As we close in on the final weeks of what has been the strangest election of my life, I find myself sifting through all the lies and deceptions Americans have had to endure for the last eight years ever since Donald Trump came down the faux-gold, like him, escalator in Trump Tower. If history is a guide, we will one day exit this vice-filled hellscape and emerge to better days. Humanity has a way of, as William Faulkner put it in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech — ‘prevailing.’ That is the prize for our eyes.

Until that blessed time, we’re forced to endure lies and deceptions from creatures of the “dark side.” Here are a couple for your consideration.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

Of all the lies told during this presidential campaign, which do you think set the standard for all the others? Which has done the most damage? Which is the most believed, or, in Lenin’s parlance, which has become the truth?

I suggest the gold medal for lying goes to “illegal immigration.”

Everything Donald Trump has said and continues to say in ever more unhinged and strident ways about immigration at our southern border has been a lie. Over the weekend, for example, he claimed more than 600,000 immigrants, all convicted of violent crime, had been released around the country to do more damage.

First, he inflated the number by nearly 50%. It’s really 425,000. Second, he neglected to mention that the data is over a 40-year period, that the government follows these people, and that the numbers include many who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

Moreover, the former president asserts he was far more vigilant in rounding up the undocumented than either Barack Obama before him or Joe Biden after.

Trump and his sycophants would have you believe he is now the only thing standing between you and the millions of murderers and rapists pouring over the southern border heading for your home with plunder in their eyes. If Americans elect him, he will fix it all, and he’ll do it even before he’s inaugurated.

Just like he did in his first term.

Permit me to peel that noxious onion a bit.

According to the right-leaning Cato Institute, Trump did a terrible job removing/deporting illegal immigrants to the U.S. during his first term. He compares woefully to Barack Obama’s eight-year record before him, as seen below. If stopping illegal immigration is your yardstick, Obama’s first four years compared with Trump’s four years are a hands down win. And Obama kept it up in his second term.

Moving on, how does Trump’s immigration record stack up to Joe Biden’s? Not well. Once again, according to another Cato Institute paper, Trump released a greater percentage of immigrants crossing the border into the U.S. interior, and removed/deported a smaller percentage than has the Biden Administration, as seen in this Cato chart.

Yet, the main issue Republicans have latched onto for the battle for the White House is the Biden/Harris Administration’s awful performance on immigration.

Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” once again are on full display.

What about the charge (well, lie) that undocumented immigrants coming over the southern border are doing so much raping and murdering?

The truth is entirely different.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a study two weeks ago that examined crime in Texas, the entry point for immigrants coming over the border. The study encompassed the period from 2012 through 2018 and used Texas Department of Public Safety data. The studies first paragraph said:

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

But that didn’t stop Texas Senator Ted Cruz from doing his best to capitalize on the grief of a Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter was killed by two illegal immigrants from Venezuela.

In a 60-second emotional Cruz campaign ad playing on TV stations across the state, the mother, Alexis Nungaray, says her heart would break again if U.S. Rep. Colin Allred beats Cruz in November.

Cruz continues to milk Jocelyn Nungaray’s tragedy as an example of how “every day, Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants,” as he put it during a primetime speech at the Republican National Convention this summer.

The MAGA messaging has grown especially loud, even desperate, in recent months as border crossings fell to their lowest point since February 2021.

And before we leave the immigration issue, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the lying and vile cruelty inflicted on the people of Springfield, Ohio, by JD Vance and his mentor.

During the one and only presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Trump asserted that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal Haitian migrants, the ones he insists are murderers and rapists, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.  When ABC Moderator David Muir told him ABC had verified with Springfield’s City Manager that no such stealing and eating had happened, Trump said he “saw it on TV.”

This ridiculous story was completely debunked by every reputable news organization in the country, but Vance continued to push it, encouraging supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Nearly 40 bomb threats have been made against schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes since this malignity started, forcing evacuations and closures. In an irony-defining moment, Springfield was forced to cancel its annual celebration of diversity, arts and culture in response to the threats, and state police have been deployed to city schools. Citizens and their Haitian neighbors have been living in dread about what could come next.

Keeping in mind that Vance is the junior Senator from Ohio, have either he or Trump shown any remorse for putting the VP candidate’s constituents through this hell?

What a stupid question.

“Deception, deception, deception”¹

One of the things that characterizes politicians of the less upright variety is their ability to deceive, and to do it with utmost sincerity.

Such is the case with Republican Derrick Anderson, who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District  against Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman (D), a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, former ethics officer for the National Security Counsel (NSC), and twin brother of Alexander Vindman, also of the NSC, who testified during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial about Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelenskii.

The Vindman/Anderson race is highly competitive with polls giving a slight edge to the democrat. Early voting began ten days ago on 20 September.

The mudslinging in this contest, both real and imagined, has been getting more ferocious by the day.

When not firing both barrels at each other, the two candidates are doing whatever they can to be seen in the best light. You know, family men of high character. Which is why Derrick Anderson’s team released an ad last week with this photo.

And that’s not the only photo. Another has the loving group sitting around a dinner table. Very homey.

There’s only one problem. Derrick Anderson is not married to this woman or any other and has no children. He’s JD Vance’s “childless” father.

Right now, you may be asking, “Well, who is the lovely lady with the big smile and the three kids?”

They are the mother and three children of an Anderson friend.

Anderson’s ad did not say that. It said nothing, leaving voters to infer, even assume, this was a picture of the happy Anderson clan.

In this day and age, you can’t hide this stuff, and so, in short order, the truth emerged with predictable results. The social media universe eviscerated the Republican candidate just as early voting was underway.

The Anderson campaign did not have to give the Vindman campaign this kind of ammunition. But it did.

Deception, when discovered, can have severe consequences. Maybe in this case it won’t. But in a race as tight as this with such voter polarity, little things, like faking a family, can reverberate in loud ways.

_________________

¹Amanda, to her daughter Laura, upon learning Laura dropped out of secretarial school weeks ago, but has left the house every day since, pretending to attend. From The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, 1944.

