Today's News for August 24th

Bloomberg:

Trump Shutdown Threat Complicates Congress’s Debt Ceiling Plans

President Donald Trump’s threats to shut down the government in October over border wall funding triggered concerns on Capitol Hill and could complicate Congress’s job of raising the debt ceiling.

Congress needs to pass a spending measure to keep the government open by Sept. 30 -- the same time it’s facing a deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit. GOP leaders don’t have a plan yet for how they’ll proceed but one likely scenario is to package the two measures together to get them to the president’s desk.

Trump’s shutdown threat may just be part of the routine bluster he employs in negotiations, but it still raises the specter of a potentially market-shaking showdown if he decides to follow through on it.

This is still a problem over a month away, and Trump is most likely bluffing. Yet this story seems to be front page news on most news sites.

So how do we get a month ahead in our lede news story?

The line of questioning goes like this:

1. What really important stuff happened yesterday? Nothing.
2. What really important stuff will happen today? Nothing.
3. What really important stuff will happen within the next week? Nothing.
4. What really important stuff will happen within the next month or so? Bingo!

Occasionally, you will get something really important happening far off that supersedes all other news, like "Asteroid to strike Earth next year, wipe out all life". But that is only every million years or so.

In other slow news...

The Guardian:

Charlottesville: United Nations warns US over 'alarming' racism

A UN committee charged with tackling racism has issued an “early warning” over conditions in the US and urged the Trump administration to “unequivocally and unconditionally” reject discrimination.

The warning specifically refers to events last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the civil rights activist Heather Heyer was killed when a car rammed into a group of people protesting against a white nationalist rally.

Such statements are usually issued by the United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (Cerd) over fears of ethnic or religious conflict. In the past decade, the only other countries issued with early warnings have been Burundi, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria.

The United States has been warned under the procedure in the past when Cerd raised the issue of land rights conflicts with the Western Shoshone indigenous peoples in 2006.

“We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said Anastasia Crickley, chair of the committee.

Note this isn't over an actual racist action, such as a discriminatory law or segregation or even promoting racial preferences like affirmative action does. No, this is about idiots using their free speech rights.

Most countries in the world do NOT like free speech. so it should be no shock when the UN denounces free speech, especially when it comes from humanity's low-hanging fruit.

Now if all the UN is seeking is for "the Trump administration to unequivocally and unconditionally reject discrimination", they already did that. The MSM ignored it, and the UN found a perfectly good excuse to pile on Trump.

By the way, if you want to understand one of the key flaws in the UN, it is that it represents the countries of the world, but NOT the people of the world. The UN should be a bicameral body. when many of the nations represented at the UN are only representing dictatorships and rigged democracies, and not the people living under them, then the directives coming from said body are more representative of the leaders, not the people.