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US open to ‘new arrangement’ on Iran’s missile tests

Posted By on April 8th, 2016

After appeal to UN over Tehran’s violation of ballistic missiles resolution, Kerry says White House ‘prepared to work for peaceful solution’
United States suggested Thursday it was open to a “new arrangement” with Iran for peacefully resolving disputes such as Tehran’s recent ballistic missile tests.

Setting the stage for President Barack Obama’s summit with regional leaders in Saudi Arabia later this month, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with the foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council to advance a series of proposals aimed at easing Arabs’ concerns about last year’s Iran nuclear deal and the warming of ties between the US and Iran. These include providing new counterterrorism, conventional military, missile defense and cybersecurity capabilities.

Washington has denounced Iran’s ballistic missiles program, including a March 9 test of two missiles, as a violation of a United Nations ban.

But Kerry, a moment after declaring America was united with Persian Gulf countries against the Iranian missile tests, said the US and its partners were telling Iran that they were “prepared to work on a new arrangement to find a peaceful solution to these issues.”

He said Iran first had to “make it clear to everybody that they are prepared to cease these kinds of activities that raise questions about credibility and questions about intentions.”

Kerry did not elaborate further.

The US, France, Britain and Germany had previously called on the UN Security Council to formulate an “appropriate response” to Iran’s recent ballistic missile tests which they say were carried out in defiance of a UN resolution and to threaten Israel. An Iranian news agency said had the phrase “Israel must be wiped out” written on them in Hebrew.

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Iran boasts it has developed 12 new nuclear products On Day of Nuclear Technology, Rouhani also announces new atomic facility, unveils latest technology….

Posted By on April 8th, 2016

In a ceremony to mark Iran’s National Day of Nuclear Technology, the Islamic Republic on Thursday announced the unveiling of twelve new, self-developed nuclear products in several different fields, ranging from fuel and laser technology to power plants and reactors.

Among the products unveiled at the ceremony, which was attended by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, were new centrifuge systems and fuel rod complexes for testing reactors, according to the Iranian Fars news.

The report quoted a spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization referring to “new nuclear achievements” in “fuel, laser, power plants and health fields.”

During Thursday’s event, Rouhani also announced the establishment of the Pasman Gor nuclear site in Anarak region, as well as the publication of three books related to nuclear technology and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

On Wednesday, Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said the country intends to produce the powerful explosive Octogen for use in the warheads of its missiles to improve their “destructive and penetration power.”

Octogen is used as an explosive in penetrating missile warheads and as a solid rocket fuel — but is also employed as part of the detonator in an atomic bomb.

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The Qualification Question Clinton, Sanders, and their qualifications By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on April 8th, 2016

Hillary Rodham Clinton says Bernie Sanders is not qualified to be president. Senator Sanders says Mrs. Clinton is not qualified to be president. Both of them are correct, but there’s a bit more to the question.

Mrs. Clinton is a lifelong political grifter who poses as a feminist champion while riding on the coattails of her husband, an old-fashioned intern-diddling patriarchal chauvinist who just happens to have been the most gifted politician of his generation before his decline to his current diminished state. Like that of Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s so-called career in the private sector and in activism rose in neatly incremental tandem with her husband’s elevation through the ranks of political office. If you believe Mrs. Obama was being paid three-hundred grand-plus for vaguely defined administrative work or that Mrs. Clinton’s legal and cattle-futures-trading careers thrived without their patrons taking notice of the vast political power accumulated by their husbands, you are a naïf.

Mrs. Clinton over the years did successfully exploit her marriage to a powerful and vile man into two notable positions of her own: senator from New York and secretary of state. As a senator, she was — at best — undistinguished, merely punching the clock as she prepared to run for the presidency. Unfortunately for her, an equally ambitious nobody senator from Illinois was following the same program, and he is a better politician than she is. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was catastrophic: Our allies were alienated, our enemies emboldened, our diplomats abroad slaughtered like livestock. Our national reputation is in tatters and our international prestige greatly diminished, thanks in no small part to her incompetence and that of the president she served.

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There’s a Name for Trump’s Brand of Politics: Neo-fascism by Daniel Pipes

Posted By on April 8th, 2016

Of his many outrageous campaign statements, perhaps Donald J. Trump’s most important ones concern his would-be role as president of the United States.

When told that uniformed personnel would disobey his unlawful order as president to torture prisoners and kill civilians, Trump menacingly replied “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” Responding to criticism by the speaker of the House, Trump spoke like a Mafia don: “Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t? He’s gonna have to pay a big price.” Complaining that the United States’ international standing has declined, Trump promised to make foreigners “respect our country” and “respect our leader” by creating an “aura of personality.” Concerning the media, which he despises, Trump said, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

He encourages participants at his rallies physically to assault critics and has offered to cover their legal fees. He has twice re-tweeted an American Nazi figure. Only under pressure did he reluctantly disavow support from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. [He kept a copy of Hitler’s collected early speeches, My New Order, by his bed. He called on followers to swear allegiance to him, evoking Hitlergruß-like salutes.]