Joe Biden’s administration has made reforming drug pricing a signature policy goal. His Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug price negotiations will bring $7.5 billion in savings for seniors beginning in 2026. He has not stopped there.

Last Friday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, led by Lina Kahn, whom 60 Minutes profiled this past Sunday, sued the country’s three largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group’s Optum unit, CVS Health’s CVS Caremark, and Cigna’s Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

How did we get here? And what are PBMs, anyway?

First, how did we get here?

The PBM industry was born in the late 1960s when Pharmaceutical Card System, Inc., (PCS) invented the plastic benefit card. By the mid-1970s, PCS was serving as a fiscal intermediary by adjudicating drug claims. In other words, it was a prescription Third Party Administrator (TPA). By working for insurers and health plans, PCS (later, AdvancePCS) and others figured out that they could leverage the buying power of their clients to negotiate lower drug prices.  And until around 1992, that’s what they did. During that approximately 20 year period, PBMs saved insurers, health plans and consumers money by driving physicians and patients to use lower cost generic drugs. This was a valuable service for all.

In 1992, however,  PBMs began to change their focus. As noted by the Wall Street Journal in August, 2002, from 1992 through 2002, PBMs had “quietly moved” into marketing expensive brand name drugs, not generics. This has created an incestuous relationship between PBMs and pharmacy companies, which occurred over three periods.

From 1968 through 1994, pharmaceutical companies acquired PBMs. For example, in 1994 Eli Lilly bought PCS for $4 billion and SmithKline Beecham bought Diversified Pharmaceutical Services (from insurer UnitedHealth) for $2.3 billion. But the FTC saw anti- trust implications in these deals and ordered the acquisitions to stop and the pharmaceutical firms to divest the PBMs.

So, Eli Lilly sold PCS Health Systems to Rite Aid for $1.5 billion,  SmithKline Beecham sold Diversified Pharmaceutical Services to Express Scripts for $700 million, and Merck spun off Medco Health Solutions, the PBM for 68 million Americans at the time.

The third PBM evolutionary period, the one we’re now living in, has seen mergers between PBMs and PBMs with pharmacy chains. Those long and winding acquisition roads have resulted in three PBMs — Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRX — cornering 78% of the nation’s PBM business, serving 266 million Americans.

In 2023, total revenue for these three firms had grown to nearly $400 billion, with CVS Caremark reporting more than $175 billion, Exoress Scripts more than $100 billion and OptumRX slightly more than $116 billion.

Second, what do PBMs really do?

The first thing one has to understand in trying to answer this question is that PBMs quintessentially define the word “opaque.”

PBMs claim they serve consumers by negotiating lower prices with drug manufacturers, which result in rebates and discounts that are applied when a health care consumer pays for prescription medication. Sounds simple, but it’s not. It is ridiculously complicated, as this chart from the Drug Channel Institute’s 2024 Economic Report on U.S. Pharmacies and Pharmacy Benefit Managers shows.

Let’s see if we can simplify the obscura using this scenario.

Imagine for a moment you are a pharmaceutical company CEO. You produce drugs that help sick people be healthy. Trouble is, the great big US healthcare system in which you operate is a labyrinthian rabbit warren. And in the center of your part of it sit PBMs.

Here’s your issue as a drug company CEO: You know, regardless of what price you set for your super-duper drug, you’re going to have to give a lot of it back as a discount to the PBM so it can give rebates to its clients. What’s a busy CEO to do?

Well, one answer is to set the price, the list price, so high that you’ll be able to provide a generous discount and still make what your finance folks say you must have for a profit.

In a weird sort of way, this works most of the time for patients, but only if they have health insurance. What happens if they don’t? This is where things get sticky. Uninsured people, who mostly don’t have enough money to afford insurance, even the Affordable Care Act variety, get stuck paying the full list price, the one you inflated in order to provide the discount that allows you to make a profit and PBMs to (kind of) save money for their customers. And let’s not forget that even people who have insurance will pay full price until they get past their deductibles. This has been especially difficult for some uninsured Type 1 diabetics, who, as I have written previously (here and here), have had great difficulty paying for the insulin they need to take every day ─  just to stay alive.

And that is why Lina Kahn’s Federal Trade Commission has sued the big-three PBMs, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies. In its lawsuit, the FTC contends this conduct hurts patients, such as those with no insurance, as well as those with coinsurance and deductibles, who were not eligible for the rebated price.

Kaiser Family Foundation health policy expert Larry Levitt described the FTC action as a “shot across the bow.”

“Insulin is an extreme case of PBMs extracting bigger and bigger rebates from drug manufacturers and driving list prices up at the pharmacy counter, but this is a dynamic that plays out with many medications,” he said.

As you would expect, the three Pharmacy Benefit Managers have criticized the FTC’s approach to the industry, accusing it of bias. Early last week, Express Scripts sued the FTC seeking to force it to withdraw a report that said PBMs enrich themselves at the expense of smaller pharmacies.

The Drug Channel Institute’s Adam Fein, Ph.D., has measured total rebates and discounts paid by drug manufacturers in 2023 as $334 billion. He calls it the “gross-to-net bubble.” One way of looking at that is to say Doctor Fein’s figure is the amount drugs were overpriced in 2023.

Of course, the Occam’s Razor solution here is for drug companies to set prices precisely at the point they end up at after discounts and rebates are applied, thereby establishing a realistic list price and eliminating the middleman.

In our Rube Goldberg health care world, that has as much chance of happening as rain has of suddenly beginning to fall up, instead of down.

In March of 1772, Doctor Joseph Warren, a Revolutionary hero who fought at Lexington and Concord and would later die on Bunker Hill, delivered an oration at Boston’s Old South Meeting House commemorating the second anniversary of what came to be known as the Boston Massacre, where five colonists were killed and six wounded. Crispus Attucks, a whaler, sailor, and dockworker was the first to die. He was also the first person of African and Native American descent killed in the fight for American freedom. He would not be the last.

