Citizen Cartwright

Bullet said to be dodged on Oct. 1 government shutdown

After all the talk in recent weeks, a temporary funding measure that would keep the government open past a midnight deadline should make its way to President Obama on Wednesday with time to spare, says longtime budget reporter Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press.

The measure already has helped topple the House speaker and exacerbated divisions between more pragmatic Republicans and a Tea Party wing that’s increasingly dominant, Taylor notes.

Tea Party forces are frustrated that the bill, which would prevent a repeat of the partial shutdown of the government two years ago, fails to bar federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The stopgap spending measure scheduled to be voted on by the Senate and then the House on Wednesday would provide 10 weeks to negotiate a more wide-ranging budget deal for the rest of fiscal 2016, which ends Sept. 30, 2016.

The Islamic State’s recruiting in America

The group has assembled the “most sophisticated recruitment effort ever seen on social media with the ability in an instant to reach from the darkest corners of the Middle East all the way to the bedroom of a 16-year-old girl checking her Facebook page in suburban America,” says The Christian Science Monitor.

So far this year, 58 Americans — more than half of them under the age of 25 — have been arrested for attempting to travel to Syria or for plotting violence in the United States.

That’s more than twice the number of similar arrests for all of 2014.

The CSM is running a seven-part series this week on the Islamic State’s online strategies and “potential solutions to countering its appeal.”

A possible cause of the next financial crisis

We’re seeing more and more news on this:

It’s very possible that a liquidity panic could lead to the next financial crisis, says The New York Times.

“Liquidity” refers to how easy it is to convert assets to cash. You can quickly get cash from a savings account; it may take awhile to sell your house.

William Gross, referred to by some as the “king” of bond investors, this summer wrote about “possible exit and liquidity problems in future months and years.”

He’s referring to the potential difficulty of finding buyers for some bonds when an individual or a company wants to sell, causing the bonds to be sold at fire-sale prices.

The potential for such a crisis isn’t restricted to big pension funds and wealthy investors.

“Mutual funds, hedge funds and ETFs are part of the ‘shadow banking system,’ where these modern ‘banks’ are not required to maintain reserves or even emergency levels of cash,” Gross wrote in a letter to investors.

“Since they in effect now are the market, a rush for liquidity on the part of the investing public, whether they be individuals in 401(k)s or institutional pension funds and insurance companies, would find the ‘market’ selling to itself with the Federal Reserve severely limited in its ability to provide assistance.”

Not everybody is convinced a liquidity crisis is upon us. Matt Levine, a columnist for Bloomberg View, says it’s a "liquidity illusion,” which he defines as a narrative that “big investors buy a lot of bonds thinking that they’ll be easy to unload in a crash, but in fact they won’t be easy to unload, and there’ll be panicked fire sales that worsen the crash and lead to a real crisis.”

He says: “How is that illusion tenable when everyone talks about it all the time? What big investor is suffering from the liquidity illusion? Presumably not all the investors who are quoted constantly in stories about the liquidity illusion, right?”

Also in the news

How the Russian buildup in Syria could lengthen the conflict there

House GOP hardliners agitating to have one of their own in a leadership role

Planned Parenthood chief to Congress: Video allegations are ‘offensive’ and ‘untrue’

Behaviorists showing the U.S. how to improve government operations

Big donors seeking larger roles in presidential campaigns

Should the now-outlawed tontine be brought back to aid retirement financing?

The future of computer chips: Is smaller, faster, cheaper soon to be over?

Added calcium may not protect older bones, researchers say after analyzing prior studies

Obama, Putin eye each other warily on Syria policy

With a stony-faced handshake, President Obama and Russian President Putin on Monday held their first formal meeting in more than two years, hours after outlining their contrasting visions for Syria’s future in dueling speeches at the U.N. General Assembly.

Obama urged a political transition to replace Syrian President Assad; Putin urged sticking with Assad, saying that his military is the only viable option for defeating the Islamic State.

In his speech, Obama took aim at Russia’s military buildup in Syria as well as its support for Ukrainian separatists, saying, “We are told that such retrenchment is required to beat back disorder, that it’s the only way to stamp out terrorism, or prevent foreign meddling.

“But I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backward. … And if we cannot work together more effectively, we will all suffer the consequences.”

