monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

US President Donald Trump's views on Mexico border wall have evolved, says his chief of staff, John Kelly.

Speaking to Fox News, Mr Kelly also did not deny reports that he had described the president as "uninformed" when he made campaign promises about a wall.

The comments were overheard during an immigration meeting on Wednesday, according to US media.

A row on immigration between lawmakers and the White House is currently risking a federal government shutdown.

Congress faces a deadline of midnight on Friday to pass a stopgap measure that would fund federal agencies until next month.

Democrats want the bill to include protections for immigrants who entered the US illegally as children, known as "Dreamers".

Republican President Trump has been fighting to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme.

However, he had signalled he was ready to make a deal to help the Dreamers, in return for funding for border-security plans, which include building a wall along the Mexican border.

Mr Kelly said the administration was now looking at creating a wall across 700 miles (1125 km) of the 3,100km stretch. He said this would include improving existing fences.

He said the estimated cost was $20bn (£14bn; 16bn euros); Mr Trump had originally put the figure at $10-$12bn.

During his election campaign, Mr Trump had also insisted Mexico would pay for it in its entirety.

Mr Kelly said they were now looking at alternative ways to raise funds, including via possible visa fees or renegotiating the Nafta trade deal.

"Campaigning is very different from governing," he said in the Wednesday night interview.

Earlier, other US media reported that Mr Kelly had privately told a group of Democrats from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that President Trump had not been fully informed when he came up with his wall plans.

Mr Kelly was quoted as saying that he had tried to persuade the president to change his position on the issue.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to be blamed for a federal shutdown with crucial mid-term elections looming in November.

Republicans have the advantage, by controlling both chambers of Congress, but they are seen as divided on key issues.

BBC News North America reporter Anthony Zurcher says if they stick together, the Republicans in the House of Representatives can pass some sort of short-term solution without any Democratic support. However, Senate Democrats will then have to decide whether they have the numbers to block the bill and force a shutdown.

Democrats want the funding bill to include protections for around 700,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.

Bipartisan immigration talks had sounded promising until it was reported last week that Mr Trump had dubbed certain nations "shitholes" during legislative negotiations.

The president gave a deadline of 5 March for Congress to come up with a solution.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin maintain a deal is still on the table.

But the White House has declared it dead, leaving immigration out of the spending bill to be voted on by Friday.

Immigration negotiations would continue next week if Democrats support the bill, said the White House.

House Republicans are trying to persuade Democrats to vote for the continuing resolution by including a provision to extend the Children's Health Insurance Program (Chip) for six years.

Chip, which provides healthcare for nine million children, is near the top of the Democrats' wish list.

At least some Democratic votes are needed to pass the budget measure ahead of Friday's deadline.

Republicans then have to tackle their own divisions, and hope a provision in the bill to eliminate a tax on expensive health plans could appease conservative lawmakers.

In December, Congress passed a similar short-term bill to keep the government open until 19 January.

The hope had been that Congress would have reached a deal on immigration by now.

And this deal, if it passes, would only keep the government running until 16 February.

The whole drama may be replayed in the coming weeks.

A nice dodge (It got 7 thumbs up) for refusing to respond to points made.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday the White House was merely insisting upon a decades-old practice of coordinating testimony of former officials to prevent any breaches of executive privilege.

Pity though that she didn't take time to lay out the many prior instances over the last decades where testimony was coordinated for the purpose of protecting exec privilege. She was probably busy.

Executive privilege is the power of the President of the United States and other members of the executive branch of the United States Government to resist certain subpoenas and other interventions by the legislative and judicial branches of government in pursuit of information or personnel relating to the executive.

The Supreme Court confirmed the legitimacy of this doctrine in United States v. Nixon in the context of a subpoena emanating from the judiciary, instead of emanating from Congress.[3] The Court held that there is a qualified privilege, which can be invoked and thereby creates a presumption of privilege, and the party seeking the documents must then make a "sufficient showing" that the "Presidential material" is "essential to the justice of the case" (418 U.S. at 713–14).

Generally speaking, presidents, congresses and courts have historically tended to sidestep open confrontations through compromise and mutual deference, in view of previous practice and precedents regarding the exercise of executive privilege.

The Clinton administration invoked executive privilege on fourteen occasions. In the Obama Administration, when Congress asked an agency for information about presidential communications, as it often did, the agency consulted with the White House to see if there were objections to responding.

In 1954, Eisenhower used the claim of executive privilege to forbid the "provision of any data about internal conversations, meetings, or written communication among staffers, with no exception to topics or people."

President Trump’s chief of staff privately told a group of Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had not been “fully informed” when promising voters a wall along the Mexican border last year,

"I'm going to build a wall on the southern border to protect your babies and house pets from those people but I first really need to get more fully informed on costs, feasible design options, how we'll pay and whether this will have any real positive effects on drug traffic and illegal immigration. I really don't know anything about that stuff"

"Campaigning is very different from governing," he [John Kelly] said in the Wednesday night interview.

