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Hanson's push back theory based on his view the world may becoming fed up!. (See 2 below.)
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Glick believes Israel must destroy Iran's nuclear capability if they have the ability. (See 3and 3a below.)
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Strange things can happen in politics but ,by all logic, Hillarious has a lock on the coronation and thus, concludes she does not need to expose herself to scrutiny.
Bernie Sander's is a side show and is making it difficult for others running because he is sucking all the press/media oxygen from them and is so far left and off the charts they have little positioning room left to challenge Hillarious.
Her coronation is a sad comment on the pathetic bench the Demwits have as is an equally sad commentary on the Demwit Party's contempt for solutions to our nation's problems. There modus operandi is simply - win at any cost! and damn the character, competence and achievementsof their candidate. But then they did that with Obama, Carter and a few others.
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Greece's problems are symptomatic of what happens when European Socialist Politicians do what they do best - spend whatever Germany has been willing to lend them while granting unrealistic entitlements.
That said, Greece is too small to sink the world but it is a warning along with the collapses taking place in Argentina, Puerto Rico. A world awash in debt will eventually be unable to expand and employ those seeking a way out of their increasing impoverishment.
It is not out of the realm of belief and prophecy that Americans, like their Greek cousins, may one day find themselves standing in lines seeking their own dollar deposits from ATM's if we continue down the road Obama wants us to drive!
"He who spends what isn't 'hisn' will go broke or to prison!"
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In a cooking test this Arab Israeli Woman expresses her love of Israel and tells it like it is. Sounds like a female Donald. Meanwhile she and her son are ostracized for saying what they have:
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See some of the art by some of the artists we love but cannot afford to own so we are willing to travel thousands of miles.. (See 4 below.)
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Sowell on the cliche usage of the word slavery that has caused people to stop thinking. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) FROM THE TRAIL
Dear Dick,
It is unbelievable that just one short year ago, Bonnie and I (and many of you) were walking in the Marietta Independence Day Parade (think 100 degrees!). Quite a lot has changed since then. Unfortunately, one thing hasn't changed. We still face a daunting crisis in our country that has actually gotten worse since last year.
In my first six months in the U.S. Senate, one thing is very clear: Washington is just as dysfunctional as we all thought. There is hope, however, that there really is a way forward if we would just focus on setting clear priorities with a renewed sense of urgency.
This crisis I've been talking about for the past two years is evolving and becoming more acute. I see this crisis in two dimensions now: our domestic fiscal catastrophe and the global security debacle. To fully understand the depths of these two crises, we also need to understand how the Obama Administration has failed the very people they claim to champion - working men and women in this country (that's you, me, our families and friends, everybody).
President Obama has created the fourth branch of government, the regulators, and is running our country without Congress through the use of executive orders and regulatory mandates. It is very clear that our Founders never intended an imperial presidency like this. Add to that our current activist judiciary and you get a better perspective of our current situation.
Our domestic fiscal crisis is real and threatens our very republic. I know that's dramatic, but I really believe it. We are well past several tipping points. With $18 trillion of debt, if interest rates were at their 30-year average of 5.5%, we would already be paying almost $1 trillion in interest each year (twice what we spend on our military). This is totally unmanageable. Add to that, the over $100 trillion in future unfunded liabilities and you can see that we are well past another tipping point. Finally, the Social Security trust fund goes to zero in 18 years (Medicare in 15 years and Social Security disability in 2 years!) We cannot allow Washington to ignore this fiscal catastrophe any longer!
As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, I receive detailed information about global events daily. That, combined with my two trips to the Middle East since taking office, reinforces my belief that the world is more dangerous right now than at any point in my lifetime. And yet, President Obama has chosen to lead from behind. This intransigence has led to a situation where our friends don't trust us, and our enemies don't fear us.
There are three areas of foreign policy that really concern me right now: the rise of traditional rivals like China and Russia, the growing rise of ISIS, and the threat of a nuclear Iran. President Obama himself said, "We don't have a strategy to deal with ISIS." He also said, "In year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero." (You can't make this stuff up!)
Knowing now firsthand how Washington operates, and understanding these two areas of major crisis, I am actually encouraged that there really is a way forward. We have to cut our spending, rein in these out-of-control regulators, change the way we fund our government, and unleash this God-given energy blessing. Yes, we can break the gridlock and grow our economy...not just talk about it.
