Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are encouraged that non-conservatives like David Brooks of the New York Times and Chuck Todd of NBC News suggest Obamacare’s disastrous debut is proof that government fails to do many things well. They also rip the Obama administration over the IRS auditing a cancer patient who told Fox News he would ‘let nature take its course’ rather than pay much higher premiums and deductible. And they react to Amazon.com planning to use drones to deliver packages within 30 minutes of placing an order.
Beware of Smiling Iranians
Retired Israeli Brigadier Gen. Elihu Ben-Onn says Israelis are very upset with the nuclear agreement in Geneva that relaxes sanctions against Iran in exchange for a freeze in enrichment and no curbs on weapons programs. He also fears the U.S. and our allies fell prey to the smiling diplomacy of Tehran.
“The Iranians try to gain time. They start what we call the smiles operation. Suddenly the foreign minister of Iran Mohammad Zarif starts smiling. The new leader Rouhani is also smiling. All of them know how to speak English. All of them went to American colleges, so the enemy is not so frightening as it might have been before. If they are nice and speak good English, maybe they are nice guys,” said Ben-Onn.
“This is a misleading operation, a smiling operation, but they haven’t reached the point that the Iranians really decided to stop what they started. In other words, one day we may wake up in the morning and find Iran again in a position that can threaten the entire free world and Saudi Arabia and Israel and other countries in the Middle East who may be the victims of this policy,” said Ben-Onn.
So why does did a multilateral team led by the United States agree to this deal? Ben-Onn believes President Obama was determined to find a diplomatic resolution rather than get close to the possibility of U.S. troops being deployed again in the Middle East after years of being in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s better to speak than to fight I can assure you. I was in many wars and I know what I’m talking about,” said Ben-Onn. “I don’t know what to predict but I can tell you we are very worried about what will be the outcome of this agreement.
Ben-Onn says just 48 hours after the deal was signed in Geneva, Iran is already showing it has little intention of honoring the deal, with leaders in Tehran saying the document it signed does not contain the same terms as what the U.S. has released to the press.
Israel was not a part of the negotiations, and Ben-Onn says government ministers have assured him the deal will not impact Israeli leaders from acting in the national interest.
“They say if Israel will be under danger, then this agreement in Switzerland does not apply to Israel and Israel always has the right to defend ourselves against any threat or any enemy that might attack Israel in the future,” said Ben-Onn.
While unimpressed with the temporary deal, Ben-Onn says he hopes the U.S. drives a hard bargain in negotiations over a permanent agreement that will result in the eradication of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Touchy TSA
Thanksgiving is the busiest travel time of the year and millions of people will hit the friendly skies to spend time with family and friends. But before that happens, they have to navigate the TSA security checkpoints. The Capitol Steps offer their unique take on this nightmare, as we’re joined by Steps star and co-founder Elaina Newport.
Three Martini Lunch 11/26/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see a mainstream media reporter like Mark Halperin admit that Obamacare will lead to rationing of care and people dying as a result. They also react to President Obama telling a pro-amnesty heckler that he would stop all deportations if he could. And we rip on the Obama administration’s effort to turn Thanksgiving into a national Obamacare pitch.
‘It’s All in the Hands of the U.S.’
The Obama administration is trumpeting a weekend deal with Iran and five other nations that will freeze certain parts of the Iranian nuclear program and open facilities for greater inspection in exchange for the relaxing of some crippling financial sanctions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is incensed at the deal, calling it an “historic mistake”. Congressional Republicans as well as many Democrats are worried that the deal results in the U.S. giving up key diplomatic leverage while Iran technically gives up nothing.
The group responsible for exposing Iran’s clandestine nuclear program is also unimpressed. Officials with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) say the west wasted a golden opportunity to demand major Iranian concessions.
“The very fact that this regime agreed to whatever it agreed to shows their weakness, their vulnerability. This is something that should have been exploited. If the international community, and particularly the United States, was decisive enough, this was a regime that you could have actually forced them to abandon their entire program,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director in the office of the U.S. representative of the NCRI.
Jafarzadeh says the Iranians came to the table for three main reasons, including the economic toll of sanctions, major protests against Ayatollah Khamenei and additional NCRI revelations of additional nuclear facilities.
“This was a regime that was in trouble. This was the time that you needed to increase the pressure and force them to make the serious concessions that they were supposed to do. They didn’t press them hard enough. The agreement could have been much much strongerthat would have in effect really abandoned and dismantled the nuclear weapons program of Iran. It didn’t,” said Jafarzadeh.
