HMM: Beijing Develops Plan to Counter Trump Tax Overhaul.

Under the plan, the people say, the People’s Bank of China stands ready to deploy a combination of tools—higher interest rates, tighter capital controls and more-frequent currency intervention—to keep money at home and support the yuan.

An official involved in Beijing’s deliberations called Washington’s tax plan a “gray rhino,” an obvious danger in China’s economy that shouldn’t be ignored. “We’ll likely have some tough battles in the first quarter,” the official said.

Central to officials’ fear is the yuan, which has just regained its footing after enormous government efforts to prop it up. Should the yuan lose steam again, the thinking goes, it could further exacerbate capital outflows in a vicious cycle.

And:

While the tax overhaul isn’t directly aimed at Beijing, it is another way China will be squeezed.

Under the tax plan now going through the U.S. legislative process, America’s corporate levy could drop to about 20% from 35%. Over the next few years, economists say, that could spur manufacturers—whether American or Chinese—to opt to set up plants in the U.S. rather than China, where total tax burdens on companies are among the highest of major economies.

Our current corporate tax code — a black hole of time-sucking, innovation-throttling cronyism — is perhaps the most enormous own-goal in modern economics.

PAUL KRUGMAN HARDEST HIT: Former UK Defense Official: Military May Not Be Adequately Prepared for Alien Invasion.

(Classical allusion in the headline.)

FEEL THE BURN:

Ouch.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Walks Back Jeff Sessions-Russia Bombshell.

In May, CNN reported that Sessions had failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador when he was a senator. Justice Department officials told CNN that Sessions had not listed those meetings on a security clearance form, even though the form says to list “any contact” with the “foreign government” or its “representatives” in the past seven years.

CNN framed the non-disclosures as more evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump team, writing, “He has come under withering criticism from Democrats following revelations that he did not disclose the same contacts with Kislyak during his Senate confirmation hearings earlier this year.”

At the time, Sessions said he was told by the FBI not to list meetings “connected with his Senate activities,” but CNN’s legal expert denied those claims.

“A legal expert who regularly assists officials in filling out the form disagrees with the Justice Department’s explanation, suggesting that Sessions should have disclosed the meetings,” CNN asserted.

The CNN report led to breathless coverage by the rest of the legacy media, who painted the non-disclosures as a Trump official trying to hide problematic meetings with the Russians.

However, CNN admitted early Monday that FBI emails prove that Sessions’ explanation for the non-disclosures is accurate.

We’re going to need a new 24-hour news network just to keep up with CNN’s botched reporting.

STEALTH IS HARD; CLEAN CORPORATE CULTURE IS HARDER: Russia’s Su-57 Stealth Fighter Is Doomed to Fail.

Westerns analysts have concluded that Russia’s fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter is unlikely to enter operational service before 2027. Postponements, cost-overruns and research and development-related problems mar the project.

This should come as no surprise. The Su-57 program was never really viable.

Back in early 2006, Russian president Vladimir Putin integrated all of Russia’s aviation companies into a single, state-owned holding — the United Aircraft-building Corporation.

Despite bombastic reports in the Russian media, UAC turned out to be a lame duck. The conglomerate proved capable of re-launching production of types designed back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Otherwise, UAC is incapable of innovation and adaptation.

The main reason is that most of UAC’s directors are hand-picked yes-sayers — people more than happy to discuss planning, strategies and new projects, but lacking the ability to make hard decisions.

The writing was on the wall when Moscow cut its order to a purely ceremonial number of jets. Even India, which has plenty of experience getting adequate results out of a corrupt procurement system, wants to pull out as Russia’s Su-57 development partner.

ROGER L. SIMON: “I guess it’s clear that were I an Alabaman, I’d be sitting this one out.”

BRIDGET JOHNSON: New Times Square Threat: ISIS Backers ‘Recognize Explosives as the Capital’ of U.S.

Meanwhile, Bridget’s unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER: Ex-Gawker Employees Launch Crowdfunding Drive to Buy Website.

The campaign was launched Monday on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter and seeks to raise at least $500,000. Gawker ceased publication in August 2016 after losing a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan.

“This is a testing of the waters,” said James Del, a former vice president of programming at Gawker Media LLC who is organizing the crowdfunding drive. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers is also advising, while other former employees are providing input on the project.

