Laurent Fabius our hero?

He seems to have been the only barrier to giving Iran all they want.  Laurent Fabius is a French Socialist politician and the current Foreign Minister of France. He served as Prime Minister from  1984 to  1986.   He is Jewish by ancestry

Marathon talks on a deal to temporarily curb Iran's nuclear program have broken down after a negotiations between foreign ministers ran into trouble late last night.

France raised objections to a draft agreement, complaining it did not go far enough to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers of six other delegations conferred with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a late-night session which broke up after midnight.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told France Inter radio yesterday that Paris would not accept a 'sucker's deal'.

They complained the text which was drafted as part of the agreement had been presented a 'fait accompli' and did not want to be forced into a a deat.

EU foreign policy chief Barones Ashton said 'a lot of concrete progress has been made but differences remain' with Tehran.

Asked whether it was French objections which scuppered any deal, Baroness Ashton said Fabius 'came determined to try to help this process'.

Zarif said the three days of talks had been 'very productive', despite the failure to reach agreement.

SOURCE

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Obama’s Democrat Party of Pitchmen and Liars

It’s getting both comical and frustrating to watch liberals rush a prevent-style defense in the wake of Obama’s most recently broken promise. The now laughable claim that “if you like your private insurance plan, you can keep your private insurance plan” is haunting Democrats across the nation. It’s hard not to call such a line – uttered well after the White House estimated millions would lose their insurance – anything other than an outright lie.

From the party that decided to parse the meaning of the word “is” in the 1990’s has come a full range of defenses. The most popular being that “for 95 percent of Americans” the President’s claim will prove to be accurate. . . Of course this is merely the most recent lie to escape the lips of the Left’s most desperate salesmen.

This figure is based off the roughly 5 percent of Americans who get their insurance from the individual market, as opposed to their employer provided coverage. And yet, according to the rarely mentioned memo that proves the President’s malicious intent to deceive, as many as 69 percent of certain employer based insurance plans could lose coverage. According to McClatchy news, as many as 52 million Americans might be losing their coverage because of the pages of regulation in the “Affordable” Care Act.

Which brings us to another point: Aren’t the Democrats supposed to be the party for the disenfranchised? Are those 52 million (or for that matter, the 11 million people to which Obama, Wasserman-Schultz, and Jay Carney keep referring) not real people? Are they not cancer survivors who are depending on their current insurance, and current doctors for care? Or are we not supposed to concern ourselves with anecdotal stories when the narratives run contrary to Democrat platforms?

So far, in Obamacare’s infancy, far more people have lost their insurance than have signed up for the exchanges. Yet, I don’t see Obama holding a press conference with people like Edie Sundby standing behind him as a human prop. Maybe he should. . . From a pure PR standpoint, there are far more horror stories to highlight than success stories in relation to the “Affordable” Care Act.

And let’s not gloss over the name of the President’s signature piece of legislation. . . Now, which is the bigger lie: The President’s claim that you can keep your insurance, or the actual name of his healthcare bill? The “Affordable” Care Act is projected to increase premiums an average of 41 percent. And for many of those who will soon be losing insurance coverage, the increase (as they’re forced into more comprehensive and wide ranging plans) could be substantially more. Some victims of the President’s socialization of Healthcare have reported premium hikes up to 1000 percent.

In fact, as we learn more about the law and its implementation, we are learning that many aspects of the law were sold with less-than-honest sales pitches. Remember how Obama, Pelosi and Reid insisted this Frankenstein of regulation was necessary to insure the uninsured? Well, after a decade of implementation the law will still fail to cover tens of millions of Americans. . . And that’s assuming that those individuals who find themselves unexpectedly without coverage this year don’t decide to remain in the category of “uninsured.”

What’s more stunning, is that the Media is just now beginning to catch on to this theme. It’s not as if this is the first time the White House has let slip a non-truth. Much of the President’s tenure has been a tour of dishonesty and deceit.

Remember Fast and Furious? First there was denial. Then we were told the operation was small and isolated. Then the Department of Justice issued a letter stating no knowledge of the operation; only to retract that letter and admit to “administrative” knowledge of the gun running operation that ultimately took the lives of two US border Patrol Agents. Then there was Benghazi: At first we were told that Ambassador Stevens was killed in a protest-gone-wrong. . . Of course we now know that was not only false, but unconditionally and irretrievably false. And what about the IRS scandal that started as “a couple of rogue” agents in Cincinnati; but quickly ballooned to involve the IRS Director herself?

Not all of Obama’s non-truths, half-truths and outright-lies are the products of uncovered scandals. Some are more benign than others. After the government shutdown and debt ceiling negotiations, it’s almost comical to recollect his 2008 speech to the Mile High City, in which he portrayed himself as the great “Uniter.” After a full five years of stubbornly high unemployment, we should be reminded about his promise to create “shovel ready” jobs.

The implementation of Obamacare has simply exposed a long standing truth about our 44th President: His teleprompter has no periods. . . Only Asterisks. And while Democrats try to blame the private insurance companies (that Obamacare is responsible for regulating), and the purchasers of “inadequate” insurance, they will quickly lead the American people to another truth:

President Obama is merely a representative sample of today’s Democrat Party. Because let’s face it. . . There’s only one Party in America that is currently defending the claim that 51 million Americans will be able to keep the insurance they are currently losing. If you or I made a similar claim to Congress, it might be considered a felony.

