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Reports of protests are overblown. A few incidents around the country, but nothing major.

5 (45.5%)

A few major incidents in capitals, but nothing much in DC.

5 (45.5%)

A major incident in DC, but nothing much around the country.

0 (0%)

More than 10 capitals have major upheavals, but nothing much in DC.

0 (0%)

A major incident in DC plus more than 10 capitals with significant upheavals.

1 (9.1%)

More than half the capitals around the country have problems with protesters, but DC is quiet.

0 (0%)

DC has major problems, while more than half the capitals around the country also have considerable trouble with protesters.

0 (0%)

Huge disruption to the day.

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 9

Voting closed: January 19, 2021, 10:49:21 PM

[NeedsAdjustments]

Sure its old news by now, but.....

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sarah-sanders-and-other-republicans-slam-democrats-for-partying-on-the-beach-amid-shutdown

Is the POTUS a witting or unwitting foreign asset working for In interests of Russia?

What's a Trump Presidency done for the the economy of Russia compared to the economy of the USA?

I asked a yes or no question.

Because if you want to go on a tangent about economies ask about the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia...

REDSTATEWARD's non-denial tells us that he actually doesn't care if Trump is a Russian asset, so long as the rich get their tax cuts.

Trump's own non-denial tells us that he could actually be one.

[kidcarter8]

https://twitter.com/goppollanalyst/status/1084524922226044928?s=21

[josh]

This has probably been posted here before, but I didn't find it with a quick search, so here it is again:

https://medium.com/s/story/what-happened-when-a-trump-supporter-challenged-me-about-the-wall-e54e86a5edd1

What Happened When a Trump Supporter Challenged Me About the Wall
I explained exactly why a wall won’t work, using conservative sources to prove it

Vicky Alvear Shecter

conservative challenged liberal Facebook friends to “make a case, not based on emotion” against Trump’s wall. Conservative buddies flooded his post with snide remarks about how this would be impossible for “deluded libs.”

“Okay, I’ll play,” I responded. To avoid being accused of bias, I explained that I would use only conservative sources to make my point. My primary source was a policy paper by the Cato Institute—a conservative, libertarian think tank—along with other conservative voices (listed below).

Here’s why I’m against the wall, I wrote:

1. Walls don’t work. Illegal immigrants have tunneled underneath and/or erected ramps up and down walls and simply driven over them. People find a way. When East Germany erected its wall, it created a military zone, staffed by booted, machine-gun carrying guards ready to shoot to kill. Yet thousands managed to make it to West Germany anyway. More to the point, do we really want to model ourselves after communist East Germany?

2. Most illegal immigrants are “overstayers.” They come to the U.S. legally—for vacations, jobs, schools, etc.—and then stay long past their visas. By 2012, overstayers accounted for 58 percent (the majority) of all unauthorized immigrants. A wall is meaningless here.

3. Walls have little impact on drugs being brought in to the U.S. According to the DEA, almost all drugs come in through legal points of entry, hidden in secret containers and/or among legit goods in tractor-trailers. A wall will have little to no impact on the influx of drugs into our country.

4. It’s environmentally impractical. Walls have a hard time making it through extreme weather. For example, in 2011, a flood in Arizona washed away 40 feet of steel fencing. Torrential rains and raging waters do serious damage. Also, conservative sources generally do not address the environmental harm that walls create, but there is plenty of documentation showing the potential for irreparable damage to both plant and animal life.

5. A wall would force the U.S. government to take land from private citizens in eminent domain battles. Private citizens own much of the land slated for the wall. The costs of the government snatching private land—and the legal battles that would ensue—are incalculable.

6. Border patrol agents don’t like concrete or steel walls because they block surveillance capabilities. In other words, they can’t mobilize correctly to meet challenges. So, in many ways, a wall makes their job more difficult.

7. Border patrol agents say walls are “meaningless” without agents and technology to support them. Are we prepared to pour countless billions annually—well after the wall is built—to create a nearly 2,000-mile militarized, 24-hour-surveillance border operation? Because according to patrol agents, that’s the only way a wall would work. Again, are we really going to use East Germany, a brutal communist state, as our model here?


