Fox News Comes To The Mexican Border In Arizona
63A Neighbor Speaks Out
Tonight, Fox News pillar Greta Van Susteren broadcast an interview of Arizona border resident Bill Odle by reporter Griff Jenkins. The two men traveled along the actual border between Mexico and Cochise County, Arizona, for a full four miles. In that time, as BIll pointed out, they'd seen exactly one Border Patrol agent.
There are two types of fencing in that area. One is the twelve foot high thingamajig which looks impressive at a glance but can be climbed in seconds by anyone with a smidgen of upper body strength. The other is nothing but a series of low, heavy, X-shaped deterrents to vehicular traffic which can easily be crossed by any pedestrian without climbing.
That's right. Those sections don't even pretend to stop human traffic, only drug-laden vehicles. Backpack-laden northbounders? No problem whatsoever. To underscore the ease with which this border can be (and is continually) crossed by anyone who wishes to do so, Jenkins actually had Bill hold his camera so that he, the Fox reporter, could be filmed standing atop the lower fence.
Nobody else in sight.
How scary is that? Not as scary as a Sarah Palin / Michelle Bachmann ticket would be to liberals, but scary enough. Although as Bill made clear, it's not like he and his wife, Ellen, hear gunshots every day. Such things are still rare...so far. And in his exact words, regarding this area as a place to be,
"First off, it's nice or we wouldn't live here."
A few more details: Bill and Ellen are friends and neighbors of ours. Bill was, in fact, the very first neighbor to stop by in order to welcome us to the area after we arrived in April of 2009. At that time, we first slept for a week in our vehicles. Then Pam got settled in our old camp trailer while I and our oldest cat (now deceased) moved into an 8' x 12' steel storage shed. It was well worth it; like Bill says, it's nice or we wouldn't live here.
Like he also says (I paraphrase), it's not a place where you're well advised to ignore your surroundings. The Boy Scouts have a motto: Be prepared. I'm in tune with that and have accordingly taken our surroundings and the action we've seen into consideration when building our new hybrid earthbag home. The outer portion is complete as of today except for a couple of coats of paint. Any builder worth his salt--and I built this home single handed--is going to make sure the dwelling suits the location.
Which is why I've literally built a fort.
Defensible
The building in the photo looks defensible...and it is. In fact, I'll be writing a hub titled "How To Build An Arizona Border Fort" in the near future--probably after painting our mini-palace to blend a bit more closely with the surrounding earth. For now, let's just mention that the walls are seventeen inches thick and will stop small arms fire cold.
A concerned reader of my online material recently expressed dismay that Pam and I had to live as "prisoners in our own home" due to the border situation here. We're anything but that. Being "ready" and being "spooked" are not one and the same thing. Another individual once declared that if I feel I have to have a fort, I must be a racist, Hispanic-hating loser.
Hardly.
See, if we were like a lot of Americans living in mobile homes with cheesecloth walls and vulnerable, picture-window living rooms, then we might tend toward being a touch nervous. Our son lives in one of those, albeit 15 miles from the border rather than our single mile. After the Border Patrol snagged more than a dozen illegal immigrants less than 30 feet from his front door about a month ago, we spotted him to a Kimber .45 ACP sidearm. (Solid knockdown power, for those who don't know firearms.) Living in that mobile home, he needs that kind of punch in case--well, in case he ever needs it.
We don't.
Not that I'm going to list exactly what we do or don't have in the way of this or that--no use handing any bad guy who drops by a blueprint--but I will say that our fort is a strong enough passive defense that unless a cartel squad brought along a TOW missle, a couple of folks inside with semiautomatic weapons in .22 caliber could hold it for a week. That level of homeland security lets us sleep soundly without becoming so paranoid we begin distrusting people of Hispanic descent on sight. Which is good, since our closest neighbors and a number of our relatives are in fact Mexican American.
Jan Brewer, our Governor, has actually met with President OzBama and invited the disisnterested dude down here to personally see the border including the camps of those waiting on the other side for their turns to invade. The problem is not only that he most likely won't bother to come here--but that even if he does look, he won't see.
We borderlanders do see. Fortunately, some of us--like our neighbor, Bill Odle--are verbally gifted when it comes to explaining the situation to news reporters. And who knows? One day, we may even see a Fox News report pointing out that when the federal government ignores its duty in Arizona, then Arizonans build border forts.
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Thanks, WMH. It's possible more people will be building along this line. Certainly most of the few folks who have stopped by are deeply interested in studying what we have put together.
Speaking of OzBama, I'm watching Hannity at the moment on Fox News. What's remarkable about this particular broadcast is that virtually every pundit and/or commentator agrees that the President's address from the Oval Office--57 days after the beginning of the spill--was a very bad speech, literally an out-and-out disaster. And those people commenting include liberals.
