US Politics Mega-thread - Page 26

The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

Mr. Obama’s fascination with an Iranian nuclear deal always had an air of unreality. But by ignoring the strategic implications of such diplomacy, these talks have triggered a potential wave of nuclear programs. The president’s biggest legacy could be a thoroughly nuclear-weaponized Middle East.

On March 23 2018 10:10 TheLordofAwesome wrote:

Is this the report that was written only by the Republicans on the committee? I didn't see the article clarify that one way or another. The article also states that the report claims that the FBI improperly charged Flynn with lying to the FBI, because no deception took place in the interview. Except there is the not so small detail that Flynn was never charged; instead, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, which means that Flynn himself confesses to the lies. Given such a glaring falsehood, I am inclined to view everything else in that report as pack of lies.

On March 23 2018 10:26 GreenHorizons wrote:
We would be remiss to not point out Bolton's Ambitions of rekindling the nuclear arms race with Russia.

I know Trump is supposed to be a Russian puppet, but we also know he goes with whatever the last person said, wouldn't be hard to find bipartisan support for escalations with Russia, and Bolton is the right person to talk him into it.

His first briefing he was wondering why we can't just use nukes iirc.

On March 23 2018 10:16 Plansix wrote:
Ah good, I found a link to Bolton's 2015 peice about bombing Iran first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html



Notice how Bolton skips right over the Iraq war in this story where he was 100% wrong about WMDs. This man is all about bombing first and asking questions later.

On March 23 2018 10:28 Plansix wrote:

Bolton is a pure Yes Man and won't do anything to anger Trump. It will be Iran and North Korea all day with him just to make sure Trump is happy.

On March 23 2018 10:29 TheLordofAwesome wrote:

Could you elaborate? I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say.

On March 23 2018 11:32 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:


I wonder if this is what Rosenstein and co are planning on discussing in their cyber-law announcement tomorrow. Seems plausible that we'll get a lot of information on this soonish.



To be fair this thread balloons fast as hell
At any given time I only catchup on the previous 2 pages.

On March 23 2018 10:36 Introvert wrote:


Well we are trying to interpret what the article says, yes? The report perhaps doesn't view Flynn's plea as "real" in the sense that he's admitting guilt. And I'm inclined to agree, Flynn made some mistakes in his memory, the FBI thought nothing of it, but Mueller used it to get...something.

edit: I think "FBI" is not what was meant in that piece.

The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that needs to pass this week to avert a government shutdown increases spending on clean energy and keeps the Environmental Protection Agency funded at current levels.

That’s despite the White House suggestion that Congress cut EPA’s budget by one-third and make drastic reductions in clean energy research.

Tarak Shah, a former chief of staff in the science and energy office at the US Department of Energy, told Vox the bill was an “utter repudiation of the Trump budget!”

The EPA will keep its $8.1 billion budget with a few changes, including $66 million allocated toward the Superfund program for cleaning up highly contaminated sites.

The Department of Energy’s high-risk, high-reward research incubator, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, can also breathe easy. Trump’s budget proposal recommended eliminating the popular program, but Congress gave it a $47 million boost up to $353 million.

The DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office, which the White House wanted to gut by $1.3 billion, also got a 15 percent increase to a new total of $2.3 billion.

On March 23 2018 11:26 Womwomwom wrote:
Speaking of emails, The Daily Beast is claiming that Guccifer 2.0 is a GRU officer.

On March 23 2018 12:00 Doodsmack wrote:


What’s your source that says it was only errors of memory? He did plead guilty.

The FBI is not expected to pursue any charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn regarding a phone call with Russia's ambassador, barring new information that changes what they know, law enforcement officials told CNN Thursday.

Flynn was fired by President Donald Trump earlier this week after it was revealed that he withheld information from Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the US. A US official confirmed to CNN last week that Flynn and Kislyak discussed sanctions, among other matters, during a December call.
Flynn initially told investigators sanctions were not discussed. But FBI agents challenged him, asking if he was certain that was his answer. He said he didn't remember.
The FBI interviewers believed Flynn was cooperative and provided truthful answers. Although Flynn didn't remember all of what he talked about, they don't believe he was intentionally misleading them, the officials say.

So in March, lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.

A Congressional source also tells us that former FBI director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on March 2 that his agents had concluded that Mr. Flynn hadn’t lied but had forgotten what had been discussed. Perhaps the FBI changed its view.

On March 23 2018 10:30 Doodsmack wrote:


A man who was a member of the Project for a New American Century is definitely not a neoconservative. And we all know how closely Trump's campaign aligns with neoconservatism.

During January 2009 at the end of President George W. Bush's second term in office, Jonathan Clarke, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, proposed the following as the "main characteristics of neoconservatism": "a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms", a "low tolerance for diplomacy", a "readiness to use military force", an "emphasis on US unilateral action", a "disdain for multilateral organizations" and a "focus on the Middle East".