When Joseph Warren delivered his oration, he was serving as President of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress and was highly respected in the colonies.

Like most upper-class, educated colonists (Harvard, 1759), he looked to ancient Rome’s Republic for  guidance in attaining freedom. By some accounts, he delivered his oration that day in a flowing white Roman toga that would have made Cicero proud.

It was an attachment to freedom, he said,

which raised ancient Rome from the smallest beginnings, to that bright summit of happiness and glory to which she arrived; and it was the loss of this which plunged her from that summit, into the black gulf of infamy and slavery. It was this attachment which inspired her senators with wisdom;…it was this which guarded her liberties, and extended her dominions, gave peace at home, and commanded respect abroad…

Warren warned that Rome lost her Republic over time as her leaders “forgot their dignity and virtue” and “committed the most flagrant enormities,…whereby the streets of imperial Rome were drenched with her noblest blood.”

Seeing into the future, Warren knew that one day America would be free of British rule, so he urged his listeners to study what happened in Rome. If they did, and learned the lesson, he predicted America would be “a land of liberty” and “the seat of virtue.”

And that is precisely what happened following the successful American revolution. When asked by Elizabeth Powel, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

It’s been a struggle ever since.

We were all reminded of this on Saturday when the Secret Service foiled another assassination attempt on the life of Donald Trump that unfolded as he was playing golf at a country club of his in Florida.

The suspect had an AK-47-style rifle with a scope attached. Authorities also found a GoPro digital camera at the place in the bushes where he’d been hiding for 12 hours, which suggests he appears to have been planning to broadcast his attempt to kill Trump. If it weren’t for an eagle-eyed Secret Service agent, who noticed the rifle barrel sticking out slightly from the bushes, the attempt may have succeeded.

The suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, has a long criminal record and has been active on social media. He once wrote a self-published book in which he urged Iran to assassinate Trump.

Routh had backed candidate Trump in the 2016 election, but grew disillusioned with him during his first term. In June of 2020, Routh wrote on social media, “While you were my choice in 2106, I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment and it seems you are getting worse and devolving … I will be glad when you gone.”

Court documents released yesterday detail Routh’s past run-ins with the law, including felony convictions in North Carolina. He was convicted in 2002 for “possession of a weapon of mass death and destruction” and in 2010 for “multiple counts of possession of stolen goods.”

Federal law prohibits individuals convicted of a felony from possessing firearms, let alone assault rifles like the AK-47. That didn’t seem to stop Mr. Routh.

This sordid event is another spoke in the wheel of approaching political anarchy. Think what would have happened throughout the nation if Routh had succeeded. Although officials pointed out he never had “line of sight” on Trump, that was only because Trump hadn’t yet reached  the golf hole where Routh had set up his ambush. But the target was on its way.

There are now 48 days until the election. I’m less worried about those 48 days than I am about the 48 that follow — the ones between the election and the inauguration.

Regardless of whether you vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris on 5 November, it’s likely those 48 days will be fraught with tension. If a peaceful transfer of power occurs, the nation will have shown its best side to the world. But if not, we will be dragged “into the black gulf of infamy” Joseph Warren warned us of and toward which the fringe elements of society seem intent on pulling us.

If that happens, we will be looking back on January 6th, 2021, as nothing more than a warm-up, opening act.

That is a distinct possibility, which is a terribly scary thought.

Regarding the debate where cats and dogs were on the menu

The 2024 election is now 52 days away. Post debate polls are about to be released. Most people paying attention expect a small bump for Kamala Harris. We’ll see.

Donald Trump’s approach to the debate seems to have been to see how many weird and crazy things he could shoehorn into 90 minutes, and to do it all with ever increasing  hyperventilating anger.

The highlight for me, and I suspect a lot of people, was his assertion that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal Haitian migrants, the ones he insists are murderers and rapists, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.  When ABC Moderator David Muir told him ABC had verified with Springfield’s City Manager that no such stealing and eating had happened, Trump said he “saw it on TV.”

The origin of this lunacy was one Springfield woman, Erica Lee, who posted the bizarre anecdote in a local Facebook group. Then, on 5 September, a screenshot of the post was shared on X, which went viral. It’s now been viewed by almost one million people.

Fox News picked up the story and reported it. Then, when it became clear the story was totally made up, Fox reported it wasn’t true. Mr. Trump, Fox’s most devoted viewer, must have missed that second report.

Shortly after the debate, Ms Lee revealed her source for the baseless story, saying she heard it from a neighbor, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from the friend’s daughter. She also admitted that she doesn’t even know the daughter who started the whole thing.

Adding some fuel to that claim was a graphic video, viewable on YouTube, which shows the 16 August arrest of Allexis Telia Ferrell, who allegedly killed and ate a cat in Canton, Ohio. Stark County Court records for Ferrell, a non-Haitian American citizen, show she was charged with cruelty to companion animals.

Finally, JD Vance circulated the “story” on X, but did say it was “possible the rumors would not prove to be true.”

And that’s all the “evidence” there was for this brushfire of calumny.

Over the past couple of days, Haley Byrd Wilt, of Notus, tried to ask as many Senate and Congressional Republicans as she could get to stand in one place long enough what they thought of the migrant stealing and eating episode. You’d think she had thrown them into a pizza oven given the speed at which they tried to escape.

Only Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, a state chock-full of Haitian migrants who vote, and are therefore important to him, offered any kind of rational reply. Of Haitians eating cats, he said, “We’ve never had a problem with that in Florida.” And Rubio wasn’t worried that Trump’s claims would affect the considerable Haitian population in his state.

“The Haitian community in South Florida, in particular, is well-ingrained in the fabric of our community,” he said. “We all know each other. It’s not going to be an issue in Florida.”

But he was careful not to criticize Trump.

Meanwhile, back in Springfield, Ohio, population about 58,000, bomb threats forced the closing of City Hall and a couple of schools on Thursday. There were no bombs, but the citizenry is decidedly on edge and upset about its new undeserved fame as the cute little pet stealing and eating capital of the country.

