With "nights" like King Bill, who is in charge of the court's concubines, Princes John Podesta, Lanny Davis and Paul Begala and Court Jester, James Carville, Queen Hillarious has assembled a loyal cadre of characters who will protect her from the attacks of lowly commoners seeking truth.
Even Professor Victor Davis Hanson has seen through the Queen's efforts to obfuscate but The Democrats have invested heavily in Royalty and are prepared to stop at nothing to enthrone their anointed.
After all if Obama can be elected, and twice no less, anything is possible. Politics always trumps what is best, they say! If you do not believe this then think Sir Harry Reid and Madame High Horse, Nancy Pelosi!(See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
In the final analysis when a nation has lost its moral moorings "what difference does it make?"
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Meanwhile, our Nobel Peace Prize winning President dangles weapons to seal his Iran deal! See 2 below.)
It can be done but Obama will never do so because he wants Iran to become the power in The Middle East as he withdraws America and distances The Democrat Party from our ally, Israel. (See 2a and 2b below.)
===
Erick Erickson of Macon, accurately "ass"esses Obama! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Fall of the House of Clinton
Posted By Victor Davis Hanson
Hillary Clinton will probably survive her latest ethical disaster. James Carville — of “if you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find” fame [1] — is back again to pronounce the Clinton Foundation scandal as “diddly-squat.” [2] He may be right in the political sense. After all, we know the standard Clinton rescue plan from the past: her aging point-men like Carville, Lanny Davis, and Paul Begala flood the airways, yelling “prove it!” at their television hosts and declaring:
1. That the accusations are “old news.”
2. That the accusers are funded by right-wing conspiracists.
3. That everyone does what the Clintons did.
4. That the media pick on the Clintons.
5. That there is no hard evidence (because they have destroyed documents) that would ever lead to a criminal case. And:
6. That they are moving on, to work on behalf of the folks.
Such obfuscation worked well with Troopergate, Travelgate, Whitewater, the cattle futures scam, Monicagate, the pardons, and Bill’s serial and sometimes coercive sexual conquests. The scorched-earth protocol has already largely dispensed with the “what difference does it make” and “we came, we saw, he died” [3] Libya/Benghazi scandals. That the ex-president of the United States often flew on a private jet with registered sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, known for supplying underage women to his guests, is, as the Clintons say, “old news.” Hillary Clinton’s serial lies about her email accounts and the Clinton Foundation shakedowns will likewise fade — despite the national-security implications of both transgressions for the United States.
So by “Fall of the House of Clinton” I don’t suggest that a special prosecutor will be appointed to indict Hillary and Bill for crimes that would likely make the accusations that were once leveled against Sen. Robert Menendez, Gov. Bob McDonnell, Scooter Libby, Conrad Black or Dinesh D’Souza look like child’s play in comparison.
The Democrat Party’s investment in Hillary Clinton is too substantial for any such reckoning. Liberals have embraced the Cold-War cliché — “of course, he is a SOB, but he’s our SOB.” Translated to Hillary that means she is a tough political brawler, she’s on their side, and she’s all they got — and therefore anything such an asset does is more or less tolerable in an imperfect world. Democrats expect her to weather this mess. Each time she does so, the next and more egregious scandal becomes more “old news.” The family’s Nietzschean creed is that any scandal that does not kill off their careers makes a Clinton stronger. Despite the dozen or so ethical scandals that will inevitably arise over the next two years, Hillary Clinton will be nominated by the Democrats and has at least a 50/50 chance of being elected president. The Democratic elite will call her survival “fully vetted” and “time tested.”
But all that said, the House of Clinton has utterly collapsed in a moral sense. The very name Clinton is now synonymous with amorality and will be so for the rest of American history. It is not that the Clintons are immoral and thus break existing moral canons and laws; rather they operate completely outside of any moral universe. To them, there is no such thing as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical, only whether their aim is judged lucrative and the means to obtain it without serious liability. A form, a disclosure, a protocol for a Clinton is not a question of signing it as required or not signing it; rather, for them, such a requirement simply does not exist. Clintons do not erase emails; they destroy the server to ensure erased emails are erased for good.
Simple facts that would embarrass most are utterly irrelevant to the Clintons. How can Hillary trash hedge funds, when her son-in-law runs one [4] (and a dubious one at that)? She has just attacked the privileges of elite hedge funds without telling us that her daughter worked for one and is now reportedly worth $15 million. Once Hillary Clinton stepped down from the State Department, she immediately rented space in a speculative financial office — so much better to monitor their unethical tax policies?
