Except that crybaby-Abrams has been anything but gracious.

First of all, Abrams founded a nonprofit through which she flooded then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office with incomplete, inaccurate, and outright fraudulent voter applications — only to cry “racism!” and “voter suppression!” when some of those applications were thrown out. And that was before the election. In other words, she seeded the narrative for her loss even before her defeat.

Second, as our Louis DeBroux noted in November, “Democrat crybaby-Abrams lost her race for governor with more votes (1.9 million) than current Republican Governor Nathan Deal won reelection with in 2014 (1.3 million).” Yet she stubbornly clung to her “voter suppression” narrative, frequently airing her phony grievances since the election. Indeed, she now insists record turnout among minorities only “led to even more of those voters being subjected to voter suppression.”

And socialist-Beto calls that “grace”? He does need the 2020 votes from minorities, after all.

That brings us to drybaby-Abrams’s New York Times op-ed just yesterday, titled “Why I Am Determined to End Voter Suppression.” Spoiler alert: No she’s not; she’s committed to perpetuating and expanding the myth for nationwide political advantage.

She claimed, “My home state, Georgia, for example, suffered a vicious blend of electoral malfeasance, misfeasance and mismanagement during my race for governor last fall. But Georgia is not alone.”

Neither is crybaby-Abrams alone. Democrats in general are sowing distrust in the American electoral system, all while claiming it is Republicans who are undermining elections. And Dems are pushing numerous rules changes — from dumping the Electoral College to blocking citizenship questions on the census — that would stack the deck in their favor. Meanwhile, people like Elizabeth dinky-Warren are telling the American people that “if all the votes are counted, [Democrats will] win every time.”

If this is “grace,” we’d hate to see spiteful, divisive partisan bitterness.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63047?mailing_id=4278&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4278&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Before President Trump announced that he was imposing 25% tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods, he got encouragement from an unlikely source: Sen. Charles scumbag-Schumer, D-N.Y. The Senate Democratic leader, who has little good to say about Trump most days, tweeted, “Hang tough on China, @realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down. Strength is the only way to win with China.”

That should have been a wake-up call for Beijing. When Chuck scumbag-Schumer is tweeting support for Donald Trump, it’s time to cut a deal.

But China didn’t cut a deal — and now it is paying a price. Those who suggest Trump started this trade war with China have it backward. Beijing has been waging economic warfare on the United States for years — stealing our intellectual property, forcing our companies to transfer technology as a price of doing business in China and subsidizing state-owned enterprises to prevent U.S. businesses from competing in dozens of sectors of the Chinese economy. The difference now is Chinese leaders are facing a president who is willing to fight back.

China apparently didn’t think Trump would do so. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese negotiators believed they had leverage because Trump “was worried about the future course of the U.S. economy and therefore may be more eager to do a deal.” Big mistake. The U.S. economy is strong, unemployment is at the lowest level in five decades, and wages are rising. In fact, America’s biggest economic problem is that we have more job openings than unemployed people to fill them.

China’s economy, by contrast, is in trouble. Last year, China reported its slowest economic growth since 1990, and the Financial Times reports that many experts “believe its official data understates the true extent of the slowdown.” While the United States has added about half a million manufacturing jobs since Trump took office, China’s manufacturing sector is shedding jobs. And the Chinese population is aging rapidly as birthrates are falling, which means the workforce is becoming smaller and less productive.

Our economic strength against China’s relative weakness gives Trump leverage in this standoff, and he is using it. Trump knows the United States can better withstand a trade war than China and that President Xi Jinping needs a deal more than he does.

Trump is wrong when he says tariffs are good for our economy because China is paying us “hundreds of billions of dollars” in tariff revenue — money he can use to help farmers withstand the blow of lost sales to Beijing. China is not paying the cost of tariffs. American businesses and consumers are paying. But the fact that Trump mistakenly believes tariffs are good for the economy should be a wake-up call for Beijing. He thinks he’s in a win-win situation, and that means, in this game of chicken, Trump is not going to blink.

