The tax plan at bottom is now lead story on front page.
"Real estate groups ready to battle GOP on tax proposals" by Victoria McGrane Globe Staff November 12, 2017
WASHINGTON — Home builders and real estate agents are ramping up a battle against Republicans in Congress with a simple message: Stop messing with the American dream.
The object of their ire is the House GOP proposal to cap the total eligible loan amount for the IRS mortgage interest deduction at $500,000, down from the current limit of $1 million.
Only about 6 percent of mortgages nationally are larger than $500,000, so in this case it’s the American dream for well-to-do home buyers. But it’s a lucrative and crucial sector of the real estate market in many places, including Massachusetts. About 8 percent of Bay State mortgages are larger than $500,000, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
So the industries that thrive on building and selling expensive houses are flexing their lobbying muscle in Washington.
“We’re at DEFCON 2. We’re trying last-ditch diplomacy before declaring all-out war,” said Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders, describing his group’s stance on the sweeping tax overhaul bill unveiled by House Republicans last week.
The industry won good news Thursday when the Senate apparently heeded the outcry and released a tax plan that keeps the mortgage deduction threshold at the current $1 million. It’s still far from clear how this debate will be resolved. The National Association of Realtors said it still objects to other aspects of both House and Senate bills.
Neither the House nor the Senate has passed a bill, and if they pass competing measures, differences will be need to be ironed out and adopted by both chambers.
The sweeping Republican tax overhaul plan has triggered an explosion of activity at lobbying firms across the capital as special interests from universities to biotech firms to hedge funds beseech lawmakers to spare their cherished tax breaks, but few of those fights promise to be as intense as the one over the mortgage interest deduction, as well as the elimination, in the Senate plan, of the deduction for local real estate property taxes. The House would cap that deduction at $10,000.
These deductions are cherished by millions of homeowners — especially in high-cost areas, like the Boston suburbs — and also are considered vital to professionals who make their livings building, selling, and financing America’s houses.
The potent lobbying groups are running online ads in key GOP districts, and targeting potentially sympathetic lawmakers in both the House and Senate.
“The Republican tax plan is bad for middle-class families. It’s bad for homeownership. It’s bad for America,” threatens an online video ad that Howard’s home builders group has run in recent days.
The rhetoric highlights the serious challenges lawmakers face as they search for ways to offset the steep reduction in the corporate tax rate, from 35 to 20 percent, that is the centerpiece of the overhaul.
“This bill is a direct threat to consumers and homeowners,” warns a sample e-mail the National Association of Realtors is urging its 1.3 million members to send to their representatives and senators as part of a national “call to action.” So far, more than 160,000 such messages have been sent, the group said.
The realtors group is planning to turn the heat up further next week by flying members from around the country to Washington to lobby their lawmakers in person.
So much for the greenhouse gas concerns.
Republicans may control all the levers of power in Washington, but they’ve struggled to rally together on other major legislative agenda items, most significantly on their repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Changing the tax code is a no less complicated task, and already major fault lines have opened up. In the House, rank-and-file Republicans from states with high housing costs and high taxes — the two tend to go together — have balked at efforts to scale back the state and local property tax deduction and the mortgage interest deduction.
Representative Darrell Issa, who represents suburban San Diego, was the latest to announce his opposition to the House GOP bill and the first California Republican to join the revolt over the state and local tax deduction changes.
Issa disputed claims by GOP leadership that the bill would help all taxpayers and cited the “sky-high tax rates” in his home state, “coupled with high housing and property costs [that] are pushing Californians to the brink. I cannot endorse changes that may make the tremendous burden felt by California taxpayers even worse,” Issa said.
Industry officials also say the GOP plan to double the size of the standard deduction, coupled with severe cuts to the popular state and local deduction, mean far fewer Americans will choose to itemize their deductions and would simply forgo the mortgage deduction. For some, that would reduce the financial incentive to buy a house.....
??????
Why would anyone need an incentive for the American Dream?
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What's lost in the debate over “homeownership” is homelessness.
Related: House, Senate tax proposals have crucial differences
Also see:
GOP tax plan hammers the middle class
Republican: House won’t end property tax deduction
Trump weighs in on taxes, seeks deeper cut for rich
"If the tax cut passes, it will constitute the largest heist in human history. This is daylight robbery by the super-rich against the rest of society: homeowners, students, the middle class, the young, the poor, indeed everybody who doesn’t own a significant stock portfolio. The result will put America into a tailspin: falling home prices, rising student debts, and a massive mortgage on the future, all because of the insatiable greed of David and Charles Koch, Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, and Donald Trump, and of Wall Street and the C-suites they represent....."
They want it bad.
One way to avoid Boston real estate? Run for Congress in Lowell
Former ambassador joins crowded congressional race
Entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai will run for Senate as an independent.
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Scores of Cambridge restaurants paid six figures for a liquor license. Others got them for free
It's the top feature, and what do I care?
Then again, on second thought, maybe free booze and workplaces don’t mix.
You can blame the New Yorker for that.