Who has the money to pay Bill Clinton $500,000 for a 40-minute talk, and why would anyone do so? (Before we blast oligarchs, remember that UCLA, a public university, paid Hillary $300,000 [5] [$165 a second] for chit chat (did she touch on the unfairness of $1 trillion of student loans or the over-compensation of the one-percent?). Hillary came onto the national scene after using her husband’s cronies to steal $100,000 from the cattle futures market after a paltry $1,000 investment. I say steal unapologetically, given that statisticians report than any of us would have had a 31 trillion to 1 chance to replicate Hillary’s investment savvy. Not satisfied by rigging a system that cattlemen and farmers must assume is transparent and honest, Mrs. Clinton — of raise-taxes-for-the-public-
How about transparency and honesty? Bill Clinton lied under oath repeatedly during the Monica investigation, to the point of being disbarred and fined. Subpoenaed legal records of Hillary Clinton turned up (too late) mysteriously in the White House. In the latest email scandal, the mystery was not that Hillary set up a stealthy private communication system to facilitate the Clinton scheme of offering foreign zillionaires the opportunity to give money to the family foundation and huge cash speaking fees for Bill, in exchange for likely favorable U.S. government decisions affecting billions of dollars in international trade and commerce — and perhaps the very security of the United States. We expected even that from Hillary Clinton the moment that she assumed office — in the manner that her husband had once pardoned convicted FALN Puerto Rican terrorists [6] in hopes of winning bloc votes for her New York Senate campaign, in addition to snagging money from convicted felons. That Mrs. Clinton refused to sign disclosure forms and to follow government protocols about donations and correspondence, as she promised she would, was also nothing new. But what was novel was Hillary Clinton’s ability to hold a press conference and lie about every single aspect of her email crimes. Everything she said was untrue: from the nature of smart phones and email accounts, to the email habits of other cabinet officers, to the methods of securing a server, to the mix between public and private communications, to the method of adjudicating her behavior. All were untruths offered without a shred of remorse.
What is the House of Clinton? It is a large family syndicate predicated on the three facts. One, Bill is a amoral, well-connected ex-president and good old boy schmoozer who enjoys a lifestyle that only ethical misconduct can ensure. Two, a less charismatic Hillary plays good cop to his bad, and for thirty years has been seen by donors as the likely first female president. Three, as flexible liberals, they have no ideological reluctance to snag Wall Street and corporate pay-for-play cash — and they let that be known to the one-percent who in turn feel that the Clintons’ populist verbiage is simply good insurance. The result is that although Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea are not business people, they became multimillionaires precisely because they can offer access and at least the scent of favorable government treatment to billionaires.
All three have become utterly shameless people. Chelsea lectures us on how wealth has had no hold on her — after making $600,000 from NBC to appear a few times on air, and becoming a multimillionaire working for a hedge fund without any demonstrable financial talent. Hillary sermonizes about poor students while charging them a fortune for a half hour of banality. Bill talks about women’s rights as he has serially translated political power into sexual gratification from those younger, poorer, or less influential than himself.
Wall Street and corporate American know there is no deal considered beneath the Clintons. If they will, as reported, wheel and deal off the human tragedy of the Haitian disaster, then they will indeed do anything. If they are willing to defame and destroy women abused by Bill Clinton, they will not only do that, but proclaim themselves feminists. They have created a huge shakedown conglomerate in the Clinton Foundation in Machiavellian fashion: the philanthropy brilliantly masks the cynical tapping of such funds for personal aggrandizement. Quid pro quos go through the foundation to “help” the helpless while providing the family the moral veneer to moonlight and rake in huge fees from foundation donors, who do not give such largess for nothing. Hitting up corporate finaglers for $70 million in tag-along private jet travel would be burdensome; but creating a tax-free “philanthropy” to provide such corporate one-percent travel for the three Clintons (whether to lecture on global warming or the unfair tax policies of the one-percent) is brilliant in the Medieval sense.
The utter moral collapse of the House of Clinton is, of course, a national disgrace. But the shame is not because the Clintons are what they are — grifters in ties and pantsuits. Rather, the liberal community’s neglect of three decades of their amorality reminds us what progressivism has become: a psychological squaring in which abstract caring allows privileged people to enjoy their material bounty without guilt over where it came from or how it is used.
Hillary Clinton was out of the stump the last few days blasting CEOs, hedge funds, and right-wing political and religious figures [7] who might impinge on abortion on demand. In other words, she was contracting progressive penances and exemptions for her family’s ongoing greed and indulgence — and for all those who so willingly empower her.
1a)
“Younger women know a female will become president in their lifetime; many of them don’t think it has to be or even should be Hillary.”
“How can she possibly distance herself from the Obama administration she served for four years, but whose policies increasingly alienate independent voters she needs?”
RELATED: Will the Clinton-Cash Scandal Doom Hillary’s White House Bid?
That last comment goes to the heart of her problem with Democratic insiders. Publicly, they praise Hillary as a candidate of exceptional experience in government and one who is likely to harvest bushels of votes from people eager to elect the first female president. Privately, they fret about a recent Quinnipiac poll in which 54 percent of Americans say Clinton is not honest or trustworthy. Among independents, that number hits 61 percent. “Candidates distrusted by that many people can win the White House, but it leaves no margin for error or another big scandal,” one Democratic former officeholder admitted to me.
54 percent of Americans say Clinton is not honest or trustworthy.
That’s why so many Democrats hope Hillary Clinton will be challenged by a more formidable rival than the former governors or senators who are currently lining up to oppose her: Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and Jim Webb. Senator Elizabeth Warren, an economic populist to the left of Hillary, has steadfastly declined to run for president. But each new scandal or Hillary campaign stumble could fuel the pressure for her to enter the race. Most Democratic strategists believe that only a woman could seize the nomination from Mrs. Clinton, given Hillary’s name ID and campaign war chest. In 2008, Barack Obama would have had no hope against Hillary, despite his formidable campaign skills, if he hadn’t also had a history-making card to play as the first African-American man with a realistic chance of becoming president.