And while China is not paying the cost of the tariffs, their impact on U.S. consumers may not be as bad as some observers predict. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors points out, our low rate of inflation neutralizes much of the costs of higher prices from tariffs, which will diminish over time. “If the US places 25% tariffs on all Chinese imports and no substitution for those goods and services occurs, the additional cost would be $145 billion. That’s a bit over one percent of 2018 consumer spending,” Scissors writes, but “the cost will certainly not that be that high, because substitution will occur. And the cost will fall over time as more producers enter to replace Chinese.”

In other words, our dynamic, growing, low-inflation economy can handle a trade war with China. That does not mean China will buckle easily. State ownership is the means by which the Communist Party directs the Chinese economy. Getting China to stop subsidizing large sectors of its economy, and to cease its theft of U.S. intellectual property, will be extremely difficult. But Trump knows he has no chance of doing so by filing complaints with the World Trade Organization. He is right to take a hard-line stance.

It’s much easier to question the wisdom of launching trade wars with allies such as Canada and the European Union. But we should all be able to agree that China is an economic predator against which we need to fight back. Trump is using tariffs to force China to open its markets to free trade and competition. Every American should be standing behind the president as he does so — just like Chuck scumbag-Schumer.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63016?mailing_id=4274&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4274&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Why? Because the considerable resources of the United States intelligence community and federal law-enforcement agencies were turned on the political opponents of those in power before the 2016 election. As Barr put it last month, “Yes, I think spying did occur.” This is the sort of thing we’d expect from the likes of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and, of course, Vladimir Putin in Russia. In America, such abuse should raise grave concerns … even if the administration had a good reason for doing so, which it clearly didn’t.

Case in point: In 2007, Charles Stimson, a DOD official in George W. Bush’s administration, criticized the Gitmo Bar — a name for the attorneys representing the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay — and suggested that clients of those firms should make them choose between representing al-Qaida or corporate retainers. He was run out of office for that “offense,” even though the Gitmo Bar provided al-Qaida with far more than hanoi-Jane Fonda gave the North Vietnamese.

Imagine if the Bush administration had turned the FBI on the Gitmo Bar the way Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s administration turned the FBI on the Trump campaign. Does anyone think that MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post would be giving those investigators the same deference they demanded on dirty cop-Mueller’s behalf? If you believe that, we at The Patriot Post have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

We need answers. We needed answers about other problematic actions in the past, like Operation Fast and Furious, the IRS targeting of the Tea Party, and the targeting of journalists Sharyl Attkisson and James Rogan over their reporting, to name a few of scumbag/liar-nObama’s “non-scandals.” Of course, we never got those answers. All we got were whitewashes.

With the end of the dirty cop-Mueller probe, we now need to know what prompted the FBI’s actions before, during, and after the 2016 election. What evidence was used to justify spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign? Why did investigators choose the techniques they chose? Were the omissions in the FISA applications honest mistakes, or was something more sinister involved? And what was behind the “unmasking” of American citizens caught up in surveillance?

Many conservatives have been understandably skeptical of the FBI’s conduct. If there were honest mistakes, let’s reveal them and make changes so they’re not repeated. And if there were deliberate abuses, let’s punish those responsible.

After all, it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s only “crime” was running against — and defeating — scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63023?mailing_id=4274&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4274&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The latest controversy surrounding worhtless-Tlaib began with the following comment: “There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out… And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, and it was forced on them.”

Got that? The Holocaust was a tragedy, but mainly for the Palestinians.

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein has a point-by-point rebuttal in which he sums up all the factual errors in Tlaib’s assertion. He concludes, “worthless-Tlaib’s claims that her Arab ancestors provided a ‘safe haven’ to Jews after the Holocaust ignores the Jewish presence in the region and efforts to establish a Jewish state that predated the Holocaust, ignores that her ancestors allied with Hitler at the time of the Holocaust, and ignores decades of violence and terrorism directed at Israel both before, during, and after the Holocaust.” Moreover, her comments are meant solely to delegitimize Israel.

