From Tear Down This Wall To Tear Up That Deal! All Trump's Fault? Why Have A President? Mann Oh Mann!

Hell is just open.
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From tear down this wall to tear up this deal.

When and if we go to war with Iran it will be Trump's fault because he stood up to tyrants while Obama cowered. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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My law school days are long over but Trump is correct, the Washington Judge did not interpret the law he decided he would make law.  There is nothing Trump has done that violates the Constitution and this judge decided he knows more about our nation's security threats than the president.

If there ever was a case that justifies being reversed it is this one. Most of the District and Circuit Courts in California, Washington and Oregon are beyond liberal.

Trump's attack on the judge may give heartburn but think back to FDR when he tried to pack The Court and his comments about obstructionist Jurists.

Trump is right and the order will be reversed should higher courts come to their senses. If they cannot,  then why have a president? (See 2 below.)
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When it comes to challenging Climate Change Data, Mann oh Mann, don't even think about it! If a climate change believer comes up with a theory and backs it with hockey sticks you better accept it as gospel. (See 3 below.)
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Last night a nation gave a great standing and deserved ovation to Bush '41.
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Dick
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1) The Iran Deal Can’t Be Enforced

The agreement’s entire basis is appeasement. It merely ‘calls upon’ Tehran not to test missiles.

By John Bolton

Iran’s continued missile testing on Saturday has given President Trump one more reason to tear up his predecessor’s deal with the regime in Tehran. After Iran’s Jan. 29 ballistic-missile launch, the Trump administration responded with new sanctions and tough talk. But these alone won’t have a material effect on Tehran or its decades-long effort to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons.

The real issue is whether America will abrogate Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, recognizing it as a strategic debacle, a result of the last president’s misguided worldview and diplomatic malpractice. Terminating the agreement would underline that Iran is already violating it, clearly intends to continue pursuing nuclear arms, works closely with North Korea in seeking deliverable nuclear weapons, and continues to support international terrorism and provocative military actions. Escaping from the Serbonian Bog that Obama’s negotiations created would restore the resolute leadership and moral clarity the U.S. has lacked for eight years.

But those who supported the Iran deal, along with even many who had opposed it, argue against abrogation. Instead they say that America should “strictly enforce” the deal’s terms and hope that Iran pulls out. This would be a mistake for two reasons. First, the strategic miscalculations embodied in the deal endanger the U.S. and its allies, not least by lending legitimacy to the ayatollahs, the world’s central bankers for terrorism.

Second, “strictly enforcing” the deal is as likely to succeed as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Not only does the entire agreement reflect appeasement, but President Obama’s diplomacy produced weak, ambiguous and confusing language in many specific provisions. These drafting failures created huge loopholes, and Iran is now driving its missile and nuclear programs straight through them.

Take Tehran’s recent ballistic-missile tests. The Trump administration sees them as violating the deal. Iran disagrees. Let’s see what “strict enforcement” would really mean, bearing in mind that the misbegotten deal is 104 pages long, consisting of Security Council Resolution 2231 and two attachments: Annex A, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the main nuclear deal, known by the acronym JCPOA); and Annex B, covering other matters including ballistic missiles.

Annex B isn’t actually an agreement. Iran is not a party to it. Instead it is a statement by the Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany, intended to “improve transparency” and “create an atmosphere conducive” to implementing the deal. The key paragraph of Annex B says: “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons” for eight years.

Note the language I’ve italicized. Iran is not forbidden from engaging in all ballistic-missile activity, merely “called upon” to do so. The range of proscribed activity is distinctly limited, applying only to missiles “designed to be capable” of carrying nuclear weapons. Implementation is left to the Security Council.

The loopholes are larger than the activity supposedly barred. Iran simply denies that its missiles are “designed” for nuclear payloads—because, after all, it does not have a nuclear-weapons program. This is a palpable lie, but both the JCPOA and a unanimous Security Council accepted it. Resolution 2231 includes a paragraph: “Welcoming Iran’s reaffirmation in the JCPOA that it will under no circumstances ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” The ayatollahs have been doing precisely that ever since their 1979 revolution.

