Thinking, about this headline. Thinking, I agree. Thinking, that one, one of the key issues for my distaste of Trump, may very well have been his association with the Right side of government, and it’s ideology. In this regard, the question to all of us left of center and beyond, is how we’d have been, would be, with a left sided Trump? I know my answer. What’s yours?
Thing is, Trump’s problem, mostly, is that he’s… hmmm… an imbecile.
For me, being politically incorrect is generally more of a good thing, than bad. For that, Trump gets decent marks. The country, humanity even, deserves, needs, a departure from the old line boilerplate politician that essentially took over this country after the WWII.
This isn’t the place for that longish essay. It’s just a shortcut sentence to my point, and this article below.
Again, the issue with Trump… he’s an imbecile. We don’t need that.
Heading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll has a warning for Democrats: Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.
Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.
It certainly is true that Brexit, and the relationship with the EU is complicated. But, the reasons why this leave/don’t leave conflict has become a two year long fiasco mess that it is today, is not as complicated.
The general public, the voting masses of citizens, the vast electorate, the rank and file, the mainstream who hold ordinary jobs, many who struggle to provide, survive, and most importantly, do not own a life of politics, all too often fail to study a societal problem to the depths it requires.
Ignorance, naïveté, laziness, misguided trust, or, even given proper analysis, just flawed reasoning, all fill the bucket of excuses that explains these events.
Combine these habitual very human shortfalls with millions of impassioned, clashing opinions, and you get a vortex of downward spiraling conflicts that drags everything into it.
Politicians, government legislators, for all their flaws, their corruption, their weaknesses, their lies, and their greed, are genuinely driven, dedicated individuals, who have a very specific job to do. Research, study, and analyze a problem or situation, and form an informed opinion of action to address that situation or problem. Whether their ultimate position serves them, or their constituents selfishly, or with a measure of greater good thinking, is besides the point.
The definition, or outcome, of right or wrong is not relevant. The point is, there was a very specific, step by step process that is undertaken to help make a decision, take a stand, or propose a solution to the situation or problem.
In the UK, as in the U.S., and increasingly, around the world, the citizenry aggregate, is unwilling, uncommitted, to put the same work into understanding and executing this same process before they present their own opinions.
Until this changes, there will be more crisis and havoc before there is resolution and stability.
MB
Theresa May Survives Leadership Challenge, but Brexit Plan Is Still in Peril
Two and a half years after Britain’s referendum on whether to leave the European Union, the country remains divided. We met with voters on both sides of the debate — those who voted to leave and now feel betrayed, and those campaigning for a second referendum
By Stephen Castle, NYTimes
LONDON — Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, survived the gravest threat yet to her embattled leadership on Wednesday, winning a party confidence vote and averting a leadership battle that threatened to plunge the country into prolonged crisis.
But the victory celebration, if any, is likely to be short-lived.
While Mrs. May survived to fight another day, the future of her stalled plan to leave the European Union looked bleaker than ever.
She still lacks the votes in Parliament to pass it. She stands little chance of winning the concessions from Europe that she needs to break the logjam.
And the surprisingly strong vote against her within her own party underscores the difficulty she faces in winning approval for any plan for Britain to leave Europe, or Brexit, as the deadline for withdrawal looms.
For one moment, however, after a week of humiliating setbacks, the prime minister could savor her win.
Prime Minister Theresa May outside 10 Downing Street after she survived a confidence vote on Wednesday.
“Here is our renewed mission,” she said outside her offices at 10 Downing Street after the vote on Wednesday. “Delivering the Brexit that people voted for, bringing the country back together and building a country that truly works for everyone.”
But even that moment was tempered by loss.
Mrs. May won the vote only after promising that she would step aside soon after the Brexit agonies were over, according to reports from a meeting of Conservative Party lawmakers preceding the vote. That pledge removed the generally unwelcome possibility that she would stand as party leader in the next general election.
Mrs. May, said George Freeman, a Conservative lawmaker, had made clear “that she has listened, heard and respects the will of the party that once she has delivered an orderly Brexit, she will step aside for the election of a new leader.”