Related:
Beacon Hill needs to draw clear lines on sexual harassment
Yeah, only one or two articles came out about the culture up there, as if the pre$$ were protecting them.
George Takei, Richard Dreyfuss are accused of sexual misconduct
Oh, no, not George!
‘Dukes of Hazzard’ star arraigned on charges of indecently assaulting teenager
He did what?
At least Matt Damon is clean.
Taylor Swift reckons with her ‘Reputation’
Taylor Swift sets Gillette Stadium date
All part of the same fraternity..... or not:
"We weren’t there — we weren’t invited is more accurate — so it’s taken a few days to get a handle on who attended the private party hosted this week by Patriots owner Robert Kraft and featuring a performance by his good friend Sir Elton John. We’re told the Rocket Man played — without a band — for about 90 minutes, and the set included many of his most popular songs: “Bennie and the Jets,” “Your Song,” “Candle in the Wind,” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” among others. The crowd included, as you might expect, a few current and former Patriots, notably Andre Tippett, Willie McGinest, Lawyer Milloy, Scott Zolak, and Julian Edelman. Other boldfacers enjoying John’s greatest hits included former GE boss Jack Welch and wife Suzy Wetlaufer, Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans, Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck and wife Emilia Fazzalari, Combined Jewish Philantropies president Barry Shrage, Bank of America’s Anne Finucane, Attorney General Maura Healey, Bain Capital’s Paul Edgerley, Abby Johnson’s husband Chris McKown, Providence Equity Partners CEO Jonathan Nelson, W.B. Mason CEO Leo Meehan and wife Gigi, Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, Viacom vice chair Shari Redstone, restaurateurs Steve DiFillippo and Ed Kane, stylist Pini Swissa, and ACE Ticket CEO Jim Holzman. Like last year, when Kraft enlisted the Rolling Stones to play, the party was held in a tent-like temporary structure set up on the field at Gillette Stadium."
Ah, there is no place like home, 'eh?
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Below the fold is the gun control agenda.
"In upstate New York, a tragedy eclipsed, but not forgotten" by Mark Arsenault Globe Staff November 11, 2017
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Before Sutherland Springs and Mandalay Bay, the Pulse nightclub and San Bernardino. Before Mother Emanuel church, the Washington Navy Yard, Sandy Hook, and Aurora. Before Gabby Giffords and Fort Hood, there was Binghamton.
In 2009, a gunman opened fire in an immigrant services center here, killing 13 men and women. At the time, it was the nation’s worst mass shooting since 32 people had been killed at Virginia Tech University in 2007, and one of the deadliest in US history.
Eight years later, the world has largely forgotten about Binghamton, its tragedy turned achingly familiar by the shootings that have followed. This is far from a mournful place, and the little memorial park that residents built by the Chenango River is quiet and tasteful. But the rampage still affects the community and its people in subtle ways.
What is mainly different is inside people’s heads. And while most have recovered as the years have passed, they are changed.
“It was an episode that ripped apart our delusion that we were safe from all that,” said Gerald R. Smith, a 63-year-old historian who works out of the Broome County Public Library downtown.
Yes, it can happen here, Binghamton learned the hard way, in a small city of about 46,000, roughly the size of Attleboro or Leominster.
Not even barricading yourself in the house will help.
Smith thinks now about the security of his own office, “in a public building in a downtown setting in a neighborhood that’s marginally OK.” There are no metal detectors. It’s a library. You just walk in.
“We’ve had to rethink how we look at people,” he said.
The attack lingers on in countless other ways, both trivial and profound.....
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Related:
In Air Force, colleague feared church gunman would ‘shoot up the place’
Texas town holds first Sunday service since church attack
Mistrial declared in biker gang case
It was regarding the 2015 brawl and shootout in Texas regarding the biggest motorcycle gang going, and the mistrial is the kangaroo court way of covering it up and keeping it secret. It's what they used to call a show trial.
Body count blamed on MS-13 violence grows in N.Y. suburbs
Don't you dare blame those illegal immigrants!
2 dead, 2 wounded in Atlanta concert shooting
F*** off, and don't go to concerts.
At least five dead, children wounded in Calif. shooting
Appeal offers hope for Newtown families in suit against gun companies
FBI’s gun background-check system lacking records of millions of cases
They will want you to hand over your weapons after the "terrorists" attack a hospital.
"Providence man and 2 others are charged after his escape with R.I. State Police cruiser" by Evan Allen Globe Staff November 11, 2017
Officials have defended the police and troopers who fired approximately 40 rounds into the vehicle, saying that Santos, who had two open warrants, presented an imminent danger to the public.
Where did they think they were, Virginia?
At her Saturday morning press conference at the State Police headquarters in Scituate, R.I., Colonel Ann C. Assumpico, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police, said the video of the shooting “speaks for itself,” and she commended the involved officers for “keeping the public safe, saving lives.” She promised to release more information, including the names of the four state troopers who fired their weapons, when the investigation was complete.
“Our sympathies go out to the family of Joseph Santos,” she said. Assumpico said that while Demers was critically injured, officials have heard that she is “doing well.”