Once a disaster, always a disaster...if you have picked up a copy of the Manchurian President yet, you are reading of his actual youth. The parts he didn't bother to tell us. There is also a person who knows he was born in Hawaii who is ready to stand up and testify to this fact. It is my stipulation that he needs to be moved out of that office and all his crew with him. He is not a US citizen and never was. Nor is he an honest human being. Noone would spend so much money to hide his birthplace?? Would you?? And in the presidency it should be public knowledge....True public knowledge, not a farce. Sorry, got off track there...LOL HIS SPEECH? on the other hand was so full of c%^p, I fell asleep, in the middle of it. I am deeply concerned for those who are damaged from the oil volcano, but I said from day one, they were not going to be able to cap it. They still have not. And the people who are without ways to make a living because of this are too many to count. I have no words to express the depth of my empathy for them. There was an attorney who came on the news here who was involved in the Valdez spill.....Nineteen years it took to get some of claims paid, so if BP gets the money out there and it looks like they possibly are, this is a good thing. People will still be able to exist....
WMH, I'm guessing you meant to type that he was NOT born in Hawaii? Your comment says he WAS! LOL!
Yes, a lot of us do know that he's not a citizen. Pam and I are two of those, having heard one of those remarkable single-shot TV broadcasts where his grandmother stated clearly that she was present in the hospital room when he was born. In Kenya. She died not long after that, and (of course) that broadcast immediately disappeared from the airwaves.
There have been a number of those single-shot "goodies" over the decades, several of which I've been fortunate enough to either see/hear personally or fortunate to hear about it from people I know well enough to trust. One involved the last words of Lee Harvey Oswald in the instant before Jack Ruby pulled the trigger. Another pertained to the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh. They're always shut down within literally seconds of the first live shout-out.
Which, obviously, makes me a "birther"...except that I don't spend any time trying to prove what so many of us know to be fact. Why not? Because as a warrior, I've trained myself to seek out and attack (a) an enemy's weakest point and (b) a point where my own skills match up to my best advantage. Everyone around Obama knows very well that knowledge of his birthplace MUST be covered up to gain their goals, so they've thrown everything into the task including the kitchen sink.
Where can I personally nail his sorry politics to to the has-been totem pole? By shining a light on his many evil and/or idiotic moves that are well publicized, moves about which the motives may be argued but about which the facts are stone cold clear. If someone (or many someones) do manage to prove his Kenyan birth in a way that even Democrats are forced to acknowledge, I'll stand up and cheer and head off to town to buy a bottle of sparkling grape juice to celebrate. But till then, no holding my breath till I turn purple and pass out.
As for the Manchurian candidate, no, I haven't snagged a copy yet. Mostly, once again, because his day to day public utterances are more than enough to be going on with. But I have ordered Glenn Beck's newly released political thriller, The Overton Window, and--since it was a bargain on Amazon--actually signed up receive an extra copy.
Now I just have to figure out who's supposed to have that second copy!
RIGHT now, off to write "Hillary Clinton and the Ecuadorian Gambit".
OMG I did make a major typo....He WAS NOT BORN IN Hawaii....NOT sorry to have been so long in correcting myself. La Machine was blown out of the water by bad electrical in here...She had to get a new power supply and modem and was in the shop....Just got back online....Sooo Yes I boo booed and didn't know it. But, I do not try at any point to be perfect either.....ROFL!!! Hmmm how did his grandmother die, was it of natural causes or was she offed for telling the truth....makes you wonder...and you can shoot that extra copy off to me if you like! lol
WMH, please feel free to drop me an email with your snail mail address, and yes, I'll take you up on that, i.e. send you that extra copy of The Overton Window. I may actually finish the book tonight and will eventually do a Book Review hub on it...but promise not to spoil the ending! :)
Yes, it does make one wonder if his ailing grandmother might have been, um, "helped along" on her journey to the other side.
That is almost too scary to think about how a person would even do that to acquire a position.....of course it is a position of power which is being greatly abused....thank you so much!!
I doubt the issue exists that would be too scary for me to think about, but I see your point. It's been well established throughout history that people will do pretty much anything to achieve power, including things much worse than lying about one's birthplace.
A good read Ghost. I admit that as much as I like Arizona (been to Phoenix and Sedona numerous times) I wouldn't do what you're doing-then again I'm not you.
I hear you about the illegals; they're a major problem. The bigger problem with unsecured borders is the FACT that terrorists have the same access to America that the other illegals do. Folks like Obama are living in denial of the immensity of this threat, otherwise they'd be sealing our borders up with every available resource.
Yes, the easy access for terrorists is definitely the larger problem. Not that the 7 bullets hitting the El Paso city hall building from a gunfight across the border is a SMALL problem, but still....
I have to agree that Obama is living in denial, or at least most probably doing so. The only answer if he's NOT doing that would be to consider his endangering of the country (via open borders) to be deliberate. That would be treason, and I truly hope the elected President of the United States is not EVER tarred with that brush, now or a thousand years in the future.
Incompetence and denial of reality are definitely more than enough to be going on with....
Wealthmadehealthy Level 2 Commenter 23 months ago
No, the loon is too busy playing golf, having parties and literally pissing everybody off to do something which might possibly be considered constructive....as I stated before, he might get bit by a mojave, which I personally think would do him good. Having literally watched via pictoral view of what you have built and how you have worked so hard on it, YOU should be very proud of your home. People who live in glass houses have no protection, but on every side, just like a fort in the olden days, you are prepared to take a shot at whatever comes your way.....you should not be scared. You ARE protected. More people should build houses like this, cool in summer, warm in winter and able to take a gunshot which will not penetrate ..... GREAT HUB!!!