In the vote on Wednesday, on a confidence motion called by her own Conservative Party, Mrs. May won the support of 200 Conservative lawmakers, while 117 voted against her. The protest vote exceeded many forecasts, and is expected to compound her difficulties in Parliament, where her enemies were already pressuring her.
“This was a terrible result for the prime minister,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leader of the hard-line pro-Brexit faction.
The vote does give her some breathing room. Under the Conservative Party’s rules, she cannot be challenged again by her own lawmakers for another year, which at least offers some stability for moving the Brexit plan forward. Had she lost, the Conservatives would have been thrust into a divisive, drawn-out process that would have stretched well into the next month.
Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 committee, the body that represents Conservative backbenchers, announcing that Theresa May survived the confidence vote.
The delay would have threatened the country’s ability to reach a deal by the March deadline, potentially resulting in the messy prospect of a no-deal Brexit.
Nevertheless the victory came at a price, laying bare the opposition within her own party ranks to Mrs. May, who leads a government that has no parliamentary majority.
The confidence vote was called after weeks of discord when at least 48 Conservative lawmakers submitted the letters of protest required to force it. Mrs. May canceled a trip to Dublin where she had hoped to talk to her Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, about changes that might help build support in the British Parliament for her Brexit proposals.
But it had already been clear that she was in deep political trouble, battered from multiple directions by her management of the European Union withdrawal. In particular, many hard-line Brexit supporters within her party believed she was not making a complete enough break with the bloc.
In recent days, she suffered two embarrassing setbacks. Last week, the House of Commons voted her government in contempt of Parliament — the first time any prime minister had been censured in that way — for failing to release the advice her government’s lawyers had given on Brexit.
And on Monday, she postponed a vote on the Brexit agreement she had negotiated with the European Union, acknowledging that it stood to be defeated by “a significant margin.” In fact, lawmakers say, views on the topic, which has dominated British politics for nearly three years, are so fragmented that no approach has majority support in Parliament, and probably not even among Conservatives.
May’s Brexit Deal Is Probably Still Going to Fail. What Happens Then?
Nobody knows, really. But these are the likeliest scenarios.
Mrs. May argued Wednesday morning that the only beneficiaries of a vote of no confidence would be the opposition Labour Party.
Having survived it, she now faces an uphill task to garner sufficient support for her withdrawal agreement with the European Union, a lengthy legal document that Brussels has warned is the only deal on the table.
John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institute, said that the size of the vote against her “is an even clearer signal that she won’t be able to get her deal through Parliament, and makes it even more likely that when she puts the deal to the vote she will lose that.”
On Thursday she is scheduled to travel to Brussels to meet leaders of the 27 other European Union countries to try to secure some reassurances that might help her win a vote on the Brexit plans. She has promised to allow lawmakers to decide the matter by Jan. 21. If there is no agreement then, Britain could be facing a chaotic departure on March 29.
Or not. There could be a second referendum, a mutually agreed extension of the negotiating period or even, as Mrs. May has warned her party, no Brexit at all. What does not seem to be in the cards, for now, at least, is the general election that the opposition Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been angling for throughout the Brexit process.
While Mrs. May has maintained a public face of optimism over securing some pledges from the European Union intended to reassure her own lawmakers, she is unlikely to win any game-changing concessions.
Mrs. May in the House of Commons on Wednesday
Her strategy appears to be to delay the critical vote — now probably in the middle of January — and to hope that the growing risk of a disorderly departure brings some lawmakers back into line. But many doubt that will work.
“Clearly, her last throw of the dice is count down the clock and try to bounce people into voting for it,” Mr. Springford said. “But I am not convinced she will win that vote. I don’t think that she can get meaningful concessions from the European Union that would be enough to get her over the line.
“The best hope is that everybody calms down over Christmas, that they start to really worry about no deal, and that some more moderate people signal that they will support her. But everyone is now so high up their pole that I am not sure they can climb down.”