One percentage point of incremental GDP growth would yield $350 billion in federal revenue each year. Merely eliminating our archaic repatriation tax on foreign U.S. profits would yield over $450 billion of federal revenue by growing the economy by more than 1.5% incrementally. That's why I am working to introduce a bill to eliminate this tax. We've been working on this for some time and I really believe that we could see more than $2 trillion come roaring back into our economy with this simple change. A few weeks ago, I also sponsored a bill that would bring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) back under the control of Congress. The CFPB is a serious privacy concern as well as a huge hindrance to small town banking.
Our global security crisis requires leadership that the Obama Administration has not provided. Clearly, we cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state and we have to combat their support of terrorism. The way to do that is to double down on our sanctions that got them to the table in the first place. We have to develop a comprehensive strategy so our allies and our own military have a clear mission regarding how to stop ISIS. We have to engage Europe and NATO to stand up to Putin and we have to continue to engage China economically and get our own fiscal house in order.
We obviously need experienced leadership to accomplish all of this. That's why this upcoming presidential election is so important. We know Hillary will double down on these failed liberal policies that are doing so much damage to our country already.
I recently gave a speech at the annual Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington. You can watch the full speech here. Most of the Republican presidential candidates were there and it's obvious that any of these candidates would be better than Hillary Clinton.
As I write this on Independence Day, I'm reminded of the foundational principles that were so important to our founding mothers and fathers:
- Economic opportunity
- Fiscal responsibility
- Limited government
- Individual liberty
My prayer is that we get back to these simple principles that have guided us all these years...soon.
I am so humbled to be the junior senator from Georgia and am working very hard to make a difference up there. I am the OUTSIDER and plan to ALWAYS BE the OUTSIDER in Washington. Thank you for your prayers and for helping us in so many ways. Bonnie and I will never forget how we got here and where we came from (Miss Gervaise will make sure of that).
I want to leave you with two of the most encouraging observations I have so far. I recently attended the funeral of Clementa Pinckney in Charleston and am so impressed and encouraged by how all the people of Charleston and South Carolina have handled that terrible tragedy. In the face of such tragedy, we must focus on what unites us as a country, and not what divides us.
Also, since January, I've made two trips to the Middle East and spent this past Mondayat Ft. Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield. I can tell you that the best...the VERY BEST...of America is in uniform fighting for our freedom every single day. Please pray for them and thank them every chance you get.
We are so blessed to live in this miracle called America and we need to go to work to make sure all the advantages we have enjoyed will be there for our children and our children's children.
Thank you so much and God Bless!
David and Bonnie
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2 -
Is the World Becoming Fed Up?
Faster, please: A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Given European socialism, and given its therapeutic culture that assumes morality is relative and situational, it is quite stunning — especially to the Greeks — that suddenly debts are to mean not endless negotiations, haggling, blame-gaming, and contextualization, but are reduced to something akin to Calvin Coolidge’s snarky alleged quote, “They hired the money, didn’t they?”
Aside from the threats of Vladimir Putin and the wobbling of the European Union, Europe is being overrun with illegal immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Once an impoverished foreign national arrives at any European shore, the European Union, either out of utopian piety or colonial guilt, feels obligated to accept him, without questioning much his legal status or the reasons for his arrival — much less why it should not extend such magnanimity to tens of millions of others who may well follow.
But the cash-strapped leftwing European public, outside its privileged elite, is slowly tiring of illegal immigration as well. Apparently it has concluded that tens of millions of illegal migrants neither assimilate quickly nor are much thankful to their hosts for their sanctuary status — and that hundreds of millions more would come if they could to enjoy the European welfare state. An aging and shrinking European socialism accepts that its own redistributionist entitlements are not sustainable. But it also assumes that those arriving from the former Third World have neither the interest nor the skills to join the labor force to subsidize their hosts’ own generous retirement packages.
At home the progressive Left is on the scent of another scalp, this time Donald Trump’s for his uncouth and blunderbuss stereotyping of illegal immigrants from Mexico, who, he implies, are for the most part not Mexico’s choice citizenry and who have a tendency to commit various crimes upon arrival.
The best way to refute the shoot-from-the-hip Trump’s stereotyping of an entire illegal immigration population as inordinately committing crimes and relying on state subsidies should be easy: his critics should not quote creased-browed professors and outraged ethnic activists, but first cite federal and state statistics of crimes committed by illegal aliens as well as the legal status of those on federal and state assistance, and then calculate to what degree these percentages are not — or in fact are — in line with the native American population.