During the press conference, Assumpico offered more details on how Donald Morgan, 35, [who] was shot with a Taser during his arrest in Cumberland, R.I., was able to allegedly steal the cruiser despite being handcuffed and in State Police custody.....
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Also see: ACLU questions how high-speed chase ended in deadly shooting
The truck matched the description and Santos panicked because he had a suspended license.
Two charged in Milford triple shooting
Their case is currently offline.
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Buzz Aldrin joins New York veterans parade
Far out, man.
You hungry?
Veterans honored at Puerto Rican memorial in Boston’s South End
After Irma and Maria, US Virgin Islands still struggling
Houston’s struggle after Harvey mirrors America’s
After hurricane, signs of a mental health crisis haunt Puerto Rico
And the feds just pulled out.
MEMA sends additional help to Puerto Rico
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"Trump says Putin ‘means it’ about not meddling in US elections" by Julie Hirschfeld Davis New York Times November 11, 2017
DANANG, Vietnam — President Trump’s account of the conversation indicated he was far more inclined to accept the Russian president’s assertions than those of his own intelligence agencies, which have concluded that Putin directed an elaborate effort to interfere in the vote.
So do I. His own intelligence agencies lie.
Trump said it was time to move past the issue so that the United States and Russia could cooperate on confronting the nuclear threat from North Korea, solving the Syrian civil war, and working together on Ukraine.
His remarks inspired immediate ridicule from Democratic lawmakers, including Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“You know who else is insulted by it, Mr. President? The American people,” Schiff said on Twitter. “You believe a foreign adversary over your own intelligence agencies.”
Who feed Congre$$ all that Iraqi WMD garbage?
Trump heaped disdain on the former leaders of three US intelligence agencies — John O. Brennan, the former CIA director; James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; and James Comey, the FBI director he fired this year — appearing to suggest that they were less trustworthy than Putin.
“I mean, give me a break — they’re political hacks,” Trump said. “You have Brennan, you have Clapper, and you have Comey. Comey’s proven now to be a liar, and he’s proven to be a leaker, so you look at that.”
Clapper lied to Congre$$, and Trump is straying into very dangerous ground here. We have seen what happens to presidents who challenge intelligence agencies.
Also see:
"Trump appeared to be trying to parse his earlier remarks to reporters, [when] Trump referred to former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. as ‘‘political hacks.’’ Brennan said Sunday that he considers Trump’s characterization ‘‘a badge of honor.’’ Both men were highly critical of Trump on CNN’s ‘‘State of the Union’’ for not saying definitively that Putin was behind the Russian interference in the US election, a conclusion strongly endorsed by the US intelligence community. Appearing later on CNN, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin came to Trump’s defense. Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, said Sunday, ‘‘The president believes that after a year of investigations of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, there is zero evidence of any ballot being impacted by Russian interference.’’ Last week, Trump lashed out at the former heads of the intelligence agencies, dismissing them as ‘‘political hacks’’ and claiming there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious of their findings that Russia meddled to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton....."
Yeah, you better believe the liars in the US intelligence community!
Related: Sessions mulling second special counsel to investigate Republican concerns, letter shows
They are going to finally look into the Clinton Foundation and the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia.
Off course, the pee dossier that has been flushed proved collusion between the Clintons and Russia via the discredited British spy, but you know.....
After Trump’s comments, General Michael V. Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, wrote on Twitter that the CIA had told him that the agency’s director “stands by and has always stood by” its January findings regarding Russian interference.
“The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed,” he wrote.
Someone say something?
The president said lingering questions about whether his campaign aides had worked with Russia to sway the election were souring Washington’s relationship with Moscow on a host of vital security issues.
“Having a good relationship with Russia is a great, great thing,” Trump said. “This artificial Democratic hit job gets in the way, and that’s a shame, because people will die.”
The allegations of collusion are the subject of an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as multiple congressional inquiries.
Trump’s comments about the Russian president and his warning about deteriorating Moscow ties came after the close of the APEC conference in Danang, where the White House steered clear of a formal meeting between the two men.
The small group of reporters who travel with Trump were barred from covering his activities for most of Saturday, leaving them in the dark about his informal interactions. But video showed him shaking hands with Putin on Friday evening at a gala dinner and chatting with him Saturday before and after a group photograph of the APEC leaders.
That never makes them happy.
The Kremlin released a statement saying that the leaders had met and struck an agreement on Syria, but the White House did not confirm the information for most of the day. Then, in a question-and-answer session with reporters later, Trump said he had had two or three brief conversations with Putin, mostly about Syria.
The talks were described in a joint statement by United States and Russia that reaffirmed previous commitments to defeat the Islamic State and to untangle conflicts between their forces on the Syrian battlefield.
It said that Trump believed he had had “a good meeting” with Putin on common efforts that, once in place, would “save thousands of lives.”
Trump’s description of the exchange about election meddling was striking because it suggested that he concurred with Putin’s oft-stated contention that the issue was a contrived story that had been allowed to become an irritant between the United States and Russia, to the detriment of both countries.....
