Michael1942's Blog

More on the wall. MA
Jamil Smith, U.S. Rolling Stone 3 hours ago

The border wall is Trump University. It’s Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka, too. It’s the futile promise of a fruitful career in the Trump Organization if you’ve earned his favor on a game show, or the assurance of fortunes once you buy that book that he didn’t write and likely never read himself. The wall is a con. And like practically everything else at the foundation of his empire, Trump always lied about who was going to pay for it.
Those of us intimately familiar with the structures already built inside our borders to oppress brown and black people knew that it didn’t matter whether or not the wall was a “metaphor,” as Lindsey Graham put it last Sunday.
Jerry Falwell, Jr., the Liberty University president, told the Washington Post this week that there is nothing Trump could do to endanger his support from the evangelical community and that “I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.” I presume “anything” includes a partial government shutdown over a border wall that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for but alas, there was no follow-up.
The sycophancy of supporters like Falwell, Jr., is why Trump never needed to try this hard to get the wall built. He may not have needed to even attempt to follow through on it. Were he wiser, he would have continued to use the wall as a political McGuffin: the unobtainable, unknowable object that he continued to dangle in front of his supporters until he won his second term. Now, as Democrats take over the House of Representatives today, Trump is behaving as though he lacks bladder control. Inadvertently, he has handed Democrats a unique opportunity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but preventing the construction of Trump’s border wall is a chance to defeat an actual, literal example of structural racism.
Democrats need to both defeat the wall and use this as a teachable moment for the country. Other forms of institutional bigotry are much less obvious, and therefore more easily ignored or equivocated. Betsy DeVos reversed the Obama guidance aimed at reducing racial disparities in school discipline, for one. Right before Christmas, we learned that Ben Carson has been pulling back Housing and Urban Development investigations into systemic patterns of segregation, choosing instead a more regressive path: focusing on individual cases brought to the department’s attention. On Thursday, the Post reported that a more sweeping rollback of “disparate impact” regulations is under consideration. A border wall, even a mythical one, is easier than housing discrimination for some Americans to envision.
Despite his astonishing 89 percent approval rating among Republicans, it is to Trump’s disadvantage for him to make the wall a wedge issue. For one, the partial shutdown is currently showcasing, and not in a good way, how essential government is to our lives. Native tribes surely care more about their roads being paved by government workers so that they can eat and get health care. Those 800,000 or so federal workers must understand that their rent and bills are jeopardized solely because Trump wants to signify to bigots yet again that “No, really, I’m with you.” (Perhaps he needed to reboot his credibility with the racists after signing the FIRST STEP Act and getting too much credit for “overhauling” the criminal justice system.) The folks coming to Washington on their class trips have found museums closed and uncollected garbage overflowing from the cans in the National Mall. Yosemite’s roadsides reek of the urine from reckless visitors. Images from the shutdown have offered a gross analogy for a nation under Trump: this is America without adult supervision.
Democrats depend on an America that considers government to be important, and their voters strongly prefer it not to be racist. The wall is structural racism manifest, not “border security.” Consider that argument, not some heady stuff about whether it can actually exist along the nearly 2,000 miles of border line. Democrats have the power to keep Trump and the Republicans from having the wall, and that should be the end of it. Politically, this is hunting in the zoo: tell Trump, “Hey, how about $0.00 for your wall,” and wait him out. I don’t think that it will take all that long to get the government working again.
Even conservative commentator Ann Coulter, a consistent advocate of the wall, believes that Trump will fold on this issue. What happens next is the question. “If he doesn’t build the wall, the next president will be a Democrat,” she said during a Wednesday radio interview. I’m not so fatalistic. If Trump caves, I doubt too many Democratic challengers bring up the wall as a failed promise in 2020. And if dropping his ransom demand ends the shutdown, the effect may be like the changing of a channel once the credits begin to roll. Given the attention span that folks seem to have, it all might depend upon whom he fires the next day. Or which country he fires upon.

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Over the past 2 years of his Residency TOTUS has name called and blasted his “perceived” enemies with epithets and schoolboy type names. Unfortunately or fortunately  in my opinion the old school yard  retort applies here. The retorts goes as follows: “I’m rubber, you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you”. TOTUS has called folks “showboat’ s”, Crazy Joe,Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown,Crooked Hillary,Lying James Comey,Liddle’ Bob Corker,Little Marco, Low-IQ Maxine Waters and finally but not the end of the list, Crazy Bernie. There are parts or all of these sobriquets that apply to TOTUS but unfortunately shortsighted people can offer only immediate reactions without understanding  the long range effects of their actions. TOTUS is accustomed to his words creating immediate action no matter the consequences. Recent mess ‘The wall”. After several bipartisan proposals for border security TOTUS is still carping about a wall without understanding the entire project which includes active surveillance (which has been effective) current natural barriers, more border personnel and adding to existing effective existing barriers (fencing up to 30 feet high). TOTUS is in campaign mode and will probably continue by tweeting no matter what. Solution- vote for better Government.

