Another way to agitate everyone. Does Trump reflect the fact that America has become a crude and coarser nation? Have we permanently lowered our values?
As a result of Obama's six year tenure we also no longer are a nation that adheres to laws. We have
become a far more lawless and less law abiding nation and Obama has led the parade castigating the police and ignoring the Constitution's mandates. .(See 1 below.)
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Stella also does New York City and then The Hamptons to visit with her maternal grandparents!
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This must be listened to so I re-post the link! Just outstanding!!!!!
The conservative message is the correct one for those seeking freedom, care about property rights and values but we fail to package it correctly so it will have appeal to voters. It is a failure of messaging.
If the Republican candidate believes he/she will not be campaigning against Obama they are sadly mistaken. He will be out there rallying the factions that return Democrat Presidents to office. He will be telling them Republicans are at war with women, he will be spreading the lies that helped him win and then get re-elected. He will be demonizing and dividing, pitting citizen against citizen, blowing smoke, telling everyone how better off they are , blaming others for his own failures and offering them the opportunity to become ever more dependent upon a government , by then, some 19 trillion in debt.
He will return to being "The Music Man" just as he has been as president. He will be effective because , as Whittle points out, few voters vote with their head, they vote with their heart and emotions.
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Tobin on the distortion of the truth regarding Iran and Israel. (See 2 below.)
Congress has done it before. (See 2a below.)
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I have no love for former President Carter but I do wish him well in his fight against cancer. It is a terrible malady and no one should suffer.
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Now let's turn our attention to Hillarious:
History Buffs... Does this look familiar?? But then who teaches history anymore. History is embarrassing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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As Iran moves towards possessing a nuclear weapon it is aligning itself with the PLO to force Israel to rid itself of its own nuclear weaponry. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) The Trump Catharsis
By Victor Davis Hanson
The coarser and cruder Donald Trump becomes, and the more ill-informed on the issues he sounds, the more he coasts in the polls. Apparently, a few of his targets must be regarded as unsympathetically as their defamer.
Trump is rightly mocked for cynically spreading quid pro quo money around. But he quickly counters that his critics -- from Hillary Clinton to his Republican rivals -- have all asked him for such cash or for favors.
Trump preps little. He has no real agenda. And he makes stuff up as he goes along. For such a New York brawler, he has thin skin, smearing his critics, often in creepy fashion. How can a former Democrat, once a pro-choice, pro-amnesty liberal and a supporter of single-payer health care, remain the godhead of the conservative base for weeks on end?
The answer is that Trump is a catharsis for 15 percent to 20 percent of the Republican electorate. They apparently like the broken china shop and appreciate the raging bull who runs amok in it. Politicians and the media are seen as corrupt and hypocritical, and the nihilistic Trump is a surrogate way of letting them take some heat for a change.
Some of Trump's companies may have declared bankruptcy. But if that is so bad, why is the U.S. government running up $18 trillion in national debt? If Trump ran his businesses the way government manages the Social Security Trust Fund, would we criticize him for running a Ponzi scheme?
We have learned that the supposedly sacrosanct IRS is as conniving as any Third World junta. Is the coarse Donald Trump any more dishonest than the smooth former IRS official Lois Lerner?
Trump is uncouth and reckless in his language. But former Attorney General Eric Holder disparaged Americans as "cowards." Barack Obama all but called his Republican critics kindred souls to Iranian hardliners. Did Trump make fun of the Special Olympics the way the president once did when referring to his own poor bowling form?
Vice President Joe Biden once used racist language to characterize then-candidate Obama. "You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. Trump is crass and in your face, but his supporters see his venom as no worse than that of the foul-mouthed Sen. Harry Reid, who gets a pass from the media.
The grandees of Planned Parenthood talk of their abstract compassion. But in secret videos, they boast of trafficking in human body parts, which is as macabre as anything out of Dickensian London. Do Trump's wheeler-dealer businesses peddle fetal arms and legs on the side?
