"The effort by Ms. Harris to address the root causes of migration, which can take years, is..."

".... unlikely to quickly produce the swift action demanded by Republicans and some Democrats to reduce the overcrowding at the border."

From "Biden Names Harris to Work With Central America on Migration/The president gave the vice president a prominent role in the politically charged issue at a time when thousands of children are being detained in facilities along the border" (NYT).

The "root causes" language is a reference to something Harris said: "While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law. We also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek."

Walking and chewing gum at the same time is a metaphor,* initially designed to insult someone who can't do these 2 relatively easy-to-do things simultaneously. It doesn't work too much as a brag, unless you're saying that the 2 things are easy to do at the same time. 

What are the 2 things? There's a huge difference between wanting people not to come + caring about root causes and effectively enforcing all of the law restricting the border + changing the conditions that are causing people to come to the border. 

The first set of things is easy to do, damned near effortless. The second set is nearly impossible, done together or done one at a time. Might as well laugh about doing them together because you know you're not going to make much progress at all on either.

_________________________

* "The term is recorded in a Texas newspaper in [1964]. President Lyndon Johnson allegedly said that then-Congressman (and later president) Gerald Ford couldn’t 'fart and chew gum at the same time.' As early as the 1900s, it was observed that women talk a lot and chew gum a lot, but don’t 'talk and chew gum at the same time.' Entertainer and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers was described in 1926 as 'the only man in the world who can chew gum and talk sense at the same time.' It’s probable that the saying 'walk and chew gum at the same time' developed from the earlier 'talk and chew gum at the same time.'" That's at Quora. To speculate more coherently: People said women can't "talk and chew gum at the same time," then some crude fellows thought it was funner to say "walk and fart at the same time" — because walking and farting is a very funny subject. (I've seen George Carlin demonstrate the hilarity.) Then it got turned around for fun to LBJ's "fart and chew gum at the same time." Then it got cleaned up into the present-day corruption, "walk and chew gum at the same time."

Why do white people want to use the N-word?

 Question flipped:

@kendonfahr

HIT THE PLUS SIGN for more common-sense content! #fyp #CaliStarChallenge #xyzbca #JohnHughes

♬ original sound - kendonfahr

Have you been following the Madison, Wisconsin story about a city council meeting where somebody muttered "c*nt"?

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

An independent analysis has failed to identify the person who called a local activist a vulgarity toward the end of a marathon online meeting in September that exposed deep divisions on the Madison City Council. At the same time, the report released Thursday by Phoenix-based USA Forensic identifies four men who might have said the word. And while the four include the man long accused in the incident, Ald. Paul Skidmore, it also suggests the culprit was, unlike Skidmore, wearing a headset and had a microphone that was activated at the time the word was uttered. 

So it sounds like it wasn't Skidmore. Yet the headline is "Accused Madison City Council member 1 of 4 suspects ID'd in report on misogynist slur." Why stress that it could still be him when it's more likely to be one of the other 3? We heard the word because the utterer had a voice-activated headset. 

You may think: I need to know more about the "deep divisions on the Madison City Council" and what all this has to do with Skidmore.

[City Attorney Mike] Haas said the city provided [Audio analyst Bryan] Neumeister samples of voices of nine other men in the meeting “whose microphones Zoom identified as being activated at the time the word being analyzed was spoken.” Skidmore was not among those men, but Haas said that given Kilfoy-Flores’ complaint, “we also asked that a sample of Alder Skidmore’s voice be included in this comparison.” Neumeister ruled out six of the men based on their accents, background noise or their distance from their microphones, but not Skidmore, 9th District; Alds. Michael Tierney, 16th District, and Keith Furman, 19th District; or city staffer Joe Schraven. It wasn’t clear Thursday whether Zoom could have recorded someone speaking if the platform didn’t indicate the person’s microphone was on, and Haas declined to answer that question. Neumeister did not respond to requests for comment. 

The headline on this article is really unjustified. And I'm guessing Neumeister initially asked only for voice samples from the males who had voice-activated headphones, so that Skidmore would have been absolved at that point. So why did Hass insist on including Skidmore? I guess because Skidmore had been accused, but why was he accused?

The findings come a little more than two weeks before Skidmore faces voters in the April 6 election. He and Nikki Conklin emerged from a four-way primary last month. 

The woman who was about to speak when someone blurted out "C*nt!" was Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores, identified in the article as an "activist." She made a formal complaint against Skidmore. At the very end of the article, we get something of an answer:

Skidmore has grown increasingly isolated on the council in recent years as the council has moved even further to the left politically and Skidmore has been outspoken in his defense of the Madison Police Department, which local activists and their allies on the council believe needs reform, more oversight or cuts. At the time he was alleged to have uttered the vulgarity, the council had just finished approving the creation of a civilian board to oversee police and an independent police auditor, and Skidmore was the last one to speak before Rhodes-Conway called on Kilfoy-Flores to speak. Video of the person who said the alleged profanity did not pop up in the Zoom meeting when the word was spoken, and no one in the meeting reacted to the slur at the time it was uttered.

He supported the police.