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Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the occasion of an interview at the Aspen Security Forum to announce that Iran “is now probably one or two weeks” away from having enough fissile material to construct a nuclear weapon. The real news is that Iran may already have a bomb. //
What is much more likely is that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon on hand. In February 2023, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl told the House Armed Services Committee that Iran could make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in "about 12 days." If they could make enough material for a bomb in "about 12 days" a year and a half ago, there is no reason to assume they didn't. There is nothing in the behavior of the Biden White House that could have possibly deterred them. Just last month, the official White House estimate was 18 months (see How Close Is Iran to Getting Nuclear Weapons? New Info Alarms Intelligence Officials). //
Blinken, of course, tried to blame it all on the Trump administration for leaving the Obama-conceived Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that guaranteed Iran a path to owning a bomb without troublesome sanctions by calling Iran out for cheating (Trump Says Iran Is Violating Nuclear Deal and the Left Goes Bonkers (VIDEO) and BREAKING. President Trump's Remarks on Leaving the Iran Nuclear Deal – RedState).
The real fault lies in a strategy based on nothing more than the hope that a terrorist state dedicated to the destruction of the United States could be convinced to forgo developing a nuclear weapon by bribing them.
According to Politico, many well-known legal and political commentators have been getting together on previously unreported, weekly off-the-record Zoom calls to talk about the lawfare against former President Donald Trump. //
The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment. //
Laocoön of Troy
11 hours ago
Same thing they did with JournoList back in the day. Some of the same people too. Krystol, Rubin, and others among the upscale NYC/National Review crowd.
the 1906 Antiquities Act. The century-plus-old law allows the commander-in-chief to unilaterally place additional public lands under enhanced federal protections by executive order.
While a national park is a large swath of land protected by an act of Congress, land with a “national monument” designation protects a “specific natural, cultural or historic feature.” The 1906 law, however, requires that the area preserved must be “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
President Obama had a habit of violating the law’s mandates to establish quasi-national parks without congressional approval. President Biden is carrying on the tradition. //
Designating public lands under monument status strips the multiple-use mandate that allows residents to capitalize and more freely recreate on public property.
By turning most of health care into what amounts to regulated utilities, Obamacare forced mergers and acquisitions within the sector.
A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighting a new antitrust investigation against the nation’s largest health insurer represents a variation on a long-standing theme. In this instance, as in prior occurrences, the Justice Department and federal officials are trying to undo the harmful effects of a law — Obamacare — that has led industry giants throughout the health sector to consolidate.
Recall that, four election cycles ago, then-candidate Obama promised in 2008 that his health care plan would lower premiums by an average of $2,500 per family. That premiums continue to rise unabated shows the failure of Obamacare by Obama’s own standards — and the anti-competitive behavior the law has engendered explains why. //
But Warren gave away the plot by citing the title of a blog post in her letter: “How Obamacare Created Big Medicine.” It’s the perfect summation of why, as Donald Trump said in social media posts around the time of Warren’s letter, “Obamacare sucks.” And the Justice Department’s investigation into UnitedHealth provides an implicit admission that even President Biden and his administration agree.
Given what we know now, a coronavirus pandemic that emerged out of Wuhan more than three years ago seems less like a coincidence. Yet Daszak of EcoHealth has been the most vocal lab-leak theory denier. Among his efforts to shut down any public discussion of the lab-leak theory, the most infamous one was that he organized a group of scientists to co-sign a letter published by Lancet, denouncing the lab-leak theory without disclosing his conflict of interest (his intimate collaboration with the WIV). //
The leaked Project DEFUSE documents are a reminder, according to Chan, who commented on X, “This is a pattern of dishonesty. Clearly, we cannot take the word of conflicted parties. It is urgently important that the public and investigators gain full access to all EcoHealth documents relating to WIV research.” //
Democrats and corporate media’s collective silence and the lack of curiosity about the virus’s origin are likely driven by two reasons. First, they cannot blame the origin of Covid on Trump because the NIH funding occurred under former President Obama. Any investigation of Covid’s origin will inevitably lead to the questionable conduct of Anthony Fauci, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, and his allies at the NIH, from underwriting the WIV’s gain-of-function research to suppressing the lab-leak theory since the beginning of the pandemic.
