Allen West is the SIRC's next President Day Dinner Speaker, Monday, Feb. 15, 2016.
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Today JEB decided he had to take off his softer velvet gloves and put on some leather ones and respond to Donald. Trump is correct in suggesting that none of the 16 other candidates have caught fire because he has sucked all the oxygen out of the room but JEB, I understand, will begin to spend some of his huge war chest and try and define Donald as less than a reliable conservative, inconsistent and off the charts.
As long as voters are enamored with Trump they will be more willing to accept his explanation that he has always been a conservative and, like Reagan, morphed into a Republican. Because Trump is not a politician and has no voting record to defend the fact that he has changed/emerged is not as big a deal because people know they too change and evolve. Thus, they identify with Trump, not because of his political views but because he speaks to and touches their emotions.
Trump is not handled and the public like this fact, unlike the other candidates who have advisors etc. Trump wings it, is comfortable in his own skin and this is what endears him for the moment.
Trump offers those who are pissed off a way to protest and because Donald is who he is, accomplished what he has and is more charismatic than quirky Ross Perot, he has leverage.
If JEB is effective in changing the public's mood and they begin to dwell on Donald's inconsistencies then we will see his meteoric rise melt but that remains a long shot. JEB is just too nice a person even when he is upset. Maybe I am missing something but this is what I believe
Stay tuned.
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Even Jay Pritzger has gone against Obama and Kerry on the Iran Deal. (See 1 below.)
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After my meeting with Rep. Buddy Carter it is likely Congress will reject the Iran Deal but not be able to override Obama's veto. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)
True bipartisanship – oppose the deal
By J.B. Pritzker
Ending Iran’s nuclear threat and bringing it into the international community of law-abiding nations is one of the most pressing U.S. foreign policy objectives. And so I was relieved and grateful to watch President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry work tirelessly over the past several months to achieve a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.
This work was made all the more complicated by the need to coordinate the widely disparate interests among the P5+1 countries of Russia, China, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Anyone who has been in business negotiations with multiple parties, as I have, knows how difficult it can be to find common ground with so many strong voices in the room.
The challenge in multi-lateral negotiations is not to lose sight of one’s over-arching goal in the midst of the cacophony of opinions at the bargaining table. For the U.S., which Iran has dubbed its No. 1 enemy in the world, our objectives were to reduce the threat to the homeland, to American interests abroad and to our allies in the region.
Regrettably, the Iran deal fails to meet these goals and raises the prospects for war. I cannot support a deal that reduces all our leverage upfront, giving Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, in return for permitting it to maintain its advanced nuclear program and the infrastructure of a threshold nuclear state.
For decades, Iran has covertly worked to develop a nuclear weapons program and has repeatedly violated its international obligations. The United States cannot afford to give Iran the benefit of the doubt; our national security will depend on it.
In addition to gaining access to up to $100 billion worth of frozen assets and the lifting of sanctions at the beginning of this agreement, the deal lifts the arms embargo in only five years and critical ballistic missile restrictions after only eight years. This regime has no respect for human rights or international norms and is the world’s most robust supporter of terrorists bent on destroying Western countries.
A financially bolstered hard-line Iranian regime will result in increased terrorism abroad and even more repression at home. Given Iran’s atrocious human rights record, we risk compromising our progressive values if we eliminate sanctions and prop up this reactionary regime.
I am a lifelong Democrat. Like a rapidly expanding list of Democrats across the country, I oppose this deal. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) encapsulated our thoughts most eloquently when he recently came out against the agreement: “better to keep U.S. sanctions in place, strengthen them, enforce secondary sanctions on other nations and pursue the hard-trodden path of diplomacy once more, difficult as it may be.”
The president and Secretary Kerry disagree with us. We are all Democrats. Apparently, this is not a partisan issue.
I have been disappointed to read the president’s remarks tainting the debate by challenging the motivations of deal opponents like myself. There is room in our party to have opposing views of the Iran deal. Democrats on both sides can legitimately reach alternate conclusions based on different interpretations of the facts without questioning their loyalties or their intentions.
Instead, I question the motives of Iran. Just days after the agreement was announced, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei announced that his “government’s policies toward the arrogant government of the United States will not be changed at all” as his audience responded with exuberant shouts of “death to America.”
Some will argue that if this agreement works, it will buy us 15 years and prevent the need for military engagement. But they ignore that the agreement allows Iran to continue research and development on advanced centrifuges, and therefore it will be only days away from breaking out to a nuclear weapon after 15 years. Iran will have done this within the confines of the agreement, so the U.S. and the international community will have legitimized Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state, not prevented it.
