by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Jul 14, 2015 | Barack Obama, International, Liberty, Middle East, North America, Radical Islam, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com
Full text of the Iran deal is here.
Official the Joint Plan of Action with Iran is now complete with several items considered just housekeeping matters are still to be worked out. The Parchin plant MAY have allowed inspections while the other locations are off limits. The Fordo plant continues the enrichment work and Bashir al Assad is dancing at Disney. (sarcasm)
It is unclear if the UK Parliament or France votes on the JPOA but it is likely to occur. China and Russia stand with Iran especially on the arms embargo and sanction relief side.
Israel is sounding the alarms for security not only for Israel but for America and Europe.
Lifted sanctions include these individuals:
For the full text of the JPOA, click here.
By Eli Lake at Bloomberg:
As the Senate wraps up debate this week on Iran legislation, expect to hear a lot about “hardliners.”
The Senate’s alleged hardliners have tried to add conditions to a nuclear deal the U.S. is currently negotiating with Iranian moderates, but there is little chance the senators will succeed. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is expected to call for an end to debate on their meddling amendments.
According to a certain school of thought, all of this is a good thing. Our hardliners, say cheerleaders for the Iran negotiations, empower Iran’s hardliners, who are also wary of a deal.
President Obama views the politics of the Iran deal in these terms himself. Back in March when Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republicans sent a letter to Iran’s leaders, reminding them that any deal signed with Obama could be reversed by Congress or future presidents, the president played the hardliner card: “I think it’s somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran.”
There is definitely a political logic to pinning this “hardliner” label on the senators. The White House can artfully shift the conversation away from the contents of the deal it is negotiating. Instead the debate is framed as the Americans and Iranians who seek peace (moderates) versus those in both nations who want war (hardliners).
It’s simple, but deceptive. This tactic understates the power of Iran’s hardliners and dramatically overstates the power of U.S. hardliners.
In Iran, the people inside the system who are negotiating a deal, such as Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, must take the agreement to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for approval. In Iran, the hardliner approves the deal.
In the U.S. system it’s the other way around. Senators like Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz support amendments that would set new conditions before lifting Congressional sanctions on Iran. But there are not enough votes in the Senate to overturn an Obama veto on the legislation if these amendments are attached. In other words, Obama frames the conversation in the U.S., because he has the power to ignore his hardliners whereas Zarif is obliged to placate his.
Then there is the substance of the amendments themselves. Democrats and Republicans have derided certain Republicans’ amendments to the bill as “poison pills,” aimed at making a deal with Iran impossible. But these amendments would require Iran to end its war against its neighbors, release U.S. citizens who have been jailed and recognize the right of the world’s only Jewish state to exist. Outside the context of Iran negotiations, these are hardly radical views. Obama has expressed support for these positions himself.
Compare those demands with those of the Iranian hardliners. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces on Sunday reiterated the red line that no military installations would be accessible for international inspections. This would pose a problem, given that the U.S. and other great powers have agreed to allow Iran to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for tough inspections. The Iranian hardliners appear to be putting back in play something Obama’s team believed was already agreed.
The most important distinction between Iran’s hardliners and America’s hardliners however is their political legitimacy. Iran’s people have supported reform, but nonetheless the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and domestic spy agency have tightened the grip on power despite elections when reformers won the presidency.
Contrast their ascent with the plight of Iran’s moderates: In 1997, Iranians elected a reformer president, Mohammed Khatami, who promised to open up Iran’s political system. But throughout his presidency he was unable to stop the arrests of student activists or the shuttering of opposition newspapers. By the end of Khatami’s presidency, some of his closest advisers were tried in public for charges tantamount to treason. In 2013, Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani, who ran as a reformer even though under Khatami he had overseen crackdowns on reformers. Rouhani has not freed the leaders of the 2009 green movement from house arrest or most of the activists who protested elections in 2009.
When Obama talks about his Iran negotiations, he glosses over all of this. He emphasizes instead that Rouhani has a mandate to negotiate and that he is taking advantage of this diplomatic window.
Obama had threatened to veto legislation that would give Congress a chance to review, but not modify, any agreement the administration reaches with Iran and five other world powers. Now the president says he will sign the legislation, but only if it doesn’t include the kinds of amendments favored by the so-called hardliners. After all, those amendments are unacceptable to the hardliners who actually have sway — in Iran.
by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Jul 14, 2015 | Liberty, North America, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
KeyWiki.org
Donna Brazile
Donna Brazile…is a leading Democratic Party operative. She is an adjunct professor, author, a syndicated columnist and the Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation at the Democratic National Committee.