Of course, Trump’s opponents rarely do that, partly because governments, both state and federal — which love to categorize Americans by race, class, and gender — strangely claim that they do not have accurate and up-to-date statistics on illegal aliens. When the liberal PolitiFact stitches together what facts it can find to properly refute Fox pundit Gavin McInnes’s erroneous claim that 50 percent of Texas murders were committed by illegal aliens, does it then go on to correct the record with a more accurate percentage?
No. PolitiFact trumpets that 50% of Texas murders are not committed by illegal aliens. End of story? But it does not then tell us that its own data of refutation nevertheless might suggest that 17% of Texas murders may well be committed by illegal aliens — an astounding figure in its own right.
Open-borders advocates typecast every bit as much as does Trump, likewise adducing anecdote in lieu of hard data. If one listens to the exaggerations of Trump, he implies that the majority of arrivals from Mexico are criminally minded. But if one listens to La Raza Inc. or Rep. Gutierrez, illegal aliens seem to be all dreamers. The truth is that impoverished and most indigenous peoples from central Mexico and Central America are neither saints nor sinners, but as a rule arrive without legality, a high school diploma, money, or English, and by needs are quite willing to ignore immigration law both when arriving — and steadily thereafter. (The vast majority — over 80% — from last year’s border surge skipped their required subsequent immigration hearings.)
Presidential candidate Trump is supposedly enjoying a bump in the polls. How could that be, given his plutocratic hubris, his flamboyance and his often sloppy rhetoric? Again the answer is predictable. He is blunt — and uncouth; while the Left is sly and uncouth. The public sometimes prefers their exaggerations as bold and not packaged in nasal whines. We are supposed to shudder at the reaction when writer Ann Coulter, promoting a supposedly nativist book about immigration, is rushed by illegal immigration activists at a book signing. Then she confirms our stereotypes by declaring that Latin Americans typically express criticism in such a riotous fashion. The media forgets that she is matched and trumped by the activists themselves. They disrupted a peaceful book signing; they tore up books that they disagreed with (an act which has a good 20th-century fascist pedigree); some brought out Mexican flags to show solidarity with the country that they most certainly do not wish to return to. And there was a shout or two, in racist fashion, that Coulter should return to Europe — as if a guest here illegally from a foreign country has a greater claim on residence than does a U.S. citizen.
As in the case of Paula Deen, Duck Dynasty, and the addled Donald Sterling, the nation unleashed its thought police to destroy Trump in the fashion that has worked so well with other intemperate or biased speakers (at least those who are not of the liberal bent of politically incorrect gaffers like a Sen. Harry Reid, Vice President Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, David Letterman — or Barack Obama, who believes “typical” white people (all 220 million?) stereotype blacks while there are apparently “gangbangers” crossing illegally into the U.S. on his watch). But so far, the politically selective yanked sponsorships and corporate ostracism seem to have little effect on the self-promoting and boisterous multibillionaire Trump. Why so? Perhaps the cause is again public exhaustion with hypocrisy. NBC, after all, still has on the air an inveterate prevaricator like Brian Williams and a homophobe, racist, and anti-Semite like Al Sharpton — after publication of their respective make-believe stories and various hate speech.
Trump seems to sense that if he is to play the role of an IED, at least there are lots of collateral liberal hypocrisies that can blow up along with his own biases. Are people then fed up with the thought police, who can go from a reasonable request not to use state subsidies and sanctions to fly the Confederate battle flag to the hysterical Trostykization of everything Confederate in popular culture and entertainment? How did we go from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lecturing us recently on why gay marriage was neither necessary nor appropriate to similar skepticism earning others a career-ending rebuke? Why did not the president power up the White House in 2009 or 2011 with the gay rainbow light show?
If Trump is completely unhinged, then it would be impossible last week for illegal alien Francisco Sanchez to randomly shoot apart the aorta of passerby Kathryn Steinle — out for a pleasant stroll with her father on a pier walkway in sanctuary city San Francisco. Trump, of course, in the fashion that Barack Obama routinely cites Trayvon Martin and other tragedies, used the murder as proof that his generalizations are based on some fact.
And perhaps in some cases they are. Sanchez had already been deported to Mexico five times and arrested, convicted and incarcerated — and paroled — for seven prior felonies. He was out largely because he was released from custody by a San Francisco judge in accordance with the city’s “sanctuary” policy of not notifying immigration authorities when an illegal alien, ex-felon or not, is freed from jail.
