Well, nice to see we were right and it was all a publicity stunt. A dangerous stunt, but a stunt nonetheless.
And @oldfella1962 is shown to be completely wrong about the motives of trump as he tells the military he wants them to shoot immigrants in the face on the border, Despite it being completely unconstitutional for law enforcement duties to be taken on by the military twitler thinks he is above the constitution and law of the country and wants the military to use deadly force on people crossing the border and has issued a memo declaring his orders. I expect that this will immediately be excused by @oldfella1962 who is one of our local Russian bots who cannot allow any wrongdoing by the president to be mentioned without his mental gymnastics as to why twitler is allowed to operate above the constitution. I should also note that this will probably be ignored by the military and challenged in the courts before being tossed into the trash heap of unconstitutional bullshit twitler has tried, and we should be hearing the first toddler and his minions whining over how the courts are all in Obama's pockets as our thanksgiving surprise. https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/cae2ead2-5871-3488-9207-7593ebb9d9d7/white-house-approves-use-of.html
nice rant! Might want to save it for when a soldier shoots a brown person in the face. Don't hold your breath!
You were the one claiming trump did not want deadly force used on immigrants when I said it. Now you move the goal posts to a what if that may not be possible if the courts step in and stomp all over trump's illegal orders or the pentagon acts within the constitution despite trump's declaration. None of this goal post shifting saves you from being wrong about your glorious leader little hands twitler.
Are you saying he was forced to have tighter border security and more Border Patrol agents than any previous president and deport more people than any other president, including Trump?
Then why did he increase border security and border guards and deportations to unprecedented levels? He did those things.
I try desperately to assume you are NOT this stupid but every time I come here I find it even more challenging.
Most children are not very bright. It would be truly shameful if @Federal Farmer were an adult and this stupid.
The answer to your question is no, but he decides how to administer the policies. So why, during the first two years of Obama's presidency, when we had a democratic president and democratic control of the Senate, did border security increase to unprecedented levels, the number of border guards increase to unprecedented levels, and more people were being deported than under any other president, including Trump, when the Democrats wanted open borders? Why did Obama UNILATERALLY send troops to the border if he wanted them to be open?
Trump is rambling again, claims he's authorised lethal force at the border and that they'll "shut the whole thing" if need be: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/22/politics/trump-us-troops-lethal-force-closing-border/index.html Matthis has quickly come out to say that troops have been authorised to assist border patrol/customs if they encounter violence but this does not mean lethal force - troops will be equipped with riot gear.
mainly pandering to conservative xenophobes without accepting the reality that actual facts don't change their minds and they can still be manipulated by Trumpublicans anyway.
At this point my only objection is this puts the military in pointless danger if they are too spread out. I imagine the armed forces are not going to position 1 soldier per mile as would be about the distance between them that the present number would achieve. They will probably be in groups with the border patrol. They will probably keep order at major crossing points. It won't stop people from crossing in the more remote areas, and there is no funding for the wall of trumpian stupidity. At this point trump is impotent and all his calls are doing is pumping up his base while being ineffective to any problem. Now that the dems control the house it is up to them to either stop his wall funding or hand him the ball to avoid victory. He has to do these pointless things so he can claim the dems are holding him back and get his base all rowdy for 2020. Shooting immigrants in the face seems to be the main battle cry of the confederacy nowadays.
"At this point my only objection is this puts the military in pointless danger if they are too spread out. I imagine the armed forces are not going to position 1 soldier per mile as would be about the distance between them that the present number would achieve." - Tererun Damn this reminds of something which is (to me) funny as hell. This will sound like something from the M*A*S*H TV show, but bear with me: When we were in Balad Iraq (just north of Baghdad) we had a pretty big perimeter to guard. We had guard towers every couple of hundred meters or so. Anyway sometimes there was no way to man every tower with two soldiers per tower. So they had fake soldier cutouts (kind of like the actual sized celebrity advertising cutouts in stores) in some towers along with a real soldier to make it look from a distance like the tower was fully manned to cover two directions for an interlocking "field of fire" between towers. Apparently no bad guys in Iraq had ever heard of binoculars before. None of them ever did try getting close enough to find out for sure what the deal was. They just fired mortars from so far out we couldn't see them anyway, so it was kind of a moot point. But I wish I could have been in the briefing tent when somebody pitched the "fake soldier" idea!
I was in the Air Force from 1980-1984. I joined the Army in 1988 working air traffic control equipment repair. So in the sandbox our unit set up & operated airfields for helicopters. Sometimes the air force would have their own airfields for their fixed wing aircraft at the same location. We were the first ones in to new areas because setting up a long improved runway capable of handling heavier aircraft takes more time - helicopters can land & take off almost anywhere of course.
