We will drain the swamp in Washington, D.C., and replace it with a new government, of, and by, and for the [RICH] people.






SWAMP CREATURE


 "Venturing Into the Swamp, Trump Dines With Major Donors": "President Trump dined at the ornate Georgetown home of [C. Boyden Gray,] a prominent Washington lawyer on Wednesday night with wealthy donors who are expected to play crucial roles in financing his re-election campaign. ...

"Attendees included donors and operatives who are working to raise money for the America First groups, such as the Dallas financial executive Roy W. Bailey and the Oklahoma oil billionaire Harold Hamm, as well as the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., according to someone briefed on the list of attendees and published reports." [Playbook Power Briefing, March 8, 2018]








REPUBLICAN PARTY





RACE






ISIS







HEALTHCARE


Azar to emphasize health data with insurers
HHS secretary Alex Azar has been everywhere lately, and will return to some of his most prominent emerging themes today in a speech before America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's leading trade group.
What to watch: Azar will focus at least partially on health information technology and the need to give consumers more access and control over their own information, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks.
  • Similar to the approach he took earlier this week in a speech to hospital executives, Azar will also emphasize value and prod the industry to come to the table on its own. He's expected to say:
"Putting the health care consumer in charge...will require some degree of federal intervention — perhaps even an uncomfortable degree."
"But the status quo is far from a competitive free market in the economic sense of the term...facilitating a competitive, value-based marketplace is going to be disruptive to existing actors." [Axios Vitals: Thursday, March 8]





NAFTA ROUND 7 HAS PROGRESS FOR AGGIES: President Donald Trump's pledge to impose steel and aluminum tariffs may have overshadowed the NAFTA talks, but negotiators from the U.S., Mexico and Canada were able to finish a chapter long-described as nearly complete: food safety. It was one of three chapters - along with good regulatory practices and transparency - to wrap up during the Mexico City round, demonstrating slow, but steady, progress in the renegotiation.
What's the deal with food safety? The sanitary and phytosanitary chapter, which governs food safety, is the first of its kind to fast-track and prioritize requests between the U.S., Mexico and Canada related to trade and inspections, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said. The chapter will help breakdown obstacles to agricultural trade, and it "guarantees animal and vegetable sanitation based in science," Guajardo told reporters at the close of the talks.

Small victories: Sector annexes on proprietary food formulas and chemicals were also closed this round. The annex on proprietary food formulas aims to protect the confidentiality of certain mixes and ingredients that are traded in the region. The second annex would make room for more regulatory cooperation in the use of chemicals [POLITICO's Morning Agriculture, March 8, 2018]



EDUCATION





CLIMATE CHANGE


















TRUMP TRADE SUPPORTER: MAKE TARIFFS RETROACTIVE: Former Nucor Corp. Chairman Dan DiMicco is urging Trump to stick to his guns on tariffs and go one step further by making them retroactive to April 2017, when the Commerce Department launched the Section 232 investigation leading to Trump's pending decision.
As tariffs seem ever more likely, importers are beginning to wonder how soon they will bite. Will they affect shipments already in transit, or will they begin in a few months' time to give companies time to adjust? On that point, DiMicco had a strong opinion. "Not only should there not be any consideration for what's on the water, it should be retroactive to when they first announced the 232 investigation," he told Morning Trade.
DiMicco, who worked as a trade adviser on Trump's 2016 campaign, said once the president and Ross launched the investigation, importers rushed to make deliveries before any tariff increases took effect. That's one reason why U.S. steel imports increased in value to $29.1 billion in 2017, from $22.3 billion in 2016.

A 25 percent retroactive tariff could hit importers with an approximately $6 billion to $7 billion bill, even before they started paying the increased tariff on future shipments. That seems like a big wallop, but DiMicco said duties are often made retroactive in anti-dumping and countervailing duty cases because of the tendency for importers to ship product early. [POLITICO's Morning Trade, March 7, 2018]



TECHNOLOGY

AI AND THE FEDERAL GOVT - The House Oversight IT subcommittee this afternoon holds the second in its series of hearings on artificial intelligence, and turns its focus to how government bodies are using the nascent technology. In the panel today, representatives from the Defense Department, General Services Administration and Homeland Security Department will discuss how their respective agencies leverage AI. Subcommittee chairman Will Hurd (R-Texas) has said he's interested in understanding how AI can help make citizen interactions with government services more efficient. "It should make every interaction an individual has with the federal government take less time, cost less money, and be more secure," he'll say, according to prepared remarks.

