monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Steel Border Fence Stopped 91% of Illegal Immigration, Slashed Crime

Mulvaney said that Obama, Schumer and Clinton voted for a border wall in 2006.

They did vote for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized building a fence along about 700 miles of the border between the United States and Mexico.

Still, the fence they voted for is not as substantial as the wall Trump is proposing. Trump himself called the 2006 fence a "nothing wall."

Mulvaney’s statement is partially accurate, but ignores important context. We rate it Half True.

[...}On 15 January, they are set to update the World Magnetic Model, which describes the planet’s magnetic field and underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. [...]

Update, 9 January: The release of the World Magnetic Model has been postponed to 30 January due to the ongoing US government shutdown.

likening immigrants

The US will work with allies to "expel every last Iranian boot" from Syria, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.

Mr Pompeo warned there would be no US reconstruction aid for areas controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad until Iran and its proxies had left.

He also criticised ex-President Barack Obama's Middle East policy, saying he had made "dire misjudgements".

Mr Pompeo was speaking in Cairo three weeks after President Donald Trump said US troops were pulling out of Syria.

The announcement had shocked US allies and sparked strong criticism in Washington.

Mr Pompeo, who has been seeking to reassure allies following Mr Trump's surprise announcement, said: "America will not retreat until the terror fight is over. We will labour tirelessly alongside you to defeat Isis [the Islamic State group], al-Qaeda and other jihadists that threaten our security and yours."

He said that the US was a "force for good" in the Middle East, adding: "Where America retreats, chaos follows."

Border fences are not built to deter legal immigration.

he just prefers the white ones.

Iran, like Russia are both way to important for Assad's survival so it really doesn't matter what America offers.

What are they built for?

“Alternative facts”: The term manages to be tedious, ridiculous and perilous at once — a real sign of the times. For anyone who doesn’t remember, Kellyanne Conway introduced it in early 2017 to defend the White House’s falsehoods about attendance numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration the week before. There she was on “Meet the Press,” serenely chiding an exasperated Chuck Todd for being “overly dramatic” as he repeatedly tried to get her to concede that lying to the American public was bad.

Her phrasing may have been new, but Conway was taking part in what has apparently become a conservative tradition — performing a skepticism so extreme that it makes the ancient Greek skeptics look like babes in the woods. Recall a high-ranking aide in the Bush administration needling a journalist for belonging to “the reality-based community.” A respect for facts, the aide suggested, was ultimately for suckers: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

(...)

The book contains useful summaries of the debates in the 1980s around the ozone layer and acid rain. Drawing from the research of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in “Merchants of Doubt” (2010), O’Connor and Weatherall compare industry-sponsored campaigns questioning environmental damage to the strategic skepticism of tobacco companies, which disputed the link between smoking and lung cancer by insisting that the link wasn’t utterly definitive. As one tobacco executive put it, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public.”

The debate — or as the authors might put it, “debate” — around climate change has followed a similar narrative. O’Connor and Weatherall point out that the scientific consensus has long coalesced around human-caused climate change, even if denialists insist that the science is still unsettled.

.fences are built to deter illegal immigration.