Finally, Resolution 2231 itself also merely “calls upon” Iran to comply with Annex B’s ballistic-missile limits, even as the same sentence says that all states “shall comply” with other provisions. When the Security Council wants to “prohibit” or “demand” or even “decide,” it knows how to say so. It did not here.

The upshot is very simple: Iran can’t violate the ballistic-missile language because it has reaffirmed that it doesn’t have a nuclear-weapons program. Really, what could go wrong?

These are weasel words of the highest order, coupled with flat-out misrepresentation by Iran and willful blindness by the United States. The Jell-O will not stick to the wall. The deal cannot be “strictly enforced.” And this is only one example of the slippery language found throughout the deal.

Pentagon sources have said that the missile Iran recently tested failed while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. This is telling. If the missile program were, as Iran claims, only for launching weather and communications satellites, there would be no need to test re-entry vehicles. The goal would be to put satellites in orbit and keep them there. But nuclear warheads obviously have to re-enter the atmosphere to reach their targets. The recent tests provide even more evidence of what Iran’s ballistic-missile program has always been about, namely supplying delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

Time always works on the side of nuclear proliferators, and the Iran deal is providing the ayatollahs with protective camouflage. Every day Washington lets pass without ripping the deal up is a day of danger for America and its friends. We proceed slowly at our peril.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).


1a) Trump wants to push back against Iran, but Iran is now more powerful than ever
BY Liz Sly and Loveday Morris

A long-range S-200 missile is fired in a military drill in the port city of Bushehr on the northern coast of Iran on Dec. 29, 2016. President Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, said the United States is “putting Iran on notice” after it test-fired a ballistic missile last week. (Amir Kholousi/AP)

BEIRUT — President Trump’s tough talk on Iran is winning him friends in the Arab world, but it also carries a significant risk of conflict with a U.S. rival that is now more powerful than at any point since the creation of the Islamic republic nearly 40 years ago.

With its warning last week that Iran is “on notice,” the Trump administration signaled a sharp departure from the policies of President Barack Obama, whose focus on pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran eclipsed historic U.S. concerns about Iranian expansionism and heralded a rare period of detente between Washington and Tehran.

Many in the region are now predicting a return to the tensions of the George W. Bush era, when U.S. and Iranian operatives fought a shadow war in Iraq, Sunni-Shiite tensions soared across the region and America’s ally Israel fought a brutal war with Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Except that now the United States will be facing down a far stronger Iran, one that has taken advantage of the past six years of turmoil in the Arab world to steadily expand its reach and military capabilities.

“In order to confront Iran or push back more fiercely against it, you may find you’re in a conflict far more far-reaching and more destructive to the global economy than many of our allies or American public are willing to bear,” said Nicholas Heras of the Center for a New American Security.

Iran’s alleged quest to produce a nuclear weapon — which Tehran has always denied — has been curbed by the nuclear accord signed in 2015. But in the meantime it has developed missiles capable of hitting U.S. bases and allies across the Middle East and built a network of alliances that have turned it into the most powerful regional player.

Iran now stands at the apex of an arc of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean, from the borders of NATO to the borders of Israel and along the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It commands the loyalties of tens of thousands in allied militias and proxy armies that are fighting on the front lines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen with armored vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons. They have been joined by thousands of members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s most prestigious military wing, who have acquired meaningful battlefield experience in the process.

For the first time in its history, the Institute for the Study of War noted in a report last week, Iran has developed the capacity to project conventional military force for hundreds of miles beyond its borders. “This capability, which very few states in the world have, will fundamentally alter the strategic calculus and balance of power within the Middle East,” the institute said.

America’s Sunni Arab allies, who blame the Obama administration’s hesitancy for Iran’s expanded powers, are relishing the prospect of a more confrontational U.S. approach. Any misgivings they may have had about Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric have been dwarfed by their enthusiasm for an American president they believe will push back against Iran.

