Obama’s Secret Iran Détente

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Photo Credit: APThe Obama administration began softening sanctions on Iran after the election of Iran’s new president in June, months before the current round of nuclear talks in Geneva or the historic phone call between the two leaders in September.

While those negotiations now appear on the verge of a breakthrough the key condition for Iran—relief from crippling sanctions—began quietly and modestly five months ago.

A review of Treasury Department notices reveals that the U.S. government has all but stopped the financial blacklisting of entities and people that help Iran evade international sanctions since the election of its president, Hassan Rouhani, in June.

On Wednesday Obama said in an interview with NBC News the negotiations in Geneva “are not about easing sanctions.” “The negotiations taking place are about how Iran begins to meet its international obligations and provide assurances not just to us but to the entire world,” the president said.

But it has also long been Obama’s strategy to squeeze Iran’s economy until Iran would be willing to trade relief from sanctions for abandoning key elements of its nuclear program.

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Obama Camp Views 20-Week Abortion Ban as ‘Pretty Scary’ Pro-Life Tactic

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Photo Credit: AP/Susan WalshPresident Obama’s old campaign operation rallied the troops today, warning of a “pretty scary” ban on abortions in the sixth month of pregnancy that voters in Albuquerque, N.M., might pass.

“Something pretty scary is happening in Albuquerque right now,” Kaili Lambe, who manages women’s issues campaigns for Organizing for Action, wrote in an email to Obama’s 2012 campaign volunteers and grassroots donors.

“This is a serious attack on women — and it’s a deliberate attempt by extreme interest groups to test their latest anti-women strategy,” she said.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Ordinance had 54 percent support among the city’s likely voters, even though “Albuquerque generally is a progressive city and New Mexico is generally a progressive state,” as ProgressNow New Mexico spokesman Patrick Davis said.

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Issa Subpoenas Lew for Tea Party Targeting Docs

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Photo Credit: APRep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, served Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with another subpoena relating to the IRS scandal in which the organization targeted Tea Party organizations, the committee announced on Friday.

This is the second subpoena Issa has served on Lew regarding the scandal. “Secretary Lew is responsible for providing all pertinent documents Treasury has in its possession, both within and outside the IRS,” Issa said in a statement. “The Committee is aware of responsive documents in Treasury’s possession that have not been produced to the Committee.”

In a press release, the House oversight committee detailed the committee’s and other House committees’ efforts to obtain documents from the IRS and the Treasury Department about the scandal—and how President Barack Obama’s administration has obfuscated and not complied with the House’s investigations and previous subpoena.

On June 13, Issa joined Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the House oversight committee’s subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs; Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; and Charles Boustany (R-LA), the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, to write to Lew to demand he produce nine categories of documents by June 27. On June 27, Issa’s committee notes in its release that the Treasury Department responded by producing “only 356 pages of documents, mostly letters from Member of Congress and drafts of congressional testimony.”

On Sept. 18, Issa and Jordan wrote to Lew to again demand compliance by Oct. 2 with the June letter’s request for nine categories of documents and made clear that the committee was prepared to use “compulsory process” (subpoenas) if Lew did not comply. On Oct. 2, the Treasury Department wrote to the committee and said it would not be able to meet the deadline due to the government shutdown. “As an accommodation to the Treasury Department, the Committee allowed an extension of time for a response,” Issa’s committee noted.

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ObamaCare Website Glitch Sending Private Information to Wrong People

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard Americans are methodically dealing with the Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at the realization that the technical back-end of the exchanges is as dysfunctional as the front-end of the site; (3) shock at the cancellation of plans and increase of premiums; and (4) depression at the prospect of losing access to doctors, too. We’re ready to move on to the fifth stage: acceptance that privacy will also be a casualty of HealthCare.gov.

Justin Hadley was perhaps the first consumer to witness this breach. As was reported by the Heritage Foundation, Hadley is a North Carolina resident who used to buy his insurance from Blue Cross Blue Shield on the individual market. In September, Blue Cross Blue Shield informed him that, thanks to Obamacare, they were canceling his policy. Hadley went to HealthCare.gov and was one of the lucky few able to register with the system. He was rewarded when a letter popped up onscreen. The letter was made out to someone else​—​one Thomas Dougall, of Elgin, South Carolina​—​and it contained Dougall’s contact information and notes on his and his family’s eligibility to buy insurance on the exchanges. When Hadley reached out to Dougall to inform him of the mistake, Dougall was shocked.

