More Lies, More Dirt. When will It End?

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Victor Davis Hanson does an analysis on Grandma Hillarious! (See 1 below.)

Every passing day brings more signs of corruption, self-dealing and possibly selling our nation down the river for outrageous speaking fees.
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If Iran is within a few months of a break out, Netanyahu has some serious decisions facing him. Israel could take it upon themselves to attack Iran  because they may have no alternative.  I have warned of this, Bibi warned of this and the JV team in the White House mocked him.

So much for trusting Obama who has repeatedly told Israel he has their back! (See 2 below.

Obama is not one to eat crow but he is engaged in damage control.   (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) Hillary Clinton apparently plans to base her presidential campaign on the noble goals of greater fairness and shared sacrifice.
By Victor Davis Hanson

She has already lambasted vast differences in compensation. "The average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes," Clinton warned.
She is right -- but can best appreciate that fact from her own career and family.
Recently, Clinton has demanded up to $300,000 for brief 30-minute speeches. She apparently believes in the free-market theory that on the lecture circuit, speakers -- like CEOs -- should be paid as much as the market can bear.

At UCLA recently, Clinton's fee worked out to about $165 per second. In three minutes of autobiographical chitchat, Clinton pulled in more than the average full-time fast-food worker makes in a year. Note that, directly or indirectly, universities pass such charges on to their student customers, who are currently collectively in debt to the tune of more than $1 trillion.

Or perhaps Clinton learned of pay unfairness from her own daughter, Chelsea. Without a shred of journalistic experience, Chelsea Clinton earned $600,000 a year from NBC News. That rate worked out to more than $26,000 a minute for each minute Chelsea appeared on air.

To cement her populist credentials, Hillary Clinton is also attacking big-bucks hedge funds. She made a good point when she thundered in Iowa earlier this month, "There's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers that I saw on I-80 as I was driving here."
But Clinton must know intimately about such financial speculators and their low tax rates.

Back in Arkansas, she once had a Clinton family crony from Tyson Foods invest $1,000 in cattle futures on her behalf. That relatively tiny sum mysteriously exploded into a $100,000 profit. Professional investors suggested that the odds of such unheard of profit-making were 31 trillion to 1.
And there was most definitely "something wrong" about the taxes -- or lack of them -- that Clinton paid on the profits. She failed to report fully her capital gains to the IRS. That lapse earned her some $14,600 in tax penalties and back interest.

Or perhaps Clinton learned about hedge fund unfairness from her own her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky. He's the husband of Chelsea Clinton and co-founder of the $400 million hedge fund Eaglevale Partners LP, along with his two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs.

Or maybe Hillary acquired her distrust of hedge fund operators more intimately from daughter Chelsea, who used to work at Clinton family friend Marc Lasry's $13.3 billion New York hedge fund firm, Avenue Capital Group.

Young Chelsea reportedly already has a net worth of some $15 million -- mostly due to brief stints working for family friends at companies such as Avenue Capital and McKinsey & Co.

If Hillary's own daughter and son-in-law did not warn her about how those in their business make undue profits, then perhaps Ms. Clinton learned from her own first-hand observations. After she stepped down as security of state, she immediately rented private office space from the Rock Creek Group, a Washington-based investment firm with strong ties to the Clinton family. Did she want a convenient spot to observe Wall Street's bad habits?
Hillary Clinton is going to wage lots of wars in the upcoming campaign, but ironically, most of them will be against the sort of behavior exhibited by her own clan.

War against women? Perhaps that refers to employers such as Hillary Clinton. As a senator, she paid women on her own staff just 72 cents for each dollar her male staffers received.

Or perhaps her crusade will touch on sexual exploitation in the workplace -- especially those older alpha males who translate their power into sexual favors from their 20-something interns. From 2002 to 2005 Bill Clinton flew more than 10 times on the private jet of billionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Hillary Clinton has promised a war against big money's corrupting role in politics. Again, the Clintons should know. Their campaign advisors are already bragging that they will pull in a record $2.5 billion for the 2016 campaign. While secretary of state. Clinton moonlighted to rake in millions for her family foundation from rich foreigners.

Will another war be about transparency and honest government? That might mean no private email accounts and servers for Cabinet officials -- or destroying correspondence without review by outside auditors.

The problem with Hillary Clinton's various progressive campaigns is that they will be logically waged against people in her own family

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2)

Obama Kept Iran's Short Breakout Time a Secret

By  Eli Lake

The Barack Obama administration has estimated for years that Iran was at most three months away from enriching enough nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb. But the administration only declassified this estimate at the beginning of the month, just in time for the White House to make the case for its Iran deal to Congress and the public.

Speaking to reporters and editors at our Washington bureau on Monday, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz  acknowledged that the U.S. has assessed for several years that Iran has been two to three months away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. When asked how long the administration has held this assessment, Moniz said: "Oh quite some time." He added: "They are now, they are right now spinning, I mean enriching with 9,400 centrifuges out of their roughly 19,000. Plus all the . . . . R&D work. If you put that together it's very, very little time to go forward. That's the 2-3 months."

Brian Hale, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed to me Monday that the two-to-three-month estimate for fissile material was declassified on April 1.  

Here is the puzzling thing: When Obama began his second term in 2013, he sang a different tune. He emphasized that Iran was more than a year away from a nuclear bomb, without mentioning that his intelligence community believed it was only two to three months away from making enough fuel for one, long considered the most challenging task in building a weapon. Today Obama emphasizes that Iran is only two to three months away from acquiring enough fuel for a bomb, creating a sense of urgency for his Iran agreement. 

