Cagle World

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].

Another shoe has dropped in the Biden administration’s self-induced border crisis that’s ravaging the nation. The latest affront to common sense and national security is exceptionally galling.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit released data which revealed that from January 1, 2023, through the second week in May, more than 2,300 illegal alien convicted criminals have been released into the U.S. interior, along with more than 2,850 illegal aliens with pending criminal charges.

U.S. taxpayers are, for the most part, funding the criminal aliens and the suspected criminal aliens’ movements from the border into the nation’s interior. In other words, taxpayers are underwriting the release of criminals who might eventually rob, assault or rape them.

In all, over the last five months, nearly 51,000 illegal aliens have been released from ICE custody. The releases picked up significantly in April and May as Biden’s DHS ended Title 42, one of the last remaining controls at the U.S.-Mexico border. These statistics are exclusive of the approximately 1.5 million “gotaways” that pose heightened threats to the nation’s safety and security.

Releasing criminals, a policy that is likely to continue as long as Biden is in the White House, invites mayhem. The likelihood that criminal aliens will be deported is slim. ICE has suspended worksite enforcement, will not remove illegal aliens from the interior of the U.S. unless they commit a violent crime and often not even then. Furthermore, ICE won’t detain criminal aliens who have been arrested and identified by state and local law enforcement as having no lawful basis to remain.

For years, enforcement advocates have argued that if an illegal alien had not been present, then, logically, the crimes he perpetrated would never have happened. Secure borders, by definition, mean a safer nation. Victims of illegal aliens like San Francisco tourist Kate Steinle, Houston police officer Kevin Scott Will and one-year-old Rehma Sabir, all fatalities, would still be alive.

The deaths of Steinle, Will, Sabir and hundreds of other victims occurred during administrations that imposed at least a modicum of border enforcement and gave ICE officers leeway to carry out their sworn mission to arrest and deport unlawfully present aliens.

Today, a different, more alarming policy is in place. Among the asylum seekers are criminals who are being red-carpeted into the country and are unlikely to ever be removed. Their presence represents a threat to citizens and to legal immigrants alike, a stark reality that is of no consequence to Biden, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas or Biden’s party.

Earlier this year, Biden announced that he would rescind amendments that the previous administration put into place to expand expedited removal, which has been established law for more than 25 years. Expedited removal is a procedure by which DHS can, without a formal proceeding, remove an alien who has entered illegally, or has sought entry without proper documents or through fraud.

Needless to say, expedited removal is a useful tool in discouraging the millions of illegal immigrants waiting outside the U.S. to surge the border. Biden has simply discarded it.

Under current invite-the-world conditions, crime has soared. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that in fiscal 2021, the year when Biden and Mayorkas opened the border, the number of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S. surged after declining in previous years. Homicides, assaults, domestic violence, illegal weapons possession and sexual offenses committed by illegal aliens all increased dramatically in fiscal year 2021 compared to fiscal year 2020.

In 2021, illegal immigrants committed 1,178 assault and domestic violence crimes, which represents a more than 400 percent increase from the 208 in 2020. DUI convictions rose 347 percent from 364 to 1,629, and illegal possession of drugs or drug trafficking rose 453 percent from 386 to 2,138. Sixty homicide or manslaughter convictions were attributed to illegal immigrants, a 1,900 percent increase from the previous year.

The dangerous, deadly results that open borders spawn aren’t an anomaly, but the exact end game that Biden, Mayorkas and their advisors always envisioned.

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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].

President Biden’s welcome-the-world border policy presents graver challenges than just admitting an estimated 10 million worldwide migrants by the time the Biden term ends in January 2025. Among the migrants are convicted criminals and terrorists on the FBI’s watch list.

And needing specialized attention are pregnant women.

A Time story, “Pregnant Asylum-Seekers Needed Help at the Border,” shared Mexican migrant Xiomara’s journey north. When Xiomara arrived at the border with her three young children, ages 10, 6 and 4, she was nine months pregnant. Xiomara told border patrol officials that she was feeling contractions, but she refused an offer of transportation to a nearby hospital. Instead, with Migrant Protection Protocols still in place at the time, officials returned Xiomara to Mexico where she gave birth. Likely, she’ll attempt to migrate again.

Knowing the exact number of pregnant women who have surrendered to border patrol officials is impossible, but within the millions who have crossed, a safe guess is that several thousand either were expectant or would soon grow their current families.