In the 1990s, Brazile was the communications director for far left Delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC). She also ran Al Gore‘s campaign for the White House in 2000.
Brazile is Founder and Managing Director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy and training firm based in Washington, DC.
In her early 20s, Brazile became actively involved in the United States Student Association, lined up a job as a lobbyist with the National Student Education Fund and moved to Washington, DC.
Brazile attended a Youth Peace and Disarmament Conference in Helsinki, Finland, and learned “firsthand how negatively other peoples viewed nuclear arms. That was one of the factors that hardened her resolve to want to go to Washington to work towards change.” The conference was the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth‘s for peace, detente and disarmament, World Forum of Youth and Students, 19-23, January 1981.
In 2009, Brazile was listed as a member of the Advisory Board of Wellstone Action, a Minnesota based organization built on the political legacy of that state’s late “progressive” and Democratic Socialists of America allied Senator Paul Wellstone.
Rep. Karen Bass traveled to Havana, Cuba on June 5th, 2011, accompanied by Donna Brazile, former Congresswoman Jane Harman and Sara Stephens of the the pro-Cuban Center for Democracy in the Americas, as a “Women’s Leadership Delegation.”
The delegates participating in the Cuba fact-finding trip attended meetings with “Cuban academics, policymakers, journalists and NGO representatives.”
Donna Brazile, Karen Bass, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, Jane Harman
(more…)
by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Jul 13, 2015 | Europe, Liberty, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com
Vladimir Putin has his propaganda machine working in full speed. We are being sucked into it and not recognizing the clues much less asking harder questions against his agenda.
There is a two part series on the Pro-Kremlin operation. Part 1 video is here. Part 2 video is here.
Now, the movement behind the machine is something called ‘The Agency’ which is a location in St. Petersberg, Russia called the Internet Research Agency.
From DenisonForum: The Agency’s origins can be traced to the 2011 anti-government protests, organized because of the growing evidence of fraud in the Parliamentary elections that year. The protests had been organized largely via Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal and the government wanted to ensure that similar protests were far more difficult to put together in the future. So the next year, Vyascheslav Volodin was named the new deputy head of Putin’s administration and given the task of gaining better control over the internet. In addition to starting the Agency, laws were passed that required bloggers to register with the state and the government was allowed to censor websites without a court order. Putin justified the new laws “by calling the Internet a ‘C.I.A. project,’ one that Russia needed to be protected from.”
The full background investigation on the Internet Research Agency, or rather the Kremlin troll factory is found here.
For the software and internet geeks out there, below is the proof of the machine where evidence was peeled back by using open source analytic tools.
From Global Voices Online: In April of this year, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Guardian reported on the website вштабе.рф, a large photo gallery of pro-Russian memes and “demotivator” graphics. Most of these crude caricatures ridicule US, Western, and Ukrainian leaders, whilst portraying Vladimir Putin as strong and heroic.
The site gives no credit or attribution for its design, and offers no indication as to who might be behind it. Intrigued by this anonymity, I used Maltego open-source intelligence software to gather any publicly-available information that might provide clues.
The Secrets of Google Analytics
My use of Maltego revealed that the site was running Google Analytics, a commonly used online analytics tool that allows a website owner to gather statistics on visitors, such as their country, browser, and operating system. For convenience, multiple sites can be managed under a single Google analytics account. This account has a unique identifying “UA” number, contained in the Analytics script embedded in the website’s code. Google provides a detailed guide to the system’s structure.
Whilst investigating the network of sites tied to account UA-53176102, I discovered that one, news-region.ru, had also been linked to a second Analytics account: UA-53159797 (archive).
This number, in turn, was associated with a further cluster of nineteen pro-Kremlin websites. Subsequent examinations of these webpages revealed three more Analytics accounts, with additional sites connected to them. Below is a network diagram of the relationships I have established to date.
Most notably, Podgorny is listed in the leaked employee list of St. Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency, the pro-Kremlin troll farm featured in numerous news reports and investigations, including RuNet Echo’s own reports.
Podgorny’s date of birth, given on his public VK profile, is an exact match for that shown in the leaked document.
Podgorny is also VK friends with Igor Osadchy, who is named as a fellow employee in the same list. Osadchy has denied working for the Internet Reseach Agency, calling the leaks an “unsuccessful provocation.”
