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Eeyup. Dude has started a crowd-funding page to raise one billion dollars to pay for the President's signature wall.
Something occurred to me as I was driving home tonight. Presupposing that you are a non-US citizen who wishes to enter the US, why not do it the easy way? Get a passport from your country of origin, and then show up at a major border checkpoint along with all of the regular commuters. Yes, there are tens of thousands of people who live in one country and work in another. If you listen to the morning / afternoon traffic segments on KPBS radio San Diego, border wait times are part of the report. This is considered normal in border-towns.
Do it just prior to a major holiday. When asked, say that you are visiting your aunt & uncle in (name of city near border crossing) for a few days.
Bonus: when you are stopped by a police / ICE officer in the US and asked for proof of citizenship, you have it! You can proudly say "I am a citizen of [country X], here visiting my family for a few days." And then, because you have your papers in order, you will be free to go along your way.
I have personally walked across the US / Mexico border at San Ysidro numerous times. Usually carrying hard-sided toolboxes that look like the villain's briefcase out of a James Bond movie. I say from experience that so long as you have a plausible story and the appropriate documentation, it's really not hard at all.
This, incidentally, is how an elected leader becomes a tyrant.
Trump is getting closer to a Cabinet full of yes-men
By Aaron Blake December 21 at 10:13 AM
For almost two full years, President Trump’s critics have been calling for top administration officials to resign in protest when they view Trump as having gone too far. They decried as a coward the anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who assured that forces within the administration were working to curb Trump’s impulses but wouldn’t be named.
They finally got what they wanted Thursday. But the results may not be what they wanted.
In his resignation letter, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis made little secret that he could no longer serve a president who trashes key U.S. alliances and has moved to pull out of both Syria and Afghanistan. After emphasizing issues on which Trump has clearly frustrated him, Mattis wrote, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
Mattis’s departure is the most striking of Trump’s tenure for two reasons: 1) Mattis might be the most respected individual in the administration, and 2) More than anybody who left before him, Mattis made clear he was resigning in protest over a contentious issue.
But as Trump’s struggles to find a new chief of staff have shown, the upshot is that it’s going to be more and more difficult to draw top Trump administration staffers from the ranks of relatively moderate, experienced and respected institutionalists such as Mattis. Anybody who would serve as Trump’s secretary of defense has to look not just at Mattis’s resignation letter but also at the decision to pull out of Syria in the first place. Trump has reportedly disregarded the advice of basically all of his military advisers. Whoever is signing up for this is signing up to be tied to decisions that people such as Mattis and many Senate Republicans regard as extremely dangerous for national security.
Mattis himself said Trump deserves a secretary of defense who is “better aligned” with the president on key issues, but finding that person could prove problematic. Trump’s noninterventionist and nationalistic foreign policy is something you see much more from ideologues than experienced military figures. To do what Mattis suggested, Trump will have to either go well outside the military mainstream — or select a yes-man or yes-woman.
And to see where this is likely to go, you need only look at the changes among Trump’s Cabinet-level officials.
After Rex Tillerson was fired, Trump installed as his replacement Mike Pompeo, who had taken curiously pro-Trump positions as CIA director — even undercutting his own intelligence community’s conclusions about Russian election interference to echo Trump’s talking points. While Mattis was protesting privately, Pompeo was spinning the Syria decision in Trumpian terms. “The president made an enormous commitment to take down the caliphate, and that has been achieved,” he said on NPR. Pompeo has also been out front in selling Trump’s muted response to Saudi Arabia’s killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi — another decision hawkish Senate Republicans abhor but Pompeo has happily gone along with.
For chief of staff, Trump has selected Mick Mulvaney in an acting role. Mulvaney once called Trump a “terrible human being” but is now reportedly preparing to let Trump be Trump, including breaking down the regimented White House processes instituted by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.
Kelly, Tillerson and Mattis were the three officials who Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said last year “help separate our country from chaos.” Now all three are out, with at least two of them replaced by much more go-along-to-get-along replacements.
The most high-profile shift toward yes-men is with his attorney general. After Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and declined to pursue Trump’s requested investigations of Democrats, Trump has picked an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who mused about defunding Robert Mueller’s probe and investigating the Clintons. (Whitaker has now refused ethics advice that he also recuse himself.) Then Trump picked a permanent attorney general nominee, William Barr, who we just learned wrote a 20-page memo to the Justice Department attacking Mueller’s obstruction-of-justice probe. It was almost as if each man were auditioning for Trump with their commentary, which in both cases aligns almost perfectly with Trump’s own.
The shift has been similar in lower-profile top administration jobs. After Trump clashed with national security adviser H.R. McMaster, he picked as his replacement John Bolton, who rather quickly cast aside his extremely hawkish foreign policy views on issues such as Russia to meet Trump’s “America First” demands. Same with Trump’s chief economic adviser. Gary Cohn, who questioned some of Trump’s actions, has been replaced by Larry Kudlow, a through-and-through free-trader who is now promoting Trump’s trade wars and protectionism.
