Just Returned From Atlanta. Much Traffic.

Warren Buffet may wear rack suits but he knows how to play the system to his advantage while appearing as your next door benign uncle.

In the last decade or so Uncle Warren has become more and more engaged in politics and working the system behind the scene, has aligned himself with Goldman Sachs and has become a quiet power who gets what he wants behind the facade of giving his wealth away.

The media folks adore him because he provides them with good copy about the  righteous capitalist and  they excoriate the Koch Brothers.

Don't believe everything you read and the way the media and print folks characterize.
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Meanwhile, Iran has picked our  pocket and Obama has facilitated the theft.  (See 1 below.)
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Where oh where have the Democrats gone?  They have been replaced by zealot Demwits.

Who are these strange bedfellows.  Well one is a Socialist named Bernie, another is  a Native American who taught at Hahvahd and is now a radical Senator.

These are the emerging leaders of the new Demwit Party who are following in the footsteps of the worst president in American history.

If you vote for them you will not recognize America and if you vote for the remnants of a dying party you might as well close shop because Hillarious already proved she is capable of pillaging The Home of taxpayers. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)

What Détente With Iran Really Means

By Jonathan Tobin

For Secretary of State John Kerry, the capture of American sailors by Iran this week was an opportunity to create a “good story.” From his perspective, he’s right. The incident might have become an excuse for an escalation of tensions in the Persian Gulf and resulted in the Americans being held for an extended period. Instead, U.S. personnel were returned unharmed by their captors within a day. The incident could thus be counted as a triumph for Kerry’s diplomacy. Indeed, Kerry was quick to claim that the resolution showed that the new era in U.S.-Iran relations had already begun paying interest above and beyond his belief that the nuclear deal he had negotiated enhanced the security of the U.S. and its allies.

As far as the well being of the sailors in question, Kerry is probably right. If the U.S. was not interested in cultivating ties with Tehran and about to deliver it a huge cash reward in terms of lifted sanctions, the captured Americans might have been in for a very bad time indeed. But the full measure of what it means to be living in the post-Iran Deal-era can’t be measured solely in terms of defusing one potentially dangerous incident. Though this is not the message that Kerry wants us to hear, as it turns out, the pictures of surrendered sailors on their knees and a filmed apology by their inexperienced commander will probably have a far greater impact on those looking to the U.S. for leadership as Iran seeks regional hegemony than the prospect of more harmonious relations between Washington and Tehran.

If we are judge by the spin about what happened that is coming through in administration-friendly outlets like the New York Times, the Pentagon and the State Department are working hard to make the incident appear to be the fault of the Americans involved. That may well be true but the full court press to make it appear as if it was the “good story” Kerry wanted, tells us more about the administration’s mindset than anything else. Though we were constantly assured during the debate over the Iran deal that the pact’s purpose was to end the nuclear threat and not create a new era of Iran détente, the months since the negotiations ended have proved the opposite.

We didn’t need to see what happened this week to know that Kerry believes good relations with Iran are his priority. The administration proved with its refusal to demand real accountability for Iran over its past research on possible military dimensions of its nuclear program and its supine approach to Iran’s violation of United Nations prohibitions on its ballistic missile program, that there is no issue it considers important enough to cause it to rethink its desire for a honeymoon with the Islamist regime. The indecent rush to lift sanctions ahead of schedule in spite of Iran’s missile violations and proven role in terrorism was proof enough of Kerry’s desire to appease Iran. Yet long before that, years of refusal to take action in Syria to remove Iran’s ally Bashar Assad testifies to Washington’s mindset that sees détente with Tehran as the most important thing that it can achieve in the Middle East.

But now that the administration has achieved its objective and is about to implement the deal, it’s fair to ask what this will mean for the United States.

Clearly, as Kerry is at pains to point out, so long as the U.S. has something it can offer Iran, the ayatollahs won’t be looking to do anything that will be so outrageous that even President Obama would be forced to respond. Thus, it’s obvious that minor incidents like a couple of American boats going off course in the Persian Gulf won’t be turned into new hostage incidents. That’s a minor achievement for U.S. diplomacy, but it must be remembered that Iran is already holding four American hostages that have been largely forgotten by Obama and Kerry. Kidnapping American sailors would have been a strategic error that would have cost the Iranians dearly, and Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei isn’t a fool.

So long as the U.S. is acquiescing to a continuing Iranian nuclear program that will likely yield them the bomb they want after the deal expires in a decade there is no reason to antagonize the Americans in a way that would undermine Obama’s appeasement policy.

But by airing the humiliating photos and video, the Iranians were sending the region a message that put an exclamation point on other recent developments. Saudi Arabia already feels abandoned, leading it to extreme actions against Iranian allies that make the region more dangerous. It also reminded Iran’s Hezbollah auxiliaries and Hamas allies that they needn’t fear America anymore than Tehran does.

