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I appeared on Silvio Canto Jr's talk show from Dallas yesterday.  It's here. 

JULY 20,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

TRUMP TRUMPED? – From Fox:  Iowa's largest newspaper has called on Donald Trump to drop out of the 2016 presidential race amid the furor of the real estate magnate's weekend comments about Sen. John McCain's service during the Vietnam War.  At a conservative summit in Iowa Saturday, Trump, whom several polls had shown to be leading the Republican field, dismissed McCain's reputation as a war hero, saying of the Arizona Republican who was held for five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, "I like people who weren't captured."  In an opinion piece published late Monday, the Register said Trump's comments were "not merely offensive, they were disgraceful. So much so, in fact, that they threaten to derail not just his campaign, but the manner in which we choose our nominees for president."  Trump right now is actually gaining in support.  I hope this is temporary, and simply a factor of name recognition.  Trump's behavior is embarrassing, and it is distracting from serious discussion of the issues.

PROTECTING RECRUITERS – From Fox:  WASHINGTON – While safety concerns at military recruitment centers have been a long-standing issue, last week’s fatal shootings at two Tennessee installations underscore the deep risk recruiters face daily and the scramble at state and national levels to prevent a similar tragedy from taking place again.  The U.S. military on Monday confirmed to Fox News it directed recruiting centers across the country to step up security measures in the wake of the deadly rampage that claimed the lives of four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor.  At the same time, a handful of governors have taken steps to beef up security measures at National Guard recruitment centers.  Governors in six states – Florida, Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas – ordered their Guardsmen to be armed.  It is utterly unacceptable that American soldiers, acting in their capacity as recruiters, are often sitting ducks, with little or no protection.  It would be nice if their commander-in-chief showed some interest in the matter.

US AND CUBA RE-ESTABLISH RELATIONS – From CNN:  Havana, Cuba (CNN) One bitter holdover of the Cold War slipped into the history books at 12:01 a.m. Monday, when the United States and Cuba re-established diplomatic relations. For the first time since severing ties in 1961, they reopened embassies in each other's capitals.  Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla traveled to the Cuban Embassy in Washington to raise his country's flag, an event that Cuban government officials said would be broadcast live on the island's state-run TV.  A Cuban delegation of diplomats, artists and veterans of the revolution commemorated the breakthrough with about 500 guests and more than likely down a few celebratory mojitos and shots of Havana Club rum.  It's a farce.  It will not improve the life of one Cuban citizen.  Cuba is a dictatorship, its people enjoying no human rights to speak of.  Yet, we asked for nothing for them in return for diplomatic relations with the United States.  Human rights are no longer part of the American agenda, the result of our having a presidential administration that is leftist, and thus uninterested in the basics of human freedom.

July 20,  2015      Permalink

REAGAN VS. OBAMA – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 8:44 A.M. ET:   Jackson Diehl, in the Washington Post, performs a very useful journalistic service by comparing the diplomatic techniques of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. 

Is it fair to say that Obama’s handling of Iran is comparable to Reagan’s treatment of the Soviet Union?

A narrow answer is yes, in the sense Obama described: Reagan might well have concluded that a bargain postponing Iran’s emergence as a nuclear threshold state for 15 years was worthwhile regardless of the nature of the regime. Beyond that, however, Reagan’s answer to the Soviet threat was virtually the opposite of Obama’s for Iran. In that difference lies the strongest critique of the policy this president has pursued.

The conclusion?

...Obama’s Iran policy more closely resembles the realpolitik of Nixon with China, as The Post’s Charles Lane has pointed out. The rewards, if any, will come in Iranian cooperation in defeating the Islamic State, or in enabling political solutions — and an American exit — in Iraq and Syria. Even that is a long shot, according to most of the administration’s own experts, who expect Iranian aggression to escalate rather than diminish.

In the end, Obama’s policy could produce a very different legacy than that of Reagan. A generation later, the Gipper’s arms negotiations with Moscow look like a modest success — but his contribution to the collapse of Soviet communism was an epochal achievement. Obama may be able to point, 15 years from now, to an Iran that remains non-nuclear. But the most likely effect of his engagement policy is not the implosion of the Islamic republic, but its perpetuation.

COMMENT:  Read all the stuff that goes between those two quotes.  It really amounts to a devastating portrait of our egotistical, immature president.

Obama was taken soooo seriously when he came to office, the darling of the sixties liberals.  Reagan was laughed at by the same crowd. 