Naturally, worthless-Tlaib didn’t back down. In fact, she claimed to be the victim of racists who objected to her statement: “You know, I got a text from a friend who’s like, ‘Hey, next time, you know, really clarify. Maybe talk like a fourth grader because maybe the racist idiots would understand you better.’”

It’s no surprise to see worthless-Tlaib’s anti-Semitism wrapped in gross revisionist history, or to see her double down and call her critics racists. worthless-Omar likewise charged critics with “Islamophobia.” What makes this episode stand out is that House Speaker Nancy Pulosi also backed up worthless-Tlaib. She accused Republicans of “desperate attempts to smear [worthless-Tlaib and] misrepresent her comments.” In fact, she demanded, they “should apologize to Rep. worthless-Tlaib & the American people for their gross misrepresentations.” House Minority Leader scumbag-Steny Hoyer joined her, insisting that Trump and congressional Republicans “owe [worthless-Tlaib] an apology.”

In short, this is the effluent of a party that thrives on identity politics. Earlier this year, Pulosi had to deal with how to respond to worthless-Omar’s anti-Semitism. The House ended up passing a vacuous resolution — with the votes of worthless-Tlaib and worthless-Omar! — generically condemning hatred and bigotry. Now, in a calculated political move, both Pulosi and scumbag-Hoyer have circled the wagons, defending the Democrats’ increasingly favored brand of hate and accusing others of the true sin. Who runs the party again?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62996?mailing_id=4272&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4272&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The New York Times no doubt considers it quite a coup to have obtained and published President Trump’s tax return information from 1985 to 1994. But doing so violated Trump’s right under federal law to the confidentiality of his tax returns.

The Times — which reported that Trump’s businesses lost $1.17 billion during the 10-year period — has no more right to Trump’s tax returns than it has to mine or those of any of you reading these words.

Confidentiality, as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in 1991 in U.S. v. Richey, is essential to “maintaining a workable tax system.”

Taxpayer privacy is “fundamental to a tax system that relies on self-reporting” since it protects “sensitive or otherwise personal information,” said then-Judge (now Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1986 in another case when she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Federal law — 26 U.S.C. §7213(a)(1) — makes it a felony for any federal employee to disclose tax returns or “return information.” Infractions are punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000 under the Alternative Fines Act (18 U.S.C. §3571).

Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of The New York Times story, tax returns themselves, as well as tax return information such as these IRS transcripts (which are a summary of the tax returns), are protected from disclosure by federal law. And this provision applies to private individuals as well as government employees, a fact that should be considered by the New York Times’ source.

According to the newspaper, it did not actually obtain Trump’s tax returns but “printouts from his official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, from someone who had legal access to them.”

The Times quotes a lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, as saying that the tax information in the story is “demonstrably false” and that IRS transcripts, particularly from the days before electronic filing, are “notoriously inaccurate.” However, that claim is disputed by a former IRS employee now at the liberal Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The president tweeted Wednesday in response to the Times story: “Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ … you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes….almost all real estate developers did — and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!”

Could the editors and reporters at the New York Times be prosecuted for publishing this information?

Section (a)(3) of the law makes it a felony for any person who receives an illegally disclosed tax return or return information to publish that return or that information. But it’s unknown if the bar on publication by a media organization could survive a First Amendment challenge.

What we do know is that in previous incidents, the government did not attempt to prosecute the publisher of tax return information. In 2014, the IRS agreed to pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 to settle a lawsuit after an IRS clerk illegally disclosed the organization’s tax return.

The clerk gave the tax return to Matthew Meisel, a former employee of Bain & Company, who gave it to the Human Rights Campaign (a political opponent of the National Organization for Marriage).

The tax return was then posted on the HRC website and published by the Huffington Post. Although the IRS paid to settle the lawsuit, none of the individuals or organizations involved in the illegal disclosure and publication were prosecuted.