On February 16, 2015, United States District Judge Andrew S. Hanen in Brownsville, Texas, issued a preliminary injunction against an executive action taken by President Barack Obama that would have given Illegal immigrants legal status and protection and let them apply for work permits.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans made a finding that the Immigration and Nationality Act “flatly does not permit” deferred action.

In United States v. Texas (2016), the United States Supreme Court, In a one-line per curiam decision, affirmed the lower-courtinjunction blocking the President's program.

The Democrat’s upset win [in Wisconsin] was the 34th pickup for the party of the 2018 cycle. Republicans have flipped four seats from blue to red — two in the Republican-trending Deep South, one in New Jersey and one in Massachusetts.

US President Donald Trump has denied his changing his views on the Mexico border wall.

It comes after his chief of staff, John Kelly, told Fox News that the president's opinions had evolved since his original campaign promises about its construction and funding.

Hours later, the president tweeted to say Mexico would still "directly or indirectly" pay for the wall.

I almost feel sorry for Kelly

Despite President Trump’s reported call to reject immigrants from “shithole countries,” people from these countries actually have plenty to teach us.
Let’s start with a quiz:

Which country was the first in the world to ban government discrimination against gays in its constitution?
A) Norway
B) New Zealand
C) South Africa

Answer: It’s the so-called s-hole country, South Africa. It also bans discrimination based on gender and disability. Someday all the world will be so enlightened.

1. Sierra Leone’s president has committed the country to providing free health care for children under 5 and for pregnant women, including prenatal care and deliveries, although care still lags. Meanwhile, in America the issue doesn’t get such high-level attention, so American women die in childbirth at five times the rate of British women.

2. Kenya is way ahead of the U.S. in mobile money. It’s easy in Kenya to transfer money by cellphone and to use a phone as a bank account. Nearly everyone has a mobile phone, and 88 percent of Kenyan mobile phone users also have mobile money accounts. Kenyans don’t understand why Americans are so backward in telecommunications.

3. Rwanda may eliminate cervical cancer before America, for Rwanda vaccinates virtually all girls against the human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer. By also employing screenings for older women who were not vaccinated, it aims to eliminate cervical cancer by 2020. In contrast, only 65 percent of American girls get vaccinated for HPV, and a woman dies every two hours in the U.S. from cervical cancer.

“I wish parents in the U.S. worked as hard as those in Rwanda to get their daughters vaccinated, so that they will never need to know the horrors of cervical cancer,” says Dr. Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

Indeed, while African leaders have worked very hard to raise vaccination rates and save lives, America has a president who has repeatedly cast doubt on vaccines.

4. Understanding the importance of languages in a globalized world, many Kenyans speak English, Swahili and a tribal language, and polyglots are common throughout Africa. In contrast, there’s the old joke: If somebody who speaks three languages is trilingual, and one who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one language? An American.

5. African health officials have strongly promoted breast-feeding to make sure that babies get the healthiest possible start in life. So while 20 percent of American babies are exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life, the figure is 42 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, it’s a stunning 87 percent.

6. African governments have conscientiously followed recommendations of the World Health Assembly to curb infant formula marketing that discourages breast-feeding; the U.S. has not. In this respect, suggests Shawn Baker of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “The U.S. might benefit from technical assistance from Botswana.”

7. Nigeria ensures that 93 percent of households get iodized salt, to reduce iodine deficiency that causes mental disability as well as goiters. In the U.S., only a bit more than half of salt sold to households is iodized, and iodine deficiency is becoming more common.

8. At a time when much of the rich world has turned against refugees, Uganda has quietly accepted more than one million South Sudan refugees. Likewise, the Diffa region of Niger is heroic in taking in refugees from northern Nigeria, and it now resettles refugees at extraordinarily high rates, helping the newcomers rather than demonizing them.

9. In the latest Freedom House index, the U.S. fell in the rankings of freedom and democracy and is now outranked by two African countries, Cape Verde and Mauritius. Both successfully manage multiracial societies in a way we can learn from.

10. The fastest-growing economy in the world is Ethiopia’s, according to the World Economic Forum, with Tanzania’s and Djibouti’s also in the top six. They are all growing more than twice as fast as the U.S. economy.

11. The Trump administration could learn something about diplomacy from Botswana, which asked the U.S. to please clarify whether the U.S. considers Botswana a shithole. No bluster, no military threats, no rude tweets — but the point was made.

12. Immigrants to the U.S. from Africa show a passion for education that can inspire us all. Sub-Saharan African-born immigrants are likelier to earn a college degree (39 percent) than native-born Americans (31 percent). That education, I trust, makes them wary of invidious insults aimed at entire continents and of stereotyping people from those continents.

“Africa, like any continent, has its problems,” notes Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch. “But it also has its areas where it excels. We diminish ourselves when we dismiss entire nations with an epithet rather than open ourselves to the positive examples they set.”