This isn't 1846. Mexico is our largest single trading partner. Spending our own lives and treasure to babysit an unstable nation on our Southern border is in fact the last thing the US (whoever you're asking) wants.
That's the pressing question, watching the truth social meltdown following the supreme court tariff decisions really has allies wondering if the US system has functional guardrails and if the will to bell the cat exists sufficiently to exercise them.
What do you mean by "Democrat failures"? The Democratic party doesn't believe Biden's immigration policy was a failure, and in fact the official party position seems to be that Biden didn't open the border enough. Democrat politicians have committed to more of the same, and dozens of cities and states controlled by progressives have put sanctuary policies in place that almost completely forbid immigration control of any kind.
Help me out here. Its not clear to me what the Left considers a failure.
Introducing a solid zero-knowledge age verification option is the opposite direction of ending anonymity in the Internet, which other parts of the same governments are also working on.
So yeah, I'll gladly trust and cheer on the part working in the right direction.
I know the Optimus marketing wank is all sci-fi humanoids, but I wonder if the products that actually hit the market will be much simpler, not trying to compete with human arms, as you say. Does that seem likely to you?
I don't think the Obama comparison is very useful. Trump faces a vastly more difficult problem than Obama did. For most of his presidency, Obama simply continued the Operation Streamline era policies that he inherited from Bush. He didn't have to clean up after a previous administration that had completely lost control of the border, allowing somewhere between ten and forty million immigrants through. And Obama didn't have to contend with dozens of states and cities declaring themselves sanctuaries, completely off limits to meaningful immigration enforcement, even of criminal migrants.
My own state promptly made it illegal for local law enforcement to cooperate with border patrol or immigration enforcement agents in any circumstance.
So now, if we want our country to have meaningful borders, immigration enforcement has to be done the hard way, and it shouldn't be surprising that Kristi Noem's clown show is showing signs of clusterfuckery. It's actually surprising that things have gone as well as they have.
That’s not what was argued. “The hard way” refers to institutional difficulty, not illegality — specifically, enforcing federal law in the face of state non-compliance and sanctuary policies.
Difficulty does not equal unconstitutionality. If you think the measures required violate specific constitutional provisions or civil-rights protections, name them and explain how.
Otherwise, this is an empty moral reframe that clumsily sidesteps concrete claims about enforcement feasibility and changed conditions.
That’s a slogan, not an argument. The point being made -- and made well, deserving of consideration -- was about institutional conditions (sanctuary laws, state non-cooperation, scale of inflows) that simply didn’t exist during Obama’s early years, regardless of party.
When is comes to immigration in particular, that simply isn't true. As I alluded to in my comment, Obama inherited Bush's Operation Streamline immigration regime, which was running like a Swiss watch in comparison to the mess we have now. Over the course of his two terms, Obama squandered his inheritance as the progressives encroached. By election season in 2015, the progressive model was being embraced by mainstream Democrats, and was pretty plainly admitting to open-borders aspirations. In my opinion, this more than anything handed Trump his first election victory. If there was one thing that could convince the normies that we need a border wall-- whether literal or symbolic-- it was the sudden realization that the Left was serious about open borders and unlimited immigration.
And of course, not to be outdone by Obama, Joe Biden managed to lose control of the border in a manner that has no precedent in American history, once again handing Trump an easy victory. It's like they wanted to lose another election.
To grasp how radically the Democrat party has moved left on immigration, recall that Obama and Hillary Clinton ran against each other on strict immigration enforcement. Here's my favorite Hillary quote from a 2008 campaign speech:
> "If they’ve committed a crime, deport them, no questions asked. They’re gone. If they’re working and law-abiding, we should say here are the conditions for you staying: You have to pay a stiff fine because you came here illegally, you have to pay back taxes, you have to try to learn English, and you have to wait in line."
It's because this reporting is nonsense. It comes from a health influence with "mama" in the name, always a good indicator of scientific rigor.
They say they tested for "organic fluorine", and when it predictably came back positive they crowed that the floss contains the kind of PFAS that has been loosely correlated with health effects (such as the small-molecule chemicals PFOA, PFOS, or Gen-X). But if they had any familiarity with chemistry or the products they were testing, they'd have known that what they actually found is plain old Teflon, which is the most biologically inert substance in common use, does not emit volatile PFAS, and is not (yet) under regulatory scrutiny.
No, they tested for organic fluorine, and then acted surprised when they predictably realized that many floss products contain PTFE, widely known as Teflon, which we've already known for decades. It's not a secret, and it is in fact the only floss that I can use on my tightly arranged teeth.
PTFE is not a PFAS in the sense used in health research. Teflon is a hard, waxy plastic which is among the most inert, biologically inactive substances known. It is used everywhere from medical implants, Gore-Tex, and other clothing, teflon tape used to seal plumbing joints in your house, and many other other common uses. There is no evidence (that is, evidence from scientifically solid studies-- there are a couple poor ones), that any dental floss raises physiologic levels of PFAS.
The reason you know this reporting is bullshit is that nobody is proposing that we outlaw teflon tape in drinking water plumbing, even though it's made from the same plastic as the best floss products.
And not just genetic luck, but luck of childhood circumstances. Lots of people were given a deranged relationship to food as a child by their parents, leading in many cases to actual metabolic derangement as well.
Echoing the other reply, there is a raging scientific debate between the energy balance model and the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity and diabetes. There are large cohorts of very smart scientists on both sides of this debate.
