user: Input: Sunday Open Thread
The Obama campaign is out with a Web video highlighting job loss resulting from cuts to state and local budgets — and contrasting Obama’s plan to send billions in aid to the states to rehire first responders and teachers with Mitt Romney’s claim Friday that we don’t need any more of them:

At Obama’s presser on Friday, he made one of his most extensive cases yet that austerity and more cuts to government will push us further into crisis, while Romney’s comments later in the day gave Obama’s campaign an opening to reframe this debate as one not about parasitic bureacrats but one specifically about cops, firefighters and teachers. More broadly, the argument is now fully engaged over the relationship between government job loss and the economic crisis.
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It's about: Enjoy.


Problem: Father photographs every day of his son’s life for 21 years, winning kudos online

The YouTube video of Cory McLeod aging 21 years in just six and a half minutes has been viewed more than 5 million times.

Cory McLeod ages 21 years in only six and a half minutes.

But he isn’t superhuman: He’s the star of a new YouTube video made from more than 7,500 pictures his father took of him every day since his birth, which has now racked up nearly 5 million views online.

Using an old-fashioned film camera, father Ian McLeod photographed his son once each day, no matter where he was and no matter what time it may have been.

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“It could be 5 to 12 and I’m turning him over in bed,” his father told reporters of the ambitious project, which captured the boy’s first steps, his first time behind the wheel and even his travels to places as far away as South Africa.

Ian — who says the project was only supposed to last a couple of years but just kept going because it was so much fun — says his son looks like several celebrities in some of the shots, including a baby Lee Harvey Oswald and an infant Frank Sinatra.

Aside from a whole lot of film, the project took tons of time. Once he had gathered all the photos, Ian McLeod spent a year and half using a scanner to digitize each picture.

“Seventy-one albums later, YouTube’s here,” he said.

For his part, Cory said being ready for his close up every single day was “sometimes” difficult.

"It was stuff like when I was at a friend's house or something and my dad would ring up and say, 'I need to come round and take your photo,’” Cory told CBS News this week.

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But the hard work seems to pay off and the online fans have come pouring in.

“Great job Dad,” a YouTube user named “northowigirl” wrote. “Best history of pictures to hand down to your son.”

“What an amazing gift to give ... not only for your son but for yourself and his mother as well as your son’s children someday ... very touching,” YouTube user Dana Craig commented.

The much photographed son has said he plans to continue the project but with a new twist: By giving his dad a break and taking pictures of himself each day.

Write a one or two sentence summary.

Summary: See Cory McLeod age 21 years in only six and a half minutes.


Q: The Challenge of Securing the Border

Two decades ago, the border with Mexico was not as big a priority as it is today. The Border Patrol‘s entire budget was only $362.6 million in 1993 — some $584 million in today’s money. It had 4,028 agents. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, border patrolling wasn’t amazingly effective.

Studies in the mid-1990s found that of all the immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer than half — somewhere between 35 and 45 percent.

Fast forward to the present and things have changed a lot. The Border Patrol has more than 21,000 agents — 18,500 along the border with Mexico. Its budget last year exceeded $3.5 billion. We have drones and sensors and hundreds of miles of fence.

And according to a report by the National Academy of Sciences published last year, Border Patrol agents apprehend about a quarter of those trying to enter the country illegally.

To be sure, these estimates must be taken with a grain of salt. We don’t know how many people are trying to enter the United States illegally in any given year, so it is impossible to tell precisely what share gets caught. Estimates of apprehension rates are derived from statistical analyses that rely on fairly strong assumptions about immigrants’ behavior: How many times do they try to get in after being caught? Are the odds of being caught the same each time?

It is also true that net flows of illegal immigrants from Mexico have fallen to zero over the last few years, because of a combination of slow growth in the United States, expanded legal guest-worker programs and an aging population in Mexico that is slowing the growth of its labor supply. By that measure, the border is as secure as it will ever be.

But the apprehension statistics underscore the vulnerability of the current effort in Congress to pass immigration reform. In my column this week I pointed out how a similar effort six years ago was weakened by disagreements over a guest worker program, which broke apart the coalition of labor, immigrants’ rights advocates and businesses supporting the legislation. Assailed by conservatives — who viewed illegal immigrants as lawbreakers and demanded that the border be secured above all else — the effort failed.

This time around, border security remains a hitch. Some conservative Republicans are still demanding that the border be secured before the first undocumented immigrant gets a green card. But the statistics suggest that an impermeable border is a fantasy, no matter how much money and technology is thrown at it. “Border security is part of a strategy by the anti-immigration constituency to stop reform after the fact,” said Gordon H. Hanson, an expert on the economics of immigration at the University of California, San Diego. “You make the trigger impossible to meet.”

The immigration legislation presented in the Senate sidesteps the issue nicely. Under its proposed legislation, the Border Patrol must put together a plan to keep out 9 of 10 immigrants trying to enter illegally over the most common entry points — a seemingly impossible target. But it is less tough than it seems. The Border Patrol gets to count as success its own estimate of how many run back into Mexico — a fairly unscientific number that can rely on agents’ reading of a footstep in the sand or a broken blade of grass. And those immigrants will surely try again another day.

What’s more, if it doesn’t hit the target within five years, all Congress can do is form a commission to come up with a better plan.

It may be optimistic, however, to assume that this leniency will survive when the legislation falls under the full glare of public scrutiny.

A:

assistant: The immigration legislation in the Senate recognizes that trying to make the Mexican border impermeable to illegal entry is unrealistic. But opponents may yet challenge that premise.