An Iran that is strong enough and secure enough in its moral supremacy over the Americans doesn’t need to take any more American hostages. But it can throw its weight around in Iraq and Syria in such a way as to make its drive for regional hegemony even more credible. What the Saudis and other Arab governments, as well as Israel, are seeing is an America that is solely interested in good relations with Iran. The Americans are perceived as merely grateful that Iran isn’t holding onto stray naval vessels while letting Iran do what it wants throughout the region.

What the naval incident proves is that Obama has set a very low standard for Iranian good behavior. As much as Americans should be glad about the sailors going free, they need to understand that on other issues of substance that speak to Iran’s ability to impose an axis of its allies across the region, the U.S. has gotten nothing for all of the gifts it is bestowing on the Islamist regime in the nuclear deal. The post-deal environment is one in which Iran has gotten stronger. A strong Iran doesn’t need to hold sailors. It’s already picked America’s pocket.

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2)The Democratic Crack-Up

Barack Obama’s political legacy may be the dismantling of the party’s center.

By 

KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

The nation tuned in to Round Six of the Republican debate mashup Thursday night, and the media is busy micro-covering every last rift between the GOP candidates. In the process reporters are ignoring the far more interesting party crackup going on.

You might not know it, but the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine battle that potentially dwarfs that of conservatives. On one side is a real but weakened mainstream Democratic movement that has its roots in Clinton centrism. On the other is a powerful, ascendant wing of impatient and slightly unhinged progressive activists. This split has been building for years, but The Donald has been so entertaining that few have noticed.

Now it’s getting hard to ignore. Polls this week show Bernie Sanders tying or beatingHillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Put another way, a self-declared socialist, a man who makes many think of their crazy uncle Bob, is beating a woman who spent eight years planning this run, who is swimming in money, and who oversees the most powerful political machine in operation.

Opinion Journal Video

Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger on what’s driving the Vermont Senator’s popularity in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name. For all the Democratic establishment’s attempts to anoint Mrs. Clinton—to shield her from debates and ignore her liabilities—the rank and file aren’t content to have their nominee dictated.

Especially because many of those rank and file belong to a rising progressive movement that has no time or interest in the old Clinton mold. Barack Obama’s biggest legacy may prove his dismantling of the Democratic center. He ran as a uniter, but he governed as a divisive ideologue and as a liberal, feeding new fervor in the progressive wing.

These progressives proved more eager than even the Republicans to steadily pick off Democratic moderates—and helped the GOP to decimate their ranks. The Democratic congressional contingent is now at its smallest size since before FDR. But boy is it pure, and it retains an unwavering belief that its path to re-election is to double down on the Obama agenda.

The president insists that financial institutions were entirely to blame for the 2008 crisis, and that government’s role is to transfer more from those greedy capitalist owners to poor Americans. Out of this class warfare came the likes of Occupy Wall Street, Sen.Elizabeth Warren, and today a Sanders campaign that describes “wealth and income equality” as the great “moral issue” of our time.

Mrs. Warren, a progressive hero, went out of her way last week to praise the Sanders Wall Street “reform” plan. Even Joe Biden wanted in on the action, lauding Mr. Sanders and suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was still “relatively new” to the income-inequality debate. Hillary is stuck trying to explain why her campaign donations from bankers aren’t a disqualifier.

The president came to office claiming that climate change was one of the greatest threats to the world, and poured billions into subsidies and green slush funds. Out of this came a new breed of environmental activists with groups like 350.org, who chain themselves to buildings and call for the immediate end of all fossil fuel use, as well as a new breed of billionaire enthusiasts like Tom Steyer. This crew views even the Sierra Club as a sellout. Mrs. Clinton is left trying to explain her former support for the Keystone XL pipeline, and vowing she’ll never be so rational again.

Mr. Obama came to office on hopes that he’d heal lingering racial divides. Instead his Justice Department accused Republicans of using voter ID laws to “suppress” minorities, and stoked anger over policing tactics. We now have a Black Lives Matter campaign and campus protests that demand apologies and new black hiring quotas. Mr. Sanders includes a standard meditation on police brutality and racial inequality in all his stump speeches.

These movements and activists (who also embrace the gun debate, and the women’s-rights debate, and socialized health-care debate) are now the beating heart of the Democratic Party. And they are rallying around Mr. Sanders. MoveOn.org has endorsed Bernie. The liberal Nation magazine has endorsed him. Bill McKibben, the head of 350.org, has endorsed him. Jodie Evans, the co-founder of the antiwar group Codepink has endorsed him. Celebrity activists like Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo are feeling the Bern.

Mrs. Clinton keeps insisting that she’s not “nervous at all” about the nomination. She should be. True, Mrs. Clinton has a powerful organization and strengths, and she is lurching left to capture these new progressive voters. But the blunt reality is that the Democratic Party, of which the Clintons have long been the titular heads, isn’t really their party any more.

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