The House Energy and Commerce's digital commerce subcommittee is also due to look at the way emerging technologies and the rise of e-commerce platforms like Amazon are affecting the field of retail. [POLITICO's Morning Tech, March 7, 2018]



TAXES & TARIFFS


HATCH TAKES A STAND, CALLS TARIFFS A TAX HIKE: Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch made his feelings known on Trump's steel and aluminum tariff plans, suggesting that the trade restrictions would be a tax on American consumers and businesses and sap the benefits of recent tax cuts.
"The proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports threaten to undermine that success [of tax reform]. Raising taxes on steel and aluminum importers will increase production costs for American manufacturers and raise prices on American consumers that rely on steel and aluminum products," Hatch wrote in a letter to Trump. "History has demonstrated repeatedly that consumers - American families and taxpayers - ultimately bear the burden of tariffs on these kinds of imports."
Hatch, who earlier in the day had expressed skepticism with Trump's preference for across-the-board tariffs, suggested that the president sidetracked his own trade agenda with his surprise announcement of the pending restrictions last week. [POLITICO's Morning Trade, March 7, 2018]

THE DAY IN ONLINE SALES TAX: The Trump administration's decision to advocate for giving states more power to collect sales tax on internet purchases has raised the ire of at least one advocate for certain online retailers. The solicitor general's briefargued, among other things, that states have the authority to force out-of-state online retailers to collect sales tax, but suggested that catalog sales aren't pervasive enough to require that step. "They justify this anti-tech position by saying that any American who puts up a website is creating an electronic presence in all states," said Steve DelBianco of NetChoice.
DelBianco also argued to Morning Tax that the administration's stance could run afoul of the Internet Tax Freedom Act, which bans discriminatory taxes against electronic commerce. "The idea that if you're a catalog or mail order seller that Quill still protects you, but when you put up a website you've lost the protection is discriminatory," DelBianco said, referring to the current Supreme Court precedent that allows states to only collect sales tax from companies with a physical location.
But Joseph Bishop-Henchman of the Tax Foundation cast some doubt on that argument, saying the taxes at issue were neutral and that just taxing online retailers differently didn't rise to the level of discrimination. "Discrimination means motivated by animus against a group, and that's just not present in this case," Bishop-Henchman told Morning Tax in an email. [POLITICO's Morning Tax, March 7, 2018]



MIDDLE EAST




AFGHANISTAN





MATTIS ARRIVES IN AFGHANISTAN, TALKS PEACE, via The Washington Post: "Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Afghanistan on Tuesday to meet senior U.S. and Afghan officials and discuss both the military campaign and 'peeling off' some members of the Taliban to pursue a peace deal with the Afghan government.
"The unannounced visit comes two weeks after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani made what many observers consider an unprecedented offer, inviting the Taliban to begin peace talks without preconditions to end the 16-year war. The Taliban said last month that it is open to reaching a political settlement and negotiating, but it has not responded to Ghani's offer.
"Mattis, speaking on a flight to Afghanistan from Oman, said Tuesday that talking about a peace settlement is 'not cart before the horse,' and that is backed by the ongoing efforts of the U.S. and Afghan militaries. Still, some members of the Taliban may be willing to pursue peace, especially considering a fracturing in the group that has occurred over the last few years, he said.
"'All wars come to an end,' Mattis said. 'You don't want to miss an opportunity because you weren't alert to the opportunity. So, you need to have that door open, even if you embrace the military pressure.'" [POLITICO's Morning Defense, March 13, 2018]


SecDef Mattis made a surprise visit to Afghanistan today. Under discussion: "both the military campaign and 'peeling off' some members of the Taliban to pursue a peace deal with the Afghan government," the Washington Post reports, traveling with the secretary.
Scene-setting: "The defense secretary and his staff arrived at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport on an C-17 jet in the morning before being whisked away on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in damp, chilly weather to the U.S. military headquarters in Kabul. He met immediately with senior officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass and Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. officer in Afghanistan. He planned to meet later in the day with Ghani."
FWIW, "The defense secretary's latest visit included a new security precaution in which journalists traveling with him were directed to withhold publishing anything until after he left the airport and arrived at the U.S. military headquarters in Kabul. That followed a Taliban attack on the airport in September a few hours after Mattis's last visit." Read on, here.
The Taliban's tug-of-war with government forces continues in the western Farah province,the New York Times reported Monday from Kabul. "Dadullah Qani, a member of the Farah provincial council, said Taliban fighters stormed Anardarah district, which used to be a safe area, and overran a number of government compounds early on Monday. Additional troops that were later sent in retook the district and pushed the Taliban back out," a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry told the Times. "They lost 56 fighters and a dozen of them were wounded," the Afghan MoI spox said of the Taliban. "Of our forces, I can confirm eight men were killed and 13 wounded." That, here.
Evergreen headline: "U.S. Officials Brace For Return Of Terrorist Safe Havens To Afghanistan." That's a separate New York Times' read on how the war in Afghanistan is going presently. One depressing sentence from that: "now, Afghan and American officials said, the same area that was obliterated by the United States' biggest conventional bomb [the MOAB] is once again being used by extremists to plot attacks against the Afghan government and the West." More on America's ongoing war in the legendary "graveyard of empires," here. [The D Brief, March 13, 2018]




TURKEY














NOTE: The news sources here vary.  Not all sources have the same credibility, but in an effort to share some different perspectives, they are included here.  This compendium itself cannot claim to be unbiased.  Please take into consideration where these different perspectives originate in assessing their value.  Thank you

NOTE: I have no official connection to any organization from which information is shared.. Occasionally, I post informational material and/or an opportunity to donate or join as  a "community service" announcement.  These again are shared for their varying perspectives.

Any books listed are random or topic-related to something else in the post.  Think of these as a "library bookshelf" to browse.  They are shared for informational or entertainment value only, not as being recommended

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