In Brussels, diplomats said they could see little benefit from Mrs. May’s travails, and that no new British leader would be able to change the fundamentals of the 585-page divorce agreement negotiated so painfully.
That applies to the so-called backstop that the pro-Brexit lawmakers are particularly incensed about. That provision would insure the free movement of goods over the Irish border in the event that a free-trade agreement is not reached in the two-year transition period after Brexit. What is especially galling for the Brexiteers is that it would continue indefinitely, or until the European Union decides it is no longer needed.
The main fear is that there is no majority in Parliament for any kind of Brexit deal, one diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity according to diplomatic protocol.
“Even the funny elements of this are actually tragic,” said another diplomat. “I still hope Beckett, Kafka and Havel are not those who will finish writing this piece.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Brussels.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants.
Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands regulation at a moment when Mr. Trump has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “crystal-clean water.” The proposed new rule would chip away at safeguards put in place a quarter century ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who implemented a policy designed to ensure that no wetlands lost federal protection.
“They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,” said Blan Holman, who works on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat.
President Trump, who made a pledge of weakening a 2015 Obama-era rule one of his central campaign pledges, is expected to tout his plan as ending a federal land grab that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their property as they see fit.
Under the Obama rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and planting certain crops, and would have been required to apply for permits from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into those water bodies. Under the new Trump plan, which lifts federal protections from many of those streams and wetlands, those requirements will also be lifted.
A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, John Konkus, declined to comment on the plan.
The clean water rollback is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to weaken or undo major environmental rules, including proposals to weaken regulations on planet-warming emissions from cars, power plants and oil and gas drilling rigs, a series of moves designed to speed new drilling in the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and efforts to weaken protections under the Endangered Species Act. This week in Katowice, Poland, at an annual United Nations conference on mitigating global warming, Trump administration officials held an event touting the benefits of fossil fuels.
The proposed water rule, scheduled to be announced Tuesday morning at the Environmental Protection Agency, is designed to replace an Obama-era regulation known as Waters of the United States. Tuesday’s unveiling of the proposal is expected to coincide with its publication in the federal register. After that, the administration will take comment on the plan for 60 days, and it could then revise the plan before finalizing it next year.
The Obama rule, developed jointly by the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about a third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as tributaries, streams and wetlands.
But it became a target for rural landowners, an important part of President Trump’s political base, since it could have restricted how much pollution from chemical fertilizers and pesticides could seep into water on their property.
The new Trump water rule will retain federal protections for those larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them, and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water, according to a detailed eight-page fact sheet prepared by the administration ahead of the unveiling of the rule and reviewed by The New York Times.
But it will strip away protections of so-called “ephemeral” streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water, or connected to such bodies of water by a surface channel of water. Those changes represent a victory for farmers and rural landowners, who lobbied the Trump administration aggressively to make them.
“The Obama administration led with the premise that all water is connected, all water runs downhill, and the federal government could control all water,” said Don Parrish, director of regulatory relations with the American Farm Bureau Federation, who met with White House officials over the summer to press the case for those changes.
“If they can control the water that falls out of the sky, they control the land that it falls on,” he said.
Mr. Parrish also said the Obama rule chafed its detractors because of the perception it was written by bureaucrats who did not understand the daily reality of farmers’ livelihoods. “The last administration called our concerns silly and ludicrous, and this administration took us seriously. They listened to us,” he said.
In particular, he cited a social media campaign run by the Obama administration, “Ditch the myth,” which challenged the claim that the rule would have regulated water in ditches. “With that campaign, they were laughing at us,” he said.
Mr. Trump won cheers from rural audiences on the presidential campaign trail when he vowed to roll back the Obama rule. Real estate developers and golf course owners (industries in which Mr. Trump worked for decades) were also among the chief opponents of the earlier rule. One of Mr. Trump’s first actions in office was to sign an executive order directing his E.P.A. chief to repeal and replace the rule.
To environmentalists, however, the proposed rule change “upends the core mission of the E.P.A., which is to protect human health and the environment,” said Bart Johnsen-Harris, who works on water policy at the Environment America, an advocacy group.