Putin charged that attempts by Western nations to impose democracy — including in Iraq and Libya — were responsible for upheaval in the Mideast and North Africa. Although people in those regions clearly wanted and deserved change, “the export of revolutions, this time so-called democratic ones,” he said, had resulted in “violence and social disaster” instead of a “triumph for democracy.”

“I cannot help asking those who have forced this situation, do you realize now what you have done?” Putin said in remarks that never mentioned but were clearly directed at the United States. “Policies based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.”

Beyond the barbs, the two did raise the prospect of cooperating more closely on fighting Islamist terrorists and brokering a political solution in Syria.

NASA says water is flowing on Mars, increasing odds of life

The announcement is a shift for the agency, where officials repeatedly have played down the idea that the dusty and desolate landscape of Mars could be inhabited today.

Of course, unlike the green men once imagined, the life would be microbial.

Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars exploration program, says the only definitive way for now to determine whether there's life on Mars is to collect rocks and soil for analysis on Earth, something a U.S. lander set for liftoff in 2020 will do.

NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from the areas to be studied because the rovers weren’t thoroughly sterilized, and NASA worries that they may be carrying microbial hitchhikers from Earth that could contaminate Mars.

Doctors soliciting patients for donations

More and more, development offices at major cancer centers are teaching doctors to raise money for the medical center or for their own research, according to a study published online Monday in The Journal of Clinical Oncology.

In the unprecedented survey of more than 400 oncologists at 40 leading cancer centers, nearly half said they’d been taught to identify wealthy patients who might be prospective donors. A third had been asked to directly solicit donations; half of them refused. Three percent had been promised payments if a patient made a donation.

Also in the news

Afghan forces fighting to retake northern city from Taliban

Iraq turning to Russia in fight against Islamic State

David Petraeus’ analysis of what Putin is up to

What Chinese President Xi offered on his U.S. visit: A slight shift in tone

Obama secures nations’ pledges of 40,000 more troops for U.N. peacekeeping

GOP senators ignore Cruz move to defund Planned Parenthood in spending bill

What Planned Parenthood’s chief will tell Congress in her first testimony since videos

Search for speaker to replace Boehner falls to splintered Republicans

Covert electronic surveillance by law enforcement prompts calls for transparency

Volkswagen’s scandal highlights European stalling on new emissions tests

U.S. rail service is threatened as deadline for safety system looms

Cellphone industry pressure seen in watered-down 911 emergency location rules

As banks retreat, private equity rushing to buy troubled home mortgages

Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates is among 2015 MacArthur genius grant recipients

New devices taking the pain out of hospital visits

House leadership mess and other big challenges facing GOP

Hard-liners haven’t put forward a viable candidate for House speaker, leaving Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Calif., positioned to succeed John Boehner, Ohio, who shocked everybody on Friday by announcing his resignation.

McCarthy has spent fewer than nine years in the House. Here is a profile of McCarthy, from Politico.

But those hard-liners aren’t expected to make it any easier for McCarthy than they did for Boehner on upcoming issues including whether to raise the federal debt ceiling and a long-term spending bill.

Dozens of members of the House have held their seats only since the 2010 election, and many of them pledged to force a drastic reduction in the role of government.

Meanwhile, in the presidential race, the top three GOP candidates never have held elective office. And billionaire donors who can contribute unlimited amounts of money to support a candidate have undercut the power and relevance of the national party.

And party leaders are caught between a need to appeal to an angry grass-roots hungry to upend the party’s leadership and placating donors who don’t want to risk losing the White House for a third straight election.

As U.N. General Assembly convenes, what’s Putin up to?

Top world leaders including President Obama will be speaking at the General Assembly opening on Monday in New York.

But all eyes will be on Russian President Putin, who will be making his first General Assembly appearance in 10 years.

For the second time this month, Russia has moved to expand its political and military influence in the Syria conflict, this time by reaching an understanding, announced on Sunday, with Iraq, Syria and Iran to share intelligence about the Islamic State.

Like Russia’s earlier move to bolster the government of Syrian President Assad by deploying warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria, the intelligence-sharing arrangement was made without notifying the United States.

“President Obama will seek to understand what the Russian government means when it states that it is enhancing or increasing its military involvement in Syria in order to support efforts to counter ISIL,” says Celeste Wallander, the president’s Russia adviser.