Stories similar to Xiomara’s abound. A 16-year-old pregnant migrant entered the San Ysidro border station with her 16-month-old daughter and her husband. Because she and her daughter are both under 18, they were then sent to a San Benito facility for unaccompanied minors. One incident on the Southwest border occurred when a pregnant migrant went into labor on the Rio Grande River bank. Another asylum-seeking migrant, after giving birth in a Staten Island hospital bathroom, dumped her newborn son in a trash can. The boy survived, and police charged the mother with reckless endangerment of a child’s welfare.

Because the government automatically grants American citizenship to foreign nationals born on U.S. soil (known as the birthright citizenship policy), the boy is automatically an American citizen. Along with other children born on American soil to foreign-born asylum-seekers, he eventually will be allowed to petition for his nuclear and nonnuclear family members, a never-ending population time bomb, to come to America.

As the illegal alien families move from the border into the U.S. interior, migrants represent burdensome costs to fiscally stretched communities. At the start of 2023, illegal immigration’s aggregate net cost to United States taxpayers – at federal, state and local levels – was at least $150.7 billion. For instance, in Illinois, more than 1,500 miles from El Paso, Texas, a major point of entry for illegal aliens, the cost was $4.59 billion in 2022, or $930 per household, an expense that will repeat itself year after year. For communities on the border, the costs are staggering. The border crisis costs California $21.76 billion and Texas $8.88 billion annually in education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice system costs, and welfare expenditures.

And remember – the invasion is still in its early stages. More than two-thirds of the world’s population has smart phones; the word is out that America has not only opened its borders, but is welcoming the new arrivals with, among other rewards, cell phones! When everything is free, which is how the migrants perceive their U.S. lives, word travels fast.

Nearly all the migrants will need access to the entire social services buffet – public education, health care, housing and SNAP benefits. Others have noted that Biden has made every state a border state, but that commonly made observation can be confirmed by the staggering costs to taxpayers to fund illegal immigration. Despite what the migrants tell immigration officials – that they are fleeing persecution and have credible fear for their lives – they’re economic refugees and don’t qualify for asylum.

Department of Justice statistics show that between FY 2008 and late FY 2019 – a period during which the Department of Homeland Security routinely used expedited removal – 83 percent of migrants stopped at the border who claimed a fear of harm were cleared to make asylum claims in court. Fewer than 17 percent of them received asylum. By contrast, more than 45 percent never applied for asylum, and 32.5 percent were ordered removed in absentia when they failed to appear in court.

Twenty-five years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman rebuked the Wall Street Journal for its open borders enthusiasm. Warned Friedman: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” Friedman continued to observe that welfare benefits to illegal immigrants represent an enormous wealth transfer scheme.

The scheme in progress has the Biden administration’s whole-hearted endorsement. After all, the White House conjured the open border plan, so, naturally, the administration would look at the invasion with satisfaction that the new world order is working out exactly as designed.

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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].

Mark Edward Vanderheid was born in Tonawanda, New York, on February 11, 1949.

Four months after his 20th birthday, and only six months after he arrived in South Vietnam in 1968, Vanderheid, a U.S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal, lay dead on the Quang Tri battle field; mortar shell fragments had torn his body open.

Young Mark was one of 58,222 who died in the Vietnam War. Among the enemy, an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters were killed. 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died, and more than 2 million innocent civilians were killed.

The futile war in Vietnam began in 1959, when the first U.S. soldiers were killed during a guerrilla raid on their quarters near Saigon. The war ended ignominiously in 1975. U.S. forces never had a chance.

President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the powers that escalated the war, had no exit strategy, and knew that Americans back home would be unwilling to make a sustainable commitment to victory. Such a pledge would mean higher taxes to support Johnson’s guns and butter economy, thousands more lost lives and more domestic turmoil. In 1997, during a meeting with McNamara, Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap told his foe that the U.S. could never have won. The Vietnamese, Giap said, were willing to fight for 100 years.

At different times and to different degrees, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon – the war’s architects – realized that Vietnam was a morass, a disaster in the making, and defeat, inevitable. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” McNamara said.

Their too-late awakening was cold comfort to Lillian and Edward Vanderheid, Mark’s parents, as well as to the other families whose loved ones, while defending a misguided, and ultimately failed cause, died too young.

Mark’s body was returned to Tonawanda in July, and he was buried with military services at Elmlawn Cemetery. On December 19, 1968, the Tonawanda News published a letter from the Vanderheid family in which they shared memories of their hero son, and expressed gratitude for the two memorials that had recently been dedicated to Mark.

