From this article on the Huffington Post site:
WASHINGTON (AP) —" Congressional negotiators reached agreement to prevent a government shutdown and finance construction of new barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, overcoming a late-stage hang-up over immigration enforcement issues that had threatened to scuttle the talks."
"Republicans were desperate to avoid another bruising shutdown. They tentatively agreed
Monday night to far less money for President Donald Trump’s border wall than the White
House’s $5.7 billion wish list, settling for a figure of nearly $1.4 billion, according to
congressional aides. The funding measure is through the fiscal year, which ends on
Sept. 30."
"The agreement means 55 miles (88 kilometers) of new fencing — constructed
through existing designs such as metal slats instead of a concrete wall — but far less than
the 215 miles (345 kilometers) the White House demanded in December. The fencing
would be built in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas."
A word of caution is in order, however. The president has not yet signed the agreement,
though it is believed that he will.
I was amused to read my google news feed this morning. The first headlined story said that Kevin McCarthy claims that Pelosi and the Dems caved to Trump.
ReplyDeleteThe second headline says that Trump is pretending that Congress had not just demolished his wall.
The third headline said the deal falls short of Trump's demand and is worse than the deal he could have had last December.
I didn't bother to click on the stories. We'll see how it unfolds. It isn't over until he signs the legislation.
I think people are angry witb both the president and Congress, and they are feeling the heat to get it worked out. But it's not impossible that Trump could screw it up again.
DeleteThis may avert a 100% shutdown. But government functions in many departments like the EPA have been partially shut down, being hamstrung by Trumps appointments of billionaires, lobbyists and idiots to lead them.
DeleteStanley, yes, cutting off funds isn't the only way to destroy a deparment. Appointing incompetents and dumb@sses will do it, too.
DeleteFor example, David Bernhardt, whom Trump has nominated to replace the tarnished Zinke as head of the Interior Department. Mr. Bernhardt's Job One is to eliminate endangered species protection on a small fish, the delta smelt, so more water can be released to farmers. The move would also "devastate the regional ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Delta, scientists say, imperiling dozens of other fish up the food chain and affecting water birds, orcas and commercial fisheries and encouraging toxic algal blooms."
DeleteYeah, and so what?
Before coming to the attention of our president, Mr. Bernhardt was a lobbyist -- for, inter alia, those California farmers who are about to see the end of those troublesome smelt.
ttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/climate/david-bernhardt-endangered-species.html?action=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Hi, FWIW, I read about this news in our local suburban newspaper, which picked up the Associated Press story. If you consider AP to be less partisan than HuffPost (I do, but ymmv I suppose), I'd note the following about the AP story: it recited the same facts about the reduced border wall funding; but it also called out that Democrats had apparently scotched a deal last week over the issue of the number of detention beds to be made available for border detainees. It seems that Democrats caved on that issue yesterday, and that opened the way for this agreement to be reached.
ReplyDeleteHad the government shut down again, I don't know whether the public would have blamed Democrats this time because of the detainee-beds issue (isn't everyone's instinct to blame Trump finely honed at this point?), but it seems possible that Dems at least felt vulnerable enough over it not to let it be a deal-killer.
I'm trying to read the tea leaves about what Democrats are thinking these days, but it's still pretty murky to me. The conventional wisdom is that Nancy Pelosi cleaned the president's clock in the last shutdown; and Democrats are coming off of a pretty successful wave election in 2018. But it feels like things are shifting in some ways. Maybe Democrats are going to lean in more on the environment and health care, and lean back a little bit on the border and identity politics? Not that Democrats care less about the latter two sets of issues, but perhaps politically those issues are a bit more zero-sum than the environment and health care?
Actually, it appears that the HuffPost article was from AP. Huff is not my favorite venue; I prefer our regional daily, which is less partisan. But things sometimes appear in HuffPost before anyone else gets them. And said regional daily is often a day late getting their scoops.
DeleteI don't know if people would have blamed the Dems more; at this point I think people are just sick of the whole mess and want it to go away.
FWIW, a columnist in National Catholic Reporter came out with this endorsement. Don't Know if Joe B. is testing the waters or not.
DeleteThe bed tiff looks like a negotiating ploy/marker to me. Ds give up the beds (that they thought of lately), and Trump gives up most of his Wall. D's have put the beds in play for the future. The great negotiator gets a few miles of fence.
DeleteI read the NCR article endorsing Biden. The writer opined we should crawl before we walk. Did we crawl before we walked during the New Deal? Or fighting WWII? Pelosi putting down the Green New Deal as a dream shows she's another corporate Democrat. You can doodlef**k about medical care and taxing the rich, but the big steamroller of climate physics is on the way, Madame Speaker. Steamrollers roll over crawlers.
DeleteUnfortunately we are steamrollered in the shorter term (likely measured in centuries) no matter what we do. Efforts to mitigate climate change are for the sake of our descendants, whether literal or in a collective sense. I do hope (but I am a realist) that politicians and policy makers are honest about that, and don't promise that we will see a reversal in our lifetimes.
Delete"Actually, it appears that the HuffPost article was from AP."
DeleteYeah, thanks for pointing that out, that's really interesting. I had to go back and double-check both stories. Two different stories, by two different sets of authors, with two different slants or angles, all about the same set of events, and from the same wire service. I didn't know that happened. Hey journalist out there: what I just described: is that standard practice?
