Iran deal: whatever iran wanted. secret deal after secret deal

Scenes From a Graduate School: Did God Survive the Election? Posted: 27 Dec 2016 03:35 PM PST (John Hinderaker) The Associated Press recounts the difficulty that graduate students at Emory are experiencing with “healing” after last month’s election. The scene is a course in Faith and Politics; you may wonder why anyone cares about the students’ feelings. The AP explains: The discord in Room 322 of the Rollins Building reflected the state of the nation as Trump nears inauguration. Well, not exactly: the AP notes that the entire graduate school class consists of Democrats, with the exception of one lone Republican. But reporters, like professors, can lose sight of the fact that the United States is not 97% Democrat. The graduate students are having trouble healing. The classroom held all the moroseness of a funeral parlor. Just 16 hours had passed since Donald Trump had won the presidency, and in this “Faith and Politics” class at Emory University, graduate students talked of being shocked and wounded, fearful and horrified. From shaky voices, there was conviction that bigotry had prevailed, and from eyes, tears fell. The students were assigned to write a paper on how the country could heal after the election. No doubt the task would have been easier, from the students’ perspective, if Hillary Clinton had won. This student was typical: Kathryn Stanley, a 49-year-old teacher, daughter of a preacher and member of Atlanta’s renowned Ebenezer Baptist Church, sidestepped the issue altogether. The day after the election, she sobbed alongside her junior high school students even as she urged them to maintain hope in the face of their fears, and that night she cried again as she spoke to her classmates. Four weeks later, she conceded she was no more ready to give Trump a chance, nor to devise a blueprint for healing. “I’m not in the healing space yet,” she said. The liberal students looked for a silver lining amid the gloom: Searching for meaning, Stanley said she knew there was still a God, while a classmate said maybe things had to get worse before they got better. So God survived Donald Trump’s election! Whew. The only conservative in the class is, relatively speaking, a voice of sanity: Off in a back corner, the lone conservative in the class, a 33-year-old lawyer named Stephen Tippins, stayed quiet. He couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump, skipping the presidency on his ballot, but he didn’t share his classmates’ pain. As students were called to the lectern that night and a week later, the reluctant Tippins went last. He touched on a question that formed the basis for his final paper: “Heal from what?” Good question! We had an election and your candidate lost. When did that become a form of personal injury? The students’ professor sees the example of South Africa as instructive: Franklin himself wondered what move or what singular figure might bring people together. His theological background nudged him toward thinking it could be a religious leader, perhaps an evangelical pastor popular with Trump supporters. He pointed to the post-apartheid healing in South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a major step and Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu emerged as key unifying figures. So he is suggesting that if a Democrat succeeds Trump as president, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be in order? Then, as in South Africa, Trump administration officials could confess their sins in hopes of being granted amnesty against criminal prosecution? Sounds like a great path to healing, if by “healing” you mean “revenge.” But I suppose it is a mistake to take our universities seriously.

Obama’s secret concessions to Iran revealed Posted: 27 Dec 2016 11:03 AM PST (Paul Mirengoff) Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) posted documents revealing that President Obama granted Iran permission to stockpile uranium in excess of the 300 kilogram limit set by the nuclear deal. Jenna Lifhits of the Weekly Standard has the story. The exemptions had been kept secret for almost a year. However the Trump administration reportedly intended to make them public, which may be why the IAEA decided to reveal them. The Obama administration didn’t just keep the exemptions secret. Apparently, it denied their existence. According to Lifhits: Some details of the exemptions had previously been leaked. The Institute for Science and International Security revealed in September that Iran had been allowed to exceed certain caps in the deal so that the country could come into compliance with the deal’s terms. Administration officials dismissed the. . .report at the time. In other words, the administration was dishonest. What else is new? Why did the administration keep the exemptions secret? Probably to be able to maintain the pretense that the nuclear agreement is holding up. Any deal will hold up if violations are secretly deemed non-violations. A source who works with Congress told the Weekly Standard: The Obama team was just hoping to get through the next few weeks without revealing that they’ve been allowing Iran to go beyond the nuclear deal the whole time. That way the president and Secretary of State Kerry could keep declaring that Iran has been following the deal, and their echo chamber could keep saying the nuclear deal is working. But now it’s public. The only reason that the nuclear deal is still in place is because the Obama team has been secretly rewriting to let Iran cheat. The only question is, what’s still not being told? It’s a good question. What’s now being told is bad enough, however: The now-confirmed exemptions reported on by ISIS include allowing Iran to keep low-enriched uranium (LEU) in various forms beyond what’s allowed under the nuclear deal. The concession applies to forms that have been “deemed unrecoverable” for use in a nuclear weapon, and Iran has promised not to build a facility to try recover them. But if Iran breaks its promise and builds such a facility, these forms of uranium suddenly would be recoverable. This, I imagine, is why the term “unrecoverable” apparently is not in the underlying agreement — the one that was made public. As Associated Press reporter Bradley Klapper said to John Kerry’s spokesman when word of the secret exemption first leaked: You’re using this term that’s not in the document. I’m just trying to figure out how we can actually check that or understand what it means. If you say some things are usable but some things aren’t, but I don’t know which are which, that’s not spelled out in the document. That seems to be a new idea here. New and dangerous. Kerry’s spokesman had no meaningful response. Obama’s desire to accommodate Iran is matched only by his desire to screw Israel and lack of desire to avert disaster in Syria. Indeed, the first desire helps explains the latter two.