Okay, this isn't really what Donald Trump proposed in last night's 8-minute address to the nation about the need to fully and immediately fund security for our southern border, as well as the President's intent to continue the government shutdown as the only possible method of getting the Democrats to take part - however unwillingly - in our nation's defense.
The President spoke eloquently of the high costs of our current inadequate security. A flood of illegal drugs, weapons, and gang members bringing suffering and death to Americans, as well as devastating the job market for African-Americans and Hispanics, and costing taxpayers untold billions for support services for our uninvited guests.
But as frightening as the President's statistics were, they can't compare to the terror we experienced when our TV screen was suddenly filled with two soul-sucking faces that put the "butt" in rebuttal...
Schumer and Pelosi glowered into the unblinking camera and lied their shriveled rear ends off about what Trump had said only moments before. They characterized his statements as lies and hate, and claimed that Democrats are actually wildly enthusiastic about funding border security as long as Trump just ends the shutdown so the matter can be (ahem) "debated" separately until a bipartisan solution can be reached. Because the last 50 years or so of debate haven't quite been enough yet.
They claimed that Trump's wall - or any physical barrier - would be expensive and inefficient. Not terms we remember them bandying about in regards to other Democrat programs, let alone Obama's disastrous "shovel ready jobs" program which cost over 100 times what Trump is requesting for security measures. As a jobs program alone, this could be characterized as a success for Democrats if they'd just allow it to happen.
Interestingly, Schumer and Pelosi didn't bother to address how to stem the ongoing flood of illegals into our country, nor how to eliminate the direct threats to the lives and well-being of Americans. They stared into the camera like a nightmare version of the couple from Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting, interested only in stoking fear and hatred.
Bottom line: the point-counterpoint speeches reaffirmed our belief that the wall needs to be built, and that a continuing government shutdown is the only way to get Democrats to do remotely the right thing.
Steady on, Mr. President.
44 comments:
Agreed, Stilt. “Steady on”, indeed.
The latest Bond villains:
Ernst Stavro Blohard and Irma Rhymes-With-Bunt.
Well, to me, the speech was spot on, covering all the reasons it is a National Security issue. I flipped over to a movie after President Trump said good night. I have no interest in the S & M duo telling me what I just heard was a pack of lies with absolute no proof other than their good word. I wish President Trump had ended the speech with, "And Lying Chuck, no way in hell are you getting $29 Billion for a tunnel in NYC. God Bless you and Good Night."
Now, I suspect Monday, he will announce a National Emergency and use the Army to build it. He will give the S & M duo 6 days to change their minds. Also, he will announce that if the National Emergency somehow is sued, the shutdown will continue until that is settled.
A hundred billion a year to deal with illegal immigration versus five billion for a wall (probably be much more but who cares). The physical barrier will reduce the demands on understaffed border control officials and make drones and other sensors more effective, while slowing the flow of drugs and reducing the stress on our economy. But then the Dems would lose all those voters!
But never fear! Virginia Governor Ralphie put-yer-eye-out-with-that-thing Northam is going to finish the Dems job of making Virginia the latest hell-hole by getting rid of the photo ID requirement to vote. Gotta figure out where to go to retire.
Although a good start, I am not convinced that a wall is the best way to go. It will still be scaled, tunneled under, driven through, flown over, or boated around.
Increasing video surveillance including a fleet of drones to track illegals until the authorities can arrive, as well as actually enforcing existing laws seems more prudent to me.
Stilt;
I had a magnificent career as journalist and engineer but never once touched the glory you float casually through in your every issue.
Thanks for all that you do. Keep up the good work forever.
that's a good second layer, after having a physical barrier.
A barrier backed up by cameras and roving patrols s how security at Pelosi's mansion works.
$ 5.7 Billion divided by $4.407 Trillion (F.Y.2019 budget) x 100 = 0.13% or ~ 1/8 of 1%.
Pocket change these Democrat assholes wouldn't bend over to pick-up. Let's cut vote buying $.