*** This internet researcher will continue the investigation and report more. For expanded details on the first cut of the investigation, click here.
by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Jul 13, 2015 | Liberty, North America
The Watcher’s Council
Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: What Advice Would You Give The Presidential Candidate Of Your Choice?
Don Surber: My advice to Marco Rubio: Smile more and be positive. Resist the temptation to play to the reportorial bleachers; they hate you and want to destroy you. Be kind to your fellow Republicans. Never say an unkind word about any of them. Ever.
GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: Currently in limbo – I really dig Marco. And GOV Perry and to a little lesser extent SEN Cruz and GOV Walker. I also dig how the Donald fired off blistering cuts on many of them. The guy has a point.
Just saw a bit on the telly where SEN Rick Santorum rather unnimbly ducked, weaved and dodged specifics on handling ISIS. It was painful to watch and listen.
While the good Sen is not my cat thus far – it does bring up a raison d’etre for gooder advice – especially on ISIS.
1. Make it big.
Loudly and proudly declare the goal will be to chuck their carcasses onto the same pile as Waffen Ss and Kamikazees. Terms like Annihilation, utter destruction mixed in with picturesque prose about repeatedly raining destruction on them sans modesty or restraint.
Also make it clear, internat’l borders in this case are only pretty lines on a map. There is no where ISIS will be able to raise the flag without American military power being in their face.
2. Go big.
Party it up. Announce their will be massive Bar B Ques
(beef, chicken and pork) held in Raaqa the very day their HQ falls, that American troops will be on the ground in newly acquired turf in the ME for eons if needed.
LOL any and all ME nations fear about the American military seizing oil wealth, bases and turf. After all, America was invited back into the Middle East – simply because the nations there are too weak, too disorganized and unserious about destroying ISIS.
3. Mean and Scary
American combat troops in large numbers on the ground killing ISIS for the duration and afterwards
4. If ISIS is truly a threat – then treat it like one with all the disproportionate force available.
Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason: Unfortunately, I have yet to find the presidential candidate of my choice. But I would like to tell “The Donald” to just go away.
JoshuaPundit: I have no presidential candidate at this point, but I admit to leaning towards Scott Walker simply because the floor beneath governor’s chair in Wisconsin is littered with the skulls of his enemies who did everything they could to destroy him. The idea of someone in the White House with actual successful executive experience and real accomplishments intrigues me, I admit.
Aside from telling most of the candidates in both parties to go find honest work instead, what I’d advise anyone who wants the job to do is to level with the American people. That doesn’t mean ridiculous sound bite applause lines guaranteed to make headlines – the last thing we need is another Ross Perot – but real solutions to real problems… and that’s also going to mean attacking Mrs. Clinton head on and linking her to the Obama regime’s failures. Politics, after all, is war by other mean.
The Independent Sentinel: I’d like to give advice to Hillary Clinton. Democrats are always very generous about giving advice to Republicans which they feel compelled to follow and the least I can do is pay it back.
The first thing Hillary should do is promise to approve the Keystone Pipeline with an Executive Order the day she takes office. She should follow that up by approving every nuclear plant application and canceling all new climate change rules, especially now that we know an Ice Age is coming.
If I were her, I’d promise to fill up GITMO with all these terrorist wannabes we keep growing at home.
Her agenda should include lowering taxes on the wealthy, declaring all 50 states right-to-work and she should admit the war on women and the whole pay equity issue are bogus.
Oh, and she should immediately promise to close the borders.
Finally, she should do away with minimum wages, right after she says she plans to declare war on a few countries.
Ask Marion: My advice to the person that was not exactly my first choice for the GOP presidential nomination until lately is to “keep doing what you are are doing!!”.
I have become more and more of a Donald Trump fan day by the day and I don’t seem to be alone!! Clint Eastwood jumped on the Trump train.
The Donald knows business and finance; he knows many of both the political and business leaders from around the world; he has the guts to say what he thinks and what a lot of Americans want to hear; he has name recognition; he is actually pro enforcing American law and securing the borders; he can self-finance so he won’t owe anyone favors if he is elected; the media hates him so you know he is on to something; and Trump loves America and Capitalism. Sounds like a great presidential candidate to me!!
Trump has guts and understands showmanship. So while the liberal media kept trying to feed everyone the idea that his trip to Los Angeles and Arizona would be disastrous, it turned out exactly the opposite.
