A ship named the Francop, carrying cargo from Iran to Syria, was intercepted and searched Tuesday near Cyprus by the Israeli navy. Hundreds of tons of weaponry were found on it, including some 3,000 rockets almost certainly destined for Hizbullah.

The president of the United States seems not to regard this as being of any importance. We cannot find that he has said anything about it.

He issued a statement to commemorate the taking of 66 American hostages in Tehran on November 4, 1979, in which he had nothing to say about the continuing mass demonstrations inside Iran against the regime, or the violent treatment to which the demonstrators are being subjected.

He said:

Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized. The 444 days that began on November 4, 1979 deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice.

This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust, and confrontation. I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community. We have accepted a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency to meet Iran’s request for assistance in meeting the medical needs of its people. We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community.

Iran must choose. We have heard for thirty years what the Iranian government is against; the question, now, is what kind of future it is for. The American people have great respect for the people of Iran and their rich history. The world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice, and their courageous pursuit of universal rights. It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.

Michael Ledeen reports and comments at PajamasMedia:

Big demonstrations still going on all over the country: Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Zahedan, Arak, Mazandaran, Tabriz, Rasht confirmed so far, and no doubt we will hear of others in the next hours and days.

The regime has failed to intimidate the people; the effect of the violence, the brutal savagery, the mass rapes, executions, and torture is to intensify their contempt (they trampled pictures of Supreme Leader Khamenei). …

Alas, their contempt is not limited to their own tyrants. It extends to President Obama, who today issued a masterpiece of appeasement and all but groveled in begging the leaders of the Islamic Republic to make a deal. …

He could not spare a single word for the plight of the people of Iran, who were being beaten, clubbed, stabbed and shot as he issued his statement.

This is Jimmy Carter all over again, and just as Carter’s appeasement of the Islamic Republic led to the death of countless innocents, in Iran and around the world, so Obama’s appeasement will do the same. He, and his administration, are accomplices to evil.

American schoolchildren are being taught to sing praise-songs for Barack Obama, in the same way kids are taught to sing them for the Dear Leader in Communist countries.

In March 2009 the kindergarten class of Marymount School performed this song (found at Thunder Tales, where more such songs may be read and heard). The blarney goes that Barack Hussein Obama is more Irish than anyone else. What higher praise could come from an Irish song-writer?

O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara

There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.

You don’t believe me, I hear you say

But Barack’s as Irish, as was JFK.

His granddaddy’s daddy came from Moneygall

A small Irish village, well known to you all.

He’s in the White House, he took a chance

Now let’s see Barack do Riverdance.

Toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a lama

There’s no one as Irish As Barack O’Bama.

He’s as Irish as bacon and cabbage and stew,

He’s Hawaiian he’s Kenyan American too.

He’s in the white house, he took his chance

Now let’s see Barack do Riverdance.

Toor a loo, toor a lay, toor a loo, toor a lama

There’s no one as Irish As Barack O’Bama.

From Kerry and Cork to old Donegal

Let’s hear it for Barack from old Moneygall.

You think you own your body?

Well, you don’t.

How can you be so selfish, so acquisitive, so greedy as to want to claim permanent possession of it?

You have no moral claim to it whatsoever. Any more than to any other private property.

As Proudhon said: ‘Property is theft.’

Or at most a loan.

You’ve only got your body on loan from the community.

Not only must it be returned to common ownership after your death, but bits of it can be taken away from you while you’re still alive.

So says Obama’s ‘regulatory czar’, Cass Sunstein.  He proposes the ‘routine removal’ of human organs from the dead, because ‘the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission.’

In our post of  November 10, 2008, we quoted a 12 year-old’s joking definition of marriage:

Marriage is a union between two or more living things.

There are folk in Obama’s White House who wouldn’t find that funny.

Phyllis Schlafly writes at Townhall:

We thought our nation had settled the polygamy issue a century and a half ago, but this nomination makes it a 21st century controversy. Obama’s nominee for the EEOC, a lesbian law-achool professor named Chai R. Feldblum, signed a 2006 manifesto endorsing polygamous households (i.e., “in which there is more than one conjugal partner”).

This document, titled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships,” argues that traditional marriage “should not be legally and economically privileged above all others.” The American people obviously think otherwise, and current laws reflect our wishes.

Feldblum is not the only pro-polygamy Obama appointee. His regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, wrote a book in 2008 called “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” in which he urged that “the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government.”

