The President Speaks To Congress

As I listened to all the television analysts talk about what President Trump’s speech might be like, and then watched him give it while Republicans in Congress stood up repeatedly to applaud - and some Democrats sat and politely clapped - I kept hoping for the sun to break out.

Petty politics should be put aside, he leaked just before the speech. Democrats and Republicans would work together to insure a better future, he promised. Decaying industries will come roaring back, coal miners will go back underground to earn a living and die from black lung disease, and unfair trade deals would vanish almost overnight.

Our taxes will get lower, our economy will get better, our military will become stronger, and - he said it with a tone that was almost daring anyone listening to disagree - God Bless America.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with any of it, in fact.

Then I made a cup of coffee, and I realized that I had hoped - at least a little part of me had hoped - that he really could make a deal to let everyone in the country get cheap health insurance. That immigrants coming into the United States would be admitted based on their skills, not the countries where they came from, and that it would end up driving up everyone’s wages.

Then it hit me. I was Charlie Brown, and he was Lucy, holding a bright shiny football down on the ground and just waiting for me to run over and try to kick it. Looked real good, until you actually tried to touch it.

President Trump did mention a goal of clean air and clean water, something that is very important to me and to a lot of other people. It came at 9:45 p.m., and seemed almost like an afterthought - especially coming on a day when his proposed budget signaled a gutting of the EPA and he issued an executive order that would begin a study on the feasibility of ending federal oversight of streams and swamps and other small watercourses that 19 million people depend on for drinking water. But, the rule he wants to end is strongly opposed by builders and golf course operators.

It was overshadowed by the creation - vaguely - of something called VOICE (the victims of immigrant crime engagement, I think) - which would be run by homeland security and do something about illegal immigrant crime. Stop it? No way. Give money to victims? Didn’t say that.

In fact, he didn’t really say much of anything when it came to the nuts and bolts details of his proposals. A trillion dollar public/private partnership to rebuild our infrastructure sounds good, but what does it mean? The government builds a road and a private developer builds the bridge that it goes to? Who sets the tolls?

Jobs are vanishing because of automation and the aging infrastructure which makes it difficult to move goods from one place to another in our nation. Well, that will all get better somehow. I promise.

Now, come on and just  kick that ball.

Who Let The Dogs Out? Me.

Strange to say, but now that following all the lies and contradictions of President Donald Trump has become nearly a full-time job for me, some people are wondering just how I get the time to do it.

(In truth, that is a lie. It’s not even close to a full-time job, certainly not a paying job, and nobody I know has asked me how I do it. I’ve just been listening to The Donald too much, and its starting to rub off.)

But, it’s still a good question. How can I, or any normal human being, keep up with his flow of lies, exaggerations, distortions, misleading comments and off-the-point answers and still have a normal life?  Well, let me tell you how I did it the other day. Actually, I do the same thing almost every day.

I start at dawn, when my very special alarm clock goes off. It doesn’t ring. It doesn’t vibrate. It doesn’t shine beams of light to wake me.

No, my alarm clock barks. And jumps on the bed. And licks my face, and jumps some more, and then starts pushing me off the bed. Gently, of course. My two puppies are really polite, but they are also very energetic. And, each of them weigh about 65 pounds. Standard poodles. Working together - which they do very well - they make it hard to ignore them.

So, I put on a robe and go downstairs and let them out. Then, because they have been watching, the cats come out to be fed. Just as soon as the dogs are out the door. They are indoor cats, and they get fed in the living room, behind a gate the dogs never jump over.  Why? It’s the same mystery of why my dogs, and lots of others, don’t ever go down the basement stairs.

But, I’m getting off point. Feed the dogs, feed the cats, let the dogs out again, let the cats out on the porch (it’s screened so they can’t get out). Let the dogs in. Let the cats  in. The whole process takes about a half hour.

 And, here’s the secret. I have time to make a cup of coffee and to go onto the computer and read newspapers. And it never takes a half hour. It takes an hour or more. Because there is so much good stuff to read.