“We are so happy and excited about President Trump,” said Abdullah al-Shamri, a former Saudi Arabian diplomat, speaking from the Saudi capital of Riyadh. “We expect him to deal with the Iranians as the threat that they are, producing missiles and interfering in other countries.”

Exactly what the Trump administration intends to do about a state of affairs that has already become deeply entrenched is unclear, however. So pervasive is Iran’s presence across the region that it is hard to see how any U.S. administration could easily roll it back without destabilizing allies, endangering Americans, undermining the war against the Islamic State and upsetting the new regional balance that emerged during the Obama administration’s retreat, analysts say.

The Trump administration has given no indication that it intends to abrogate the nuclear accord. Rather, U.S. officials say, the goal is to contain activities that lie outside the scope of the accord, such as the ballistic missile program and what one official called the “destabilizing activities” of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies.

So far, U.S. action has been confined to retaliation for Iran’s test-launch of a ballistic missile last week and an attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on a Saudi Arabian navy ship in the Red Sea. The Treasury imposed sanctions Friday against people and companies alleged to be involved in the missile program and the Pentagon dispatched the destroyer USS Cole to the coast of Yemen, suggesting that Iran’s arming of the Houthis may be an early target.

Otherwise, the Trump administration has given little indication of what it has in mind, except to make clear that it intends to be different from Obama.

“Iran is playing with fire — they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!” Trump wrote in a tweet Friday.

Iran has offered a relatively muted response to the challenge, with Iran’s foreign minister tweeting that Iran is “unmoved” by the threats emanating from Washington. “We’ll never initiate war,” he said.

Iran may well conclude that it is not in its interests to engage in confrontation with a new U.S. administration already earning a reputation for unpredictability, analysts say.

But those familiar with Iran’s behavior in the region have said that they do not believe it will readily surrender its gains. 

“Any pushing back, the Iranians won’t take it lying down,” predicted Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite Iraqi parliamentarian who has, for many years, worked to bridge the divide between Iran and America in Iraq.

“Iraq, Iran and the United States are an extremely finely balanced equation, and Trump shouldn’t come and bash,” he said. “He should play this extremely delicately.”

It is in Iraq, where fighting the Islamic State has most conspicuously brought the United States into a tacit alliance with Iran, that a more hostile relationship between Tehran and Washington could prove most consequential.

Iranian-backed militias are deeply embedded in the overall Iraqi effort to wrest back territory from the militants, one that is also being aided by the United States. In the Mosul offensive, hundreds of U.S. advisers are working alongside Iraqi troops advancing from the east, among about 6,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq. Thousands of Iranian-backed militia fighters are meanwhile advancing on the city from the west, among a force of tens of thousands that answers mostly, though not exclusively, to Iran.

One of the Iranian-backed groups fighting around Mosul is Kitaeb Hezbollah, which also blew up American troops with roadside bombs and fired mortars into U.S. bases at the height of U.S.-Iranian tensions a decade ago. It will not hesitate to attack U.S. troops should the United States attempt to diminish Iran’s role in Iraq, said Jaffar al-Hussaini, Kitaeb Hezbollah’s spokesman.

“We look at America as our first enemy, the source of all evil on the Earth,” he said. “American interests in Iraq are within our sights and our fire range. If they act foolishly, their interests will be wiped out . . . and we can target their bases whenever we want.”

It is also hard to see how the United States could act to curtail the extensive influence acquired by Iran during the war in Syria. Iran and Russia together have fought to ensure the survival of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and they are now pursuing a peace settlement in alliance with Turkey that excludes a role for the United States. America has been left with few friends and little leverage, apart from the Kurds in the northeast of the country.

Russia controls the skies over Syria, and Turkey wields influence over the rebels, but Iran holds sway on the ground, through its extensive network of Shiite militias drawn from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They have provided the manpower for front lines from the northern countryside of Aleppo, near the Turkish border, to the Golan Heights bordering Israel in the south.