Back in 2013, when Congress was weighing new sanctions on Iran and Obama was pushing for more diplomacy, his interest was in tamping down that sense of urgency. On the eve of a visit to Israel, Obama  told Israel's Channel Two, "Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close." 

On Oct. 5 of that year, Obama contrasted the U.S. view of an Iranian breakout with that of Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time said Iran was only six months away from nuclear capability. Obama  told the Associated Press, "Our assessment continues to be a year or more away. And in fact, actually, our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services." 

Ben Caspit, an Israeli journalist and columnist for Al-Monitor,  reported last year that Israel's breakout estimate was also two to three months away. 

A year ago,  after the nuclear talks started, Secretary of State John Kerry dropped the first hint about the still-classified Iran breakout estimate. He told a Senate panel, "I think it is fair to say, I think it is public knowledge today, that we are  operating with a time period for a so-called breakout of about two months." 

David Albright, a former weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told me administration officials appeared to be intentionally unspecific in 2013, when the talking points used the 12-months-plus timeline. "They weren't clear at all about what this one-year estimate meant, but people like me who said let's break it down to the constituent pieces in terms of time to build a bomb were rebuffed," he said. Albright's group released its own breakout  timetable that focused solely on the production of highly enriched uranium, not the weapon itself. It concluded Iran was potentially less than a month away.

When USA Today asked a spokeswoman for the National Security Council about Albright's estimate, she responded that the intelligence community maintained a  number of estimates for how long Iran would take to produce enough material for a weapon. 

"They have made it very hard for those of us saying, let's just focus on weapons-grade uranium, there is this shorter period of time and not a year," Albright told me. "If you just want a nuclear test device to blow up underground, I don't think you need a year."

This view is supported by a  leaked document from the International Atomic Energy Agency, first published by the Associated Press in 2009. Albright's group published excerpts from the IAEA assessment that concluded Iran "has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device based upon (highly enriched uranium) as the fission fuel."

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst who is now an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution, told me that most of the technical estimates about an Iranian breakout were not nearly as precise as they are sometimes portrayed in the press. "The idea there is such a thing as a hard and fast formula for this is nonsense," he said. "All the physicists come up with different answers depending on what inputs they use."

In this way, Obama's new, more alarmist figure of two to three months provides a key selling point for the framework reached this month in Switzerland. When Obama  announced the preliminary agreement on April 2, he said one benefit was that if it were finalized, "even if it violated the deal, for the next decade at least, Iran would be a minimum of a year away from acquiring enough material for a bomb."

Hence the frustration of Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "We've been researching their claim that a deal would lengthen the breakout time for Iran from two to three months to a year," he told me of the administration. "We're just trying to confirm any of their numbers and we can't confirm or make sense of what they are referencing."

Nunes should hurry. The Iranian nuclear deal is scheduled to breakout in less than three months.

2a)

NYT: Obama Does About-Face on Netanyahu to Limit Damage to Dems

President Barack Obama is making overtures to repair his long-strained relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the efforts have more to do with currying favor with pro-Israel members of Congress and American Jews than with the Jewish State, according to The New York Times.

"The White House is engaged in an aggressive effort to assuage the concerns of American Jewish groups and pro-Israel members of Congress over the nuclear agreement with Iran, and to limit the potential political fallout for Democrats of what has become a bitter rift in the American and Israeli relationship," according to the Times.

The Obama administration "is nothing if not pragmatic, and the issue on the table now is creating conditions for a reasonable outcome should the Iran agreement be reached," former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt and Princeton professor Daniel C. Kurtzer told the newspaper.

"There was a moment in the midst of this where you wonder if anger was replacing policy, but they came to their senses and said, 'O.K., anger is not a policy, now we've made our point, it's time to move on,'" he said.

The already tense leaders' relationship further unraveled following Netanyahu's address to Congress on March 3 voicing strong opposition to the Obama administration's proposed deal with Iran.

Just last month, The Wall Street Journal reported Obama succinctly stated that he did not expect a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians to take place on his watch

(Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images; Debbie Hill/UPI/Landov)

By Melissa Clyne

"What we can't do is pretend that there's a possibility for something that's not there," Obama said at a news conference. "And we can't continue to premise our public diplomacy based on something that everybody knows is not going to happen at least in the next several years."

But since then, the White House has stepped up its efforts to extend itself to Israel by doing things like sending Vice President Joe Biden to speak at an Israeli Independence Day celebration in Washington on Thursday, marking Israel's 67 years of independence.

Israel's Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, a Netanyahu insider who the White House blamed for "orchestrating" the prime minister's address to Congress, took to Twitter to laud the move.

After his relationship with Netanyahu went from "simmering tensions" to "open hostility," Obama in the past weeks has publicly put aside his animus and spoken of his "strong devotion to Israel" while logging hours of meetings with Jewish leaders, the Times reports.Though Obama used the meetings to impart "his deep commitment to Israel," he said that he has no current plans to meet with Netanyahu in person, according to the Times."He told the group that a face-to-face meeting at the White House would probably end with Mr. Netanyahu publicly venting his complaints about the president's policies, particularly his efforts to forge a nuclear agreement with Iran," the Times reported.

Obama reportedly said he would wait to meet with the prime minister until after June 30, the deadline for a deal with Iran.

The president's about-face can be attributed to concerns by some senior members of the administration that the "public feuding … had become excessive and unseemly, threatening to undermine efforts to build support for a potential Iran deal and to erode Democrats' political advantage with Jewish voters," according to the newspaper.

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