Only fools today laugh at Reagan.  Only fools today think Obama is a darling.

July 20, 2015       Permalink

IRAN AGREEMENT – THE IMPORTANT BASICS – AT 8:26 A.M. ET:   It takes a fine reporter, like Eli Lake of Bloomberg, to cut through the haze of the Iran agreement and get to the truth.  And the truth is that the West – what's left of it – made most of the serious concessions in talks leading to the Iran nuclear agreement.  It's a pathetic story.  From Bloomberg: 

Now that the President Barack Obama and his administration are selling the Iran nuclear deal, they say U.S. negotiators held a firm line against Iran's last-minute push for even more concessions. But if you compare the deal today with what was described in a White House fact sheet on the "framework" reached in April it shows that the West ceded a lot of ground to Iran in those final days in Vienna.

In a few cases, the White House line is partially true. Iran's leaders had publicly insisted that they would forbid international inspectors any access to military sites, and its negotiators tried to get an immediate lifting of a U.N. arms embargo on conventional weapons. In both cases, Iran compromised for the final deal. But more often it was the West that backed down, and in more significant ways.

For example, in April the White House touted that, "Iran has committed indefinitely to not conduct reprocessing or reprocessing research and development on spent nuclear fuel." Yet the new pact will allow Iran to reprocess such fuel after 15 years. The final agreement says Iran can begin production of efficient advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium in eight years. The April fact sheet strongly implied research into advanced centrifuges would be delayed for 10 years.

Senior administration officials in April said the nuclear agreement would allow inspectors "anytime, anywhere" access to suspected nuclear sites, but the new deal will give Iran 24 days' notice of any inspections, as well as a say in whether inspectors will be able to visit certain sites at all. The U.S. also agreed in the final days of talks to lift a U.N. conventional weapons embargo on Iran in five years, and to end sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program in eight, both issues on which the framework deal is silent.

More concerns arise from the "road map" that the International Atomic Energy Agency released Tuesday, on how it will resolve longstanding questions about the history of Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. First, the description of how it plans to do so is dangerously vague. Equally important: Until May, the U.S. position was that Iran had to come clean about that history before there would be any sanctions relief. Now that issue has been shunted aside in terms of lifting sanctions.

While it's true that the April deal was only a framework, and that some changes should have been expected, all these concessions taken together represent a retreat by the U.S. team since the spring. "The fact sheet allowed just enough wiggle room to give the impression that nothing had been conceded in Lausanne," Valerie Lincy, the executive director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, told me. "But when I read the agreement, it's clear there are things that have been conceded in terms of the details on advanced centrifuges, reprocessing of plutonium and the inspections."

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It's excellent, compelling, and demonstrates conclusively that what we're being told by the Obama administration is sheer nonsense.

July 20, 2015        Permalink

TRUE?  – AT 8:07 A.M. ET:  Dr. Ben Carson has become a favorite speaker among conservative Republicans.  I don't think he can get the presidential nomination, but might just pull out the vice-presidential nod, depending on circumstances.

He made some comments on where blacks stand politically that I thought were worth noting.  I don't know if he's accurate, but I hope he is.  From The Hill:

Ben Carson on Saturday said African-American voters are "waking up" to the possibility of supporting GOP candidates for office like himself.

"I think there's a lot of people who are waking up," the neurosurgeon-turned-presidential candidate said at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa.

"I met with a group of black pastors yesterday and people are waking up in droves," he continued. "I think they're realizing what's been happening here."

Carson said he converted to the Republican Party after growing up and going to school in Democratic strongholds during the Reagan administration.

"I started listening to Ronald Reagan … and I said he doesn't doesn't sound like that," he said, noting he had heard horror stories about conservatives during his entire upbringing.

Carson criticized President Obama for shrinking the size of the U.S. military in the face of terrorism threats in the Middle East.

"Our military is shrinking while our enemies are growing and metastasizing," he said. "It seems like we're trying to destroy ourselves. We've got to do better than that."

The Republican presidential hopeful said he would prepared to fight Islamic State in Syria and Iraq if successful in his bid to become commander-in-chief.

"We have radical Islamic jihadists who want to destroy us and they want to destroy our way of life," he said. "And their existence is a threat to us. We cannot be in that mindset that we made a mistake and we spent a bunch of money, so let's just get into our little cocoon. That's not going to work."