Newspapers really are a window on the world. I certainly respect the New York TImes and the Washington Post and the LA Times. For variety, I will look a couple of times a week at other papers, the Boston Globe or the Chicago Tribune or just any newspaper in any state where some politician has made the news - just what does Kansas or Arkansas think of their senator or their congressman or their governor. You can tell a lot by how a story is written or an editorial is phrased. Or even what those papers choose to ignore.

And while I’m drinking my coffee and looking at the newspapers on line, the TV is on, usually MSNBC or Fox News. And there’s always a couple of minutes to go out and pick up my copy of the New York Times from the driveway. It usually takes me a couple of days to go through the whole paper because of all those small, really interesting and - oddly - sometimes important items that rarely see the light of day in the 24 hour broadcast news cycle.

Did anyone else read the piece on the proxy battle between the Pope and the Knights of Malta? Or how many pro golfers seem to be lining up to play a round with President Trump. (Yes, the same man who complained that President Obama played too much golf.)

For people who might think all this reading and listening is a little obsessive - I really do enjoy it. That’s what retired people should do. Things they enjoy. And let me suggest one pretty good touchstone to the nation’s news if you are looking for something to read - USA Today.

Now I know that a lot of people don’t give much thought to USA Today, because they remember it as that paper where the stories were never more than 300 words long and because its format was one story for every state, no matter how little was going on that day. It’s hard to get excited about a study of elementary schools in a state where you don’t know anyone with kids.

And, of course, getting it free every time you stopped at a motel didn’t really boost its reputation for quality.

But, its a different paper today. Stories are longer, and well-reported. A lot of its stories get the space they need, many of the enterprise reporters clearly were given the time needed to do things right, and it still has the kind of national grass-roots scope you don’t always get from our big national papers.

Besides, you get good stuff like this.

A recent story by David Jackson noted that “The White House also deploys anonymity from time to time. Less that two hours before Trump criticized the use of anonymous sources and said all sources should be named, an administration official provided a briefing on the condition he not be identified.”

You could also find this re-tweet from our president. “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack  Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud. 4:23 PM - 6 Aug 2012.”

Now I have to stop. The dogs want to be let out again.

Soon, The Fun Begins

 I remember not to long ago that Donald Trump, the candidate, told me that I should vote for him because he was the only person who could fix our failing infrastructure, and the only person who could defeat ISIS, and the  only person who could end the decay of our cities and Make America Great Again.

Now, the man who is President has shown us his secret plans. He has told our generals to get together and come up with a plan that will defeat ISIS - something which he clearly doubts they ever thought of doing on their own. Turns out he didn’t actually have a plan.

And, he has decided not to submit a budget to Congress that will fix our decaying cities, bring back jobs, stop unfair trade agreements and Make America Great Again. This is, apparently, something that Republicans in Congress never thought to do on their own. Maybe he could show them his plan first, kind of like a cheat sheet.

(I wonder if it would be more efficient to just draft all the Republicans in Congress and make them generals, so they could do both jobs at the same time. With the President’s approval, of course.)

But, that’s silly. Let me explain why.

When a politician, any politician, says they have a plan to do something, it’s one of those  big picture things. Hey, everybody, let’s put on a show in the old barn. And, presto, the barn is clean, the cast is ready, and people come in to watch the musical.

And someone handles the parking and someone else gets the permits and someone else takes the tickets and someone else rents the porta-potties and someone else gets the candy and soda for the refreshment stand while someone else sells the food and someone else helps usher people to their seats, and still another someone else is waiting to clean up and haul the garbage to the dump.....well,  you get the idea.

It’s kind of easy to plan great things, like bring back the coal industry regardless of the cost, or pollution, or lack of demand. Or build cars in America - Kias anyone - when you don’t actually build them, just assemble them from foreign-made components. My favorite idea comes from the energy independence people, who want to build everything - solar and wind and oil and natural gas and coal and hydropower - so we will be rolling in cheap electric power.