Just thinking out loud here ...
How many California Americans currently still live in tents as a result of the wildfires last summer? How many homeless American children still sleep on the streets? How many homeless/forgotten American veterans wander around our towns?
Until the those two spazzes can fix our problem of providing succor to our people, let the wall building begin.
It just hit me... COMPROMISE! Gotta write to Trump: Build the wall with illegal US "immigrant' labor; but they have to work on and complete it from the south side.
Has everyone forgotten BHO/Eric Holder DEBACLE, Operation Fast and Furious, when the House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over his failure to turn over documents related to the scandal?!? WE, the PEOPLE were at "ground zero" in a CRISIS then, which has only worsened exponentially, costing lives and, by now, UNTOLD TRILLIONS of dollars of benefits to ILLEGAL ALIENS. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
First, the President should have left much less time for the opposition to scramble to rebut by announcing he would go on air much much later than he did.
Second there are already memes out on the web on Nan & Chuck's rebuttal that are hilarious.
Last, how this will end, who knows, but keep in mind for the democrats, its not about 'give me your poor, ....' its about political survival; bringing in new fresh faces to put on the liberal/democratic plantation and dependable votes in the future. Why that point has not been raised in the debate has puzzled me.
Methinks that President Donald J. Trump (I love seeing that in print) kept it short and sweet to give those experienced politicians and news hacks more time to make jackasses (well more jackassian) out of themselves; which they did a very good job of. And we know that the illegals will tunnel under, try to climb over, swim around, and do all kinds of other ways to get through but the wall will at least slow them down.
I've got to go tend to my chickens. It is so windy here today that one of them laid the same egg four times.......
@Section147- I don't always see eye-to-eye with Trump, but I'm solidly behind him on this issue.
@M. Mitchell Marmel- I genuinely found the two of them staring into the camera to be very disturbing. These are not good people.
@James Daily- It was harder than heck for me to NOT turn off Chuck and Nancy, but I felt like I owed it to this blog's readers to subject myself to their lies. And they're good at what they do: they'd almost sound reasonable if you didn't know that there wasn't an iota of truth in what they were saying.
@Jim Irre- When combined with other (ahem) "common sense" immigration reform measures, the wall would pay for itself in savings. And no, a wall can't do the whole job - but it can be a critical piece.
And there is NO reason to abolish photo Ids at the polls except to enable voter fraud. Period.
@Geoff King- I agree with every point...though I recommend those measures in addition to a wall.
@Jack Wiegman- What a nice thing to say! True story: when I was in college (and dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I got the worst grade in my "creative writing" class because I wanted to do things my own way and develop my own voice. Still, I owe that instructor a debt: it wasn't until that point in my life that I truly realized that "experts" can be idiots.
@sofa- Actually, the main deterrent to people breaking into Pelosi's mansion is the chance, however slight, that they might see her emerging from the shower.
@Rod- This CLEARLY isn't about the money or fiscal responsibility. These are, after all, Democrats we're talking about.
@Bobo the Hobo- You're talking about priorities, which I wish was the case in Washington. I completely agree.
@Rod- Brilliant! Granted, the Dems will still insist on unionizing the workers...
@Dr. Roger Harris- Sadly, when you start a sentence with "has everyone forgotten," the odds are that the answer will be "yes" with the possible exception of this forum. Can there be a worse idea than "let's give weapons to the bad guys so we can track how guns move around?" And again, the answer is "yes" - because it was a worse idea to then not bother to track the freaking guns other than to collect the occasional serial number at the scene of a murder (or mass murder). It depresses me on a daily basis that people like Holder never end up in jail over crap like this.
@Fish Out of Water- I wish like hell that Trump had used some of his time to run old footage of Schumer talking about the immediate need to stop illegal immigration...then leave Chuckie stammering when it was his turn to respond on live TV.
And you're quite right about the reality behind the Dems wanting to flood our nation with illegals, but it's likely not a point which would sway many voters because the MSM will dismiss this obvious truth as falsehood and hate speech.
