A FIRST-PASS ANSWER IS “LOTS”: How Much Worse Can it Get for Venezuela’s State Oil Firm PDVSA?

It’s getting ugly:

Finding a soft landing out of the crisis for PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary Citgo Petroleum could become increasingly complex for the United States as it seeks to manage Venezuela’s deteriorating situation. Washington has placed sanctions on critical members of the Venezuelan government but has been reluctant to take action that could spill over to Citgo’s ability to operate. Citgo operates three of America’s largest oil refineries for a total capacity of 750,000 b/d, including an important regional facility near Chicago. Citgo supplied fifteen billion gallons of gasoline in the United States in 2015. So far, Citgo has been shielded from creditors by its corporate structure. But recently, impatient creditors of state oil company PDVSA are starting to use more aggressive tactics, with one such group trying to seize an oil cargo ship in an attempt to get paid. To avoid such circumstances, PDVSA, which for all intents and purposes can no longer attain bank letters of credit, is “time swapping” ownership of some of the undesignated crude oil cargoes it can muster for export for exchange of later delivery of badly needed fuel and feedstock. The arrangements are designed to discourage creditors from trying to grab oil in international locations because, in effect, the oil is already owned by other parties before it sets sail from Venezuela.

Late-stage socialism always involves fights over who gets to plunder the last corpses.

WHAT A SHAME: No one is going to win the Google Lunar X Prize competition.

“After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar X Prize teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline,” the X Prize Foundation released in a statement. “This literal ‘moonshot’ is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30 [million] Google Lunar X Prize will go unclaimed.”

I’d like to see more of the regulatory hurdles either lowered or removed.

HAND-ME-DOWNS: The US Navy May End Up Flying the Air Force’s Unwanted MQ-1 Predator Drones.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Secret Society Update, Schumer Rescinds Wall ‘Offer’ and Much, Much More.. “Democrats do not want the public to see the House Intelligence memo outlining FISA abuse by federal law enforcement. Since they have no control over that, the Democrats are trying to smear, discredit and undermine it before it sees the light of day. DiFi and leaker Rep. Adam Schiff are doing their part in the smear.”

WHITE HOUSE: ‘Flake-Graham-Durbin’ Agreement on Immigration ‘Dead on Arrival.’

“In short, it’s totally unacceptable to the president and should be declared dead on arrival,” she said.

She also said Trump has consistently called for these principles in immigration reform.

“The president has been extraordinarily consistent on immigration and what his priorities are,” [White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders] said. “His views are shared by the vast majority of the American people and have bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.”

Polling shows Americans want a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) deal that does not increase legal immigration or continue the practices of chain migration and the visa lottery system.

A January 2018 Harvard-Harris poll found 81 percent of respondents want 1 million or fewer total immigrants allowed into the U.S. per year, which is fewer than 2015’s total of 1.38 million.

Trump rescinded President Barack Obama’s DACA executive order in September and gave Congress six months to find a legal solution.

McConnell should bring it to the floor anyway, and see if Schumer is willing to go to the shutdown mattresses again over losing a legitimate Senate vote, or even over a perfectly kosher presidential veto.

HMM: Loretta Lynch – Bill Clinton tarmac meeting now makes sense, it was the end not the beginning.

William Jacobson:

We now know a lot more about the sequence of events, which now strongly suggests that the tarmac meeting was not the start of events that led to the exoneration. Rather, it now appears that the tarmac meeting was the end of that process, the signal to the Clintons that all was taken care of.

The key facts we know now but did not know then are:

The tarmac meeting was planned, not spontaneous, as we covered on August 5, 2017, ACLJ: DOJ Document Dump Shows Lynch-Clinton Tarmac Summit Planned, Media Coverup.

The conduct of Lynch in trying to conceal details was not consistent with it being an innocent meeting, as we covered on August 7, 2017, Loretta Lynch used alias “Elizabeth Carlisle” to email about Bill Clinton tarmac meeting and August 10, 2017, Why did Loretta Lynch need DOJ Talking Points about a meeting she alone attended?

The FBI has tried its best not to produce documents regarding the tarmac meeting, and when it did, those documents focused heavily on how the meeting was discovered, as Judicial Watch reported on November 30, 2017.

