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The Dangerous Fantasy behind Obama’s Iran Deal By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

On January 16, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that Iran had satisfied the conditions necessary to achieve a lifting of most international sanctions under its nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In exchange for reducing its number of operational uranium-enrichment centrifuges, sending most of its enriched uranium out of the country, and removing the core of a plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor, Iran received approximately $150 billion in sanctions relief, and the United States returned $400 million in Iranian funds it seized in 1979, plus $1.3 billion in interest. The same day, Iran released five Americans it had held prisoner in exchange for the release of seven Iranian criminals held by the United States.

The White House and its supporters did victory laps, arguing that Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal and its willingness to swap prisoners had proven the wisdom of the president’s Iran policy. But there are many reasons to believe that these developments, far from strengthening American national security, are actually dangerous wins for Iran.

Before all else, it should be noted that American officials had to relax certain requirements of the deal so Iran could receive sanctions relief in the first place. Language barring the testing of ballistic missiles was removed from the agreement’s text and buried in the annex to a UN Security Council resolution. The U.S. also dropped a stipulation that Iran resolve questions about its past nuclear activities, choosing to address those questions in a secret side deal between the IAEA and Iran. As a result, even though Iran conducted two ballistic-missile tests last fall and did not fully cooperate with an IAEA investigation into its nuclear history, the IAEA was able to certify that Tehran met the Implementation Day requirements to have sanctions lifted because these issues had been dropped from the agreement.

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Dear Trump Voters, Your Darling Is a Two-Timing Cad By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

Dear Trump Voter,

For several months now, you have heard people such as me criticizing you for your zealous devotion to Donald Trump. We have pointed out that Donald Trump’s policy preferences, on matters ranging from abortion to taxes to private-property rights, are closer to Hillary Clinton’s than to those of any Republican in the last half-century. We have pointed out that Donald appears to have no particular knowledge of most of the subjects that would occupy his time as America’s chief executive; nor does he exhibit any particular inclination to study up. We have noted his strongman tendencies, his penchant for scurrilous personal insults, and his general megalomania.

We have noted these things, and much more — and yet you refuse to leave his side.

We understand the attraction. You feel small and under siege, and Donald seems manly and strong. He has money and “astonishingly excellent” health and a really big tower. He is fecund with barbs and insults.

If we thought this relationship were healthy, we would support you. We only want you to be happy, prosperous, and in the lowest tax-bracket possible. But we — well, we were in Sioux City, Iowa, this weekend, and we think you need to know what your Donald really thinks of you:

The polls, they say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.

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Trump Doesn’t Have a Clue about America’s Enemies By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

The presidency’s most crucial duty is the protection of American national security. Yet, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt months into his campaign, Donald Trump did not know the key leaders of the global jihad. The man who would be commander-in-chief was unfamiliar with Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who has been murdering Americans for over 30 years; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s longtime deputy who has quite notoriously commanded al-Qaeda since the network’s leader was killed by U.S. forces in 2011; and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State (ISIS) and a jihadist so globally notorious that many teenagers are aware of him.

Of course a man who wants to be president should make it his business to know such things. But even the casual fan who does not know the players without a scorecard at least knows who the teams are and why they are competing. Trump failed even that basic test, confusing the Kurds (a minority ethnic group beleaguered by ISIS) with the Quds Force (the elite operatives of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).

​The global jihad is complex, comprising terrorist organizations and abettors that include rogue nations and other shady accomplices. Their fluid alliances and internecine rivalries often defy the Sunni–Shiite divide. Matters are complicated further still by ideological allies such as the Muslim Brotherhood that feign moderation while supporting the jihadist agenda. The threat is openly aggressive on its own turf but operates by stealth in the West. A president may not have to be good with names to oppose it effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

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Deviancy in Billions By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

I turned off “Billions” a minute after its opening scene of a bound, chained and muffled Paul Giamatti engaged in some S & M sex. My beef is not with what consenting adults do to each other in the game of arousal – it’s that since I don’t consider victimless perversions any of my business, I similarly choose not to watch or be implicated in them. I subsequently heard that the episode which involved burning and urination turned out to be between husband and wife. Instead of softening my reaction, this reinforced my resistance to being a voyeur of other people’s masochistic fantasies. Though the creators of Billions beg the issue of pushing boundaries between porn and regular tv by making the participants a happily married couple, the viewer is the one being exploited. This belief was sustained after watching the second episode of Billions in which all the characters – male and female – sprinkle their dialogue with heavy doses of language similar to the gangsters on The Sopranos.