For the record, in May 2021, the U.S. expanded Haitian eligibility for a humanitarian program granting deportation relief and work permits to an estimated 150,000 Haitians already living in the U.S. who cannot safely return to their home, Reuters reported.

Want to join Mar-a-Lago?

In 2015, before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the cost of a membership at Mar-a-Lago was $100,000. After he won the election, he raised the price to $200,000. Today, it is $700,000.

In November, shortly after the election, four slots are coming open, and the price to buy in?

One million dollars. And all of it goes to Donald Trump. Maybe six bankruptcies helped him become a better businessman.

Enough said.

False equivalence at the New York Times – a continuing embarrassment

Margaret Sullivan is a journalist who was the first New York Times public editor, or ombudsman. Now, she writes for The Guardian and publishes a Substack column, called American Crisis. Her most recent entry is highly critical of her former bosses at the Times. While Sullivan asserts that, with its enormous resources, the Times does a lot of great work, she bemoans its coverage of the 2024 presidential election.

As an example, she wrote that she had been discussing this with her former colleague, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter James Risen, who was deeply disturbed by what he was seeing.

She wrote:

“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.

“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to the epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.

“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.

This is a small example of how mainstream media, and particularly America’s “paper of record,” is covering this election. In a committed effort to be seen as fair and balanced, it is being anything but.

The nation deserves better.

Cartoonists do it better.

For hundreds of years, political cartoonists have afflicted the comfortable as no other group has. You won’t find much false equivalence coming out of this crowd.

I end this weekend read with a perfect example.

When Donald Trump desecrated Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, I wrote about it. However, I could never capture the callow disregard for the cemetery’s hallowed ground as well as Pulitzer Prize winner Darrin Bell did last week.

See what you think.

Today, we leave the hot jungles of  the Vietnam of my youth where, in the late 60s and early 70s hundreds of thousands of soldiers from opposing sides tried to kill each other and where more than 50,000 Americans died, making the ultimate sacrifice.

We arrive 50 some odd years later in the charming and hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington DC, where so many of the dead from Vietnam have found their final resting place, joining other fallen from our wars.

On 26 August, the cemetery and all its dead were pulled into the political knife fight that is the 2024 presidential election. Once again, as he always seems to do, morally corrupt and remorseless Donald Trump, empty of mercy, pity, empathy, conscience, and guilt, decided that what was in his interest was ever so much more important than any moral considerations for the dead and their loved ones.

As NPR originally reported, on that day Trump visited Arlington Cemetery at the invitation of some Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed at the Abbey Gate of Kabul International Airport while U.S. forces were evacuating Afghan allies three years ago. Thirteen service members were killed after an Islamic State fighter detonated a bomb that also killed more than 170 Afghan civilians.

Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown. Fine, so far. But that’s not all he and his campaign aides did.

Those service members he was invited to mourn are now buried in Section 60, which is the resting place for those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Armed Forces considers Section 60 sacred ground, as do the families of the dead who are entombed there.

I’ve been there, and, when I was, I had the feeling of being in church.

On that day, after laying the wreath, Trump and his campaign team cavalierly invaded Section 60, Arlington’s sanctum sanctorum, for a political photo op and video. Members of Trump’s entourage pushed aside an Army employee who was trying to enforce the rules — and federal law — which forbid photos, videos, and anything else that smacks of political campaigning within the gravesites.

Trump got his pictures.

After the incident became public, Trump’s Representative Steven Cheung, said, “This individual was the one who initiated physical contact and verbal harassment that was unwarranted and unnecessary,” As if that wasn’t enough, he added that the employee obviously “had a mental problem.”

The Army said the employee who’d been tossed aside declined to press charges, allegedly because of fear that Trump and his MAGA minions might retaliate against the employee or her family. For the record, the Army said she was only doing her job.

At a campaign rally the next day, Trump blamed the whole thing on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Then he said it didn’t happen. It was a “made up story.” Makes your head spin. But what else would one expect?

Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, wrote to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, asking for the incident report from Arlington, which the Army has not yet made public, as well as a briefing.

With Donald Trump, this stuff is routine transactional business. Incidents like this come fast, so fast they seem like a many-headed-hydra, mythology’s version of whack-a-mole. The result is the nation has become desensitized to their rapid fire and depraved nature. And our mainstream media — I’m talking to you, New York Times — treats them as if they’re nothing more than a little dirty politics, which happens in every campaign, doesn’t it?

An existential crisis for American democracy? Many scholars seem to think so, but you’d never know it from America’s “paper of record.”

Yesterday morning, writing in the Washington Post, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, giving Trump the Voldemort treatment, never saying his name, scathingly rebuked those who had used Arlington National Cemetery for “a political event.”

Admiral Mullen wrote:

But no part of Arlington — or any veterans’ cemetery for that matter — should ever play host to partisan activity. These cemeteries are sacred ground. They represent the final resting places of our best, our brightest, our most unselfish citizens.

Our fallen and departed veterans did not serve, fight or die for party. They fought and died for country, for each other, for their families and for us. They served in a military that defends all Americans — regardless of creed, color, race and, yes, voting habits.

On a hot and humid August day in 1970, a MedEvac helicopter landed on a dusty, wind-swept pad on the western edge of Camp Eagle in northern South Vietnam. Camp Eagle was the base camp for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, of which I was a fully paid up member in good standing.

Eagle, about the size of a small city, was roughly seven kilometers south of the city of Hue where the heaviest fighting of the Tet offensive had happened a little more than two years earlier. America won the battle of Tet on the ground, but lost it in the press. Although the war went on for another six years, Tet was the turning point where we lost the support of the American public, if we ever had any to begin with.

When the chopper landed, I was sitting in the door beside the door gunner with my legs hanging out. Both legs hurt — a lot. With the blades still whirling, a couple of medics lifted me out and carried me to a nearby truck with a red cross on the side of it. They maneuvered me inside the back end of the truck and onto a seat on the side, and off we went to a medical unit somewhere on the base.

