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Walls Work

“Walls work!” I keep hearing this from conservatives and Trump supporters with regard to the border wall. They point to the voices of Border Patrol agents who say that a wall is necessary for them to do their job effectively.

I get that, and I do not deny that a wall will help them do their jobs. But the thing about saying, “Walls work”, is that it stops short of the truth, which is that, “Walls work, but they do not work by themselves.”

This truth was absolutely solidified for me as I watched an interview with a quartet of Federal Prison workers during the January 7, 2019 episode of HBO’s Vice News Tonight. The men were Trump voters and some military veterans, with all being proponents of the idea of a walls being used to boost security. The interview was mostly about how the shutdown impacted them (something worthy of discussion), but when they asked whether they thought a wall was necessary they stated this idea clearly – as guards in a prison they know that walls serve a strong purpose in keeping what is inside the walls from reaching other side, but it is not just the walls that do this alone but the people, technology, and other factors that are a constant presence and expense that make the walls effective.

In other words, a wall is a barrier that can be easily overcome unless you are prepared to invest in the things that actively enforce the security provided by those walls.

And this is where the idea of $5 billion for a wall falls apart. For even as it falls short by a factor of 4-6x when you ask conservative experts about the cost of building such a structure, it does not include a penny of investment in the things that make a wall effective.

What are those things?

When asked, John Kostelnik, Federal corrections officer and president of their Union, said, “We work in a prison and I’ll say this much, a wall is a tool. If you don’t have the staff inside of it, if you’re not paying that staff, walls don’t mean shit. Period. So if this is all about a wall it’s going to fail. But if he’s going to staff and pay the people, and put the right equipment on the walls – cameras and whatever we have inside the prisons – then it could be a tool that could be effective.”

Ignoring the parts that allude to the shutdown, how much have we heard about the people and the, “cameras and whatever we have inside the prisons”? Nothing!! Truthfully, we don’t even know that we have a wall any more, it could just be some form of “steel slats, artistically designed”.

Regardless the $5 billion that is being asked for is not just woefully short of the amount required to actually build it, the money that would be required to equip, staff, and maintain it has never been openly presented by this administration, but it will likely be exponentially greater on an annual basis than the amount for which this president has shut down our government.

I do not echo the sentiments of officer, veteran, Trump voter and supporter Edward Canales when he says, “You can have the tallest wall in the world but if you don’t have the staff (pause), why not try to compromise? Why not say, ‘You know what, let’s increase border patrol, let’s rotate national guard units it, and let’s see if that works.’”, but I do believe that all reasonable options that would also be necessary to make the wall effective once built have not been discussed nor considered as factors in increasing border security on their own by this administration, his party, and his supporters, and they really must be.

If there truly is an emergency on the border (there isn’t, and the people there will tell you as much) then why not first look to fund additional agents with access to modern technology, like drones with thermal imaging cameras that can monitor movement remotely and send units to where they are needed?

Walls may work, but would the things that allow them to be effective work on their own? I believe they would.

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Conservative Thoughts On A Border Wall

The words below are not my own, they are taken from an editorial posted by Vicky Alvear Shecter on the Medium.com site. The bulk of the editorial is information produced largely from the work of the Cato Institute, a conservative, right-wing think tank, explaining precisely why a border wall will have little to no affect on illegal immigration. These are not liberals opposing the president out of spite, these are like-minded people who deal in ideas and facts for a living. I’ve chosen to extract the text instead of sharing the editorial in an effort to share the information and not the spin that accompanied it. Like the author I have shared links to the information sources at the end.

1. Walls don’t work. Illegal immigrants have tunneled underneath and/or erected ramps up and down walls to simply drive 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 US legally — for vacations, business, to study, etc. — and then STAY past their visas. By 2012, overstayers accounted for 58% (THE MAJORITY!) of all unauthorized immigrants. A wall is meaningless here!

3. Walls have little impact on drugs being brought in to the US. 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 available that show its potential for irreparable damage to both plant and animal life.

5. A wall would forces 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 back them up.” Are we prepared to pour countless billions annually — 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?

8. Where walls have been built, there was “no discernable impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens.” In other words, they came in elsewhere, primarily where natural barriers such as water or mountainous regions precluded a wall.

9. An unintended consequence is that a wall 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 or can even do those jobs. And if seasonal worker do get in, a wall makes it harder for them to leave! A wall 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 REALLY cost? SEVEN BILLION. And that’s only for 700 miles. Whatever we think it’s going to cost, experience shows us we have to multiply it by more than 500%.

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), that means we’re really talking about pouring endless billions into something that doesn’t even work. And, of course, we taxpayers will be footing the bill, not Mexico. Given all the drawbacks, is that 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.” (Emphasis mine) Also it would create many “direct harms:” “the spending, the taxes, the eminent domain abuse, and the decrease in immigrant’s freedoms of movement.”

And, we must add, since conservative sources do not — that the environmental harms are likely to be severe.

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

Conservative Sources Outlining the Uselessness of Trump’s Wall:

The Cato Institute: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-wall-wont-work

Former Reagan staffer and Tea-Party liaison: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2011/10/12/the-conservative-case-against-a-border-fence-trying-to-stop-illegal-immigration-with-a-really-big-fence-would-be-a-futile-waste-of-money

Chicago Tribune (conservative paper): https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-perspec-chapman-trump-wall-mexico-immigration-20180314-story.html

The National Review (conservative magazine): https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/04/donald-trump-border-wall-plan-ridiculous-guaranteed-failure/

Nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI) think tank: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/borders-and-walls-do-barriers-deter-unauthorized-migration

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The Utter Vastness Of Left-Wing Conspiracies

Let’s think about “left-wing conspiracies” for a moment using the one currently before us.

Documented and accepted without question by the GOP is that Dr. Blasey Ford contacted her congressional representative via in July 2018. The letter contained accusations about Brett Kavanaugh in writing. This letter was sent and received before he was nominated when Dr. Blasey Ford found that the accused was on a short list of candidates in the hands of the president.

OK, let’s stop right here and ponder this letter and the circumstances surrounding it. What do we know?

  1. There were about two dozen names on the shortlist of nominees that the president had.
  2. The letter Dr. Blasey Ford sent is about one and only one of them.
  3. The letter specifically accuses that one person and provides testimonial evidence dated 6 years prior to sending, sourced from credible medical professionals to whom Dr. Blasey Ford spoke to about the incident.
  4. Additionally the letter specifically names a friend of said nominee as a co-attacker, as well as other friends who attended the party at which the incident is said to have occurred.
  5. From this letter any and all other aspects of the Blasey Ford vs. Kavanaugh kerfuffle arise.

That’s all I want you to think about – the details of the initial letter Dr. Blasey Ford sent in July of this year to her representative. With only that in our hands let’s put our thinking caps on and consider the vastness of the “conspiracy” behind this plot to ruin a man in the name of partisan politics. I’ve been doing it for days and as I see it only one conclusion is plausible:

If this is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy – if this were nothing but a pre-planned, last minute partisan hack job as the Republicans insist – then that conspiracy was so vast, so well thought out, so incredibly executed that it knew enough about upcoming vacancies on the Supreme Court to start building a case on Judge Kavanaugh over half a decade before his name even appeared on a short list.

My god, they’re good!!

But wait, weren’t there other names on the list?! Is it possible that the Democrats new enough about the future SCOTUS short list that they began conspiring against each and every possible name on that list over a half-decade ago, knowing that when needed they could immediately set to work scuttling each and every one of them using impeccably fabricated evidence from credible sources?!

Of course not!! The proof for this can be summed up in only two words, “Neil Gorsuch”.

If this left-wing conspiracy had existed for years then surely the person the Democrats would have wanted to destroy with every ounce of their ire and every weapon at their disposal would be the man named to fill the seat President Obama once offered to the unquestionably qualified judge who sits next to Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals, Merrick Garland – the man whose nomination the Republicans scuttled without a second thought or a single interview for pure political gain.

Yet somehow Gorsuch’s nomination moved through the Senate without rancor and without any major objection – heck, the utter lack of vocal opposition to Gorsuch’s nomination could be a conspiracy unto itself, but I digress.

What could the lack of opposition to the prior nominee possibly mean about this vast left-wing conspiracy machine – the machine that has so brilliantly, effectively, and permanently damaged Mr. Kavanaugh’s sterling reputation?

If this is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy – if this were nothing but a pre-planned, last minute partisan hack job as the Republicans insist – then that conspiracy was so vast, so well thought out, so incredibly executed that it knew enough about the future to know that an ultra-partisan and criminal president would be nominated and elected, that he/she would be able to convince a second sitting justice to vacate their seat so he/she could appoint the one and only judge on an as yet written shortlist that would not only overturn Roe, as the alt-christian base that helped put him/her in office requires, but the nominee would also hold positions that would not both prevent said criminal president from being investigated for their criminality while in office and also be willing to rule rule favorably on a case not yet filed based on an incident that has not yet occurred to be heard in the very year the nominee would take office that would change standing law and allow pardons issued by him/her to all his/her co-conspirators for federal crimes to prevent prosecution at the state level.

Wow! There’s a lot in there that I have yet to talk about, so let me unwrap it all.

Here’s what I am implying the Democrats needed have known in 2012 in order to allow them to “orchestrate” this public crucifixion of Brett Kavanaugh:

  1. That a completely unimpeachable and utterly professional woman would be willing to ruin the life she had made for herself and her family in a place designed to be as far away as possible from the memories of an attack suffered during her teen years by, knowing that it is not him, naming the nominee as one of the perpetrators of that attack to both her husband and to professional counselors, and to subsequently so effectively convince herself of that lie that she would not just pass a polygraph but would be able to survive as a “credible and attractive witness” when grilled in front of the nation by 11 men hell bent on destroying her.
  2. That the Republican party would nominate, and the United States would elect, a president that would be so potentially corrupt as to lead an administration so mired in conspiracy and allegation that it would require its Attorney General to recuse himself from leading an investigation into allegations against a campaign that yield multiple indictments and guilty pleas by members of the campaign, suggesting that charges will eventually be filed against the president him/herself.
  3. That the Republican party would nominate, and the United States would elect, a president that would wield the power of the pardon so wildly as to use it as a get out of jail free card for political cronies, citing their “unfair treatment” by political enemies, caring nothing about any potential subversion of justice that would result from said pardons, and would dangle such pardons openly in order to prevent those currently loyal to him/her from testifying against him
  4. That in 2015 during a traffic stop Terance Martez Gamble, a convicted felon, would be found to be in possession of a gun, be prosecuted and convicted by the state of Alabama, and be charged by the federal government for the same crime and accept a plea before appealing the case under the grounds that he was being punished twice for the crime.
  5. That the appellate courts would confirm the lower court rulings eventually leading to an appeal to the Supreme Court that would be heard in October 2018, just as the nominee would be voted on by the Senate.
  6. That the ACLU (a long time political rival of the GOP) would file an amicus brief in support of Gamble stating that “no person shall be … subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb”, even knowing that during the hearings they would be forced to (for only the 4th time in their history) issue an official statement opposing the nominee.
  7. That Senator Orrin Hatch, who sits on the very committee responsible for vetting the nominee, would file an amicus brief as a part of said as yet unknown SCOTUS case that would argue against the separate sovereigns doctrine, a standing legal precedent which rules that pardons granted at the Federal level have no effect on a State being able to prosecute for those crimes. In other words, if the court decided that this was a case of double jeopardy, that a Federal pardon would now also serve as a States’ pardon.
  8. That “Brett Kavanaugh” would the one and only name on an as yet defined short list of nominees to an as yet unopen seat on the Supreme Court given to an as yet unelected criminal president that would satisfy not just the alt-christian’s desire to overturn Roe (every name on that list does that), but would also be willing to subvert long standing judicial precedent in order to defend a criminal president and their allies from any and all possible prosecution.

Damn, that’s a lot to take in.

And if you’ve been able to take it all in, damn, it’s an incredibly impossible pill to swallow.

Yet, that is what the Republican members of the Judicial Committee would have you believe…

That in the late summer of 2018 a professional woman trained in the effects of trauma will more than credibly be able to express the details to a Senate Committee regarding an experience of sexual assault that occurred during her teens at a party held in the neighborhood of a future nominee to the Supreme Court while naming names of not just the nominee and an alleged co-attacker but other friends of said nominee, be convincing to the extent that they must capitulate that she indeed suffered some form of attack on the night in question but that attack could not possibly have been from the accused because he is a man so utterly and completely devoid of character flaws that to even consider the credibility of the accusation would be to do him the most vile of injustices, and that their Democratic rivals (who could not manage to get the most well know and electable woman in their party’s history elected president in a “can’t lose election” just two years prior) were prescient and resourceful enough to know in 2012 that they both found and convinced this woman to falsely confess to her husband and to a marriage counselor that a man who she did not know committed that assault, because no other name on the list they do not yet have will possibly work for them in 2018.

