Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Kamala Harris, Enjoined in Lawsuit

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SACRAMENTO — A Virginia-based conservative group filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit this week accusing California Attorney General Kamala Harris of engaging in the kind of activity that was the subject of the recent scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service. Are state officials trying to chill the speech of conservative nonprofits?

“Not only did IRS employees improperly target groups based on politics, but they also improperly demanded a host of details about the groups’ activities, according to a report on the abuses by a Treasury Department inspector general,” according to a Washington Post report about the federal scandal. The IRS even demanded information about some of these groups’ smallest donors.

Now the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is saying the state of California is improperly demanding information about its donors – and is threatening unusually harsh penalties if the group doesn’t comply. One other conservative group has filed a separate lawsuit against the attorney general, which is now in the Ninth Circuit.

**** Now comes the court’s decision on her collusion.

Court enjoins California AG Kamala Harris on First Amendment grounds

Stopping acts statutorily related to some of Lois Lerner’s abuse of First Amendment rights of nonprofit organizations, a federal judge has enjoined California attorney general and Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate Kamala Harris from obtaining donor records of 501(c)(4) organizations.

Without express state statutory authority, and allegedly in violation of federal law protecting the confidentiality of donors listed in Schedule B, Ms. Harris demanded that organizations that register with her office under California’s charitable solicitation law disclose their largest donors.  She threatened fines against those who did not comply with her lawless, ultra vires demands.

Most states have charitable solicitation statutes requiring nonprofit organizations to pay fees and obtain a license before asking the public for contributions.  These state statutes typically require nonprofits to file their tax return, IRS Form 990, as part of their annual licensing application, but allow Schedule B listing top donors to be redacted.

The Supreme Court has acknowledged that states may require registration of nonprofits before solicitation of contributions so long as their laws do not violate the First Amendment.  The February 17 injunction against Harris noted that she threatened to suspend the solicitation license of plaintiff Americans for Prosperity unless it disclosed its largest donors.  The district court found that she could not assure that donor records would be kept confidential under her policies, which are not based in any concrete state law, and that would have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.

AFP presented evidence that its donors, which include the Koch brothers, have received threats.  The court found that AFP raised “serious questions going to the merits” of the larger case, which was sufficient for the injunction.

Federal law requires that donor information on IRS Form 990 Schedule B be kept confidential, with both civil and criminal penalties for disclosure by government officials.  Last year the IRS was fined $50,000 for unlawfully leaking the names of donors to the National Organization for Marriage.

Judicial Watch uncovered e-mails linking Lois Lerner to the IRS’s inappropriately collecting donor names of conservative organizations filing for tax-exempt status.  E-mails also indicate that Ms. Lerner unlawfully disclosed confidential tax information of Tea Party applicants to the Federal Election Commission.  She was eventually referred for criminal prosecution by the House Ways and Means Committee for, among other things, “exposing, and [potentially disclosing], confidential taxpayer information, in apparent violation of Internal Revenue Code section 6103 by using her personal email to conduct official business.”

Ms. Harris, who has been repeatedly described as the “female Barack Obama,” is running to fill the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer.  She has taken the side of supporting warrantless searches of cell phones, but a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California that the government needs a warrant.

 

 

 

 

Feds on the Move to Counter Judge’s Immigration Stay

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Recently, Judge Hanon issued a temporary stay order against the Obama regime to stop the White House DAPA order on immigration. Now the Feds are on the move.

HOUSTON (CN) – The 5th Circuit on Monday will be asked to decide whether the Obama administration’s deferred deportation programs for immigrants who were brought to the United States as children are permissible because of prosecutorial discretion.
The Justice Department on Friday said it will ask the 5th Circuit today to stay an injunction that prevented hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants from applying for amnesty.
Twenty-six Republican-led states sued Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and other top immigration officials late last year, claiming Obama’s executive actions are unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, granted an injunction against the programs last week. Critics claim that the Republican states forum-shopped to sue in Hanen’s court. Hanen, a George W. Bush appointee, was well known as a critic of Obama’s immigration policies.


Hanen did not rule that Obama’s programs are unconstitutional, but that they cannot take effect until legal questions are settled.
The Texas-led plaintiffs claim that because Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) would allow qualifying immigrants to apply for work permits and driver’s licenses, the states will be stuck with the cost of processing them.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services already has the authority to grant undocumented immigrants work permits, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Greg Palmore said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and USCIS both are branches of the Department of Homeland Security.
Obama’s programs are simply an element of the process of prosecutorial discretion, which immigration officials use to decide who should be deported, according to Palmore.
“Under the deferred action process, and prosecutorial discretion as a whole, ICE is screening every alien we encounter, including those in custody,” Palmore said Friday.
“Decisions are based on the merits of each case, the factual information provided to the agency and the totality of the circumstances,” Palmore said.
“ICE is focused on smart and effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes the removal of convicted criminal aliens, recent border-crossers and immigration fugitives who have failed to comply with final orders of removal issued by the nation’s immigration courts.”
Palmore said ICE would not discuss how it handles a particular case without the immigrant’s consent, as that information is protected by the Privacy Act.
The American Center for Law & Justice, a Christian conservative law firm based in Washington, D.C., joined 27 Republican congressmen in an amicus brief supporting the states’ lawsuit.
It claims Obama’s amnesty offer goes beyond the powers held by immigration agencies.
“As the judge indicated, there is no express or implied statutory authority to create entire new legal programs that go well beyond individualized discretion or resource-based priority determinations and extend into new, large-scale entitlements that actually contradict Congress’s expressed intent,” the firm said Friday in a statement.

DEFENDANTS’ EMERGENCY EXPEDITED MOTION TO STAY THE COURT’S

FEBRUARY 16, 2015 ORDER PENDING APPEAL AND SUPPORTING

MEMORANDUM

INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

Defendants respectfully move for a stay, pending appeal, of the preliminary injunction entered in this case on February 16, 2015 [ECF No. 144], concerning the November 20, 2014, memorandum issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security (“Secretary”), setting forth guidelines for the consideration of deferred action for the parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents (“DAPA”) and modifying existing guidelines for the consideration of deferred action for certain individuals who came to the United States as children (“modified DACA”) (collectively, “Deferred Action Guidance” or “Guidance”). Defendants have filed a Notice of Appeal [ECF No. 149] from the Court’s February 16, 2015 Opinion and Orders granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction [ECF Nos. 144 & 145].

A stay pending appeal is necessary to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS” or “Department”) is able to most effectively protect national security, public safety, and the integrity of the border. Specifically, the Deferred Action Guidance enjoined by this Court is an integral part of the Department’s comprehensive effort to set and effectuate immigration enforcement priorities that focus on the removal of threats to public safety, national security risks, and recent border crossers, thereby best securing the Homeland in the face of limited resources.

Absent a stay, DHS will sustain irreparable harm—harm that would not be cured, even if Defendants ultimately prevail on that appeal. Allowing the preliminary injunction to remain in place pending appeal would also harm the interests of the public and of third parties, who will be deprived of the significant law enforcement and humanitarian benefits of prompt implementation of the Guidance. When these harms are weighed against the financial injuries claimed by Plaintiffs (and found by the Court only as to Texas), the balance of hardships tips Case 1:14-cv-00254 Document 150 Filed in TXSD on 02/23/15 Page 5 of 24 decidedly in favor of a stay; the harms claimed by Plaintiffs are not imminent and are fully within their power to avoid.

A stay is also warranted in view of Defendant’s substantial case that the preliminary injunction was issued in error—all that Defendants must establish concerning a likelihood of success in order to warrant the requested stay. Defendants’ case is substantial indeed: the Court lacked authority to issue the preliminary injunction, both because Plaintiffs lack standing and because the Deferred Action Guidance is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion by the Secretary that is neither subject to challenge by the States, nor required to be issued through notice-and comment rulemaking. That the Court’s reasoning on standing and the merits has been rejected by other district courts further underscores the fact that Defendants have a substantial case on appeal.