I just think of all those happy stockholders who put their money into power plants that are not needed because there is so much excess power, and all of those workers who will be hired to sit around just in case the plants have to be put on line.

No one needs to be told that the GOP’s grand plan for Obamacare - just repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act - didn’t quite go as advertised. We’re still waiting to hear just how we would take all that Mideast oil. And I expect all that infrastructure work will  be starting any day now.

Which is wrong, of course. None of that work can start until Congress comes up with a budget and the President signs it. And, he will, because he has promised to help the Republicans in Congress to do it. Its just the hard-eyed reporter in me. Waiting for the actual facts before I can make up my mind. But, I can speculate.

For example,  just think of the opportunities that all the members of the House of Representatives will have when they decide how to cut the cost of health care. I particularly like the idea of just giving block grants to the states, and letting the Republican governors tell their own voters that insurance costs are going up because Congress didn’t give them enough money to hold down premiums.

I know that the infrastructure work can’t begin until people sign contracts. And, contracts to rebuild roads and bridges won’t get signed until they are funded. And, there’s another problem.

Which bridges? Which roads? We really have to decide. And that means making hard choices. Say “yes” to Cleveland and “no” to St. Louis? Patch up a failing, inadequate bridge so that it will last for another five or ten years, or just replace the whole thing and add the extra two lanes you really need. Well, you can fix three or four bridges for the cost of one new one, but that just kicks the problem down the road and, eventually, costs a lot more money.

That’s the kind of debate we should be having right now. Has anyone heard it in the halls of Congress? 

Well, the budget should be coming out soon. Soon, the fun begins.

Is it time yet?

I get the feeling, and it’s just a feeling, that the time that Donald Trump will get dumped is coming much faster than I thought. 

And, no, it's not the Democrats or the “I was at a meeting and never heard it” Republicans who will be doing the dumping. The Democrats lack the power and the see-no-evil hear-no-evil Republicans lack the will.

But there is one cold-eyed realist who has the strength and the will to dump Trump, and who is counting the pros and cons of doing it - a count that seems to be getting worse for our president every week.

That is, of course, Vladimir Putin, the KGB-trained leader who has no trouble sending his troops in and paying a lot of behind-the-scenes bribes to get what he wants, and who knows that when an asset becomes a liability there is only one thing to do - squeeze the last bit of value out of them, and get rid of them as an object lesson to others.

Think of it as a guy who gets in over his head to a loan shark. It's almost a cliche - the loan shark tells the cops “Why would I hurt him? I want to get my money back.”

Except, of course, he never will get paid. But, suddenly, all the other clients who are paying almost as much interest as people with loans from deregulated banks, suddenly start paying as much as they can. Until they lose their house.

I don’t want to get off track. The maze of complex relationships between Trump and the Trump empire and the Trump advisors and the Trump loans through lord knows how many shell companies is too easy to get lost in.

Let me put it simply. Trump is either an asset or a liability to the Russians. And the more he talks and the wilder his comments get, the more attention gets paid to things that Vladimir doesn’t want to talk about. And doesn’t want other people talking about either.

Putin goes around bare-chested and can enjoy the mocking attention because, in a lot of people, it's mixed with envy and admiration. Just ask any of the Republicans who said he was a much better leader than Barack Obama.

No, Trump can’t go around bare-chested. And, he keeps saying that better relations with Russia would be a good thing, although he never says for whom it would be a good thing.

Let's not talk about that.

Putin may have hated Hillary Clinton, but I think he is finding unpredictable chaos is not really a better deal. Maybe the time he leaks the secrets out to the “lying media” is getting closer than we think.

Maybe,  just maybe, I could be right.

Thought For The Day

Here’s a thought for the day. You probably learned it in school many, many years ago, or maybe from some distant relative.

It’s a lot easier to tear something down than to build up something new.

What does this have to do with our current national madness? Well, all the ranting and raving going on in Washington and on Main Street seems to be about efforts to tear down existing things - the Environmental Protection Agency, health care, existing trade agreements.