Trump’s promises to curb Iranian influence are at odds with his stated desire to pursue closer cooperation with Russia in Syria and also to support Assad, because Iran is allied with both Assad and Russia, said Mustafa Alani, a director at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

“He will not be able to contain Iran if he is going to support Assad. He cannot have both at the same time,” he said. The solution, he said, is to topple Assad, because “Assad is the man who is underpinned by Iranian support. He was saved only by Iranian intervention.”

Alani sees no reason Trump should not easily be able to contain Iranian influence. 

“It is a myth that Iran is strong. The only reason Iran is strong is because of U.S. weakness,” he said. “Iran is very thinly stretched. It will not take a lot to contain Iran.”

But even those celebrating the shift in American policy don’t seem so sure. 

“Tehran today is challenged by a strict, driven, strong and decisive United States, which was not always the case with the lenient and hesitant Obama administration,” said a commentary Saturday in the Pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. “The region now faces turbulent winds of change. It will not be easy.”

Morris reported from Baghdad. Mustafa Salim in Baghdad also contributed to this report.

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2)Trump Restraining Order

He’s right on the law but his rants against a judge are offensive.

The damage from President Trump’s order on immigration and refugees continues to compound, now escalating into a conflict with the judicial branch. There’s enough bad behavior and blame to go around, but Mr. Trump didn’t need to court this altercation.

On Friday federal Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a nationwide temporary restraining order (TRO) on Mr. Trump’s suspension of U.S. entry for migrants from seven countries associated with terrorism risks. The Trump Administration is obeying and not enforcing its new immigration policy pending appeal of the TRO, so apparently the onset of fascism that we keep hearing about will be postponed by the Constitution’s normal checks and balances.

But Mr. Trump is exporting his politics-by-insult to the courts, writing on Twitter that “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” The more appropriate response to executive defeat in the courts is to say that the Administration is confident it will prevail on appeal, and especially in this case. Judge Robart’s TRO is remarkably flimsy.

Judges have the power to impose temporary restraining orders when the plaintiffs can show they are suffering irreparable injury and are likely to win on the merits. Judges have an obligation to explain why they are availing themselves of this extraordinary remedy and to work through the logic.

Judge Robart’s seven-page ruling includes no discussion or analysis, with only a cursory assertion of the harms that Washington and other states have conjured to “the operations and missions of their public universities and other institutions of higher learning, as well as injury to States’ operations, tax bases and public funds.”

The Constitution gives the federal government supremacy over immigration, and in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 Congress gave the President the exclusive authority to temporarily suspend “the entry of any class of aliens” that “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The first step for any judge is to determine if he has jurisdiction—that is, the plaintiffs have suffered concrete injuries that are grounds for a lawsuit. Speculative claims about state budgets and colleges don’t qualify. Thus Judge Robart’s TRO exceeds the limits on judicial power. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump Administration’s motion for an administrative stay that would have lifted Judge Robart’s order immediately, but the plaintiff—Washington State—must respond by Monday. Then a panel will decide whether to rule or hear oral arguments.

Mr. Trump’s rants against the judiciary are offensive to the rule of law, and perhaps also to his own case. Anyone who defies Mr. Trump these days becomes an overnight progressive folk hero—think Sally Yates—and the judicial liberals of the Ninth Circuit may rally around a bad ruling if they feel they have to defend the judiciary from presidential attack.

Even if the law is on his side, Mr. Trump and aides Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller created this mess with an executive order that was conceived in secret, sloppily written and overbroad, and sprung on a confused public. Breitbartian methods may work online but in the Oval Office they run up against political reality. When Mr. Trump indulges his worst impulses, he makes enemies out of potential friends and debacles out of should-be victories.

3) A Libel Suit Threatens Catastrophe 
for the Climate of Public Debate

Michael Mann sues to silence critics, and errant courts ignore the First Amendment to help him.

By MICHAEL A. CARVIN and ANTHONY DICK

The First Amendment provides robust protection for political and scientific debate, but it faces a new threat from a climate activist determined to silence his critics. In a case pending before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, Penn State professor Michael Mann is waging an aggressive campaign of lawfare, accusing of defamation those who dare to question his work. So far, the courts have given this assault on free speech a green light.