This was not my first time making this kind of trip. A couple of months earlier, during a brief encounter with some of our friends from the north, a tiny piece of shrapnel had navigated its way into a fleshy spot just above my right knee. For a little thing, it hurt a lot. So, I’d taken a chopper ride back to Eagle where a medic had frozen the spot, made a small cut, dug out the miniscule metal, bandaged me up, and sent me back to my men who did their best not to laugh about it in front of me.

This latest trip to the rear had nothing to do with shrapnel.

Regular readers may recall the 15-mile march to the sea my men and I made on a hot and rainy summer night, the sand-filled bread we pigged out on, the crammed-in Sampan ferry ride up the South China Seacoast, during which Rusty the Scout Dog crapped voluminously smack dab in the middle of us, all of which preceded our launching what was likely the only amphibious beachhead assault of the entire war, only to be met, not by North Vietnamese regulars with murderous intent, but by Red Cross Donut Dollies with Coca Cola.

All of this so my Commander, call-sign Bobcat, could win his silver star.

I don’t know which was more humiliating, getting hit in the knee with shrapnel so small you could hardly see it, or being the butt of merciless “amphibious assault” jokes from fellow officers I used to think were friends.

But following the battle that wasn’t, the military gods smiled, and my men and I were allowed to hang around for nearly three weeks on the beach we had recently “captured.” It was too bad the Donut Dollies couldn’t hang around with us, but they had Cokes to deliver elsewhere. C’est las vie.

During our nearly three weeks of semi-vacation, we routinely patrolled the lowland area, encountering nothing but a few water buffalo and some rice paddy farmers who would have slit our throats if they thought they could have gotten away with it.

When not patrolling, most of our time by the sea was spent in it, swimming and surfing when the tide came in. It wasn’t until I saw Apocalypse Now nearly ten years later and watched Robert Duvall’s fake troops doing the same thing that I realized we might not have been unique, after all. But there was one stark difference between us and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie — we never had to endure the “smell of napalm in the morning.”

That was no small blessing. Standing on a ridgeline looking across a valley toward the end of my time in Vietnam, I saw what a napalm strike could do as two jets streaked in to release their grisly cargo on the forest below. It looked as if the earth had opened up to have fiery hell rise and devour everything it touched. Made me realize just how right Sherman had been about war being hell.

About a week into our time on the beach, we were resupplied, and some kind soul included a couple cases of beer. Shortly after that, I stepped on a small, pull tab that once sat on top of  a can of Bud. It cut my foot, and I thought nothing more about it, except to order the guys to police the area so it wouldn’t happen again to someone else.

Two days later, the foot began to hurt. A couple of days after that, my right calf started to ache and swell. Over the next several days, what was obviously an infection made its way all the way up my right leg and down my left. The pain was exquisite. I couldn’t stand, let alone walk, and it was at this point that our medic, Corporal Gary Porzinski, said he’d done everything he could, which wasn’t much, and I needed to get back to Camp Eagle to get more sophisticated help before things became serious.

And that was how I found myself on the Huey MedEvac chopper winging my way back to Eagle, then to the ambulance with the Red Cross on the side of it, and finally to a light hospital unit where, along with about twenty other medical inmates also suffering from different kinds of infections, I was told to bend over for a shot of penicillin in the ass twice a day for the next ten days.

We were all officers in the medical unit, which was in a large tent, and I remain convinced to this day that the army nurse with the big grin and the giant hypodermic needle derived great joy in slamming it home with vigor.

But what do you do in the middle of a war in the middle of a large army base in the middle of a medical unit tent? Answer: not much.

Which the guys who ran the medical unit realized. One of them was our Battalion Surgeon, Major Skip Davies — a man  I counted as one of my best friends in Vietnam. We had known each other back on Fort Benning before getting the orders everyone knew would one day arrive. Our wives were friends and kept each other company all the time we were gone. Each of us had baby girls we were hoping to get to know.

After I’d been in the medical unit for about a week, he came to see me while I was in between shots in the ass. I told him it would be nice if the guys recovering in the tent could have a little entertainment of some sort. He thought that was a good idea, so good he told me he’d already arranged for us to have a movie night. “What movie,” I asked him. “Nope,” he said, “It’s a surprise. But you’re going to like it.”

And so it was that the following day a few soldiers rigged up a large screen outside the tent and put about 25 dilapidated, rickety chairs in front of it. As darkness began to fall, we all made our way to the chairs in our hospital johnnies with the slits up the rear to make it easier for Sgt. Caligula, or whatever his name was, to get at us. We settled ourselves in, someone turned on a big projector, and the movie began.

It was Mash, which had come out earlier that year. I have no idea how the army not only got it, but got it to Camp Eagle in Vietnam. Regardless, there it was in living color right in front of us. Directed by Robert Altman, with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, Elliot Gould as Trapper John, and Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips Houlihan, it was stingingly hilarious.

We had just gotten to the truly ironic part. Hawkeye, Trapper John, and their ghoulish pals had assembled, just as we had, in chairs in front of a tent within which Hot Lips was showering. They sat waiting, as did we. We knew something huge was about to happen.

And it did. At that very moment Camp Eagle came under rocket attack. Regardless of our infectious states, or whatever Hot Lips was doing, once we heard the first explosion we all unassed the area and ran for the nearest bunker into which we dove, some headfirst.

About ten rockets hit Camp Eagle that night, none of them remotely near us, but movie night was ruined.

The next day, cured, I jumped a chopper, flew back to the beach that began it all, and rejoined my men, who hadn’t missed me in the least. We were only at the beach another day or two. After that we said goodbye to water and sand and choppered north deep into the jungle where the war came back to meet us with a vengeance.

It wasn’t for another ten years that I was able to see the nearly two hour, full movie of Mash. With my wife Marilyn, I finally saw Sally Kellerman’s shower screen drop to the ground to reveal her standing humiliated, naked, and covered with soap to the applause and guffaws of Hawkeye and all his friends assembled in front.