@Fred Ciampi- I always hold my breath a little when Trump starts to speak, but he did a fine job on this one (except for very weird and distracting breathing and a strange one-eyed squint). He stuck to the point, sounded reasonable, and laid out a solid case.
Estimates vary, but let's say there are 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Tracking them with drones? That's a lot of drones. Then we would need a second string of drones to take over while the first line of drones got their batteries charged. We would also need drone battery charging stations located all over the country and guard drones watching them in case of vandalism. We would need some more drones to track any vandals. And just suppose an illegal immigrant being watched by a drone went in a mall, how would the drone know which exit door to be watching when they came out? We would probably need drones watching every entrance and exit door of every building in the U.S.
I believe that would work. We don't need a wall.
@Jim: The northern Virginia counties need to be severed from the rest if the state and joined with the People's democratic republic of Maryland.
For comic relief what are Busty's and Lefty's thoughts on the matter?
And what about Chuck and Nancy's deep concern for the idled Federal workers and their financial situation?
Talk about the tail wagging the dog...
@Alan: Drone Plan B: Just a few well-stationed Predator drones.. inside the DC loop.
@rickn8or: voting bloc-wise, they know these furloughed workers will blame the President and vote as they historically have, democratic.
The idiots who voted these circus clowns into office are greedy welfarians who don't give a damn about the country (gee...I wonder why we have so many of them here; I thought we had immigration laws). It's one thing to be poor, yet quite another to be poor, uneducated, ignorant and---yes---stupid. We can use these terms to describe certain politicians, but when we tack them onto voters, we've got problems, Houston---serious problems....and it will get only worse.
I was going to say, "Wait until the Muslims gain office in the fed gov." Hell, they are now THERE! The Democrat Party is no longer the self-described "Party of the Poor." They have morphed into what should be termed the "Socialist Party," because that is exactly how they now operate.
I also naively thought Crazy Nancy would be kaput, but I was gravely wrong! The woman is like a virus, and for some reason, she is so powerful that she now controls the entire House. From Pelosi to Boehner to Ryan, and now back to Pelosi: the woman who blithely waved aside the vulgar statement by Rashida Tlaib. Had the source of the same term been a Republican, all hell would have broken loose in the lib media.
Please don't forget the billions will go into OUR ECONOMY..our fabricators, our contractors & laborers, our surveillance technicians, etc. WIN/WIN all around.
Don't know that the shut down will get the dems to do even remotely the right thing. I don't believe it is possible for Nancy P. Lousy and Chuck the Schmuck to be anything but pure evil.
I didn't watch his speech. Right now I cannot bring myself to switch on the tube for any reason. If I want to get lied to, I'll call people who owe me money and ask when I'm getting paid. No, I'm not insinuating President Trump would lie, it seems every other person on the networks does it with every word. especially when they speak Of the President, his staff, family and friends.
An odd thing happened this AM. One of the news feeds I check had a Twitchy video of Chuckie and Nan watching themselves deliver their humorless rebuttal. I couldn't get it to play, and now I find it has disappeared. Government controlling the internet alrready?
Drone with armor on them. That's the ticket.
It's nice to see Democrats suddenly concerned about expensive and inefficient government expenditures, which pretty much describes the $10-trillion spent during the Obama era. Perhaps if Trump had called the wall "shovel ready" it might have gone over better.
Before the ascension of Obama and Hillary, a sleazy trial lawyer named John Edwards was vying for the White House with his "Two Americas" theme. Of course, the "Two Americas" were supposedly "the evil rich" and "the sainted poor". (Of which, Mr. Edwards was clearly and unapologetically a member of the upper 1% of the former) I concurred that there was "two Americas", except they really were not the traditional Democratic "rich vs the poor", but was, in fact, the beneficiaries of government largesse versus those who were to be the victims of it. The beneficiaries are:
The political class.
Well-connected crony capitalists.
Rent-seekers. (Lawyers, middlemen, accountants)
The welfare industry.
