1/9/19

My dear Friend and President, DJT,

Sorry! I decided that eating dinner with my family was more important than listening to your speech. I read it this morning at my favorite source of information, fact.ba.se. Don't you love how the domain name spells "factbase?" They avoided using ".com" by getting the name from Sweden. Isn't that clever? I get your schedule there every day, and they format transcripts of your remarks beautifully. Best of all, it's all facts and nothing but the facts!

Anyway, I was disappointed that you didn't offer something new to the stalemate. The only thing "new" in the speech was the idea that "wealthy politicians" "don't build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside." That was a catchy line!Otherwise, it was the same old, same old. 

Wall of house across from Mar a Lago from Google Maps

I give you an A+ for your use of #s. In 9 minutes and 35 seconds you used 12 specific numbers, including 10 quantities, one percent and one ratio. We call a phrase like "30,000 sex crimes" a quantity because it includes an integer and a unit of measure. In this case, we are measuring how many sex crimes were committed by undocumented individuals. The WP pointed out that this quantity was somewhat misleading because 1 person could be responsible for several of those crimes, and the WSJ noted that all of the crimes you enumerated would not be stopped by a wall or a steel barrier. You are not the first person to mislead with statistics. In fact, that practice is so common that lots of people I know don't trust any argument that involves numbers. We'll see if that's true of the American public.

I tried to find out how many people watched the speech but that info was not available. I'm sure that Rush, Ann and Laura were watching and will be telling their listeners all about it. We know all of the late-night comedians were watching, too. My guess is that no one changed their minds about the issue and that the shutdown will continue. What's your guess?

Best,