Just as men have been convinced by fashion to sport the unshaved, grizzled look for the past few years, writers have succumbed to the notion that it enhances the macho quality of their highly educated characters to hyphenate all their words with the F word. So we have the US attorney and of his female associate speaking the same way that uneducated and inarticulate characters do. There are no longer distinctions in language that would normally signify differences in class, education, gender and profession. Watching Billions, I thought of the difference between programming for PBS and for cable channels and the duplicity of pretending that what is being shown on Showtime is simply a reflection of reality. In the name of nostalgie de la boue, there is a conscious effort to degrade the more educated proponents of lawful society so that their behavior becomes no different from the criminal element. In some ways, this is the reverse of what David Chase did in The Sopranos where murderous criminals lived upper-class lifestyles – decorating their Mcmansions, consulting psychiatrists and concerning themselves with getting their children into Ivy League schools. This was a clever way of appealing to the target audience that would pay for a premium cable channel and remain interested in the affairs of organized crime.

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Segregationist Nihilism The Oscar nominations have brought a corrosive racial politics to the fore. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

The Oscar nominations have brought a corrosive racial politics to the fore.
By Victor Davis Hanson — January 26, 2016

One of the stranger demands of various campus affiliates of Black Lives Matter was the call for “safe spaces.”

That is a euphemism for designated racially segregated areas.

In such zones, particular minority groups are reassured that no white students or faculty could enter — and thus by their mere presence supposedly remind them of institutionalized white bias.

Left unmentioned is the surreal college enforcement of such segregation. What will happen if a half-white student, or a Brazilian, Peruvian, or Syrian foreign student, wanders into a safe space designated for blacks? Does the Dean of Diversity — presumably dressed in a sport coat with elbow patches rather than appearing as Lester Maddox with a bat — call security to expel the miscreants for their racist assumption that there should not be private areas set off by race?

Does the dean have a handy color-coded wheel he can pull out to place next to the arm of the would-be intruder to verify whether the bounder is guilty of being white? Do courts go back to the 1940s racial zoning laws for legal precedents for sustaining racially separate safe spaces on public campuses? And in reaction, do so-called white students then mark off their own racially designated areas — perhaps permissible if called “unsafe spaces”?

The old idea of racial and ethnic healing through interaction, assimilation, integration, and intermarriage has become passé in the era of Obama. The president, after all, has given us everything from “typical white person” and Trayvon Martin as the son he never had to Rev. Wright’s venom and Eric Holder’s “my people.”

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Palestinians: Is Abbas Losing Control? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

If Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas loses control of his Fatah faction, who gets to comfort him? Could it be his erstwhile rivals in Hamas?

Abbas seems firm in his refusal to pave the way for the emergence of a new leadership in the West Bank. A split within Fatah in the West Bank seems the inevitable result. Gaza’s Fatah leaders are furious with Abbas. The deepening divisions among Fatah could drive Fatah cadres in the Gaza Strip into the open arms of Hamas.

“The talk about Fatah-Hamas reconciliation is nothing but a smokescreen to conceal the growing discontent with President Abbas’s autocratic rule.” — Palestinian official.

Fatah is Israel’s purported “peace partner” — the faction spearheading efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state. Decision-makers in the U.S. and Europe might wish to keep abreast of the solvency of Abbas’s Fatah faction when they consider the wisdom of the two-state solution.

If Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas loses control of his Fatah faction, who gets to comfort him? Could it be his erstwhile rivals in Hamas?

Abbas has been facing increasing criticism in the past weeks from senior Fatah officials in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It seems that they have tired of his autocratic-style rule. Some of them, including Jibril Rajoub and Tawfik Tirawi, have even come out in public against the PA president, demanding that he share power enough at least to appoint a deputy president.

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The Spreading Scent of Cologne by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

What appals so many onlookers is that this damage to European societies is being done with open eyes and listening ears, and that many lessons have not been learned.

The mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve, and many through the year, are clearly the work of single, mainly young men. In packs, people can more easily give in to anti-social tendencies, but these men from North Africa and the Middle East seem to bring with them social attitudes that make it hard for them to conform with European notions of what is, and what is not, criminal or decent.

Muslim hate speakers are given free rein to address students at many British universities. The double-standard is that the same universities have banned controversial but important speakers or just about anybody who supports the state of Israel. And if speakers are not actually banned, hordes of ideologically-inspired students and outsiders will turn up to disrupt their lectures with shouts, screams, and threats.

The city of Cologne, still famous for its scented water, has become, since last New Year’s Eve, best known for the depredations and misogyny of a growing population of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The events of that evening, when hundreds of women were assaulted, manhandled, and even raped by thousands of migrant newcomers who could not be restrained by the police, spread across the world in days if not hours.

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Following Danes and Swiss, Germans Now Confiscating Cash and Valuables from ‘Migrants’ By Michael Walsh

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

As it dawns on Germans that they’ve been had in more ways than one, local governments within the Federal Republic are gradually beginning to come to their senses. Although the evil that Angela Merkel has done will live on long after she is gone, the only way that Germany can hope to preserve its culture, language and traditions in the face of an alien demographic tidal wave is to crack down now. A first step:

Germany has begun taking cash and sentimental jewellery from wealthier refugees in return for aid. The measure has been introduced to pay for the more than 1.1million migrants who have entered the European country last year. It is a move that was initiated in Denmark and Switzerland, where assets worth more than 1,300 euros (£992) and 900 euros (£687), respectively, are taken from those coming into the countries seeking refuge.

In Bavaria, Germany, refugees are now only allowed to keep cash and items worth 750 euros (£578), according to The Times. Tougher measures are in place in Baden-Wurttemberg, were authorities will take any over 350 euros (£270), the Daily Express reports. Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrman said: ‘The practice in Bavaria and the federal rules set out in law correspond in substance with the process already in place in Switzerland.

Of course, there is the usual whining from leftist “advocates,” but this is just their usual smokescreen for what they really desire, which is a borderless First World thrown open to its historic enemies, and the destruction of western civilization.

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Perfect Democrat Headline: Noam Chomsky Tells Al Jazeera He’d Vote for Hillary By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

Via Politico:

Noam Chomsky would “absolutely” choose Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee if he lived in a swing state, but her primary challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, “doesn’t have much of a chance,” the MIT professor and intellectual said in a recent interview.

Chomsky, who lives in the blue state of Massachusetts, said he would vote for Clinton if he lived in a swing state such as Ohio.

“Oh absolutely…my vote would be against the Republican candidate,” Chomsky told Al Jazeera English’s Mehdi Hasan in a two-part interview — part of which will air Friday on “UpFront.”

Chomsky cited “enormous differences” between the two major political parties. “Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”

A good chunk of the electorate who is mad at either party’s establishment would probably vehemently disagree with the “enormous differences” line. I know for a fact that disgruntled conservatives could be assuaged quite a bit if Mitch McConnell would just once be as mad at the Democrats as he is at Ted Cruz.

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Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal Appears Gravely Criminal By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

From the start, since we first learned about the home-brew email system then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up for conducting her government business, I’ve argued that she very likely committed felony violations of federal law. Yet it appears I underestimated the gravity of her misconduct — ironically, by giving her the benefit of the doubt on a significant aspect of the scheme.

When the scandal went public in March 2015, Mrs. Clinton — already the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — held a press conference to explain herself. Among other well-documented whoppers, she maintained that she had never stored classified documents on, or transmitted them via, her private server. I theorized that she was exploiting the public’s unfamiliarity with how classified information is handled in government systems:

In the government, classified documents are maintained on separate, super-highly secured systems. … Mrs. Clinton would not have been able to access classified documents even from a “.gov” account [i.e., a non-classified State Department account], much less from her private account — she’d need to use the classified system. In fact, many government officials with security clearances read “hard copies” of classified documents in facilities designed for that purpose rather than accessing them on computers.

…

[S]ince we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information — the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents. The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails.