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Don't sweat the sequester. Obama is simply hyping when, in fact, it will be manageable if he chooses to not demagogue the issue. But then Obama needs to create a crisis so it won't go to waste.
Have you seen the new TV sit come starring President Obama? It is called "Leave it To Cleaver." (See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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Get ready for a new State Department strategy. No more Reset Button, just the Hagel Haggle! (See 2,2a and 2b below.)
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I have been warning about what happens when interest rates rise? (See 3 below.)
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It is Darwin time again. Yes, they walk among us and procreate if they live! (See 4 below.)
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Livni is Israel's equivalent of Hillary. (See 5 below.)
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"Now I know it's Obama's Fault:" http://www.youtube.com/embed/xEYFFiEnUjQ?feature=player_embedded
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We hd great Braves seats for over 25 years behind the plate and were in clear viewof Ted, jane , Jimmy andRoslyn, whenthe latter came to the games, and Teddy is right abut Jane's limp chop. What a fraud she was then, still is . Should have been tried for treason! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1a)Embrace the Sequester
Something odd happened a few months ago as I weighed the various aspects of the dreaded Sequester Monster, a creature vilified across party lines.
It is often true that if enough people in government say something is bad, there is a strong chance of redeeming qualities.
So my journey began. The only element of the sequester that bothered me in the least was military cuts. But my friends at the Institute for Policy Innovation properly observe that defense spending will not fall below 2007 levels, which were 75% above pre-9/11Pentagon budgets.
High enough for me? Of course not. I actually want to continue fighting wars against jihadists who will most assuredly continue to wage war on us. But alas, Barack Obama is President, and even if we manage to derail Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary, we are not going to get Dick Cheney or John Bolton policies from this White House.
Future Congresses, hopefully peppered with a lot more Republicans, will be able to join with Obama’s GOP successor to fill in any holes that might be dug in the near term.
The conservative overreaction to the defense spending cuts distracted from the overwhelming truth of the sequester: It is the only way we are going to take the first serious steps toward spending reductions.
Can there be any doubt about this?
Democrats are never serious about real spending cuts. Republicans say they are, but too rarely show real willingness to act accordingly.
So the feared sequester, hatched in the Obama White House itself, ironically becomes the only path to real cuts.
The administration is shell-shocked. Obama and the Democrats cannot believe they have not been able to further roll the GOP into agreeing to tax increases without any assurance of spending reductions.
But this rigid, do-nothing, obstructionist Republican Party has done exactly what it should do when outflanked by a Democrat White House and Senate: it has stood its ground and refused to buckle under the pressure of bad ideas.
As such, the sequester deadline ticks ever closer. The beads of sweat on Democrat foreheads are all you need to know that something wonderful is about to happen.
I do not universally follow a flow chart that says if Obama dislikes it, it must be a good thing. But on fiscal matters, that process rarely fails.
Witness the proud first responders gathered behind him Tuesday at a White House photo-op. They were brought in to scare the daylights out of Americans who are supposed to recoil at spending cuts because it will mean slashed police and fire personnel, as well as diminished food safety, airport security and a host of other hazards.
And make no mistake, if the sequester comes, with its thoroughly proper axe that forces politicians to do what they will not do on their own, this White House will punish us.
It will indeed cut things that protect Americans. Not because it has to, but because it wants to.
Barack Obama will tell the nation that the evil Republicans have done this to them. Those Republicans had better be ready, with examples of precise cuts that could have been made that would have endangered no one.
The administration’s craven tactics will have to be put right back into its face. We will need strong, energetic messengers to fan out across the media landscape to tell the nation just what this regime did to make voters think spending cuts cannot happen without danger or pain.
With respect, that means Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell will need to take a seat while Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and others of similar energies grab the American people by the lapels to deliver the first clue millions of them will get about the depth of our fiscal crisis and what it takes to get out of it.
So, to summarize:
The sequester is not to be feared, it is to be embraced. In fact, after the cuts take effect from this one, it would be nice to engineer another one. And another after that.
I’m through waiting for compromises that will never happen. Even if they did, they would be even more watered-down than the sequester cuts.
This whole drama cries out for context.
The first year of sequester cuts are about one-tenth of the $850 billion we flushed down the infamous stimulus toilet. Casting that money to the wind didn’t seem to bring these levels of panic from the media culture that now dutifully echoes Obama’s distaste for the sequester.
And for even further clarity, the roughly one trillion dollars in “cuts” over the next decade are measured against spending levels boosted by inflation forecasts and after exempted spending is factored back in, at totals actually higher than a trillion.
Yes, the argument can be made that these “cuts,” condemned as “brutal” by President Obama, may not in fact be cuts at all over the ten years to come.
Which brings us to the silliness of all of this sequester-mania. No one knows what will be happening in our nation’s budgets four years from now, or eight years from now, much less ten. Today’s cuts, real or imagined, can be deepened or obliterated by future whims.