HA! Good one - very topical! Seriously though, rain is no problem for us. We set up radars (part of our air traffic control equipment) so they can fly IFR (instrument flight rules) as well as VFR (visual flight rules). And they can fly with night vision capability too when needed, mostly for combat operations. That said until we get the radar officially flight-checked/certified they can only fly VFR but in the sandbox rainy weather was a rarity. As (bad) luck would have it on 24 March 2003 the region got hit with the mother-of-all sandstorms and visibility was about zero feet! Nobody could fly, or even drive. You could barely walk - some people ran a long length of 550 cord with them when they had to go outside, so they could find their way back to their tent! The Weather Channel did a special on this epic sand storm. Anyway there we were deep into Iraq surrounded on all sides in a relentless sandstorm, and haven't had a chance to even set up communications or an airfield. We just got there the day before - this was the worst possible timing! Luckily the Special Forces (Australia & US) had ran most of the bad guys out just before we got there. But now they were trying to regroup and they knew the area like the back of their hand - and the Special Forces were long gone...... Good times!
Flashback to the '80s. When someone said that they wished to defect from the Soviet Union or other Eastern Bloc countries, did you sweat what happened to them after that? And by this, I mean, you figured that the government did whatever it did and those people were safe, right? Because you knew that communist governments were evil (I mean, look at all the people Stalin killed), so getting those people into the US was the important thing. What makes things different now? Seriously. Those athletes that defected to the US on their world tour, why did they wait until they got here before they defected? They stopped at any number of countries before reaching the US, but once here, they decided that this was the best place to defect. Was it our laws regarding refugees/defectors? Was it our way of life? I don't know. But I do know that I didn't give two shits about them after this point, because at least they were safe in the USA. I'd heard how bad that they had it in the USSR/GDR/other Eastern Bloc country. Are things better in, for example, Venezuela than they were in the Soviet Union? I don't know, but they're pretty bad. Let's say that shit got real bad here. You know, something like anyone who says something mildly critical (like "I don't think the President's hairstyle suits him) was enough to land you in jail. For whatever reason, you decide that it's better to move to another country than to stay and fight. You have two choices, you can walk to Mexico and seek help, or you can walk to Canada. Which do you choose? Mexico? I mean, it's got a nice warm climate, but the drug lords control a lot of the country and kill thousands of innocent people all the time. Canada? It's cold as fuck there, but you don't have to worry about drug lords wiping your family out simply because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What makes things different now? I mean, we know that there's bad things happening in South and Central America, because every now and then we see things about it on TV/whatever. But we don't have the constant drumbeat about it on TV/etc like we used to do with the Soviet Union. Venezuela doesn't have the kind of navy that the USSR did, so there's no stories about them bumping into our ships on the nightly news, but does that mean the people fleeing the country are in any less danger than those fleeing the Soviet Union? Yes? No?
ruh-roh so, doesn't this qualify as an act of war? (oh... and Trump lied about what's going on... q'uelle surprise) Children 'Screaming and Coughing in the Mayhem' as Trump Border Patrol Fires Tear Gas Into Mexico "Strong breeze carried U.S.-launched teargas deeper into Mexico. Migrants ran for hundreds of yards before escaping the cloud." by Common Dreams staff 31 Comments A migrant family, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America en route to the United States, run away from tear gas in front of the border wall between the U.S and Mexico in Tijuana, Mexico November 25, 2018. (Photo: Reuters) This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates... After Central American migrants approached the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday to call attention to awful shelter conditions and request asylum, U.S. Border Patrol agents reportedly fired tear gas into Mexico, forcing parents with toddlers to flee. "Children were screaming and coughing in the mayhem," the Associated Press reported. "On the U.S. side of the fence, shoppers streamed in and out of an outlet mall." Earlier on Sunday, U.S. authorities closed off both directions of the San Ysidro port of entry, which is one of the largest border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico. "Imagine having tear gas launched at you after escaping gang violence/poverty while carrying your child," Juan Escalante, a columnist at the Huffington Post, wrote on Twitter. The demonstrations by Central American asylum seekers came amid reports that the Trump administration is looking to cut a deal with the newly-elected Mexican government to keep migrants out of the U.S. until their asylum claims are fully processed. While U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter late Saturday to claim that asylum seekers will now be forced to stay in Mexico until their cases are processed, the incoming Mexican government officials said publicly that no such agreement has been reached.
It probably is an act of war for Mexico to not stop those folks. Good catch. They’re lucky we only used tear gas.