It is and that is why, as well as to provide possible impeachment proceedings, even though they have found nothing (the DNC leaks were from inside, folks, sorry).
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"Trans-Pacific trade partners are moving on, without the US" by Alexandra Stevenson New York Times November 11, 2017
HONG KONG — President Trump shook up the world economic order this year by pulling the United States out of a major international trade pact and raising fundamental questions about its global role.
I suppose everyone has one redeeming quality.
Today, the world is moving on without it.
So am I.
A group of 11 countries announced Saturday that they had committed to resurrecting a sweeping multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, without the United States.
A new deal, which would have to be signed and ratified by each country, would include major US allies like Japan, Canada, and Mexico. Collectively, they account for about a sixth of global trade.
The agreement will “serve as a foundation for building a broader free-trade area” across Asia, Taro Kono, Japan’s foreign minister, said in a statement.
Pointedly, the potential members of what is now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership came to an early agreement on the broad outline of a deal while many of their leaders were meeting with Trump in Vietnam — itself a potential member of the new trading group.
Some details of a new deal, including when rules would be phased in, still need to be determined, and prospective member states like Canada raised last-minute concerns. But a new deal could be announced as soon as early next year.
Other countries are slowly but surely making progress on their own sweeping trade deals, without any participation from the United States. China is negotiating a potential deal with 16 Asia-Pacific countries, including Japan, India, and South Korea.
The European Union and Japan hope to strike separate trade pacts with a group of South American countries, Brazil and Argentina among them.
From tough talk on China (“they took our jobs”) to casting doubt on the decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement (“the worst trade deal ever made”), Trump has threatened to lob a grenade at an increasingly integrated global economic system.
I'm getting tired of the self-internalized war terminology spewing forth in every damn article.
His administration has questioned years of efforts to lower global trade barriers, arguing that they hurt US workers and led to big trade deficits. It also means dealing with nations one-on-one, rejecting the regional and global pacts his predecessors pursued, but other factors are pushing the rest of the world to fill the void left by the United States. China’s rise as a regional and economic power is driving other nations either to join with it or to join together to counter it.
Fast development in places like Southeast Asia means potential new markets for all kinds of products. The absence of the United States means potential opportunities for others.
“At some point, the administration may begin to see that this was a strategic mistake and that dropping out of trade is not in the interest of American workers,” said Rufus Yerxa, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a lobbying group that represents companies like Walmart, Ford, and Microsoft. “We’ve got to compete and be a winner in global markets — and the danger is, the strategy is divisive,” he added.
Yeah, look who is front of the picket line for American workers.
With reps like that.... sigh.
More worrying for some is the possibility that the Trump administration is ceding its position as global leader to China, a rising economic and political influence in the region.
“The US has lost its leadership role,” said Jayant Menon, an economist at the Asian Development Bank. “And China is quickly replacing it.”
Was going to happen anyway.
There are still challenges ahead of the group, and not all the prospective member states meeting in Danang, Vietnam, were in complete accord over the finer details of a new deal. François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s minister of international trade, said in a statement that Canada would sign a deal only once its interests had been addressed.
What is this pissing on the party after an article full of how great it is a deal is being made?
Even without the United States, the deal would be the largest trade agreement in history. It is intended to increase protections for intellectual property in some countries, while opening more markets to free trade in agricultural products and digital services around the region. It also has provisions on improving working conditions, although there is debate about the likely results.
Corporations to benefit.
In a statement posted online, the Australian government said that the agreement in principle demonstrated the 11 countries’ “commitment to open markets, to combat protectionism and to advance regional economic integration.”
The 11 countries working toward the new agreement are Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, and Brunei.
The new agreement has been crafted with the hope that the United States will one day participate. Some of the provisions — among them ones that the United States lobbied for — could ultimately be suspended, including some on copyright protection.
Given the intensity with which Trump excoriated the original deal, it seems unlikely that this administration will come back to the table.
Then we will just have to get another one, huh?
The thing was so unpopular even Clinton had to back off it to steal the nomination from Sanders.
“It will be difficult for the administration to backtrack,” said Wendy Cutler, a former US trade negotiator who worked on the Trans-Pacific deal and is now managing director of the Washington office of the Asia Society Policy Institute, but other countries like Korea, the Philippines and Thailand are expected to join once the deal is ratified, said Cutler.
For members, the pact could offer a sense of security in a time when a number of politicians around the world are questioning the impact of trade and globalization.
In other words, they are going to ram it through before you like it even less.
Speaking last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia said the deal promised “greater transparency and a stronger rule of law, in a world which is dangerously short of both,” referring to the “siren songs of populists, advocating protectionism.”
Empty hollow words and platitudes from a pos political puppet.
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"Wary Hanoi seeks a path between China and US" by Hannah Beech New York Times November 11, 2017
HANOI — Vietnam’s full-on war with the United States lasted a decade. Its tensions with its northern neighbor, China, have persisted for thousands of years — from a millennium of direct Chinese rule and a bloody border war in 1979 to more recent confrontations in the South China Sea, so with the rest of the world struggling to reckon with China’s assertive moves in the Pacific, the Vietnamese, hosts of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are offering guidance.