The trend lines are clear. As the Trump presidency persists, and as Trump gets bolder and bolder with his willingness to shake things up and do what the “smart people” plead with him not to do, he’s being surrounded more and more by people who won’t bother to plead.
Yes, that might ultimately help bring him down as president — which is the dominoes that Trump’s critics have long wanted to set off with protest resignations. But in the meantime, it means actions such as pulling out of Syria, shutting down the government, and engaging in trade wars that depress the stock market are much more likely to proliferate.
Perhaps it needs to get uglier before it gets better, the critics may reason, but it will get uglier.
“I think the appointments are very problematic,” says James Joyner, an Army veteran of Operation Desert Storm and an associate professor of security studies at the Marine Corps University, “though not because I’m worried about civilian control of the military. This isn’t about civilian control, it’s about military influence.”
Mr. Trump’s inclination toward generals in top jobs also runs counter to the credo of civilian control of the military — a constitutionally enshrined principle that some say safeguards the United States from becoming another Pakistan or Turkey, where the military is a political player.
No doubt these men bring tremendous experience. But we should be wary about an overreliance on military figures. Great generals don’t always make great Cabinet officials. And if appointed in significant numbers, they could undermine another strong American tradition: civilian control of an apolitical military.
“While I deeply respect General Mattis’s service, I will oppose a waiver. Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, in a statement last week.
I just ran the numbers and I never liked Mattis as a cabinet pick, so this is a big win against a dangerous practice that could lead to the US staying in countries we don't need to be in...
if i was a thinking man, and clearly im not, but it's almost, allllllmost, like orange man bad, therefore orange man bad, and anything bad orange man does is bad. almost, but i would never accuse my opinion of that.
I don't see a contradiction here between military and civilian control of the armed forces. The President is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and as a matter of historical context, Trump is among a minority of US Presidents in that he has never been a military officer.
Take, as a counterpoint, the Surgeon General. The Surgeon General is not required to do any actual doctoring as part of their job, but none the less, we recognize that it is preferable to have someone with medical training and experience in that posting.
Ditto the Secretary of Agriculture. They don't have to grow any corn, but a consensus has developed that it is preferable for them to be educated and experienced in the subject.
The same applies here. There is a very good reason why the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of War (prior to SecDef being invented in 1947) has customarily been drawn from the ranks of experienced senior military officers, going all the way back to the colonial era.
There's a great scene in Battlestar Galactica in which the President approaches Cpt. Lee Adama, asking him to be her personal military advisor. Lee demurs, saying that as the senior military officer, his Father the Commander should advise her. The President then says "No, no. I'm not looking for military advice. I'm looking for advice about the military."
That exchange was pivotal in building the character of that season of the show. But alas, it's not the case here. The function of the Secretary of Defense is to provide the President with military advice.
To your earlier point, read 10 U.S. Code § 113, the section which deals with the establishment of the office. The very first paragraph:
(a) There is a Secretary of Defense, who is the head of the Department of Defense, appointed from civilian life by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. A person may not be appointed as Secretary of Defense within seven years after relief from active duty as a commissioned officer of a regular component of an armed force.
As to other things- I've been seeing a lot of memes / posts, both here and elsewhere, which seems to imply that the strategies and priorities of the democratic members of congress ought to be based upon an objective assessment of what is best for the security and prosperity of the nation, rather than merely reflecting the opposite of the strategies and priorities of the republican president.
(Gas is more expensive in California than **** Germany Texas.)
Anyway, moving on. Want to make people hate and fear guns? Start when they're young.
In Attempt To Change Gun Culture, Toy Gun Buyback Programs Hit The Streets Posted on December 24, 2018 by Lesley Hollywood
Gun buyback programs are becoming an increasingly common attempt to ‘rid the streets of evil guns’ and it should come as no surprise that the anti-gun community is now utilizing these programs to indoctrinate kids.
During this buyback for youth program, kids were encouraged to bring water pistols, Nerf guns and other toy guns to exchange for new toys that had been donated by former New York City Police Officer, Sean Acosta.
Here’s what Acosta had to say about the program: “It has to start at a young age,” Acosta says. “If we can get them to say, ‘It’s not cool to carry these toy guns,’ then maybe when they get older, they won’t ever carry a real gun.”
In a society where guns stop crime and save lives more than 2.5 million times per year, teaching children that “guns are bad” is doing a disservice to both them and the community around them. Gun safety programs, such as the one recently implemented in an Iowa middle school, can help children to understand and respect firearms. Imagine if a child were to encounter a gun laying in the bushes while playing with his friends at the park. Will that child be better equipped to handle the situation after turning in his Nerf Gun, or after taking a gun safety course? If gun grabbers truly cared about safety, they’d be asking themselves this question.
12-20-2018, 10:00 PM
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