding in reefs five years later. More bad news: Wildlife officials reported that a toxic algae outbreak has left as many as 50 sea lions sickened and stranded on Malibu beaches in the past week.

For the next few years as clean up and rebuilding continue, Malibu’s good times are over. When friends ask what it was like to grow up near California’s beaches, I can’t come up with a description that would do my experience justice. I simply say, “I wish you’d been there with me to appreciate it.”

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

If the Democrats are really as battered, bruised and confused as recent reports indicate, they should act immediately to remove Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

After the 2024 drubbing that Democrats were on the short end of, and with defeated presidential candidate Kamala Harris permanently out of D.C. politics, Schumer is an omni-present reminder of the party’s failure.

When last seen, Schumer was protesting in front of the Treasury Building alongside Maxine Waters saying, “We will win. We won’t lose,” a reference to Elon Musk’s DOGE. Yelling and arm-waving is a bad image for Schumer, 75, Waters, a 86, Elizabeth Warren, at 75 another shrieking protester, and the floundering Democratic Party.

Schumer has been a congressional fixture for 45 years, while Waters has been around 36. Warren just began her third Senate term, though she’s been hanging around Washington in various capacities for three decades. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrat’s 80-year-old minority whip, is a 42-year congressional veteran who will assumedly run for a sixth term in 2026. Durbin’s signature issue, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the unpopular and unconstitutional DACA, has been stuck in legislative quicksand for two decades. Some DACAs are now over forty, have protection from deportation, work authorization, jobs, and families that include American citizen children.

When the American Federation of Government Employees gathered on Capitol Hill and rallied “to save the civil service” and to oppose President Trump’s push to reduce federal government’s workforce size, Maxine Dexter, (D-Ore.) said, “…we have to f… Trump.” As President Teddy Roosevelt said, “Profanity is the parlance of the fool.” The Democrats’ strategy is all wrong, as was their insistence the Trump administration represents a “constitutional crisis,” alarm that does not resonate with voters.

In tennis, after the match, the loser and winner meet at the net, shake hands, and pat each other on the back. The loser returns to the locker room, not grousing but committed to reviewing the match tapes, identifying strategically what led to his loss, and dedicating himself to practicing longer and harder to win next time. Before the upcoming tournament, the loser fires his coach, his trainer, and his dietician; he sheds deadwood.

Getting rid of power-obsessed, entrenched Schumer and Durbin would be hard unless former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is summoned. Pelosi put the skids to President Biden, her friend of 50 years, to end his re-election bid. Even if Schumer and Durbin retire or are pressured to resign, New York and Illinois will remain blue, but the rest of the 2026 Senate election calendar looks grim for Democrats, especially after Michigan’s Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Minnesota’ Tina Smith announced their retirements

Looking back at November, woeful Kamala Harris deserves the lion’s share of the blame for her landslide defeat. Harris was a bad candidate who ran a horrible campaign. Her candidacy was, as Democratic strategist James Carville said, like starting the seventh string quarterback in the Super Bowl. But the Democrats’ bench is wafer-thin.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, or any of the other possible candidates would have fared worse than Harris. They all shared the impossible task of winning while saddled with President Biden’s burdensome baggage – an open border that admitted more than 10 million unvetted illegal aliens, national debt increases of more than $6 trillion, and brazen disregard for the Supreme Court’s ruling that he could not forgive student debt, a decision he disobeyed when he subsequently discharged multiple billions in indebtedness, and then bragged about his defiance of SCOTUS.

On a nationally televised interview, the host asked Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson if Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had knocked on his door to present the Democrat plan. In the imaginary conversation, Jefferies would say to Johnson, “We agree that government waste and fraud must be eliminated. But we have produced a better plan you should consider.” Johnson replied to the interviewer that no one from the aisle’s other side had, at any time, reached out to him.

The Democrats undertaking should be to forget about President Trump and make a sound plan, promote it nationwide, and sell it to the voters. Statistics compiled in 2024 show that of the 210 million registered voters, 38.8 million are Republicans and 49 million are Democrats.

The new and improved Democratic roadmap should be to stop harping about President Trump and instead explain why Americans deserve your party’s vote.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].

Meet Gus Zernial, the American League slugger who blasted home runs for the Chicago White Sox, the Philadelphia/Kansas City As, and at his career’s end, the Detroit Tigers.

Zernial has faded from memory, but the plate accomplishments of the player nicknamed “Ozark Ike” after the 1950s popular comic book character are worth recalling.  During the six-year period from 1950 through 1955, no AL player hit more home runs than Zernial’s 177. Only the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra hit more AL home runs than Zernial, who finished his career with 237 that included nine grand slams and 10 pinch-hit home runs. The U.S. Navy WWII vet hit multiple home runs in a game 32 times and ended his career with a .486 slugging percentage.

In 1951, while the White Sox were training in Pasadena and Marilyn Monroe’s Hollywood career was waxing, her agents wanted to profile her with well-known athletes. Zernial filled the bill. As a popular Stars’ basher, pictures with Zernial and Monroe would be perfect for movie magazines and gossip rags. In his autobiography, Zernial wrote that Monroe was more than another blond bombshell but was “very intelligent.” When the photo shoots ended, Zernial’s teammates wondered if he asked Monroe for a date. Zernial replied, “Not hardly. My wife was sitting right on the field!”