The odd thing is China helped them during the Vietnam War, according to Ken Burns.
“I would like to give advice to the whole world, and especially to the United States, that you must be careful with China,” said Major General Le Van Cuong, the retired director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.
Like any good Communist soldier, Cuong pays attention to the details of leaders’ abstruse speeches, and he noted that President Xi Jinping of China had referred to his homeland’s status as a “great” or “strong power” 26 times in a lengthy address last month.
“Xi Jinping’s ambitions are dangerous for the whole world,” Cuong said. “China uses its money to buy off many leaders, but none of the countries that are its close allies, like North Korea, Pakistan, or Cambodia, has done well. Countries that are close to America have done much better. We must ask: Why is this?”
More like do I believe it?
Now, President Trump’s decision to take the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, which would have given 11 other economies an alternative to a Chinese-led economic order, has left the Vietnamese feeling vulnerable.
“As Vietnamese, we are always trying to find a way to balance China’s power,” said Nguyen Ngoc Anh, a professor at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi. “For us, TPP isn’t just an economic issue. It’s also about geopolitics and social issues.”
Anh noted that local liberals had cheered the trade pact because it would have forced Vietnam to adhere to international labor and government accountability standards that Hanoi might otherwise not meet.
And if those standards are not enforced?
With the 11 other members of the pact agreeing to proceed without the United States, Washington’s withdrawal — not to mention Trump’s “America first” speech at the APEC meeting Friday — leaves some nations wondering if their best option may be Chinese-backed trade pacts and financing deals that have fewer guarantees for workers and less transparency.
“We are both communist countries, but people like me in Vietnam don’t want to develop the same way that China has,” said Anh, who studied economics in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. “We want to follow the Western-oriented way.”
Yeah, except we have been told we are not communist.
Trump praised Vietnam’s progress in brief remarks before a state dinner Saturday, calling the nation ‘‘one of the great miracles of the world.’’
While the United States is the largest market for Vietnamese exports, Vietnam’s biggest trading partner is China. Yet Vietnam runs a significant trade deficit with its populous neighbor, and Vietnamese economists worry that China doesn’t play fairly.
“China is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t observe international law in many areas,” said Le Dang Doanh, an influential economist who has advised members of the Vietnamese Politburo on trade.
Neither does Israel, but that doesn't seem to be a problem.
The Vietnamese watched in alarm last year when Beijing reacted to an international tribunal’s dismissal of China’s expansive claims over the South China Sea by ignoring — and even mocking — the judgment. Vietnam and four other governments have claims of their own on the resource-rich waterway that conflict with China’s.
It is hard to overstate the level of Vietnamese antipathy toward China. In a country where public protest is rare and risky, some of the few large-scale demonstrations in Vietnam in recent years have been against the Chinese.
Then they must have been government-approved, right?
But this national aversion puts Vietnam’s leadership in a bind. It cannot ignore China’s growing economic magnetism. For many members of APEC, China now ranks as their number one trading partner.
In return for investment and project financing — roads, railways, dams, airports, and colossal government buildings — leaders of regional economies are increasingly doing Beijing’s bidding.
As opposed to the U.S., which threatens war, destroys the place, and then fails to rebuild.
Is it any wonder people would rather go with the Chinese? At least they are building infrastructure in peaceful way.
Cambodia and Laos have given support for Beijing’s South China Sea claims. Thailand has complied with Beijing’s demand that it return Chinese dissidents who once counted on it as a haven.
That's why the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar was in the news a few months ago. It was the West looking to carve out a Kosovo so NATO could have a base there.
Even the Philippines has appeared to yield, despite the fact it lodged the successful South China Sea lawsuit at The Hague. Days before Trump’s visit to Manila on Sunday, it disclosed that President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered a halt to construction on a disputed sandbar in the South China Sea, a move widely regarded as intended to placate Beijing.
Vietnam, more than any other country, has grown practiced at divining when not to challenge the two Pacific powers — both of which it fought within the last half-century.
In the 1970s and 1980s, China seized spits of land in the South China Sea that Vietnam had controlled or that were unoccupied but claimed by Hanoi.
Yet perhaps sensing a US reluctance to confront China in the South China Sea, Vietnam has declined to take China to international court, as the Philippines did, even as the Chinese have turned disputed reefs and sandbars into militarized islands.....
Yeah, China is the militaristic behemoth even though the U.S. spends more on "defense" than the rest of the world combined.
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Oh, New York Times. That explains the slop.
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"Lebanon asks Saudi Arabia to clarify why Hariri hasn’t returned" by Bassem Mroue Associated Press November 11, 2017
BEIRUT — Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, called on Saudi Arabia Saturday to clarify the reasons why the country’s prime minister has not returned home since his resignation last week.
A political crisis has gripped Lebanon and shattered the relative peace maintained by its coalition government. Lebanese officials have insisted on the return home of Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Saudi Arabia amid rumors he is being held against his will. Saudi officials have said that their measures against Lebanon are in response to the militant Hezbollah’s group support of anti-Saudi rebels in Yemen known as Houthis.
