Joel B. Pollak - Page 285

The Castro brothers haven’t survived in power without being canny politicians as well as ruthless tyrants. And they have President Barack Obama pegged: they know that his ego trumps all other priorities, and are willing to flatter him to win concessions. Raúl Castro used his country’s debut at the Summit of the Americas to deliver an hour-long rant against the U.S. role in the region–then excused Obama: “I apologize to him because President Obama had no responsibility for this.”

The left has a convenient explanation for California’s severe drought: climate change. Though scientists have yet to make a direct connection, and have suggested instead that the drought is the result of a wind anomaly not related to overall global warming, that has not prevented politicians from putting on their lab coats and declaring their conclusions, demanding not only (sensible) water restrictions but also (irrational) controls on the use of fossil fuels, as if less coal equals more rain.

A war of words–and fundraising emails–has erupted between Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) over the Iran deal. The fight began when Schakowsky objected to Kirk’s remark to Politico that “Neville Chamberlain got a lot of more out of Hitler than [U.S. negotiator] Wendy Sherman got out of Iran.” Schakowsky said it was “appalling” for Kirk to “equate the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Nazi appeasement.” Kirk then used her attack in a fundraising email.

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act appears to be the most effective way for Congress to stop President Barack Obama from appeasing the Iranian regime with a bad nuclear deal. The “Corker-Mendez-Graham” bill, or the “Corker Bill,” would require President Obama to submit the final Iran deal to Congress. Yet the text of the bill now before Congress would actually make an Iran deal easier to approve–and would do so by gutting the Senate’s constitutional power over treaties.

Rand Paul may be “closest to Obama in his view on foreign policy,” as Dr. Charles Krauthammer put it on Tuesday, but he is facing stiff competition from Jeb Bush in that category.The former Florida governor praised Obama’s initial negotiating efforts with Iran on Tuesday, telling an audience in Denver that “we need to give him credit” for “bringing other people along and making it tougher.” The puzzling statement suggests the influence of James A. Baker III on the Bush campaign.

The judge presiding over a case involving billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has thrown out accusations against lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, who once represented Epstein but was not named in the lawsuit brought by Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell on behalf of “Jane Doe #3.” The judge cited Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(f), which allows a court, on its own volition, to strike portions of pleadings that are “redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is a candidate to succeed retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) as Senate Minority Leader, has reiterated his support for a bipartisan proposal to require President Barack Obama to submit to Congress any nuclear deal with Iran. Because President Barack Obama has promised to veto the legislation–known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act–Schumer’s position is seen as a rare moment of dissent. However, there may be less here than meets the eye.

For days, lefties like Chris Matthews of MSNBC and Jonathan Chait of the New Republic have been fuming that conservative critics of the Iran “framework” have referred to it as the sequel to the Munich agreement of 1938—the deal that defined “appeasement.” Yet President Barack Obama proved his critics correct on Monday when he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that Iran be required to accept Israel’s right to exist as a condition of a final deal.

California Governor Jerry Brown warned Americans on Sunday morning that California’s drought was a sign of climate change. However, in his appearance on ABC News’ This Week, with guest host Martha Raddatz, Brown also defended California farmers from charges that they are overusing water, arguing that they feed the rest of the country.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger could travel back in time, as he did in the Terminator movies, and stop himself from vetoing gay marriage in 2005 and 2007, then perhaps he could have saved his political career from its later, near-complete devastation. However, the Silicon Valley techies haven’t yet invented a time machine. So Schwarzenegger must content himself with an op-ed in the pages of the Washington Post, lecturing fellow Republicans about the evils of Indiana’s religious freedom law.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with his cabinet on Friday, who unanimously opposed the framework Iran deal reached Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland, and said that any final deal must include Iran’s recognition of Israel.

In the wake of the Iran “framework” agreement Thursday, President Barack Obama celebrated–but the Iranian regime pushed for more concessions, disputing the White House’s “fact sheet” on the deal and insisting the parties had agreed to end sanctions immediately. Iran’s reaction was a clear sign that between now and the end of June, an already-bad deal is going to get worse as the Iranians see just how much Obama wants an agreement, and use that to make new demands.

Left-wing Israeli writer Ari Shavit, an ardent advocate of Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, has blasted President Barack Obama’s “framework” deal with Iran, saying that Obama is making the same mistakes for peace that George W. Bush made for war. Just as Bush launched an invasion of Iraq with no clear idea of the strategic consequences, Shavit says, Obama does not realize the deadly results of a bad deal with Iran, including a nuclear Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey.

Several years ago, two professors co-wrote a book, The Israel Lobby, that repackaged Zionist conspiracy theories in the respectable garb of academic prose. The authors, Stephen M. Walt of Harvard and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, claimed that Israel, through its network of American supporters, pushed the U.S. to go to war with Iraq and were about to do the same with Iran. On Thursday, President Barack Obama gave his endorsement to that theory.

The P5+1 powers have, as expected, reached a “framework agreement” on a nuclear deal with Iran. And, as suspected, the agreement allows Iran to retain its enrichment facility at an underground bunker. It also allows Iran to maintain a small amount of enriched uranium, and will offer the regime sanctions relief as soon as it can show it is keeping its end of the bargain. As to information about possible military dimensions of Iran’s program, there is nothing but an agreement to talk further.

As talks over a nuclear deal with Iran continued past self-imposed deadlines, Israel’s intelligence minister has warned that the military option is on the table–and noted that Israel does not need U.S. cooperation to carry out a pre-emptive strike.