Video: Donald Trump Press Conference LA; victim’s families; Jamiel Shaw – FULL-UNEDITED
Video: FULL Donald Trump Arizona Rally 15,000+ People
Donald Trump is looking less and less like a wild card and more and more like he could win!
Well, there you have it.
Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.
It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it.
And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that, y’know?
by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton | Jul 12, 2015 | Barack Obama, Liberty, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
Doug Ross @ Journal
UnsavoryAgents
The usually brilliant and stalwart Kevin D. Williamson of National Review appears at last to have fallen victim to the virus known as Beltway Insider-itis. In doing so, he joins the likes of David Brooks and Jen Rubin, so-called “conservatives” who act as the unofficial PR wing of the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove, and the Republican National Committee.
We fully expect the Left to tar Constitutional Conservatives and Tea Party activists as racists (no matter their love and support of Allen West, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, Israel, et. al.); most recently the progressive sissy-boy (which is the term he prefers, I hear) Damon Linker of The Week labeled the conservative base a bunch of Birchers who hate, among others, “negroes, elites, decadent city folk, Catholics [and] Jews”.
We do not expect the likes of Williamson, however, to channel Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Karl Rove and Tom Donohue and slam the very group of Americans who handed the Republican Party massive midterm wins at every level of government in 2010 and 2014.
Thus, it was with great surprise that I read Williamson’s latest (“WHINOS: On the Martyrdom of the Holy, Holy Base“), a full-throated attack on you and I, who he terms “WHINOS”.
Never mind the Democrats, economic realities, Putin, ISIS, the geographical facts of the U.S.-Mexico border — all would be well and all manner of things would be well if not for the behind-the-scenes plotting of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their enablers, who apparently can be bribed with small numbers of cocktail weenies. The WHINO is a Republican conspiracy theorist, in whose fervid imaginings all the players — victims, villains — are Republicans.
Why the vitriol (and patently false vitriol at that)?
Williamson, like many Beltway insiders, has panicked at the latest polls showing Donald Trump (no, not Donald Trump!) atop the current GOP field.
Recall, however, that at this same moment in the prior election cycle, Rudy Giuliani sat in Trump’s position.
Williamson also insists Romney was a wonderful candidate and anyone who couldn’t see the difference between the former Massachusetts governor and Obama was either a “fanatic or extraordinarily ill-informed”. Or perhaps nominating the Godfather of Obamacare made the dominant policy issue of 2012 a moot point?
And why do I call Williamson’s insipid arguments patently false?
He need look no further than his own website to read the sobering wisdom of Andrew C. McCarthy (“Republicans Have Needlessly Undermined their Ability to Resist the Iran Deal”), which effectively shreds every last molecule of Williamson’s diatribe.
In fact, on the most important national security question in possibly all of American history, the Obama-Kerry nuclear Iran agreement (McCarthy terms it “a disastrous deal that would end sanctions against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism while paving its way to a nuclear-weapons arsenal”), John Boehner and Mitch McConnell conspired with Barack Obama to simply cede Congressional oversight of a deal that will reward Iran with $150 billion and allow it (easily) to build nuclear weapons.
That legislation … enacted as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, shifts the burden of persuasion away from President Obama and onto opponents of the Iran deal, thus making the deal virtually impossible to stop or undo…
…Iran, of course, is not just an accused party; it is an incorrigible recidivist. In overt contempt for our nation and president, Tehran is already in flagrant violation of the “Joint Plan of Action” it agreed to with the administration. The mullahs see that, even as they systematically flout this interim deal, Obama is hell-bent on looking the other way. It is therefore certain that they will violate the final deal — which will be so frontloaded with carrots (e.g., a $150 billion signing bonus in the form of immediate sanctions relief) that the sticks can be laughed off…
…Under the Constitution, the president must persuade a two-thirds supermajority of senators to approve an agreement with a foreign power. That is, as I’ve repeatedly contended in connection with the Iran negotiations, the Constitution’s presumption is against legally binding international pacts…
…Under the Constitution’s burden of persuasion, then, the Iran deal did not have a prayer of becoming law … In the final Iran deal, the burden of persuasion is key. Enter the Corker legislation. It undermined the Constitution’s presumption against international agreements by shifting the burden of persuasion: Rather than forcing the president to persuade two-thirds of the Senate to approve the deal, it imposes on opponents the burden of persuading two-thirds of the full Congress to reject it.
