Big dust up in the White House yesterday. Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer discuss the border wall. Trump wants $5 billion to get to work on the wall in critical areas. He quoted statistics where the wall has cut down illegal entry. Schumer called him a liar citing the Washington Post. He suggested Pelosi wasn’t officially Speaker yet and she went ballistic. The media cut and edited the discussion and suggested Trump lost his temper. I watched the entire discussion and never saw that happen. Later, ABC Nightly News called Trump a liar when he said large sections of the wall have been completed and ABC said that’s just not true. To emphasize they showed a section of barbed wire. This is from ABC News two years ago.
President Donald Trump‘s longtime campaign promise of building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border could be one step closer to fruition after he signed an executive order Wednesday announcing a series of steps to deter “illegal immigration from Central America.”
But some 700 miles of border fencing had already been completed along the country’s nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico, much of it during Barack Obama’s presidency, as part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was signed by George W. Bush.
The type of fencing that extends from California to Texas varies according to the terrain and the population of the areas it borders, according to images released by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2011.The types of fencing includes wire mesh, chain link, post and rail, sheet piling, concrete barriers for vehicles and X-shaped steel beams for livestock.
Jose Luis Gonzalez/REUTERS
A worker stands next to a newly built section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence at Sunland Park, U.S. opposite the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico January 25, 2017. Picture taken from the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border. more +
Trump has said he wants a concrete barrier as high as 55 feet tall and has described his proposed wall as “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful.” Under the Secure Fence Act, the pedestrian border fencing completed in fiscal year 2007 was estimated to cost about $2.8 million per mile, according to a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office. It was constructed using mostly the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Guard, according to the Congressional Research Service. The 2009 report also found that fencing constructed in fiscal year 2008, which mostly used private contractors, cost about $3.9 million per mile.
So, in January 2017 ABC News found it convenient to say Obama had already built a lot of the wall. In December 2018 ABC News found it convenient to say Trump lied when he said much of the wall has been built. This is just another example of the evil, biased, fake news we get daily.
This is the non-stop news for 24 hours. Cut and edited and intended to show that the brave Democrats forced Trump to say he will shut down the government if he doesn’t get the wall. Most of the government has been accommodated in budgets passed already so no much will be shut down. To me Pelosi and Schumer came across as semi-senile old politicians behaving like petulant children and showing they never intend to do one bi-partisan thing in the next two years. But, their counterparts must go home and put fingers to the wind and see what their constituents say about the wall. After all, Nancy and Chuck represent NY and CA which don’t represent the United States. Nancy was adamant that Trump does not have the votes in the House. Once thing is sure, she is more effective than the useless Paul Ryan in that regard. But for Ryan’s incompetence this might be a moot point.
Plus, while all this is going down France has a terrorist attack.
If most Americans want the wall there will be a wall. If Trump shuts down the government to get the wall most Americans may find it did not affect them one iota.
Today there is another 24/7 news item. Cohen was given 3 years in prison. News says this is bad for Trump. Alan Deshowitz says: “If a person hires a lawyer and asks that lawyer to commit an act, the lawyer is being hired to render judgment about the legality of that act.. The client is protected if the lawyer commits the illegal act on behalf of the client. ” This is considered the foremost legal expert in the country. End of story.
But, is this country the media wakes every day and tries to see how many of the 63 million of us who voted for Trump they can piss off.