He shouldn’t have been. When members of Congress questioned Kathleen Sebelius about privacy concerns last month, the secretary of health and human services protested, “I would tell you we are storing the minimum amount of data, because we think that’s very important. The hub is not a data collector.”

It’s difficult to imagine what Sebelius was thinking. “The hub”​—​meaning the web portal that is HealthCare.gov​—​does not collect medical records to store away on government servers. But it does collect all sorts of data about you, which it keeps attached to your account.

Yet what worries people about the site isn’t that HealthCare.gov is a “data collector”; the concern is that it’s a data sieve.

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Cuccinelli Only the Latest Conservative Candidate Targeted by G.O.P.

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The Republican establishment continues to undercut the campaigns of conservative candidates. Ken Cuccinelli was just the latest.

In early 2013, a Texas-based Tea Party website posted a series of articles that documented how the G.O.P. establishment, at the county, state and national levels, had worked against six candidates supported by Tea Party organizations — five running for House seats, and one G.O.P. nominee for a U.S. Senate seat.

A seventh case detailed how the Chair of the Illinois State Republican Central Committee was chosen. It illustrates the “Illinois Combine” – the bipartisan collaborative formula going national these days.

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Anti-Semitism is on the Rise, Finds Survey of European Jewish People

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Vincent KesslerThe survey of 5,847 Jewish people from the eight European countries where 90 per cent of Europe’s Jews live found that more than three-quarters believe anti-Semitism is on the rise.

The European Jewish Congress has condemned the findings, timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms in Nazi Germany, as “a watershed moment for the continent of Europe”.

“The Jewish reality in Europe is of great concern and the authorities need to deal with incidents of hate and intolerance in a holistic manner to really combat these manifestations before it is too late,” said Dr Moshe Kantor, the congress’s president.

According to the survey, conducted by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights, almost one-third of Jewish people have considered emigrating because they do not feel safe. In Hungary, France and Belgium between 40 to and 48 per cent said they had thought about fleeing.

Thirty eight per cent of the Jewish polled people in Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Latvia said they always or frequently avoided wearing a skullcap, Star of David or anything else that could signal their religion.

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Anti-Obamacare Candidate Bridges Tea Party and Establishment Divide

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Photo Credit: NEWSCOMBen Sasse is doing what few Republicans have been able to accomplish: He’s uniting the GOP establishment with anti-establishment conservatives in his bid to become the next U.S. senator from Nebraska.

The broad coalition Sasse is building is something the Nebraskan is proud of — and it’s an element of his campaign he’s been actively pursuing. “We’re building a broad conservative coalition of Nebraskans who want to fix Washington,” says Sasse in an email.

“We’re grateful that all types of folks across Nebraska are responding to our conservative, solutions-oriented message. This week, for instance, we’ve sought the support of gun owners, of Christian service organizations, and of the Chamber of Commerce. We want everybody; we want to grow the conservative movement.”

The key appears to be Sasse’s anti-Obamacare message, which the former Bush official is able to speak about fluidly and persuasively. It’s resonating especially well now that the open-enrollment period for the massive health care overhaul has been so disastrous.

“Ben Sasse is the rare candidate who can clearly and forcefully prosecute the case against Obamacare, not only because it’s an unconstitutional assault on our liberty, but also because he’s read every word of it,” Club for Growth president Chris Chocola said this week in a statement endorsing the candidate.

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Military Must Do More with Less

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner We live in oxymoronic times. Everyone recognizes the need for a streamlined, more efficient Pentagon. Yet Congress won’t let the Department of Defense close another base or increase the copayments military families make for their very generous health insurance plans. Continuing resolutions and sequestration prevent weapons makers from doing a deal with the Pentagon that sticks.

The defense budget is in free fall by some measures, facing $492 billion in possible sequester cuts over nine years, or roughly $55 billion annually. These come on top of earlier cuts by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and in addition to huge reductions in war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. military budget still totals $600 billion. That is 40 percent of what the entire world spends on defense, and substantially more than the Cold War average in inflation-adjusted terms.

