Tag: split

Brace for debt-limit whiplash. The ‘when’ gets risky for a split Congress.

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After the U.S. technically reached the $31.4 trillion debt limit in late January, the Treasury Department started taking “extraordinary measures” to keep the country from defaulting. That wonky process, which involves accounting maneuvers that reduce certain types of government debt, gave the nation a borrowing cushion of about $800 billion at the beginning of February.
But the government has many bills to pay, including sending out money to support Medicare providers, veterans benefits, Social Security checks and assistance to state and local governments.
Federal taxes come due in April, sending billions into government coffers and ensuring the country is safe from default through most of the spring. The day when the country can no longer meet its financial obligations, known as the X-date, is heavily dependent on whether those tax receipts meet, exceed or fall short of expectations.
Predicting how much cash the government will bring in during tax season is always difficult. Last year, for example, estimates from Congress’ nonpartisan budget office lowballed by about $500 billion what turned out to be record-setting revenue. This year, a difference of a few hundred billion dollars could buy — or cost — the country several months of leeway.

By late spring, the pendulum typically shifts to the spending column. If tax revenue comes in low, the nation could come extremely close to defaulting. If tax season is particularly fruitful, the extra money could keep the U.S. from defaulting until late summer or early fall — and likely keep markets rosy in the meantime.
On June 15, quarterly tax payments are due, an influx that could help buoy the nation’s cash through July. While that revenue bump is smaller than the regular tax season, quarterly payments usually bring in tens of billions of dollars as corporations, self-employed people and some other taxpayers hand over their estimated dues.
On June 30, the Treasury Department is allowed to extract about $140 billion in borrowing power from a key federal retirement fund. The accounting maneuver doesn’t affect any workers’ savings or prevent any retirees from getting their cash.
The federal government tends to run a deficit in late summer. And, by all estimates, the U.S. is most likely to reach the brink of default in August or September.
That’s an unfortunate timeframe for Congress’ 535 lawmakers, who want to escape Capitol Hill for their scheduled August recess but also historically seem incapable of reaching a bipartisan deal well in advance of a hard deadline.
More quarterly tax payments roll in on Sept. 15. If the U.S. hasn’t run out of borrowing power by then — and if Congress still hasn’t raised the debt limit or passed a short-term patch — that mid-September revenue bump will add billions of dollars to whatever borrowing authority the country has left.
With no substantial revenue coming in during October, available cash will wane quickly at this point, if it even lasts that long.
The timeline is uncertain, highly subject to the whims of federal cash flow. Despite those dangers, congressional leaders and the White House are virtually nowhere in their discussions to lift the borrowing cap.
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#Brace #debtlimit #whiplash #risky #split #Congress
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 18, 2023
2 Women enter into agreement’ to split days with a single man they love

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Gwalior: A man and two women, including his first wife, have decided to live peacefully in two separate houses by dividing three days each of a week between them and also with the liberty to the man to spend the seventh day with the woman of his choice, said a lawyer associated with the family court in Gwalior city.
However, counsellor and advocate Harish Diwan termed the “agreement” between them illegal as per Hindu law.
The story of the two women and a man, who is an engineer, came to light when the man again entered into wedlock with a female colleague in Gurugram after he left his wife in Gwalior during the COVID-19 pandemic, Diwan said.
His first marriage took place in 2018 to a Gwalior-based woman and they lived together for two years. During COVID, he sent his wife to her parents’ home and went back to Gurugram, he said.
When he did not return till 2020 to take her legally wedded wife, she grew suspicious and went to his Gurugram office. She learnt that he had married a colleague and a girl was also born during the period, Diwan said.
The woman fought with the man publicly and protested in the office over his second marriage. She then approached a family court in Gwalior for justice, he said.
Later, her husband was summoned to Gwalior. Despite attempts to counsel him, the man refused to leave the second woman, Diwan said.
His wife as well as the second woman were counselled but they were not ready to understand, he said.

Later, the trio entered into an agreement according to which the man will spend three days of a week with his wife and another three with the woman he allegedly married, with the liberty to live with the woman of his choice on Sunday, Diwan said.
He provided a flat each to his wife as well as the other woman in Gurugram and also agreed to share his salary equally with them as per their agreement, Diwan said.
When asked whether this agreement has any legal sanctity, Diwan said, “This agreement was done between three of them with mutual consent. Neither the family court nor the councillor has any role in it.”
“In fact, the three were categorically told that they are Hindu and as per Hindu law, this agreement between them is illegal. As per the law, a Hindu man cannot marry another woman until he divorced his first wife in a legal manner, but they decided to go ahead with their pact,” Diwan added.
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#Women #enter #agreement #split #days #single #man #love
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 17, 2023
Women enter into agreement’ to split days with a single man they love

