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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I'd be interested to know how much of this is from Putin directly. Historically his centers of power have been in the FSB and General Staff and he's struggled to exert control over the GRU and MOD. It seems like there are several different lines of attack here so it almost makes you wonder whether different parts of the Russian government are more or less doing their own thing. The Kremlin doesn't have as much control over various agencies as people often think it does.
They should have sent a poet.![]()
and Bolton apparently has ties to Russia as well.
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:26:33 PM by megaeliz
Congress may avoid a shutdown with a $1.3 trillion omnibus budget bill that has conservatives fuming and attacking it
. The bill will need to withstand resistance from the most right wing Republicans, and some resistance from some Democrats. The x-factor is whether Trump will get out his veto pen, especially since it takes away virtually all increases in border/wall funding. It does nothing regarding DACA and certain other priorities for Democrats, however.
If passed (which is expected, as both Republican and Democratic leaders support it), the legislation will keep the government open through September 30, giving us at least six months without a major budgetary showdown.
This particular omnibus is coming in the nick of time. If it fails to pass by the end of Friday night, the government will enter its third shutdown in two months. And some hurdles remain. While the Republican leadership originally scheduled release of the text for Monday night, it didn’t come for another two days, prompting consternation among some members of Congress.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who forced a brief shutdown in February to emphasize his opposition to increased federal spending, has promised to oppose the omnibus and won’t say if he’ll attempt to delay a vote and force a shutdown again.
The House Freedom Caucus, an influential subgroup of conservative members, has pledged opposition, as has the Heritage Foundation:
Link to Freedom Caucus' denouncement of the bill, since it couldn't be copied and pasted
The misgivings are bipartisan. House Democrats are reportedly threatening to not vote for the rule bringing the legislation to the floor; if they and House conservatives together defeat the rule, that would stop the underlying legislation in its tracks. Most likely, though, the legislation will pass, and a number of important changes in policy and funding levels for everything from immigration to gun research will take effect.
The whole point of omnibus legislation is that it’s kind of a cobbled-together mishmash of provisions and priorities. As Vox’s Tara Golshan notes, the bill resolves a number of serious disagreements present throughout the negotiation process for it:
- Republicans wanted increased funding for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) interior enforcement (that is, of undocumented immigrants already here, not on the border) and an increase in the number of detention beds. The final deal included 328 additional CBP officers but required ICE to cut detention beds.
- The White House, at the last minute, asked for $25 billion for a border wall, which was reduced to only $1.6 billion in the final deal.
- While Democratic leaders have appeared willing to accept an omnibus that doesn’t revive the DACA program, other Democratic members of Congress have suggested they’d oppose any funding bill that doesn’t protect DACA. The final bill does nothing on DACA.
- Both parties wanted to include provisions to stabilize Obamacare health insurance markets, which fell apart over disagreements about whether funding can go to plans that cover abortions, and over disagreements about whether the stabilization measures would hurt more than they help.
- The White House wanted to strip $900 million in funding for the Gateway project, a $30 billion endeavor to add a new commuter rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York under the Hudson River. Ultimately, the $900 million wasn’t included, but hundreds of millions in unallocated funding that could wind up going to the project did make it in.
- The omnibus includes a new law (the Fix NICS Act) that would increase enforcement of the federal law requiring state law enforcement agencies to report criminal records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), and give states more financial incentives to report records. It’s just about the most modest thing that Congress could do on guns, but it’s still sparked some conservative pushback; the Freedom Caucus wanted to pair it with a law requiring states to recognize each other’s concealed carry permits.
- The bill also bars employers from taking their workers’ tips, holding back a push by Trump’s Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to allow restaurant owners to confiscate tips if they pay workers minimum wage or above.
- The bill doesn’t defund “sanctuary cities” that attempt to protect unauthorized immigrant residents from federal immigration officials, despite Trump’s last-minute push to defund the cities as part of the omnibus.
- Nor does the bill do anything to target Planned Parenthood, a common target of Republican ire.
Other issues that sparked less overt controversy are also addressed in the omnibus:
- The National Institutes of Health get a $3 billion funding increase.
- The Census Bureau will get another $1.34 billion, a Democratic priority.