What Democrats really worry about is that no one will beat the Clinton Machine for the Democratic nomination — it will survive and go on to become an inviting target for Republicans in the general-election battle.
RELATED: Do Hillary’s Fair-Pay Talking Points Apply to Her Own Family? MORE HILLARY CLINTON WHY WON’T THE MEDIA HOLD HILLARY TO THE SAME STANDARD THEY DID BOB MCDONNELL? SNARKING HILLARY IS NOT THE WAY TO THE WHITE HOUSE HILLARY'S INFAMOUS WOMEN IN THE WORLD TALK ISN'T QUITE AS AWFUL AS YOU'VE HEARD (THOUGH IT'S STILL AWFUL)
Focus groups and polls show that voters are most interested in finding candidates they judge as authentic — leaders who don’t play the normal political games. For Hillary Clinton, that represents a challenge. Her campaign is emphasizing her desire to help “everyday” people, while at the same time the press is starting to reveal the Clinton Foundation as a lucrative slush fund for the Clintons and their friends. In some years, the foundation spends $500 million, but overhead, salaries, travel, and undisclosed “other” expenses eat up a huge chunk of that, leaving perhaps 15 percent for actual charitable work.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, whose book Clinton Cash is due for release on May 5, as well as Pulitzer Prize–winning Jo Becker and and Mike McIntire of the New York Times, have raised new questions. Their research points to a disturbing pattern of foreign contributions and enormous speaking fees for Bill Clinton that appear to be timed to coincide with preferential actions the State Department took while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state.
RELATED: With Hillary, Appearances Are Everything Hillary
Clinton has dismissed the reporting as “distractions and attacks.” But she did find time last week to suddenly call for a truce in what she sees as an increasingly hostile political climate. “I am tired of the mean-spiritedness in politics,” she told voters in Claremont, N.H. “Enough with the attacks and the anger, let’s find answers together and figure out what we’re going to do.
” Hillary Clinton could, of course, put all the concerns about her family foundation and its seedy dealings to rest if she were to release all the e-mails concerning the foundation that were in her private e-mail account — the one she used, in violation of explicit government rules, to conduct government business. But she has already announced that the e-mails she viewed as “private” have been deleted and her server scrubbed. She has yet to answer questions about whether e-mails that concerned the Clinton Foundation during her tenure at the State Department were “private,” in her estimation. Because they are now gone, we will probably never know.
RELATED: Hillary Is Way Out of Step With Her Own Party on War
Democrats privately believe that the Clintons can recover from the e-mail and foundation scandals because it’s unlikely reporters will ever find a “smoking gun” that explicitly links foreign donations with public actions. But Democrats also know that other scandals may soon be unearthed. And if they do, not only will Hillary Clinton prove unable to establish herself as an “authentic” candidate, she also will establish herself as a pro at conducting an “authentic” cover-up.
John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for National Review Online.
1b)
MICHAEL J. EDNEY
Obama is dangling compensation packages that could aid the GCC states and Israel in this endeavor — in return for the withdrawal of their opposition to the Iran deal.
Flying branch shopping for bunker-busting bombs
by JAMES DREW
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-air-force-has-lots-of-options-for-smashing-iran-s-nuclear-facilities-fa7812c0f28a?section=%5Bobject%20Object%5D
Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told CNN the United
States military has the capability to “shut down, set back and destroy” Iran’s
nuclear program.
The highly-publicized yet classified weapon Carter was referring to is the
Massive Ordnance Penetrator — a behemoth, 30,000-pound bunker bomb
introduced specifically to destroy Iran’s underground uranium enrichment
facilities.
In January, we told you the Pentagon was modifying and testing the bomb as
the diplomatic push for a nuclear settlement with the pariah state
intensified. But of course, that’s not all the U.S. military has been up to
in the background.
The Air Force, which leads the development of air-delivered bunker bombs, is
preparing to go shopping for a new “family” of weapons to kill fortified
targets — and it’s compiling that shopping list right now.
This list is likely to include a new rocket-rammed High Speed Strike Weapon
for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, plus a new class of inexpensive,
mid-weight penetrating bombs.
And as a last resort, the U.S. government is holding onto its only
earth-penetrating nuclear bomb, the B61–11, even as it reduces its nuclear
stockpile to comply with an arms reduction treaty with Russia.
The Air Force definitely wants to make more improvements to the Massive
Ordnance Penetrator, since a third and fourth “enhanced threat reduction”
modification program is included in its 2016 budget plans. The service is
also about to scale up production of a smart, void-sensing fuze that counts
bunker layers and detonates at the correct level.
An Air Combat Command review of the flying branch’s so-called hard-target
munitions inventory recently wrapped up, and that study is circulating among
senior leaders within the department and the Office of the Secretary of
Defense.
The classified study assessed what the Air Force currently has, and what it
might need in the future as nations like Iran and North Korea find new ways
to harden their military installations against attack from the West.
The Air Force won’t say much about the study officially, but senior service
officials have been dropping hints as Congress seeks assurances about the
military’s ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites should diplomacy fail.
The service’s chief scientist told House lawmakers in March that a research
program to develop a 2,000-pound hard-target killer for the F-35 and other
modern fighters and bombers is ready to transfer to an acquisition program.
The Air Force needs a smaller, more compact weapon to destroy hard and
deeply buried targets, Walker said at the hearing.