Of course, they - the demolition team - keeps promising something new and better to replace those things, once the rubble is removed. We need less regulation, they say. Just plain common sense will do.

Well, not to be a traitor to my class, but have you ever read a mortgage or a quarterly statement from any company or investment fund. I’m sure they would love to simply put out a one-page letter, saying something like “We made 6 per-cent this quarter. Don’t bother with those other details we used to include, because the government now says we don’t have to report on them.” Do you think anyone would buy a share?

Heck, I just got an offer from a bank telling me I could get an interest-free loan for 18 months. Big print right on top of the blank check they sent. Tiny print on the bottom of the page said that when the 18 months is over, the interest rate would likely be 28 per-cent, or maybe more. Details to come.

So, when people in Congress promise that things will be better when they get rid of all those bad regulations, you might ask yourself what they’re really talking about.

A lot of nothing

Its not that I don’t have a lot to say today. There is a lot going on.

But, real facts are often more important than the opinions people have about them, and so today I will defer. It's much better to spend your time today reading a newspaper or looking at a TV set or listening to the radio about the news coming out of Washington.

I will say that when I turned on Fox News, briefly, the story I saw was about the Prime Minister of Israel coming to Washington to meet President Trump, who may no longer be committed to a two-state solution for peace in the Middle East.

There was no mention of what he was proposing instead, only that it was “historic”.

Some observations, briefly

Some thoughts have been going through my mind lately,  bumping against each other so hard and so fast it's hard to keep them all straight. In no particular order, some of them are:

1 - People in Washington are now starting to ask “what did he know and when did he know it” about the now-fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Given the track record of President Donald Trump, that could be a really hard question to answer.

2 - Is using a private server more a threat to national security than having a top-level political meeting with the head of a foreign nation at a table in a public restaurant while people around you are taking pictures and recording the conversation on their cell phones.

3 - When, oh when, are some Republicans going to say publicly what they are saying to each other privately about the direction our nation seems to be taking.

4 - Wouldn’t it have been better trying to get our new government up and running than running an endless twitter war against enemies, real or imagined, some of whom turn out to be friends just a few days later.

5 - Is anyone thinking about putting together a national budget. That would at least clarify what our national priorities really are.

6 - Will the first copy of the new Republican health care plan be put into the cornerstone of the new Wall along the Mexican border, to be opened in a hundred years as a historic document?

The Wall, briefly

Sometimes I talk too much. At least that's what my friends say.

So, here are just a couple of facts about The Wall without any comment.

First - A new estimate has just come out that the wall between the United States and Mexico will likely cost well over $20 billion - twice as much as the $10 to $12 billion that President Trump said it would cost while he was campaigning.

Second - Much of that increased cost is being blamed on the amount of land that will have to be condemned because of construction.

Third - A study by the University of Texas found that lots of ranchers and farmers who own land that is split by the existing wall have effectively lost their property on the other side.

Fourth - President Trump says that the cost estimates may look high now,  but that he expects it to go down because he drives a hard bargain. Just look at what happened to the price of jet fighters, he says.

Fifth - Farmers who need to borrow money year to buy seed and ranchers who need to buy cows or feed very often go to banks and put up their land to secure short-term loans.

Sixth and Final Point - So, what happens when the farmers can't borrow money for seed, or when the illegals who have harvested crops each year can't come across The Wall to do the work?

Mission Impossible and Donald Trump

 I have been thinking a bit about the limits of Presidential power. To be more specific, just what can the president do to keep our nation safe.

Now, to be fair, I come at this question from a rather contrary point of view. I used to enjoy Mission Impossible as a kid. Every week, the team figured out some elaborate scheme to get rid of some bad guy. Often, they did it by arranging for some other bad guy to kill him.

It made me wonder why they didn’t just shoot the bad guy themselves and save 20 minutes or so of program time. Remember, this was long before James Bond.

So now, years later, we have a president who tells us that, for national security reasons that can’t be disclosed to a judge, he has to keep hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country for 90 days.