While President Obama says the deal removes the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu and others believe it greatly increases the likelihood the Iranians will get the bomb because the deal provides legitimacy for the program and the easing of sanctions allows Iran to be more bold in pursuing it’s goals.
“Those are very valid allegations to take into consideration because you don’t want to provide financial assistance to this regime because that money is definitely going to be used, at least partially, in funding the very same program that you want to stop,” said Jafarzadeh.
Critics of the deal also point out Iran has repeatedly flouted United Nations Security Council sanctions, leading many to conclude Iran simply cannot be trusted to honor any agreement.
Is there any reason to think this time will be different?
“Absolutely not. They have never honored any agreement at all on any issues but particularly on the nuclear weapons program of Iran,” said Jafarzadeh, who also rips the agreement for completely ignoring Iran’s weaponization programs that are being developed simultaneously with the nuclear weapons.
“It’s not all about enrichment. It’s also about the nuclear weaponization program of Iran, the kind of research and development they have been doing along with their enrichment program,” said Jafarzadeh, who says it’s not too late for the U.S. and our allies to demand access to those sites as well if Iran truly has nothing to hide.
The agreement struck over the weekend is designed to last six months and give the seven nations time to forge a permanent treaty concerning Iranian nukes. Jafarzadeh says where we stand six months from now depends mostly on the United States.
“It all depends on how seriously and how strongly this administration will pursue it. If Iran detects that the White House is pretty much happy with what they got, they can play games with the White House and the State Department about this. Then you’re either going to be back to square one or in a worse situation six months from now,” said Jafarzadeh.
“On the other hand, if this administration would stress on some of the points in this agreement and really really press it hard, we could actually be several steps ahead of where we are,” he said.
“The ball is in the court of the United States. How they’re going to pursue this and where we’re going to stand six months from now, it’s all in the hands of the U.S. period,” he said.
Three Martini Lunch 11/25/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review see Democrats getting more wobbly on Obamacare as even Minnesota Sen. Al Franken suggests a delay in the individual mandate may be necessary. They also react to the Obama administration trumpeting a deal that weakens sanctions on Iran in exchange for a pause in the nuclear program. And they wonder why a solid majority of Americans disapprove of Obama’s performance, issue positions and integrity yet 70 percent still like him.
Just Can’t Hide Biden
As Vice President Joe Biden celebrates his 71st birthday, the Capitol Steps mark the occasion with their hilarious parody, “You Can’t Hide that Biden Guy”.
Three Martini Lunch 11/22/13
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review find delicious irony in the news that many Democratic congressional staffers are not happy with the impact Obamacare is having on them. They also groan as Senate Democrats essentially kill the filibuster. And they’re disgusted as the Defense Department proposes cutting military spending by closing all stateside commissaries.
‘This Is A Very Bad Idea’
The U.S. Senate is quietly moving towards a vote on a plan to curb sexual assaults in the military by moving sexual assault cases and other major criminal allegations out of the military justice system and into civilian courts, a move former Pentagon official Jed Babbin claims creates a whole set of new problems without doing anything to solve the rising number of assaults.
The plan is sponsored by New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and is breaking down along unusual lines. Tea party favorite and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz supports the bill while Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin are opposed.
“This is a very bad idea. It upsets the entire United States Uniformed Code of Military Justice and overturns roughly 60 years of UCMJ proceedings,” said Babbin.
Gillibrand’s thesis is that military commanders cannot be trusted to handle these serious allegations given the rising number of assaults and steps need to be taken to ensure justice is done. Babbin says moving serious crimes out of military courts is a terrible precedent.
“What Gillibrand is trying to do here is take the military justice out of that business and say we’re going to have a separate class of protected people, the victims of sexual assault, and we’re going to give them civilian lawyers and a whole separate civilian process. It’s bad for the military. It’s bad for order and discipline,” said Babbin, who further asserts that commanders are the best people to have in charge of handling these serious allegations.
“Commanders understand what’s going on. They understand what the context of these offenses are. They can hear things and see things and learn things that they’ll never be able to do in the civilian world,” said Babbin.
Babbin, a former Air Force JAG officer himself, says he doesn’t know a single JAG officer in any branch who doesn’t investigate sexual assaults vigorously. He further points out that the chief of staff of every military branch is staunchly opposed to the bill.