In these and other ways, the Republican presidential candidate breaches the normal boundaries of American politics. He wants the military, the congress, foreign governments, the press, and ordinary citizens to submit to his will. His demands, and not some musty 18th-century documents, are what count. Trump presents himself as billionaire, master dealmaker, and nationalist who can get things done, never mind the losers and the fine print.

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Donald J. Trump and the Moscow Establishment Posted By Cliff Kincaid

Posted By on April 8th, 2016

We read over and over again how Donald J. Trump is running a campaign against “the establishment” in the Republican Party. The term sounds horrible and dangerous. But when you seriously think about it, the Republican Party “establishment” has one purpose—to maintain the party as a viable opposition vehicle to the plans of the Democratic Party. This is what a two-party political system should be about. Without two major political parties, America’s democratic form of government collapses and the United States becomes a socialist one-party state. The Trump candidacy threatens to destroy the two-party system.

Trump and his allies have made the term “establishment” into a dirty word. But Trump, an outsider with a history of supporting the other party, is trying to stage a hostile takeover of the GOP. The apparent plan is to make the Republican Party into a carbon copy of the European far-right “populist” parties that serve Russian interests. Some of these, like the National Front of France, are Russian-funded.

Interestingly, Donald J. Trump has a cordial relationship with the Moscow establishment headed by Vladimir Putin, but despises the Republican establishment in the U.S. For example, Trump has nothing but contempt for Mitt Romney, who ran against President Obama in 2012. For all his faults, Romney at least recognized the dangers posed by Russia. By contrast, Trump talks about a strategic alliance with Putin.

Putin’s network of shell companies and tax havens has recently been exposed in the so-called Panama Papers as a method by which he protects billions of dollars in personal wealth. One has to wonder whether Putin also maintains a global network of agents and sympathizers to make sure the Free World wilts in the face of Russian military aggression in Europe and the Middle East. One would have to be naïve to think no such network exists. Indeed, Trump is clearly a part of it, for he attacks NATO and various U.S. allies, including South Korea and Japan, and receives the open support of the Kremlin and its agents. Foreign intervention in an American presidential campaign has never been this blatant.

Supporters of Trump, who despise the Republican Party establishment, don’t like to talk about Trump’s ties to the Moscow establishment. This blindness has made it possible for Putin to strike gold, in the geopolitical sense, through Trump’s success in the Republican Party. It’s Trump’s foreign policy vision, such as it is, that could mean the demise of the Republican Party as a political vehicle for those who offer a realistic analysis of the military dangers posed by Russia and China. It’s true that Trump talks about China, in the sense that its economic power is a threat, but he is mute on the Russia-China military alliance in foreign affairs and the threat that it poses.

It is significant that Trump gets along better with Putin and his comrades than with “fellow” Republicans. That could be because he has mostly been a Democrat throughout his business career and has sought business deals in the former USSR and Russia. He calls Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and others in the GOP the worst of names, including liar, and yet Putin is considered by Trump to be a strong leader doing a good job for Russia. Trump even apologizes for the regime’s murder of journalists and political dissidents.

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MY SAY: ANCHORS AWAY!

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

I have grown increasingly tired of so called news programs. Years ago one read newspapers and saw “newsreels” before double features in movies. Now news has become show business. One watches it accompanied by the chatter and blather of the anchors who are not journalists. They are news readers who pepper their blather with bias, ignorance and bad grammar.

This goes for all programs- liberal and conservative. The ladies – even formerly comely Megyn Kelly cackle at their own jokes and look like dominatrices while they flash industrial size false eyelashes.

The men range from pompous asses (Charlie Rose and O’Reilly clones) to oh so mild mannered and boring (Anderson and Blitzer) to outright and predicable dopes (Hannity and Chris Matthews)

Their so called “political”coverage has given a mountebank like Trump a free ride and ignored the duplicity and mega-scandals of Hillary Clinton.

Bring back news reels that cover everything – stories about immigration, homeland security, foreign policy, elections, profiles of the candidates, terrorism etc. without the opinion of tyros. Then, I can relax and watch “Dancing with the Stars”….rsk

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The Enormous Fraud of the Iran Deal Is Catching Up with Obama By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

After a recent surge in threatening behavior by Iran and reports that it may soon be given access to the U.S. financial system, the House Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into whether Obama officials misled Congress about the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive plan of Action, or JCPOA). The “historic” deal, they said, would help bring Iran into the “community of nations” and lead to improved relations between Iran and the United States.

While this congressional investigation is a welcome development, it is too little and too late to reverse the Obama administration’s policy of offering any and all concessions — including over $100 billion in sanctions relief — to get a nuclear agreement with Iran. Most members of Congress thought the JCPOA was a bad deal; the majority of them voted against it last fall. But many now realize that this agreement is in fact an enormous fraud that is undermining Middle East and international security.