OK, maybe our immigration standards are so poor that terrorists will come flooding in on flights tomorrow if the ban doesn’t go into effect immediately. Or, maybe not. Maybe he knows something I don’t.

But. what if the president got a tip that two terrorists were coming into the country wearing sweatshirts and were planning to release a deadly germ in a bus terminal or a subway. Fine, let's immediately ban people wearing sweatshirts from getting on airplanes, and let's detain everyone on airplanes coming into the country wearing sweatshirts until we can check them out extremely - we’ll only have to hold some of them for a week or so.

Or, maybe, the president hears something about terrorists from the Middle East planning to attack the United States. And, he goes to a list of seven countries where our vetting process isn’t great, and says let's stop immigration for 90 days until we figure out how to check the backgrounds of people coming from there.

And, let's say the terrorists realize this, and just go to another nearby country not on the list, and come into the United States from there.

But we don’t have to pick any specific example. All we have to realize is that the president has the power to do many things to keep our nation safe from terrorism, but that he doesn’t have the unilateral power to do everything he wants to keep us safe.

That does, of course, get into the question of drones and killing terrorists, and suspected terrorists, and some of the innocent people - children included - who may be with the suspected terrorists when the bomb hits. It did, as I recall, raise some problems for the previous administration.

Still, in the end,  our president, unlike the secretary in Mission Impossible, can’t disavow all knowledge of the people working for him.

Just how to non-citizens get Constitutional rights?

  

People keep asking how non-citizens manage to get Constitutional rights. Now, they’re asking it about President Trump’s proposed 90-day ban on immigration from several countries in the Middle East.

But. in the past, it has been asked about a lot of other things. Still, it is always the same question - why do non-citizens get the rights that our country gives to its citizens.

I just watched a debate on this on TV. And, sadly, none of the commentators managed to give the right answer. So, let me try.

The Constitution of the United States of America - a wonderful document, by the way - generally does two things. It tells us what the federal government can do and it tells us what the federal government can not do.

It does not divide rights between citizens and non-citizens when it bans certain actions. It simply says that the federal government can’t do that to anybody.

Let's take something really simple, freedom of speech.

The government can not keep someone from speaking in public, or printing something for the public to read. (Again, an exception might be made - in time of war, for example, you can’t publish the timetable of cargo ships carrying troops or medical supplies).

What the government can do is take action against someone who has said or done something it feels is improper - after they say it or print it.

So, when Donald Trump says - without offering any proof - that he is banning an existing government process for 90 days because “the security of our nation is at stake,”    you or I or anyone else has the right to go to court to ask him to prove it.

In the case of immigration, for example, the federal government might have to show why refugee immigrants are banned from coming into the country under an existing review program that already takes a year or more to get through, while the door is wide open to people from those very same countries who come in on student visas. To me, its just common sense that an 18-year-old is more likely to be a terrorist than a six year old child.

But, that’s something for a court to decide.

Information Overload

So I woke up the other day and went through the usual routine - let the dogs out, feed the cats, let the dogs in and feed them, make a cup of coffee, go out and pick up the paper from the driveway, and drink the coffee.

And, suddenly, I was paralyzed. I just sat there, cup to my lips, my mind just so overloaded from reading the paper that I couldn’t come up with a single cohesive thought.

Trump did this. Trump did that. Pence did this. Bannon did that. People in ______ are upset about our new national policies. Trump may have actually done something right, and deserves credit for a wise decision.  (Yes. I actually agree with him on something). Trump tweeted. Trump trumped himself.

That’s what my life has become. Information overload. Without any real information.

I know the Trump Motus Operandi. Promise everything and deliver nothing. Although lately it seems to have changed to promise one thing and deliver another, or just deliver something no one ever expected and claim you are just living up to your promise. 

Its change. Its change. That’s what I promised.

Just imagine a small child being sent to their room, crying “I know I promised to be good, but I never promised good to who.”