SOURCE

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The Future of the Conservative Movement

At long last, the conservative movement is taking a long, hard look at itself. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his fellow ideologues barrel full steam ahead in their quest to “fundamentally transform” the country.

The time is now to read to Ilana Mercer’s, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Mercer, the daughter of a rabbi and former anti-apartheid activist, was raised, first in Israel, and then South Africa. Though this classical liberal and self-professed “paleo-libertarian” has never been any sort of friend to either apartheid or any other racially-based institutional arrangement, Mercer is at great pains to note the ugly fact that, by any standard, life in “the New South Africa” is dramatically worse than was life in the old.

And this is why she fled her home to forge a new existence in America.

The first chapter of Cannibal is a gripping—and grisly—account of the scourge that crime has become in post-apartheid South Africa. Refusing to reduce the victims of barbarism to a bunch of bloodless statistics, Mercer introduces readers to people like twelve year-old Emily Williams, who was shot to death when she stumbled upon an armed robbery in progress at a friend’s house while walking to school. Her heart broken parents subsequently decided that their country had become an intolerable place to remain. They have since relocated to the United Kingdom.

The reader is also acquainted with the likes of Rene Burger, a young and promising medical student who was kidnapped and gang-raped at knife-point by three degenerates at a “well-patrolled” hospital where she was taking classes, and Sheldon Cohen, who died in front of his young son after being gunned down by three predators.

Mercer identifies others—including a not inconsiderable number of her own relatives—who have suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of South African thugs. She also definitively establishes that to no slight measure, this crime epidemic is motivated by an animus toward whites, a deep seated racial hatred that is both encouraged and, particularly in the case of the legions of white Afrikaner farmers who have been forced from their lands, sanctioned by the African National Congress.

But it would be a grave mistake to think that Cannibal is only about South Africa. It is not. As its author describes it, and as its subtitle makes clear, it is a “labor of love” to her homelands old and new. Mercer is determined to spare America the same fate that befell South Africa. Furthermore, it would be as equally egregious a mistake to think that Cannibal is only, or even primarily, about race. There are larger issues to which Mercer speaks, issues with which conservatives have grappled from at least the time that their “patron saint,” Edmund Burke, first articulated them.

Though Mercer insists that she is no conservative, there are similarities, striking similarities, between her and Burke. The latter made an impassioned defense of his 18th century England against the radicalism of the French Revolution that he feared would soon enough ravage his country. It was in response to these ideological excesses that conservatism first emerged as a distinctive tradition of thought. Mercer carries on this estimable tradition inasmuch as she seeks to defend her new country, America, against the ravenous radicalisms that threaten it.

The forces that imperiled France and England in Burke’s day are the same forces that consumed South Africa and that imperil America in our own. These forces boil down to a lust, an insatiable lust, for revolutionary change and the ideological abstractions that inspire it.

As the conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott memorably remarked, change is emblematic of death. Thus, conservatives have always preferred changes that are slight to those that are vast, changes that are necessary to those that are not, and changes that are gradual to those that are radical. Changes that are “fundamentally transformative” siphon the life out of a society by severing its present from its past.

Unlike most of us, Mercer knows all too well how an agenda to “fundamentally transform” a society, pursued with all of the recklessness with which such agendas are inevitably pursued, is guaranteed to destroy that society—however beautiful-sounding the abstract ideals in the names of which it is executed.

However, it isn’t just the usual suspects—leftists or Democrats—who have an ardent affection for radical change and abstract ideals. The GOP and “the conservative press” have had more than their share of true believers as well.

It was, after all, “conservatives”—or, more accurately, neoconservatives—that most rigorously supported George W. Bush’s campaign to “fundamentally transform” the Middle East into an oasis of “Democracy.” Noting that abstract ideals like Democracy are not timeless principles written in “human nature” but the hard-earned gains of a civilization that has been millennia in the making, Mercer was among those who argued mightily against this fool’s errand from the outset. Though she fell out of favor with some notable “conservative” media personalities for doing so, time has vindicated her while indicting her critics.

SOURCE

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Words Matter

Here’s a letter to the Washington Post from economist Don Boudreaux:

Matt Miller includes himself among those “who think the health security the Affordable Care Act provides marks a fundamental advance in America’s social contract” (“Obamacare’s well-insured critics,” Nov. 6).

Mr. Miller needs a refresher on the definition of “contract.”

A contract binds only those parties who voluntarily agree to be bound by its provisions.  Central to this definition of “contract” is the presumption that all parties to the contract know the provisions to which they agree.  But because Obamacare passed without a single favorable vote of the opposition party, because it passed by a narrow margin in the House of Representatives, and because even some of Obamacare’s enthusiastic Congressional supporters admitted that they did not know all of the provisions of the bill, to call Obamacare part of a “social contract” is a dishonest attempt to clothe that legislation with a legitimacy that it does not possess.

Unchecked political majorities often run roughshod over minorities – forcing, in each case, the minority to obey the majority’s commands (rather than, as with true contracts, bargaining with parties who remain free to refuse any and all contractual offers).  No realistic person doubts this regrettable reality.  Please, though, let’s not perfume up and glorify such exercises of raw majoritarian power by calling their outcomes clauses of a “social contract.”

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Pictures

Every now and again I put up a small gallery of graphics that have appeared on this blog that I think are worth revisiting.  The latest can be accessed here or here

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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