COMMENT:  I would love to see some serious polling in black America to determine actual attitudes, rather than the attitudes assigned to African-Americans by the media and their own self-appointed "leaders."

For example, we're told that blacks hate the police, feel "oppressed" by authority.  And yet, when New York City's former, and great, police commissioner, Ray Kelly, went to black churches to speak, he always got a standing ovation.  I wonder why.  I also wonder why the press is so uninterested in the answer.

July 20,  2015     Permalink 

JULY 19,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:20 P.M. ET: 

MADNESS – From CNN:   Phoenix (CNN) Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley apologized on Saturday for saying "All lives matter" while discussing police violence against African-Americans with liberal demonstrators.  Several dozen demonstrators interrupted the former Maryland governor while he was speaking here at the Netroots Nation conference, a gathering of liberal activists, demanding that he address criminal justice and police brutality. When they shouted, "Black lives matter!" a rallying cry of protests that broke out after several black Americans were killed at the hands of police in recent months, O'Malley responded: "Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter."  Invoking the familiar names of blacks who died at the hands of police, including Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, thousands have taken part in protests across the country calling for a more aggressive federal response to recent slayings by police.   The demonstrators, who were mostly black, responded by booing him and shouting him down.  Incredible.  A candidate for president has to apologize for saying that all lives matter.  This is what we've come to in Barack Obama's "progressive" America.

STILL A JERK – Incredibly, Donald Trump still refuses to apologize to John McCain, who, he said, wasn't a real war hero.  Trump is committing political suicide.  From Fox:  Donald Trump on Sunday declined to apologize for his comments about war veteran and Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, suggesting the backlash is being fueled by fellow Republican presidential candidates trailing him in the polls.  “Republican candidates, some of whom are registering one percent and zero, they're very upset that I'm leading the polls by actually a nice margin,” Trump, a self-funded, billionaire real estate mogul, told ABC’s “This Week.” “They started attacking me.”  Trump is an amateur, and is certainly not a president.  He should stick to real-estate.  Of course he should apologize.  He should also get spiritual counseling. 

ROYAL MESS – From AFP:   Buckingham Palace is reportedly considering legal action over how a 17-second clip showing a young Queen Elizabeth II giving the Nazi salute was obtained and published by The Sun, while bracing for a new documentary set to reveal the close ties between the family of her future husband and Adolf Hitler.  A Channel 4 documentary, due to be aired July 30, is expected to look into how Prince Philip’s sister met and came to admire Hitler, according to the Daily Mail. The documentary will include passages from a private, unpublished memoir kept by Philip’s older sister Sophie who reportedly wrote of entertaining the Nazi leader and his men before their rise to power.  Three of Prince Philip’s sisters were married to senior Nazi officers, including Sophie who wed Prince Christoph von Hessen, head of the SS in the Air Ministry.  Is it poor taste to ask that our media show a similar interest in the background of Barack Hussein Obama Jr., and stop avoiding the subject?

July 19,  2015     Permalink

CONGRESS PUSHES BACK ON IRAN – AT 9:06 A.M. ET:   Obama is rushing to the UN with his Iran agreement, seeking ratification before the United States Congress even considers the pact.  Many Republicans are outraged, and are being joined by some brave Democrats.  But the protests won't matter.  Obama does what he wants, and the amen corner in the American press will applaud him.  From The Hill:

Senate Republicans have found a new target in the war of words with President Obama over Iran: the United Nations.

They argue that the administration is about to leapfrog Congress by allowing the international body to approve a nuclear pact that lawmakers have not signed off on, let alone properly reviewed.

The battle is uniting Republicans, from conservative firebrand and presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to GOP leadership and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, urged the administration to hold off on the U.N. Security Council vote.

Doing otherwise, Thune said, would show that “the president holds the opinion of the United Nations in higher esteem than the American people.”

The quick move toward the U.N. vote has also angered rank-and-file Republicans, with Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) saying that it makes it seem like the administration “always intended to bypass Congress by moving through the United Nations.”

Cruz is threatening to block nominees and funding for the State Department unless the administration prevents the U.N. Security Council from voting on the resolution on the nuclear deal, which could happen as early as Monday.

One of Cruz’s rivals for the GOP nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), also blasted the administration, suggesting that Obama is taking the deal to the United Nations first because he knows Congress will ultimately reject the deal.

