Banging his head against it: Will Trump sabotage another deal over the wall?
Less than a day after congressional Democrats and Republicans announced they had a deal in principle to avert another government shutdown, President Trump harumphed displeasure: “I’m not happy about it. It’s not doing the trick.”
Surprise surprise, these comments followed conservative media types pronouncing it a “garbage compromise” (Sean Hannity) or “pathetic” (Laura Ingraham).
So yet again, a president who claims to be strong and independent and interested in unifying the country, not to mention a world-class dealmaker, looks capable of scuttling a meaningful attempt to reach common ground just to demonstrate fealty to the far-right fringes.
This is the best agreement Trump is going to get. It funds the outstanding parts of the government through Sept. 30. No, Trump won’t get his $5.7 billion for 200 miles of a “big beautiful wall,” but he will get $1.375 billion for a more fence-like barrier.
Call that the penalty for willful acts of sabotage. Last summer, the Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to a $1.6 billion wall “downpayment”; Trump said no because the deal didn’t slash legal immigration enough for his tastes. (Insult to injury: In this year’s State of the Union, Trump ad-libbed the lie that he wants legal immigrants admitted in “the largest numbers ever.”)
This time, if he has an iota of good sense, he’ll take good enough as good enough.
Instead, expect the President of the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the world to sit in front of a television, with itchy Twitter thumbs, seeing how angry pundits are about an important piece of public policy before choosing whether to plunge the government into another shutdown. Egad.
— New York Daily News
El Chapo’s destiny is an American prison cell
El Chapo’s murderous Sinaloa drug cartel was based in Mexico, but for years its American nerve center was Chicago. His henchmen from the Little Village neighborhood, twin brothers Pedro and Margarito Flores, turned the city into a conduit for as much as 1,500 kilos of cocaine and heroin each month that would be distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada. Often, drugs sent to American cities were stashed behind fake walls or in crates of frozen fish or avocados shipped in boxcars and tractor-trailers.
The twins from Chicago were business partners with the notorious drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, but they also were his undoing. They flipped on him, secretly recording him and other cartel members. “Amigo!” Guzman said to one of the Flores brothers in Chicago in a recording of an intercepted phone call. “Here at your service.”
Once atop a drug smuggling operation that spanned four continents, Guzman, 61, now faces spending the rest of his life in prison after his conviction Tuesday in a Brooklyn federal courtroom. The 5 1/2-foot kingpin’s “bloody reign,” said Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, “has come to an end, and the myth that he could not be brought to justice has been laid to rest.”
A declaration universally welcomed, but particularly in this city. A share of those drug shipments that came through Chicago stayed in Chicago. El Chapo’s evil stoked street violence and ruined the lives of countless youths here.
In 2013, the Chicago Crime Commission branded Guzman “Public Enemy No. 1,” a designation the commission had used just once before — for Al Capone. His fate sealed, Guzman now can don a different number, the inmate kind, that comes with an orange jumpsuit.
— Chicago Tribune