Sunstein argues that traditional marriage discriminates against single people by imposing “serious economic and material disadvantages.” He asks, “Why not leave people’s relationships to their own choices, subject to the judgments of private organizations, religious and otherwise?” …

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was passed in 1996 by overwhelming majorities in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified more than 1,000 federal laws that are based on the traditional definition of marriage, including the tax laws that permit married couples the advantage of filing joint income tax returns and the Social Security benefits awarded to fulltime homemakers, both very popular federal laws.

The peculiar push to recognize polygamy as just another variety of marriage is a predictable and logical corollary of the political movement to recognize same-sex marriage. If our government cannot define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, it follows that there can be no law against the union of a man and several women.

Or, to be consistent, none against the union of a woman and several men, a woman and several women, a man and several men.

And why leave it there? Why narrow the field to the living? A person recently married a fairground ride: must such a marriage be monogamous? Why not a person and several fairground rides?

Of course, a limitation to one spouse can be forced by circumstance,  as in the case of the person who married the Eiffel Tower. There just aren’t any other Eiffel Towers. Nothing, however, should prevent the Eiffel Tower itself getting married to several persons.

And if marriage to things is now okay among some sections of public opinion, what about marriage to animals?

In welfare-state Britain  wives are entitled to ‘benefits’ from the state just for being wives, and while polygamy is illegal under the law of the land, the several wives of a Muslim can all get these hand-outs. In effect this is a displacement of British law by sharia. Some Muslim men, in addition to a plurality of wives, keep an animal or two on the side for the further satisfaction of erotic urges; a practice not forbidden by sharia law, as is acknowledged by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in his Little Green Book. Fortunately for the British tax-payer, sharia does not require a man to marry his four-legged ‘bits of fluff’.

Phyllis Schlafly goes on to say:

For years, polygamy, even though it is totally demeaning to women, has been embraced by the powerful American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). …

The ACLU’s feminist president, Nadine Strossen, stated in a speech at Yale University in June 2005 that the ACLU defends “the right of individuals to engage in polygamy.” On Oct. 15, 2006, in a high-profile debate against Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Strossen stated that the ACLU supports the right to polygamy.

Speaking to the Federalist Society on Nov. 18, 2006, the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, confirmed his organization’s support of polygamy.

The massive immigration that the United States has accepted in recent years includes large numbers of immigrants from Third World countries that approve of polygamy as well as marriage to children and to close relatives. …

Attacks on the traditional legal definition of marriage come from the gay lobby seeking social recognition of their lifestyle, from the anti-marriage feminists and from some libertarians who believe marriage should be merely a private affair, none of the government’s business. These libertarians want to deny government the right to define marriage, set its standards or issue marriage licenses. …

We may have to depend on the Republican Party to maintain government’s proper role in defining and protecting traditional marriage. The very first platform adopted by the Republican Party, in 1856, condemned polygamy and slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism”. …

It’s a metaphor from the German-speaking world: a bicyclist – one who treads down hard (as when pedaling) on those he despises while he bows (as over handlebars) to those he respects.

*

Ben Rhodes, who is Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications and the writer of many of his foreign policy speeches (now you know the name of the culprit), said, according to The Washington Post:

“Our interests are the same with our allies and our adversaries. We’re saying the same thing to everybody. Our interests are the same no matter what country we’re talking to.”

If this were really the Weltanschauung shaping Obama’s foreign policy, it would be not merely misconceived, not just naive, not even simply stupid – it would be lunatic.

But in fact he doesn’t treat friends and foes alike.

Bowing to America’s ‘adversaries’, he  –

Gently propitiates the Mullahcracy of Iran and lets it become a nuclear power. Ditto the Despotism of North Korea. Kindly lets Iranian and al-Qaeda terrorists roar back into Iraq. Cozies up to Dictator Hugo Chavez. Literally bows to Saudi Arabia’s tyrant-in-chief who is spreading ‘soft’ jihad throughout America and the whole Western world. Lends a sympathetic hand to the flesh-eating Molloch of the Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, to help him evade trial. Yields graciously to rapacious Russia. Implores the barbaric Taliban to grant him a face-saving peace in Afghanistan [see the post immediately below]. Creeps cap-in-hand to Communist China. Plays nice with the slave-keepers of Cuba.

Stamping on America’s friends, he –

Snaps his fingers at Britain. Bullies Honduras. Cold-shoulders Colombia. Alienates Israel. Refuses to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looks the other way while Georgia is invaded and partially occupied by Russia. Breaks US promises of defense shields to Poland and the Czech Republic and, as an afterthought, lets them know his irrevocable decision with a casual midnight phone call – or does he get Hillary to text them the message?