Read the entire Federal appeal here that was filed today.

DHS was to begin accepting requests for modified DACA on February 18, 2015. On February 16, 2015, the Court granted Plaintiffs’ Motion and preliminarily enjoined Defendants from “implementing any and all aspects or phases” of DAPA and modified DACA, as set forth in the Guidance. Order of Temporary Inj. (“Order”) at 1-2 [ECF No. 144]. The Court found that “at least” Texas has standing to sue, stating that Texas would be required under the existing terms of state law to expend funds to provide driver’s licenses to individuals who receive DAPA and modified DACA at some point in the future. Mem. Op. & Order (“Op.”) at 22-36 [ECF No. 145].

Pssst, You ARE a Customer of This Bank

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“If the Desert Sunlight solar firm is the ‘beginnings of a renewable energy future,’ then the future doesn’t look bright for taxpayers, ratepayers and all Americans who think mega-corporations should make a living by selling their products, not by selling a bill of goods,” The Heritage Foundation’s Mitchell Tu and David Kreutzer wrote for The Daily Signal.

In addition to benefiting from the Department of Energy’s now-defunct 1705 loan program, two of the four firms involved also are significant beneficiaries of funding provided by the Export-Import Bank: General Electric and First Solar.

The Export-Import Bank provides taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees to foreign countries and companies for the purchase of U.S. goods. The bank’s charter is set to expire June 30, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are beginning to wade into the debate over whether it’s life should be extended.

Pulling back the curtain and going deeper…..

Communist Regime-financing Ex-Im Bank Fights for Survival

The U.S. taxpayer-backed Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), widely criticized for crony capitalism as well as for financing communist and socialist regimes with American money, is fighting for its very survival amid scandals as a growing coalition of lawmakers in Congress works to finally shut it down. From funneling billions in “loans” to state-owned banks in Russia and Communist China, to offering the corrupt Brazilian state-owned oil giant Petrobras $2 billion to “develop oil fields,” to hiring politically connected “green energy” cronies, the bank’s activities have come under increasing criticism on Capitol Hill. Now, with its charter set to expire this summer without congressional action, the Ex-Im Bank — originally created to subsidize U.S. exports to the mass-murdering regime ruling the Soviet Union — is sparring with the American people’s elected representatives over its fate.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, key figures in the establishment wing of the GOP, often dubbed “RINOs” for being alleged “Republicans In Name Only,” are pushing for the re-authorizing the Ex-Im Bank’s charter. Corporate welfare-loving Democrats, too, despite being in the minority in both chambers of Congress, are working to keep the controversial bank alive. Even the most extreme self-styled “progressives,” such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose specialty is attacking business and markets in the quest for ever bigger and more oppressive government, want to re-authorize Ex-Im. Meanwhile, Big Business lobbyists with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other special-interest outfits are right now twisting arms on Capitol Hill and plotting strategies to keep the taxpayer-backed Ex-Im cash flowing to their members.

Establishment Republicans anxious to please powerful special interests have proposed “reforming” the bank in an effort to make saving it more palatable to the public. Among them is Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), who introduced a bill with more than 50 GOP co-sponsors, so far, to “reform” the bank while re-authorizing its charter until 2019. Last week, a coalition of Big Government-loving Democrats led by ultra-leftist Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) tried to force the House Financial Services Committee to at least consider renewing Ex-Im’s charter, but conservatives on the panel voted down their amendment. Even Obama, who accurately described the bank as “little more than a fund for corporate welfare” while on the campaign trail in 2008, is now working hard to browbeat Congress into re-authorizing the Ex-Im Bank.

