Heading out today. If you're on Interstate 95, heading south, and you're driving slowly, please get out of the left lanes. Let's kick this last pre-Easter Jolt off with some good news . . . We Won't Have Harry Reid to Kick Around for Much Longer!
Good riddance! Senator Harry Reid, the tough tactician who has led Senate Democrats since 2005, will not seek re-election next year, bringing an end to a three-decade congressional career that culminated with his push of President Obama's ambitious agenda against fierce Republican resistance. That is a fantastic open-seat opportunity for Republicans, who mopped the floor with Democrats in the 2014 elections in Nevada. This is really good news for Senator Brian Sandoval. I mean, Governor Brian Sandoval. I mean, for now. Just When You Thought the Iran Deal Couldn't Get Worse . . . No. No. No, no, no. The president of the United States does not get to unilaterally consign us and our closest ally in the Middle East to a doomed future of trying to placate nuclear-armed apocalyptic Iranian mullahs. The deal seems to get worse every day. At this point, our only hope is that it gets so bad that our allies who are closer to Iran can't go along with it, and our president is left signing a deal that Great Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and the rest can't accept. That might make the deal more obvious for what it is -- a presidential permission slip to assemble the material for a bomb, as long as they don't assemble the bomb itself -- and make it effectively expire January 20, 2017. If the centrifuges are not for weapons purposes, why does Iran need to keep them in a fortified bunker protected from airstrikes? The United States is considering letting Tehran run hundreds of centrifuges at a once-secret, fortified underground bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites, officials have told The Associated Press. The trade-off would allow Iran to run several hundred of the devices at its Fordo facility, although the Iranians would not be allowed to do work that could lead to an atomic bomb and the site would be subject to international inspections, according to Western officials familiar with details of negotiations now underway. In return, Iran would be required to scale back the number of centrifuges it runs at its Natanz facility and accept other restrictions on nuclear-related work. Instead of uranium, which can be enriched to be the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, any centrifuges permitted at Fordo would be fed elements such as zinc, xenon, or germanium for separating out isotopes used in medicine, industry, or science, the officials said. The number of centrifuges would not be enough to produce the amount of uranium needed to produce a weapon within a year — the minimum time-frame that Washington and its negotiating partners demand. We were assured the deal would be contingent upon full Iranian cooperation with inspections . . . well, actually, maybe not: Under the new plan, Tehran wouldn't be expected to immediately clarify all the outstanding questions raised by the IAEA in a 2011 report on Iran's alleged secretive work. A full reckoning of Iran's past activities would be demanded in later years as part of a nuclear deal that is expected to last at least 15 years. The current plan is that we're going let Iran enrich uranium from a fortified underground bunker. If this is the compromise, what did we talk them down from? Letting them build a nuclear facility in Manhattan to save on shipping costs? Obama Contemplates Turning His Back on Chicago & Rahm Emanuel There's that traditional Obama loyalty: Barack and Michelle Obama are seriously considering moving to New York after his presidency, and building the Obama Library at the city's Columbia University, sources told BuzzFeed News. Columbia's bid on the library — and the notion of the Obamas in New York — has been widely viewed as a kind of courtesy to the Big Apple, with the universal assumption among even the Obamas' inner circle that the couple would move back to Chicago in January 2017. But sources familiar with the process said their thinking has changed in recent months, the result both of messy Chicago politics and a personal craving for a new beginning when they leave the White House for the last time as residents. The first family fears the Chicago they left is not one they want to return to, and a source close to the family said the long-shot New York library bid has emerged as a serious alternative. What, did they hear the mayor was a real jerk with temper-control issues? Or have the teachers' unions decreed that Rahm is now persona non grata for all progressives of good standing? Oh, I get it now. There's just too much gun violence in Chicago. Here's the counter-offer: Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently fighting for his political life in a heated run-off campaign, floated the idea Wednesday of naming an airport after the Windy City's favorite son: President Barack Obama. The Rage-Inducing Need to Overhaul All of Society . . . Mostly on the Left, but . . . Here's a really smart observation from Robert Tracinski as he contrasts (most) Christians, most individualists, and progressives and statists: For the secular leftist, the end state (as ideal as things can get) is social and necessarily political. It is all about getting everybody else on board and herding them into his imagined utopia. There are so many "problematic" aspects of life that need to be reengineered, so many vast social systems that need to be overthrown and replaced. But the rest of us are all screwing it up, all the time, through our greed, our denial, our apathy, our refusal to listen to him banging on about his tired socialist ideology. For the Christian, the ideal end state is safely in the next world and therefore is never in doubt. For the individualist, it's in his own life, and it's mostly under his direct control. For the leftist, however, it is all outside his control. It requires other people, a lot of other people, and those SOBs usually refuse to cooperate. Talk about rage-inducing. If the whole focus of your life is on getting everybody else to agree with you on every detail of your politics and adopt your plans for a perfect society, then you're setting yourself up to be at war with most of the human race most of the time. Which means an awful lot for the Angry Left to get angry about. There's a flip side to that last observation, by the way. The constituency for socially conservative big government -- those who want to use the power of government to further socially conservative ends -- isn't particularly big, but it does let out some rumbling every now and then. There are periodically not-so-influential conservatives who follow in the footsteps of Tipper Gore and call for the banning of music, movies, images, and artwork they don't like. "Sin taxes" remain popular with some Republican governors. Apparently a long while back Mike Huckabee expressed support for a complete ban on cigarettes. There are always going to be young punks who don't sufficiently appreciate their country; this isn't to say that mandatory national service for all citizens is an appropriate tool to rectify this. Some Republicans voted for a bill that included a provision to study "whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed." When you see government overreach in America today, nine times out of ten it's coming from the Left. But that doesn't mean conservatives of all stripes shouldn't resist the temptation of using government to . . . immanentize the eschaton. ADDENDA: This is the last Morning Jolt until April 6. Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and any other holidays you have in the coming days. Finally, be wary about any shocking news headlines on Wednesday. | 
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