Politics

Via Snake Hole Lounge blog,

The US Statutory Debt Limit, a failed tool to halt the endless growth of Federal debt issuance, is once again in play at nearly $20 trillion. It was only at $6 trillion in 2002.

The problem, of course, is runaway Fed spending which is currently at around twice that of Federal current tax receipts, requiring that the deficit be funded by issuing Federal debt (or raising taxes and/or cutting Federal spending).

More than two years after it was initiated by President Obama, the Trump administration is preparing to lift a ban on the sale of some military style weapons to police, according to the Hill. The reversal, which was widely expected, was confirmed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday during a scheduled address at the annual meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has fired no fewer than 14 high-level staffers, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus and former chief strategist Steve Bannon. With so many vacancies in the West Wing, the Hill is reporting that members of Congress aren’t certain to whom they should reach out at the White House ahead of a particularly difficult stretch of the legislative calendar.

A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.

On Monday morning, the world had one less geopolitical hotspot to worry about, when following months of escalating verbal jawboning and explicit threats on both sides, India agreed with China to disengage at the contested territorial dispute face-off site in Doklam.