“It’s a clear sign that he knows if this deal is reviewed closely by the American people, it will be rejected,” Rubio said. “We cannot allow America's security to be outsourced to the United Nations.”

The senators have bipartisan support on the other side of the Capitol.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said during an interview with "Lou Dobbs Tonight" that lawmakers would try to block Obama from lifting an arms embargo if he lets the U.N. vote take place before Congress approves, or disapproves, the deal.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 House Democrat, is also pushing back against the administration. The Maryland lawmaker said that waiting to take the deal to the United Nations until after Congress has voted "would be consistent with the intent and substance" of the review legislation.

COMMENT:   I suspect that many of the more grown-up Democats, and there are some left, are actually appalled by Obama, but they can do very little about it.  They are desperately afraid of the race card, which will be played during the Iran debate.  And they are desperately afraid of having primary opponents run against them by left-wing groups. 

July 19, 2015       Permalink

OBAMA'S NEW CRUSADE – AT 8:45 A.M. ET:  Having done his best to make Iran into a world power, President Obama is now hard at work on a new project – convincing America that one of the great American success stories, reducing the crime rate dramatically over two and a half decades, is really an illusion, and that many criminals are merely misunderstood members of oppressed classes.  From Paul Mirengoff at Powerline: 

Having empowered Iran’s criminal regime and all but ensured its long-term survival, President Obama is turning his attention to doing what he can for American criminals. In one day this week, he commuted the sentences of 46 criminals, the most presidential commutations in a single day since at least the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, according to the White House.

The president also took the time to write a personal letter to each of the 46 criminals. He has not, however, contacted the family of Kathryn Steinle who was murdered in San Francisco by an illegal alien and convicted felon who was released from prison earlier this year.

Obama has already commuted more sentences than Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush combined. And he is only getting started, as Daniel Horowitz notes in a perceptive article.

More importantly, Obama is doing all he can to persuade Americans that our criminal justice system is illegitimate. That system is “broken,” Obama insists. The way to fix it, he asserts, is through softer sentencing and earlier release for convicted felons, mostly (so far) dealers in hard drugs.

Bill Otis demonstrates that (1) the criminal justice system, far from being broken, is a contemporary American success story and (2) Obama’s prescription for “fixing” the system would lead to a significant increase in crime.

Bill reminds us that since America implemented the tough sentencing regime about which Obama complains, the crime rate has fallen by one-half. Today, we have more than five million fewer serious crimes in this country per year than we did a generation ago, and more than ten thousand fewer murders per year. Serious sentencing is a key part of this success story, together with more police and more aggressive policing — programs that Obama and his allies also oppose.

COMMENT:  So-called "progressives" have no problem with high crime rates.  They interpret crime as legitimate protest against society.  The hard-left mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, is also at war against the police and a criminal-justice system that has worked remarkably well. 

Chicago is a perfect example of what we can expect.  It is ravaged by gun violence, and the progressives blame...the guns.  Trigger fingers need not apply.

July 19, 2015       Permalink

THE TRUE IRAN – AT 8:26 A.M. ET:  We're told so much about Iran, and so much of it is wrong.  Amir Taheri is one of the best analysts of the country, one of the few who actually knows what he's talking about.  This is a must read – the best piece on the truth about Iran that I've read recently.  From the New York Post:

“American rulers have always dreamed of forcing us to change our behavior, and failed,” Iran’s “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, said Saturday. “Five US administrations took that dream to their graves. The present one shall have the same fate.”

Khamenei’s analysis is not far off the mark. Successive American presidents have worked hard to persuade the Khomeinist regime in Tehran to modify aspects of its foreign policy, so far with no success.

The reason may be the inability or unwillingness of successive US presidents, and a good part of the American political and cultural elite, to properly understand the nature of the Khomeinist regime.
Jimmy Carter believed the Khomeinist seizure of power represented the return of religion to the center of public life.

His administration described Khomeini as “a holy man” and “the Gandhi of Islam.” Carter wrote letters to Khomeini “as a man of faith to a man of faith.” He even ordered the resumption of arms supplies to Tehran.

We all know what that did to Carter.

COMMENT:  Taheri spares no one, including Republicans.  But one is struck by the moronic statements made by Bill Clinton after leaving the White House, and it is fair to wonder whether Clinton was paid for one.  Taheri informs us that John Kerry's sister worked in Iran and that he has an Iranian son-in-law.  Didn't know that. 

Read it.

July 19,  2015     Permalink