Somehow, it didn’t pack quite the punch I thought it would.

Epilogue

Between the Vietnam war and now, Camp Eagle slowly disappeared. Nature reclaimed its own and erased our presence. If you looked for signs of it now, you wouldn’t find any. It’s as if we were never there. That’s  good.

Introduction

We’re in the beginning of the stretch run for the 2024 presidential election, and, already, I need a break. I’ll bet you do too.

With that in mind, regular readers will know I have occasionally posted stories from my long-ago time in Vietnam. A number of you, perhaps having dallied too long with the doctored-up Kickapoo Joy Juice, have suggested if I could come up with a few more, I might have the beginnings of an actual book some foolish people might be persuaded to read, maybe even buy.

Giving these misguided literary critics the benefit of the doubt, it’s conceivable they might have a barely discernible point. So, what follows is the first of two stories. I will post the second one next week. Let me know what you think.

_____________

Orders arrive

It was a beautiful late summer day in Vietnam, and my 28-man Platoon and I, along with Rusty the scout dog and his handler, PFC Snyder, were feeling good. Having recently concluded one of our personally satisfying  occasional encounters with a few visitors from the North, we were sunning ourselves on the rocky top of what passed for a mountain in northern South Vietnam, when Bobcat called.

Bobcat, who preceded Bulldog of The Calendar and Nuts fame, was Colonel Robert Stillingworth, “Still” to his friends, Bobcat to me.

Anyway, Bobcat called, and the ultimate, sub-rosa reason he called was because, in his tenth month of a 13-month Vietnam tour, Bobcat, who has long since become one with the universe, had yet to win his Silver Star. He, like all full-bird Colonels of the Vietnam era, believed winning this award was essential in his quest for what he considered his much-deserved promotion to Brigadier General. Of course, I did not know any of this at the time. Why should I? But afterwards it explained everything.

As soon as I heard his voice, I knew siesta-time was over.  “Go to the secure freq. I have orders for you,” he said. I switched to our secure frequency. He said, “You are to proceed to the sea.” Then he gave me a couple of coordinates, which, with deduction worthy of an officer and a gentleman, I presumed to be somewhere on the coast of the South China Sea. “You are to be there no later than 0100 hours. You will receive further orders upon arrival. Any questions?”

Well, no. Seemed simple enough. Then I heard, “Bobcat out.” The man had a way with words.

I pulled out my map and saw that our upcoming little nighttime stroll would cover about 24 kilometers, we called them “clicks.” This would equal roughly 15 miles. Twenty-four clicks in less than eight hours and, since we had just been resupplied with rations, ammo, and what not a couple of hours earlier, we’d be bebopping along with about 85 pounds on our backs.

The good news was we wouldn’t have to bebop through much jungle. After we made it down the mountain, we’d be just about one click from Highway 1, the only paved road north of Saigon. We’d take that north, and it would lead us right to where we were supposed to go. Simple. As long as we didn’t stumble onto any of the bad guys.

So, I gave the bad news to the squad leaders and my platoon sergeant Dave Lucey, we gathered up our stuff, and off we went. About an hour later, we were on Highway 1. That’s when the rain began. It rained all the way to the sea.

We arrive

In the gloom of a rainy night, about one click from where we were supposed to wind up, we took a right off the highway onto a dirt track and saw the lights from a village up ahead. As we got nearer we could hear voices, a lot of them. But before we got there we smelled the bread.

In our haste to make the deadline, we hadn’t stopped to eat, just kept slogging up Highway 1 in the rain. Now, dead ahead of us, a sorry group of cold and wet-to-the-core soldiers, was an old woman, smiling from ear to ear, standing behind a table in front of a tiny building that appeared to be the village bakery. She had two hanging oil lamps, one on each side of her, and spread out on her table were loaf after loaf of newly baked bread. Somehow, the lady had known we were coming.

Ravenous as we were, we bought every loaf, making the smiling Mama-San instantly wealthy. We wolfed them down. If you ignored all the sand still in the bread it was the best we ever tasted.

Then we moved on to our rally point, where all the voices were coming from. We found ourselves in a little harbor, really little. And in it were a few small boats, not much more than Sampans, really.

Standing on a small pier hanging out over the water was the Intelligence Officer of our Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Barnacle. He showed me written orders, but didn’t let me read them, and told me the boats behind him belonged to the South Vietnamese Navy. “Excuse me, Sir, South Vietnam has a Navy?” I asked. “Yup, and you’re lookin’ at it.” He then said, “Your orders are to board that ship over there with your men and, ah, the dog, I see you have a dog. Well, that’ll be all right. Dogs can swim. The ship will ferry you up the coast to just south of the DMZ , where you will conduct an amphibious assault and secure the beach.”

When he said DMZ, he got my attention, because the DMZ was the Demilitarized Zone, the most dangerous place in all of Vietnam.

I just looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is a joke, right?” “No joke,” he said. “Get ready to board, cause you’re leaving in 15 minutes.” “But sir,” I said, “Are you going to brief me on the resistance my men and I will likely encounter when we do this stupid-ass, crazy thing?”

Colonel Barnacle draped his arm over my shoulder and pulled me aside. “Lieutenant,” he said. “Believe me when I tell you it is highly unlikely you and your men will encounter much resistance, if any.”

“Is this just an exercise?” I asked. “Sort of,” he said. “But it’s kind of secret. Now get your ass on the boat.”

So, we did. Scout dog Rusty, PFC Snyder, and the rest of us began squeezing ourselves into the hold on the deck of the first boat. The hold, about 20 by 20 feet, sloped from the middle out to the sides. At the middle it was about four feet high. At the sides it was down to about two and a half feet. Somehow, we crammed ourselves in. It would have been a lot less uncomfortable if it weren’t for all the 85-pound rucksacks and weaponry. Finally, crushed together, we pushed off from the dock, and the put-putting engine sent us all slowly out into the South China Sea.