In other words, the Corker bill (and, remember, Bob Corker is simply a puppet of Mitch McConnell in this and many other matters) surrendered full control of the most dangerous deal imaginable — handing cash and nuclear weapons to a terror state whose unofficial slogan is “Death to America” — to Barack Hussein Obama.
I don’t know whether McCarthy wrote his piece as a direct assault on Williamson, but suffice it to say that it appears purpose-built.
Williamson must also ignore the fact that, in order to get elected, men like Boehner and McConnell pledged fiscal responsibility, a full repeal of Obamacare, and investigations of Barack Obama’s high crimes and misdemeanors.
In fact, a Republican Congress has aided and abetted the most massive expansion of government since World War II; an act of fiscal irresponsibility so unhinged and detrimental to society that Mark Levin’s new book on the topic (Plunder and Deceit) is already a #1 bestseller weeks before it hits the shelves.
In fact, a Republican Congress has done nothing of import to repeal the disastrous Obamacare law, even as the Supreme Court and the Department of Health and Human Services rewrites it at will.
In fact, a Republican Congress has failed to name a Select Committee to investigate the weaponization of the IRS (the mere suggestion of which was outlined in Richard Nixon’s prospective articles of impeachment); it has permitted Hillary Clinton to destroy her government records that were under subpoena with virtually no repercussions; and it has failed to diligently pursue any one of dozens of other scandals (e.g., Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the UAW bailout, the violation of the War Powers Act, etc.) that should be front and center every single day.
Is it any wonder that the conservative base is frothing at the mouth?
Williamson concludes with the pithy phrase “[w]hining is no substitute for winning”; unfortunately his beloved Establishment has done very little winning, whether in general elections or on the most important policy questions of the day.
In order to win, Kevin, you have to fight.
Feckless, cowardly boobs like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have surrendered at every opportunity without even considering a fight, insisting before the battle is even joined, for instance, that they’ll never shut down the government.
The American people need a Presidential candidate who will fight. Whether that man is Donald Trump or, more realistically, someone like Ted Cruz, Americans want a candidate who will not hesitate to face our enemies, whether they be foreign or domestic.
by renee nal | Jul 11, 2015 | Liberty, Uncategorized
Rick Perry hired Austin Barbour via Gulflive
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry seems to have largely escaped the scrutiny recently directed toward Scott Walker for hiring establishment operative Brad Dayspring who aggressively lied about the Tea Party during the hotly contested Mississippi primary last year.
While Scott Walker, who this author has long suspected of as having establishment sympathies, has been appropriately getting heat for hiring a pro-Cochran thug, Rick Perry should also be called out for his “terrible hires,” including Henry Barbour (who previously worked for Perry), and should be “censured” and is “quite possibly the most despised campaign consultant in the entire conservative movement,” “McCain flunkie” Steve Schmidt (who believes that Sarah Palin “is filled with anger, has a divisive message”) and Austin Barbour (who also worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign) as senior adviser to three of Perry’s super PACs.
As reported at CNN Friday:
Two pro-Perry groups — Opportunity and Freedom PAC and Opportunity and Freedom PAC I — raised $12.8 million in the first half of the year. A third super PAC, which was created Thursday, collected a $4 million check from a single donor, bringing the full tally for the three groups to $16.8 million as of July 10, said Austin Barbour, the senior adviser to all three affiliated entities.
Last year, NBC reported that the pro-GOP establishment Barbour family had “palpable” anger toward Chris McDaniel, who threatened the establishment in Mississippi. In a nutshell, creepy Kate Cochran’s father Thad, through his evidently-coveted campaign staff, convinced black Democrats with robocalls and radio advertisements in the 2014 primary that the Tea Party is racist and would take away food stamps.
A pro-Cochran radio advertisement said in part,
“[B]y not voting, you are saying ‘take away all of my government programs, such as food stamps, early breakfast and lunch programs, millions of dollars to our black universities’…everything we and our families depend on that comes from Washington will be cut.”
A pro-Cochran robocall lamented:
“[I]f we do nothing, Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel wins and causes even more problems for President Obama.”
The conservative grassroots, i.e. those paying attention, universally recognize and abhor the words and deeds of the power-grabbing, Constitution-shredding establishment republicans. Just as one will never (ever) find these politically-savvy folks excited about the prospect of a Jeb Bush presidency; the patriot movement is also unified in their disdain for those who lied (also see here and here) to black voters in Mississippi in order to secure a primary victory for establishment incumbent Thad Cochran in 2014.