Trump's jujitsu style begs the question of whether many of the objects of his ire are any less reckless than he.
The government and media talk compassionately of amnesty and sanctuary cities. But the repugnant Trump reflects the anger of millions who are tired of hearing only of dreamers, with rare mention that undocumented immigrants commit murder at a rate much higher than the national average, or that more than a quarter of all federal inmates are non-citizens, most of them here illegally.
Did the tragic fate of Kate Steinle -- murdered in San Francisco by a frequently deported, frequently paroled undocumented immigrant -- prove Trump crazy? Was it an aberration or the logical wage of sanctuary cities?
Mexico published a didactic comic book to advise its own citizens how to illegally cross the border. It rakes in more than $20 billion in annual remittances, saves money on social spending and uses America as a safety valve for its own failures. It is certainly crude of Trump to stereotype Mexico as an enemy of the U.S. But does Mexico not sometimes connive against its northern neighbor?
Without detail, Trump derides President Obama's Iran pact in buffoonish terms, as if Trump is judging a bad deal on his reality TV show "The Apprentice."
But is he wrong? If the Iranian theocracy sincerely plans to stop uranium enrichment, dismantle centrifuges, ensure anytime/anywhere inspections and stop exporting terrorism, why, then, are Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and most moderate Middle Eastern nations against the deal, and China and Russia for it?
Trump is a nasty catharsis through which some fed-up conservatives are venting their furor over the plight of the country and politically correct hypocrisy. The mystery among the political and media class is how quickly these disgruntled conservatives will be cleansed and get Trump out of their systems, and whether it will happen before he does other Republican candidates real damage.
For now, it will take a bit more of the unfiltered Trump's preposterousness and anti-PC bluster before his teed-off fans are finally pacified.
Scorning or ridiculing Trump's hypocrisies, narcissism or outlandishness won't silence him, much less win over his supporters. That will happen only when voters find a more savvy, more informed, more polite -- but equally blunt and unafraid -- version of Trump, perhaps a candidate like either Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, all of whom are more likely to channel unapologetic conservative anger rather than crudely amplify it.
Trump will fade when his brand of medicine becomes even worse than the disease. Apparently we are not quite there yet.
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2)
Coming to grips with the reality of the anti-Semitism and hate that is at the heart of Iranian foreign policy is a difficult problem for the administration. It has struck an agreement with Iran that, at best, merely postpones the moment when the Islamist regime will get a nuclear bomb while granting its nuclear program international approval. It also gives it a lucrative cash bonus in the form of perhaps $100 billion in unfrozen assets and the relaxation of sanctions that will enrich the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The fact that this deal will give material aid to Iran’s terrorist campaign against Israel while leaving open the door to it eventually gaining the ability to wipe out the Jewish state with a nuclear weapon ought to trouble President Obama’s supporters. Some, like The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, struggle to justify the blithe assertions from Obama that Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is “just a politician.” Obama and Secretary of State Kerry treat Khamenei’s ideology, statements and even Iran’s history of acting on his murderous goals as unimportant. They believe the chance for détente with the West, which is obviously in Iran’s best interests will always override other considerations.
Goldberg wrongly claims there are no real alternatives to the Iran deal but, unlike Obama, he understands that concerns about Iran are not purely the function of fear but rooted in reality. Just as important, he is aware that by framing the argument about Iran as one between “Jewish special interests” and “the rest of the world,” the administration and its cheerleaders are empowering anti-Semites in the Middle East as well as possibly here at home. Unfortunately, Goldberg is too much a prisoner of his own liberalism and support for Obama’s vision to draw the proper conclusions from this or the flaws in the Iran deal. He thinks it would be a good idea if it made more of an effort to signal that it knows it is dealing with vicious anti-Semites and terror supporters. But that is exactly what Obama and Kerry can’t do because they are so wedded to their vision of détente with those anti-Semites.
Which leads us back to Cohler-Esses’ story.