If such a prosecution were attempted, there is no doubt that a First Amendment challenge would be filed.

The courts would then have to answer an important question: Are the interests of the government in an effective tax system and that of citizens in maintaining the confidentiality of their financial information outweighed by the First Amendment right of the press, and by and the public’s interest in obtaining financial information on elected officials?

In the midst of this illegal disclosure to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced Monday that he would not comply with a demand by the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass, to provide the committee with copies of tax returns filed by Trump and eight of his companies for the last six years.

Mnuchin sent a letter to Neal telling him that “the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution requires that Congressional information demands must reasonably serve a legitimate legislative purpose.”

The Treasury secretary is correct. Numerous court decisions hold that legislative investigations must have a legitimate legislative purpose. Mnuchin says that Neal’s request “lacks” such a legitimate purpose.

The court decisions supporting Mnuchin’s decision include the 1957 decision in Watkins v. U.S., in which the Supreme Court told the House Un-American Activities Committee that “there is no congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure” the “private affairs of individuals.”

Rep. Neal has claimed that the legislative purpose of getting the Trump tax returns is to examine how the IRS audits presidents. But as Trump’s legal counsel has pointed out, Neal didn’t ask for the tax returns of any other presidents and hasn’t asked any questions of any kind about IRS policy and procedures for such audits.

Mnuchin tells Neal in his letter that he is willing to provide the congressman with complete information on “how the IRS conducts mandatory examinations of Presidents, as provided by the Internal Revenue Manual.”

If examining how the IRS audits presidents is really Neal’s legislative purpose — as opposed to simply wanting to expose anything embarrassing the committee finds in Trump’s tax returns — IRS information on its policies and procedures would be the only information the House committee would need.

So the Treasury Department has put House Democrats in check for now. It will probably be up to the courts to see who achieves checkmate when it comes to the Trump’ tax returns.

Now the interests of protecting the privacy of taxpayers warrants the opening of a government investigation to find the leaker who provided the Trump tax information to The New York Times.

The IRS and the U.S. Justice Department should investigate how this disclosure happened, find out who did it, and prosecute anyone who violated the law.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62942?mailing_id=4270&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4270&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

“Google knows a lot about you and, if you use Google Maps or other Google apps, it stores a copy of everywhere you go,” explains Todd Haselton, CNBC’s technology products editor. Haselton picked a random date in the midst of performing Google’s “Privacy Checkup,” and what he discovered shocked him. “It knew everywhere I went, including that I took Interstate 95 to our office in northern New Jersey and that I arrived at 7:58 a.m.,” he explains. “It knew that at 1:02 p.m. I drove to Jersey City and took a train in to Manhattan to the New York Stock Exchange before returning home at 4:38 p.m. And it has a copy of the pictures I took at each location.”

To what end? Google claims the maps will help one discover more efficient commuter routes and reacquaint one with locations along the way. Yet as the Associated Press revealed last year, such help wasn’t optional. It discovered Google services wants your data bad enough “to store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.”

The AP’s discovery was confirmed by computer-science researchers at Princeton. Moreover, while Google assured users they can turn off “Location History” anytime they want, the AP discovered that some Google apps still store time-stamped location data automatically.

As both Haselton and the AP note, Google offers a number of ways to either remove or control such data, but it requires a number of user-initiated steps to do so. Moreover, much of it is misleading. For example on an iPhone, one can turn off “Location History” and Google will still get location data from apps that will store it under the heading of “My Activity.”

Last Tuesday, Google announced it will give users more privacy tools and greater control over how they’re being tracked both outside and inside their homes. CEO Sundar Pichai insisted the company was making an effort to stay ahead of “constantly evolving user expectations” on privacy.

Jeremy Tillman, president of Ghostery, wasn’t buying it. “They’re sort of marginal improvements,” he stated. “They are not bad, but they almost seem like they’re designed to give the company a better messaging push instead of making wholesale improvements to user privacy.”