If successful in acquiring Gawker, Mr. Del said the blog would be operated by a nonprofit foundation. If they reach their funding target but someone else purchases the blog in bankruptcy, Mr. Del, 30, said they plan to launch a new publication intended to capture the “Gawker ethos” which he described as publishing unbiased and unfiltered gossip, news articles and writing.

Given that the company was put out of business for publishing revenge porn, I’d hesitate before using “Gawker” and “ethos” in the same sentence.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “If being creepy is a disqualifier, almost no one would be holding office in Washington or Tallahassee.”

STILL TURNED UP TO 11: DNC unity commission blasts GOP ‘atrocities’ while touting changes for primaries.

CHECK, PLEASE: 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date.

Anyone who isn’t heading towards the door after the third question — “How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?” — deserves whatever comes next.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Sexbots With Full Motion Are Closer Than You Think.

SALENA ZITO: For once, the joke is on Al Franken.

For a man who was courted by everyone in the Democratic Party to headline their fundraisers — both for their re-elections as well as their state party’s coffers — fawned over for his Hollywood pedigree, and admired by progressives for his notorious grilling of Republicans appointed to Cabinet positions in the Trump administration, the mere thought of being reduced to zero status in American politics was a bridge too far for the egocentric Minnesotan.

In truth, it likely repulsed him.

He is a man used to being center stage, needed, wanted, catered to, fawned over, and courted.

If you have any doubt to the validity of this argument, consider his exit speech on the floor of the Senate when he announced he will resign his seat last Thursday; he never once admitted doing anything wrong. He also never said he was sorry.

“I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party,” Franken said.

In the end, he was defiant, blamed others, and was without the grace to show remorse.

But other than that, how did you enjoy his non-resignation speech, Salena?

RALPH PETERS: Why the ‘Arab street’ didn’t just explode.

In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week, the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.

Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.

We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.

Rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab governments; demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that, combined, barely put a thousand activists in the streets; and yes, four deaths: two demonstrators and two Hamas terrorists hit by an Israeli airstrike.

I wrote at Hot Mic the other day:

The most important two Arab states are Egypt (population) and Saudi Arabia (wealth), and neither seems likely to retaliate beyond a pro forma protest. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman can’t afford to derail his modernization effort by emboldening a bunch of reactionary hotheads, and Egypt can’t afford to do much that isn’t bankrolled by the Saudis.

Erdogan would probably love to stir up a mess for Israel, but the Turks aren’t exactly loved in the Arab world. And Iran was going to continue arming Hezbollah whether Trump recognized Jerusalem or not.

Trump’s move ought to have been seen for the low-risk no-brainer it was, but those kind of things always seem to shock Washington.

MY DATA, MY CHOICE: Congressman Says Google, Facebook, Amazon Should Pay Consumers for their Harvested Data.

JAY CARUSO: CNN’s Reliable Sources Segment On Media Distrust Swings And Misses.

Frum’s argument is a straw man in which he suggests the news consumer demands 100 percent accuracy from the media. He also suggests the dogged determination by reporters to deal with an administration so hell-bent on lying makes it understandable they would overshoot in an attempt to get at the truth.

Investigative reporters and political reporters are well-versed in the culture of lying that exists in Washington. They know the game, and they know how it works. To suggest they screw up because they take on such a burden dealing with an administration that lies like none other does a disservice to their work.

So what should the media do to earn back some of the trust they’ve lost knowing they will still make mistakes from time to time?

First, members of the press have to stop being baited by President Trump.

I never got to the second step, and suspect neither will the Washington press corps.

WOULD YOU TELL HIM HE CAN’T? North Korea’s newest claim: Kim Jong Un can control the weather.

HISTORY: The U.S. Army Had a Special ‘Suicide Squad’ Ready to Strike Russian Forces.

Had the Cold War turned hot, there would have been no escape for the U.S. garrison in West Berlin. Marooned in a city more than 100 miles inside Communist East Germany, the U.S. Berlin Brigade—and the British and French garrisons as well—would certainly have been overwhelmed by Soviet and East German troops. Their presence helped keep half of Berlin free from Communist rule. But it was no secret that theirs was a suicide mission.

Yet there was a unique American unit with an even more hazardous mission: a small Special Forces detachment whose job it would during wartime to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Soviets and their puppet armies. That sentence bears repeating: Deep inside East Germany, in the midst of a vast Soviet military and secret police apparatus, a small group of U.S. commandos would attempt to blow up Russian supply depots and lead local resistance groups.