I can’t turn on the TV or the radio without hearing about the latest Trump this or Trump that, and the list of commentators who are right - who are so right - has been building like an avalanche. Good God (an insight here) I seem to be adding to this myself.

And, I can’t stop. Information overload. Wait. Look over there. Dodd-Frank must be preserved. Look over there. Out the window. The warmest year on record, once again, and its raining, not snowing in February.

Or over there, at our allies, who are feeling the wrath. Even Vladimir Putin seems to have been double-crossed.

And my coffee was getting cold. And the dogs were barking. And the cats were being cute. And I turned the page without really seeing it.

God help me.

I'm OK, you're OK

We live in a world of superlatives. It's second nature to us.

Our children are the smartest, are grandchildren are the cutest. Our favorite baseball team is usually number one - at least until the season starts - and the beer we drink while cooking burgers on the grill is always better than the swill that other people buy.

As a nation, we celebrate the best. And the best of the best. We publish lists of best-selling books and then go out and buy them, keeping them on the list a lot longer. We review movies and proclaim them the best of the year (ignoring the fact that it may only be March), and we give awards to the best of the best that lead to speeches that begin “I’d like to thank the academy....

OK. I’ve done it myself. Lots of times. At least with the cutest kids stuff.

There’s a downside, too. Things that are merely bad become terrible. “That’s the worst show I ever saw,” comes to mind.

But, with most people, there is also a reality check.

For many football fans, the best quickly drops each season to “best in the division” and then shifts down to “best chance of being in the wild card playoffs.” On lots of TV reality shows, the best cook or the best designer doesn’t last too long. Just until the next show. And the best car or truck in its class doesn’t turn out to be the one that everyone buys.

And the “C” that your child will surely get some day on their report card turns out not to be the end of the world. Not getting that job you interviewed for is something people learn to accept.

In fact, most people have developed a healthy skepticism when someone claims to be the smartest or the richest or the bravest. And, yes, while I am going there, I’m not quite going in the direction you expect.

Me, and apparently half the country - give or take a few - have rejected our President’s claims to be smarter than the generals and more caring for the poor than Planned Parenthood and getting a bigger audience than Arnold did on the Apprentice. (I’ll give him that one).

And, what bothers me about our newly-elected President is that, with him, nothing is OK. Just OK.

Some stuff has to be.  Things like breakfast cereal or the three year old car in my driveway. I love my two dogs, but will certainly admit that their breed may be great for me but might not be the best for everyone. Heck, when the mail sometimes comes late it doesn’t make my postal carrier the worst in the world.

Now, I expect a little hype on the people President Trump has named to serve on his cabinet, But, how could all of those people turn out to be the best and the brightest and the smartest. Especially when we all know that President Kennedy trademarked “best and the brightest” decades ago. (I would hate to think the Trump camp would sink to plagiarism.)

All his hotels and golf courses can’t be the best, and all the places he has leased his name to certainly aren’t all the most wonderful in the world. 

 By the way, why has he never looked around the Trump Empire and told us which hotel and which golf course is really the best one? Would that make all the others second-rate?

 No. What I thought was just a little annoyance about our new President - his vocabulary - is turning out to be a really big thing. Now his speeches and public comments are generally short and direct. No soaring heights of phrasing or glowing images. Which isn’t all bad. Ernest Hemingway was a great writer, and his language was just as direct.

What’s missing from Trump Talk is the living heart of his ideas. Ronald Reagan gave us a shining city on a hill that would be an inspiration to all mankind. Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us so many wonderful visions that it would be hard to count. All we get from Trump is “Great.”  And he never explains why great for him is great for me. The same way that members of Congress don’t exactly have to go out and buy health insurance on the open market. They have a great plan - actually they can take any one of 57 options in the Gold Tier government health plan available to them.

But back to Trump Talk. In all the things I have heard from him, the world is divided between the very good and the very bad. Australia has a refugee policy - it’s great or it’s terrible. Marco Rubio is running against him, he’s the worst. Stops running, and he suddenly has a wonderful future.