“The High Velocity Penetrating Weapon was a program that we put together to
do this,” he continued. “[It has] been very successful and now it’s
transitioned that technology into the follow-on program that Air Combat
Command is now looking at in their analysis of alternatives.”
Buy ‘The B-2 Goes to War.’
There has been surprisingly little discussion about the weapon program since
2011, when the Air Force paid military contractors Lockheed Martin and
Raytheon to design prototypes, which were due to undergo sled-testing last
year.
According to an Air Force presentation from 2011, the bomb would fit inside
the F-35’s internal weapons bay for stealth. To overcome the size and weight
constraints, a rocket motor would ram the hardened, high-explosive warhead
into the target.
The Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a gigantic bomb with plenty of punching
power because of its sheer size. But it only fits on the Air Force’s B-2 and
B-52 bombers, whereas the High Velocity Penetrating Weapon would be
compatible with more aircraft types — and overcome its relatively small size
with speed.
According to Maj. Gen. Scott Jansson, the Air Force’s top weapons-buyer, the
flying branch probably won’t ever produce MOP in large numbers.
“We’re looking at less-expensive weapons than MOP that we can build in
greater quantities, but MOP was considered in that analysis as well,”
Jansson said. “[It] might be part of a family of capabilities that can hold
certain targets at risk.”
One program Jansson is about to approve for production is Orbital ATK’s Hard
Target Void Sensing Fuze. The company completed development of the smart
fuze last month, and the Air Force and Navy plan to purchase 5,500 of them
over the next few years to replace the existing time-delayed fuzes on older
penetrating warheads.
“It’s a big deal,” Jansson said in a March interview. “It’s a significantly
improved fuze over anything that we have today. If we have the intelligence
that says we want to target the third floor down in an underground bunker,
we will program the fuze to ignite in that layer.”
If all conventional means fail to destroy a target, there’s the B61–11
nuclear option. The National Nuclear Security Administration is reducing its
five B61 nuclear bomb variants to one, the B61–12 — except for the
bunker-busting variant that debuted in the 1990s.
“I see an enduring role for the ability of the U.S. Air Force to be able to
take out deeply-buried, hardened targets,” Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, Air
Force assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence, said in an April 20
interview. “We will do that for the nation, and in order to do that we have
an array of assets and weapons to do that in a credible manner, and not just
nuclear weapons.
“We don’t have a set retirement date yet for the B61–11. It was actually
more recently introduced into the stockpile, but it will continue for a
while.”
1b)
Hillary’s Cynical Song of Self
The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat.
By Bret Stephens
Maybe. But what was striking about these critics is that none of them bothered to rebut the point that Mrs. Clinton is a habitual liar who treats truthfulness in politics the way a calorie-counting diner might treat hollandaise sauce on steak: to be kept strictly on the side or dribbled on in measured doses. Her lying has become as much a given in the liberal mind as Bill Clinton’s womanizing: He does his thing, she does hers.
Get over it.
All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?
This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.
Opinion Journal Video
Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on the nonprofit’s history of IRS missteps. Photo credit: Getty Images.
In other words, she’s singing a Song of Herself. She will say, do, and be pretty much anything to get elected. And the rest of us are supposed to fall in line because we prefer our politics to be transactional not principled, our politicians to be opportunists not idealists, and our national creed to be “do what you gotta do” not “upon this rock.” This is what might be called the Clinton Bargain: You can always count on their self-interest trumping other considerations, so you never have to fear that they can’t be bought.
The only question is who is doing the buying.
In recent days we’ve begun to learn some of their names: a Ukrainian billionaire with pro-Western politics and business interests in Iran; a Canadian mining magnate who oncetestified, in the New Yorker, that “all my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton,” because “he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”
More such names will drop, along with the coincidences of meetings taken, approvals granted, donations received and emails deleted. And the Clintons’ answer—beyond the usual lines about “right-wing attacks” and “tired old stories” and “it’s all for a good cause”—will once again be: Get over it.
Will we?
Cynicism is the great temptation of modern life. We become cynics because we desperately don’t want to be moralists, and because earnestness is boring, and because skepticism is a hard and elusive thing to master. American education, by and large, has become an education in cynicism: Our Founders were rank hypocrites. Our institutions are tools of elite coercion. Our economy perpetuates privilege. Our justice system is racist. Our foreign policy is rapacious. Cynicism gives us the comfort of knowing we won’t be fooled again because we never believed in anything in the first place. We may not be born disabused and disenchanted, but we get there very quickly.
This is the America that the Clintons seek to enlist in their latest presidential quest. I suspect many Democrats would jump at an opportunity not to participate in the exercise—it’s why they bolted for Barack Obama in 2008—and would welcome a credible primary challenger. (Run, Liz, Run!) But they will go along with it, mostly because liberals have demonized the Republican Party to the point that they have lost the capacity for self-disgust. Anything—anyone—to save America from a conservative judicial appointment.
As for the rest of the country, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy offers a test: How much can it swallow? John Podesta and the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team must be betting that, like a python devouring a goat, Americans will have ample time to digest Mrs. Clinton’s personal ethics. If Peter Schweizer is publishing his “Clinton Cash” book now, it can only mean it will be Stone Age news by the time November 2016 rolls around. Nobody today remembers the names of Susan McDougal,David Hale or Jim Guy Tucker.