Second, the Democrats and corporate media’ conduct during the pandemic has shown that they were only interested in taking advantage of a crisis to grab more power and expand their control over the country and the American people. Public health prevention is their last concern. Therefore, it is up to concerned citizens and independent media to keep searching for truth and demanding accountability.
While nearly everyone agrees that it was a colossal intelligence failure on the part of Israel and its allies that led to the slaughter on October 7, the ensuing war in Gaza, and other instability in the region, the little-known truth is that it was US military aid to Lebanon provided by Joe Biden's national security brain trust that effectively prevented Israeli intelligence from sniffing out the plan and preventing the attack.
To understand this, one has to look at our history with Lebanon since the Bush (43) administration. If you find yourself asking how the United States ended up funding the internal security apparatus that rolled up Israel's intelligence networks and blinded them to the coming storm, the answer is a lot like the character Mike Campbell in his novel "The Sun Also Rises" explaining how he became bankrupt: "Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” //
In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a nasty little war. Even though Lebanon was a virtual Iranian satrapy under the de facto control of Hezbollah, the Diplomatic SmartSet® reasoned that we needed to try to retain some influence. As a result, we began a program of providing training and equipment to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and their Internal Security Forces (ISF). It wouldn't take a genius to figure out what would happen. Still, the logical and foreseeable consequences of training the ISF when Iran politically dominated the country were beyond the grasp of a Harvard Kennedy School grad.
The training and equipment paid immediate dividends to Hezbollah as the ISF began trading Israeli agents and sources to Hezbollah in return for survival. This is from an account of a 2009 Lebanese operation.
The chief of Lebanon’s domestic security forces had a warning for the Hezbollah commander: “You’ve been infiltrated.”
With that, Achraf Rifi, head of the U.S.-backed Internal Security Forces, handed over evidence showing that two trusted, mid-ranking Hezbollah commanders were working as informants for Israeli military intelligence, said a high-ranking Lebanese security official with knowledge of the April 2009 meeting. //
With the rise of ISIS and the effective dissolution of Syria, more money was directed to the LAF and ISF because they were viewed in Foggy Bottom as the glue that was holding Lebanon together. Money to supply the LAF and ISF with equipment and training continued under Obama and grew under Trump. By 2020, the US was spending $242 million annually in Lebanon, up from $213 million in Obama's last year in office.
The training and equipment were excellent because the ISF rolled up 15 Israeli espionage networks in their next round of arrests that took place in December 2021. //
The above report places the beginning of planning and training for the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians in the late summer of 2022. This was carried out while a US-trained, equipped, and funded Lebanese counterintelligence service provided operational security for the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran planning and training period. As if to underscore the abject failure of the "retain influence" and "glue that holds Lebanon together" crowd, no one in the ISF, which we had trained and equipped for over a decade and whose salaries we were paying, dropped a dime to US intelligence or diplomatic personnel.
None of this is to say that the Biden national security goat rope knew the attack was coming, but it is hard to see how the outcome differed from being an active participant. Had we not been overawed by our cleverness and let Lebanon descend into its natural state, which is chaos and violence, Hamas would not have had a secure area in which to plan and to train, and the coming attack would probably have been discovered and prevented. //
Author's Note: My primary resource for this story is "Eyeless in Gaza" https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/america-leaves-israel-eyeless-in-gaza
We don't have a ‘problem’ on the border. We have a Biden immigration policy, which is working perfectly, if you're a hard-left person, which is destroying American identity, it's crippling the rule of law.
It is flooding the country with people who haven't been trained into the culture, don't necessarily understand how to function in our society and create all sorts of problems. //
And I think we don't realize yet this is a deliberate policy by people who want to undermine America, change it profoundly, and eliminate all of those crazy ideas like the Constitution, the rule of law, the work ethic, meritocracy, actually being able to know and do something. //
If you'd told me not so long ago that a U.S. president would deliberately undermine our security and actively flout our laws, I would have thought you were nutters and that it was a crazy conspiracy theory. And, yet, that's exactly what we've been seeing with first Obama and now his surrogate Biden.
Gingrich's explanation as to why is as good as any you'll see.
What he did was contribute to the risks to not only Israelis but Americans, because it's coming to a theater near you. If Hamas is not stopped in its tracks from doing the terrorist acts, they will bring them to the United States. //
Barack Obama, ever the smug globalist, and ever the cheerleader for the Palestinians, is never going to change his Israel-blaming stripes. Thankfully, Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli people are no longer affected by his actions or rhetoric.