So we must focus on what we know today.
We know today’s Washington is genetically incapable of even starting down the road of the spending cuts we need.
We know we have the gift of the sequester, which will cut some things we may not want cut, but provides the only hope of cutting countless other types of spending that must be reduced if we are to fiscally survive.
We know the Obama administration has now decided it hates the sequester. We also know this administration is hell-bent on destroying private wealth in order to build a European-style, neo-socialist society driven by obscene government spending that will turn us into Greece.
Case closed. Reach out for that March 1 deadline with confidence. The sequester is not without challenges, but it represents our first, best hope to take a few baby steps down the long, long road toward responsibility.
1a)Blame Game Rages on Over Looming Sequester
We are just days away from a cataclysm of biblical proportions. The cuts foretold in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are young as far as prophecies go, but apparently they are every bit as terrifying as rivers of blood and plagues of locusts. Any day now we can expect White House spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement: "And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the rate of increase in federal spending."
The great game in Washington is who will get the blame for something both House Speaker John Boehner and President Obama agree will be calamitous for the country. It is an argument so idiotic it could only pass for seriousness in Washington. The Republicans correctly note that the president proposed the sequester. In fact, back when the president believed that Republicans were more terrified of these automatic budget cuts than Democrats were, he pretended that he would veto any attempts to get rid of them that didn't give him even more of the tax hikes he holds so dear. Now that Republicans have already agreed to a tax hike, they'll be damned if they'll raise them even more.
Fair enough. But the GOP agreed to the idea. This wasn't some elaborate con in which John Boehner wakes up thinking March 1 is a morning like any other, only to discover $85 billion is missing.
The GOP will probably lose the public relations battle over the sequester, because that's the Republicans' job in the age of Obama. A U.S. ambassador is murdered in a terrorist attack the administration ineptly responded to -- and blamed on a video -- but the only real story is that Republicans are so crazy, they want to know what happened. The president nominates a middle-brow pol to run the Defense Department, one who must recant all of his well-known views in order to get the job, and the story is how irrational the GOP is for caring. If the White House dispatched a drone to circle Boehner's home, the front-page story in The New York Times would be on the speaker's troubling paranoia.
But that doesn't mean Republicans should make the White House's job easier. Which is why it's good news that the House leadership is reportedly working on legislation that would force Obama to choose where the $85 billion in cuts should come from. Both the president and Boehner agree that the across-the-board cuts required by the sequester make no sense when most agencies can find less painful ways to trim a few pennies out of every dollar.
It's unlikely that Obama will take such a deal, since he and the Democratic-controlled Senate twice rejected legislation that replaced sequester cuts with more reasonable ones. Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.
And he's not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school's Thanksgiving parade.
And that is what galls me. If the sequester goes into effect, the federal budget for this year will still be larger than last year's ($3.553 trillion in 2013 vs. $3.538 trillion in 2012). With the sequester in effect, federal non-defense spending will still be 10 percent higher than it was in 2008. But Washington, led by Obama but with GOP help, is telling the American people that unless government gets an even bigger raise (with money borrowed from China, by the way), civilization will unravel, 911 calls will find no purchase and Bane shall irrevocably seize control of Gotham.
The federal government has grown inexorably for decades. Our president casts himself a Solomonic manager, and yet he is saying that absent a few extra pennies on every dollar there's no way he can maintain government's core functions? A manager in any other field of human endeavor would be fired on the spot for making such an argument. But in Washington this passes for leadership.
1b)GOP Must Not Cave to the Bully on His Sequestration
President Obama's demagoguery and fear-mongering on his sequester cuts are breathtaking, even for him. Lest you think I am engaging in hyperbole, let me give you the dictionary definition of a demagogue.
One definition is "a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument."
Obama's ordinary MO is to stir people against one another, to stoke the flames of envy among some against others in lieu of rational argument to rally support for his causes.
Obama has had four years to try his ideas. They have all failed, in every category. His stimulus plan to spend nearly $1 trillion of borrowed money to jump-start the economy was a colossal, unconscionable waste of money we didn't have and not only didn't work as promised but probably stalled the private sector's efforts to recover. He remains defiantly unrepentant in the face of his repeated reckless green policy failures.
Liberal economists and ideologues -- in some cases, there's little difference -- cling fast to the myth that Obama's gutting of the private sector to chase public money after projects for which there was no demand actually helped the economy. But they can't prove their assertion that the economy would have been worse but for the stimulus any more than one can prove a negative. But objective evidence says otherwise: Obama has presided over the worst recovery in 50 years.
But those who control the writing of history (and the other disciplines, such as economics, that have been thoroughly politicized in modern academia) have an advantage in controlling the present. Liberal academic revisionists have firmly planted in our history and economic texts the myth that FDR's big-government policies brought us out of the Great Depression. Only recently have a number of modern historians and authors set the record straight: His policies exacerbated and prolonged the Depression. Yet Obama persists in touting his own big-government prescriptions, demanding we ignore history and his own record.