Are we seriously going to model ourselves on East Germany and their wall? Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
8. Where barriers were built, there was little impact on the number of border crossers. According to the Congressional Research Center cited in the Cato report, after San Diego rebuilt a fence making it more wall-like—taller and more opaque—the structure “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border” in the area. They simply came in elsewhere, primarily where natural barriers such as water or mountainous regions preclude a wall.

9. A wall has unintended consequences on other industries: For example, it blocks farmworkers from exiting when their invaluable seasonal work is done. Farmers are against the wall because it makes getting cheap seasonal labor almost impossible, as few American citizens want those jobs. And if seasonal workers do get in, a wall makes it harder for them to leave. It traps migrant farm laborers in our country.

10. Trump’s $5 billion is a laughable drop in the bucket for what would actually be needed. For example, according to the Cato Institute: An estimate for a border wall area that only covered 700 miles was originally $1.2 billion. How much did it cost in reality? $7 billion. And that’s only for 700 miles. Whatever we think it’s going to cost, experience shows us we must multiply it by more than 500 percent.

11. According to MIT engineers, the wall would cost $31.2 billion. Homeland Security estimates it at $22 billion. Given the pattern of spending mentioned in number 10 (plus Murphy’s Law), we’re talking about pouring endless billions into something that doesn’t even work. Of course, we taxpayers will be footing the bill, not Mexico. Given all the drawbacks, is this really the best use of our taxes?

As the conservatives of the Cato Institute put it, “President Trump’s wall would be a mammoth expenditure that would have little impact on illegal immigration.” It would also create many “direct harms,” including “the spending, the taxes, the eminent domain abuse, and the decrease in immigrant’s freedoms of movement.”

We must add, because conservative sources do not, that the environmental harms are likely to be severe.

In other words, the facts show that walls don’t work. Instead, they create even bigger, more expensive problems.

So what happened after I posted this conservative-sourced, fact-based list of why the wall is a bad idea?

Silence.

I waited for someone to respond, to engage with me. Where were the angry defenses or rebuttals? But when I searched for the post after a few days, I couldn’t find it.

My Facebook friend had deleted it. You could say, like Trump with the government, he shut me down rather than deal with the facts.

The ugly genius of Trump is his ability to manipulate deep, primal emotions—namely fear and hate. Along with Fox News, he has convinced his base that immigrants put them in “extreme danger” and only a wall will make them “safe.”

Unfortunately, their need to feel safe is much stronger than their will to grapple with a complex, multifaceted problem—a problem that will require serious engagement with complex policies to get at the root of it.

And so, here we are, paralyzed by shutdowns at every turn.


Conservative-Leaning Sources Explaining the Uselessness of Trump’s Wall:
The Cato Institute: “Why the Wall Won’t Work”
Former Reagan staffer and Tea-Party liaison Donna Wiesner Keene: “The Conservative Case Against a Border Fence” published by U.S. News & World Report.
The Chicago Tribune (a conservative-leaning paper): “Trump’s Wall Is Performance Art, Not Border Security”
National Review (conservative magazine): “Trump’s Border Wall Plan Is Ridiculous on Its Face”
Additional Sources
Harvard Business Review (business-oriented): “A Wall Won’t Secure the U.S.-Mexico Border, but Economic Policy Could”
Nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI): “Borders and Walls: Do Barriers Deter Unauthorized Migration?”

[josh]

https://twitter.com/goppollanalyst/status/1084524922226044928?s=21

It's as if the person protesting didn't actually read what they linked, either the highlighted part or the part after it.

Mexico is a problem. The extensive southern border is mentioned, but it is hardly the only thing - and the same Obama administration determined that a wall would not solve the problem.

But let's skip the parts that don't go along with the argument one wants to make.

[josh]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-jobs-economy-farm-workers-taxes/

No, they are not taking jobs from Americans. They are filling jobs that not enough Americans seem to want to do.

And yes, maybe raising the pay is the right response, but in a time when jobs are more available and workers less so, it is unclear that that doesn't just shift the shortages around.

[Yankguy1]

https://twitter.com/goppollanalyst/status/1084524922226044928?s=21

Do you think these Twitter people that you're so fond of linking to have any particular insight (like you, they know things), after all KATICA is a "researcher", or are they political hacks with enough money to have their very own Twitter account (they're free!!!!)? 