One was an award given in his name to the most spirited Tonawanda High School varsity football player. The other memorial, Lillian and Edward wrote, is the Payne Avenue Christian Church’s “beautiful stained-glass window.” The letter continued: “Words just can’t express the deep feeling within us as we sat in church listening to the memorial dedication service the young friends of Mark’s had to dedicate the stained-glass window that has been put in our church in memory of him. May God Bless you all.”

Grieving Lillian and Edward remembered how Mark loved to play sports and teach other young boys how to play. He coached Little League and also umpired games. Lillian thought back to one day when Mark was home on leave and said, “Mom, someone has to help those people over there. Those kids have never known anything but war. If I can do even a small part to help them to someday just be kids and enjoy a childhood like I did, to be able to throw baseballs and footballs instead of hand grenades, I’ll have done my part.”

Lance Corporal Vanderheid did more than his part, and deserved to live a full, rewarding life. The Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon Vietnam war-obsessed White Houses stole from Mark, and from other thousands, that basic privilege.

Mark’s name is on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., panel W54, line 8. His biography appeared in Gary Bedingfield’s “Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice,” dedicated to the 500 players who died in service to America.

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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].

Title 42 has  ended, and the “Great Reset” is gathering a full head of steam.

In 2020, the World Economic Forum proposed the Great Reset and drafted its mission statement, which included these words: “…Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honors the dignity of every human being.”

While the mission conveys compassion, the sub rosa translation is: Green light the free flow of cheap labor.

Signing on immediately were corporate globalists like Amazon, Google, Huawei Technologies, Saudi Aramco and Volkswagen. President Joe Biden was all-in, too, and eager to help out his cheap labor-addicted supporters. The easiest and most effective way for Biden to get on board was to throw open the Southwest border which he did on his first day in office.

The impact of the open border is apparent, and troubling. In sanctuary city New York, which has received more than 60,000 aliens this year, including 4,200 last week, Mayor Eric Adams is busy pushing some of his new arrivals off to suburban Newburgh and Rockland counties, as well as Orangetown, which sought injunctions to prevent the migrants’ transfer. Adams promised that his city would fully fund – with taxpayer money – hotel housing for up to four months, a good trick since the city faces a $10 billion deficit by 2026, and realistically doesn’t have a penny to spare.

Anticipating thousands more migrants each day, Adams is considering alternative housing outside the inner city such as Kennedy International Airport hangers, abandoned hospitals and, potentially, tent facilities in Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Queens’ Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the New York Mets Citi Field parking lots, Aqueduct Racetrack, Coney Island and Orchard Beach.

Sunday strolls through the park, an afternoon at the track or the beach, and the evening ball game would immediately become less viable for tourists and residents, and reduce the tax revenue that Adams so desperately needs. New York City has spent more than $1 billion in accommodating migrants. The full-fledged commitment of Adams and the Biden administration to admitting and housing illegal aliens, with no end in sight, is immeasurable.

The unthinkable: 20 homeless veterans were evicted from Orange County hotels to make way for a group of unvetted migrants, a new low in the corrupt migrant agenda.

Adams and other under-siege mayors like Washington, D.C.’s Muriel Bowser, El Paso’s Oscar Leeser, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, while still in office, declared emergency conditions, begged for more federal funding and decried Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs for engaging in what they labeled inhumane political stunts.

The outrage should be directed at Biden, border czar Vice President Kamala Harris and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for encouraging the unsustainable open border policy of admitting, and then transporting, aliens with taxpayers funds into the U.S. interior.

To avoid the bad optics of overcrowded migrant facilities and aliens sleeping on city streets, Biden authorized releasing them into the interior without a notice to appear in immigration court. But District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II issued a two-week temporary restraining order to block Biden’s mandate that took effect at 11:59 p.m. on May 11, a date which corresponded with Title 42’s expiration. Wetherell said that the border crisis is “largely one of [the administration’s] own making through the adoption of an implementation of policies that have encouraged the so-called ‘irregular migration’ that has become fairly regular over the past two years.”

Score a big win for the cheap labor lobby – Amazon, Google, etc. – that signed on to the Great Reset’s mission statement. Millions of paroled aliens will soon have work authorization and will be competing not only with U.S. citizens for jobs, but also with each other in a battle that will further drive down wages.

In case of any doubt about the administration’s ultimate goal of more accessible cheap labor, Mayorkas made it crystal clear. Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mayorkas said: “Regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet the needs of employers here in the United States.”