So if commanders looking the other way isn’t the problem, why are we seeing record number of sexual assaults reported in the military? Babbin says it’s because of political correctness running amok in the Armed Forces.
“The numbers are rising, quite frankly, because an awful lot of women are now serving with men in close conditions. You now have women serving on submarines, which has never been true up until about two years ago. You have a situation where people are under stress, they’re working in very close conditions and things are going to happen,” said Babbin. “The biggest problem is not the offensive nature of sexual assaults. The biggest problem is consensual sex.
“I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who used to be the skipper of a nuclear aircraft carrier and that was his problem,” he said.
It isn’t clear what the fate of the Gillibrand bill will be in the U.S. Senate. Babbin does not expect the House to consider anything similar, but if it passes the Senate lawmakers in both chambers will contend with the legislation as part of the must-pass Defense Authorization bill.
The Kennedy Assassination 50 Years Later; Memories of an An Eyewitness Reporter
The following piece is authored by Radio America Founder and President James C. Roberts
On November 22 our son Andrew will marry Melody Dantzler in Charleston, South Carolina. Anticipating the joy of the occasion and the sight of the handsome groom and beautiful bride, I cannot help but think back 50 years to November 22, 1963, to a another attractive young couple and to the violent tragedy that shook the nation.
Like everyone alive on that day, I remember exactly where I was (going into my dormitory at the boarding school I then attended) when I got the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
For my late cousin Charles Roberts, the memories of that day were burned into his psyche until the day he died 29 years later. Chuck was White House correspondent for Newsweek magazine and was in Dallas, riding on the first seat of the first press bus about six car lengths behind the presidential car, passing the Texas School Book Depository when the shots rang out.
Chuck’s first-person reporting, in Newsweek, made for riveting reading and would, in the opinion of Ben Bradlee, have earned him the Pulitzer Prize were it not for the fact that reporters for weeklies were not eligible. (The Pulitzer that year was given to UPI correspondent Merriman Smith).
Chuck wrote a best-selling book, The Truth About the Assassination and he and I spoke about the events of November 22nd many times after he retired.
In November of 1983, on the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, I was serving as director of the White House Fellowships program and we held a session on the assassination at the National Archives, the repository of the main exhibits of the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
The Archivist produced many of the key items, for viewing, including Kennedy’s bloody shirt, Oswald’s rifle, the deadly bullet and many others and in this somber atmosphere, Charles Roberts related his recollections to the group who listened in rapt attention.
He clearly heard the shots ring out, he said, but couldn’t say for sure how many. Major General Chester W. Clifton, Kennedy’s military aide, told Chuck that he had heard four shots.
Merriman Smith thought he heard three. Chuck remembered two. A key lesson to be drawn from this, he said, was the unreliability of eye-witness reports in times of confusion and crisis.
At the sound of the shots, Chuck saw a uniformed policeman running across Dealey Plaza, to the left of the President’s car with pistol drawn, “an immediate tip-off of serious trouble, violating the old rule of thumb that no one draws a weapon in the President’s presence unless he means to kill him or prevent him from being killed,” he wrote.
He also noted a “photographer, pursued by a policeman running up the grassy embankment ahead and to the right of the president’s car, ducking his head as if under fire.”
In the confusion the press bus stopped next to the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald had fired the shots at Kennedy, and the reporters poured out to find out what has going on. Chuck told me that reporter Robin MacNeil, who ran into the Texas School Book Depository, thought afterward that he had literally run into Lee Harvey Oswald, who was fleeing the building.
Soon the reporters clambered back onto the bus which raced toward the Dallas Trade Mart, the site of the President’s scheduled speech. Upon arrival, most reporters headed up the escalator to a press room but Chuck ran to the parking lot where he heard a transmission between two police officers that the Kennedy motorcade had gone to Parkland hospital.
Brusquely rebuffed by the President’s personal physician, Vice Admiral George Burkley, when he asked for a ride, a police sergeant stepped out into the street and flagged down a cab, telling the cabbie, “take this man to Parkland Hospital – fast.”
Once at Parkland, Chuck encountered Senator Ralph Yarborough, near the emergency entrance where the president’s blood-spattered car was parked. Yarborough had been riding in the motorcade beside Vice President Lyndon Johnson just behind the President’s security car. Shaken, but coherent, he told Chuck over and over that he “smelled the gunpowder…. It clung to the card nearly all the way to the hospital.”
