Category Archives: Politics – international

Aren’t you glad Obama is president?

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Meanwhile, while we agonise over Cecil, there is this to distract your attention. From Drudge:

IRAN: Obama Admin Lying About Nuke Deal for ‘Domestic Consumption’…
ARMS RACE: Saudis Want More Missiles…
Top French Official Contradicts Kerry Claims…
TEHRAN SAYS US EXPERTS BANNED FROM UN INSPECTIONS…
Rulers urge baby boom to double population…

But look on the bright side. There is also this:

Japan unveils ‘Death Star’ laser weapon…
Most powerful in world…

Oh, and I almost forgot:

China, Russia to hold military drills…

The future is shaping up so well.

UPDATE: The video above is of John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moni emphatically stating that they have not read the side deals with Iran. Nothing is any longer a scandal. But nothing makes sense any more either.

The self-preservation of the West versus a nuclear Iran

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From Sultan Knish, The Myth of Iran’s Peaceful Nuclear Program. But a myth is something that people at least half believe, if not actually a literal truth, then at least as a framework in which to understand what cannot otherwise be explained. We know what Obama is up to, and probably even why. The question is why so many others are going along. Everyone, including Obama and John Kerry, understands all of this completely:

Last year Iran was selling gasoline for less than 50 cents a gallon. This year a desperate regime hiked prices up to over a dollar. Meanwhile, Iranians pay about a tenth of what Americans do for electricity.

Unlike Japan, Iran does not need nuclear power. It is already sitting on a mountain of gas and oil. Iran blew between $100 billion to $500 billion on its nuclear program.

The Bushehr reactor alone cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion making it one of the most expensive in the world.

This wasn’t done to cut power bills. Iran didn’t take its economy to the edge for a peaceful nuclear program. It built the Fordow fortified underground nuclear reactor that even Obama admitted was not part of a peaceful nuclear program, it built the underground Natanz enrichment facility whose construction at one point consumed all the cement in the country, because the nuclear program mattered more than anything else as a fulfillment of the Islamic Revolution’s purpose.

Iran did not do all this so that its citizens could pay 0.003 cents less for a kilowatt hour of electricity.

It built its nuclear program on the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”

Obama’s motives are clear enough and the dangers to every Western country, and not just Israel, are equally clear. The question is why nothing has been done by others to stop this process in its tracks. The instinct for self-preservation often seems to fall dead at the feet of ideology. But the will to power never falls dead. There are evil days ahead.

The US federal government’s unfunded liabilities are more than $1.1 million per taxpayer!!

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How can this be true? What happens when the house of cards finally falls? The article is 16 declared GOP candidates. Zero meaningful solutions to America’s $18 trillion debt. The fact is there are no solutions to this:

America’s cumulative borrowing is rapidly approaching $20 trillion, while the federal government’s unfunded liabilities (future expenditures minus future tax revenue) now exceed a whopping $127 trillion — better than $1.1 million per taxpayer.

Picked up at Instanpundit where Glenn Reynolds writes, “No one in the political class — and this very much includes those bylined operatives in the press — wants to shut down the gravy train, regardless of consequences.” I just reckon they must think that if it hasn’t burned the house down yet, maybe it won’t or at least not in the next four years.

We will lie to the public any time, anywhere

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The post-Obama era is going to be something quite different from the one he inherited, as dangerous as it already was. This is the article in full: Obama’s dishonesty on Iran.

Under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, that nation’s theocratic regime receives relief from economic and arms sanctions in exchange for curtailment of its nuclear program. But there’s a catch — when inspectors seek to verify Iran’s compliance, the Iranians can delay the inspection of any site for at least 24 days.

But before the deal was struck, the Obama administration had promised much more — “anytime, anywhere” inspections, on demand. When asked about this on Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry displayed symptoms of amnesia.

“This is a term that, honestly, I never heard in the four years that we were negotiating,” Kerry said. “It was not on the table. There’s no such thing in arms control as anytime, anywhere.”

Barring a genuine brain malady, there is no gentle way of skirting around the fact that this is a lie. The White House specifically promised this in public. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser and spokesman, in making the case for the Iran deal in April, told CNN, “Under this deal, you will have anywhere, anytime, 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has.”

Beyond this, Kerry appears to have specifically discussed it as a negotiating point with senior lawmakers. After speaking with Kerry, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., mentioned “anytime, anywhere” in a speech this spring to Jewish groups uneasy about the deal. And Kerry seems to have told the same thing to the Republican chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees, according to their recollection.

Unfortunately, Kerry’s difficulty in telling the truth extends well beyond the issue of inspections. For example, consider the far more dangerous and controversial provision in the deal that lifts the existing sanctions against Iran’s acquisition of conventional arms and ballistic missiles. Kerry said in the same Sunday interview that the deal extended those sanctions by five and eight years, respectively. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the same thing explicitly — that the sanctions would have ended if not for the deal.