As I have explained here on National Review Online, in “Obama’s Iran Deal Is the Opposite of What He Promised the American People,” the negotiations that produced the JCPOA were an endless series of fallacies and deceptions. To get Iran to the negotiating table, the Obama administration foolishly agreed that the mullahs could continue to enrich uranium and develop advanced enrichment centrifuges. This means that the timeline for an Iranian nuclear weapon will shorten when the JCPOA is in effect, because Iran will all the while be improving its capability to produce nuclear fuel.

Obama officials made several misleading statements about the JCPOA last July that have come back to haunt them. These will be the focus of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.

One of the most controversial of these statements was President Obama’s and Secretary Kerry’s assertion that under this agreement, Iran agreed to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions barring missile tests for eight years. But there is no language barring missile tests in the JCPOA; this provision is buried in a U.N. Security Council resolution (Resolution 2231) that merely endorsed the JCPOA.

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The Reality-Denying Politicization of the English Language By Victor Davis Hanson —

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Last week, French president Francois Hollande met President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels, Paris, and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly referred to the violence as “Islamist terrorism.”

The White House initially deleted that phrase from the audio translation of the official video of the Hollande-Obama meeting, only to restore it when questioned. Did the Obama administration assume that if the public could not hear the translation of the French president saying “Islamist terrorism,” then perhaps Hollande did not really say it — and therefore perhaps Islamist terrorism does not really exist?

The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings, and films of Leon Trotsky on orders from Josef Stalin. Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.

The Library of Congress, under pressure from Dartmouth College students, recently banned not just the term “illegal alien” in subject headings for literature about immigration, but “alien” as well. Will changing the vocabulary mean that from now on, foreign nationals who choose to enter and reside in the United States without being naturalized will not be in violation of the law and will no longer be considered citizens of their homeland?

Did the Library of Congress ever read the work of the Greek historian Thucydides, who warned some 2,500 years ago that in times of social upheaval, partisans would make words “change their ordinary meaning and . . . take that which was now given them.”

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The VA Scandal: Two Years On Our veterans deserve better from the nation they have served. By Pete Hegseth

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

The Veterans Affairs–​scandal headlines speak for themselves. The Daily Beast: “Veteran Burned Himself Alive outside VA Clinic”; azfamily.com: “Dead veterans canceling their own appointments?”; New York Times: “Report Finds Sharp Increase in Veterans Denied V.A. Benefits,” “More than 125,000 U.S. veterans are being denied crucial mental health services,” and “Rubio, Miller ask committee to back VA accountability bills.”

Are these headlines from 2014, when the VA scandal broke? The sad answer is no. All these headlines — and so many more — are from the past ten days, a fact that also speaks for itself.

Two years ago this week — thanks to courageous whistleblowers in Phoenix and a fed-up House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman — the world was finally exposed to rampant VA dysfunction and corruption. Dozens of veterans had died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA — which was, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg. Across the country, VA officials had manipulated lists to hide real health-care wait times. In total, thousands — and possibly far more — met the same fate: waiting, and dying, at the hands of a calcified and soulless bureaucracy. Investigations were launched, and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki eventually resigned.

Even the reflexively defensive Obama administration confirmed the obvious in a June 2014 report, admitting that “a corrosive [VA] culture has led to personnel problems across the Department that are seriously impacting morale and by extension, the timeliness of health care,” with “problems . . . exacerbated by poor management and communication structures, distrust between some VA employees and management, a history of retaliation toward employees raising issues, and a lack of accountability across all grade levels.” The report flatly states that the VA must be “restructured and reformed.”

Yet, two years after the VA scandal broke, no such restructuring or reform has occurred. Instead, almost nothing has changed at the failing Department of Veterans Affairs. VA officials have kept their jobs, and veterans continue to be treated like second-class citizens inside their own system. But after two years of committee hearings, two years of investigations, and two years of funding increases for the VA, how bad could it really still be? Judge for yourself.

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Virginia Tech’s Campaign Against Charles Murray A textbook case study of systemic corruption in Higher Ed. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Among the variety of other topics that it explores, my book, The American Offensive: Dispatches from the Front, discusses at length the intellectual and moral corruption that pervades much of the humanities and liberal arts in the contemporary academy.

The examples of the corruption are legion. Recently, at San Francisco State University, a white student, Cory Goldstein, was accosted, harangued, and assaulted by a black woman—a university employee—for…wearing dreadlocks.

Evidently, Goldstein “micro-aggressed” against this woman specifically and blacks generally, for he is guilty of “cultural appropriation,” of appropriating a hair style that is distinctive of “black culture.”

“Micro-aggressions,” “cultural appropriation”—these are just some of the terms of the esoteric insider-speak to which college students are daily exposed courtesy of their professors.

To repeat, college students are taught to view their experiences in terms of the template of grievance imposed upon them by their instructors.

In a sane world, a world within which people hadn’t forgotten that the university is an institution whose raison d’etre has been the promotion of Western civilization, the ideological abuses to which the academic world has been subjected would constitute nothing less than an epic scandal.

In a sane world, taxpayers wouldn’t part with one red cent to subsidize this perversion of the university’s historic mission.

But we’re not living in a sane world.