While we all thought Obama was just waiting around for fate to lift any requirement for a decision on the war in Afganistan from his shoulders, it seems that his administration has been secretly crawling to the Taliban, trying to negotiate peace terms that would leave the Taliban in power in parts of Afghanistan – and being turned down.

From Islam In Action:

“US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast,” a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net requesting anonymity for not being authorized to talk about the sensitive issue with the media.

He said the talks, brokered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, continued for weeks at different locations including the Afghan capital Kabul. …

A Taliban spokesman admitted indirect talks with the US. …

Afghan and Taliban sources said Mutawakkil and Mullah Mohammad Zaeef, a former envoy to Pakistan who had taken part in previous talks, represented the Taliban side in the recent talks.

The US Embassy in Kabul denied any such talks.

“No, we are not holding any talks with Taliban,” embassy spokeswoman Cathaline Haydan told IOL from Kabul.

Asked whether the US has offered any power-sharing formula to Taliban, she said she was not aware of any such offer.

“I don’t know about any specific talks and the case you are reporting is not true.”

Sources say that for the first time the American negotiators did not insist on the “minus-Mullah Omer” formula, which had been the main hurdle in previous talks between the two sides.

The Americans reportedly offered Taliban a form of power-sharing in return for accepting the presence of foreign troops.

“America wants 8 army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of Al-Qaeda network,” the senior [Afghan] official said.

He named the possible hosts of the bases as Mazar-e-Sharif and Badakshan in north, Kandahar in south [? – see below], Kabul, Herat in west, Jalalabad in northeast and Ghazni and Faryab in central Afghanistan.

In exchange, the US offered Taliban the governorship of the southern provinces of Kandahar [? -see above] , Zabul, Hilmand and Orazgan as well as the northeastern provinces of Nooristan and Kunar.

These provinces are the epicenter of resistance against the US-led foreign forces and are considered the strongholds of Taliban.

Orazgan and Hilmand are the home provinces of Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Omer and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

“But Taliban did not agree on that,” said the senior official.

“Their demand was that America must give a deadline for its pull out if it wants negotiations to go on.”

Harmless nonsense, for the most part, is what goes on in the Vatican now, and it can be quite entertaining.

From the Telegraph:

The late Pope John Paul II could be beatified within months, setting him on the path to full sainthood.

The mayor of Rome, who would play a pivotal role in organizing the event, said the beatification of John Paul is expected to take place “at the latest” by 2010. …

Vatican observers say the most likely date for the beatification would be April next year, on the fifth anniversary of the popular Pontiff’s death.

Beatification precedes canonisation and involves a complicated process including the verification of miracles attributed to the person being considered.

A miracle normally takes the form of the curing of a disease or affliction which has no scientific explanation. A second miracle is then required for sainthood.

In John Paul’s case, the miracle under consideration is said to have taken place when a French nun was cured of Parkinson’s disease.

The process leading to sainthood usually takes decades, but Pope Benedict XVI launched the beatification process for John Paul just two months after his predecessor’s death on April 5, 2005.

However, a wisp of a shadow threatens the proceedings:

During the summer, the former Pope’s spokesman said the beatification process would not be delayed by the publication in Poland of correspondence between John Paul and a female compatriot.

Wanda Poltawska, who was one of a handful of people by the Pope’s bedside when he died, published a book with extracts of letters that she exchanged with John Paul, whom she met in 1962 while he was in Krakow. It is due to be published in Italy in February.

There is no suggestion that they had a romantic relationship, but some Roman Catholic Church officials were reportedly annoyed that she had “exaggerated” her friendship with the late pontiff and that the relationship would have to be scrutinised as part of the beatification process.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who ran the Vatican press office for 22 years, said there was no special connection between Mrs Poltawska, 88, and the former Pope.

Mark Steyn writes (read it all here, it’s good fun):

Valerie Jarrett announced the other day that “we’re going to speak truth to power.”

Who’s Valerie Jarrett? She’s “Senior Advisor” to the president of the United States — i.e., the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to “speak truth to power” to. But I suppose if you’re as eager to do so as his Senior Advisor, there’s always somebody out there: The Supreme Leader of Iran. The Prime Minister of Belgium. The Deputy Tourism Minister of the Solomon Islands. But no. The Senior Advisor has selected targets closer to home: “I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town-hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death. . . . ”

Ah, right. People “putting up signs.” Can’t have that, can we? The most powerful woman in the inner circle of the most powerful man on earth has decided to speak truth to powerful people standing in the street with handwritten placards saying “THIS GRAN’MA ISN’T SHOVEL READY.” …

As an anonymous wit once said, ‘The human race is divided into adults and women.’