Princeton computer scientist Jonathan Mayer, was equally unimpressed with Google’s promise to give Chrome users better control over tracking cookies used by digital advertisers to target customers. “This is not privacy leadership,” he asserted. “This is privacy theater.”

If Google were genuinely interested in privacy leadership they’d answer a simple question: Why is Google’s default position that the user must opt out, rather than in to tracking schemes that would make George Orwell blush?

As always, the answer is money. “The company makes billions of dollars annually by selling digital ads that are targeted at the interests people reveal through their search requests and data collected by Google apps and services,” the AP explains.

Google is hardly alone. Amazon’s Alexa a home-based, name-activated device that listens to what one is saying — and then sends a copy to Amazon of everything it records. Like similar devices, including Apple’s Siri, these recordings are ostensibly used to train the artificial intelligence tech companies use to make them more “efficient.” Or as both Amazon and Facebook assert, to improve products, not to sell them.

Reality is a bit more chilling. “Alexa keeps a record of what it hears every time an Echo speaker activates,” explains columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler. “It’s supposed to only record with a ‘wake word’ — ‘Alexa!’ — but anyone with one of these devices knows they go rogue. I counted dozens of times when mine recorded without a legitimate prompt.”

A couple of states have stepped up to prevent what amounts to eavesdropping. Illinois passed the Keep Internet Devices Safe Act, which prohibits such recording without specific consent from users, and the California State Assembly’s privacy committee has advanced an Anti-Eavesdropping Act addressing the same concerns.

Yet tech giants keep pushing the envelope. Google’s Nest thermostat reports one’s house temperature to Google in 15-minute increments, and also tracks the movement of people in the house. “Smart lights” track when they’re turned on and off, smart garage door openers track up and down movement, and smart speakers track one’s music choices, with all of the data sent back to the companies that make the devices — most of whom share it with Amazon.

Unfortunately, hackers have access to such data as well. A woman who thought her three-year-old daughter was having nightmares discovered that the Nest Cam installed above her bed was transmitting pornography via the intercom feature in the software.

Such possibilities are enabled by Big Tech’s insidious priorities. The Washington Post reports, “Software designed to help people break into websites and devices has gotten so easy to use that it’s practically child’s play, and many companies, including Nest, have effectively chosen to let some hackers slip through the cracks rather than impose an array of inconvenient countermeasures that could will detract from their users’ experience and ultimately alienate their customers.”

Almost unbelievably, this virtually unlimited surveillance has its supporters. RealClearMarkets editor and Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks John Tamny brings up the inefficiencies of Communist Cuba, where “aren’t any Amazon-style companies going out of their way to meet the needs of their customers,” to tout the benefits of a device that he wished listened to him “with greater frequency.” “Figure that the more Alexa listens to my wife and me, along with our daughter, the better Amazon can get to know us,” he declares.

And while he makes the legitimate point that no one held a gun to anyone’s head and made them put Amazon’s Echo in their house, he derides Fowler’s aforementioned take because if “one’s buying something in the market economy, your purchases are being tracked. This is a good thing.”

Utter nonsense. As Ben Franklin stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” That goes double for those who would sacrifice liberty, safety, and privacy for efficiency and convenience.

As mentioned above, government — assuming it hasn’t totally surrendered running the country to the tech giants — should at the very least impose opt-in on these intrusive behemoths.

Moreover, if they can’t squeeze the surveillance toothpaste back in the tube, then it’s time to hit these companies where it hurts: Congress should allow people to copyright their personal data, and require tech companies to provide detailed logs of who’s getting what for the purposes of exploitation. Every company using one’s personal data to make a profit should be required to pay a percentage of that profit back to each individual they track.

It’s not a cure, but it might force companies to do some serious re-prioritization. Far more important? Break up these giants — giants with historically unprecedented power — and limit the amount and nature of data they can share with each other.

“Efficient” totalitarianism is a lousy alternative.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62965?mailing_id=4270&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4270&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Blexit opened many black eyes to the truths of the Democrat party. Now we look forward to the 2020 presidential election and examine the pressing issues black voters are truly concerned about.