[LarryBnDC]

https://twitter.com/goppollanalyst/status/1084524922226044928?s=21

It's as if the person protesting didn't actually read what they linked, either the highlighted part or the part after it.

Mexico is a problem. The extensive southern border is mentioned, but it is hardly the only thing - and the same Obama administration determined that a wall would not solve the problem.

But let's skip the parts that don't go along with the argument one wants to make.

[facilitatorn]

Sure its old news by now, but.....

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sarah-sanders-and-other-republicans-slam-democrats-for-partying-on-the-beach-amid-shutdown

Is the POTUS a witting or unwitting foreign asset working for In interests of Russia?

What's a Trump Presidency done for the the economy of Russia compared to the economy of the USA?

I asked a yes or no question.

Because if you want to go on a tangent about economies ask about the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia...

REDSTATEWARD's non-denial tells us that he actually doesn't care if Trump is a Russian asset, so long as the rich get their tax cuts.

Trump's own non-denial tells us that he could actually be one.

A half-witting pawn and his half-witting follower.

[NeedsAdjustments]

Good piece, for anyone who missed it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/trump-2020-media.html

I don't know if we touched on this study at the time, or maybe this is a different study with equally mind-blowing results but reading this is still...mind-blowing:

Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has been analyzing that coverage since Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015. Patterson found that for much of that year, the number of stories about Trump in the country’s most influential newspapers and on its principal newscasts significantly exceeded what his support in polls at the time justified.

And those stories were predominantly positive. “The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls,” Patterson wrote in one of his reports about the election. In stark contrast, stories about Hillary Clinton in 2015 were mostly negative.

Through the first half of 2016, as Trump racked up victories in the Republican primaries, he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party, and it was evenly balanced between positive and negative appraisals — unlike the coverage of Clinton, which remained mostly negative.

Only during their general-election face-off in the latter half of 2016 did Trump and Clinton confront equivalent tides of naysaying. “On topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone,” Patterson wrote.

[whiskeypriest]

This weekend's Russia news reminds me of the old probably apocryphal story about one of Lyndon Johnson 's early campaign and a rumor campaign he wanted to start against a pig farmer. "I know no one will believe it, but let's make the son of a bitch deny it."

[NeedsAdjustments]

Something to be aware of....

“The country needs a credible resolution of these issues,” he added. “If confirmed, I will not permit partisan politics, personal interests, or any other improper consideration to interfere with this or any other investigation.”

But Mr. Barr also included a subtle caveat, limiting his assurances about the Mueller investigation to the issues under his control: “I can assure you that, where judgments are to be made by me, I will make those judgments based solely on the law and will let no personal, political, or other improper interests influence my decision,” he wrote.

That qualification could be important because Mr. Barr has long advanced a philosophy of strong executive powers under which any administration decision is ultimately the president’s to make. His views also include the notion that the president is the nation’s top law-enforcement official, not the attorney general....

- NYT, 1/14/19

A little chilling.  Sounds like Dick Cheney's "unitary executive" all over again.

The Barr statement making all the headlines today is meaningless, and this touches on exactly why.  The concern with him was never that he would unilaterally end the inquiry, but that he would not be a restraining voice in Trump's desire to do so.  And he won't.  This quote doesn't change that.

I think we may be able to say that given his more professional background, that he will not be passing on info about the investigation to Trump's lawyers.  On that, we get someone better than Whitaker.

But Trump didn't spend two years slamming Sessions for not protecting him from the inquiry only to bring someone in that hasn't given him some assurance to that effect.

[josh]

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-wall-mexico-follows-footsteps-authoritarian-leaders-throughout-history-ncna956411

Khrushchev's great-grandaughter is not fooled by Trump's rhetoric.

[josh]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1/14/1826096/-Thanks-Trump-TSA-Slips-Up-Big-Time-Woman-Boards-Plane-With-Gun-and-Ammunition-in-Atlanta?utm_campaign=trending

We're from the TSA and we're here to protect you.

[josh]

Ah, the wonders of the federal shutdown and how wonderful it is for the impacted folks...

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/11/684414651/thousands-face-threat-of-eviction-after-hud-contracts-expire-due-to-shutdown

[josh]

The Bigot-in-Chief is at it again:

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bje945/trump-tweets-elizabeth-warren-campaign-commercial-wounded-knee-native-americans-murder?utm_source=vicefbus