Government employees.
The losers are:
Those who will always pay much more in taxes than they'll ever consume in benefits.
The non-networked with the political class.
And, the middle class.
Which brings me to current events. Just who are the victims of today's state of affairs? Certainly, the poor and middle class bear the brunt of most of the undesirable aspects of illegal immigration. But who is bearing the brunt of the government shutdown? Largely people who are getting an unscheduled paid vacation? People who didn't have a care in the world a decade ago while everyone else in the private economy were facing pay & benefit cuts, assuming that they got to keep their job in the first place?
The latter is how this is playing out in Trump country. The Democrats sobbing is not playing well.
The prog talking point that there is no "crisis", it's all manufactured and suddenly appeared with the election of DJT is laughable horseshit. This has been going on since the mid-1960s, when it was initiated by the Lyin' of the Senate (Mary Jo Kopechne was not available for comment). Unfortunately Reagan was fooled by the bait and switch in the 1980's. It's way past time for this NATIONAL SECURITY emergency to be addressed with seriousness and haste.
I am also so very sick of all commentators, even on the right, stressing that 99% of the migrants are ONLY looking to improve their lots in life. Fine, come through the front door into the most immigrant-friendly nation in the whole freaking world. Otherwise stay home. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity. Douche.
@TrickyRicky
"Sean Hannity. Douche"
Touche!
I can't even stand looking at him for the few seconds he appears at the end of Tucker's show.
Government shutdown? WHAT government shutdown? I would never have known, unless it had been on the news each day.
It was patently obvious that Chancy (or is it NanChuck?) were only interested in the government shutdown, not border security. Those poor poor people who will be paid retroactively for their unexpected vacation must be top priority, even if they are deemed non-essential. Here's a thought. Since they are going to be paid anyway and we all know it, why not make them work during the shutdown? Well, can't have that because it makes sense.
"I've got to go tend to my chickens. It is so windy here today that one of them laid the same egg four times......."
Great line! We had winds in the 50s and 60s last week and again yesterday. It does get a bit tiresome. But I do little things like pruning the trees, so ours don't uproot and fall over - unlike some of our neighbors. Guy next door lost two of his, yesterday.
That hundred billion spent once the illegals get in is good for hiring all the "helping professionals" and NGOs to care for the poor downtrodden illegal aliens. And given that those "helping" folks are normally libs/hippies/commies, they represent the voting base of the Democrat party.
And that's not mentioning all the contract overhead, management fees, etc., also presided over by the l/h/c folks. There's a lot of good money to be made selling the NGOs to ply their trade (apologies to country joe and the fish).
We need to stop paying for relocation services, etc. I'm Catholic but it steams me that Catholic charities get fat from government contracts to take care of the illegals. Kinda. Other religions do the same thing and profit in the same way. Stop that racket right now.
There ain't no horse that never been rode and ain't no cowboy what never been throwed. But barriers have multiple purposes. Of course there's the obvious "don't come in here" hint, but it also helps to canalize the invasion horde into more manageable areas. Plus, with proper intrusion devices, the time it takes to tunnel under should allow for someone to come to that place to apprehend. I just looked at Joint Publication 3-15 (a DoD thing) and it had a lot of interesting stuff (plus much superfluous stuff). There used to be a Surveillance, Targeting and Night Observation FM, but I can't find my copy. STANO and barriers are a good fit.
Using drones/electronic surveillance of an unobstructed border is just a recipe for getting suckered by feints while the real smuggling goes on down the road. Gotta canalize them. Of course, if you're talking about drones with Hellfire missiles, that's a different thing.
I believe that Rosenstein has a job waiting for him - with Mueller. Now, I am not sure that Barr's pick for AG with change anything. If anything can be done, it is up to the acting AG to get it done.
On the continuing wall soap opera, it is over as far as the President is concerned and now to the back up plan. Here, he will build with the Nation Emergency act and leave the shutdown in place, continuing to veto anything that comes to his desk. Again, count this collateral damage as democrat hypocrisy.