Come on, folks. Even I know that no one outside of people working for Infowars is smart enough to pre-plan all of that.

So what does it mean if this isn’t all a conspiracy?

More importantly, what does it say about you if I’ve managed to convince you that it probably isn’t and you still don’t care?

 

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Democracy Dies Today

(Update Friday Sept. 28, 3PM EDT)

It seems inevitable that Democracy will die today.

As utterly compromised and as purely political a justice as has ever been nominated will be placed in a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court this afternoon. This Justice’s questionable qualifications to serve were evident from day one regardless of his behavior outside of politics at any point in his life. That this has become about what a young Brett Kavanaugh may or may not have done to Dr. Ford or other women speaks to how utterly opaque and obfuscated the investigation into his nomination has been.

Tens of thousands of documents about Judge Kavanaugh’s time with the Bush administration have been sequestered from public view in the name of “executive privilege” by a (potentially) criminal president who stands to benefit from a man who is on record as saying he does not believe a sitting president can be investigated, let alone prosecuted – even as he during his time with Kenneth Starr pursued precisely that.

That the call for a halt to his confirmation by an organization as respected as Amnesty International for Kavanaugh’s involvement with potential war crimes when defining the Bush administration’s torture policy has gone completely unaddressed speaks to the utter political nature of this appointment.

That white men of power found the need to shout out their contempt for any attempt to thwart the seating of a privileged boy from Georgetown Prep, just a year after the Senate had already done just that with no opposition, speaks to their contempt for the process laid out by our framers in a document that they carry in their pockets but ignore at will.

Brett Kavanaugh is a justice who will subvert the Constitution in the name of Republican politics for decades to come, and once the vote this afternoon is held there will be no recourse shy of impeaching him while on the bench to change that – something that is sure to spark the ugliest and potentially bloodiest and politically divisive battle this nation has seen in over a century.

I mourn that this is our country. I mourn that during a lifetime where I have seen such strides made in the advancement of the rights for women, racial minorities, and people of all sexual identity, I will watch as all of these advances will be rendered void with a single vote. For when Justice Kavanaugh dons a black robe it will be a robe that protects the prejudice and hatred of the alt-christian religious right and white nationalism. It will be a robe that protects a criminal president. It will be a robe that forever makes partisan the one branch of government that the founders sought to keep utterly apolitical.

Today the party that spent 8 years screaming that a president without blemish of scandal or investigation was on the brink of bringing Sharia Law to the United States has just taken the first step in doing just that. Taking a wild and perverse reading of Old Testament Law coupled with the writings of Apostles taken utterly out of context – leaving out the words of Jesus entirely – the legalized religious hatred they have long attempted to instantiate throughout middle-american red states will now be allowed to stand. All because a party without soul purchased the souls of Bible-carrying and cross-wearing Americans hell bent on changing a single Supreme Court ruling.

Democracy dies today. The Great American Experiment is over. It has been washed down the drain with the bath water of overturning Roe.

Tomorrow we build the pyre from which a Phoenix will one day rise on the next America. What we cannot know is how far off that is, and how many will perish in this travesty’s wake.

Jesus wept.

***

So it seems that the Senate has granted democracy a stay of execution. I will not call the actions of Jeff Flake heroic, in fact at the moment I find him very much akin to Pontius Pilate. But I’m thankful it will live to see October.

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Something is heating up

A month ago I was ready to leave Facebook, which has served as my sole connection to most of my “outside world” since I took this work-at-home gig at the beginning of this tumultuous decade. Expressing thoughts and outrage in real time about events that just seem to get more outrageous now by the hour, let alone the day or week, seems to simply magnify the impact of even the smallest of these exponentially, and that can tear a soul down quickly.

So I’ve spent the Christmas and New Year holiday wondering about just how I might be able to force myself into a mode of expression that requires a more than knee-jerk reaction in real time. How I could distill my thoughts about something…  and that’s where it hit me and this place was conceived.

I have no idea when it will open, or what the first post will be, but I’ve paid for the damn domain name for a couple years so I better do something with it eventually.

I’m going to keep comments turned off because I don’t want to manage the riffraff in more than one place, but the idea is that if I’ve got something to say I’ll put it here and then share it on Facebook where people can comment on it – and share it if they want, something you can’t do with my personal posts due to privacy settings. We’ll see how it goes.