If starving isn’t unhealthy, what does the word ‘unhealthy’ mean?

There are powerful persons who believe with fanatical conviction that (other) people should starve to death rather than eat something ‘unhealthy’.

As a result, millions are deprived of food.

Even Bill Gates protests about this state of affairs. We say ‘even Bill Gates’, because he usually goes along with the thinking of those who believe in government control of individual lives, aka socialists. (See in the quotation below a list of lefty organizations he supports.)  He doesn’t seem to realize that he is one of the greatest benefactors of mankind ever, through supplying billions of people with something they want: the products of Microsoft, which are put to trillions of productive uses throughout the world. Doing so –  as a model capitalist – has rightfully made him rich, and he has no moral obligation to redistribute his wealth in a secondary and much feebler attempt to do good. But he apparently thinks there is, perhaps out of some unwarranted feeling of guilt.

Whatever prompts him, he has undertaken to alleviate the chronic hunger of whole populations in Africa. And he has run into an impediment: the adoption, by stupid African rulers, of two Western ‘progressive’ notions: that people must be made to eat healthy food, and that genetically modified foods are unhealthy.

This article is from FrontPageMag:

The left-of-center philanthropist says starving Africans should be allowed to eat genetically modified foods.

Bill Gates took on the Famine Lobby while addressing a forum on the world food supply in Iowa. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Gates took aim at the chorus of environmental leftists and organic food advocates who believe Africans should starve rather than eat genetically modified (GM) foods. “Some voices are instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity. They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on earth, population is growing faster than productivity,” he said.

The opposition is significant, because Gates is left-of-center himself. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with assets of $29 billion as of 2005, has focused on the “population” side of the “problem” in the past, sending billions of dollars in grants to such pro-abortion groups as Planned Parenthood; Population Action International, Population Services International, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the Population Resource Center. Gates has also financed such organizations as the [Soros supported] Tides Center, the Tides Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, and has supported a gun control initiative in Washington state.

However, Gates announced he will issue a $120 million grant to increase food productivity in sub-Saharan Africa through the planting of genetically modified seeds. In Des Moines, Gates cited a Stanford study from 2008 concluding African farmers will lose one-quarter of their productivity within 20 years if they continue to plant the same strains of corn. However, “If the seeds perform well, African farmers can expect to produce two-million more tons of maize in a year of moderate drought.” Radio Iowa reports Gates has “committed more than a billion dollars” in all.

In proposing this initiative, he is standing up to the Green Left, which has long favored environmental “purity” [over] human well-being. Greenpeace cooked up the term “Frankenfood” to demonize genetically modified foods a decade ago. …

Dire predictions aside, GM foods not only potentially increase food production but have replaced the need to spray crops with chemical pesticides, which sickened or killed Africans. Those farmers who spray can now streamline the process, saving them much time and money. The modified crops are more resistant to cold, drought, herbicides, pests, and disease. They also supplied nutritional gaps in the consumption patterns of the poor. For instance, so-called “golden rice” spliced Vitamin A into rice, which could stave off blindness among the world’s poor who eat little more than rice. …

Greenpeace has long claimed GM foods increase allergies; however, the World Health Organization – hardly a corporate, capitalist shill – concluded, “No allergic effects have been found relative to GM foods currently on the market.” Although six EU nations ban GM foods, Jaap Satter, a senior policy adviser at the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, has said, “You cannot say anymore that there is a scientific reason to be against genetic modification.” The National Research Council summed up the situation: “no conceptual distinction exists between generic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify DNA and transfer genes.”

Some environmentalists seem concerned the foods will be too successful at feeding the poor. Al Gore has worried, “The most lasting impact of biotechnology on the food supply may come not from something going wrong, but from all going right…we’re far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain.” Given the environmentalist movement’s hatred of population – best exemplified by Obama Science Czar John Holdren’s justification of compulsory abortion in the United States – this may be the real locus of their disdain.

So deep is the Green Left’s hatred of GM foods that even an organization Gates founded has given genetically modified food a chilly reception. “The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 “with the objective of improving agriculture in Africa.” However, its leader, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, vowed in 2007: “We in the alliance will not incorporate GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in our programmes. We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds.”