Mr. Mann is famous as the creator of the “hockey stick” graph, which portrays a dramatic trend in global warming over the past century. Numerous critics have cast doubt on the quality and accuracy of his work. They argue that his historical temperature proxies are unreliable, his data presentation misleading, and his statistical techniques skewed.

Even among those who support the theory of global warming, some have singled out Mr. Mann’s work as sloppy and exaggerated. David Hand, a former president of Britain’s Royal Statistical Society, has written that Mr. Mann’s technique “exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick,” which corresponds to the 20th-century temperature rise.

Not content to answer his critics in the public square, Mr. Mann has sued them. One target of his lawsuit is the political magazine National Review, which published a 270-word blog post criticizing Mr. Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent . . . ‘hockey-stick’ graph.” His lawsuit objects to the magazine’s decision to quote a critic who wrote that Mr. Mann “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”

National Review moved to dismiss the suit, citing a phalanx of Supreme Court precedent. The Constitution obviously does not allow crippling damages to be imposed for voicing one’s opinion, however vehemently or caustically. Punishing such criticism because a jury disagrees with it does not aid the search for truth, but impedes it by stifling conflicting views. As the liberal Justice William Brennan observed: “Truth may not be the subject of either civil or criminal sanctions where discussion of public affairs is concerned.” Such speech “is the essence of self-government.”

As a federal court once put it in the particular context of scientific controversies: “More papers, more discussions, better data, and more satisfactory models—not larger awards of damages—mark the path toward superior understanding of the world around us.” Even a meritless defamation suit can be an effective weapon to intimidate critics and shut down debate through ruinous litigation costs.

In this case the trial court refused to dismiss Mr. Mann’s libel suit. Judge Natalia Combs Greene ruled that the defamation claims were “likely” to succeed because “to call his work a sham or to question his intellect and reasoning is tantamount to an accusation of fraud,” when in fact Mr. Mann “has been investigated by several bodies (including the EPA)” which determined that his research was “sound and not based on misleading information.” For procedural reasons, the case was reassigned to Judge Frederick Weisberg, who largely adopted Judge Greene’s reasoning.

Appellate courts, which exist to reverse such legal error, in this case compounded it. National Review was supported in friend-of-the-court briefs by such unlikely allies as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Washington Post and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Yet a panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals—Judges Vanessa Ruiz,Corinne Beckwith and Catharine Easterly—held in December that Mr. Mann’s suit should proceed to a jury. The court again relied on various “official” investigations that had cleared Mr. Mann of misconduct, including an inquiry by the federal government. Speech that disagrees with the government is at the core of the First Amendment’s protection—though not in this court’s topsy-turvy world.

National Review has filed a petition for rehearing along with its co-defendants, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg. If the full court of appeals does not correct the error and end this assault on the First Amendment, the case will doubtless proceed to the Supreme Court.

Those hoping Mr. Mann prevails because they agree with him about global warming are missing the point. If he succeeds in diminishing the right to free speech, he and his fellow climate activists have just as much to lose. Mr. Mann has attacked his critics for peddling “pure scientific fraud,” engaging in what he calls “the fraudulent denial of climate change,” and taking “corporate payoffs for knowingly lying about the threat climate change posed to humanity.” He accused Fox News of trying to “mislead its viewers” through a “deceptive” report about climate change.

None of this is particularly polite, but it is common in the cut-and-thrust of public debate. If such caustic criticism is now to be fair game for legal action, big oil companies and other well-heeled interests can launch their own lawsuits asking juries in Texas or Oklahoma to silence Mr. Mann and his allies.

The logic of Mr. Mann’s position threatens to convert political and scientific debate into a litigation free-for-all, with all sides seeking to sue one another into submission instead of resolving differences through the free exchange of ideas. For those who care about the spirit of open inquiry at the heart of the scientific enterprise, it is scarcely possible to imagine a greater legal disaster than the prospect of Mr. Mann’s succeeding on his claims.

Messrs. Carvin and Dick are Washington lawyers. They represent National Review in Mr. Mann’s lawsuit. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++