The phrase “suicide mission” doesn’t even apply.

The unit had many names over the Cold War. But as James Stejskal, a veteran of the detachment, describes in his book Special Forces Berlin: Clandestine Cold War Operations of the US Army’s Elite 1956-1990, they always knew what they were getting into. “They were aware of the odds against them and the threat posed by the Warsaw Pact forces stationed just kilometers away. Despite that, no one wavered in their commitment to face and deter the Soviet war machine.”

Fascinating stuff, if you have even the slightest interest in this sort of thing.

SO FAR: Four Times Liberal Hollywood Declared War Against GOP Women.

BREAKING: NYC Bomber ID’d.

Twenty-seven-year-old Akayed Ullah is in police custody. Officials say he sustained burns to his abdomen and hands and cuts after the crude pipe bomb exploded.

Law enforcement officials say Ullah was inspired by the Islamic State, but apparently had no direct contact with the terrorist group. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the suspect or incident.

Dog bites man.

PRIVACY: Ireland risks shooting itself in the foot in crucial Microsoft email case.

The case involves emails held at Microsoft’s Dublin data centre. A federal judge in a drug case in New York state demanded that Microsoft’s US office produce the emails. Microsoft refused, saying that the appropriate approach was to use the well-established route of mutual legal assistance treaties, by which countries authorise the gathering and exchanging of information for such cases.

Microsoft rightly argued that to allow courts or law enforcement in one country to have direct access to data held in another violates fundamental privacy guarantees that make modern business possible.

International data exchange and storage are the basis for the multibillion-euro cloud-computing model, which brings efficiency and scale to businesses large and small. Instead of every company having to invest in costly hardware and software, they instead can use applications and storage made available online – “in the cloud” – from companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, which are among the dozens that now have enormous data centres in Ireland for this purpose.

Crucially, the only reason a US judge can even try to directly demand access to electronic data is because a vague US communications law from the 1980s fails to indicate whether electronic data has the same protection as information on a piece of paper.

Well, it certainly should have the same protection — but remember that no one’s life, liberty, property, or data are safe while the legislature is in session.

CHANGE: Saudi Arabia to allow movie theaters after decades of ban.

It’s the latest stark reversal in a county where movie theaters were shut down in the 1980’s during a wave of ultraconservatism in the country. Many of Saudi Arabia’s clerics view Western movies and even Arabic films made in Egypt and Lebanon as sinful.

Despite decades of ultraconservative dogma, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to ram through a number of major social reforms with support from his father, King Salman.

The crown prince is behind measures such as lifting a ban on women driving next year and bringing back concerts and other forms of entertainment to satiate the desires of the country’s majority young population.

The 32-year-old heir to the throne’s social push is part of his so-called Vision 2030, a blueprint for the country that aims to boost local spending and create jobs amid sustained lower oil prices.

King Faisal was assassinated in 1975 following similar reforms, including allowing television.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Alabama Senate Race, RUSSIA Update and Much, Much More.

OF COURSE: Turkey’s Erdogan calls Israel a ‘child-murderer’ state.

BUT: Netanyahu Says Israel Will Not Be Lectured to by the Likes of Erdogan.

AND: Erdogan will cut ties with Israel if the US Embassy moves.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the de facto Turko-Israeli alliance was one of the few bright spots in Middle East geopolitics. These days, it’s the de facto Saudi-Israeli alliance.

And it’s no coincidence that the Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince bin Salman is attempting to modernize, while Turkey under Erdogan is regressing into pre-Kemalist thuggery.

CLAIM: After Jerusalem, the US Can No Longer Pretend to Be an Honest Broker of Peace.

Trump has, in effect, adopted wholesale the Israeli position that all of Jerusalem belongs exclusively to Israel, and that all of it—including areas extending far north, south, and east of the city—is Israel’s capital, denying the Palestinians any national or political rights there. He has thereby nailed the United States flag to a position that antagonizes virtually every Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim, and the overwhelming majority of peoples and governments around the world.

There can be—and there should be—no going back to the old formula in place for decades, whereby the United States colluded privately with Israel and the two powers thereafter imposed their will on the Palestinians. That was never the way to achieve a just and lasting peace; it served only to oblige the weaker party to bow to the will of the stronger, which in turn exacerbated and prolonged the conflict.

Even if Rashid Khalidi’s ruthlessly dishonest argument had any merit, it would still matter only if the Palestinian leadership was honestly desiring of peace.