Obama has had four years to get the economy moving, and our extraordinarily high level of unemployment is just as high as it was when he took office and, when you consider the record numbers of people leaving the workforce, is much worse than the numbers indicate. Yet he still refuses to accept any responsibility for his own failures.
Obama will not offer any plan to reduce spending, especially entitlements. He just keeps going back to his crusade against the rich, from whom he's already extracted a higher tax rate and eliminated personal exemptions and deductions. He promised he wanted a balanced approach, but he refuses to balance his punitive tax hikes with spending cuts and entitlement reform. Even former Sen. Alan Simpson said that unless Obama gets serious about entitlements, he will have a failed presidency.
But Obama and his Democratic senators will not pass a budget, and they will not participate in entitlement reform. Instead, Obama is back railing against the Republicans for their alleged unwillingness to further tax the rich, whom they have already reluctantly agreed to discriminatorily tax.
Obama tells us that Republicans are insisting on keeping his brainchild -- the sequestration -- in place to avoid further taxing the rich. This is the same sequestration he promised to support; he even threatened to veto efforts to remove it. Now he complains about its draconian cuts -- not about cuts to the military but about cuts to his sacred domestic programs. But in fact, even with the sequester cuts, we will be spending more in fiscal year 2013 than we have in any other fiscal year in American history, save 2011. He is simply misleading the public because he wants to further punish the rich -- even if it means holding hostage our military and accelerating the nation's imminent bankruptcy.
Obama is dreadfully wrong on both sides of the fiscal equation. Economic growth does not depend on government spending, which has the opposite effect because it sucks the wind out of the private sector; and you balance the budget not by taxing the rich but by drastically cutting spending and reforming entitlements.
Obama and his ilk mock Republicans for their "trickledown" economics, but Obama is the quintessential proponent of his own trickledown economics. As to the private sector and entrepreneurship, he is an atheist. He believes that only he and his central planners in the omniscient federal government can cause economic growth and that from that high mountain of government largesse will trickle down economic activity for the ignorant, impotent private sector and the economy at large.
The sequestration, as House Speaker John Boehner has said, is an ugly way to cut spending and is not good for our national defense. But if we don't start cutting fast (and the sequester is more a reduction in the rate of spending increases than it is a cut), we won't have the money to support a military at all, much less anything else. Time to stop playing games with the nation's very viability and our children's future. The Republicans must hold to their guns this time.
1c)
This Year, March 1 Is Groundhog Day
Why Democrats are wrong that 'sequestration' will be another political victory for themselves.
By Kim Strassel
The sequester drama unfolding in Washington brings to mind that classic Bill Murray film, "Groundhog Day." Only it is as if President Obama failed to catch the end of the movie, where the loop is finally broken.
The White House is playing the sequester exactly as it played the recent fight over the tax cliff and the earlier one over the payroll tax. Here the White House again warns of economic calamity, there Democrats again insist that it is up to Republicans to act. Here Mr. Obama again demands more taxes, warns that the clock is ticking, and coaxes the GOP toward a big backroom deal. The entire Democratic establishment wakes up every morning to "I Got You Babe."
Weirder yet, the White House and its media acolytes seem convinced that the same victory is nigh. The administration actually believes—and Politico actually reported—that "Republicans are in a worse position than during the fiscal cliff fight." Accordingly, the White House is now waiting for the GOP to play its role, succumb again to the Inevitable Awesomeness of Obama and accept his policy demands.
The wait will continue. Because what the White House and the press are missing is that Republicans want this debate. The sequester isn't some GOP fallback position. It is a proactive strategy, their way of busting out of the "Groundhog Day" cycle and changing the Washington spending debate. They aren't bluffing.
Why would they change course? The law, this time, is in their favor. On March 1, Washington automatically gets some modest spending restraint—which is exactly what is needed and what the GOP campaigned on. The Republicans have struggled with their sequester messaging, doing a poor job distinguishing between good policy (cutting spending) and bad process (across-the-board cuts). But what is clear is that 98% of Republican legislators see the necessity of sequester, and the few who don't matter little, since their colleagues won't allow a legislative change.
Republicans have been too often burned by Mr. Obama to consider big deals. That age is over. The polls? House Republicans are focused on those in their home districts, where voters will demand that they hold the line against new taxes. Republicans also now understand that to give Mr. Obama revenue through closing "tax loopholes" is to effectively kill the longtime GOP goal of real tax reform.
Mr. Obama will do his best to make the sequester look painful, warning of furloughs, layoffs, diminished security. But unlike the threat of the tax cliff—which would have immediately hit all American paychecks—the sequester may prove a harder calamity to sell.
