A Texas mayor explains why the wall is good for his small town

The Star Ledger of Newark ^ | 01.12.19 | Paul Mulshine

[Coleus]

LOS INDIOS, Texas – Photographer Andre Malok and I were three days into traveling the banks of the Rio Grande before we saw any sort of wall along the Mexican border.

We finally saw one in McAllen. So did half the TV crews in Texas.

It was Thursday, the day President Trump came to this border town to give a speech on his current tiff with Congress over $5 billion in funding for a border “wall” – or “fence” – or whatever.

The day before, Andre and I had driven along 150 miles of border without seeing any barriers at all on the river banks. There’s just a relatively narrow, relatively shallow river with easy access in many spots.

But there’s one heck of a barrier in the booming border city of McAllen. It’s both a wall and a fence. The 12-foot metal fence is perched on a 20-foot concrete wall.

That short stretch of wall became the center of controversy when CNN’s Jim Acosta posed before it on Thursday and announced “we're not seeing any kind of imminent danger, there are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence here in the McAllen, Texas, area … no sign of the national emergency that the president has been talking about. As a matter of fact, it's pretty tranquil down here.”

That got him into a Twitter feud with Donald Trump Jr., who responded that the reason things were tranquil is “because walls work.”

[Elsie]

That short stretch of wall became the center of controversy when CNN’s Jim Acosta posed before it on Thursday and announced “we're not seeing any kind of imminent danger, there are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence here in the McAllen, Texas, area … no sign of the national emergency that the president has been talking about. As a matter of fact, it's pretty tranquil down here.”

DUH!!!

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One day, three men were hiking and unexpectedly came upon a large raging, violent river. They needed to get to the other side, but had no idea of how to do so.

The first man prayed to God, saying, "Please God, give me the strength to cross this river." Poof! God gave him big arms and strong legs, and he was able to swim across the river in about two hours, after almost drowning a couple of times.

Seeing this, the second man prayed to God saying, "Please God, give me the strength ..and the tools to cross this river." Poof! God gave him a rowboat and he was able to row across the river in about an hour, after almost capsizing the boat a couple of times.

The third man had seen how this worked out for the other two, so he also prayed to God saying, "Please God, give me the strength and the tools...and the intelligence... to cross this river."

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And poof!
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God turned him into a woman. She looked at the map, hiked upstream a couple of hundred yards, then walked across the bridge.