In fact, the U.N. sanctions needed no extension — they would have remained in place without further action until Iran stopped enrichment of uranium altogether. The deal that Kerry negotiated is what actually lifts the sanctions. And this concession is troubling by itself — after all, even if Iran can argue that its nuclear program has peaceful applications, it cannot say this of its ambition to develop its ballistic missile technology.

But it is even more troubling that Kerry and the Obama administration cannot just admit they traded this concession to get a deal. Instead, they are pretending that their dodgy concession is some kind of diplomatic victory for the United States.

In his weekly radio address, President Obama warned Americans, concerning the debate over the Iran deal, “you’re going to hear a lot of overheated and often dishonest arguments about it in the weeks ahead.” He was right. Only the dishonest arguments are coming from his own administration, which is desperately trying to defend dangerous concessions that will pave the way for a radical regime to finance terrorism and build a nuclear arsenal.

I just wish the Obama media would be more explicit about what the world has achieved with this deal. What do they see as the great positives for the future in a nuclear Iran? Lying in politics is not news. What ought to be news isn’t just the lying, but how dangerous for the future of world peace this deal is.

Go on, make sense of this

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Obama has been perfectly consistent in his policy and the American media and the left in general have been perfectly consistent in their ignorance. Since Iran will lie, and Obama was perfectly aware that Iran has lied, how does one interpret any of this?

AMERICA TAKES IRAN’S SIDE…
OBAMA WARNS CONGRESS: HANDS OFF NUKE DEAL…
Deep skepticism…
FEARS OF NEW ARMS RACE…
How Iran Will Use Technology To Cheat…
NETANYAHU: ‘Historic Mistake for World’…
ISRAEL ‘NOT BOUND’, WILL DEFEND ITSELF…
ROUHANI: ‘God has accepted nation’s prayers’…
Centrifuges Continue to Spin…
MAG: Dems lie about inspections…
No breakthrough for Americans held in Tehran…

Brett Stephens said what needs to be said in March, Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory. That was what needed to be said. The question now is what should be done?

Trump not surreal at all

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donald-trump-las-vegas-2

You can read my live blog here, and then there’s this news report, Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas from which I will quote a bit to see how surreal the attitude of the headline writer is. The story is pretty accurate, and is worth reading through. The Drudge headline for the link is “Trump Rocks the House in Vegas”. It begins:

Donald Trump just gave one of the most bizarrely captivating speeches of his several-weeks-old campaign.

Standing in front of an animated screen in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump spoke passionately for almost a half an hour, hitting some of his main talking points: President Barack Obama’s weakness, a ‘porous’ southern border, his business successes, and even Benghazi.

It was one of two similarly themed speeches in the day. Later, he spoke before a crowd of what his campaign said was more than 15,000 in Phoenix.

Trump made illegal immigration the primary focus of both speeches, railing against the Mexican government for supposedly sending undocumented immigrants to the US.

Although others like to compare him with Ronald Reagan, the closer comparison for me is with Dwight D. Eisenhower for whom his first elected office was also that of President. I thought it was a very effective speech, and while there are still lots of questions that must hang in the air for a while, there was nothing flaky about how he behaved or what he said. What made him different was that he was willing to take issues head on and not pussyfoot around. Hillary won’t take questions from reporters, all of whom are her friends and supporters. Trump took questions from the floor and answered every single question that the audience was willing to put up, both friendly and hostile. And while there were some vacant areas that he will have to think through more carefully, he made no mistake on the night. You would not want to write him off, at least not yet. For me he was much more impressive than Marco Rubio had been the day before.

UPDATE: Trump’s speech has had wide circulation here in the US. I am now at Stanford for the next couple of days and saw an AP story in the local press, garbled of course, and negative, but still mentioned. This, however, is the take from Breitbart: TRUMP IN VEGAS: SLAMS OBAMA, HILLARY, JEB… CROWD GOES WILD. Some of the flavour:

LAS VEGAS, Nevada – Republican candidate Donald Trump addressed the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, telling delegates of his underestimated wealth, his passion for securing America’s border, the slanted portrayal of him in the mainstream media, and how he believes that China and Mexico have “smarter leaders” than the United States.

Some libertarians, who the conference is aimed at, believed that Trump would receive a hostile reception at FreedomFest. But the crowd was generally supportive, or at least open-minded, to Trump’s run. One delegate told Breitbart London, “He doesn’t pretend to be anything. People were surprisingly supportive of him.”

The report captures the essence of the surprise in finding Trump make sense about the issues he dwelt on. But his trying to locate his support within the Tea Party movement, as discussed in the report, may be the largest surprise of all.