Agencies will have 120 days to implement changes. While those agencies are currently predicting doom, they will in reality face pressure to impose cuts in ways that minimize harm. Government unions won't let agency heads cut employees instead of fancy conference budgets. Moreover, this is a 2.5% cut in spending, not a government shutdown. Americans will continue to get their passports, cash their Social Security checks, and visit national parks.
What has to make the White House a tad nervous are the questions it is beginning to get from the savvier members of the press. Didn't you folks in the White House also agree to $1.2 trillion in sequester cuts? Why are you now changing the goal posts, asking for taxes? Are you really saying you can't find $85 billion in sensible cuts from a $3.8 trillion budget? Why not just ask the GOP for the flexibility to impose the cuts more wisely?
That last question will grow in prominence as the House GOP soon takes up legislation to continue funding the government. Republicans have vowed to lock the sequester cuts into that continuing resolution, though there is talk of including a provision that would give Mr. Obama more flexibility to administer the trims.
The White House has shown no interest in being given that authority. It prefers to campaign on Armageddon coming, and blame Republicans. But can it maintain that position if vulnerable Senate Democrats like North Carolina's Kay Hagan (whose state is getting hit by the defense sequester) start calling for a flexibility provision? Democratic frustration is already bubbling up against a White House that is so convinced of its campaigning brilliance that it has devoted no resources to mapping out a legislative fallback position.
That has some Democrats nervous. They understand that the GOP isn't budging. They are watching Republicans begin to define this battle on their own terms.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Thursday highlighted both government spending embarrassments and Mr. Obama's "false choices," noting that the president has the power to choose to "cut waste like smoking machines and EPA grants to foreign countries" rather than "degrade our military." The president, said Mr. Cantor, can "eliminate slush funds" rather than "let criminals run through the streets."
This is where the GOP needs and wants the fight to be—on big government, on Mr. Obama's spending addiction, on the drag of federal spending on the private economy. That debate—take note—is already a far cry from the endless media focus on Republican divisions and weakness that dominated the tax-cliff and payroll fights and led to GOP defeats.
It is an end, as the GOP sees it, to the Groundhog Day loop. And it is why the sequester is coming.
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2)Hagel Proves Obama Won't Stop Iran
Does it matter that a nominee for secretary of defense doesn't particularly care for American power?
Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2007, Sen. Chuck Hagel revealed the kind of prejudices regarding American military strength most frequently found in the pages of the Nation magazine or among protesters at Occupy rallies. Distancing himself from Republicans he regarded as too bellicose, Hagel said, "Rather than acting like a nation riddled with the insecurities of a schoolyard bully, we ought to carry ourselves with the confidence that should come from the dignity of our heritage, the experience of our history, and from the strength of our humanity, not from the power of our military."
This is a familiar leftist critique of America, a psuedo-psychological analysis of our foreign policy as a form of pathology. For a certain set of people, the problems in the world are never (fill in the blank): Soviet aggression and expansionism, communist repression and adventurism or Islamic radicalism and terror. No, the problem is always America's neurotic need to throw its weight around, alienating benign foreign powers and creating discord and trouble.
Whereas fair-minded people the world over consider the Islamic Republic of Iran to be a terror-sponsoring gangster regime, Sen. Hagel described the Iranian regime at his confirmation hearing as an "elected and legitimate" government. A friendly Democratic senator later offered him an avenue for retreat, which he grabbed, saying, "What I meant to say -- should have said -- it's recognizable." What regime isn't "recognizable"?
What solicitous Democrats cannot obscure is that Sen. Hagel has a long record of softness toward Iran. He voted against designating Al Quds a terrorist entity, advised direct negotiations with the mullahs, opposed sanctions, and suggested that a military response to Iran's nuclear program is not a "viable, feasible, responsible option." In a 2007 speech, he praised Iran's cooperation with the U.S. in Afghanistan and noted that our two nations had found "common interests." From these, Hagel continued, "emerged common actions working toward a common purpose."
This is sheer fantasy -- disturbing enough in a U.S. senator but profoundly unsettling in a secretary of defense. Just two months before Hagel sprinkled these rhetorical rosebuds at the mullahs' feet, an Al Quds force had attacked our forces in Karbala, Iraq. We were not at war with Iran (or not consciously). Time magazine reported the ambush: "In the back of two of the vehicles were the four Americans. One of them was alive, though barely. Handcuffed, he had been shot in the back of the head, but he was breathing. The other soldiers were already dead. One had taken bullets in both legs and his right hand, and at some point the kidnappers had torn open his body armor and fired bullets into his chest and torso. Two others were handcuffed together, with one's right hand joined to the other's left. Two shots in the face and neck had killed one. Four bullets in the chest had killed the other."
The Al Quds terrorists had stolen all of the men's ID tags. Before dying, one of them had scrawled his name in the dust of the jeep.