The FBI decided, sometime by early May 2016, not to charge Hillary. The drafts of the exoneration statement now are public, and show a concerted effort to reword the language to support exoneration. These drafts took place prior to the tarmac meeting and prior to the interview of Hillary on July 4th weekend.

Senior FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was part of the team investigating Hillary, was removed from the Mueller investigation of supposed Russia collusion in the summer of 2016 for sending anti-Trump text messages (though the removal was not disclosed for several months). Strzok was involved in editing and softening the Comey draft exoneration statement.

Strzok was having an affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Based on text messages recently released, it appears they believed Hillary would not be charged and suggested Lynch Knew the Outcome of FBI Hillary Probe in Advance.

So what significance does the tarmac meeting take in this new context?

Read the whole thing.

I’d ask why it’s up to pajama-clad bloggers to do the dot-connecting the mainstream media should be doing, except we already know the answer.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I ask the Special Counsel’s office if Lisa Page was involved in approving Peter Strzok’s warrant requests, they decline to answer.

VIDEO: Strzok and Page Wanted to ‘Fix’ Damage They Did in Clinton Investigation, Text Reveals.

SLOW LEARNER: Democrats are funding CHIP for six years and reopening the government without losing their shutdown leverage.

Ezra Klein:

Consider what we don’t know about what comes next. We don’t know which immigration bill, or bills, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bring to the Senate floor. We don’t know if any immigration compromise passes the Senate. We don’t know if an immigration bill that passes the Senate will get a vote in the House. Even if it does get a vote in the House, we don’t know if it’ll pass. And if it does pass, we don’t know if Trump will sign it.

We also don’t know what the implicit Democratic position is here. If Democrats get a fair vote in the House and Senate on an immigration deal and it doesn’t pass, will they shut down the government again in three weeks? Put differently, is this a deal about a fair process or about a particular outcome? If Democrats don’t get a deal and they shut the government back down in three weeks, it’s hard to see what was lost here.

Schumer accepted public humiliation rather than extend the shutdown past the two-day mark — and this is “leverage” he might be reasonably expected to use again in just three weeks?

Perhaps the SJW Wing of the Democratic caucus will force Schumer to try again, but two “Schumer Shutdowns” in under a month would be awfully difficult to pin on the GOP. Particularly since it didn’t even work the first time around.

KYLE SMITH: The Final Year Reveals the Obama Administration’s Naïvety and Arrogance.

The Obama foreign-policy masters see their three accomplishments as the Paris Climate Accord, the opening to Cuba, and the Iran deal. Given that the former wasn’t presented to Congress for approval, was nonbinding, and was later dumped by President Trump, while the other two amounted to making concessions to American foes in exchange for virtually nothing, this is a bit like bragging that you suckered the Franklin Mint into giving up a souvenir Elvis plate for only $34.95. But to understand why Rhodes and Obama are so pleased with their foreign policy, you have to understand the way they think. The documentary is revealing about that.

Rhodes’ rhetorical trick, which he shared with Obama, was to use a favored trope of the center-right in service of knocking down a strawman. “[Obama] has been saying for ten years that American exceptionalism is rooted in what we stand for and how we act and not just in our ability to impose our will on people,” Rhodes says, as if anyone is arguing that American exceptionalism equals steamrolling other countries like Hitler.

Rhodes is an arc man: There’s this Mighty Arc of History (™), see, and everything naturally bends toward it. (In Vietnam, Rhodes coaches Kerry how to talk about the trip: “I think the main thing for them is drawing the arc of progress like how far this place has come and how tied that is with the relationship with us.”) The Arc is indistinguishable from a progressive vision of the future, so if you do nothing, everything just gets more progressive by itself. That’s how it works in theory, anyway.

Naïvety, meet arrogance.

It was eight years of dorm-room bull session as Great Power foreign policy.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A SHUTDOWN: US kills 150 ISIS fighters in Syria airstrike during government shutdown, Pentagon says.

The airstrike took in one of the last remaining pockets of ISIS control along the Euphrates River near the border between Syria and Iraq, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East.