Once, Robert Malley was too radical for the Obama campaign, or for the White House. The Middle East scholar, widely seen as anti-Israel, reportedly met with the terrorist group Hamas and encouraged the United States to do the same. Then, in February, President Barack Obama appointed Malley as a senior director at the National Security Council. Today, Malley is advising Secretary of State John Kerry in Lausanne, Switzerland as he negotiates with Iran over a nuclear deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized President Barack Obama directly on Thursday evening, telling him that the new framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program “threatens the survival of the State of Israel.” The two leaders spoke by telephone to discuss the preliminary deal that negotiators from the P5+1 nations reached with Iran at talks in Lausanne, Switzerland that extended past the original Tuesday deadline.

On Wednesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown made national headlines by announcing that he had “signed an executive order requiring the State Water Resources Control Board to implement measures in cities and towns to cut the state’s overall water usage by

Once again, the Iran deal confirmed by diplomats in Lausanne, Switzerland has failed to materialize. And the only thing more pathetic than the repeated collapse of the talks is the spectacle of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry staying on, even after diplomats from China, Russia, France and Germany have packed their bags and gone home. He is simply unwilling to admit failure. But the Iranian regime is happy to entertain his illusions, and so their delegation has stayed behind, too.

Now that Harry Reid has admitted he was lying about Mitt Romney failing to pay taxes in order to help Barack Obama win re-election, the media are pretending to be shocked. But they were complicit, too, giving Reid’s claim more air time than it possibly deserved. And the Obama campaign backed Reid’s efforts, pushing his lies in their own words. The worst offender was Jen Psaki, who was later rewarded with plum communications posts at the State Department and the White House.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the emerging Iran deal on Wednesday, calling it “unconscionable” that world powers were about to sign an agreement with the “murderous” regime even as it continued to vow to destroy Israel.

After a marathon negotiating session that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, April 1–hours after the official deadline–the parties gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland reached a tentative deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Trevor Noah had barely endured 12 hours of conservative criticism about his past Twitter comments when the left began to voice its outrage, as well. Liberal critics focused in particular on Noah’s jokes about women. Yet while both left and right seized on Noah’s Twitter feed, the spirit of criticism was not quite the same for each.

Diplomats meeting Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland to hammer out the framework agreement for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program missed their deadline of March 31, and resolved to continue their negotiations for an additional day, expecting to complete an agreement on April 1st, otherwise known as April Fool’s Day.

San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, the only Republican mayor of a major U.S. city, joined the “Boycott Indiana” bandwagon, banning city travel Monday to the state over its recent Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which critics have called anti-gay. “We’ve directed the City’s Chief Operating Officer to take the necessary actions to restrict publicly funded travel by city employees to Indiana if the law is not amended or repealed by next week,” said Faulconer’s spokesperson.

Negotiations toward a nuclear deal between Iran and the P+5 nations (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) will continue through June, according to reports from Lausanne, Switzerland on Tuesday. The announcement was made to satisfy the self-imposed deadline of March 31 for a provisional agreement, with “technical” details to be agreed by July 1. However, major differences appear to have been redefined as “technical” to keep talks going.

Trevor Noah, the newly-named replacement for Jon Steward on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, is still an unknown quantity to many Americans. Curious fans and critics, eager to learn more about the South African comedian, have been combing the Internet for clues, and have turned up troubling comments about Israel and Jews that have some wondering if the new host will, like Stewart (Leibowitz), take to hiding his Jewish-sounding name to avoid controversy. (I kid.)

South African comedian Timothy Noah has been named to succeed Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Noah is talented and funny, and as a fellow native son of South Africa, I wish him well. Unfortunately, Noah is a mismatch for the show. Stewart would be a tough act to follow in any circumstances, but Noah lacks any obvious fluency in American politics or media, and his specialty in racial and ethnic humor suggest that his repertoire will remain limited.

Iranian negotiators in Lausanne, Switzerland have pulled what observers are calling a “bait-and-switch” by reneging on an earlier agreement to export their country’s existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The New York Times calls the shift a “surprise” move on a “critical element” of the nuclear deal, but adds that “the Obama administration is expected to argue that it would not constitute a serious risk” to the deal if the stockpile is inspected by international monitors.

The news agency Agence France-Presse reports from Lausanne, Switzerland that Iran and the P5+1 powers (the five UN Security Council permanent members, plus Germany) have reached “provisional agreement” on the terms of nuclear deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday that an emerging nuclear deal with Iran was “even worse” than Israel had feared, warning of a new Iranian “axis” that was “dangerous for all of humanity and which much be stopped.”

The Iranian regime apparently believes it can extract additional concessions from world powers as the deadline for a March 31 deal approaches, according to a report by Bloomberg News from Lausanne, Switzerland. Iran wants UN sanctions to be lifted up front–not kept in place for several years while international monitors measure Iranian compliance, as the U.S. and other powers (Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany) have said was a non-negotiable provision.

Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a generous Republican donor and staunch supporter of Israel, has reportedly become “incensed” at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush over comments that a Bush foreign policy adviser made about Israel.

“An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents.” Thus did Alexander Hamilton warn the American people, in Federalist No. 75, against allowing the president to make treaties alone.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to face harsh criticism, at home and abroad, for remarks he made on Election Day warning that Arabs were being bused to the polls and voting in large numbers, threatening the future of the right-wing government. Netanyahu has since apologized to the Arab community. From a purely political perspective, however, the only thing that matters is that he won. That raises the question: what if Republicans had done the same in 2008 and 2012?