While the Obama rule would have applied federal protections to wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water, or do not directly drain into them via a surface water channel, the new rule will strip away that protection. That potentially opens millions of acres of pristine wetlands to more pollution, according to Mr. Holman of the Southern Environmental Law Center.
“For wetlands, this is an absolute disaster, compared to the Obama plan,” he said. While such wetlands may not be physically next to major bodies of water, they can still drain into such larger bodies through underground networks, Mr. Holman said.
Stripping away those protections would still allow pollution to seep into the nation’s broader waterways, he said. It would also make it easier for developers to pave over such wetlands.
Federal courts had already halted the implementation of the 2015 Obama-era rules in 28 states after opponents sued to block them. However, in recent months the rules had taken effect in the other 22 states.
The wetland protection policies put in place decades ago by the first President Bush, an avid fisherman, followed on his own campaign pledge to save wetlands, saying, “all wetlands, no matter how small, should be preserved,” and proposing a “no net loss” policy. That initial policy was later weakened by Mr. Bush’s own E.P.A., but environmentalists have credited him for elevating the issue.
Fifteen years later, the second President Bush gave regulatory teeth to his father’s proposal, implementing an E.P.A. rule requiring stronger wetlands protection that his father had once envisioned.
This is a complicated situation that warrants intense scrutiny. Not only for the sanctions violations, but increasingly, the security issues. Technology is (about to be) everything in today’s world economies, political an social structures. In other words, everything about everything. Whether it’s this situation with China, or others with Russia, or the U.S., the way this cookie crumbles will foretell things to come. Do I have confidence this administration will get ahead of it, intelligently, responsibly, and make the right moves to protect what’s left to protect? Ask me something else.
It is one of China’s proudest corporate success stories, a colossus in cutting-edge technology that elbowed out Western rivals to become the biggest supplier of the hardware that connects our modern world.
Now, all around the globe, the walls are going up for Huawei.
The United States, which for years has considered the Chinese telecommunications giant a security threat, aimed a straight shot at the company’s leadership when it secured the arrest, in Canada, of Huawei’s chief financial officer.
But lately, Huawei’s setbacks have come on multiple fronts, from New Zealand and Australia to Britain and Canada. China sees the company as a pivotal driver of its ambitions for global technological leadership. Increasingly, much of the rest of the world sees it as a potential conduit for espionage and sabotage.
Huawei said Thursday that it was not aware of any wrongdoing by its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is a daughter of the company’s founder, and that it complied with the law wherever it operated. The company has long denied that it spies on behalf of Beijing.
For many years, the fog of distrust surrounding Huawei was a problem largely confined to the United States. Large American mobile carriers such as AT&T have avoided using Huawei’s equipment in their networks ever since a 2012 congressional report highlighted the security risks.
In response, Huawei focused its business efforts elsewhere. Its success in wealthy places such as Europe has helped it become the planet’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, as well as its No. 2 smartphone brand. Of the more than $90 billion in revenue it earned last year, more than a quarter came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Now, a wider patch of the world appears to be siding with Washington against Chinese technology. A turn en masse against the company, led by governments in many of its most important markets, would have grave implications for its business.
Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and a daughter of its founder, was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States.
Australia barred Huawei this year from supplying technology for the country’s fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile networks. New Zealand last week blocked one of its leading mobile carriers from buying Huawei’s 5G gear. Britain’s intelligence chief, in a rare public appearance this week, said that the country had a difficult decision to make on whether to allow Huawei to build its 5G infrastructure.
And Canada’s top spy echoed those concerns, without naming Huawei or China, in a speech on Tuesday. Huawei has tested 5G equipment with major mobile carriers in both Canada and Britain.
Behind the tariff fight that has engulfed Washington and Beijing lies a deeper contest for leadership in future technologies such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence and 5G mobile internet. For many people in China, the contest feels not merely commercial, but civilizational. At stake is the country’s ability to claim its rightful place as a superpower.