That’s one theory, at any rate. Another theory is that, even as the details of the Clintons’ transactions fade from memory, the overall impression will not. Americans may not have liked being led by honest rubes (cf. Jimmy Carter) but they liked the lying crooks even less (cf. Richard Nixon).
There’s an opportunity here for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents, in both parties. The frame for this election is cynicism. Do we succumb to it or not? A candidate who believes in great things—and has a story and a plan to prove it—can beat her.
1c) A Double-Standard Windfall for the Clintons
Corporate gifts to foreign charities have been treated as illegal bribes—resulting in million-dollar penalties.
MICHAEL J. EDNEY
Consider these facts: The chairman of a Canadian company named Uranium One reportedly donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. At the same time the company was seeking U.S. government approval to sell a 51% controlling stake to Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear agency. Meanwhile, a Russian investment bank with close ties to the Kremlin paid former President Bill Clinton a half-million dollars to speak in Moscow.
Anything worth investigating here? Not according to the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, President Barack Obama, whose spokesman announced Friday that the allegations were little more than the discredited musings of “a conservative author,” unaccompanied by “any evidence” and apparently unworthy of further discussion.
But imagine if similar payments, under similar circumstances, were made by a U.S. company to a charity closely associated with, say, the Nigerian foreign minister. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission would be banging on that firm’s doors, asserting serious violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Opinion Journal Video
Business World Columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. on the latest Clinton Foundation scandal. Photo: Getty Images
That’s the law prohibiting U.S. companies from providing anything of value to a foreign official for the purpose of obtaining a favorable action. It is invoked frequently to scrutinize the overseas operations of American businesses. When federal law-enforcement agents even suspect that it has been violated, these companies are overrun with lawyers investigating every trace of alleged wrongdoing. The investigations often end the careers of the company officials allegedly responsible and culminate in fines and payments totaling many millions. One recent settlement was for $772 million. To avoid that fate, American companies spend huge sums on compliance reviews to prevent even the appearance of impropriety.
This antibribery provision is applied to overseas charities as well. The official guide on compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act states that charitable giving cannot be “used as a vehicle to conceal payments made to corruptly influence foreign officials.”
In separate settlements with the SEC, U.S. pharmaceutical companies Schering-Plough(since merged with Merck) and Eli Lilly paid substantial civil penalties for modest contributions—$76,000 and $39,000, respectively—to the Chudow Castle Foundation, a Polish charity that restores local castles. That foundation’s president was also a government official overseeing local hospital funding, including pharmaceutical purchases. The U.S. government concluded that there was no other purpose for the castle donations than to influence his official decisions. Schering-Plough paid a $500,000 penalty in 2004. Eli Lilly agreed to pay $29.4 million in 2012, though that settlement was for a wide range of practices not only in Poland but elsewhere as well. Neither company admitted guilt.
What counts as corruption abroad is apparently viewed as good citizenship here at home. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was an effort to export our domestic anti-bribery laws. Yet no one in the Obama administration, including in the Justice Department, is looking at the conduct surrounding the Clinton Foundation with the same skepticism and drawing the same adverse inferences that have become standard in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases. Instead, large donations to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities with matters pending before the government are regarded as simply the result of an admirable interest in the foundation’s works of mercy.
If only the government agencies enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act would accept such explanations from the U.S. companies we represent. We would be happy to see federal law enforcement assume honest intentions in American business dealings abroad or take into account the practical difficulties of supervising tens of thousands of employees in far-flung operations.
Even if the federal government chooses not to change its enforcement policies, it still should vigorously investigate the allegations about the Clinton Foundation. Washington cannot credibly demand the most exacting ethical standards of American businesses in their dealings with other countries’ officials while failing to require anything close to that standard at home.
Mr. Coffin and Mr. Edney, both former senior lawyers with the George W. Bush administration, are partners in the international law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP.
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2) Obama offers weapons-for-consent deal to Saudis and Israelis
By Naomi Friedman, contributor
President Obama has made Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states an offer: Get behind me on the Iran deal and I'll give you an umbrella — a security umbrella in the form of advanced weapons and equipment. The offer, Israel's Channel One reported on Friday, is part of an attempt to get the Iran deal signed and sealed before the 2016 campaign season swings into high gear.
Both the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and Israel are openly opposed to the Iran deal, which backtracks from the administration's original commitment to dismantle Iran's nuclear infrastructure. These pro-Western allies have lost confidence in U.S. assurances that "we have your back" and are scrambling to figure out how to combat the Iranian threat on their own.
Will either fish bite?
On April 20, the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed met with Obama to discuss the agenda of the upcoming May 14 meeting between the U.S. and the GCC states at Camp David. Sheikh Mohammed asked the president to formalize the U.S.-GCC security cooperation through a treaty that defends the GCC against aggression, but the White House refused. Instead, Obama offered to provide advanced weapons systems, training and joint military exercises. Following the meeting, the GCC continued to express concerns about the Iran deal, and — in an unprecedented step — persuaded the Arab League to begin assembling a pan-Arab military force.
Now, while President Obama will warmly welcome the GCC states to Washington to discuss the deals, the president is going to try to keep Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as far away from the White House — and Congress — as possible. The prime minister is unlikely to arrive before June 30, the deadline for the Iran deal.