- The Community Development Block Grant program, a flexible federal funding program for cities and local governments, is being nearly doubled from $2.8 billion to $5.2 billion, despite Trump’s prior proposals to eliminate it.
- TIGER, a grant program for transportation projects inaugurated by Obama’s stimulus, is seeing its budget tripled to $1.5 billion.
- The bill includes the STOP School Violence Act of 2018, a measure to increase grants for security training, metal detectors, stronger locks, emergency notifications, and other provisions meant to improve school safety. It passed the House by an overwhelming bipartisan margin earlier this month.
- For the first time ever, the Congressional Research Service (an indispensable nonpartisan agency producing invaluable reports on a wide variety of procedural and policy topics) will be required to post all of its reports online. Currently, only a subset are available to the public, mostly through third parties.
An overview from Vox about Bolton
, detailing his role in politicizing and molding the intelligence that started the Iraq war, and how much of an abusive lunatic the man personally is. Bold emphasis mine.
...
“I operate on the assumption that John Bolton should be kept as far away from the levers of foreign policy as possible,” says Christopher Preble, the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I think I would rest easy if he was dog catcher in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But maybe not.”
Bolton’s elevation illustrates the degree to which the president is influenced by the conservative infotainment sphere, most notably Fox News — where he has long been an on-air fixture. Bolton was, prior to this appointment, a marginal figure in Washington foreign policy circles since his departure from the Bush administration. But he got himself one of the top jobs in the country because of his savvy work in the world of conservative media and advocacy groups.
Bolton is, somewhat ironically, a quintessential creature of the Washington swamp.
After graduating Yale Law School in 1974, where he had become friends with future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, he went into private practice in Washington. He made a name for himself working in conservative politics, becoming vice president of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and serving in midlevel roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
But it wasn’t until the George W. Bush administration that Bolton rose to greater prominence. In May 2001, Bush appointed him to be undersecretary of state for arms control, basically the top diplomat focusing on weapons of mass destruction. This position became fairly important in the runup to the Iraq War, as the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein focused on his alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Bolton took the hardest of possible lines. He forcefully argued that Iraq had WM Ds — “we are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction,” as he put in one 2002 speech. After Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech connecting North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as an “axis of evil,” Bolton insisted that this wasn’t just rhetoric — that there was ‘’a hard connection between these regimes — an ‘axis’ along which flow dangerous weapons and dangerous technology.’’
He was involved in shaping US intelligence in the runup to the war — and not in a good way. In 2002, Bolton’s staff prepared a speech alleging that Cuba had an active biological weapons program. This wasn’t true, and the State Department’s lead bioweapons analyst at the time would not sign off on the claim. Per the analyst’s sworn testimony to Congress, Bolton then called the analyst into his office, screamed at him, and then sent for his boss. In this conversation, per the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, he derisively referred to the analyst as a “munchkin” and attempted to get him transferred to a different department.
This was cruel and unprofessional, but also dangerous. Carl Ford, then the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, testified that Bolton’s assault on the analyst had a “chilling effect” throughout the department, freezing out dissent on proliferation issues beyond Cuba. John Prados, a fellow at George Washington University’s National Security Archives, came to an even broader conclusion in a study of declassified Bush administration documents: Bolton bears a significant amount of blame for the politicized intelligence used to justify the decision to attack Iraq.
“Although Bolton’s actions did not concern Iraq directly, they came to a high point during the summer of 2002 — the exact moment when Iraq intelligence issues were on the front burner — and they aimed at offices which played a central role in producing Iraq intelligence,” Prados writes. “Analysts working on Iraq intelligence could not be blamed for concluding that their own careers might be in jeopardy if they supplied answers other than what the Bush administration wanted to hear.”
None of this got Bolton fired. In fact, it got him promoted: In March 2005, President Bush nominated him to be US ambassador to the UN, one of the most important diplomatic positions in the entire government.
Bolton’s Senate confirmation hearing turned into a vicious fight, largely over his role in shaping the faulty prewar intelligence about Iraq. But his management style, as exemplified by the munchkin incident, also became a huge issue. When Ford was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he bluntly said Bolton’s personality should disqualify him from holding high office. Ford called him a “bully” who “kisses up and punches down,” among other things.
“I’m as conservative as John Bolton is,” Ford told the committee. “But the fact is that the collateral damage and the personal hurt that he causes is not worth the price that had to be paid.”