None of that laxity is new to San Francisco. Recall the 2008 murder of San Francisco resident Tony Bologna and his two sons by illegal alien and paroled felon Edwin Ramos. Nor is it novel in California in general: recall last October the two Sacramento-area law enforcement officers who were murdered by twice-deported illegal alien Luis Enrique Monroy-Bracamontes.
Quite tiring it has become to be lectured about inordinate wealth and unfairness from the money-grubbing Hillary Clinton, who apparently thinks that an electrician from Sacramento or an accountant in Lansing is proof positive of structural inequity in a way her hedge-fund-profiting daughter and son-in-law, or her own $300,000, price-gauging 30-minute lectures at public universities are not. Likewise, the public of all races and classes is tired of quite wealthy liberals and elite people of color pontificating on television on the moral lapses of the supposedly racist middle classes — assured that these one-percenters are immune from the ramifications of their own ideologies. (Where do the Obama girls go to school? How did the Holder children fly on a government Gulfstream to the Belmont Stakes? How did Chelsea Clinton become a multimillionaire? Where do network hosts live and how much do they make? When did Al Sharpton settle his back taxes with the IRS?).
Millions of Americans do not feel necessarily that holy matrimony exclusively between a man and woman is bias. Nor do they think listening to the late historian Shelby Foote or watching Lee, Longstreet, and their Confederate flags on Ken Burns’ Civil War constitutes a moral felony. They know also that liberal outrage is selective: Star Trek reruns won’t be pulled because gay George Takei (“Mr. Sulu”) is an abject racist and on record as such. We won’t ask octogenarian William Shatner (“Captain Kirk”) to disown him. Spike Lee is a praised filmmaker, whom we forgive for peddling on film lies about the death of Malcolm X and who sicced the mob on the home of the wrong George Zimmerman in his quest for vigilante justice.
Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of a disinterested media to such a degree that its biased audits of the next future Republican administration will be seen as laughable.
Europe and the United States are seeing glimpses of the ultimate leftist trajectory — a mixture of Greece and Detroit, de facto non-enforcement of the law, the Iranian nuke deal, a new McCarthyism, and race, class, and gender hatred — and are becoming afraid and perhaps appalled. A growing number of people sense that 21stcentury leftist elites are not pragmatic working people, but a privileged sect that callously experiments with other people’s lives on the understanding that they are insulated and immune from the inevitable disasters that follow from their own ideas.
A great push back is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.
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3)The Iranian-American Nuclear Project
Under President Barack Obama, the US has implemented policies toward Iran that are catastrophic for Israel specifically, for US Middle East allies more generally and for US national security itself.
Consider, first, the known details of the soon-to-be- concluded nuclear deal.
In a recent article published by The New York Times, Prof. Alan Kuperman explained that Obama’s central justification for the agreement – that it will lengthen Iran’s breakout time to the bomb from the current two months to 12 months – is a lie.
Based on nothing more than the number of centrifuges Iran will be allowed to possess and the amount of enriched uranium necessary to make a nuclear bomb, Kuperman demonstrated that far from prolonging Iran’s nuclear breakout time by 10 months, the deal will only prolong its breakout time by one month. In other words, the deal is worthless.
Actually it’s worse than worthless.
Wednesday, the Associated Press reported on the details of one of the agreement’s five secret annexes.
Titled “Civil Nuclear Cooperation,” the annex demonstrates that, far from merely failing to block Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, the deal will facilitate Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.
The leaked secret annex has two central components.
The first involves the underground uranium- enrichment facility at Fordow. Built inside a mountain, the Fordow complex is considered resistant to air strikes.
According to the AP report, the Iranians have agreed to re-purpose the installation from uranium enrichment to isotope production. In turn, the six powers have agreed to provide the Iranians with next-generation centrifuges to operate it. Yet, as the AP report makes clear, “isotope production uses the same technology as enrichment and can be quickly re-engineered to enriching uranium.”
In other words, the six powers will teach Iran how to operate advanced centrifuges capable of quickly enriching uranium in an installation that is protected from aerial bombardment.
The second section of the annex relates to the heavy-water reactor at Arak. The reactor, whose construction is near completion, will be capable of producing plutonium-based atomic bombs.
According to the AP report, the six powers have agreed to provide Iran with a light-water reactor that is less capable of producing bomb-grade plutonium.