Let’s acknowledge that his piece is not an updated version of Roger Cohen’s disgraceful whitewash of Iranian anti-Semitism published in the New York Times in 2009. The Forward seems to be aware that by sending a reporter to Iran, it was opening itself up to a charge of engaging in that kind of pilgrimage journalism. There is enough context and disclaimers in the piece to insulate Cohler-Esses against accusations of being another Cohen, let alone a new Walter Duranty (who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times with reports from Stalin’s Soviet Union that denied the terror famine in Ukraine in order to burnish the image of the Communist state).
Cohler-Esses interviewed an interesting cross-section of Iranians and found that many were not interested in conflict with the United States or to wage war on anyone. Their attitudes toward the U.S. government and Israel were negative — and a product of Iranian government propaganda — but that vestiges of the gentler sentiments of pre-revolutionary Iran toward the Jews and perhaps even Americans are still there.
The Forward writer’s personal memories of life in Iran before the revolution (he taught English there for two years in the 1970s) make him far too sympathetic to his subject to be viewed as an objective observer of the nation. He seizes on any hint of moderation — whether toward accepting Israel’s existence or skepticism or opposition to the Iranian government — to give us an account of life in the country that puts such dissent in the context of a tyrannical state where human rights are not respected. It’s a sloppy mix of reporting, opinion and analysis that confuses as much as it enlightens. But for all of its problems and his obvious sympathy for the concept of détente with Iran, this is not a Duranty-style whitewash.
We shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of Iranians are willing to say things that contradict at least some of what their government puts out. After all, we all saw the pictures of tens of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran to protest a stolen election and the status quo in the summer of 2009. Who can blame them for hoping that more contacts with the West and the prosperity that the relaxation of sanctions will bring might make their lives better?
Yet Cohler-Esses’ interviews tell us nothing about the prospects for domestic change in Iran, let alone a halt to its foreign adventures.
After all, the proof of Iran’s “plot to destroy Israel” won’t be found in interviews with Iranians at Cyrus’s tomb or in bazaars. It can be found in Iran’s state media that broadcasts anti-Semitism or in Khamenei’s new book laying out his plans to eliminate the Jewish state. It can be found along Israel’s border with Gaza where Iranian funds and equipment are helping Hamas dig new tunnels to facilitate terror raids to murder and kidnap Jews. It can be found along Israel’s northern border as Iranian personnel help Hezbollah set up missile launching sites in Lebanon as well as Syria aimed at raining down terror on Israel towns and cities. And it can be found in Iran’s military and nuclear facilities, where nuclear research, whose only purpose is a bomb that would wipe out Israel, continues. Cohler-Esses can tell us nothing about any of this. Even worse, the administration and the Times are actively seeking to distract us from these truths.
The point about Iran is not that many of its people don’t want change but that they have no way to change their government’s policies. More to the point, far from undermining the theocratic regime, the influx of cash and business will strengthen its leaders and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their support for terror far more than it will enrich its people. That is why the nuclear deal is dangerous and why the push for détente that is the real point of administration policy is based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the Islamist state.
2)
No serious observer contends that the Iranian people, like any other group on the planet, all speak with one voice about any issue. Nor is it extraordinary to learn that some of them might express a wide range of views about Israel and the United States. But to contend that the existence of some level of dissent in Iran from the positions of its government shows that the country’s policies are changing or that it is not actively seeking the destruction of Israel is to tell a lie. That’s exactly what the New York Times did today when it published a story headlined, “Reporting from Iran, Jewish Paper Sees No Plot to Destroy Israel.” The “Jewish Paper” is the Forward, which dispatched reporter Larry Cohler-Esses to the Islamist state for a weeklong visit. Cohler-Esses’ story has something of the feel of the articles produced in the past by those who visit tyrannical states in the hope of producing favorable coverage intended to blunt the revulsions of the democratic world. But while there is much to criticize in the piece, it does not claim to prove that there is “no plot to destroy Israel.” That is entirely the Times’ invention. It demonstrates how the flagship of the mainstream liberal media will seize upon the pretext to back up President Obama’s false characterizations of Iran and its leadership as posing no real threat to Israel.
