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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (758056)

12/15/2013 10:16:40 PM

From: joseffy

Respond to of 1578177

The annual "Death to America" rallies across Iran last month were the largest ever. The outpouring of hate against the United States wasn't cancelled, or even toned down, by the new Iranian president, the purportedly "moderate, reasonable" Hassan Rouhani. Far from it. "Iran's propaganda machine had been working for weeks ahead of the ceremonies to mobilize maximum public participation," reported the BBC Persian service on November 4. The resulting demonstrations were " unprecedented in their scale and scope."

This is the regime that Barack Obama has been so ardent to engage, and that John Kerry was secretly wooing as far back as 2011.

Less than three weeks after Tehran was whipping anti-US hostility to a record high, Kerry concluded an interim nuclear deal in Geneva that was so favorable to the Islamic Republic that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, delightedly claimed victory. As well he might, since the Great Satan and its negotiating partners had, for all intents and purposes, conceded Iran's longstanding diplomatic objective: international recognition of its right to enrich uranium. Kerry denied it, but the text of the deal stipulates — not once, but twice — that a final arrangement with Iran will "involve a mutually defined enrichment program."

Not to worry, Kerry assured the deal's critics: He and his fellow negotiators are "resolute" about not letting Iran acquire nuclear weapons. What's more, he added, "Foreign Minister Zarif emphasized that they don't intend to do this, and the Supreme Leader has indicated there is a fatwa which forbids them to do this."

Sound familiar? It wasn't so long ago that Kerry was similarly encouraged by Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad's supposed commitment to reform. When, even more recently, Assad brazenly defied the Obama administration's "red line" by using chemical weapons, Kerry was certainly "resolute" about the need for a forceful response. "Nothing today is more serious," he passionately declared. But the forceful response never came. The administration backed down, weapons inspectors were dispatched instead, and Assad was transformed from an international war criminal to just another unsavory negotiating partner.

With that Syrian fiasco so vivid and fresh, it's not surprising that the nuclear deal with Iran has drawn such strong — and bipartisan — skepticism. Obama and Kerry keep insisting that they aren't naïve. If the next six months show that the Iranians aren't serious about abandoning the quest for nuclear weapons, they say, the sanctions relaxed by the Geneva agreement will be reimposed. " We can crank that dial back up," Obama told an interviewer. "We don't have to trust them."

So why on earth is the administration urging Congress not to pass tough new conditional sanctions that would take effect if Iran cheats on the interim deal, or if it refuses afterward to negotiate a permanent deal shutting down its nuclear weapons program for good? Surely the best way to put teeth in the president's threat — surely the best way to keep the pressure on Tehran — is to have those new sanctions ready and waiting.

Then-Senator John Kerry with Bashar al-Assad in 2010. The future secretary of state said he was "very, very encouraged" by the Syrian dictator's willingness to reform.

But that assumes that the administration's priority is to ensure that Iran never gets the bomb. It isn't — not if actions speak louder than words.

Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Kerry urged Congress to hold off on any new sanctions until the six-month Geneva agreement has run its course. "I don't want to give the Iranians a public excuse to flout the agreement," Kerry told the committee. Brandishing the threat of new sanctions might make our "partners" think "that we're not an honest broker and that we didn't mean it when we said that sanctions were not an end in and of themselves, but a tool to pressure the Iranians into a diplomatic solution."

But the goal of sanctions wasn't simply diplomacy. It was to squeeze Iran into abandoning its quest for nuclear weapons, and complying with six UN Security Council resolutions requiring it to end all uranium enrichment. There is no reason to believe Iran has any intention of doing so. There is every reason to believe it aims to keep doing what it has been doing all along: moving forward, by any means necessary, toward a goal it has never backed away from. The mullahs rely on the gullibility of self-satisfied naifs like Obama and Kerry, who take pride in their willingness to negotiate with even the most hateful regimes — and for whom diplomacy always seems to matter more than getting the right diplomatic results.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

To: bentway who wrote (758056)	12/16/2013 8:07:20 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578177

Social science says 80% of liberal men are unhappy souls. Bentway, koan, shep are angry old white men. .... For many years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy. ........... About half of happiness is genetically determined. Up to an additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our recent past — but that won’t last very long. That leaves just about 12 percent. That might not sound like much, but the good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way. .......... In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data. Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics. You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can count it in dollars, sure — or in kids taught to read, habitats protected or souls saved. When I taught graduate students, I noticed that social entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest graduates. They made less money than many of their classmates, but were no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that success in nonmonetary terms and delighted in it. If you can discern your own project and discover the true currency you value, you’ll be earning your success. You will have found the secret to happiness through your work. There’s nothing new about earned success. It’s simply another way of explaining what America’s founders meant when they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that humans’ inalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This moral covenant links the founders to each of us today. The right to define our happiness, work to attain it and support ourselves in the process — to earn our success — is our birthright. And it is our duty to pass this opportunity on to our children and grandchildren. But today that opportunity is in peril. Evidence is mounting that people at the bottom are increasingly stuck without skills or pathways to rise. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston shows that in the 1980s, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile would rise to the middle quintile or higher over a 10-year period. By 2005, that percentage had fallen by nearly a third, to 15 percent. And a 2007 Pew analysis showed that mobility is more than twice as high in Canada and most of Scandinavia than it is in the United States. This is a major problem, and advocates of free enterprise have been too slow to recognize it. It is not enough to assume that our system blesses each of us with equal opportunities. We need to fight for the policies and culture that will reverse troubling mobility trends. We need schools that serve children’s civil rights instead of adults’ job security. We need to encourage job creation for the most marginalized and declare war on barriers to entrepreneurship at all levels, from hedge funds to hedge trimming. And we need to revive our moral appreciation for the cultural elements of success. We must also clear up misconceptions. Free enterprise does not mean shredding the social safety net, but championing policies that truly help vulnerable people and build an economy that can sustain these commitments. It doesn’t mean reflexively cheering big business, but leveling the playing field so competition trumps cronyism. It doesn’t entail “anything goes” libertinism, but self-government and self-control. And it certainly doesn’t imply that unfettered greed is laudable or even acceptable. Free enterprise gives the most people the best shot at earning their success and finding enduring happiness in their work. It creates more paths than any other system to use one’s abilities in creative and meaningful ways, from entrepreneurship to teaching to ministry to playing the French horn. This is hardly mere materialism, and it is much more than an economic alternative. Free enterprise is a moral imperative. To pursue the happiness within our reach, we do best to pour ourselves into faith, family, community and meaningful work. To share happiness, we need to fight for free enterprise and strive to make its blessings accessible to all. nytimes.com;