teacher's are. teacher's spouses aren't always.

i know lots of deeply conservative men that have teacher wives, WI doesn't have that bad of a natural division historically and it hasn't been a thing that tears households apart. But that stopped when Walker changed it from historically being a budgetary allocation thing to it being straight up about pay and benefits. Now husbands aren't just hearing their wives cry about the lack of specialist support or # of ipads per classrom, it's now "We as a house will make 5k less than we could have".

While it may have been possible for Devos to gain some traction back (not that i expected her to) she has instead had a bad reputation and so the divide has gotten worse between educators/educator-adjacent types, and the GOP. was what i meant by that one.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 31 2019 01:32pm

Dear lord he's such a thin-skinned prick.

Nah, he is right to call the press on calling political motives before things are resolved. It causes bias among people and presents a bad image for incoming politicians.

Who knew that reporting what he said would be "mischaracterizing"
It's not the first time he bad mouthed the IC, so why did he suddenly decide to back peddle on what he said the other day?

another legal port of entry large scale smuggling bust

And your point is? Of course criminals will use the more convenient legal ports of entry as long as the pressure from law enforcement is low enough. But as long as the border isnt secured, ramping up the pressure on the legal ports of entry would just cause the smuggling routes to sidestep to the border in the wilderness.

Once the border is secured, enforcement can ramp up and have an actual effect, can actually reduce the amount of drugs/human trafficking/... coming into the country instead of just causing an evasion movement.

true enough. and that's the reason the $5-6bn pricetag is horseshit. it covers the non-wilderness areas. and we'll then need to provide billions more every year for perhaps a decade to get it secured. thats neither an argument for nor against border security, its an argument for transparency. and when Trump and other people claim the wall isn't needed in all places because some are harsh wilderness he's lying, and he knows it. he's setting up the next need for the wall, "oh look how tenacious these immigrants are, now we need an even better wall."

for trump personally, it's about keeping face when it comes to his key campaign promise, a promise he cant afford to just abandon - at least if he wants to stand any chance in 2020.
for his advisors and the thought leaders on the right, e.g. Stephen Miller, it's about a paradigm shift, it's about making the wider public aware of the magnitude of the problem of the functionally open border, and about convincing them that the border hawks' perspective is the correct one.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 1 2019 07:27am

they're still running on face validity. they haven't, and can't, prove that the wall will save money overall. so they are trying really hard to constantly steer the conversation with 2 narratives.

1. Israel has a wall, it works great, so that means any wall will be as effective.

2. Welfare, food stamps, lost wages to citizens = wall will save money.

that's a hard argument to make for reasonable people when at the same time you're lying about the pricetag.

Trump's wall has boiled down to his core, likely 30-35% of the GOP, being wildly in favor of the wall and the other 80% of the country split between anti wall and "can't we be done with this issue already". the problem with people who want to see it done just to stop hearing about it is they're setting themselves up to take another big bill in a year or so.