President Obama wants to do nation-building at home, end the country’s wars and avoid involvement in Syria. Yet he is also committed to “rebalancing” the military to put greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region and preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, he still maintains 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, nearly double than when he took office.

The secretary of defense said last year that sequestration would be catastrophic for the military, yet half a year into sequestration the sky has not fallen. The sequester, which went into effect in March, has not yet fundamentally jeopardized our national security or the state of our armed forces, and some of the $40 billion in defense cuts in 2013 reflected reasonable pruning.

But other savings will be far more perilous. Dramatically reducing training for many military units, as was done this summer, is tolerable — but only for a short period. It would be debilitating if this continued, particularly to young troops who have never had intensive training.

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Barack Obama’s Machiavellian Side

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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Something tells me the president is not a regular reader of the New Criterion. But perhaps, in between his regular servings of Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and Josh Barro, he snuck a peek at the October issue of the conservative arts magazine. He might have scanned an essay by Harvey Mansfield, “Machiavelli’s Enterprise,” on the legacy of the first modern philosopher. It’s a legacy that very much includes the president.

In the essay, Mansfield discusses the Machiavellian discovery of “effectual truth.” What is effectual truth? In his 2007 Jefferson lecture, Mansfield put it this way: For Machiavelli, the effectual truth is the “truth shown in the outcome of his thought. The truth of words is in the result they produce or, more likely, fail to produce.” Consequences matter most. “Deeds are sovereign: When confronted by a necessity, Machiavelli advises, do not worry about justice, but act and the words to justify your action will come to you afterward.”

In recent weeks the world has woken up to the fact that President Obama is one of the most committed disciples of effectual truth telling in recent history. Time and again, when confronted by political necessity, he and his administration have told falsehoods in order to achieve their objectives. The fallout from the president’s lie that under Obamacare you can keep your health insurance is just the latest and most glaring example. The false explanation provided for the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, and the misleading and occasionally fictional nature of the president’s memoir and campaign biography, are two more cases of effectual truth telling. The thinker whose teaching influences Barack Obama the most isn’t Frantz Fanon. It’s Niccolò Machiavelli.

The president now says that when he was barnstorming the country for his health care law, he was telling people, “If you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law has passed.” What he actually said, though, was much simpler: If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance. The Washington Free Beacon counted 36 times when he said exactly that. Politifact counted 37 times. No subordinate clauses. No mention of granddad.

The president and his administration have been caught in an untruth, in a prevarication, in a false statement. And there are no doubts as to motive: If Obama had actually said what he says he’s been saying, the chances of passing Obamacare into law, which were dicey to begin with, would have gotten much smaller. Most Americans already had health insurance prior to Obamacare, and the prospect of losing that insurance would have made them more reluctant to support the law, which they didn’t actually support all that much anyway. Omitting the consequences of the law for the individual insurance market was one of the most effective—i.e., effectual—ways to win support for the bill from congressional Democrats. The obstacles to Joe Biden’s “big f—ing deal” were necessities to be overcome. And President Obama overcame them by lying. The result—a national health insurance entitlement—makes the dishonesty worthwhile. Or at least it does for him.

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President Obama, John Kerry Negotiate with Iran as Abuse of Jailed American Pastor Increases

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Photo Credit: AP/Idaho Press-Tribune, Adam EschbachIranian President Hassan Rouhani’s reputation as a moderate has convinced U.S. leaders to begin nuclear negotiations by easing sanctions on the rogue regime, even as Rouhani has permitted the increasing abuse of American pastor Saeed Abedini.

Abedini’s plight has worsened in recent days, while Secretary of State John Kerry prepared for a historic meeting with his Iranian counterpart.

Abedini’s family confirmed last week that he was moved to the infamous Rajaï Shahr prison.

“Once in there, one stops to be a human being,” Dutch diplomat Loes Bijnen said in 2005. “One is put out of sight, even of human rights activists and the press.

“In Rajaï Shahr, political prisoners have to share cells with dangerous criminals like murderers, rapists and drug addicts who don’t hesitate to attack their cell mates.

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