The Israelis are actually happy to wait, says Channel One's army specialist Amir Bar Shalom. Defense experts want to scrutinize the GCC deal and the final Iran agreement — in the unfortunate event that it comes to fruition — before compiling their own wish list.
Last week, Vice President Biden pledged a shipment of the F-35 joint strike fighter, a plane the Israeli Air Force (IAF) would need to overcome the long-range S-300 surface-to-air missile systems the Russians plan — at some point — to supply to Iran. The media has hailed the F-35s as Israel's solution to the Iranian threat.
Oddly enough, however, just five months ago, the Israeli cabinet rejected a proposal to increase the number of F-35s from 19 planes to 50. The Israelis believe that the plane has sacrificed operational range and payload capacity for stealth. As a result, the IAF is anxious to fly the first two models home to start tinkering with them.
Bar Shalom noted that as part of their compensation package, the Israelis might also need V-22 helicopters, new bowsers and other items to maintain its strategic military advantage in the region.
But even if Israel and the GCC states get everything on their wish lists, will they be better off? Will we?
The sanctions worked. They brought Iran to the table. The goal of negotiations should be to neutralize the Iranian threat and make the world a safer place — an achievable goal if the "surgical strike option" were anywhere near the negotiation table.
Instead, President Obama is telling U.S. allies to militarize and is throwing arms — items that tend to spark — at the powder keg that is already the Middle East.
Friedman is an American-Israeli writer and editor in the fields of political science, history and information technology.
2a) The U.S. Air Force Has Lots of Options for Smashing Iran’s Nuclear
Facilities Flying branch shopping for bunker-busting bombs
by JAMES DREW
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-air-force-has-lots-of-options-for-smashing-iran-s-nuclear-facilities-fa7812c0f28a?section=%5Bobject%20Object%5D
Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told CNN the United
States military has the capability to “shut down, set back and destroy” Iran’s
nuclear program.
The highly-publicized yet classified weapon Carter was referring to is the
Massive Ordnance Penetrator — a behemoth, 30,000-pound bunker bomb
introduced specifically to destroy Iran’s underground uranium enrichment
facilities.
In January, we told you the Pentagon was modifying and testing the bomb as
the diplomatic push for a nuclear settlement with the pariah state
intensified. But of course, that’s not all the U.S. military has been up to
in the background.
The Air Force, which leads the development of air-delivered bunker bombs, is
preparing to go shopping for a new “family” of weapons to kill fortified
targets — and it’s compiling that shopping list right now.
This list is likely to include a new rocket-rammed High Speed Strike Weapon
for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, plus a new class of inexpensive,
mid-weight penetrating bombs.
And as a last resort, the U.S. government is holding onto its only
earth-penetrating nuclear bomb, the B61–11, even as it reduces its nuclear
stockpile to comply with an arms reduction treaty with Russia.
The Air Force definitely wants to make more improvements to the Massive
Ordnance Penetrator, since a third and fourth “enhanced threat reduction”
modification program is included in its 2016 budget plans. The service is
also about to scale up production of a smart, void-sensing fuze that counts
bunker layers and detonates at the correct level.
An Air Combat Command review of the flying branch’s so-called hard-target
munitions inventory recently wrapped up, and that study is circulating among
senior leaders within the department and the Office of the Secretary of
Defense.
The classified study assessed what the Air Force currently has, and what it
might need in the future as nations like Iran and North Korea find new ways
to harden their military installations against attack from the West.
The Air Force won’t say much about the study officially, but senior service
officials have been dropping hints as Congress seeks assurances about the
military’s ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites should diplomacy fail.
The service’s chief scientist told House lawmakers in March that a research
program to develop a 2,000-pound hard-target killer for the F-35 and other
modern fighters and bombers is ready to transfer to an acquisition program.
The Air Force needs a smaller, more compact weapon to destroy hard and
deeply buried targets, Walker said at the hearing.
“The High Velocity Penetrating Weapon was a program that we put together to
do this,” he continued. “[It has] been very successful and now it’s
transitioned that technology into the follow-on program that Air Combat
Command is now looking at in their analysis of alternatives.”
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There has been surprisingly little discussion about the weapon program since
2011, when the Air Force paid military contractors Lockheed Martin and
Raytheon to design prototypes, which were due to undergo sled-testing last
year.
According to an Air Force presentation from 2011, the bomb would fit inside
the F-35’s internal weapons bay for stealth. To overcome the size and weight
constraints, a rocket motor would ram the hardened, high-explosive warhead
into the target.
The Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a gigantic bomb with plenty of punching
power because of its sheer size. But it only fits on the Air Force’s B-2 and
B-52 bombers, whereas the High Velocity Penetrating Weapon would be
compatible with more aircraft types — and overcome its relatively small size
with speed.
According to Maj. Gen. Scott Jansson, the Air Force’s top weapons-buyer, the
flying branch probably won’t ever produce MOP in large numbers.
“We’re looking at less-expensive weapons than MOP that we can build in
greater quantities, but MOP was considered in that analysis as well,”
Jansson said. “[It] might be part of a family of capabilities that can hold
certain targets at risk.”
One program Jansson is about to approve for production is Orbital ATK’s Hard
Target Void Sensing Fuze. The company completed development of the smart
fuze last month, and the Air Force and Navy plan to purchase 5,500 of them
over the next few years to replace the existing time-delayed fuzes on older
penetrating warheads.