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Gwalior: A man and two women, including his first wife, have decided to live peacefully in two separate houses by dividing three days each of a week between them and also with the liberty to the man to spend the seventh day with the woman of his choice, said a lawyer associated with the family court in Gwalior city.
However, counsellor and advocate Harish Diwan termed the “agreement” between them illegal as per Hindu law.
The story of the two women and a man, who is an engineer, came to light when the man again entered into wedlock with a female colleague in Gurugram after he left his wife in Gwalior during the COVID-19 pandemic, Diwan said.
His first marriage took place in 2018 to a Gwalior-based woman and they lived together for two years. During COVID, he sent his wife to her parents’ home and went back to Gurugram, he said.
When he did not return till 2020 to take her legally wedded wife, she grew suspicious and went to his Gurugram office. She learnt that he had married a colleague and a girl was also born during the period, Diwan said.
The woman fought with the man publicly and protested in the office over his second marriage. She then approached a family court in Gwalior for justice, he said.
Later, her husband was summoned to Gwalior. Despite attempts to counsel him, the man refused to leave the second woman, Diwan said.
His wife as well as the second woman were counselled but they were not ready to understand, he said.

Later, the trio entered into an agreement according to which the man will spend three days of a week with his wife and another three with the woman he allegedly married, with the liberty to live with the woman of his choice on Sunday, Diwan said.
He provided a flat each to his wife as well as the other woman in Gurugram and also agreed to share his salary equally with them as per their agreement, Diwan said.
When asked whether this agreement has any legal sanctity, Diwan said, “This agreement was done between three of them with mutual consent. Neither the family court nor the councillor has any role in it.”
“In fact, the three were categorically told that they are Hindu and as per Hindu law, this agreement between them is illegal. As per the law, a Hindu man cannot marry another woman until he divorced his first wife in a legal manner, but they decided to go ahead with their pact,” Diwan added.
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#Women #enter #agreement #split #days #single #man #love
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 16, 2023
Partisan split on rail safety shows at first hearing on Ohio derailment

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Republicans, meanwhile, decried what they suggested was a lack of transparent communication from the EPA, which has met skepticism for its assurances that the community’s air and water are safe.
“A month after the accident, it’s clear to me that EPA’s risk communication strategy fell short,” said top committee Republican Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). “The initial delays in messaging and response has meant that the residents still do not trust these results enough to feel safe.”
Republicans highlighted that first responders arriving on the scene didn’t immediately know what chemicals they were dealing with. In addition, residents still don’t believe EPA assurances that the air and water are safe because it still doesn’t smell right, Capito said. And, Republicans suggested that the EPA hasn’t provided direct answers on where the soil removed from the site is being shipped.
Capito grilled Debra Shore, EPA’s regional administrator, about how it is handling waste removal at the accident site, echoing complaints from Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance that large amounts of contaminated soil remain. When the soil is disturbed, “it brings the odor and then here comes a lack of trust right back down onto the community,” Capito said.
Shore reported that tests of the contaminated soil revealed only low levels of dioxins, which will allow the waste to be transported to facilities qualified for disposal as soon as Thursday.
Democrats also sought to pin down Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw about whether his company will support a bipartisan rail bill that Vance is offering with senators including Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown
and Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey.
“It’s bipartisan — that never happens around here on the big bills,” said Casey. “It’d be a good start by Norfolk Southern to tell us today — in addition to what they’re going to do for the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania — tell us today that they support the bill. That would help, if a major rail company said: ‘We support these reforms, and we’ll help you pass this bill.’”
Shaw did not directly answer the question. But later in the hearing, Shaw praised provisions included in the bill that intend to tighten tank car standards and increase training for first responders. He also mentioned his desire to improve the devices on tracks that detect overheating wheels, which investigators are eyeing as a factor in the derailment.