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Would it have been cheaper to hire contractors since the Military personnel are unarmed while stringing razor wire. Would it have created some job even temporarily? MA
By Paul Sonne
November 3
The total price of President Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above $200 million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to analyst estimates and Pentagon figures.
The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end.
Although the costs of the border deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716 billion annual defense budget, they arrive as the Trump administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures. The White House recently ordered the Pentagon to slash next year’s budget for the military by about $33 billion in response to the largest increase in the federal deficit in six years.
Veterans and Democratic lawmakers have complained that Trump is wasting military dollars in a politically motivated stunt ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, at a time when the Pentagon budget is under pressure.
“Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to make comprehensive, common-sense, and humane reforms to our immigration system, the President continues to turn to politically motivated fear mongering and uses [Department of Defense] resources and personnel as a means to drive his troubling anti-immigration agenda,” more than 100 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Nov. 1.
Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the deployment as “wasteful” in a message on Twitter and said Marines and soldiers were already overstretched.
Administration officials have defended the deployment. Mattis said this week that the military doesn’t do stunts. The commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, argued that the deployment is necessary to “effectively and safely” handle the possible arrival of as many as 7,000 migrants walking toward the border in caravans from Central America.
But military planning documents, dated Oct. 27 and published by Newsweek, predicted that only 20 percent of the migrants, or about 1,400 at the higher end of estimates, were likely to complete the journey to the border, raising questions about the size of the deployment.
“The military has a lot of things that it needs to be doing these days,” said Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Looking at estimates of the size of the caravan, you could ask the question as to whether this is the most appropriate use of U.S. active-duty forces.”
It isn’t clear how many U.S. troops will end up on the U.S.-Mexico border.
About 2,000 forces from the National Guard are already there, operating under an order Trump issued in April. Northern Command has said more than 7,000 additional active-duty troops will join them in Arizona, Texas and California. Trump said this week that he will be deploying between 10,000 and 15,000 troops but didn’t make clear whether those figures included the National Guard.
The cost of the National Guard deployment from April 10 through Sept. 30 amounted to $103 million, according to Pentagon figures. The Defense Department expects the Guard deployment to cost an additional $308 million through the end of next September, including the last quarter of 2018, as long as the operations continue apace.
Active-duty forces, which Trump deployed under his recent order, generally are less expensive because they don’t require additional pay or benefits.
Travis Sharp, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments, estimated that the cost of deploying 8,000 active-duty troops through mid-December in addition to the Guard would amount to $40 million to $50 million. Should the administration deploy 15,000 active-duty troops, as Trump suggested, the estimated cost would rise to as much as $110 million, Sharp said.
The forces could end up staying past mid-December, depending on the status of the caravans, which by most accounts are still weeks away from the border. An extension of the deployment could result in costs in excess of those estimates.
As of Saturday morning, about 3,500 active-duty service members have been deployed as a part of the mission, dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot, said Maj. Mark Lazane, a Northern Command spokesman. They include about 2,250 in Texas, 1,100 in California and 170 in Arizona, he said.
Lazane said soldiers who do not typically use firearms in their day-to-day jobs while stateside will continue to work without them, though Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the chief of Northern Command, has the authority to change that if desired.
Democrats have complained that in addition to paying for the border deployments, the Defense Department internally allocated $7.5 million to advanced planning for a 37-mile barrier along the side of a military bombing range in Arizona that abuts the border. Democratic lawmakers said the barrier alone could cost as much as $450 million.
Mattis offered a safety justification for the barrier in testimony to Congress earlier this year, suggesting that any migrants crossing the border through the range could end up hurt. Critics have said the project amounts to a move by the president to build part of the border wall he promised on the campaign trail by tapping military resources.
Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan said last week that the White House had instructed the Pentagon to prepare a $700 billion budget for 2020 — about 4.5 percent less than the $733 billion the department had planned.
Thomas Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said many of the units deploying to the border are fulfilling duties approximate to their wartime missions and could end up with good training from the field. He said the expenditure would be marginal in terms of the overall American defense budget.
“The military needs every dollar it can get. Having said that, this is not in the scheme of things a huge thing,” Spoehr said. “It probably will pass almost unnoticed in terms of the budget.”
Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.

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