Yet, as Omri Ceren from the Israel Project explains, a sufficient number of light-water reactors are capable of producing bomb-grade plutonium. Moreover, since the reactors are powered by uranium, the very existence of the light-water reactors provides Iran with justification for expanding its uranium-enrichment operations.
Then there are the US’s stated redlines in negotiations.
These have collapsed in significant ways over the past few weeks.
Because the US agreed that Iran can continue to enrich uranium, perhaps the most critical means of preventing Iran from acquiring military nuclear capabilities involve requiring Iran to expose all of its previous nuclear work that is still unknown, and requiring Iran to agree to unfettered inspections of is nuclear work and access to its personnel involved in its nuclear work on the part of UN nuclear inspectors.
Clearly, without meeting both requirements, Iran will be able to breach its commitments easily and the agreement will be worthless.
Due to the general understanding of these requirements, the administration’s public position has been that it will require Iran to both expose its previous nuclear work with possible military dimensions and permit the US unfettered access to all its nuclear installations.
For its part, Iran refuses to accept either demand.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reiterated this refusal on Tuesday.
Rather than present Iran with an ultimatum that it either abide by these basic requirements or receive no nuclear deal, the administration abandoned its position.
Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that there is no reason for Iran to expose its previous nuclear work because, “We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in. What we’re concerned about is going forward.”
This statement is a lie. As Yukiya Amano, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog IAEA, reiterated just weeks ago, “We don’t know whether they have undeclared activities or something else. We don’t know what they did in the past. So, we know a part of their activities, but we cannot [say] we know all their activities. And that is why we cannot say that all the activities in Iran [are for] peaceful purposes.”
Another key position that the Obama administration has staked out on behalf of the nuclear deal is that the sanctions that would be canceled under the deal are limited to those that were instituted in retaliation for Iran’s illicit nuclear program. The other sanctions, levied due to Iran’s illicit work on ballistic missiles, its support for terrorism and its human rights abuses, would remain intact.
But, on June 10, AP reported that the administration intends to cancel both the nuclear-related sanctions and those imposed due to Iran’s illicit ballistic- missile development. As a consequence, tens of billions of dollars will become available for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Then, there are Iran’s repeated breaches of sanctions restrictions. Under the Iran-North Korea Sanctions Act of 2006, the State Department is supposed to submit a report of sanctions violations to Congress every six months. This week Al-Monitor reported that the General Accounting Office issued a report blasting the State Department for failing to uphold its legal commitment. The last report submitted was in 2014 and its reporting covered the period up to 2011. The previous report had been submitted nearly two years earlier.
Among the reasons for the delays, according to the report, “Officials told the GAO that negotiations and relations with counties can delay the process.”
In other words, the State Department’s failure to uphold the law owes to the administration’s desire to shield Iran from further sanctions.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence failed to list either Hezbollah or Iran as threats to the US in this year’s Worldwide Threat Assessment.
And the State Department has yet to submit its annual Human Rights Report. This failure is allegedly due to the administration’s reluctance to report on Iran’s miserable human rights record.
Not only does the Obama administration refuse to view Iran and its terrorist arms as threats to the US, this week Bloomberg reported that US forces in Iraq are arming, training and providing close air support for Iranian controlled Shi’ite militia and terrorist groups led by the commander of Hezbollah forces in Iraq Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
So, too, US forces deployed to the Taqqadum base in Anbar share the base with Shi’ite terrorist groups.
Several of the terror operatives are reportedly spying on US forces at the base. Terrorist commanders have participated in US operational briefings ostensibly provided to official Iraqi security forces.
As one senior administration official told Bloomberg, “Even if these guys don’t attack us... Iran is ushering in a new Hezbollah era in Iraq, and we will have aided and abetted it.”
Beyond rendering US forces in Iraq hostages of Iranian-controlled terrorists now sharing a base with them, US support for Iranian controlled militia, as well as its policy of only transferring military assistance to forces fighting Islamic State through the Iranian-controlled Iraqi government and security forces, has facilitated Islamic State’s territorial expansion.
As Jacob Siegel and Michael Pregent explained last month in the Daily Beast, a key reason for Islamic State’s success in Ramadi and Mosul is the Baghdad government’s refusal to arm Sunni militias. As they explained, the security forces, guided by Iran, will only fight in areas important to the Shi’ites. So they refused to defend Mosul or Ramadi.