Coming to grips with the reality of the anti-Semitism and hate that is at the heart of Iranian foreign policy is a difficult problem for the administration. It has struck an agreement with Iran that, at best, merely postpones the moment when the Islamist regime will get a nuclear bomb while granting its nuclear program international approval. It also gives it a lucrative cash bonus in the form of perhaps $100 billion in unfrozen assets and the relaxation of sanctions that will enrich the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The fact that this deal will give material aid to Iran’s terrorist campaign against Israel while leaving open the door to it eventually gaining the ability to wipe out the Jewish state with a nuclear weapon ought to trouble President Obama’s supporters. Some, like The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, struggle to justify the blithe assertions from Obama that Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is “just a politician.” Obama and Secretary of State Kerry treat Khamenei’s ideology, statements and even Iran’s history of acting on his murderous goals as unimportant. They believe the chance for détente with the West, which is obviously in Iran’s best interests will always override other considerations.
Goldberg wrongly claims there are no real alternatives to the Iran deal but, unlike Obama, he understands that concerns about Iran are not purely the function of fear but rooted in reality. Just as important, he is aware that by framing the argument about Iran as one between “Jewish special interests” and “the rest of the world,” the administration and its cheerleaders are empowering anti-Semites in the Middle East as well as possibly here at home. Unfortunately, Goldberg is too much a prisoner of his own liberalism and support for Obama’s vision to draw the proper conclusions from this or the flaws in the Iran deal. He thinks it would be a good idea if it made more of an effort to signal that it knows it is dealing with vicious anti-Semites and terror supporters. But that is exactly what Obama and Kerry can’t do because they are so wedded to their vision of détente with those anti-Semites.
Which leads us back to Cohler-Esses’ story.
Let’s acknowledge that his piece is not an updated version of Roger Cohen’s disgraceful whitewash of Iranian anti-Semitism published in the New York Times in 2009. The Forward seems to be aware that by sending a reporter to Iran, it was opening itself up to a charge of engaging in that kind of pilgrimage journalism. There is enough context and disclaimers in the piece to insulate Cohler-Esses against accusations of being another Cohen, let alone a new Walter Duranty (who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times with reports from Stalin’s Soviet Union that denied the terror famine in Ukraine in order to burnish the image of the Communist state).
Cohler-Esses interviewed an interesting cross-section of Iranians and found that many were not interested in conflict with the United States or to wage war on anyone. Their attitudes toward the U.S. government and Israel were negative — and a product of Iranian government propaganda — but that vestiges of the gentler sentiments of pre-revolutionary Iran toward the Jews and perhaps even Americans are still there.
The Forward writer’s personal memories of life in Iran before the revolution (he taught English there for two years in the 1970s) make him far too sympathetic to his subject to be viewed as an objective observer of the nation. He seizes on any hint of moderation — whether toward accepting Israel’s existence or skepticism or opposition to the Iranian government — to give us an account of life in the country that puts such dissent in the context of a tyrannical state where human rights are not respected. It’s a sloppy mix of reporting, opinion and analysis that confuses as much as it enlightens. But for all of its problems and his obvious sympathy for the concept of détente with Iran, this is not a Duranty-style whitewash.
We shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of Iranians are willing to say things that contradict at least some of what their government puts out. After all, we all saw the pictures of tens of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran to protest a stolen election and the status quo in the summer of 2009. Who can blame them for hoping that more contacts with the West and the prosperity that the relaxation of sanctions will bring might make their lives better?
Yet Cohler-Esses’ interviews tell us nothing about the prospects for domestic change in Iran, let alone a halt to its foreign adventures.