“The Chinese government and Chinese companies must face these new circumstances, take up new countermeasures and get through this stage of crisis,” Fang Xingdong, the founder of ChinaLabs, a technology think tank in Beijing, said on Thursday. “This is a necessary rite of passage for China’s global technological rise.”
Huawei has tried to avoid being pulled into this fight. In an internal memo from January that was reviewed by The New York Times, Ren Zhengfei, the company’s founder, outlined a strategy for navigating these uncertain times.
The key, he wrote: Keep adapting. But do so quietly.
“Sometimes, it’s better to find a safe place and wait for stormy weather to pass,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Europe was one such place, Mr. Ren said. Huawei has cultivated political friendships and invested heavily in places like Britain. “Eventually, through years of effort, our goal is for Europeans to perceive Huawei as a European company,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Canada seemed to be another safe harbor. “The Canadian government is very sensible and open, giving us enormous confidence in our investments in this country,” Mr. Ren wrote.
This was all before Washington nearly put out of business Huawei’s main Chinese rival, ZTE.
In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from using components made in the United States after saying the company had failed to punish employees who violated American sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The move was effectively a death sentence because ZTE relied heavily on American microchips and other technology.
When the Commerce Department first announced its findings against ZTE in 2016, it released an internal ZTE document illustrating best practices for evading American sanctions.
In describing the approach, the document cited a company it nicknamed F7 as a model for how to pull it off. The description of F7 in the document matched Huawei.
A few months later, the Commerce Department subpoenaed Huawei and requested all information about its export or re-export of American technology to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by The Times.
The inquiry widened this year when the Treasury and Commerce Departments asked the Justice Department to investigate Huawei for possible sanctions violations. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York took on the case.
Eventually, the Trump administration decided to ease its punishment of ZTE, in an effort to cool tensions with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of a historic North Korea meeting. But the power that Washington wielded over the fates of Chinese tech companies had been made very clear to people on both sides of the Pacific. In October, the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Fujian Jinhua, a state-backed semiconductor company that has been accused of stealing American chip designs.
Should Huawei be subjected to a ban on using American technology, the consequences would be significant, though perhaps not as life-threatening as they were for ZTE.
One crucial difference is that Huawei, unlike ZTE, does not depend extensively on outside vendors such as Qualcomm for the main chips in its smartphones. Around two-thirds of the handsets that Huawei sells contain chips made in-house, said Sean Kao, a hardware analyst at the research firm IDC.
Still, American firms supply other kinds of chips in Huawei’s gear as well as optical equipment for its fiber cable networks and other specialized parts.
“I don’t know exactly how many suppliers are affected,” said Stéphane Téral, senior research director at the data provider IHS Markit. But one thing is certain, he said: “They won’t be easily substitutable.”
On Twitter over the weekend, the television writer Bryan Behar did something unconscionable.
He praised George H.W. Bush.
The former president had just died. In Behar’s view, it was a moment to recognize any merit in the man and his legacy.
Many of his followers disagreed. They depended on Behar for righteous liberal passion, which left no room for such Bush-flattering adjectives and phrases as “good,” “decent” and “a life of dignity.” How dare Behar lavish them on a man who leaned on the despicable Willie Horton ad, who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, who did too little in the face of AIDS, whose privilege often blinded him to need.
They lashed out at Behar. They unfollowed him. And they demonstrated the transcendent curse of these tribal times: Americans’ diminishing ability to hold two thoughts at once.
Bush has indelible stains on his record. He also has points of light. At times he failed the responsibilities of leadership. At times he did right by them. He showed folly and he showed wisdom, cowardice and courage, aloofness and kindness.
Accentuating the positive, especially in the hours after his death, didn’t eliminate the negative.
Behar said as much in that tweet, beginning it by alluding to disagreements with Bush’s agenda. No matter. The blowback came anyway, and he felt compelled, in a subsequent tweet, to explain, elaborate, justify.
“I’m not endorsing Bush’s AIDS policies,” he wrote. Nor, he added, was he expunging Willie Horton. “I found both to be repugnant. Nevertheless I sensed a fundamental goodness in his post-presidential life & wish his family compassion.”