While ISIS has lost 98 percent of its territory, the remaining 2 percent held by the terror group includes an area around the Syrian city of Al-Shaafah, where the strike took place. Top U.S. military officials believe the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is hiding in the area.

U.S.-backed fighters in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) “assisted in target observation prior to the strikes,” according to a statement announcing the airstrike.

Nice work.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Forget the Oscars, It’s Time for the Treachers.

They don’t like him. They really don’t like him.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: 63% of U.S. Dads Say They Don’t Spend Enough Time With Their Kids, Study Finds.

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: 1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia.

TYLER O’NEIL: Trump HHS Takes Vital Step to Protect Doctors From Being Forced to Perform Transgender Surgeries.

ANOTHER DAMN THING TO SUBSCRIBE TO: Disney Hires Apple Veteran to Launch Its Netflix Killer.

IT’S COLLUSION, I TELLS YA: Pentagon Counters Russia & Tests New SM-3 IIA Missile for Poland.

The Pentagon will soon fire its emerging SM-3 IIA interceptor missile from a land-based Aegis Ashore site for the first time as part of a broad-based, multi-year effort to help defend European allies from short and intermediate-range ballistic missile attacks from Russia, Iran or other potential adversaries.

A follow on to the SM-3, the SM-3 IIA is a larger and more high-tech interceptor missile able to destroy threatening targets at longer ranges; the weapon, being developed as part of a cooperative arrangement between the US Missile Defense Agency and Japan, is designed to work in tandem with Aegis radar systems to track and destroy approaching enemy missiles – by knocking them out
of the sky.

“This is the end of the development phase. We are transitioning into production. This is the final flight test before we get into operational testing,” Amy Cohen, SM-3 Program Director, told Warrior Maven in an interview.

In his first year in office, Barack Obama canceled missile defense plans we had with Poland and Czechia in hopes of courting Vladimir Putin.

And who can forget this classic hot mic slip from 2012?

And as Mark Tapscott reminded us yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s Uranium One/Russia scandal is yuuuuuge.

It’s almost as though all this talk about Trump colluding with Russia was just some kind of smokescreen for Democratic collusion (or near enough, effectively) with Russia.

SO NICE OF YOU TO NOTICE: How the Right’s War on Unions Is Killing the Democratic Party.

Since 2010, six states have passed “right-to-work” laws, meaning that workers can benefit from union representation without paying to keep the union funded. In other states, Republican legislatures have hamstrung public-sector unions by denying them collective-bargaining power.

Everyone remembers the high-profile battle in Wisconsin that Governor Scott Walker launched in 2011, but the union-busting efforts have not slowed down. In 2017, Missouri and then Kentucky’s right-to-work laws were rammed through within weeks of Republicans’ gaining power, and Iowa successfully limited the collective-bargaining power of public-sector unions. There was a push to do the same in New Hampshire, though it failed.

Few of these battles drew the same attention as what happened in Wisconsin, particularly after Donald Trump’s carnival began dominating news coverage. But there is good reason to believe that all these efforts will profoundly change the future of American politics.

It’s nice to see the Left acknowledge, even tacitly, that they can’t win without the advantage of legalized theft against the workingman.

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD: A message to our Progressive friends following the #SchumerSellout.

AMITY SHLAES: American history shows that expanding the economy benefits everyone.

Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings—the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson—score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say—the 1970s, say—simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.

Touring American history with an eye on growth, not equality, has become so unusual that doing so almost feels like driving on the wrong side of the road.

The Left gave up on “A rising tide lifts all boats” a long time ago.

OH: It looks like the ‘James Bond’ behind the dossier let a Putin pawn do all the work.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) asked Steele’s Clinton-paid handler Glenn Simpson, during the House Intelligence Committee’s Nov. 14 closed-door hearing, if Steele had gone “to Russia as part of this project,” to which Simpson replied, “No, sir.” Steele, at the time he compiled the dossier, hadn’t been back to Russia in 17 years.

So, Gowdy pressed, “How was he able to accumulate information in Russia if he didn’t go?” Simpson claimed that Steele ran a “network of subsources or subcontractors” who traveled around Russia and gathered information for him.