Mayorkas is either a) brazenly lying or b) given his position as DHS Secretary shockingly unaware that every year the federal government grants more than 1 million lawful permanent residents lifetime work permission and another 1 million guest workers enter to perform a wide variety of jobs which, for the most part, Americans are eager to do.

For the wagering public, option a) is the best bet.

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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].

Lou Gehrig had two women in his life – his mother Christina and his wife Eleanor. Had the two been able to get along, the personal life of the legendary New York Yankees ballplayer and Hall of Famer would have been less stressful.

During Gehrig’s youth, Christina, a first-generation German immigrant, was the family’s backbone. Father Heinrich was mostly unemployed, drank and was frequently ill. Lou was the only one of the Gehrig babies to reach adulthood. Three others died in their infancy. Understandably, Christina became overprotective of Lou and urged him to abandon baseball, which he picked up as a teen playing in neighborhood games. She wanted him to focus on his school books.

When Gehrig enrolled in Manhattan’s Commerce High School, he starred in football and baseball. After Gehrig’s Commerce team beat Chicago’s Lane Tech High in Cubs Park, later Wrigley Field, the 10,000 in attendance knew they had seen a superstar in the making. In an account of Gehrig’s game-winning grand slam, the Chicago Tribune wrote that “his blow would have made any big leaguer proud….”

The Gehrig family was poor. While in high school, Christina worked as a Columbia University housekeeper at Sigma Nu Theta. Lou often went to the fraternity house to help his mother serve dinner and wash dishes. Gehrig also worked part-time jobs in butcher shops and grocery stores to help supplement the household income. A New York Giants scout arranged a 1921 Polo Grounds tryout for Gehrig, but no-nonsense manager John McGraw screamed at his coaches to get him off the field: “I’ve got enough lousy players without another one showing up.” For the balance of his managerial career, McGraw rued his hasty decision.

By 1925, Gehrig, age 22, was an established Yankees starter who began to challenge teammate Babe Ruth for homerun titles. The two, despite contrasting personalities – the shy, retiring Gehrig and the bombastic Ruth – became friends, fishing buddies and barnstorming partners, the “Bustin’ Babes vs. the Larrupin’ Lous. Christina, who by this time realized that professional baseball players could earn good paychecks, loved Ruth. The Bambino gifted Christina a puppy which she named Judge, a nickname for Ruth. The extra money Ruth generated was nice too. Lou made $2,000 more on the barnstorming tour than he did during the season.

Ironically, Ruth was at the center of a lifelong feud between Lou and his mother. Christina took a dim view of Lou’s girlfriends, seeing them as threats eager to win away her beloved son. When Chicago socialite Eleanor Grace Twitchell caught Lou’s eye, Christina strongly disapproved. In her autobiography, “My Luke and I,” Eleanor described herself as “young and rather innocent, but I smoked, played poker and drank bathtub gin….” But smoking and drinking weren’t the vices that most bothered Christina.

Mother Gehrig had heard through the grapevine that on a years-ago trip to Chicago, Ruth befriended Eleanor. Christina, and the entire baseball world, knew that Ruth didn’t maintain platonic relationships with women. When Lou and Eleanor married in 1933, friends had to persuade Christina to attend.

As Lou’s career flourished, the women cheered Lou on, albeit from separate vantage points. Christina and Eleanor watched with pride as Lou closed in on the most-consecutive-games-played record, then 2,130. But the rift between Christina and Eleanor never healed. Lou’s physical condition deteriorated – “like a great clock winding down,” wrote Eleanor. A butler, a housekeeper and his mother-in-law who moved into the couple’s two-story home in Riverdale nursed Gehrig, but not Christina.

After Lou passed, tension between the in-laws deepened. The parties disputed how Lou’s estate should have been divided. Heinrich and Christina believed that Eleanor was withholding monthly payments from a $20,000 life insurance policy payable to Lou’s parents. An out-of-court settlement was reached.

Christina and Heinrich faded from the news, and died quietly. Eleanor, however, remained prominent, at least publicly. Married to Lou for only eight years, widowed for 43, Eleanor approved the final draft of “The Pride of the Yankees,” donated Lou’s baseball treasures to the Hall of Fame, left $100,000 to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and another $100,000 to the Rip Van Winkle Fund for ALS research.

Privately, a lonely, friendless and childless Eleanor withdrew, drank excessively and, once, passed out, caught her bed on fire from smoking. At Eleanor’s 1984 funeral, only two attended, her attorney George Pollack and his wife. And so ended the sad Gehrig family saga; Lou gone too soon, and his family unhappily bickering all the way to their graves.

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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].