Chuck noted that Sen. Yarborough was known for his veracity, but that his recollection had to have been mistaken, in that no bullet had been fired within 100 feet of his car which then roared off at high speed to the hospital.
One of the first reporters to reach the hospital, Chuck gazed upon a numbed Jackie Kennedy sitting outside the trauma center, in shock staring into space. Soon the other five reporters arrived and milled about in confusion inside and outside of a classroom that had been made into a makeshift press headquarters. Unofficial reports began coming out from nurses and doctors, many weeping, that the President was dead and at 1:33 PM deputy White House Press aide, Malcolm Kilduff made it official. Visibly shaken, he read a statement that said, “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 P.M. He died of a gunshot wound to the brain.”
As Chuck later wrote, “then there was bedlam.”
Minutes later, standing in the trauma center corridor, Chuck watched as the bronze casket containing the slain President’s body was wheeled by.
“My most vivid recollection, of that moment,” he wrote, “is of the dazed look on Jackie Kennedy’s face. Although I had talked to her many times, including (a) brief exchange when we arrived at Love Field, just two hours earlier, there was no glimmer of recognition as she walked by me, her hand resiting on the casket.”
Kennedy’s aides wanted to have the body flown back to Washington as soon as possible, but now – President Lyndon Johnson, had decided that he would be sworn in before Air Force One left the ground.
White House press aide Wayne Hawks quickly designated a press pool to cover the event, Merriman Smith of UPI, a wire service reporter, Sid Davis of Westinghouse, a radio/TV guy and Chuck, representing the news magazines. The three were placed in an unmarked police car, with siren silenced, which sped toward the airport at high speed, running red lights and crossing median strips en route.
Upton arrival on the Love Field tarmac, the three reporters entered the plane just behind federal judge Sarah T. Hughes who had been summoned to administer the oath of office.
Air Force One had been sitting in the sun without power for three house and as the reporters entered the plane, Chuck wrote, he was immediately struck by the darkness and the heat. The three moved forward to the main compartment where Johnson, his wife, Jackie Kennedy and Kennedy and Johnson aides – a total of 28 people by the reckoning of Roberts and Smith – crowded into the tight space.
Following the administration of the oath, Chuck recalled that LBJ kissed Lady Bird and then embraced Jackie Kennedy. Despite not being “deeply religious” Chuck found himself shaking the new President’s hand and murmuring, “God be with you, Mr President.”
Sid Davis left the plane. There followed a “nightmarish” flight back to Washington for the two remaining reporters which Chuck recalled (in an oral history quoted in Esquire magazine) as like entering “a tunnel.”
All the shades on the aircraft windows were kept down and the plane passed from daylight into darkness, unnoticed by the passengers. As the two reporters worked feverishly typing their copy amidst the weeping aides, officials and secret service agents, virtually all of the plane’s liquor stock was drained by the grieving passengers.
Seeing Roberts and Smith working on history’s first draft of the post-assassination story, officials kept coming forward – including the newly sworn-in President – who came by twice, once to say that he intended to ask Kennedy’s cabinet to stay on and the second time to say that he intended to make a short statement upon landing. There was considerable bad blood between the Johnson and Kennedy camps and some historians have written that Johnson was disrespectful in his treatment of Jackie and the Kennedy team. Chuck said nothing could be further from the truth – that the new President was the essence of graciousness and compassion toward the young widow and the slain president’s staff.
Following the publication of the Warren Report, Charles Roberts read the entire report meticulously and went on to write a best selling book The Truth about the Assassination. In it the seasoned former police reported was properly critical of the Commission’s errors of both the investigator’s conduct and some of its findings. but he concluded that its basic conclusions were correct, and he systematically rebutted the fantasies and irresponsible conclusions of the conspiracy theorists such as Mark Lane.
After weighing the evidence carefully and by doing extensive investigating on his own, Charles Roberts made this assessment:
“The truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy is that the Warren C omission reached the only conclusions that are tenable to reasonable men. That truth, extracted and distilled from the 10,400,000 words in its Hearings, is borne out by the hard physical evidence as well as the most credible eyewitness testimony. It is the truth, in Earl Warren’s phrase, :as far as it can be discovered.”
Fifty years later, the detailed, accurate and evocative reporting of this superb journalist – written in a maelstrom of panic, confusion, shock and fear – remains a model for his profession and the judgment of this seasoned former police reporter on the Warren Commission report still stands the test of time.
Mr. Roberts is President of Radio America and the American Veterans Center.