But it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).

While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.

This whole thing stinks, to coin a phrase.

ALLIES: Christian Kurds Bombed by Turkey: ‘Many Lives are in Mortal Danger… Help.’

This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

OH NO: Linus Torvalds declares Intel fix for Meltdown/Spectre ‘COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.’. “As a potential line of inquiry, he suggests: ‘Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane?'”

These and other kind epithets are awarded by Torvalds in a public email chain between him and David Woodhouse, an engineer at Amazon in the U.K., regarding Intel’s solution as relating to the Linux kernel. The issue is (as far as I can tell as someone far out of their depth) a clumsy and, Torvalds argues, “insane” implementation of a fix that essentially does nothing while also doing a bunch of unnecessary things.

The fix needs to address Meltdown (which primarily affects Intel chips), but instead of just doing so across the board, it makes the whole fix something the user or administrator has to opt into at boot. Why even ask, if this is such a huge vulnerability? And why do it at such a low level when future CPUs will supposedly not require it, at which point the choice would be at best unnecessary and at worst misleading or lead to performance issues?

Meanwhile, a bunch of other things are added in the same patch that Torvalds points out are redundant with existing solutions, for instance adding protections against an exploit already mitigated by Google Project Zero’s “retpoline” technique.

Why do this? Torvalds speculates that a major part of Intel’s technique, in this case “Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation” or IBRS, is so inefficient that to roll it out universally would result in widespread performance hits. So instead, it made the main Meltdown fix optional and added the redundant stuff to make the patch look more comprehensive.

RELATED: Intel asks customers to halt patching for chip bug, citing flaw.

That appears to be something of an understatement.

SOUTH SEAS: China will again triple dredging and will have over 50 fortified islands by 2030 in South China Sea.

China has built a 140-meter-long, 28-meter-wide dregger, the Tian Kun Hao, which has described by some local media as “Asia’s most powerful island maker”. It is expected to go into service in the summer of 2018.

The Tian Kun Hao has a deck the size of nine basketball courts, it is capable of dredging up to 6,000 cubic meters an hour and can dig as deep as 35 meters under the sea floor. It also has an advanced global positioning system and thanks to an automatic control system can be operated without any crew. The previous largest Chinese dregger could dig 4500 cubic meters per hour. Tian Kun can blast through seabed rocks, suck up sand, and pump material through a pipeline over a distance of up to 15km, allowing it to dredge in one spot and refill in another without requiring landfill material to be transported from elsewhere. That gives it the unique edge to reclaim land at a faster speed and greater efficiency than conventional operations.

The US expects China to build up in the Paracel Island area. This will weaken Vietnam’s claims. China has a deal with the Philippines so China will not build more islands in the Spratley’s to keep relations with the Philippines.

Nextbigfuture makes the obvious observation that China will modernize its dregger fleet and triple dredging capacity again over the next 15 years. China will spend $2 to 4 billion per year on better ships and on operations to build islands.

The Paracel Islands are a chain of some 130 tiny features. China will likely building up dozens into islands with airports, missile facilities and ports.

China’s island-building might be the biggest non-violent power play since the Berlin Wall, yet hardly anyone seems to take real notice.

CONTINUING RESOLUTIONS ARE DANGEROUSLY IRRESOLUTE: Unpredictable Pentagon Spending Causing Vendors to Leave Marketplace; Research and Development Stagnant.

The cyclical nature of department budgeting, including delays in getting new spending approved, is a problem for all but the largest vendors, said Eric Chewning, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for manufacturing and industrial base policy, as a member of the panel discussion.

With annual unsteady funding, Chewning said the department has been unable to “send demand signals to industry.”

“The reality is that the Defense Department does not exist for the purpose of taking care of the industrial base. it’s the other way around, said Frank Kendall, former undersecretary of Defense. “So, what the Department of Defense has to do is to ensure, to the extent that it can while doing its mission, that there is a healthy industrial base to support it.”

When Congress won’t budget, defense industries can’t.

MAYBE IT’S JUST BECAUSE STEM ISN’T SUPPOSED TO BE EASY: White Men Feel Discrimination in STEM Too, Study Finds.