Other Democrats, including Brown and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, criticized Norfolk Southern for what they characterized as focusing more on profits than rail and chemical safety.
“Norfolk Southern chose to invest much of its massive profits in making its executives and shareholders wealthy at the expense of Ohio communities along its rail tracks,” Brown said. He noted that in the last decade, Norfolk Southern eliminated 38 percent of its workforce.
Sanders tried to get Shaw to commit to providing paid sick leave for its workers — one of the changes the Biden administration is seeking. Shaw demurred.
At various points senators also sought to pin Shaw down on specific actions the railroad would take to make residents whole, including compensating people for long term medical costs and economic damages. Shaw responded to that and other attempts to pin him down on specifics with: “We’re committed to doing what’s right for the folks in East Palestine.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders answered: “What’s right is to cover their health care needs. Will you do that?”
Shaw only replied that “everything is on the table.”
“All of us are committed to doing what’s right,” Sanders shot back. “But the devil is in the details.”
Opening the hearing, Shaw apologized for the derailment and pledged “to improve safety immediately.”
“I want to begin today by expressing how deeply sorry I am for the impact this has had on the residents of East Palestine and the surrounding communities,” Shaw said. “I am determined to make this right.”
He said that while federal investigators have preliminarily found that the three-person crew behind the controls “was operating the train below the speed limit and in an approved manner,” it is still “clear the safety mechanisms in place were not enough.”
Norfolk Southern has announced safety changes in the wake of the accident that are tailored to addressing the likely cause — an overheating wheel on a car carrying plastic pellets, which then caught fire. The railroad industry as a whole has also made new safety promises, though they are also tailored to the specific likely cause of the accident.
Still, Shaw acknowledged that those voluntary initiatives “are just the start.”
“The events of the last month are not who we are as a company,” Shaw said, referring not just to the East Palestine derailment but at least two other incidents since then, including one this week that resulted in the death of a conductor.
Alex Guillén contributed to this report.
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#Partisan #split #rail #safety #shows #hearing #Ohio #derailment
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 9, 2023
Fadnavis mocks Uddhav over Sena split after alliance with NCP, Congress

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Mumbai: Uddhav Thackeray claimed the Shiv Sena had rotted during its 25-year alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, while it has been decimated in its two-and-half-year alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party and Congress, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis quipped on Sunday.
Speaking at a ‘Vijay Sankalp’ rally in Kolhapur in the presence of Union Home Minister and senior colleague Amit Shah, he said the “traitors” had been taught a lesson and shown their place six months ago, apparently a reference to the split in the Shiv Sena, which brought down the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi government.
Taking a swipe at Thackeray, the deputy CM said, “Those who said they rotted in the 25-year alliance with the BJP have now seen their party finished in two-and-half years after joining hands with the NCP, Congress (to form the Maha Vikas Aghdi post the 2019 Assembly poll results). They have been brought to the streets.”
In an apparent attack on Thackeray’s repeated utterances that the party was founded by his father late Bal Thackeray, who groomed its leaders, Fadnavis said “the Shiv Sena cannot be a property”.
“It is a school of thought. There can be a heir to a property or to some assets but not for thoughts. You have to put them in action and live up to these thoughts,” Fadnavis said.
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#Fadnavis #mocks #Uddhav #Sena #split #alliance #NCP #Congress

( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 19, 2023
Fox’s 2020 split screen revealed
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Dominion’s nearly-200-page filing not only lays out a tale of rank hypocrisy, but it weaves a broader narrative about what drove the campaign of disinformation — documenting the panic inside the network’s ranks after conservative discontent over its early (and accurate) call of Arizona for Joe Biden translated into a viewership boom for its less scrupulous competitor, Newsmax, as an aggrieved Donald Trump lashed out at Fox.
“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” primetime host Tucker Carlson texted his producer just two days after the election — one of dozens of frank admissions aired by Dominion.
And so fears of lost viewers and lost profits led Fox’s most powerful figures to indulge baseless claims of conspiracy and fraud and, in some cases, move to sideline news reporters who took basic steps to fact-check claims made by the likes of pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on the network’s airwaves.
In a series of text messages, Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham lambasted Powell and Giuliani for peddling conspiratorial goods without evidence. “Sidney Powell is lying. Fucking bitch,” Carlson wrote to Ingraham on Nov. 18. “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” Ingraham responded.
Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch called the idea that the election was stolen “really crazy stuff.” Shortly after the election, his top execs circulated a New York Post piece urging Trump to “stop the ’stolen election’ rhetoric” and “get Rudy Giuliani off TV.” They also openly fretted about whether Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson would indulge the conspiracy theories on their shows.
Emails and texts in the filing suggest that Fox’s top executives and stars were less worried about factual accuracy than about ratings crashing after viewers who bought into Trump’s election lies began to seek out different channels that would support their biases.
While one Fox exec called Newsmax’s ratings surge “troubling” and said the channel trafficked in an “alternative universe,” they also argued that the trend “can’t be ignored.” Another said the message had been sent out internally that the network was now on “war footing.”
According to the filing, Fox — still in hot water with Trump supporters for calling Arizona for Biden — did a quick about-face to protect its brand, leaving journalists at the network who reported the truth about the election in the crosshairs:
- On Nov. 9, 2020, host Neil Cavuto cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as she made unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on the air. For this, Fox Corp. Senior VP (and former Trump White House press aide) Raj Shah labeled Cavuto a “brand threat” in a message to top corporate brass.
- Hannity and Carlson tried to get Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump tweet about Dominion and noting that there was no evidence of votes being destroyed. “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck?” Carlson texted Ingraham and Hannity on Nov. 12, 2020. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Hannity exploded on top execs, including one who panicked and wrote that Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted” with Fox. (CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported last night that Heinrich was “blindsided” by this disclosure.)
- On Nov. 19, 2020, after Fox broadcasted the now-infamous Giuliani and Powell press conference about Dominion, then-White House correspondent Kristen Fisher got in trouble for fact-checking their bogus claims. Per the filing, “Fisher received a call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, immediately after in which he emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it, and that Fisher needed to do a better job of, this is a quote, respecting our audience.”
In one of the most bizarre bits, the filing reveals that Powell’s Dominion voting conspiracy came in part from an email Powell received from a tipster who claimed that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was secretly murdered while on a human-hunting expedition — and who claimed to be “internally decapitated” (“The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it,” the tipster wrote in the email).
Fox host Maria Bartiromo, who agreed to have Powell on her show after reading this email, never told viewers about the source of Powell’s claim. As Fox’s then-managing editor in Washington Bill Sammon said of the network’s coverage at the time: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”
It all amounts to what Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple calls “the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history.” But will Dominion, which is seeking $1.6 billion from a company that the NYT says has about $4 billion cash on hand, win the suit?
Defamation cases have a high bar, and Dominion will have to prove “actual malice” — that the network peddled information it knew was erroneous, or was “reckless” in not doing its homework to ensure it was accurate.
In a statement, Fox News did not directly dispute any of the facts aired in Dominion’s filing, but said the company “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
A spokesperson also said Dominion “refused to agree to allow FOX to make its response to that motion public,” and that “the reason for Dominion’s refusal will be clear when the public response is finally released on February 27.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the title of Fox executive Raj Shah.
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#Foxs #split #screen #revealed
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
February 17, 2023
Food prices are stubbornly high. The farmers in Congress are split on what to do.

