At the Danger Room, Robert Beckhusen
writes:
Mitt Romney wants a border fence. But he doesn’t just want to finish the physical fence that’s already there in bits and pieces. He wants a high-tech fence: you remember, the one that was tried, wasted a billion dollars, and didn’t work.
“As I have said many times, it is critical that we redouble our efforts to secure the borders,” Romney said to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on Thursday. “That means both preventing illegal border crossings and making it harder to illegally overstay a visa. We should field enough border patrol agents, complete a high-tech fence, and implement an improved exit verification system.”
What he’s really talking about are two high-tech border fence plans, one which utterly failed — SBInet — and its successor, which is merely problem-prone. SBInet, which aimed to blanket the border with an integrated network of fixed sensor towers spread across hundreds of miles, should have allowed Border Patrol agents to track crossings from anywhere. But unanticipated delays and problems with using fixed towers in remote and hilly terrain caused the sensors to break down in the weather or be rendered useless by interference.
The mere 53 miles of SBInet built in Arizona also came at a price tag of $1 billion. That left 334 miles uncovered in Arizona alone out of a nearly 2,000-mile border, which meant the costs for a complete (and impractical) high-tech fence could have been astronomical.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
House Dems introduce a bill to right a wrong:
Legislation to ensure that victims of pay discrimination have their day in court was introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and other top House Democrats today.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would allow pay discrimination claims to be filed within 180 days of the issuance of a discriminatory paycheck. Most workers are unaware of what their co-workers earn, and many employers even prohibit employees from discussing their pay with each other. That makes it nearly impossible for workers to uncover pay discrimination.
The legislation is named after Lilly Ledbetter, whose pay discrimination claim was denied by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision on May 29. The court said that she had waited too long to sue for pay discrimination, despite the fact that she filed a charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as soon as she received an anonymous note alerting her to pay discrimination. The court ruled that since she did not raise a claim with 180 days of the actual decision to discriminate, she could not receive back pay.
Tweet of the Day:
Rand Paul on CNN right now: "Be careful about making me seem too reasonable, you might hurt my credentials."
— @RosieGray via TweetDeck
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