This will leave the U.S. with two bad options: accept a nuclear Iran, or take military action. By legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program, removing the pressure of economic sanctions and allowing it to obtain conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, this agreement makes the prospect for war more likely, not less.
Rejecting this deal will not end the diplomatic process. In fact, accepting this deal would likely cut off the diplomatic process for at least 15 years and would preclude us from negotiating a better deal.
For the sake of our values and our security, Congress should reject this deal, leave the sanctions in place, and support efforts to negotiate a better agreement.
Pritzker is co-founder and managing partner of Pritzker Group, a Chicago-based private investment firm, and served as national co-chair of Hillary Clinton for President in 2008. He is also the brother of Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker,
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2)
Yesterday’s revelation about Iran being given the right to inspect its own military sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency gave the lie to administration promises about verification of the nuclear deal it is trying to sell to the country. But though the reports have provoked outrage from critics of the deal, the news didn’t seem to rattle the administration or shake up those who had already announced their support for the pact. To bolster their position, they now point to a statement issued by the IAEA that attempts to debunk the AP report about the details of the secret side deal it had signed with Iran. Like the State Department, t he IAEA is claiming the AP article is “misleading.” Though it doesn’t say what exactly is misleading about it, it also asserts that the agreement with Iran satisfied its needs as well as those of the Iranians. Citing secrecy requirements, the agency’s head, Yukio Amano, didn’t directly contradict the article about a draft of the document given Iran the responsibility to inspect the Parchin site and to then merely give its findings to the IAEA. But with the AP standing by its reporting, Amano’s word isn’t good enough. The stakes here are sufficiently high that Congress has a right to demand to know more about the bargain with Iran. Without that knowledge, any vote for the nuclear deal is an act of faith rather than a reasoned decision about what is good for the security of the U.S. and the world.
The discussion about the IAEA’s side deal with Iran about inspection of its military sites must be put in the context of Iran’s threats against inspectors as well as its consistent refusal to allow them into Parchin and other places that were used for research into possible military dimensions of the nuclear program (PMDs). It was only on Tuesday that reports were circulating that Iran had directly threatened Amano and warned of severe consequences if he were to reveal the contents of the agreements about nuclear inspections. Moreover, Iran’s leaders have consistently stated that foreigners will never be allowed into Parchin or any other military facility no matter what was or had been going on there.
Unlike some of his predecessor, Amano has a good record on Iran and has consistently pushed for complete access to Iranian facilities for inspections. But he is in an impossible position. The U.S. and the other P5+1 powers that negotiated the nuclear pact abandoned the positions they had previously staked out on uranium enrichment that Amano was bound to try to enforce. With President Obama making concession after concession in an attempt to get a deal with Iran at virtually any price. He cannot be expected to be tougher than the Americans. The message from Washington in recent months has been crystal clear. The U.S. believed that nothing, no matter how important it might be, should be allowed to interfere with its effort to craft a new détente with Iran.
Supporters of the Iran deal are countering critics by saying that they interpret what has been said as meaning that the IAEA will monitor Iranians as they inspect Parchin and other sites rather than to do it themselves. But they don’t say how that monitoring will take place. That sort of vagueness is unacceptable. Unless the international inspectors are there on the spot seeing everything that goes on, the entire process is worthless.
They also tell us that obsessing about Parchin is pointless because Iran isn’t doing any more work there, so the IAEA doesn’t really need to inspect. But even the administration admitted that it was vital that Iran open up its facilities and allow the West to learn how much progress they have already made. Without that knowledge, any talk about estimating the amount of time needed for Iran to “break out” to a weapon is worthless speculation.
But the point here is that Congress cannot allow itself to be put off by the sort of opaque explanations about inspections that we’ve been getting from the IAEA and the administration. There are too many reasons to distrust this process already. Americans are already being asked to accept an inspections process that involves a 24-day warning period being given to Iran before officials arrive. Unless the House and the Senate are given a full explanation of what is happening at Parchin, they cannot in good conscience vote to approve the deal. They should also begin investigating the nature of the Iranian threats and whether the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is strong-arming the IAEA while its eager diplomatic partners in the U.S. are standing by passively.
The inspections controversy can’t be dismissed with personal assurances or blithe assertions that the IAEA knows what it is doing. In this case, the UN body is merely acting as an agent of and administration that seems willing to do or saying anything to get a deal and to have it squeak through Congress via a back door approval process. Despite the president’s appeals to partisanship to force Democrats to fall in lockstep with his appeasement policy, this is a moment where they must stand up to him. Insisting on a free and transparent verification process isn’t an appeal to war, as the White House seems to keep arguing. Rather, it is an appeal to common sense, a quality that America’s negotiators seem to have lacked.
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