Last week, we saw the U.S. flag go up in Havana but more and more dissidents were arrested and subjected to repression, the one thing that the Castro regime does real well. Sunday July 26th was a bad day for dissidents, as Marc Masferrer reported.
No protests from the White House. In fact, the silence is embarassing.
Yesterday, President Obama went to Kenya and lectured his father’s homeland about gay rights, illegal in that country.
Speaking last week about the newly concluded agreement/treaty of P5+1, Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Kans.) noted, “This agreement is the worst of backroom deals. In addition to allowing Iran to keep its nuclear program, missile program, American hostages, and terrorist network, the Obama administration has failed to make public separate side deals that have been struck for the ‘inspection’ of one of the most important nuclear sites – the Parchin military complex. Not only does this violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, it is asking Congress to agree to a deal that it cannot review.”
“Secret annexes” are not new in the world of diplomacy. However, in modern history, they are most associated with the failed alliance systems of 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. The Concert of Europe, rife with backroom as well as “front room” deals, was initiated in Europe by Klemens von Metternich, representing Austria, with the collaboration of the brilliant Maurice de Talleyrand of France. The main idea was to bulwark monarchic power in Europe. Later, its successor, called the Alliance System, was jump-started by Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian master manipulator. This system is considered by historians as contributing to the occurrence of WWI.
No wonder Iran’s Supreme Leader sent around a tweet of Obama pointing a pistol at his own head. Iran’s forcing itself on the rest of the world is a central part of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution.
The Ayatollahs’ wish has long been finally to defeat the divided Arabs, and then to move on to defeat Israel, and then the grandest prize of all – the “Great Satan,” the United States.
Worse, apparently a “side deal” — classified for the Americans but not for Iran — enables Iran to provide its own soil samples to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to which it has been lying for decades. Even still worse, the parties to the negotiation are required to protect Iran’s nuclear weapons program should anyone try to attack it – including, presumably, any disenchanted signatories.
Iran will have been rewarded for having violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and been given a red carpeted fast track to complete its nuclear bomb.
School vouchers may be the most effective anti-poverty program around, yet they’re fought tooth and hammer by the teachers unions. Late last week the North Carolina Supreme Court awarded a victory to poor kids by protecting vouchers from another union attack.
Two years ago Tar Heel Republicans passed a modest reform offering low-income students $4,200 scholarships to attend qualifying private schools. The law requires, among other things, that private schools report graduation rates and test scores. It also mandates an annual report comparing the learning gains of voucher recipients and public school students.
Taxpayer plaintiffs backed by the union argued in a lawsuit that vouchers accomplish no “public purpose” because private schools don’t have to adhere to such state educational standards as teacher licensing requirements. You have to admire the gall of a union to argue that private schools are “unaccountable” when only one in five black fourth-graders at North Carolina public schools scored proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented voucher parents in the case, five of six low-income students fail the state’s end-of-grade math or reading tests.
The Obama end-run around the Constitution could yet be blocked if states exercise their own sanctions regimes.
The Iranian nuclear agreement announced on July 14 is unconstitutional, violates international law and features commitments that President Obama could not lawfully make. However, because of the way the deal was pushed through, the states may be able to derail it by enacting their own Iran sanctions legislation.
President Obama executed the nuclear deal as an executive agreement, not as a treaty. While presidents have used executive agreements to arrange less-important or temporary matters, significant international obligations have always been established through treaties, which require Senate consent by a two-thirds majority.
The Constitution’s division of the treaty-making power between the president and Senate ensured that all major U.S. international undertakings enjoyed broad domestic support. It also enabled the states to make their voices heard through senators when considering treaties—which are constitutionally the “supreme law of the land” and pre-empt state laws.
“Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street fan club keeps telling itself that she’d provide relief from the anti-growth Obama years. On the growing evidence of her policies, she’d be worse.”
Hillary Clinton’s march to the left continues, hitting a new milestone on Friday when she proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%—or the highest rate in decades.
Mrs. Clinton says she wants to overthrow “quarterly capitalism,” the supposed tendency of companies to be preoccupied with earnings reports and stock prices at the expense of investment that pays off over time. Yet her plan would undermine short-run shareholder goals and long-range economic growth.
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U.S. administration says full disclosure about program’s history isn’t critical to verify future commitments.
An Obama administration assessment of the Iran nuclear deal provided to Congress has led a number of lawmakers to conclude the U.S. and world powers will never get to the bottom of the country’s alleged efforts to build an atomic weapon, and that Tehran won’t be pressed to fully explain its past.
In a report to Capitol Hill last week, the administration said it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.
Details of the report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, indicate the deal reached this month could go ahead even if United Nations inspectors never ascertain conclusively whether Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program—something Tehran has repeatedly denied.
A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.
Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.
The 60-day clock for congressional consideration of the Iran deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has barely begun to run, and the White House and its allies are already in full sell-and-destroy mode. As details of the agreement are revealed, including side agreements, the total collapse of our side’s negotiating position in the last few weeks of the talks has become more apparent. This should be an easy deal to reject on the merits. The promise of “anytime, anywhere” inspections turned into 24-day advanced notice inspections. It was just rhetoric, claimed White House adviser Ben Rhodes. We never meant it. Inspections at the Parchin facility, where it is generally assumed military research and testing took place connected with Iran’s nuclear program, will now consist of the International Atomic Energy Agency examining samples provided by the Iranians.
The testimonials of more than 100 students from almost 50 colleges and universities in twenty states tell of “being intimidated, harassed or bullied as a Jewish and/or a pro-Israel student,” according to Student Voices(SV). A project of the AMCHA Initiative, which combats campus anti-Semitism, the data at SV spans the past year-and-a-half, and typically originates with student op-eds and articles from sympathetic media.
Although the majority of cited incidents involve Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), student government groups, and the BDS movement, several of the examples involve professors of Middle East studies, many of whom are themselves BDS activists and supporters.
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