After all, the proof of Iran’s “plot to destroy Israel” won’t be found in interviews with Iranians at Cyrus’s tomb or in bazaars. It can be found in Iran’s state media that broadcasts anti-Semitism or in Khamenei’s new book laying out his plans to eliminate the Jewish state. It can be found along Israel’s border with Gaza where Iranian funds and equipment are helping Hamas dig new tunnels to facilitate terror raids to murder and kidnap Jews. It can be found along Israel’s northern border as Iranian personnel help Hezbollah set up missile launching sites in Lebanon as well as Syria aimed at raining down terror on Israel towns and cities. And it can be found in Iran’s military and nuclear facilities, where nuclear research, whose only purpose is a bomb that would wipe out Israel, continues. Cohler-Esses can tell us nothing about any of this. Even worse, the administration and the Times are actively seeking to distract us from these truths.
The point about Iran is not that many of its people don’t want change but that they have no way to change their government’s policies. More to the point, far from undermining the theocratic regime, the influx of cash and business will strengthen its leaders and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their support for terror far more than it will enrich its people. That is why the nuclear deal is dangerous and why the push for détente that is the real point of administration policy is based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the Islamist state.
2a)
Congress Can Rewrite the Iran Deal
There is nothing unusual about doing this. The Senate has required changes in more than 200 submitted treaties before giving its consent.
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry claim that Congress has only two options for the Iran nuclear agreement: Approve it as is, or block it, and war results. Last week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) recommended a third option, to renegotiate the agreement. Noting the Iran deal’s many weaknesses, Mr. Schumer called for the U.S. government to strengthen sanctions and “pursue the hard-trodden path of diplomacy once more, difficult as it may be.”
This is a nonstarter for the administration. Mr. Obama warns that failure to approve the deal as is means that America will lose its “credibility as a leader of diplomacy,” indeed “as the anchor of the international system.” Mr. Kerry asserts that refusing to approve the deal would be inconsistent with “the traditional relationship” that has existed “between the executive and Congress.”
Nonetheless, Congress has flatly rejected international agreements signed by the executive branch at least 130 times in U.S. history. Twenty-two treaties were voted down. According to 1987 and2001 Congressional Research Service reports, the Senate has permanently blocked at least 108 other treaties by refusing to vote on them.
Moreover, the 1987 CRS report and an earlier study in the American Journal of International Law note that more than 200 treaties agreed by the executive branch were subsequently modified with Senate-required changes before receiving Senate consent and finally entering into force (examples below).
In the case of treaties, as the Senate website explains, the Senate may “make its approval conditional” by including in the resolution of ratification amendments, reservations, declarations, and understandings (statements that clarify or elaborate agreement provisions but do not alter them). “The president and the other countries involved must then decide whether to accept the conditions . . . in the legislation, renegotiate the provisions, or abandon the treaty.”
The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Mr. Obama signed in May, does not contain a provision for approval subject to conditions. However, a resolution of disapproval or separate legislation could specify what changes would be needed to meet congressional requirements. Since Congress can under the law reject the nuclear agreement outright, Iran and our negotiating partners should not be surprised if Congress takes the less drastic step of returning it to the president for renegotiation.
The historical precedents for Congress rejecting, or requiring changes to, agreements involve treaties or other legally binding international agreements. The Iran deal, formally titled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is unsigned and not legally binding. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly referred to it as a “ political agreement.” Nonbinding, unsigned political agreements receive less deference and are considered more flexible than treaties or other legally binding international agreements. Congress should be comfortable sending one back for renegotiation.
Several treaties that the Senate required be modified before ratification were with the Soviet Union. For example, the Threshold Test Ban Treaty and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty, both of which entered into force in 1990, had been blocked by senators who insisted on new provisions enhancing the U.S. ability to verify Soviet compliance. The Senate consented to ratification only after the two treaties were each augmented by new U.S.-Soviet side agreements making it easier for the U.S. to detect Soviet cheating. These renegotiations succeeded despite the fact that the Soviet Union, with its nuclear-armed missiles pointed at U.S. cities, had far more leverage than Iran does now.