The horde of progressive Democrats are running on empty, using any sensitive issue to fuel their campaigns. It’s their way to reach for low-hanging fruit that appeals to the uninformed. Topics like reparations and marijuana legalization are worn like a brand shown only to black voters to keep them emotional. For one, it’s insulting that these candidates believe black voters would give up their precious votes in exchange for free money and drugs. And two, it’s cheap. This is why the Blexit movement matters.

In 2020, the Blexit movement will shine a guiding light on the real issues affecting black Americans. I think of it as a lighthouse designed to help our lost sailors find their way home through the thick fog cast over them. To see this light, some of us have a long way to go, but more than ever before has the black population been closer to reaching the shores of sound political insight and the true issues that affect us.

Gun Rights: The Impact on Black Americans

Gun rights are becoming a growing issue among blacks. NBC reported on the increasing awareness of the importance of gun ownership in the black community, with more black first-time gun owners enrolling in gun-safety and concealed-carry courses. While demographic records are not kept on the race of gun buyers, more black people in my own circles and across the nation are showing concern for keeping themselves and their families safe by owning a gun.

Republican haven’t voiced a platform for gun ownership to date, yet Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker suggests a national gun registry that would put licensing in the hands of the federal government. Booker claims to want to “fight” the NRA, the very organization that has historically fought for gun rights for minorities. The idea of more limitations is dangerous because when increasing crime disproportionately affects your community, having protection is all you can think about. To restrict gun ownership is to keep guns further out of reach for black Americans.

Putting Abortion in its place

According to The Washington Times, six minority Democrat legislators in North Carolina voted nay on an infanticide bill. In Nevada, two minority Democrats voted nay on the Trust Nevada Women Act. State Senator Marcia Washington stated that she had no issue casting a different vote from her Democratic colleagues because she doesn’t “believe in any form of abortion,” according to the article.

More black people — regardless of party affiliation — are seeing the light and truth about abortion, which is actively reducing the black population in our nation. Progressive candidates are all for it, calling it “health care” yet at the same time minimizing the number of abortions that actually take place at Planned Parenthood clinics. While Democrats actively obfuscate the truth about black genocide, movements like Blexit help put this and other issues front and center. Because to those of us who are part of the movement, black lives actually matter.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62940?mailing_id=4270&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4270&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Iran initially responded with veiled threats against U.S. interests in the region, and with threats to stop any other nation from exporting oil through the Strait of Hormuz if Iran’s oil exports were cut off by the sanctions. National Security Advisor John Bolton announced last week that the United States would deploy an aircraft carrier group and an Air Force bomber group to the region, citing specific threat reporting. On Wednesday, Iran threatened to begin withdrawing from certain parts of the 2015 nuclear deal, including ramping up enrichment work, if its European allies — sorry, we meant the United States’ notional European allies — did not take action to help Iran avoid the effects of sanctions. President Trump in turn announced new U.S. sanctions on Iran’s metal industry, which accounts for around 12% of Iran’s economy. Iran also declared all U.S. forces in the region “terrorists,” a move that is merely an angry tit-for-tat with no legal impact.

What might be the next steps in this dance? Iran’s response to similar tensions in the past has been to hold a large, highly publicized military exercise involving its naval and missile forces, with the explicit message that Iran can control the Strait of Hormuz. Both Iran’s regular Navy and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy have stopped and boarded merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz, although none of those ships to date has been U.S.-flagged. Increased interference with merchant shipping, in particular oil tankers carrying Saudi or Kuwaiti crude oil, would be a simple way for Iran to exert leverage over the rest of the developed world’s economic safety.

Iranian-backed Shia militia groups in Iraq, which probably outnumber the Iraqi Army in manpower, are within eyeball range of U.S. forces every minute of every day, and would have ample opportunity to target those U.S. forces or the Iraqi forces we are training and supporting. And Iran can carry through on its threat to stop observing part or even all of the 2015 nuclear deal’s terms.