Donald Trump live blog

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The media man of the moment here in the US is Donald Trump, no doubt because to them he is an oddball who belongs to the Republican side of politics. They think they have invented someone utterly without mass appeal, an obnoxious billionaire entrepreneur with a negative attitude to racial minorities. He is, nevertheless, the hottest ticket in town. Here is Mark Steyn discussing Trump’s appeal:

What he said may or may not be offensive, but it happens to be true: America has more Mexicans than anybody needs, and then some. It certainly has more unskilled Mexicans than any country needs, including countries whose names begin with “Mex-” and end in “-ico”. And it has far more criminal Mexicans than anybody needs, which is why they make up 71 per cent of the foreign inmates in federal jails. Just to underline that last point, a young American woman was murdered for kicks in a supposed “sanctuary city” on the eve of the holiday weekend by an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He had flouted US immigration law for years – or, to be more precise about it, local, state and federal officials had colluded with him in the flouting of US immigration law, to the point where San Francisco’s sheriff actively demanded the return of this criminal to his “sanctuary city”, thereby facilitating the homicide of an actual citizen, taxpayer and net contributor to American society.

Be all that as it may, Trump has invited himself to Freedomfest and here he is, right there on the stage, the man himself.

Begins.

Donald Trump says he was asked to come and was very happy to. It is an honour to be here at a meeting of conservative and libertarian groups. I happen to like Ron Paul. Played a round of golf. A very nice guy. So many of us believe in the same thing.

Went to see a meeting of parents who had lost their children to illegal immigrants. An amazing thing; hardened reporters were sitting there with tears in their eyes. Others are saying that this is becoming a movement. People don’t know what is happening.

Yesterday in Phoenix. Thousands of people are calling and could not hold in the original venue. An amazing that’s happening.

Many said I wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t want to show his financials and etc, they said. I am actually much richer than people think. I am richer than they say. The reason I bring it up is because my way of thinking is the kind of thinking that we need in this country. Growth with low debt. We need this kind of thinking in this country. We have incompetent leadership. And I might mention that the Tea Party loves me – they are wrongly trivialised.

Our vets are treated like third class citizens. Must take care of our vets. We can provide a better and cheaper healthcare system than Obamacare. Knows a doctor with more accountants working for him than nurses.

Need to make America great again. But you cannot be a country great or otherwise without borders. We have exported our jobs to China. They send a car and we send corn. We think we are not dealing from strength. We aren’t but we can. We cannot get our products into China. They have a surtax on our manufactured exports.

I love China. I love Mexico. I love the Mexican people. But their negotiators are tougher than our negotiators. They send their worst people to the US.

Introduces a black man whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant. Son was walking home from the mall and as he was coming home within two minutes of his house, just shot dead in the street. The man already had three counts against him. You must, according to the Mexican mafia, commit a crime in a black neighbourhood to stay on the wrong side of the law. With Donald Trump we can see hope is coming. The thing is that Mr Trump loves America. “I trust Donald Trump.” He’s the kind of man you want to be your dad. I have a lot of black friends who are willing to vote for Donald Trump.

Trump back. The entire thing is so sad. Once it was found out that an illegal immigrant had killed his son, the story was dropped. It was true in every case. “There is something really bad out there. There is something sick out there.” People can come here. We can have immigrants.

The Mexicans send them to the US. Let the US take care of our problem citizens is the attitude in Mexico.

I talk about trade. Let me talk about NBC. We want to talk about “inclusion”. NBC has a lot of bad people. The Apprentice has been running for 14 years. [He sounds so New York!] NBC didn’t want him to run since they didn’t want to cancel his show which cannot run if he’s running for president.

I’ll make great trade deals. I want to be great on the military. All politicians do is talk. Talk about Benghazi and then nothing. Hillary’s emails, same. Hillary gets rid of her servers and the subpoenas. 48 hours of indignation and then you don’t hear about it any more. If I get the nomination, you will hear about it.

It is hard for conservative libertarian to get decent press. Nobody takes a full quote. “The American dream is dead – but I am going to make it bigger and better.” The media only quotes the first half.

Mexico sends us their problems. The political press is dishonest!!!! We have to deal with them. But I have a megaphone. Still 20% of the people who were there you wouldn’t have thought were there at all from what they said.

If I get the nomination, I will win the Hispanic vote since we will bring back those jobs from overseas. I will create jobs, which includes stopping illegals from coming in to take those jobs.

Went to Wharton. Graduated and made a fortune. Wrote the Art of the Deal. Look at the Iran deal. Persians are great negotiators. We have four prisoners over there. If I were there, I’d say fellows, you have these people. We want them back, and if they said no I’d say goodbye and end the negotiations.

I have a “tapping” – delay while thinking. I know how to negotiate.

Q&A

What I do not encourage people to come into the country illegal.

Q: Federal debt.