“Bipartisan support for corporate welfare and a corporatism state provides compelling evidence that in the end, it is money and power — not ideology — that drives the DC insider establishment,” wrote Tom Borelli, a senior fellow with the pro-market group FreedomWorks. “Instead of drawing a clear policy distinction over corporatism and making the Democrats own the label of ‘the party of big business and special interests,’ Republican backers of the Ex-Im Bank are blurring the lines between the parties and tarnishing the GOP’s brand.” He said that unless conservative activists express strong opposition to re-authorizing the crony-capitalist bank, conservative members of the House of Representatives would likely be “overwhelmed” by Democrats and “ideologically bankrupt Republicans.”

Supporters of the Ex-Im Bank point out that its taxpayer-backed loan programs are contingent on the foreign entities involved purchasing U.S.-sourced goods and services. As such, the controversial bank likes to argue that it helps “support American jobs” and promote exports. Numerous other national governments also have similar institutions that subsidize some companies or government-owned “enterprises,” so the Ex-Im claims that it, too, must subsidize certain U.S. firms and foreign entities. Another argument often cited by the Ex-Im Bank and its supporters — primarily Big Business — is that rather than costing taxpayers money, it sometimes earns some revenue for the Treasury. Even this may be misleading, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office forecasting that U.S. taxpayers will bear some $2 billion in Ex-Im losses over the next decade. Plus, there is always the prospect that enough bad loans from the bank could end up putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for many more billions of dollars.

The federal bank also harms a wide array of Americans, experts say. “Ex-Im places the 99.96 percent of U.S. small businesses that it doesn’t subsidize at a competitive disadvantage because the subsidies artificially lower costs for privileged competitors,” explained Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow with the market-oriented Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Sadly, the privileges Ex-Im extends to the few come at the expense of countless American firms and their workers. Unsubsidized firms may see reduced revenues — and their employees may see their hours cut, their salaries stagnate, or their jobs simply vanish because their employers cannot compete on the uneven playing field created by the federal government….It is time for Congress to start cleaning up its house and agree to end programs that need to go away. Enough with the pretense of reform.”

Critics have also rallied against the bank in recent years citing a wide array of other arguments. For one, and perhaps most importantly, there is no authority in the U.S. Constitution for the federal government to create a taxpayer-backed bank that picks winners and losers by loaning money to foreign governments, banks, and companies. Secondly, if participants in the free-market do not consider loans to be wise enough to put private funds behind them, critics of the Ex-Im Bank say the federal government has no business putting taxpayers’ money on the line instead. And while it may be true that some businesses and jobs benefit from Ex-Im schemes, many others suffer as a result. Countless examples have been cited by experts.

Even putting those problems aside, another major concern surrounding Ex-Im Bank is its long history of subsidizing ruthless communist regimes — a sordid pattern that continues to this day. In fact, the bank was originally established in 1934 specifically to finance exports to the Soviet Union. Why would a U.S. taxpayer-backed bank be needed to finance exports to Moscow’s regime? Because anyone with any sense in the private sector knew better than to trust the collection of gangsters, mass-murderers, megalomaniacs, and cut-throats in Moscow enslaving the Russian people while trying to mooch off of Americans to pay for it. Numerous other brutal regimes also received Ex-Im financing under a variety of pretexts.

Despite the growing uproar, the Ex-Im Bank’s financing for brutal regimes that analyst say represent major national security concerns to the United States continues unabated. Between 1997 and 2013, for example, the bank provided almost $2 billion in loans and long-term guarantees just to banks in Communist China and Russia, CNSNews.com reported, citing Ex-Im’s annual reports. Among the recipients: Bank of China, the Russian Agricultural Bank, China’s State Development Bank, Gazprombank, and many more. Of course, despite claims to be shifting toward what they call “state capitalism,” the banking “industries” in both Russia and Communist China remain entirely dominated and largely owned by the respective regimes.

