. >> commissioners, i'm jim haas, i was a member of the r.a.b. working group, and as some of you recall, i appeared a number of times over the last decade about this project. and, of course, we were reaping what has -- what we sowed long ago by not paying attention to it. the basic problem was that the first executive director kept the project and the agency under wraps. she asserted it was not a city agency, and she did her best to keep the city out of the project, as some of you are well aware. including the mayor at the time. and so, you know, a lot of what went on occurred because nobody knew what was going on. there's an old expression that says, a power deserves scrutiny, not gratitude, and i think that your desire to change the bureaucracy around is not as important as developing a way to scrutinize what is going on. to open it up to the largest extent with technical and public involvement. so along with my colleagues worried about the time frame, i, too, would like to see some of the work continued and would rather than six months, 90 day

haas. thanks for taking the time this morning. >> good morning, jim. >> so there will soon be more troops onorder than there are in iraq to fight isis where they're outnumbered three to one based on the recent pentagon estimates. you said that is an unaccept abe misuse and pollicization of our troops. >> we already have a border control there and already national guards men there. we're talking about a group of, what, three, four thousand individuals that best we know are unarmed. they are still weeks, if not months away from the american border, if, in fact, they ever get there. why would we need to send thousands of heavily arm eed soldiers when we have capable individuals on the border. we are not facing an invasion, even though that's the word that's been used. out of principal, i almost never talk about what motivates people because you never quite know. but in this case, there is no plausible argument that we need american troops. there's simply not that kind of security situation there. you are compelled to say this is political. this is to make something more definitive. it is a misu

. >> we have with us richard haas, caddie kay, jeffrey goldberg and jim van dehei with us. joy, here you go. >> isn't it something that every president, every campaign will have their closing arguments. and you can go back and whether it was becky quick arack obama reagan, they always had and their parties always had their closing argument. this is why you should re-elect us. >> this is our message. >> this is who we are. now, normal times, the republicans would use that tax cut that they passed. thats was supposed to be their supreme court argument. perhaps donald trump bragging about making the judiciary, you could go down the line of things that you would expect the economy, this president to use as his closing argument. but what donald trump and what the republican party is using is racism. you see it with donald trump saying he's going to circumvent the constitution with a -- he can't do that. you have people on right wing talk radio and right wing tv talking about the small pox that we eradicated that was, oh, migrants are going to bring in small pox and other disease