Friday, January 25, 2019

Did he cave?

This morning LaGuardia Airport in New York was shut down over concerns of air traffic control staffing issues. Olga Lautman tweeted:
Imagine air traffic controllers who work 10 hours a day 6 days a week for FREE with the unbearable stress of evictions, paying for food, mortgages, and life expenses and making sure planes don’t crash into each other.
Gail Diane responded:
This morning on @NPR an air traffic controller said that if they are 99.9% accurate in their job they'd lose 50 planes a day. Can you even imagine that kind of stress? Add financial stress and its impossible.
So air traffic was disrupted.

By mid afternoon a deal was worked out to end the shutdown.

All but one of the government departments are to be funded to the end of the fiscal year (end of September). That one is Homeland Security. It is to be funded until Feb. 15, giving everyone three weeks to negotiate a permanent deal. Lots of pundits are calling it a cave.

I’ve heard a bill will be introduced in Congress to eliminate shutdowns. If a new funding bill isn’t approved then a continuing resolution to fund the government at the old level is automatically in place.

But this isn’t over.

The nasty guy said that if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall he’ll shut down the government again (which would be only Homeland Security, the people protecting our southern border, the ones actually on the job protecting us from the supposed national emergency) or declare a national emergency and attempt to build the wall without Congressional approval.

Ksenija Pavlovic McAteer tweeted:
.@realDonaldTrump did not “cave” nor “surrendered”. What he’s doing right now is a standard tactics in torture. They torture you, then they give you a break to see if you will start to cooperate. If not, the torture continues.
Sarah Kendzior, who studies authoritarian regimes, agrees that is exactly right.

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