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There was bipartisan agreement on many of the main drivers of food inflation. But that agreement evaporated when we asked what Congress can do to slow it.
The lawmakers’ responses, below, have been edited for length and clarity.
POLITICO: What’s driving up costs for you on your farm?
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the self-proclaimed “only working farmer” in the Senate, who frequently tweets updates while driving a combine in his wheat fields:
“Repairs. The cost of diesel fuel, in particular. The cost of tires. I mean, repairs, supplies and energy. Repairs would be mostly manpower, and then diesel’s diesel.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), a rice farmer in Northern California and frequent critic of the Biden administration:
“If you want to make my cost of producing an acre of rice come back into line with just a few years ago … then my diesel doesn’t need to cost me five-and-a-half dollars a gallon versus two-and-a-half. Then my fertilizer doesn’t need to be tripled, some of the pesticides I have to use for controlling weeds and stuff. Those have gone up dramatically.”
Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.), a former Tennessee agriculture commissioner who raises beef cows on his farm:

“Farmers, just like everyday consumers, we buy lots of fuel to do what we do, and the prices for that have gone up dramatically. Like any auto buyer, it’s hard to get tractors because of the supply chain shortages there, and there are more expensive parts.”
Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif), an almond farmer who represents Fresno, a critical agriculture district in California’s Central Valley:
“The cost of energy. Fertilizer. I grow almonds and the cost of bees has increased significantly over the last five years. And the cost of subcontracting, I’m not large enough to have my own harvesting equipment for my almonds so I hired that out … that has increased significantly over the past several years.”
POLITICO: As a farmer, what do you think it would take to fix food inflation?
Tester: “More competition in the marketplace. It’s as simple as that. So what the administration has done with meat processing is a step in the right direction. Now they needed to pass my [cattle market] bills to deal with the spot pricing and special investigator. Capitalism works when there’s competition. It doesn’t when there’s consolidation.”
LaMalfa: “[Energy] is one. Also enforcing trade. [Former President Donald] Trump got a deal cut with China back then. … Our ag products are suffering greatly because [China] is not meeting the goals that were set for the ag portion of it.
I spoke to the president right after the end of the [State of the Union] speech, and I talked to him about water, California water. We need his Bureau of Reclamation and the other federal regulatory entities to cut us some slack.”
Rose: “The biggest thing contributing to inflation right now is the runaway government spending that the Biden administration has engaged in.
But then you also have just an onslaught of regulation that stands in the way of current production … the types of policies that have interfered with farmers being able to get their hands on badly needed pesticides.”
Costa: “We have a problem in this country that we’ve not been able to address successfully, and that’s the amount of food waste. … Whether it’s in our schools or other products, one of the things I want to look at this farm bill reauthorization is how we can do a better job with those impacts.
Then if it’s not extreme droughts or floods, I don’t know what category you put the avian flu. Clearly these are things we’re looking at better ability to provide in the farm bill reauthorization, [where] we plan for a lot of invasive pests.”
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#Food #prices #stubbornly #high #farmers #Congress #split
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023