Or, Iran could agree to negotiate new terms to the nuclear deal. Those terms would have to include Iran’s ballistic missile development, its sponsorship of terrorism throughout the region, and the numerous unanswered questions about various Iranian nuclear facilities and past research on nuclear weapons. Iran has never allowed a detailed inspection of the Parchin complex, for example, and has literally dismantled and hauled away every brick and stone at other suspected facilities. It still has not provided a serious accounting of its pre-2003 work on nuclear triggers or warhead design. All of those issues must be addressed, and it is for that reason the United States has ramped up the pressure on Iran.

How long before that pressure changes Iran’s mind? Iran’s leaders are the true believers of the Islamic Revolution, and have suffered sanctions and deprivation since 1980. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps functions as a virtual state within the state, and its senior leaders are the hardest of the hard-core. They have the ability to limit Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s freedom of action if he was inclined to negotiate.

The Europeans have shown very little inclination to support efforts to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions, preferring instead to trade with Iran and pretend Iran can be trusted. And China has several massive economic development deals with Iran, including a deal to modernize Iran’s oil infrastructure, in addition to being highly dependent on Iranian oil.

All of those factors add to the challenge of keeping the pressure on Iran until it produces the desired outcome. But that pressure must be maintained if we are to rectify the serious deficiencies in the Iran deal while avoiding war.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62957?mailing_id=4270&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4270&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Yet less than 1,500 miles off our shores — half the distance of a cross-country flight — there’s an ongoing geopolitical conflict that provides the latest test of a nearly two-centuries-old American operating principle, the Monroe Doctrine. In layman’s terms, the foreign-policy approach of our fifth president told the rest of the world to lay off the nations of the Americas as they naturally fell under our sphere of influence.

In January, Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro was again sworn in as president despite being selected last year in what Vice President Mike Pence called a “fake election with a fake outcome.” The highly irregular circumstances behind the 2018 election have led most Western nations to refuse to recognize Maduro as the country’s leader, contending that the presidency is vacant according to Venezuela’s constitution.

This scenario of a constitutionally mandated presidential vacancy means that leadership falls to the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly. That man is 35-year-old Juan Guaido, who was just chosen in December to lead the nation’s rightful legislative body. Rightful or not, however, the sole possessors of the nation’s guns form the basis of Maduro’s support. Aside from controlling most of the military, Maduro is also being propped up by three key nations still in his corner: Cuba, China, and Russia. In the latter case, therein lies the rub.

Our Thomas Gallatin touched on the issue last week, but the dictator who “was ready to leave this morning as we understand it,” according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was talked out of it: “The Russians indicated he should stay.”

Last Friday, President Donald Trump said he “had a very good talk with [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin — probably over an hour.” As White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders breezily explained, “The president’s primary focus throughout the call was about helping the people of Venezuela, making clear that the United States stands with the people of Venezuela, and the importance of making sure those individuals are able to get the food and the water and the medical supplies needed.” But others had a different take on this chumminess, claiming it ran counter to American global interests — and to his own administration officials’ statements.

While there are times that President Trump confounds the so-called conventional wisdom by going against the grain, the long history of Russian involvement with Venezuela is troubling. A Wall Street Journal editorial provides a quick and handy guide to some recent developments, but Trump is apparently taking Putin at his word that he’s “not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela.”

“I feel the same way,” Trump added. “We want to help on a humanitarian basis.”

But given the hypersensitivity of Democrats (and their media enablers) to all things Russian, the mere appearance of working together on anything with Putin creates a lot of bad optics, including the shrill prediction  about National Security Advisor John Bolton resigning his post in frustration and giving the Democrats another excuse to pursue impeachment for collusion.

The U.S. has little interest in a military intervention, so perhaps this is an instance of Trump trying to kill the Russians with kindness. It was, after all, another Republican who once told the world to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”  ~The Patriot Post

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