Our president's One Big Beautiful Pill will be awfully hard for many Americans to swallow

Plus, PG&E's "border" wall, three meals for a dollar, and Thom Tillis has a backbone after all

DON'T FENCE ME IN ... I don't know about you, but that scary new fence PG&E has installed to protect its corporation yard on Fifth Street looks a lot like Trump's border wall, right down to the spikes on top.

I mean, are there all sorts of kilowatts lying around that might get stolen but for that intimidating fence?

ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL LIE ... I'll probably get deported for saying this, but our dear president made a couple of bold claims about his massive domestic policy bill that are just flat out false.

I know, I know, he's never told a lie before, and if he did, Republican members of Congress who are working on this bill would certainly call him on it.

In a White House speech, available to all of us, President Trump claimed "Your Medicaid is left alone. It's left the same."

He also claimed that his campaign promise of "No tax on Social Security" is indeed included in the bill.

Given that he has hundreds of staffers telling him what is and is not in the House and Senate versions of the bill, this is not a mistake, but a deliberate falsehood.

And yet not a single Republican is willing to step up and say, "Well, actually, those claims are not true."

The strategy is simple. Have Congress go ahead and trash Medicaid spending and then have the president go on national television and say "Your Medicaid is left alone. It's left the same." And then every right wing news outlet will repeat the president's lie so often that it becomes "fact" in MAGA minds. Problem solved.

If Medicaid is "left the same," how could the current bill result in a savings of $900 billion by most estimates? If things stay the same, they generally cost the same, or given inflation, they might even cost more.

As for "no tax on Social Security," there is no such provision in either the House or Senate bill and no one is proposing such a provision should be added.

It's a lie, pure and simple.

Under current law, 85 percent of Social Security benefits are taxable. That figure remains unchanged.

Trust me on this.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, THOM TILLIS ... After years of bending his knee the president's way even when he disagreed, Thom Tillis' conscience finally got the better of him as he realized he could no longer stay silent about the obvious deep cuts to Medicaid.

He'll soon be deported, no doubt.

I'll let Tillis' words speak for themselves.