A: We owe 18 trillion money. We do all of this business and we owe them money. We are going to be Greece on steroids. A believer in free trade, but you must have good negotiators. I know most of them. I know the good ones. We would have the greatest smartest deals you ever saw.

Q: Bigger problem – persecution of Christians in the middle east

A: If you are from Syria and a Christian you are not permitted into this country. If Islamic you can easily do it. We must do something about it. I’m a Presbyterian. Persecuted people can come in. We should let them sort it out in the middle east and then pick up the leftovers. Trump was supposedly against going in. If you attack Iraq, I said, you will destabilise the balance in the middle east. Spent billions and have nothing. Iraq is meeting with Iran. We are led by stupid people.

Hillary would be the worst president. Hillary was the worst sec of state. Who would you rather have negotiating with China, me or Hillary.

Q: Foreign policy with the focus on Russia?

A: Everybody hates us and they make money from us. With me, the US will make the money and the rest of the world will like us. I would get along very well with Putin. We can make our country great again. I think of myself as a nice person, I am a nice person. But it doesn’t matter if I’m nice. But people are tired of incompetence. Hillary is not going to bring back jobs. Every single person who gave Hillary or Jeb money are lining up to get something back. Me, however, I don’t money. I don’t want anybody’s money.

Wraps up. Thanks everybody. Just angry that the conference was not in the Trump Hotel. And as I always end my speeches: “Make America great again!”

Marco Rubio as it happened

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At Freedomfest – Marco Rubio: “America’s Dream: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone”. This was written down as he spoke this evening.

There he is, right there, on stage. He’s just like his pictures, young and apple cheeked. He is telling his life story. The American dream is about happiness and fulfilment as you define it. And why is it possible? Because the US is founded on spiritual principles, where the rights come from the creator. The only power we give to the government is the power to protect those rights.

I love the system of free enterprise, he says. It is the only governing principle that allows success. I can become better off without someone else becoming worse off. His dad used to say that he had a job because someone else took the risk to open the business to employ him.

Two major changes. First, economy is becoming global. Now even America cannot get away with higher taxes and increased regs. Must work at being competitive whereas in the past no one was in their zone.

Second is improved technology. Ten years ago if I told you I was going “to google” you you would have been offended. Tech changes coming at a rapid rate.

We must become more competitive. Must fix the tax code. Tax reform is critical to become more globally competitive. We must also reduce regulations. Regs are used by established firms to prevent new firms from taking their place. He got rid of the taxi opposition in Florida to Uber! Regulatory reform is critical if we are going to be competitive.

Big on privatisation.

Need more skills. Four year degrees is the way to education at the moment. Higher ed is controlled by a cartel. Only unis can give degrees and the universities have created this monopoly for themselves. And loans are so expensive. We don’t teach welding and plumbing. We don’t teach people to do that any more.

We have single mothers working for $11 an hour who cannot educate their way up. MOOC should be coming. We need to open higher ed to competition. If you know something, you should get credit for it and then education will fill the gaps. What matters is what you know and not where you learned it.

There are things about other countries we might admire but America is the greatest. The 21st century is made for America. Big government is a disastrous idea for the 21st century. It is free enterprise that is the future. The world is going in our direction, so why would we go in theirs.

America owes me nothing. I owe America everything. My dad had to work for a living. He made sure that the life he could not have would be available to his son. That is the American dream. Whether we remain a special country will depend on whether the journey from poverty to wealth can be opened to more.

We can leave our children as the richest country that has ever been but the work is in front of us.

God Bless America!

Pig Iron Mal

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Picked up at Andrew Bolt that Malcolm Turnbull wishes to line up on the New York Times side of every issue, in this case possibly the single most important foreign policy issue of our generation. On the ABC naturally, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Islamic State threat should not be inflated. OK, but it all depends on what you mean by inflated. Here is Malcolm showing off his lack of political imagination:

Daesh is not Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan or Stalin’s Russia.

Really? What year we talking about, Malcolm? How about 1933? Same kind of stupid remark could have been made about all three at the time. Why don’t we leave it alone to fester a bit. Remember 911? That was the date. The year was 2001, fourteen years ago. Leave this one alone and where will we be fourteen years from now? Like Pig Iron Bob, we now have pig ignorant Mal.

Bern vs the Donald 2016

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An underestimate but still closer to reality: Bernie Sanders Says ‘Real’ Unemployment Rate Is Actually 10.5 Percent, DOUBLE The Official Rate [VIDEO].

Meanwhile, over on the other side, Trump: ‘Infectious disease is pouring across the border’.

Still waiting to hear what they think of the nuclear deal with Iran, but both have been able to overcome the media blockade and have brought genuine issues into the national conversation.

And perhaps funniest of all, the NYT thinks that being opposed by the Castros is political poison in the US. As the article points out, it can only do him good except for those who vote for Hillary or Bern or work at the New York Times and Washington Post.