Hagel is not worried about a nuclear Iran. In his 2008 book, he notes blithely, "The genie of nuclear weapons is already out of the bottle no matter what Iran does." In that same year, Hagel proposed that the State Department open an "interests section" in Tehran.
Before the Hagel nomination, we lived with the polite fiction that President Obama was determined to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. The president has reiterated this position consistently since 2007. Mr. Hagel demonstrated confusion about it during his confirmation hearing, mumbling, "We have no position on containment." For clarity, Sen. Carl Levin (another helpful Democrat) corrected Hagel. "We do have a position on containment, and that is, we do not favor containment."
As recently as last September President Obama said, "Make no mistake: A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained. ... The United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."
But who can take that boilerplate seriously now? The president has nominated a man for defense secretary who warms the heart of the terror regime in Tehran, a man who despises U.S. power, a man who opposed not just military action but even sanctions against Iran. That the president refuses to withdraw this nomination makes nonsense of his repeated pledges to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. If ever a nomination were filibuster worthy, this is it.
2a)Watchdog Agency: Iran Ramping Up Nuke Program
Iran has begun installing advanced centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment plant, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Thursday, a defiant step that will worry Western powers ahead of a resumption of talks with Tehran next week.
In a confidential report, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said 180 so-called IR-2m centrifuges and empty centrifuge casings had been put in place at the facility near the town of Natanz in central Iran. They were not yet operating.
If launched successfully, such machines could enable Iran to speed up significantly its accumulation of material that the West fears could be used to devise a nuclear weapon. Iran says it is refining uranium only for peaceful energy purposes.
Iran's installation of new-generation centrifuges would be "yet another provocative step," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in Washington.
White House spokesman Jay Carney warned Iran that it would face further pressure and isolation if it failed to address international concerns about its nuclear programme in the Feb. 26 talks with world powers in the Kazakh city of Almaty.
Britain's Foreign Office said the IAEA's finding was of "serious concern.'' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the report "proves that Iran continues to advance swiftly towards the red line" that he laid down last year.
Netanyahu, who has strongly hinted at possible military action if sanctions and diplomacy fail to halt Iran's nuclear drive, told the United Nations in September Iran must not be allowed to amass enough higher-enriched uranium to make even a single warhead.
Iran denies Western accusations that it is seeking to develop a capability to make atomic bombs. Tehran says it is Israel's assumed nuclear arsenal that threatens peace.
Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told Iranian media the U.N. agency's report showed "no evidence of diversion of material and nuclear activities towards military purposes."
U.S. lawmakers meanwhile are crafting a bill designed to stop the European Central Bank from handling business from the Iranian government, a U.S. congressional aide said on Thursday, in an attempt to keep Tehran from using euros to develop its nuclear programme.
In the early stages of drafting, it would target the ECB's cross-border payment system and impose U.S. economic penalties on entities that use the European Central Bank to do business with Iran's government, the aide said on condition of anonymity.
The aide disclosed the new push for sanctions ahead of fresh talks on Tuesday in which major powers hope to persuade the Iranian government to rein in its atomic activities, which the West suspects may be a cover to develop a bomb capability.
RISING WESTERN PRESSURE
It was not clear how many of the new centrifuges Iran aims to install at Natanz, which is designed for tens of thousands.
An IAEA note informing member states late last month about Iran's plans implied that it could be up to 3,000 or so.
Iran has for years been trying to develop centrifuges more efficient than the erratic 1970s IR-1 model it now uses, but their introduction for full-scale production has been dogged by delays and technical hurdles, experts and diplomats say.
The deployment of the new centrifuges underlines Iran's continued refusal to bow to Western pressure to curb its nuclear programme, and may further complicate efforts to resolve the dispute diplomatically, without a spiral into Middle East war.
Iran has also started testing two new centrifuge types, the IR-6 and IR-6s, at a research and development facility, the IAEA report said. Centrifuges spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope in uranium.
In a more encouraging sign for the powers, however, the IAEA report said Iran in December resumed converting some of its uranium refined to a fissile concentration of 20 percent to oxide powder for the production of reactor fuel.
That helped restrain the growth of Iran's higher-grade uranium stockpile since the previous report in November, a development that could buy more time for diplomacy.
The report said Iran had increased to 167 kg (367 pounds) its stockpile of 20 percent uranium - a level it says it needs to make fuel for a Tehran research reactor but which also takes it much closer to weapons-grade material if processed further.
NEW OFFER TO IRAN
One diplomat familiar with the report said this represented a rise of about 18-19 kg since November, a notable slowdown from the previous three-month period when the stockpile jumped by nearly 50 percent after Iran halted conversion.
Israel last year gave a rough deadline of mid-2013 as the date by which Tehran could have enough higher-grade uranium to produce a single atomic bomb if processed further. Experts say about 240-250 kg of 20 percent enriched uranium would be needed.
