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Veterans and Mental Illness

On a sultry June morning in our national’s capital last Friday, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . Scores of people moved silently along the Wall, viewing the names of the men and women who died in that war. Some stopped and took pictures. One group of men about my age surrounded one name for a photo. Two young women posed in front of another, perhaps a grandfather or great uncle they never got to meet. It is always an incredibly moving experience to visit the Wall. It treats each of the people it memorializes with respect. There is no rank among those honored. Officer or enlisted, rich or poor, each is given equal space and weight. It is a form of acknowledgement and respect for which many veterans still fight. Brave Vietnam veterans returned from Southeast Asia to educate our nation about the effects of war and violence. I didn’t know anything about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I entered the Connecticut Legislature in the...

Scapegoats and Concepts of a Plan: How Trump Fails Us

When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan. And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives. The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-exi...

Anxiety and the Presidential Election

Wow. Could the mainstream media do anything more to raise our anxiety levels about the 2024 election? And diminish or negate all the recent accomplishments in our country? Over the past three-and-a-half years, our nation’s economy has been the strongest in the world. Unemployment is at record lows, and the stock market is at record highs. NATO – which last came together to defend the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 – is stronger than ever. Border crossings are down. Massive infrastructure improvements are underway in every state. Prescription drug costs are lower. We finally got out of Afghanistan – evacuating more than 100,000 U.S. citizens and supporters – with just a handful of deaths. Inflation – which rose precipitously in the aftermath of the pandemic – has come back down, and prices in many areas have even begun to decline. And yet, all the media commentators can talk about these days – and they are not “reporters” when they are clearly offering opinions to frame the...

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