It kind of rules good old simple competence out of the equation. You know, the auto mechanic who knows how to fix your car, or the teacher who educates your child, or the farmer who grows your food. Or the negotiators who worked out a trade agreement covering literally thousands of items. Just simple competence, the kind we need every day in more ways than we can count.

It is a huge, huge part of living. Not everyone and everything can be the best. Or the worst.

Now, we all know there is a very thin line between love and hate. But, just how comfortable can it be knowing that you are a really bright star in the Trump sky, and there is only one place to go from there.

Just ask Arnold. You know, the one who was a terrible governor and has lousy ratings.

Words

Words

I was an English major in college, which of course left me with great love and respect for words. And I once took a class in what was called “general semantics,” which was filled with lots of cryptic observations like “the map is not the territory.”

That was a way of saying that the words we use to describe something do not actually describe it, not all of it. Which sounds like a meaningless generality until the night you try to drive over the bridge your GPS says is there, only to find out it was washed out a month before.

(I could have said ‘such’ as instead of ‘like’ in that first sentence, but us English majors have the secret power to warp phrases and misuse punctuation marks to give added meaning or just for fun).

Anyway, reflecting on the denial that the Muslim ban proposed by Donald Trump’s administration is not really a Muslim ban because it doesn’t bar all Muslims from entering the United States makes me wish that only English majors knew about the power to warp words.

Oh, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it must be a duck is mostly true - although rubber duckies do not make good targets for hunters - but there is a lot more to dislike in this denial.

Lets see how many words have been bent and how many have actually been debated in the public forum. In no particular order:

1 - You don’t have to ban all Muslims to impose a ban on Muslims. Germans didn’t kill every Jew in Europe and lynch mobs in the south didn’t kill every black, but those rotten displays of behavior were clearly anti-Semitic and racist.

2 - If you decide to stop people from entering your country because they may pose a threat, you probably should start with the most dangerous people first. Banning six year old children and elderly grandparents has nothing to do with terrorism. If you say we are just banning all people from countries roiled by terror, than the ban should certainly include France and Israel. And, maybe, any country that has a national soccer team.

3 - If you claim that this ban is making our country safer by keeping out the bad dudes and dudettes, then you should say what’s wrong with the existing vetting procedure and how you will fix it.

4 -  And as long as we’re on enhanced vetting, just what is it? I recently watched the new head of Homeland Security on TV explain that it meant looking up people on social media and checking their e-mail to see if they have contacts with terrorists. Somehow, I don’t feel much safer.

5 - You can’t say this abrupt shift in procedure is needed to keep us safe, and then say it will end in 60 or 90 or 120 days. That lets the bad dudes and dudettes just wait 60 or 90 pr 120 days to apply for admission to our country, and then just wait for a year or two to go through our old vetting process.

6 - You can’t deny that this new process is harming our national security because it only keeps some bad people out of the country.  Not until you explain how a translator working for the Army in one of those banned nations can not get into the country even though that promise was made to him years ago. 

   Of course, those clever radical Islamists might have planted a sleeper or two in our intelligence service years ago, and had them work as translators against their own people for years just to get into the United States.

  Or, maybe, they could have just sent him or her to school, got good grades, and gotten admitted to some American college, which would have been less work and cheaper, too.

So, I guess the misused word for the day is “security.”

The Wall

When he ordered work to begin immediately on the wall between the United States and Mexico, Donald Trump set a lot of things in motion. But, unintentionally I think, he also created a mirror.

A lot of politics is like that. Take something - real or imagined or just proposed - and people look at it and see what they want to see, a reflection of something within themselves they project onto the thing in question.

To many liberals, the wall is a betrayal of everything written on the base of the Statue of Liberty. To many conservatives, it's a  badly needed line in the sand to show that our country really means what it says about immigration and Law and Order.

The politicians seem to have missed the point on this one. But, I think, the media seems to have missed it, too. And yet, it keeps coming up again and again, like dandelions in an otherwise beautiful suburban lawn.

