Great News! Obama’s Drawing a New ‘Red Line’ with Iran! We Can Relax Now!
Morning Jolt March 03, 2015 Great News! Obama's Drawing a New 'Red Line' with Iran! We Can Relax Now! Fascinatingly, President Obama walks around completely unaware of how little credibility he has left -- with skeptics in both parties, with the American public, with our allies, or with our enemies. Here's his latest assurance on his rapidly-forming deal with the Iranian regime: Iran must commit to a verifiable freeze of at least 10 years on sensitive nuclear activity for a landmark atomic deal to be reached, but the odds are still against sealing a final agreement, U.S. President Barack Obama told Reuters on Monday. A ten-year freeze . . . and then what? There was once a time when Obama said Iran could "never" have a nuclear weapon. Now we're leaving the door opened a crack. Obama's comment about the time frame for a freeze represents one of the U.S. government's strongest signals yet of its red line for a successful deal. Ah. It's a "red line." How reassuring. "If, in fact, Iran is willing to agree to double-digit years of keeping their program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist ... if we've got that, and we've got a way of verifying that, there's no other steps we can take that would give us such assurance that they don't have a nuclear weapon," he said. Trust but verify, eh? Except we know -- and President Obama himself has announced in the past -- that the Iranians cheat, lie, and hide their nuclear program! They built a secret uranium-enrichment plant deep inside a mountain. Why are we so confident they won't try the same trick, or a different trick, again? The U.S. goal is to make sure "there's at least a year between us seeing them try to get a nuclear weapon and them actually being able to obtain one," Obama said in the interview, carefully timed by the White House a day ahead of Netanyahu's polarizing speech to Congress. Think about it -- breakout capacity within one year, and that's if they don't cheat! The new explanation is that this is an "alarm system" . . . except this is a fire alarm system that the fire can choose to disable any time it wants. Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), author of legislation that would trigger new sanctions on Iran if negotiations fail to reach agreement on its nuclear program, harshly criticized the Obama administration's current position in the talks on Monday night as "simply not good enough." "It is not a good deal if it leaves Iran as a threshold nuclear state, or if Iran decides to kick out inspectors," Menendez told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. "It's not a good deal if Iran proceeds on a covert path and we have no more than a year to respond. It's not enough time for us to do anything other than exercise a military option." "Here we are, near the end of negotiations, and the goal posts have moved from dismantlement to reconfiguration, Menendez said. "From a peaceful nuclear program to just enough to detect break out. From no right-to-enrichment to getting an alarm system." Menendez also pointed out that United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron came to Capitol Hill to "lobby Congress against Iran sanctions," and raised a good point: If it's fine for one allied prime minister to come to Congress and speak his mind on a mutual interest, why is it not okay for Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to do the same? You may recall the Constitution giving the U.S. Senate the power to ratify treaties. The Obama administration insists, in defiance of our own eyes, that any deal with Iran is "only an agreement, not a formal treaty." The deal is bad, secret, and unconstitutional all at the same time. Quite a feat.
Hillary Doesn't Think the Rules, or Laws, Apply to Her This morning, in Hillary news . . . She violated the law by using private e-mails… Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton's advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary's post in early 2013. Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach. Sean Davis points out Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution actually bans foreign payola for U.S. officials. The constitutional ban on foreign cash payments to U.S. officials is known as the Emoluments Clause and originated from Article VI of the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of the clause was to prevent foreign governments from buying influence in the U.S. by paying off U.S. government officials. Here's the text of the clause: No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. Internet Trolls Awaken to Find Curt Schilling at the Foot of Their Beds A public service announcement: Do not ever mess with the daughter of former Major League Baseball star Curt Schilling. Some particularly idiotic young men sent some vile messages at her, thinking that there would be no consequence. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but an irate dad determined to protect his daughter offers a fury that's probably exactly like Hell. After identifying some of the perpetrators, Schilling observed: This is a generation of kids who have grown up behind the monitor and keyboard. The real world has consequences when you do and say things about others. We're at a point now where you better be sure who you're going after. If I was a deranged protective dad I could have been face to face with any of these people in less than 4 hours. I know every one of their names, their parents, where they go to school, what they do, what team they are on, their positions, stats, all of it. I had to do almost nothing to get ANY of that information because it is all public. What part of talking about a young woman, my daughter or not, makes you even consider the possibility that this is either funny or makes you tough? I found it rather funny at how quickly tone changed when I heard via email from a few athletes who'd been suspended by their coaches. Gone was the tough guy tweeter, replaced by the "I'm so sorry" apology used by those only sorry because they got caught. It was EXACTLY like the Scared Straight episodes you watch where "tough" kids get brought to tears when they face the real world. What these kids are failing to realize, what this generation fails to realize is this; Everything they've just said and done? That is out there now, forever. It can, and in some cases will, follow them for the rest of their lives . . . These aren't thugs, tough guys or bad asses, these aren't kids who've had it rough, they aren't homeless or orphans, these are pretty much ALL white, affluent, college attending children, and I mean children. A mistake is tweeting once and saying "damn, I'm an idiot" and taking it down. These guys? They're making conscious choices to cyberbully an amazing and beautiful young woman on the internet, that none of them know by the way, because they don't like her dad or they somehow think saying words you can teach a 5 year old is tough . . . ADDENDA: Brian Cates writes about how Andrew Breitbart wanted to see an army of citizen journalists. Tom Wolfe, with a lesson on the importance of putting ideas down on paper: His first magazine assignment, for instance, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." (Wolfe says the title quickly and effortlessly, like one long, krazy word.) He was thirty-five, "too old to have gone through this," and he "had total writer's block." His editors finally told him to send his notes, " 'and we'll give them to a real writer'—they didn't say 'real'—'to put into proper form.' And with a very heavy heart, I said O.K. and I sat down to write out the notes." Within a couple of hours, he says, he thought, "Hey, I can make something out of this."
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