@ James-et.al: Given the President walking out on yesterday's meeting with the democrats, I see this scenario.
The continued shutdown gives the President cause to invoke a national emergency to get the funds he needs to start building the wall and reopen the government. This triggers the rabid/deranged, one-trick pony democrats in the House and forces Pelosi to move towards impeachment, which given their numbers, passes. The move to convict fails in the Senate, as the Republicans control it. A year later the President is re-elected and the democrats are buried in the 2020 election.
@Shelly: I like "chancy". That's great. It kinda says what our nation is under by electing such as these.
Speaking of the Shutdown:
Do note the absence of "Barrycades" this time around; deliberate (and ironically expensive acts by people who were theoretically de-funded) attempts to disrupt and inconvenience the lives of as many people as possible. It's an excellent example of the difference in attitude towards the public between Trump and the previous administration. Obama and the Democrats wanted to make sure that as an typical citizen you knew you were being punished for the Republican's insolence.
Not that you can't find examples of the deep-state "resistance" if you look hard enough for them. For example, this morning while doing some casual reading on one of my favorite topics, "climate change", I came across an example of the bureaucracy sticking its middle finger out for no legitimate reason, because apparently due to the shutdown electronics do not flow normally through NOAA servers to deliver the data normally dispensed, but are apparently capable of dispensing messages letting you know that they aren't going to work for you.
Just more proof, btw, that government-sponsored "climate change" research and data is manufactured, controlled and dispensed by people more interested in politics than in actual scientific research and advancement.
I'd like it if President Trump, when speaking with Chancy or with a press gaggle, would comment that he's got a pen and a phone.
Might be fun for him to say, also, "and for those with questionable household staff, even if you like your illegal alien you can't keep your illegal alien."
I've heard a lot of "A wall won't work" being said, but absolutely nothing about why that might be the case.
Even if there are gaps, these will become the only points of access, and BP can concentrate there.
@Alan: You're kidding, right? Drones aren't and wouldn't be used to track all 11 to 20 million illegal immigrants here. They are and would be used to patrol the border area and report incursions to border and immigration authorities who then can be dispatched to apprehend those coming over the border illegally. More barriers makes their job easier.
Further, the kind of surveillance you describe would be much more useful for tracking political enemies, unfriendly journalists and Russian agents provocateurs. Float your idea to the next Democrat-appointed AG and his/her Justice Dept. They might buy in.
Did I not read somewhere that the US Gov't confiscated more than 130 Billion dollars from Noriega and his drug running. If this is true then why is not that money being used to build a wall...with enough for Gun Towers at given intervals......Just Ask'in
Motor 2
Where's our favorite busty girl! Huh Stilton? Huh?...
Might be better to gove them to DC and construct a boatload of section eight housing for the illegals.
I sort of like those explosive collars, like they used on the Running Man...
All these wall arguments, that it isn't going to be closing the passage so tight that no-one ever can make it in over, under, through or around it, and thus it is wasted and might as well not bother but use surveillance instead. This is the solution for the wrong problem. Consider this in terms of a balance of energy, time, and expense, collectively named as effort, instead.
The purpose of the wall is to increase the amount of effort required for successful breach, for those attempting to enter, while reducing the amount of required effort for those guarding the other side.
That's all it can do, and all it needs to do. Like your front door, it keeps stray animals and curious bypassers out when closed; it additionally keeps the more lazy grades of burglars out when locked, but it is not reasonable to expect it to keep anyone with a bulldozer from breaking and entering.
Since we can expect a 1/N-like distribution of the number of attempts for some level of effort, with the least effort being the most commonly occurring, it then follows that by thwarting all the low-effort attempts (i.e. intruders walking across a marked line on the ground) we will be left with the much lower number of higher-effort attempts, such as digging under, climbing up and over, or attempting to break through. These activities require time and energy -- which time will help the defense side with discovering and stopping these attempts.
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