So, let's do something really radical. Let's take a look at what a wall really is, and what starting work on it immediately really means.

It's not pretty. Or, it might be. No one knows just what it would look like, although President Trump has given some pretty glowing descriptions. I haven’t heard anything from the architects or engineers, so I’m holding off on an aesthetic judgment.

It's likely to be very solid and very expensive. President-elect Trump said it would be big, and beautiful, with wonderful doors in it, and that it would be 30 or 40 or 50 feet high.

But, to build something that big, you need to move heavy equipment all along the route of the proposed wall, equipment that you can’t just bring up a rutted dirt trail or up a sharp mountain incline. Not to mention shoring up some of those slopes where water runs down from the hills and creates erosion problems.

So, first, we have to build a one lane road the whole width of the proposed wall. Or a two lane road, since some equipment will be really wide, and trucks will have to pass each other sooner or later. And that won’t be big enough. Since you have to do work on both sides of the wall as you build it, you are now building a four-lane highway the whole length of the border between the United States and Mexico.  That’s a whole new interstate that almost no one will ever drive on.

Then there’s the annoying question of just where to put it.You can’t build it until you survey it - you know the guys on the side of any road project who stand behind a tripod waving at another worker holding a marker 50 or 60 feet away. And, their survey requires a complete plan.  A complete route for the wall. 

Which, at this point doesn’t exist. Yes, the border between the United States and Mexico is pretty well defined - let's say it's the Rio Grande in part - but you aren’t building the wall right on the bank of that river, or right across a whole lot of other obstacles unless you want to spend a lot more than the billion dollars or so that people are estimating to be the construction cost.

Another President, Teddy Roosevelt, used to go for a walk with members of the press corps following him. He would point somewhere and then just walk straight down the line, going over or under anything in his way. But, we build things on the flattest ground we can find, which means planning a whole route.

So, build the wall really means hire the architects and engineers and landscapers and surveyors to figure out just where it will go. But, that’s wrong too. There is another step that comes first.

You have to own the land that you are building the wall on. And, right now, we don’t. If you think it can be done, just try building a fence on your neighbor’s property. Not a 50-foot high one, just a little six-foot chain link fence to keep in your pet dog.

The government can acquire the land it needs by condemnation,  but they can’t start without knowing precisely what is being condemned. So, along with the engineers and architects, we have to hire a lot of lawyers. Funny how you always end up hiring lawyers. 

And remember that If the wall cuts a cattleman’s range or a farmer’s property, the property they can no longer get to must be paid for as well. You just can’t buy the 20 or 40 or 60-foot wide strip for the wall itself. Or, we will have to build a whole lot of doors in the wall so those landowners can drive cattle and tractors through.  And the farmers have to get the keys to the doors, or we have to hire more government workers with master keys to all those locks who are on call every sunrise.

Now for the big, beautiful design. If I put up a chain link fence around my house, there is no problem with wind or rain falling on it, and the posts can be anchored in some concrete a few feet below the surface of the ground.

But look at any of the sound barriers along interstate highways, and you can see they are pretty massive things. And they aren’t 50 feet high. No, for that kind of wall you need footings that go deep into the ground to support its weight and to deal with the wind.

That’s one reason the Great Wall of China is not just a fence, but something wide enough to stand up to wind pressure and, by the way, wide enough to have a small road on the top of it.

All of this could change, of course, if we don’t build a traditional wall but a real high-tech one with drones and sensors and real people on patrol, or with new materials that are super strong and which will have enough holes to let water and the wind get through. But, that isn’t happening if you start work on it in 100 days. And, now that we have a two-lane road on both sides of the wall, any gaps will pose a real big problem.

So, as I see it, about the only thing that will be happening during the first few years of the “start work immediately” order is that we will be building a great wall of paperwork - actually a lot of it will be on computer hard drives, but agencies still require printed copies of things - and hiring a lot of lawyers.

Funny how you always need lawyers.