Siegel and Pregent argued that if Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi were to arm Sunnis to fight Islamic State in Anbar province, he would likely lose the support of Iran and the militias, and so be ousted from power. Consequently, Sunnis who oppose Islamic State are no obstacle to the march of the jihadists.
By supporting the Iranian controlled government, and refusing to directly arm Sunni or Kurdish forces, the US is supporting Iran and its terrorist groups on the one hand and abetting Islamic State expansion on the other.
The nature and scope of the Obama administration’s collusion with Iran require us to draw a number of conclusions.
First, from an American perspective, under the Obama administration, the US has destroyed its reputation as a responsible and trustworthy ally. It has endangered its allies, its armed forces and its own national security.
The US alliance system in the Middle East has collapsed.
In the short term, all that Congress can do to check Obama is reject his nuclear deal with Iran with a twothirds majority. Although the possibility that a sufficient number of Democratic senators will oppose the deal to override a presidential veto is remote, it is critical that every resource be used to convince them to do so.
In the medium term, in order to secure US national security, the next president will have to cancel US acceptance of the nuclear deal with Iran. To this end, US Jewish groups and other organizations must demand that all presidential candidates – including Hillary Clinton – commit themselves to canceling the agreement in the event they are elected.
If the US fails to reverse Obama’s policies toward Iran in the next two years, it is hard to see how it will be able to rebuild its strategic posture in the future.
The pace of change in the region and the world is too rapid today to rely on past achievements as a basis for future power.
As for Israel, it is now clear that there is no “crisis” in Israel-US relations. The Obama administration is betraying Israel. The centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy is his desire to transform Iran’s illicit nuclear program, which endangers Israel’s existence, into a legal Iranian-American nuclear program that endangers Israel’s existence.
Consequently, the last thing Israel should worry about is upsetting Obama. To convince fence-sitting Democratic senators to vote against Obama’s Iran deal, Israel should expose all the ruinous details of the nuclear agreement. Israel should let the American people know how the deal endangers not just Israel, but their soldiers, and indeed, the US homeland itself.
By doing so, Israel stands a chance of separating the issue of Democratic support for Obama from Democratic opposition to the nuclear deal. Obama wants this deal to be about himself. Israel needs to explain how it is about America.
At the end of the day, what we now know about US collaboration with Iran brings home – yet again – the sad fact that the only chance Israel has ever had of preventing Iran from getting the bomb is to destroy the mullahs’ nuclear installations itself. If Israel can still conduct such an operation, it makes sense for it to be carried out before Iran’s nuclear program officially becomes the Iranian-American nuclear project.
3a)Charles Krauthammer: The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history
3a)Charles Krauthammer: The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
WASHINGTON — The devil is not in the details. It’s in the entire conception of the Iran deal, animated by President Obama’s fantastical belief that he, uniquely, could achieve detente with a fanatical Islamist regime whose foundational purpose is to cleanse the Middle East of the poisonous corruption of American power and influence.
In pursuit of his desire to make the Islamic Republic into an accepted, normalized “successful regional power,” Obama decided to take over the nuclear negotiations. At the time, Tehran was reeling — the rial plunging, inflation skyrocketing, the economy contracting — under a regime of international sanctions painstakingly constructed over a decade.
Then, instead of welcoming Congress’ attempt to tighten sanctions to increase the pressure on the mullahs, Obama began the negotiations by loosening sanctions, injecting billions into the Iranian economy (which began growing again in 2014) and conceding in advance an Iranian right to enrich uranium.
It’s been downhill ever since. Desperate for a legacy deal, Obama has played the supplicant, abandoning every red line his administration had declared essential to any acceptable deal.
Inspections
They were to be anywhere, anytime, unimpeded. Now? Total cave.
To give a flavor of the degree of our capitulation, the administration played Iran’s lawyer on this one, explaining that, after all, “the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate.” Apart from the absurdity of morally equating America with the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, if we were going to parrot the Iranian position, why wait 19 months to do so — after repeatedly insisting on free access as essential to any inspection regime?
Coming clean on past nuclear activity
After continually demanding access to their scientists, plans and weaponization facilities, Secretary of State John Kerry two weeks ago airily dismissed the need, saying he is focused on the future, “not fixated” on the past. And that we have “absolute knowledge” of the Iranian program anyway — a whopper that his staffers had to spend days walking back.