In a separate development Saturday, the Israeli military said it shot down an unmanned aircraft that tried to infiltrate its airspace from neighboring Syria.
Only Israel can violate others' airspace, if this account is even true!
In a statement, the military said it intercepted the drone above the Golan Heights using a Patriot missile. The military said the drone was operated by the Syrian regime and was shot down in the demilitarized zone between the countries.
In September, Israel shot down an Iranian-made drone sent by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the same area. Both Iranian and Hezbollah forces have been backing Syrian President Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war.
Israel has warned that it will not accept a permanent presence of Iran or its allied militias near its border in postwar Syria.
Israel says that it expects any agreement ending the war in Syria to include a 12-mile buffer zone meant to keep away Iranian-backed militants. Israel has been closely watching Iran’s involvement in the war in neighboring Syria.
It fears Iran could use Syrian territory to stage attacks on Israel, or create a land corridor from Iran to Lebanon that could allow it to transfer weapons more easily to Hezbollah.
And now you understand why there is Plan B turmoil in the region. It's the PNAC neocons and Zionist warlords behind all of it.
Saudi Minister for Gulf Affairs Thamer al-Sabhan warned earlier this month that his government would deal with Lebanon as a hostile state as long as Hezbollah was in the Lebanese government.
The Lebanese unity government that Hariri formed a year ago includes Hezbollah members — the result of a tacit Saudi-Iranian agreement to sideline Lebanon from the other proxy wars in the region.
Al-Sabhan blasted in a tweet late Saturday as laughable those expressing support and ‘‘love’’ for Hariri despite their previous opposition to him. He added that those who ‘‘sold out’’ Lebanon would soon be exposed.
We are still waiting, and it turned out to be his boss MBS.
Also Saturday, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that French President Emmanuel Macron called Aoun expressing France’s commitment to Lebanon’s ‘‘unity, sovereignty and independence and to help it in preserving political and security stability.’’
WhyTF is he getting involved? Shouldn't he be worried about the terrorists?
"Preliminary terrorism charges have been handed to eight suspects in a French-Swiss counterterrorism sweep earlier this week. The eight were charged with associating with a terrorist network. Seven are in custody and one is under judicial supervision. Ten people suspected of using encrypted social networks to prepare a possible attack were arrested Tuesday during operations in France and Switzerland (AP)."
What a crock of crap.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Saudi Arabia is aiming to create unrest in Lebanon after doing so in the Gulf region and Yemen.
Bahram Qasemi, a spokesman for the ministry, said in comments carried by state news agency IRNA that the kingdom is trying to destabilize the region.....
YUP!
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Related:
"Iraqi forces on Saturday launched an operation to push Islamic State fighters out of territory on the western edge of the country near the border with Syria. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the push during a visit to Karbala during a pilgrimage to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Iraqi forces retook Iraq’s border crossing with Syria earlier this month in a US-backed operation (AP)."
"An explosion ripped through a pipeline belonging to Bahrain’s state-run oil company and sent flames shooting up into the night sky, with government officials on Saturday blaming the blast on an attack by militants guided by Iran. No one was injured in the explosion late Friday night near the Shi’ite village of Buri and no group claimed responsibility for the blast. However, it opens a new front in the insurgency plaguing Bahrain since its 2011 Arab Spring protests (AP)."
War is coming.
"Tens of thousands of Gazans marked the anniversary Saturday of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s death for the first time since the Hamas group seized the territory a decade ago. Amid a possible reconciliation between Hamas and the Fatah party Arafat founded, Fatah supporters flocked to al-Saraya Square in Gaza City from all over the coastal enclave. Arafat died in France in 2004 after two years of an Israeli siege on his West Bank headquarters (AP)."
Hamas didn't seize the territory, they won election, and it was Abbas that helped Israel poison Arafat (he benefited, did he not?). The French never finished the autopsy before reburying him, and I guess we will just never know.
Also see:
"The US States military said Saturday that it killed several militants in a drone strike against the al-Shabab extremist group in Somalia. The US Africa Command said the strike was carried out Friday night in Lower Shabelle region, about 20 miles north of Mogadishu. It came a day after another strike in the Bay Region, about 100 miles west of the capital (AP)."
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"Putin’s bridge to Crimea may carry more symbolism than traffic" by Neil MacFarquhar New York Times November 11, 2017
KERCH, Crimea — The looming bridge is the best show in town.
Every two weeks, Nikolai Ench, a retired sailor, and his wife, Olga, scale the scrublands above Kerch in their white Toyota truck to marvel at the colossal engineering feat inching its way across the strait separating Crimea from the Russian mainland.
“This is the first time they can build something like this in Russia,” said Ench, 67, who even spent an entire night in August staring at the bridge through binoculars until construction workers slotted the first of two arches into place at what he said was exactly 7:27 a.m. “We feel a certain pride.”
Expected to open to traffic in December 2018, the $7 billion bridge project is likely to come more freighted with symbolism than with actual vehicles. It is the latest in a series of megaprojects of the type much beloved by President Vladimir Putin.