But a resumption of conversion, experts say, means the Israeli "red line" for action could be postponed.
Refined uranium can fuel nuclear energy plants, which is Iran's stated aim, or provide the core of an atomic bomb, which the United States and Israel suspect may be its ultimate goal.
Next week's talks between the six powers and Iran to try again to break the impasse in the decade-old dispute are their first since mid-2012, but analysts expect no real progress toward defusing suspicions that Iran is seeking atomic bomb capability.
The United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany - a group known as the P5+1 - want Iran to halt 20 percent enrichment and shut the Fordow underground plant where this takes place.
Iran wants them to recognise what it regards as its right to refine uranium for peaceful purpose and to relax increasingly strict sanctions battering its oil-dependent economy.
The powers plan to offer to ease sanctions that bar trade in gold and other precious metals with Iran in return for Iranian steps to shut down the nation's newly expanded Fordow uranium enrichment plant, Western officials told Reuters on Friday.
A U.S. official said the United States was ready to meet bilaterally with Iran in Almaty, something he said Tehran had not agreed to since 2009, when Iranian officials initially appeared to accept a deal on curbing the nuclear program and then backed away.
"You've heard us say repeatedly we are open to meeting bilaterally within the context of P5+1," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I fully expect we'll be ready to meet them bilaterally if they are willing. We'll see in Almaty."
In Paris, deputy foreign ministry spokesman Vincent Floreani said the powers were ready to make a new offer to Iran with "significant new elements" and that they hoped Tehran would engage seriously in the negotiations.
Iran has suggested that shutting down Fordow in exchange for a lifting of gold sanctions would not be acceptable.
© 2013 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.
President Obama’s pick as the next Secretary of Defense is the wrong one. Heritage’s defense and foreign policy experts have examined the record of Chuck Hagel, the Republican former Senator from Nebraska, and concluded he simply does not have the experience and skills for the job. What’s more, his vision for dealing with other nations is dangerous for America.
Here are the top three reasons Hagel is wrong for the job.
1. Hagel does not have the executive and managerial experience to lead a department as large and complex as the Pentagon.
James Jay Carafano, Heritage’s vice president for foreign policy, explained:
The Secretary must be a consummate leader, manager, and multi-tasker. Hagel’s resume betrays a lack of executive experience, and his inability to perform under pressure was on prominent display in his hearing…His Senate career evidenced a conspicuous lack of key leadership/executive skills. He simply is ill-qualified for this job. His laudable service as a young sergeant in Vietnam neither exempts him from criticism nor gives him a pass on his lack of skills. We have hundreds of thousands of honorable veterans who are not qualified to be Secretary of Defense, and Hagel is one of them.
2. He embraces dangerously naïve policies such as “nuclear zero,” the dream of a world without nuclear weapons.
Hagel was actually a co-author of the Global Zero report, which recommended that “All U.S. tactical nuclear weapons would be eliminated over the next ten years.” During his confirmation hearing, he tried to walk back his position, insisting that he was not for unilateral disarmament. Heritage’s Michaela Bendikova pointed out his inconsistency and denial of the Global Zero position.
3. He advocates talking to America’s enemies and beating up on our friends.
It’s worth asking: Why does Iran endorse Chuck Hagel?
Hagel has advocated more talks with hostile nations such as Syria and Iran, the latter of which recently rejected outright any idea of bilateral talks with the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, Hagel appears never to have missed an opportunity to beat up on Israel, one of the strongest allies of the United States.
As Heritage’s Steven Bucci, director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, has explained:
Hagel has called repeatedly for better relations with Iran, the worst state sponsor of terrorism in history. In several past speeches (some not provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee), Hagel was open about the “need” to reach out to and have a normal relationship with Iran. He makes it appear as if the differences we have with Tehran—which supplied military-grade weapons to our enemies in Iraq specifically designed to kill Americans—are somehow our fault.
The Senate failed to advance Hagel’s nomination last week, but some Senators tried to use the vote as a political bargaining chip to pressure the Obama Administration for answers on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. The next vote could come as soon as Tuesday. After Hagel’s unsettling performance in his confirmation hearing, some Senators wanted more information, including financial records and speeches given by Hagel.
But the evidence on display is clear. As Carafano said, “What hangs in the balance of this nomination is the security of our nation. It is a job that requires a proven leader with executive experience and a sound understanding of global threats and workable defense policy. We can and must do better than Chuck Hagel.”
Helle Dale, Heritage’s Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy, contributed to this article.
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3) When Interest Rates Rise, Watch Out
The Fed's inevitable Sword of Damocles could be brutal for bonds and stocks. Some of us recall the massacre of 1994.
By ANDY KESSLER
Can Ben Bernanke fly us through a needle's eye? Minutes released this week from the last Federal Reserve policy meeting suggest evaluations are taking place that "might well lead the Committee to taper or end its purchases before it judged that a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market had occurred." It's about time. The experiment to kick-start the economy with near-zero interest rates has failed. Maybe our central bankers have figured out that low rates are what is holding back lending and hiring and growth.