When word reached New York Yankees’ Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio that Zernial had been chosen for a Monroe photo op, he asked, “Why should a bush-leaguer like Zernial meet her when I have not?” Always cold and aloof, Di Maggio penned harsh criticism about Zernial in his future books and when the two played in the same golf tournaments, Joe D. ignored the fence-buster. DiMaggio incorrectly assumed that Monroe and Zernial were romantically linked.

To convince DiMaggio that his relationship with Monroe was strictly business, Gus authorized his agent to release her phone number to the former Yankee. DiMaggio called her every day for two straight weeks but the starlet never returned his messages. When Marilyn learned from Mickey Rooney that Joe D. was a nationally recognized superstar, she agreed to a date.

DiMaggio, age 37, liked blonds and Monroe, age 25, was partial to famous, wealthy, more mature suitors. In the 1950s, DiMaggio’s $100,000 salary was huge. The couple dated for more than two years until, in 1954, they married in San Francisco’s City Hall. Nine months later, Monroe filed for divorce, citing “mental cruelty.” In her divorce papers, Dorothy Arnold, Di Maggio’s first wife had similarly cited “cruel indifference.”

Immediately after their separation, DiMaggio had her phone bugged, and when she moved into Park Avenue’s Waldorf Astoria, he wore a fake beard and held The New York Times over half his face while he sat in the lobby for hours, waiting for a glimpse of her. Even as she spiraled downward with drugs, booze, and mental illness, and after she became intimately involved with both President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, convinced she’d marry one of them, DiMaggio remained true to her.

When Monroe was found dead in her home in 1962, the coroner listed the cause as suicide. Zernial later wrote that he “suspected foul play.” The Yankee great identified Monroe’s body, ­organized a small, private funeral, and designed her simple, elegant headstone: “Marylin Monroe, 1926-1962.” Neither James Doughtery nor Arthur Miller, Monroe’s first and third husbands, attended her funeral.

DiMaggio never returned to her grave, but he remembered the wish Monroe had expressed to him many years ago, when they were first dating: that when she died, she wanted flowers delivered to her grave every week, just like William Powell did for Jean Harlow. Until his 1999 death, DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to Monroe’s crypt twice a week. He never remarried, and on his deathbed, his last words were, “I’ll finally get to see ­Marilyn again.”

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Copyright 2025 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].

For decades, birthright citizenship has vexed Republicans, Democrats, and constitutional scholars. President Donald Trump’s executive order described both birthright citizenship’s history and its purpose:

“The Fourteenth Amendment states: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’ shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”

Trump’s executive order would also deny citizenship to foreign nationals legally but temporarily present in the U.S., such as holders of student, work, or tourist visas.

The heated controversy centers around two fourteenth amendment phrases. Supporters of the status quo cite “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” which has come to mean illegal aliens and temporary legal residents. Opponents argue that foreign nationals are not and cannot be considered “subject to” the U.S.’s jurisdiction. Predictably, the ACLU and twenty-two blue state governors and attorneys’ generals immediately challenged the administration’s executive order.

When birthright citizenship’s broad scope is considered, the potential negative consequences must be weighed. Start with the 2021-2023 non-immigrant I-94 admissions category to the U.S. – millions of individuals, which includes temporary workers and their families, NAFTA professional workers, specialty occupation workers, and intracompany transfers and their spouses, all of whom could grow or start new families with their children born on U.S. soil automatically becoming American citizens. An estimated 300,000-400,000 citizen children are born each year to mothers who have no legitimate ties to the U.S.

Another temporary visa category, the B, intended for tourism and business purposes, stood at multiple millions total issued between 2021 and 2023. The B visa has spawned the most blatant, egregious federal immigration abuses and stands out as the best example of why birthright citizenship should end.

Birth tourism is a criminal enterprise that involves complex schemes and yields millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. Shady overseas businesses, approximately 500 in China alone, promote birth tourism on the internet and on social media. As an example of unlawful activity, on January 31, 2019, federal prosecutors announced indictments against 19 people operating three Southern California birth tourism schemes. The “maternity” or “birthing houses” principals charged their clients tens of thousands of dollars, and, in one case, “more than $3.4 million in international wire transfers” were received within a two-year span.

Operators also coached their Chinese customers on how to lie to U.S. officials and hide their pregnancies. Furthermore, “the indictments allege that many of the Chinese birth tourism customers failed to pay all of the medical costs associated with their hospital births, and the debts were referred to collection.” The charges also included making false statements to immigration officials, contempt of court, marriage fraud, visa fraud, and money laundering. The craven perpetrators fled back to China and are now fugitives from justice.

Because birth tourism, per se, is clandestine, there is no definitive breakdown by country of origin. Russia and China have long histories of anti-American espionage activities, while others may harbor anti-American sentiments. The State Department warned that such a practice could allow foreign governments or entities to recruit or groom U.S. citizens who were born through birth tourism but raised overseas, without attachment to the U.S. could threaten national security.

Late last month in Seattle, a federal judge heard and temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order. Appeals will eventually reach the Supreme Court, which will have the opportunity to finally resolve the birthright citizenship conundrum. In the meantime, the administration must toughen up.

Visa fraud is a crime. Airport Customs and Border Patrol agents should be more aware of pregnant women attempting to enter. ICE agents can visit birth hotels, put the squeeze on the proprietors, demand to see registration and visa documents, and let all criminal parties involved know that immigration authorities are aware of fraud. It would be a step in the right direction, regardless how the Supreme Court may rule.

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Copyright 2025 Joe Guzzardi, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at [email protected].