RUTHFULLY YOURS

Give Ayatollah Ali Khamenei credit for knowing his opposition. Two weeks ago the Supreme Leader declared that Western sanctions had to be lifted immediately as a condition of a nuclear deal. And sure enough, on Friday President Obama said Iran would get significant sanctions relief immediately upon signing a deal.

The Ayatollah knows that Mr. Obama wants an agreement with Iran so much that there’s almost no concession the President won’t make. So why not keep asking for more?
***Keep in mind that the talks began with the U.S. and its European partners demanding that Iran dismantle its nuclear program. But to persuade the Ayatollah to accept the recent “framework” accord, Mr. Obama has already conceded that Iran can keep enriching uranium, that it can maintain 5,060 centrifuges to do the enriching, that its enriched-uranium stockpiles can stay inside Iran, that the once-concealed facilities at Fordow and Arak can stay open (albeit in altered form), and that Iran can continue doing research on advanced centrifuges.

As the Framers knew, we are unlikely to outgrow human nature. So what happens when we decide we’ve outgrown a Constitution designed to protect us from human nature’s foibles? The question arises, yet again, thanks to Senator Bob Corker. The Tennessee Republican, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is author — along with Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) — of a ballyhooed bipartisan bill that is being touted as the derailment of President Obama’s plan to trample congressional prerogatives en route to a calamitous “deal” that will facilitate jihadist Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions. (I use scare-quotes because the so-called deal is still a work in regress.) So guess who now supports this stalwart congressional resistance to our imperial president? Why none other than . . . yes . . . Barack Obama!

You think maybe, just maybe, the Corker bill isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be?

You’d be right. When you read the legislation, it becomes apparent that Senator Corker is simply channeling his inner Mitch McConnell.

WHO TRUSTS Iran? Most Americans don’t. According to two new polls, a majority of the public strongly doubts that the ruling theocrats in Tehran can be counted on to keep their end of any nuclear deal negotiated in the US-led “P5+1” talks in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Asked in a Fox News poll how much of Iran’s claims on nuclear matters can be trusted, 55 percent of respondents replied that the United States “can’t trust anything” the regime says, while 28 percent were willing to trust only “a little.” Similarly, a survey by NBC News found that 68 percent of Americans consider Iran unlikely to abide by any nuclear agreement.

Nothing unusual there. Given Iran’s long history of deceit, it would be strange if Americans and their allies didn’t regard as worthless any nuclear promises the mullahs make.

Brussels, April 19 – Fresh on the heels of yet another brutal video clip featuring a mass-execution of “infidels” by Islamic State fighters, sixteen Foreign Ministers of the European Union decided to address the danger by voting to mark products produced in Israeli settlements.

IS militants in Libya conducted two mass executions this week, beheading one group of Ethiopians and Eritreans along the Mediterranean coast and shooting the other. Dozens of victims were killed in the two incidents, which were filmed and distributed to international media. In response, the EU ministers vowed to take measures to protect those threatened by IS barbarism, and determined that the best way to prevent recurrences of mass beheadings in Syria, Iraq, and Libya would be to apply a distinctive label to all products imported into EU nations from areas in the West Bank where Jews live.

Israel analysts shocked by Obama’s comments on sanctions, S-300 supply‘This is the new America. We had better get used to it,’ says TV commentator after president leaves door open to Iran’s sanctions demand, defends Putin’s missile sale

There was no immediate official Israeli response to the president’s comments, which were made after the start of Shabbat in Israel, when politicians generally do not work.

“Jaws dropped” around the studio, said the Channel 10 News diplomatic commentator Ben Caspit, as news broke of Obama’s declared empathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to supply Tehran with the S-300 missile defense system.

I had no idea this conference took place…please see who participated….. as well as Ralph “Nadir” (synonyms: lowest point, lowest level, all-time low, bottom, rock-bottom) of American Israel bashers….rsk
Following the heavy coverage of AIPAC’s (the virulently pro-Israeli government lobby) multi-day annual Washington convention in March, the mainstream media might have been interested for once in covering alternative viewpoints like those discussed at the April 10th conference “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it Good for Israel?” (Israellobbyus.org). Fairness and balance in reporting should produce at least some coverage of such an event.