“I don’t think Ex-Im subsidies to Chinese and Russian banks or State-Owned Enterprises constitute good uses of taxpayer resources,” Dan Ikenson, the director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, told CNSNews.com. “But, believe it or not, Ex-Im does partner with foreign export credit agencies to fund export sales and infrastructure projects even though the primary rationalization for having Ex-Im in the first place is to counteract the advantages provided to foreign businesses by those export credit agencies. It’s a complete sham.” In a report about Ex-Im’s victims, Ikenson also noted that the bank causes “substantial” “collateral damage” to many American companies.

More recently, the Ex-Im Bank offered $2 billion to Petrobras, an oil conglomerate owned primarily by the corruption-plagued, Marxist-Leninist-dominated Brazilian government, currently headed by former communist terrorist and close Castro ally Dilma Rousseff. A series of scandals in recent years surrounding the state-owned giant, which has also counted billionaire Obama ally George Soros among its investors, revealed that Petrobras was being used by Rousseff’s extremist “Workers’ Party” to bribe politicians and help finance more socialist scheming in Brazil and Latin America. Aside from the national security concerns, U.S. lawmakers lambasted Ex-Im for funding Brazilian government oil exploration even while the Obama administration was working to shut down as much American energy production as possible and destroy Petrobras’ U.S. competitors.

A growing chorus of critics from across the political spectrum is calling on Congress to finally let the Ex-Im Bank’s charter expire as a first step to reining in cronyism, corruption, market distortions, and the financing of hostile foreign governments with U.S. taxpayer money. However, despite the mass opposition, unless the American people speak out loudly and clearly against Ex-Im and corporate welfare, analysts say the alliance of politicians in the pockets of Big Business and Big Government may yet succeed in re-authorizing the taxpayer-backed boondoggle.

_______

Detail about this bank: The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) is the official export credit agency of the United States federal government.[1] It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring foreign purchases of United States goods for customers unable or unwilling to accept credit risk. The mission of the Bank is to create and sustain U.S. jobs by financing sales of U.S. exports to international buyers. The Bank is chartered as a government corporation by the Congress of the United States; it was last chartered for a three-year term in 2012 and extended in September 2014 through June 30th, 2015.[2] [3] Its Charter spells out the Bank’s authorities and limitations. Among them is the principle that Ex-Im Bank does not compete with private sector lenders, but rather provides financing for transactions that would otherwise not take place because commercial lenders are either unable or unwilling to accept the political or commercial risks inherent in the deal. Its current chairman and president is Fred P. Hochberg.

The ‘Unwelcome’ mat for Netanyahu

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If you know anything about the Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency, they are not only covert, clandestine but assertive in gathering intelligence for the full safety and security of Israel. Given this fact, you can rest assured that Israel is very current on the P5+1 negotiations with Iran on their nuclear program in addition to being current on the status of that weapons program.

The White House has become defiant with regard to Israel in recent years and it has hit a crescendo with the formal visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the joint Congress on March 3. So, this begs the question, does Netanyahu have the ‘goods’ and he will tell all while the White House has dispatched his staff and cabinet secretaries to be somewhere else?

WASHINGTON (AP) – In what is becoming an increasingly nasty grudge match, the White House is mulling ways to undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington and blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.

There are limits. Administration officials have discarded the idea of President Barack Obama himself giving an Iran-related address to rebut the two speeches Netanyahu is to deliver during his early March visit. But other options remain on the table.

Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.

The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.

Vice President Joe Biden will be away, his absence behind Netanyahu conspicuous in coverage of the speech to Congress. Other options were described by officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

Netanyahu’s plan for a March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress has further strained already tense ties between the U.S. and Israel. Congressional Republicans orchestrated Netanyahu’s visit without consulting the White House or State Department, a move the Obama administration blasted as a break in diplomatic protocol. Some Democratic lawmakers say they will boycott the speech.

U.S. officials believe Netanyahu’s trip to Washington is aimed primarily at derailing a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama’s signature foreign policy objective. While Netanyahu has long been skeptical of the negotiations, his opposition has increased over what he sees as Obama’s willingness to make concessions that would leave Iran on the brink of being able to build a nuclear weapon. His opposition has intensified as negotiations go into overdrive with an end-of-March deadline for a framework deal.  “I think this is a bad agreement that is dangerous for the state of Israel, and not just for it,” Netanyahu said Thursday.