But before we got too far out, our South Vietnamese Navy piece of junk started rattling underneath us. Then, after about ten seconds of gears squishing and grinding, everything stopped, and it became quiet. Too quiet. From somewhere in the middle of the hold we were stuffed into, I heard Randy Billingsley, who was our M-60 machine gunner, say, “I can’t swim.”  Then, a couple more guys said the same thing, and I was beginning to think Vietnam’s hot, swampy, snake infested jungle wasn’t such a bad place, after all.

That was when a door opened in the front of our compartment, which seemed to be getting smaller by the moment, and a wiry little man with a big smile slipped through it. He was carrying a wrench about the size of his arm. He slid between two of our guys and opened another door. He oozed through that one and disappeared.

Next came the banging. That was when Billingsley once again let everyone know he couldn’t swim. This got Rusty the dog upset, so he began howling. Then, everyone was talking excitedly at once, Rusty kept barking, the little man kept banging, and I began to get worried.

I don’t know what would have happened next, if not, at that very moment, the engine hadn’t suddenly come to life, which instantly silenced everyone, even Rusty. The second door opened and the little man with the big wrench was once more with us with an even bigger smile. He said, “Okey dokey,” and vanished through the first door.

Relieved, we continued up the South China Sea in the dead of night.

About ten minutes later my big mistake reared its furry, German Shepherd head, because that was when  Snyder, stuck way back in the left corner, yelled over to me, “Lieutenant, the dog’s gotta go.” The mistake had been loading Rusty and Snyder in first. They always led after our Point man in the jungle. Why not here? Well, this was why not.

There was nothing we could do, no way to get him anywhere else. So, with all of us glued tightly together and doing our best to squeeze away from the stench about to come, Rusty did his thing, a four-plopper according to Snyder, and the rest of our trip up the South China Seacoast was redolent with the very special aroma only dogshit  can make.

The assault

At 0815 hours in the morning we were finally at the assault point. Getting out of the little torture chamber that would have made Grand Inquisitor Torquemada proud was probably the most ridiculous part of the entire operation. But we did it and said goodbye to South Vietnam’s gunless Navy. We even scooped up Rusty’s calling card to save the little man with the big wrench from having to do it. After we tossed that into the sea, we noticed that the genius who designed the “plan” didn’t allow for low tide, so we hit the water for the big battle about a quarter mile from shore.

Not a shot was fired. Heads up, we casually waded ashore, walked up the beach, and found rectangular table after table along about 100 feet of beach, behind which, with smiles to light up the sky, stood six beautiful women of the American Red Cross, dressed in their signature pale blue outfits, handing out cans of Coca Cola. To the guys in the field, they were known as “Donut Dollies,” and they’d been doing this since World War II. But for us they had no donuts.

Having not died in the second coming of D-Day, we occupied the beach for the next three weeks, never encountering a single moment of stress from an enemy that must have had other things on its mind.

During our little vacation on the beach I developed a bacterial infection from a small cut I got when, in bare feet, I stepped on the discarded pull tab of a can of Bud. It became ridiculously painful, and I couldn’t stand up, let alone walk. So, I called in a chopper, my guys carried me to it, sat me in the door, and I flew back to base camp for ten days of penicillin shots in the ass. While there I met up with the Brigade Adjutant, a friend. It was he who told me the story of how Bobcat had directed an amphibious assault on a tightly held enemy location on the South China Seacoast, and, .45 calibers in each hand, had led his men to victory.

At least, that’s what the citation for his Silver Star said.

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.  In doing so, she gave a deeply passionate speech, which, like most such speeches, was long on all the things she intended doing and short on how she intended doing them. But it was a great barnburner of a speech, anyway, that, as 100,000 red, white, and blue balloons fell from the ceiling, energized and electrified the faithful.

Now the real work begins, and momentum is with the Democrats. However, as Bill Clinton warned in his Wednesday night speech, the next 75 days will be difficult and everyone should be ready for some surprises. For my money, I think Kamala Harris will probably, like Hilary Clinton and Al Gore, win the popular vote, and you know what happened to them in the Electoral College tally. Our current President, Joe Biden, won the popular vote by nearly seven million votes, but it was only 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin that separated him and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.

“Joy” as a strategy will not carry Harris to victory on 5 November. She is going to have to coherently address actual domestic and foreign policies that will resonate with American voters.

One of the most important, and complex, policy issues that really matters is the economy.  In 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid,” got Bill Clinton elected. I’m betting the same will be true in 2024 for whoever wins. After all, a political truism is that Americans vote with their pocketbooks. While it’s objectively true that the overall economy has been steadily improving over the last 15 months, prices are still high, especially grocery prices, and it’s fascinating how many political decisions get made in a grocery store checkout line.

One of the ways Kamala Harris says she’ll be attacking high prices if she’s elected is by passing a national law forbidding price gouging. However, most states already have in place laws against price gouging. They address prices during emergencies; for example, jacking up the price of shovels during blizzards, or air conditioners during heat waves. At some point, when it conceivably gets its act together, the Trump campaign will most assuredly point this out, Trump will take credit for it, and his MAGA followers will believe him.

Economists don’t like price gouging laws, but the public does, so Harris’s message might resonate — for a while. As Michael Giberson of the Cato Institute says, the argument by many economists goes like this:

Economists and policy analysts opposed to price gouging laws have relied on the simple logic of price controls: if you cap price increases during an emergency, you discourage conservation of needed goods at exactly the time they are in high demand. Simultaneously, price caps discourage extraordinary supply efforts that would help bring goods in high demand into the affected area. In a classic case of unintended consequences, the law harms the very people whom lawmakers intend to help. The logic of supply and demand, so clear to economists, has had little effect on price gouging policies.