“It’s a big deal,” Jansson said in a March interview. “It’s a significantly
improved fuze over anything that we have today. If we have the intelligence
that says we want to target the third floor down in an underground bunker,
we will program the fuze to ignite in that layer.”
If all conventional means fail to destroy a target, there’s the B61–11
nuclear option. The National Nuclear Security Administration is reducing its
five B61 nuclear bomb variants to one, the B61–12 — except for the
bunker-busting variant that debuted in the 1990s.
“I see an enduring role for the ability of the U.S. Air Force to be able to
take out deeply-buried, hardened targets,” Maj. Gen. Garrett Harencak, Air
Force assistant chief of staff for strategic deterrence, said in an April 20
interview. “We will do that for the nation, and in order to do that we have
an array of assets and weapons to do that in a credible manner, and not just
nuclear weapons.
“We don’t have a set retirement date yet for the B61–11. It was actually
more recently introduced into the stockpile, but it will continue for a
while.”
2b)
The Syrian adventure serves a dual purpose for Iran. On the one hand, it has committed Hezbollah and Iranian forces to help bolster its ally Bashar Assad in the war against Syrian rebels (both moderate and extremist) as well as ISIS terrorists. At the same time, it offers Iran a chance to extend its sphere of influence in such a way as to create a second front against Israel for Hezbollah. Hence the Israeli insistence, made clear in the strikes on similar targets in January and the attack this weekend, that it will not allow Iran or its Lebanese proxy terrorists to be able to strike at the Jewish state with impunity.
The Western media tends to view any violence between Israel and Hezbollah, whether along the border with Lebanon or in Syria, as part of an endless “cycle of violence.” From the point of view of the Obama administration and the liberal mainstream media this is a struggle to which there is no end and no beginning and thus no real policy implications other than the fear that a small conflagration could somehow be blown up into a regional war.
The problem with that way of looking at the issue is not so much that such fears are unreasonable as they are a function of Iran’s bid for regional hegemony, not a mere brush fire unrelated to the Islamist regime’s broader goals.
Hezbollah’s stance against Israel is, after all, not a function of an attempt to defend Lebanon or recover that nation’s territory occupied by the Jewish state. Rather it is a military front operated by Tehran’s terrorist proxy that is living proof of Iran’s commitment to Israel’s destruction. The conceit of efforts to set up Hezbollah bases in Syria is to offer the group a way to shoot at Israel without incurring retaliation on Lebanon that would lead the citizens of the country to try and curb the terrorist group’s power.
The reason this is germane to the nuclear talks is that the question of allowing Iran to become a threshold nuclear power is one that directly affects Hezbollah. Iran’s ability to project power across the Middle East via Hezbollah, the Assad regime, as well as Hamas in Gaza (which recently came back into the fold with Iran after a few years’ break because of a disagreement over the Syrian civil war) makes its nuclear pretensions that much more dangerous. If the nuclear deal gives, at the very least, Iran a potential for a bomb, that strengthens its terrorist allies. Critics rightly allege that the loose terms of the deal offer Iran two paths to an actual bomb, one by easily evading the pact’s restrictions because of a lack of tough inspections and one by abiding by it and waiting patiently for it to expire before building a weapon. If that is so, then the Iran deal will not only lead to proliferation and give Tehran the means to threaten Israel’s existence.
But even if Iran never takes advantage of that opportunity or never uses the bomb if it gets one, this deal places Hezbollah and Hamas under a potential nuclear umbrella. That gives the terrorists more freedom to operate and to foment and commit violence against both Israel and the United States. That’s why it’s a mistake for the United States to separate the issue of Iran’s support of terrorism and its desire to eliminate Israel from the nuclear issue.
President Obama’s illusions about Iran reforming itself and “getting right with the world” are foolish enough with respect to the nature of the Islamist regime. But when one considers that this same policy is empowering terrorist groups allied to Iran they become a dangerous error that will be paid for in Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese blood
It must be comfortable and convenient for President Obama to assume the opposition to him is because of his race. He can negotiate a bad deal with Iran and conclude the public hates it because he is black. He can tell people they can keep their doctors then take their doctors away from them and console himself that the anger of the public is just racist. He can see a solid position in Iraq and Afghanistan squandered as ISIS overruns us and, when people point it out, conclude it’s just because of his skin color. People can drop out of the workforce because they can’t find jobs and when their stomachs rumble and their mouths grumble, President Obama can look himself in the mirror and think it’d all be different if he were not a black man.
If only President Obama weren’t black, maybe he would realize that people don’t dislike him because he is black, they dislike him because he is a self-absorbed ass.
It really is amazing. Convinced of his own righteousness, President Obama actually surveys the citizenry of this country and thinks there is no conceivable way they can oppose him other than his skin color. Convinced his policies are the best, he considers the opposition against him bigoted and devoid of principle.
President Obama went into office hoping to serve people better and leaves it thinking he is better than the people he serves. But he’ll always have the press corps.