Meanwhile, even as the stock market hits highs not seen since 2007, everyone on Wall Street knows interest rates will go up—although no one except Mr. Bernanke knows when. Investors are playing a game of chicken with rates, enjoying the ride but bracing for a downturn when the rates turn up. When rates go up, bonds become more attractive than stocks because you get returns with less risk.
Those of us on Wall Street in 1994 witnessed something very similar. After several years of essentially flat short-term rates, the Fed raised rates by 25 basis points (or 0.25%) on Feb. 4, 1994. The Fed raised short-term rates a total of six times and 2.5% over the next 10 months.
In what became known as a bond-market massacre, the price of long bonds dropped almost 9%. The stock market dropped 9% in three months, killing a then-vibrant market for initial public offerings.
Today we are at the bitter end of a three-decade-long interest rate cycle, culminating in Mr. Bernanke's near-zero rates. You can't fall off the floor. And the prospect of higher interest rates is like the Sword of Damocles hanging over the stock market.On May 13, 1981, the three-month Treasury bill rate was 17.01% and the Dow Industrials were just under 1000. Today, three-month rates are under 0.12% and the Dow is headed south from 14000. What should interest rates be? In January, the Consumer Price Index rose 1.6% year over year. In a normal economy with a normal Fed, short rates should be 2%-3%.
Investors beware: The unwind is going to be bumpy. The entire U.S. bond market is over $30 trillion. Any sudden increase in interest rates means current holdings would be worth less and might create turmoil from runs or even "breaking the buck" at money-market funds. Gold is already down over 15% from last year's October peak, anticipating this Fed move.
All along, Mr. Bernanke's intent was to allow banks to recapitalize despite all the toxic mortgage debt that he and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner left on their balance sheets, so we've lived with almost four years of sub-0.2% interest rates. The results of the latest bank stress tests are due out on March 7, but 15 of the 19 largest banks (Citigroup C +0.33% the glaring exception) passed the last one. The justification for low interest rates is no longer to save banks, but instead to goose the stock market as an indirect way to create jobs.
Mr. Bernanke told CNBC last year that, "Our policies have contributed to a stronger stock market just as they did in March 2009 when we did the first iteration of this program." No kidding. But as a policy tool, low interest rates are like using gasoline to light your charcoal grill. You may singe your eyebrows, but it will certainly light the coals. The question is will the coals stay lit when the gasoline burns off.
When rates rise, the bond market will sell off, but foreign investors seeking a safe haven from their messes may continue to pile in and limit the damage, especially if incoming Treasury Secretary Jack Lew implements rather than jawbones a strong dollar policy.
The stock market is another thing. Every day this trading venue captures collective expectations in prices—expectations of corporate profits and interest rates and risk. Stocks are nothing more than all the future earnings of a company discounted back to today. The discount rate is a combination of prevailing interest rates plus some factor of risk.
But there is no risk or discount number published anywhere. It's touchy-feely. Expectations change daily. That is why stocks are said to climb a wall of worry. When no one is worried, you run out of buyers and markets top. When everyone thought Apple's share price was going to hit $1,000, and every hedge fund owned it, of course it sold off as all that good sentiment was in the stock.
But there is one real market absolute: interest rates. Right now, mutual- and hedge-fund managers are scrambling their brains trying to figure out when rates will rise, trying to outguess the Fed, other investors and probably themselves. The economy dropped a tenth of a point last quarter, Spain and Portugal are still a mess, only 157,000 jobs were created in the U.S. in January, tax rates are popping and corporate earnings may grow only 1%-2% this year.
But if and as these worries ease, the Fed's Sword of Damocles will swing. The stock market is not going to like it one bit. But why should the Fed care? Banks are recapitalized and the charcoals are lit. Our central bankers should be agnostic to stock prices anyway. This doesn't mean the stock market is going to crash, though dropping 1,000 points in a few weeks would not be surprising.
There is a possibility that Mr. Bernanke will thread the needle and manage to gradually raise rates, grow the economy and keep the stock-market rally intact. Investors should be rooting for him. The Fed, when it does move, is going to be slow and steady. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told Bloomberg radio recently, "I don't want to go from wild turkey to cold turkey."
Rising rates are OK as long as corporate profits and the dollar are rising faster, especially if declining energy and food prices provide a boost. If I were Mr. Bernanke, I wouldn't wait. Tomorrow morning I'd start raising rates as a signal to all that the economy is on sound footing.
Announce loud and clear that you are going to raise the federal-funds rate 10 basis points (or 0.1%) every month, like clockwork, until it exceeds the inflation rate, and then declare victory. The stock market might even rally on the certainty and return to normalcy.