I've had with sh!t NYT insult, sorry. It's the same slop every damn day, and it's grown so f***ing stale!
“It is showing the world the great things it can do,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. “The government might not be able to provide safety, good health care, and education, but it can provide big projects. If you cannot do bread, you can at least do circuses.”
When did he live in AmeriKa?
The bridge carries even weightier symbolism because much of the world considers Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea illegitimate.
Except Russia didn't seize anything, you lying sack of sh!t. After Obama's Ukranian coup, the Crimeans voted to secede and join Russia. Russia accepted.
Therefore, one can only conclude that whatever framing the NYT gives an issue is either a massive distortion or flat-out f***ing lie. Thank you.
“It signifies in the most visible way the connection between Crimea and Russia, that Crimea is part of Russia, connected to it by a solid bridge — that is as symbolic as it gets,” Schulmann said.
Putin has taken a keen public interest in the project, not least because the annexation of the Black Sea peninsula buoyed his political fortunes domestically by resurrecting the image of Russia as a muscular power.
(Blog editor just shakes head as the NYT puke flogs the lie.
Btw, he doesn't have to resurrect an image; they are a muscular power on the world stage)
In Crimea, billboards bearing his picture and a quote from him lauding the “historic mission” of building the bridge loom over various potholed highways.
When the project was first announced, however, it seemed that no Russian company wanted to touch it.
There were extraordinary engineering challenges, and anything involving Crimea carried the risk of international sanctions. Even more daunting, perhaps, the ultimate project supervisor, known to be a demanding boss, was laying out a rigorous construction schedule.
“The bridge itself is difficult, the scale is huge, and it is tough to meet the deadline,” said Oleg Skvortsov, a bridge specialist who led a 50-member expert advisory council.
Into the breach stepped Arkady Rotenberg, a billionaire who has made a career of taking on Putin’s pet projects.
Spanning the Kerch Strait with a bridge has been proposed repeatedly for more than 100 years and even tried once before, but some combination of costs, war, and Mother Nature doomed every effort.
Oh, yeah?
See:
"Climate change holds a mirror up to every place its effects are felt. Global warming might not specifically have caused Harvey, any more than a single major league home run can be attributed to steroids. That said, scientists have little doubt that climate change is making storms worse and more frequent. Time and again, America has bent the land to its will, imposing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on nature’s most daunting obstacles. We have bridged the continent with railways and roads, erected cities in the desert, and changed the course of rivers. Built on a mosquito-infested Texas swamp, Houston similarly willed itself into a great city. It is the country’s energy capital, home to oil and carbon-producing giants, to the space industry, medical research, and engineers of every stripe. Its sprawl of highways and single-family homes is a postwar version of the American dream. Unfortunately, nature always gets the last word....."
Yeah, AmeriKa is so exceptional!
Related: Boston shatters 116-year cold weather record
That's why they built a fire.
The strait runs between two mountain ranges, sending fierce winds howling through its narrow confines.
Ice floes crash through during the spring thaw and the area is prone to earthquakes.
For the bridge to overcome those conditions, thousands upon thousands of pylons were driven into the seabed for stability. In addition, various parts were built using aerodynamics akin to an airplane wing, ensuring that the winds flow around the structure.
Speaking of wind.
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Word is the Russians have also developed a ‘death laser’ that will mean the end of NATO.
Related:
"Pope Francis on Saturday blamed ‘‘shortsighted human activity’’ for global warming. Francis met with a delegation of leaders from the Pacific islands and told them he shares their concerns about rising sea levels and increasingly intense storms that are threatening their small islands. He decried in particular the state of oceans, where overfishing and pollution by plastics are threatening fish stocks and sea life that are critical to Pacific livelihoods. He said several causes were to blame, but that ‘‘sadly, many of them are due to shortsighted human activity connected with certain ways of exploiting natural and human resources, the impact of which ultimately reaches the ocean bed itself.’’
That sick f*** can shove it.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday that every country must pitch in to keep global temperatures from rising. Merkel said in her weekly podcast that climate change was an urgent problem, and that every country has to help limit global warming. Merkel also said it’s the responsibility of the industrial countries to develop environment-friendly technologies that are future-oriented, but ‘‘don’t lead to a loss of jobs. We don’t gain anything if steel mills, aluminum plants, and copper mills leave our countries and go somewhere else where environmental regulations are less strict — because then we haven’t made any gains for world climate,’’ she said....."
She is more concerned about world climate than you, German.
Btw, is Germany's military also exempt from carbon emission tabulations like the US war machine?
"New Delhi’s air quality is consistently ranked among the world’s worst. But a perfect storm of problems is exacerbating the problem to potentially deadly levels. Farmers who’ve recently harvested crops in neighboring states are illegally burning their fields, sending smoke into the air. Construction projects and pollution from vehicles in a city that lacks adequate public transportation are making things worse. Last week, the smog was 10 times worse than reigning pollution champion Beijing....."
This is for the pigeons, folks.