About as good as could be expected. Token amount for wall, token reduction in ICE beds, agreement on non-wall security (including mean dogs, shades of the Stasi and Alabama cops on the Edmund Pettis Bridge). Nothing about DACA, which Congress STILL needs to address.
ReplyDeleteIngraham, Coulter, and Hannity, the Triumvirate.of Horrors on the right, are outraged, so that's a bit of sweet on the side.
Addenda to my previous comment: I wrote, regarding what Democrats are thinking: "It feels like things are shifting in some ways". C minus grade for my being so unclear; the "things" I think are in flux right now are Democrats' thoughts for the future.
ReplyDeleteAlso, here is a URL to the AP story - my apologies if you hit a subscriber wall or something similar; I hit one, and I *am* a subscriber to this newspaper.
https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20190211/lawmakers-reach-border-funding-deal-to-avert-shutdown
Jim, You simply have forgotten what a big tent looks like. There are some not-dead Ds running around, but a lot of the sensitive oldsters are still brain dead and still there. Our political parties are better when they have competing ideologies within them instead of when they are responding to competing faux ideologies on the tellyvision.
DeleteJim, the most "just the news" site I read is Reuters. And it's free. The Media Bias site rates them as "least biased" and "most factual" - the same rating that AP has. PBS Newshour gets a center-left bias rating, "often uses loaded words".
ReplyDeleteBTW, the WaPo has been offering discounted subscriptions to the digital version at $52/year (I think. I already have a digital subscription, taken out when they upped my paper subscription from $110/year to $500+/year.
I used to get a WaPo electronic subscription bundled in as part of my local newspaper subscription - they had some sort of a partnership. Alas, it is no more. I'm now paying $4/month for NY Times electronic content. In some ways I prefer WaPo. But I can't pay for everything. Maybe there is a way I can read WaPo via our local library ...
DeleteJim, I have found that if I really want to read a WaPo article I can usually find it somewhere else if I google the title and author. NYT articles, not so much. They just link you back to a pay wall. Like you say, we can't pay for everything. I subscribe to 2 papers as it is.
DeleteWell, for me, the WaPo IS the local newspaper.
DeleteI didn't ever read the NYTimes until Trump started slamming it. So I took out a digital subscription. They do have a more liberal slant than WaPo, but they have a lot of good stuff, so I am keeping the subscription. We don't go out much to movies, theaters etc, especially now because of my hearing loss, so the NYTimes is a form of entertainment for me also - get away from Trump and politics.
However, I am thinking of renewing my lapsed subscription to The Economist also as they provide by far the best and most in-depth international coverage around. They do have a number of free features, but not everything.
I often do what Katherine does if I hit a paywall - google the title and author and often find it elsewhere.
But, that doesn't work with some pubs, as Katherine noted. It doesn't work with the WSJ either when I have tried. I get a headline email every day from The Times of London. They give me two free articles/week. But I sometimes see story topics of interest and no more freebies for the week, so I just google the topic and often find a different story about the same subject.
When I'm really desperate, I log in to the library's electronic data base and can find most publications there, but it's not the most user friendly data base.
At one time someone somewhere was proposing to create an intermediary service that would allow consumers like us to pay for the content we wish to read, regardless of who published it, an article at a time, but the payment would be a small amount - a penny or less per hit on the Internet. The service would charge us, and would also take care of making the publishers financially whole on the back end, so they're not pressured to give their content away for free. Given the desperate state of many newspapers and other traditional publishers, it would seem to be a sorely-needed thing. I wonder whatever happened to it.
DeleteiTunes for news? Good idea.
DeleteIf any of you want to go together on a subscription. today's Valentine promotion at WaPo is $75/year digital that includes letting one other person have access.
Unlimited access to washingtonpost.com on any device
Unlimited access to all Washington Post apps
1 bonus digital subscription to share with a friend or family member ($100/year value)
30-day digital pass to give to a friend or family member every month
Unlimited downloads of top-rated e-books from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists at The Washington Post
My buddy, Sen. Chuck.Grassley, offers a P.S. to today's opening prayer in the Senate: "Let's all pray that the president will have the wisdom to sign the bill so the government doesn't shut down."
ReplyDeletehttps://mobile.twitter.com/cspan/status/1096067220638261248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1096070963236691968&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fpolitics%2F2019%2F02%2F14%2Fpray-that-president-will-have-wisdom-sen-grassley-offers-rare-bit-commentary-while-presiding-over-senate%2F
It looks like, from both Huff Post and WaPo, that he's going to sign it. And then declare his "emergency" and bogart the funds from somewhere else. Which is maybe the best we can hope for, at least he won't be holding the Federal employees hostage again.
DeleteNo, and Democrats may be able to block the "emergency" as an abuse of power. He seems poised to raid, among other things, disaster relief funds, which means that if you are a victim of a natural disaster later this year, sorry Charlie.
DeleteGood move, putz, with an El Nino brewing in the Pacific.
McConnell seemed open to legislation that would prevent shutdowns, and I hope there is some bipartisan effort to do that.
Looks like Trump did the dirty deed. I actually listened to the jerk for this one. He has now abused an executive power. So much of our governmental system is not specified in written documents. It depends on a tacit knowledge of what checks and balanceb are. Certainly climate change is more of a national emergency, and Mitchie has expressed his fear that a future president could use this to push a Green New Deal. As someone who is panicked about climate, I would not support a president doing this. But, then again, I still have a democratic vision of America. Trumpsters don't.
Delete