Or the public. This is why Harris and Walz think pushing a national law to combat price gouging will benefit them. They believe they can make political headway with a “greedflation” narrative, blaming rising prices on corporate profit-seeking. They seem to have determined that trying to educate the public about our actual economic improvement and why it’s been happening — due to policies of the Biden/Harris Administration — is too high a mountain to climb, and, in addition, makes them too closely connected to elderly Joe Biden. Easier to find a mythological prince of demons, a Beelzebub, paint it Republican, and go after it tooth and nail.

It might work. But there’s an alternative approach the public might appreciate if given the chance.

These are three economic points Americans understand: inflation, gross wages, and real hourly wage earnings. The last is the value of wages after factoring in inflation. Hence the word, “real.” Here is a chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing how all three have interacted since 2019.

I know. Looks complicated. But stay with me.

The orange-arrowed light blue line is inflation. As the orange arrow shows, inflation’s greatest 12-month gain happened in June 2022: 9.1%. The green-arrowed dark blue line is real wage earnings, which nearly perfectly correspond to inflation; as inflation increased, real earnings decreased. As it decreased, real earnings grew, even though gross wages, the very light blue line, continued growing in the 5% range.

The dark blue line with the red arrow is the 12 month change from April, 2020, through March, 2021: 7.7%. That spike in real and gross wages happened because early in the pandemic the bottom fell out and so many low wage workers lost their jobs. This skewed the chart’s data, because most high wage earners were still employed, which drove up both gross and real wage numbers.

The political message, if one just looks at this chart for a moment, is this: In the period from  April, 2023, through July 2024, — that’s one month ago — the U.S. has seen 15 consecutive months of real wage growth along with a corresponding leveling of inflation following a precipitous drop due to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies. Further, in September, economists expect the Fed to decrease interest rates. If this happens, it will be the first drop in interest rates since the Fed began increasing them more than two years ago in March of 2022, and it will be great news for all Americans. It will also be great news for Kamala Harris.

Back to prices. Yes, they’re still high, and, more important, will likely not decline sharply before the election, but with the growth of real wages, Americans are catching up.

The bad news is that these statistics are esoteric. They’re data. And while charts convey noetic  statistical information, Americans feel grocery prices. They get emotional about them.

Nonetheless, Kamala Harris has an exceptional economic story to tell of a superb turnaround after a devastating, once-in-a-century pandemic. Donald Trump had nothing to do with that, but Harris and Joe Biden did.

Politically, Harris must distinguish herself from Joe Biden, so focusing for a while on price gouging will probably continue. Ultimately, though, the price gouging issue is like a painted hook on a wall; it might look pretty, but no hat will ever hang from it.

To win in November, it’s going to take a lot more than painted hooks, a lot more than Joy and sound bites like, “We won’t go back.”

These economic data are certainly more than sound-bites. Americans, if given the chance, will digest them easily.

“If the 75,000-plus immigrants who perform the hardest of work in Wisconsin’s dairy and agriculture were gone tomorrow, the state economy would tank.” — Jorge Franco, CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.

Immigration is one of the top, and thorniest, issues in this year’s presidential and down-ballot elections. It is polarizing, emotional, and filled with hyperbolic misinformation.

Is anyone telling the truth about it? And how would you know?

You’ve probably never heard of Peter Rousmaniere, but let me introduce him to you.

In 2006,when this Harvard MBA reached either the 2nd or 3rd act of his life, I’m not quite sure which, he dove into what he perceived as a then current and worsening crisis: Immigration in the U.S.

In the blog he’s written since then, Working Immigrants, he’s been relentless. One of the smartest people I know, Rousmaniere has become a recognized national expert and, somehow, manages to keep great swaths of data in his capacious brain.

Dividing his time between London and Boston, Rousmaniere never gets emotionally wound up in the issue. He just digs, finds facts, analyzes them, and presents data in a thoughtful and coherent manner. No shouting, no ranting, just cold, hard facts.

When considering the Democratic and Republican Platforms (as well as Project 2025), Peter Rousmaniere’s perspective is informative. For example, we all know that, if elected, Donald Trump plans the most “massive deportation in the history of America.” He says it will be 18 million people. The poorly written Republican Platform, Agenda 47, which compared to Project 2025 is the same wine in a smaller bottle, lists this as its third goal regarding immigration: “Begin Largest Deportation Program in American History.”

But, as Rousmaniere wrote last week:

H-2A temporary work visas designed mainly for farm workers have soared in usage, from 75,000 in 2010 to close to 400,000 today. Project 2025 calls for the elimination of these visas. Here is a 2022 in-depth demographic profile of unauthorized farm workers…

Nearly 45% of U.S. agricultural workers, or 950,000 out of 2.2 million, are unauthorized migrants. Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan would severely impact states like Wisconsin, where 70% of dairy farm labor is performed by over 10,000 undocumented workers. The state’s dairy industry would collapse without these workers. The National Milk Producers Federation states that immigrant labor accounts for 51% of all dairy labor, producing 79% of the U.S. milk supply. California would also be heavily affected, as approximately 75% of its farmworkers are undocumented.

With these numbers in mind, it is blazingly obvious that, even if Trump were elected, there is not going to be any kind of mass deportation of undocumented farm and dairy workers, but they have been painted darkly by politicians, especially Trump, who began it all when he first came down that faux (like him) golden staircase in New York’s Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015.

Immigration is a highly complex issue, but it has been made binary by most Republicans and some Democrats. I’m hoping, probably forlornly, that, when Trump and Kamala Harris meet for their debate on 10 September, ABC moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir will do their best to cut through the fog of partisan hyperbole and get the candidates to at least admit the complexity we all face dealing with our current immigration problem.

They could ask Peter Rousmaniere to send them some probing questions. But, given the history of presidential debates, probing questions with intelligent follow-up have as much chance of happening as looking up suddenly to see pigs flying by my second story window.

A new low even for Donald Trump

In 2018, Donald Trump bestowed the Presidential medal of Freedom on Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson. Last Thursday, with Adelson in the audience at a campaign event at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, Trump saluted her and contrasted her award with the Congressional Medal of Honor.