Not to worry, we are told. The accounting will be done after the final deal is signed. Which is ridiculous. If the Iranians haven’t budged on disclosing previous work under the current sanctions regime, by what logic will they comply after sanctions are lifted?
Sanctions relief
These were to be gradual and staged as the International Atomic Energy Agency certified Iranian compliance over time. Now we’re going to be releasing up to $150 billion as an upfront signing bonus.
Yet three months ago, Obama expressed nonchalance about immediate sanctions relief. It’s not the issue, he said. The real issue is “snap-back” sanctions to bereimposed if Iran is found in violation.
Good grief. Iran won’t be found in violation. The inspection regime is laughable and the bureaucratic procedures endless. Moreover, does anyone imagine that Russia and China will reimpose sanctions? Or that the myriad European businesses preparing to join the Iranian gold rush the day the deal is signed will simply turn around and go home?
Non-nuclear-related sanctions
The administration insisted that the nuclear talks would not affect separate sanctions imposed because of Iranian aggression and terrorism. That was then. The administration is now leaking that everything will be lifted.
Taken together, the catalog of capitulations is breathtaking: spot inspections, disclosure of previous nuclear activity, gradual sanctions relief, retention of non-nuclear sanctions.
What’s left? A surrender document of the kind offered by defeated nations suing for peace. Consider: The strongest military and economic power on earth, backed by the five other major powers, armed with what had been a crushing sanctions regime, is about to sign the worst international agreement in American diplomatic history.
How did it come to this? With every concession, Obama and Kerry made clear they were desperate for a deal.
And they will get it. Obama will get his “legacy.” Kerry will get his Nobel. And Iran will get the bomb.
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4)
As the gallery begins its thirtieth year, we decided exhibitions defining our commitments to both Western Art and American Modernism would be a fitting celebration. Over the last three decades the gallery has handled thousands of pieces by many of America’s most celebrated artists. Western Perspectives includes works by many of those artists and encompasses over a century of Western Art. From Thomas Moran through the Taos Society of Artists, to recently deceased greats such as Olaf Wieghorst and Tom Lovell, this exhibition features work by several of our favorite western artists. The exhibition will be on display through August 5th at our location at 120 East Marcy Street. Modern Perspectives, our American modernist exhibition, will open July 17th at our gallery on Palace Avenue. For further information, please contact Laura Widmar at The Owings Gallery (505)-982-6244 orlwidmar@owingsgallery.com. Hardcover exhibition catalogs for both exhibitions will be available from the galleries for $10.00. The Owings Gallery was founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Nathaniel Owings as a gallery for 19th and 20th century American Art. Over the past thirty years the gallery has exhibited thousands of accomplished works by many of America's finest painters. The gallery holds approximately a dozen special exhibitions a year, which have explored a variety of historical and contemporary themes. As an active member of the thriving arts community in Santa Fe, The Owings Gallery also represents a small and very select group of contemporary artists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5)A Legacy of Cliches By Thomas Sowell Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliche of "a legacy of slavery." But anyone who is being serious, as distinguished from being political, would surely want to know if whatever he is talking about -- whether fatherless children, crime or whatever -- is in fact a legacy of slavery or of some of the many other things that have been done in the century and a half since slavery ended.
Another cliche that has come into vogue is that slavery is "America's original sin." The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking, even longer than that.
Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life.
No one wanted to be a slave. But their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others. It was just not an issue -- until the 18th century, and then it became an issue only in Western civilization.
Neither Africans, Asians, Polynesians nor the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere saw anything wrong with slavery, even after small segments of British and American societies began to condemn slavery as morally wrong in the 18th century.
What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time.
Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States -- at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed. But that is not how it ended elsewhere.
What happened in the rest of the world was that all of Western civilization eventually turned against slavery in the 19th century. This meant the end of slavery in European empires around the world, usually over the bitter opposition of non-Western peoples. But the West happened to be militarily dominant at the time.
Turning back to the "legacy of slavery" as an explanation of social problems in black American communities today, anyone who was serious about the truth -- as distinguished from talking points -- would want to check out the facts.
Were children raised with only one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s?
As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present.
What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.
To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s.
It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward "social justice," what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.
The principal victims of these retrogressions are the decent, law-abiding members of black communities across the country who are prey to hoodlums and criminals.
Back in the 19th century Frederick Douglass saw the dangers from well-meaning whites. He said: "Everybody has asked the question, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us." Amen.
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