Organized by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which was launched about thirty years ago by a British Army Officer who served in World War II and two retired U.S. Ambassadors to countries in the Middle East (wrmea.org), the day-long program at the prestigious National Press Club should have been intriguing to reporters. After all, are they not interested in important, taboo-challenging presentations on a critical dimension of U.S. foreign and military policy?

The presenters were much more newsworthy than most of the speakers at the AIPAC convention who redundantly restated the predictable AIPAC line. “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it Good for Israel?” had presenters ranging from the courageous, principled columnist, Gideon Levy of Israel’s best and most serious newspaper, Haaretz; Princeton Professor emeritus of international law and the former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian territories, Richard Falk; former members of Congress, Paul Findley (R-IL) and Nick Rahall (D-WV); author and an Israeli general’s son, Miko Peled; Dr. Jack Shaheen, the award-winning author documenting stereotypes of Arabs and Arab-Americans in Hollywood and the U.S. media; and even a former AIPAC supporter M. J. Rosenberg (mjrosenberg.net) who witnessed the power of AIPAC money as both a congressional staffer and later an AIPAC senior staffer in the nineteen eighties.

First the right stuff:

The GOP’s hawks were well represented at the event, led by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has limited foreign policy experience but articulated a muscular vision during his Saturday keynote address. Walker said the threats posed by radical Islamic terrorism won’t be handled simply with “a couple bombings.”
“We’re not going to wait till they bring the fight to us,” Walker said. “We’re going to bring the fight to them and fight on their soil.” And Rubio is right up there in just about everything.

Then the blather:

Jeb Bush:”Our enemies need to fear us, a little bit, just enough for them to deter the actions that create insecurity,” Bush said earlier in the conference. He said restoring alliances “that will create less likelihood of America’s boots on the ground has to be the priority, the first priority of the next president.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham addressed the question of putting U.S. troops directly in the battle against the Islamic State group militants by saying there is only one way to defeat the militants: “You go over there and you fight them so they don’t come here.”

New York Rep. Peter King said: “If America becomes isolationist, if America sits back from its responsibilities, that gap is going to be filled by enemies.”

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina offered a similar outlook. “The world is a more dangerous and more tragic place when America is not leading. And America has not led for quite some time,” she said.

After eight years of a president who has hung Israel out to dry, American Jews might be expecting some relief at the 2016 election.

After eight years of a president who has hung Israel out to dry, American Jews might be expecting some relief at the 2016 election. Surely, they might be thinking (unless they are the 70-odd percent of US Jews who voted for President Obama) anyone else can only be an improvement? Enter Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this week, to the surprise of no one who has not spent the past two decades on Mars, Hillary announced she would be running for president.

To be more precise, she is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination – but then if you’re Hillary, humility is not your thing. Since her husband, Bill, was in power, she has behaved as if her own eventual succession to the White House was part of the divine right of kings.

Something’s in the air, and it’s not just the normal spring rituals of protests, love and allergies. It’s the unsettling sound of radicalism tearing America apart.

Ideas that only recently were relegated to the fringes are now going mainstream. And policies that were settled, established norms are under vicious assault.

Here’s the real shocker: The radicals are not limited to Occupy Wall Street and other anarchists demonstrating against cops, capitalism and all authority. Instead, respected public figures and government officials who would normally defend the establishment are leading the charge against it.

Take the growing New York movement to opt out of standardized student tests. While unions are protesting the use of tests for teacher evaluations, many middle-class parents are joining them.

Indeed, the most prominent opt-out leader is Rob Astorino, the county executive of Westchester County and last year’s GOP gubernatorial nominee.

Astorino, who presides over a suburban bastion of orderly and manicured prosperity, wants to repeal the Common Core standards adopted by New York and more than 40 other states. He boasted that he and his wife, a special-ed teacher, withheld their children from the exams for the second year because the tests “are poorly and secretly devised, developmentally inappropriate, disruptive to wider learning, and federally rather than locally engineered, among other concerns.”

http://www.cv6.org/1942/doolittle/doolittle.htm “THIS FORCE IS BOUND FOR TOKYO-TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND HIS GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, 13 April 1942 In the wake of shock and anger following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt pressed his military planners for a strike against Tokyo. Intended as revenge for Pearl Harbor, and […]