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Judge Trump for yourself:
"Trump and GOP reshaping federal appellate courts at a rapid pace" by Charlie Savage New York Times November 11, 2017
WASHINGTON — In the weeks before Donald Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a Washington law office, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, laid out a secret plan to fill federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary.
Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them.
I warned Democrats back then, but the thought of losing the Senate majority either didn't occur to them or they are really collaborators while maintaining the illusion of opposition.
Most have strong academic credentials and clerked for well-known conservative judges, like Justice Antonin Scalia.
Confirmation votes for five of the eight new judges fell short of the former 60-vote threshold to clear filibusters.
They included John K. Bush, a chapter president of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal network, who wrote politically charged blog posts, such as comparing abortion to slavery; and Stephanos Bibas, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who once proposed using electric shocks to punish people convicted of certain crimes, although he later disavowed the idea.
Of Trump’s 18 appellate nominees, 15 are men and 16 are white.
While the two parties have been engaged in a tit-for-tat escalation of hardball politics over judicial nominations since the Reagan years, the Trump administration is completing a fundamental transformation of the enterprise.
And the consequences may go beyond his chance to leave an outsize stamp on the judiciary. When Democrats regain power, if they follow the same playbook and systematically appoint outspoken liberal judges, the appeals courts will end up as ideologically split as Congress is today.
“It’s such a depressing idea, that we don’t get appointments unless we have unified government, and that the appointments we ultimately get are as polarized as the rest of the country,” said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. “What does that mean for the legitimacy of the courts in the United States? It’s not a pretty world.”
WOW!
The corporate courts that were devised to protect the rich are no longer legitimate?
For now, conservatives are reveling in their success. During the campaign, Trump shored up the support of skeptical right-wing voters by promising to select Supreme Court justices from a list together with help from the Federalist Society and the conservative Heritage Foundation. Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped deliver the president’s narrow victory. Now, he is rewarding them.
He's fulfilling campaign promises to voters?
Will wonders never cease?!!
“We will set records in terms of the number of judges,” Trump said at the White House recently, adding that many more nominees were in the pipeline. Standing beside Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, he continued, “There has never been anything like what we’ve been able to do together with judges.”
Appellate judges draw less attention than Supreme Court justices like Neil Gorsuch, whom Trump installed in the seat that Scalia’s death left vacant and that Republicans, led by McConnell, refused to let Obama fill, but the 12 regional appeals courts wield profound influence over Americans’ lives, getting the final word on about 60,000 cases a year that are not among the roughly 80 the Supreme Court hears.
They are the law.
Nan Aron, of the liberal Alliance for Justice, said her group considered many of Trump’s nominees to be “extremists” — hostile to the rights of women, minority groups, and workers, and unduly favorable to the wealthy, but conservatives, who have rallied around Trump’s nominees as a rare bright spot of unity for the fractious Republican Party, see them as legal rock stars who will interpret the Constitution according to its text and original meaning, and they see tremendous opportunity in the fact that Trump is the first Republican president whose nominees can be confirmed by simple-majority votes, especially since he is likely to fill an unusually large number of vacancies.
As a result, Trump is poised to bring the conservative legal movement to a new peak of influence over US law and society.....
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"Lawmakers question whether key CIA nominee misled Congress" by Deb Riechmann Associated Press November 11, 2017
WASHINGTON — Two former CIA employees are accusing the Trump administration’s choice for CIA chief watchdog of being less than candid when he told Congress he didn’t know about any active whistleblower complaints against him.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Christopher Sharpley, the current acting inspector general who’s in line for the permanent job, about complaints that he and other managers participated in retaliation against CIA workers who alerted congressional committees and other authorities about alleged misconduct.
‘‘I’m unaware of any open investigations on me, the details of any complaints about me,’’ Sharpley testified at his confirmation hearing last month.
Aren't CIA guys trained to lie?
John Tye, executive director of Whistleblower Aid, who is representing two of the complainants alleging retaliation by Sharpley and other senior managers, said some discord in the office stemmed from a case several years ago involving kickbacks from contractors.
The Justice Department announced in 2013 that three CIA contractors had agreed to pay the United States $3 million to settle allegations that they provided meals, entertainment, gifts, and tickets to sporting events to CIA employees and outside consultants to help get business steered their way.
It's called greasing the palms, and it has been standard practice regarding this country for centuries. Corruption is a way of life and how things get done!
The criminal case fell apart after intelligence employees discovered that evidence in the case was being fabricated and witness statements were being altered.
What did they think they were doing, preparing the ground for an invasion of Iraq?
These employees secretly went around Sharpley and then-CIA Inspector General David Buckley and contacted the US attorney’s office. Tye said that after learning about the falsified evidence, a guilty plea in the case, which had already been accepted by a judge, was voided at the request of the US attorney.
Afterward, leaders at the CIA inspector’s office asked auditors across town at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to look into their in-house matter. It’s unclear why that agency — a place where Sharpley previously worked — was chosen to handle the matter. Results of that investigation haven’t been revealed.....
So the CIA was stealing FHFA money as well as HUD and the rest.
Where do you think all the "lost" money goes?
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