Rising rates are inevitable. But be advised that in selloffs, stocks fall into the valley of despair. The 1995-2000 bull run followed the bond-market massacre.
Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author most recently of "Eat People" (Portfolio, 2011).
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4)Teddy Turner: Jane Fonda Turned My Dad Into a Liberal
Ted Turner was transformed from a staunch conservative into a bleeding-heart liberal by none other than one-time wife Jane Fonda, according to the media mogul’s outspoken son.
But when the senior Turner moved to the left and then expressed an interest in running for president, Fonda deep-sixed the idea by saying she’d dump him, Teddy Turner told Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.’’
“I was raised in a different time at the Turner household … a very conservative household with capitalism and all of that kind of stuff,’’ Turner said.
But when the senior Turner moved to the left and then expressed an interest in running for president, Fonda deep-sixed the idea by saying she’d dump him, Teddy Turner told Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.’’
“I was raised in a different time at the Turner household … a very conservative household with capitalism and all of that kind of stuff,’’ Turner said.
But in 1991, when the senior Turner wed the Oscar-winning actress and exercise guru — once labeled “Hanoi Jane’’ for her controversial support of the North Vietnamese — things changed dramatically.
“He started becoming more and more environmentalist and then Jane helped move things over as well,’’ said Turner. “Then when you start hanging around and everybody you’re hanging around with is liberal, then you tend to move more liberal.’’
Still, Fonda had to stomach certain customs that were tough on her liberal hide, according to Turner, who is now running as a conservative for Congress in South Carolina.
That included standing next to Turner at Atlanta Braves baseball games and half-heartedly mimicking the “tomahawk chop,’’ which some have criticized as racist towards Native Americans.
But Fonda deftly tricked people into thinking she was launching into chop, when she actually wasn’t, Turner revealed.
“If you see, Jane actually moved to the sideways chop,’’ Turner said. “She tried to avoid kind of the controversy by not doing the full chop. No, I’m serious.’’
Turner explained the Braves ripped off the move from the Florida Seminoles.
“And, of course, the Florida Seminoles are backed by the Florida Seminole Nation. So if it was politically incorrect, it was slightly,’’ he said.
Fonda, Turner’s third wife, also wasn’t thrilled when her husband became interested in a run for the White House, according to Turner.
“Ted had actually thought about running for president at one time and then Jane told him she’d leave him if he did – and, ultimately left anyway,’’ he said.
Turner, who has taken opportunity to bash his dad’s liberal leanings as he campaigns, told Malzberg:
“I’m not a liberal … People say how did you separate from your dad? I didn’t separate from my dad. My dad separated from me.’’
A high school economics teacher, Turner, 49, said he decided to throw his hat in the ring as a result of what he was teaching his students.
“Teaching economics, especially in the last couple of years, has been a great time to teach it because kids are interested in it because they hear about it all of the time and what a mess things are,’’ he said.
“The more that I had to teach, the more that I didn’t like and the more I didn’t like not only coming from Washington, but coming from the lips of politicians. They tell you what you want to hear and that’s about it.
“He started becoming more and more environmentalist and then Jane helped move things over as well,’’ said Turner. “Then when you start hanging around and everybody you’re hanging around with is liberal, then you tend to move more liberal.’’
Still, Fonda had to stomach certain customs that were tough on her liberal hide, according to Turner, who is now running as a conservative for Congress in South Carolina.
That included standing next to Turner at Atlanta Braves baseball games and half-heartedly mimicking the “tomahawk chop,’’ which some have criticized as racist towards Native Americans.
But Fonda deftly tricked people into thinking she was launching into chop, when she actually wasn’t, Turner revealed.
“If you see, Jane actually moved to the sideways chop,’’ Turner said. “She tried to avoid kind of the controversy by not doing the full chop. No, I’m serious.’’
Turner explained the Braves ripped off the move from the Florida Seminoles.
“And, of course, the Florida Seminoles are backed by the Florida Seminole Nation. So if it was politically incorrect, it was slightly,’’ he said.
Fonda, Turner’s third wife, also wasn’t thrilled when her husband became interested in a run for the White House, according to Turner.
“Ted had actually thought about running for president at one time and then Jane told him she’d leave him if he did – and, ultimately left anyway,’’ he said.
Turner, who has taken opportunity to bash his dad’s liberal leanings as he campaigns, told Malzberg:
“I’m not a liberal … People say how did you separate from your dad? I didn’t separate from my dad. My dad separated from me.’’
A high school economics teacher, Turner, 49, said he decided to throw his hat in the ring as a result of what he was teaching his students.
“Teaching economics, especially in the last couple of years, has been a great time to teach it because kids are interested in it because they hear about it all of the time and what a mess things are,’’ he said.
“The more that I had to teach, the more that I didn’t like and the more I didn’t like not only coming from Washington, but coming from the lips of politicians. They tell you what you want to hear and that’s about it.
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