The difference of opinion over the deal has become unusually rancorous.

The White House and State Department have both publicly accused Israeli officials of leaking “cherry-picked” details of the negotiations to try to discredit the administration. And, in extraordinary admissions this week, the administration acknowledged that the U.S. is withholding sensitive details of the talks from Israel, its main Middle East ally, to prevent such leaks.

The rebukes have only emboldened the leader of Israel, whose country Iran has threatened to annihilate. He has a double-barrel attack on the Iran talks ready for when he arrives in Washington. Not only will he address Congress, he will also deliver similar remarks at the AIPAC conference, an event to which administrations past and present have traditionally sent top foreign policy officials.

But maybe not this year.

An AIPAC official said Friday that the group has not yet received any reply to its invitation for senior administration figures to attend the meeting that starts March 1. The official stressed that last-minute RSVPs are not unusual, but the White House has been signaling for some time that a Cabinet-level guest may not coming.

Instead, the administration is toying with the idea of sending newly installed Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken to speak to the conference, according to officials familiar with internal discussions on the matter. But it’s possible Treasury Secretary Jack Lew could attend.

Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, who have both previously addressed AIPAC, will be out of the country on foreign travel that appears to have been arranged to make them unavailable to speak. Biden will be visiting Uruguay and Guatemala on a trip that was announced after Netanyahu’s speech was scheduled, while the State Department announced abruptly this week that Kerry will be traveling to as-yet-determined destinations for the duration of the AIPAC conference.

Obama spoke to AIPAC in 2012, while he was in the midst of his re-election campaign.

*** But there is more that gives clues as to what Netanyahu may have in his brief case regarding the Iranian nuclear program. It comes down to two countries, Iran and North Korea.

Why The U.S. Can’t Trust Iran And Its Nuclear Plans
The White House thinks Iran’s compliance with the terms of the interim deal indicates that an agreement may still be reached. The only problem: Trusting Iran is the surest path to a bad deal.
The history of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs—so full of inconsistencies, prevarications, concealments and outright lies—makes it hard to escape the conclusion that Iran’s claim to be pursuing nuclear power for peaceful purposes is disingenuous. That is why only draconian restrictions—enforced through intrusive verification and unrestricted inspections over decades—can offer guarantees that Tehran will not try to cheat again.
Since the exposure of Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities at Arak and Natanz in 2002, Tehran’s nuclear program has remained opaque. At a minimum, those revelations show Iran had lied to the international community for more than a decade, as it was busy building those facilities. That concealment in itself should elicit considerable suspicion and warrant demands that Iran make a full disclosure of the history, nature and extent of its nuclear activities. Exposure of its undeclared facilities gave Tehran a chance to just do that—instead, it chose to defy the international community and pursue its nuclear goals.
The door has always been open for Iran to come clean
For the next three years, Iran played hide-and-seek with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Eventually, in September 2005, the IAEA declared that “Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement… constitute non-compliance”and deferred Tehran to the UN Security Council.
Since then, punishment for Iran’s non-compliance has been slow and incremental, always leaving the door open for it to come clean. After two UN sanctions resolutions (1737 and 1747) failed to move Tehran, an August 2007 IAEA-Iranian joint working plan offered Iran a path to address all of the IAEA outstanding concerns about their past activities.
Instead, Tehran stalled for another six years.
In September 2009, President Obama, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown exposed another industrial-size clandestine facility: the Fordow uranium-enrichment plant. Unlike previous discoveries, which Iran had sought to explain away in the context of a civil nuclear program, Fordow was too large to be a research facility and too small for civil purposes. It was, on the other hand, ideal for military-grade enrichment, having been dug deep under a mountain and supervised by Iran’s military.
Iran again demurred and denied the obvious.
                             