And in another tweet: “I can’t believe the number of followers I’ve lost tonight for benignly expressing sorrow about President Bush’s passing. Apparently, to them, I failed some ultraprogressive litmus test.”
Should it be this hard? This tortured? I don’t know Behar or follow him on Twitter, but the reaction to his initial Bush tweet and his response to that became a kind of cause célèbre among some people I do know. They talked or tweeted about the whole episode as an example of how fractiously far we’ve fallen. The television commentator Nicolle Wallace, the former United States attorney Preet Bharara and Lanny Davis, the prominent Democratic lawyer who represents Michael Cohen, all publicly expressed support for Behar.
The tussle over remembrances of Bush echoed the tussles over remembrances of Senator John McCain, when detractors howled about any framing of him as a hero — McCain, who was captured and, for years, tortured by the North Vietnamese and who refused early release unless his fellow prisoners were also freed.
Yes, there were issues, grave ones, to be taken with his positions on American military intervention and with his domestic record. But there was valor galore, across decades of public service, and it’s possible, even imperative, to acknowledge and celebrate that.
That’s not to say that Bush or McCain, even in death, warrants only tributes. A mix of appreciations and censorious assessments is in order, and it’s very much arguable that the first wave of takes on Bush, including one that I wrote for The Times, tilted excessively toward the complimentary.
But too many of us tend to interpret events, political figures and issues in all-or-nothing, allies-or-enemies, black-and-white terms, blind to shades of gray.
A person can find Christine Blasey Ford credible, believe that Brett Kavanaugh lacks the temperament for the Supreme Court and also worry about a pile-on against him that laid waste to the concepts of due process and presumption of innocence. But the public battle lines were drawn in a way that left little room for that.
For that matter, a person can detest the conservative stacking of the court — and seethe over the manner in which Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland — and accept that Trump, in elevating Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, didn’t commit some treachery or abuse his office. He fulfilled campaign pledges and reminded us that elections have consequences.
A person can deplore Trump’s recklessly inflammatory characterizations of illegal immigration and treatment of migrants while acknowledging that secure borders are a legitimate concern. But that’s not an analysis I hear often on cable news.
We like our villains without redemption and our heroes without blemish, and we frequently assign those roles in overly strict alignment with our ideology. Behar’s tweets about Bush broke from that.
And some of his followers didn’t mind. He even gained new ones — proof that all isn’t lost.
But we do seem to be getting worse at complexity. At nuance. At allowing for the degree to which virtue and vice commingle in most people, including our leaders, and at understanding that it’s not a sign of softness to summon some respect for someone with a contrary viewpoint and a history of mistakes. It’s a sign of maturity. And it just might be a path back to a better place.
This article touches on a single issue regarding the erection and political effects of border walls and/fences. The issue explained highlights a valid grievance from author, , but, the way I see it, no matter what the argument is on asylum, or immigration, the deeper question at hand, is whether a country has open borders, or not. I’ve always found it uncomfortable and intimidating to contemplate the closed border concept in general. Yes, there are bad, or unstable people, who have bad intentions, no matter where they are, where they go, but controlling that element seems fairly straightforward in screening procedures. Even so, I don’t believe that percentage of bad immigrants, illegal or otherwise, comes close in proportion to the amount of home grown troublemakers and damaged people on our own soil. No system is perfect, but, given any border approach to balance risk and outcome, there are options that reflect a gesture of good will and welcome, and options that say, stay away, we really don’t want you here.
There’s No Real Difference Between Border Walls and Border Fences
By Scott Nicol
December 3, 2018 | 5:45 PM
Courtesy ACLU News
Democrats, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, are playing word games when it comes to funding Trump’s border wall. Sometime between now and Dec. 7, when the current appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security will expire, Congress needs to provide the agency with another’s year’s funds. A single word has become a sticking point for the politicians who will vote on that funding: “wall,” as in President Trump’s border wall. Read the full story>