The Obama administration has itself already renegotiated at least one international agreement in response to congressional opposition. In January 2009, the U.S. secretary of state and the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates signed a nuclear cooperation agreement. Some in Congress, including Rep. Howard Berman (D., Calif.), then House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, objected that the agreement didn’t ensure that the U.A.E. wouldn’t follow Iran’s footsteps and engage in uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing.
The Obama administration reopened the negotiations and by May 2009 had extracted from the U.A.E. a legally binding commitment not to engage in enrichment and reprocessing. The revised agreement soon entered into force.
In many other cases, the Senate has insisted on conditioning its consent to agreements even when they included numerous other participating countries. In 1997, the Senate resolution approving a modification to the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty with 22 participating countries (including Russia) contained 14 conditions, two of which addressed verification and compliance. The 1997 Senate resolution approving the Chemical Weapons Convention, with 87 participating countries, contained 28 conditions, many relating to verification and compliance. Neither agreement was derailed by the Senate’s conditions.
As Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge said many years ago, a Senate amendment to a treaty is “offered at a later stage of the negotiation by the other part of the American treaty-making power.”
Presidents typically resist when Congress sends them back to the negotiating table. As a 2001 CRS report put it, they regularly claim that an agreement “has been so delicately negotiated that the slightest change . . . would unbalance the package and kill the treaty.” That has not been true in an overwhelming majority of cases.
The Iran nuclear deal could be significantly improved by a supplementary agreement containing amendments and understandings designed to mitigate the deal’s key gaps and ambiguities regarding verification and compliance. This step would be consistent with the Constitution, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act and past U.S. diplomatic practice, and would be no surprise to the international community.
Mr. Kittrie is a law professor at Arizona State University, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former lead State Department attorney for nuclear affairs.
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3)-
The nuclear installations at Dimona.
(photo credit: Reuters)
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PA and Iran to work together against Israeli nukes
The nuclear installations at Dimona.(photo credit: Reuters)
The Palestinian Authority and Iran have agreed to work together to hold an international conference that would seek the nuclear disarmament of Israel, a senior PLO official who visited Tehran in the past few days said.
Ahmed Majdalani, member of the PLO Executive Committee, held talks in Tehran with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif and delivered a letter from PA President Mahmoud Abbas to Iran’s leader Hassan Rouhani.
Majdalani said on Monday his visit to Iran resulted in an agreement to revive the idea of an international conference to rid the region of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and weapons of mass destruction.
Voicing support for the nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers, Majdalani said the accord would create a positive atmosphere for ensuring security and stability in the Middle East.
The PLO official said his visit to Iran was aimed at refuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to Israel and peace. He claimed that Netanyahu was using the Iranian issue to avoid fulfilling Israel’s obligations toward the peace process.
The Palestinians are now hoping that the Palestinian issue will return to the center stage as the essence of the Middle East conflict.
Majdalani said his talks in Iran also focused on Israeli “assaults” against Palestinians; he accused the Israeli government of failing to work toward achieving peace with the Palestinians and expressed hope that Tehran would support Palestinian diplomatic moves in the international arena.
The rapprochement between the PA and Iran is also likely to pave the way for the restoration of the Palestinians’ ties with Syria. Relations between Syria and the Palestinians have been tense since the beginning of the civil war there.
Majdalani said the PA’s position toward the Syrian crisis is based on the need to find a peaceful, rather than military, solution. He said the Palestinians were very keen to see an end to the crisis because they have paid a heavy price due to the continuation of the civil war. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced since the beginning of the crisis in Syria in 2011.
An Israeli government official was concerned by the report, saying the PA’s alliance with Iran proves that its issue with Israel is not about borders or settlements, but rather the Jewish state’s right to exist.
“I would say the PA’s relationship with Iran, like its relationship with Hamas, is a matter of serous concern,” the official said. “Both Iran and Hamas believe the Jewish state should be obliterated.
They say so openly, that Israel should be destroyed. The fact that they feel comfortable forming alliances with Iran, raises questions about [the Palestinians’] own commitment to peace and reconciliation.”
Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.
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