Multiple people who had worked with Bolton came out of the woodwork to speak to these issues. Perhaps the most harrowing such account came in an open letter written by a former federal contractor named Melody Townsel, recalling a time that she raised issues surrounding the use of funds in a contract Bolton was working on. He didn’t take it well:
Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel — throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman. For nearly two weeks, while I awaited fresh direction from my company and from US AID, John Bolton hounded me in such an appalling way that I eventually retreated to my hotel room and stayed there. Mr. Bolton, of course, then routinely visited me there to pound on the door and shout threats.
All in all, according to then-Sen. Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, testimony from at least five people confirmed multiple instances of Bolton behaving abusively toward subordinates and retaliating against intelligence professionals who challenged his policy positions. For these reasons, Bolton could not be confirmed by the Senate — which was, at the time, controlled by Republicans.
Put another way, his job is to manage the information that comes to the president and then present a clear-eyed and accurate assessment of what’s happening and how to respond to it. Yet Bolton’s history suggests a long and storied history of cherry-picking intelligence to support his preferred hawkish policies.
“Bolton is so much of an ideologue,” says Eoyang, “that I don’t think he would accurately portray consequences [of policy options] to the president.”
His reported history of berating and undermining anyone who attempted to challenge him is likely to further stifle dissent. He’ll have more power over the White House national security staff as national security adviser than anyone other than the president, giving him unprecedented ability to act as a “bully,” in Ford’s words.
It’s very plausible that Bolton will accelerate the brain drain from the federal government that already seems to be taking shape — not just in the White House but across the various departments that make foreign policy.
“Bolton hates the State Department. He portrays US diplomats as closet Democrats and appeasers,” Richard Gowan, a professor at Columbia University who has studied Bolton’s career, recalls. “As NSA, he would almost certainly encourage the hollowing out of State Trump and [former Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson have begun.”
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:44:42 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
x5 I wouldn't start worrying yet. Even if they wanted to start a war the reality is there's a lot more that needs to be done than just saying "okay it's on", especially considering the current state of our forces. Trump also isn't going to give up his stage, and negotiating with the leader of North Korea is a landmark event for any president.
If anything, I'd watch and see what happens at the talks. If something happens it won't be until after that.
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:42:02 PM by archonspeaks
They should have sent a poet.@ElSquibbonator: Not in the slightest, North Korea doesn't want war as counter productive as that may seem with all the reporting on them.
They are not dumb, they know that if they go hot with the US it will be there end, and all they can hope to do is make the world bleed as they go down.
So they have taken the puffer fish approach, and try to make themselfs look bigger and more intimidating then they are in the hope that it keeps every one else away.
But they still don't actually want to fight.
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:42:50 PM by Imca
Yeah a war is only going to happen if there's some kind of misunderstanding that leads to escalation, neither party is likely to willingly enter war.
I think if Bolton's appointment leads to war it'll far more likely be against Iran instead of North Korea,.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
Especially since Mattis the supposed Only Sane Man now also hates Iran.
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:47:03 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedExcept why that works is likely due to those countries being far more densely-populated than portions of the US are. It's the same reason that the train system (and public transportation in general) works better in the EU than the US - over there, population density is high enough that it's enormously cost-effective, and quite popular with the populace. In the US - well, there's a reason the midwest tends to get called "Fly-over country", and even my own area of NY takes a good half-hour by car to get anywhere. There are bus services available, but they come through maybe 3 times a day - not exactly ideal if you need to, say, get to work.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"![]()
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Probably. Making peace with NK would make for hella good ratings, but so would making war with Iran. A win-win. War And Peace, am I right?
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:49:31 PM by kkhohoho
Iran also lacks nuclear weapons, the ability to take there neighbors hostage, or even the equipment to put up a significant fight for the US Army.
But engaging in conflict with them, killing people for no reason, and further destabilizing the region is exactly what the world needs. :/
edited 22nd Mar '18 7:51:00 PM by Imca

Don't know if this has been discussed here yet, but John Bolton has been appointed as the new National Security Adviser. This makes one thing absolutely clear: President Trump has no interest whatsoever in coming to a peaceful agreement with North Korea, and by placing matters of national security in the hands of such a man is welcoming the possibility of a nuclear war.