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On Saturday the Israeli Air Force reportedly struck surface-to-surface missile depots in Syria near the Lebanese border. The attack is widely believed to be a yet another Israeli attempt to interdict Iran’s efforts to maintain a steady flow arms and advanced weapons to its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries in Lebanon. In particular, Tehran has used the chaos of the Syrian civil war as an opportunity to establish Hezbollah bases in Syrian territory to threaten Israel. But neither these strikes nor Hezbollah’s failed attempt yesterday at a terrorist incursion along Israel’s northern border should be viewed in isolation from the aspect of Iranian foreign policy that has drawn far more interest in the West: the negotiations for a nuclear pact. Far from being tangential to the debate about the Iran nuclear framework deal that President Obama has staked his legacy on, the flow of arms from the Islamist regime to a terrorist group illustrates the danger of appeasing Tehran far better than any speech by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu or other opponents of the pact.
The Syrian adventure serves a dual purpose for Iran. On the one hand, it has committed Hezbollah and Iranian forces to help bolster its ally Bashar Assad in the war against Syrian rebels (both moderate and extremist) as well as ISIS terrorists. At the same time, it offers Iran a chance to extend its sphere of influence in such a way as to create a second front against Israel for Hezbollah. Hence the Israeli insistence, made clear in the strikes on similar targets in January and the attack this weekend, that it will not allow Iran or its Lebanese proxy terrorists to be able to strike at the Jewish state with impunity.
The Western media tends to view any violence between Israel and Hezbollah, whether along the border with Lebanon or in Syria, as part of an endless “cycle of violence.” From the point of view of the Obama administration and the liberal mainstream media this is a struggle to which there is no end and no beginning and thus no real policy implications other than the fear that a small conflagration could somehow be blown up into a regional war.
The problem with that way of looking at the issue is not so much that such fears are unreasonable as they are a function of Iran’s bid for regional hegemony, not a mere brush fire unrelated to the Islamist regime’s broader goals.
Hezbollah’s stance against Israel is, after all, not a function of an attempt to defend Lebanon or recover that nation’s territory occupied by the Jewish state. Rather it is a military front operated by Tehran’s terrorist proxy that is living proof of Iran’s commitment to Israel’s destruction. The conceit of efforts to set up Hezbollah bases in Syria is to offer the group a way to shoot at Israel without incurring retaliation on Lebanon that would lead the citizens of the country to try and curb the terrorist group’s power.
The reason this is germane to the nuclear talks is that the question of allowing Iran to become a threshold nuclear power is one that directly affects Hezbollah. Iran’s ability to project power across the Middle East via Hezbollah, the Assad regime, as well as Hamas in Gaza (which recently came back into the fold with Iran after a few years’ break because of a disagreement over the Syrian civil war) makes its nuclear pretensions that much more dangerous. If the nuclear deal gives, at the very least, Iran a potential for a bomb, that strengthens its terrorist allies. Critics rightly allege that the loose terms of the deal offer Iran two paths to an actual bomb, one by easily evading the pact’s restrictions because of a lack of tough inspections and one by abiding by it and waiting patiently for it to expire before building a weapon. If that is so, then the Iran deal will not only lead to proliferation and give Tehran the means to threaten Israel’s existence.
But even if Iran never takes advantage of that opportunity or never uses the bomb if it gets one, this deal places Hezbollah and Hamas under a potential nuclear umbrella. That gives the terrorists more freedom to operate and to foment and commit violence against both Israel and the United States. That’s why it’s a mistake for the United States to separate the issue of Iran’s support of terrorism and its desire to eliminate Israel from the nuclear issue.
President Obama’s illusions about Iran reforming itself and “getting right with the world” are foolish enough with respect to the nature of the Islamist regime. But when one considers that this same policy is empowering terrorist groups allied to Iran they become a dangerous error that will be paid for in Israeli, Palestinian, and Lebanese blood
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3) If Only President Obama Weren’t Black
“If only President Obama weren’t black, maybe he would realize that people don’t dislike him because he is black, they dislike him because he is a self-absorbed ass.”
weekend, most of the worst people in the world gathered together in Washington, D.C. as a circle of jerks to sing each other’s praises. Sadly, there was no Samson to tear down the columns and collapse the roof on the Philistines of Washington. But there was a President of the United States willing to make jokes about the “F-word” and an Imperial Court to worship him.
Byron York notes that much of President Obama’s speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner centered around “black anger.” In other words, President Obama let loose over the weekend that he has concluded all the opposition to him is because he is black.
It must be comfortable and convenient for President Obama to assume the opposition to him is because of his race. He can negotiate a bad deal with Iran and conclude the public hates it because he is black. He can tell people they can keep their doctors then take their doctors away from them and console himself that the anger of the public is just racist. He can see a solid position in Iraq and Afghanistan squandered as ISIS overruns us and, when people point it out, conclude it’s just because of his skin color. People can drop out of the workforce because they can’t find jobs and when their stomachs rumble and their mouths grumble, President Obama can look himself in the mirror and think it’d all be different if he were not a black man.
If only President Obama weren’t black, maybe he would realize that people don’t dislike him because he is black, they dislike him because he is a self-absorbed ass.
It really is amazing. Convinced of his own righteousness, President Obama actually surveys the citizenry of this country and thinks there is no conceivable way they can oppose him other than his skin color. Convinced his policies are the best, he considers the opposition against him bigoted and devoid of principle.
President Obama went into office hoping to serve people better and leaves it thinking he is better than the people he serves. But he’ll always have the press corps.
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