Evidence of Iranian nuclear subterfuge
The mounting body of evidence of Iranian nuclear subterfuge led the IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano to lament in his February 2010 report Iran’s ongoing failure to address “concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
At that point, a country loath to incur international isolation and eager to maintain economic growth, might recalibrate its course. By then, Iran had twice been offered a list of economic, political and diplomatic incentives in exchange for transparency and verification. The 2006 and 2008 proposals, formulated by the six world powers negotiating with Iran on behalf of the international community, were incorporated in UN Security Council resolution 1929 in June 2010 as a sign that Tehran could choose tantalizing economic incentives over sanctions if it only would own up to its past nuclear activities.
Iran again chose sanctions.
Frustrated with nearly a decade of foot-dragging, the IAEA published an extensive and damning report detailing possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program in November 2011.  As in the past, Tehran dismissed the information as Western “fabrications.”
Since the November 2013 interim agreement, none of the above questions has been addressed, and access to scientists and suspicious sites is still being denied.
Iran’s stalling tactics continue
One thing has changed, though. Rather than recognizing that Iran’s stalling tactics continue; or seeing Iran’s nuclear opaqueness as the greatest obstacle to a good deal; or objecting to a deal that does not fully address Iran’s past nuclear and ballistic missile research, the Obama administration has agreed to defer those issues to the ongoing IAEA work that Iran has stymied for more than a decade.
In June 2003, in a rare moment of public frustration, then-IAEA director Mohammad ElBaradei opined that “Iran should not wait for us to ask questions and then respond; it should come forward with a complete and immediate declaration of all its nuclear activities. That would be the best way to resolve the issues within the next few weeks.”
Twelve years on, ElBaradei’s sound assessment still resonates. Unless the coming nuclear deal rests on an unambiguous accounting of Iran’s nuclear past and present, the country will have obtained what it always wanted: an end to the sanctions regime and an unobstructed path to nuclear weapons.

Community Organizing, Back to the Future

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The White House just wrapped up a 3 day summit on violent extremism. The platform of the summit was ending the cycle of hate, in other words, it was a collaboration of anger management classes. Barack Obama told his audience that scaling back on the tensions was not meant for Islamists, but rather to every common citizen worldwide to be gentle going forward with Muslims.

The invitees were hand chosen and those not in attendance were also notable. Were leaders in the fields of intelligence, counter-terrorism, Christians or Jews invited? Well now so much. Imagine the Director of the FBI, James Comey who has open cases in 49 American states not attending.

When it comes to those that did attend standing for ‘human rights’, those representatives come from countries whose own human rights come into question.  “There is a very profound conceptual disagreement about whether the best way to counter violent extremism is through human rights and civil society or through an iron fist,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. The Obama administration wants “to project the human rights side, but you look at the people they’re working with and fighting alongside, and there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Elisa Massimino, president of the advocacy group Human Rights First, attended Thursday’s meeting and was struck by the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality: “We’re sitting in that room with representatives of governments that are part of the problem,” she said. “If the president believes what he’s saying, then the actions that these governments are taking are undermining our supposedly shared agenda.”

From the outside, however, the summit appears hastily organized and fraught with gaps. As of Friday, neither the White House nor the State Department had announced the names of any attendees, an agenda or what specifically the summit is designed to achieve. The summit is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, Feb. 18, and Thursday, Feb. 19.

“It’s bizarre,” says Naureen Shah, a former legislative counsel with the ACLU who recently became the security and human rights director at Amnesty International. “On the one hand they’ve been touting this summit and trying to showcase the U.S. and global efforts to combat violent extremism. But on the other hand, they’re not providing any information about what’s going to happen.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment last week on whether Russia would be participating in the summit, saying she did not currently have the list of invitees. She anticipated that, in the days before the summit, “we’ll do a briefing on the plans for the summit, what we hope to accomplish, et cetera.”

The takeaway was Barack Obama’s edit to reach out to governance in Muslim countries and require them to be more sensitive to the plight of those in poverty that would build programs generating educational access and later jobs. This is where the ‘community organizing’ comes into play.

Michelle Malkin says it best, laying it out for required reading.

Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators, and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to “invest” in unnamed immigrant “communities” vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some of the most generous welfare states on the planet have suffered horrific jihad attacks this year. Liberal Denmark’s soft-on-jihad rehab program has been a disaster. But that hasn’t stopped State Department spokes-babbler Marie Harf from mewling incessantly about “combating poverty” to combat ISIS. Vice President Joe Biden opened the convention of jihad-coddlers on Tuesday by emphasizing the need for “respect” (cha-ching) and “a sense of community.” White House senior aides spoke generically about terrorists of “all shapes and sizes,” as they studiously avoided the precise nature and identity of the perpetrators of evil that precipitated the meeting. Screw that. Muslim jihadists chopped off the heads of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya last weekend. Muslim jihadists launched deadly shooting sprees in Copenhagen at a cartoonists’ free-speech event and a synagogue. Muslim jihadists murdered Jews at a kosher deli in Paris and slaughtered the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo over their drawings. Muslim jihadists caged and burned alive Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Muslim jihadists threw gays off buildings in Iraq. Muslim jihadists beheaded journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, humanitarian workers Alan Henning and Peter Kassig, and Japanese nationals Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo. Muslim jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Nigeria. The solution, the Obama administration wants the 60 nations that sent representatives to D.C. to learn, is a super-sized community-organizing campaign. It’s Jobs for Jihad Delinquents! No, this is not a Saturday Night Live anniversary skit. Politically correct public officials from L.A., Boston, and Minnesota are holding seminars on their “outreach” efforts to disaffected yoots as shining counterterrorism models. In Minneapolis, where al-Shabaab recruiters have metastasized, the U.S. attorney has bought into Muslim grievance-mongers’ complaints that “immigrant youngsters remain marginalized, without access to adequate education, employment, and other opportunities.” Social-justice warriors are united: Less “marginalization.” More midnight basketball. What a bloody crock. States like Minnesota and Maine have bent over backward to resettle thousands upon thousands of Somali refugees — putting their demands for halal-food freebies, taxpayer-funded foot baths, and “cultural sensitivity” over the safety and well-being of native-born citizens and taxpayers struggling to make ends meet. While grandmothers and disabled soldiers and breastfeeding moms must submit to invasive TSA screening, Muslim leaders in Minneapolis have the feds groveling in apology over increased scrutiny of some Somalis. I mean, it’s not like dozens of young male members of their “community” are flying off to the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to take up arms for jihad after benefiting from America’s blind generosity. Oh, wait. They are. The persistent left-wing myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist is absolute madness. How many times do we have to remind the clueless kumbaya crowd that al-Qaida mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri had a medical degree, as did Hamas bigwig Abdel al-Rantisi and the seven upper-crust doctors who helped plan the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings? Or that al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis. Terror architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned a mechanical-engineering degree at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta majored in urban planning at a German technical university. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh attended the London School of Economics before abducting and murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl. And Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb (Colorado State Teachers College) had plenty of exposure to wealth and Western studies. The “root cause” of their evildoing is not a lack of employment, education, community centers, iftar dinners at the White House, or publicly funded “opportunities.” When will these fools in high office learn that you can’t bribe these adherents of Stone Age ideology to behave? They don’t want jobs. They want blood. Revenge. Islamist dominance. Ruthless extermination of Jews, gays, Coptic Christians, Christian aid workers, cartoonists, journalists, apostates, and infidels of all shapes and sizes. The M****m j*******s are not victims of Islamophobic intolerance and Western callousness. We are the victims of our own leaders’ bleeding-heart overindulgence and reckless refusal to deal with reality.

Winning the hearts and minds of jihad….riiiiight….. maybe including Obamacare, Obama phones, the SNAP cards and Section 8 housing will work too.