The scare tactics and shunning of American and Euro-socialist leftists is theoretical and faulty – but their mania has reaped a deadly harvest among the world’s most vulnerable people.

In 2002, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa refused to accept tons of U.S. food aid for his starving nation, because the aid contained genetically modified food (maize, specifically). “Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health,” he said. The deluded president continued, “I will not allow Zambians to be turned into guinea pigs no matter the levels of hunger in the country.”

The levels of hunger were staggering. Nearly one-third of Zambia’s 10 million people faced famine. Some 14 million Africans faced starvation region-wide. Nonetheless, the president privately upbraided officials in the UN World Food Programme for distributing GM foods, which fed 125,000 people in five camps. The WFP reported some impoverished Zambians “resorted to eating little more than twigs and ash from the fire in a brown soupy concoction.” Desperate, rural villagers broke into the palace where the stockpiles were rotting and stole 2,000 bags of maize.

In response, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in 2002, signed a “statement of solidarity” with Zambia. Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace went further, alleging the humanitarian aid constituted a sick capitalist ploy. “There is a constant drip of pressure from the U.S. government and biotech industry to make sure Africa is softened up for GM,” he theorized. “Europe is closed to them and they need a market for it.”

Others offered more than ideological support. Zimbabwe joined the boycott, preventing GM grain’s importation. Angola followed suit in 2004. Lesotho and Mozambique milled all such grain so it would not be planted and “infect” other crops.

Not all were limited to the EU and Africa. In 2004, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez passed “possibly…the most sweeping restrictions on transgenic crops in the western hemisphere.”

At home, the opposition has been remarkably well-heeled. National Review’s Deroy Murdock found:

In 2001, the 30 leading anti-biotech groups…spent $341.4 million, including Greenpeace USA’s expenditure of $23,748,737, Environmental Defense’s $38,794,150 and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s $41,625,882. Between 1996 and 2001, this crusade’s lavish underwriters included the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($11,906,500), the Ford Foundation ($39,978,020) and the Pew Charitable Trusts ($130,996,900).

It also included a large portion of the organic food market. Somehow, this story of an industry trying to spike a competitor did not make MSNBC or the pages of Mother Jones.

Whatever the dangers, the prohibition of GM foods is a moral issue. As Velasio De Paolis of the Pontifical Urban University has said, it is “easy to say no to GM food if your stomach is full.” However misled he is on other issues, Bill Gates deserves credit for standing up against the Green Left on this point.

But on another, closely related, issue he has so far failed to take the right stand:

The question remains, will he do so on the issue that seems closest to his heart: the eradication of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa? In a recent speech on the topic Gates admitted, “two tools helped to bring the death rate down: One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT.” Before Rachel Carson’s crusade – based entirely on scientific theories that never panned out – DDT use had nearly eradicated malaria. Now, according to one report, “there are approximately 350 to 500 millions cases of malaria, killing close to one million people” annually. “Every day, malaria takes the lives of 2,000 children in Africa alone.” Yet instead of backing DDT use, Gates has sought to find a vaccine.

If Gates truly wants to put the well-being of Africans above political correctness, DDT is the best place to start.

Far from stopping Iran from making nuclear weapons, the Obama administration has legitimized its efforts and given it yet more time to advance its project.

From Investors.com (Investor’s Business Daily):

The mullahs ruling Islamofascist Iran are having a fine laugh at the easily beguiled infidels running U.S. foreign policy. First they agree to a nuclear “diplomatic breakthrough.” Then they say no.

The week before last, when Iran’s negotiators agreed to send most of its enriched uranium out of the country, diplomats in the U.S. and Europe were popping the champagne corks.

But last week Iranian officials backtracked on the agreement reached in Vienna to send three-quarters of its nuclear material to Russia for processing, after which it would be returned. Some 2,600 pounds of uranium was to be shipped by mid-January.

The pact was supposed to give the U.S. a year of extra time to work its negotiating magic on the Islamist terror state, as well as hold off an attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities. …

Iran now wants to keep its uranium until it gets fuel from the West. And this change of mind comes right after dubiously re-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.” …

Even if the Vienna deal had stuck, it makes a mockery of three U.N. Security Council declarations by legitimizing Tehran’s violations of the U.N. and allowing this fanatical, terrorist-supporting regime to continue its “peaceful” nuclear program. …

How can a theocratic government with a stone-age worldview take the most sophisticated, modern, industrialized nation in the world for a ride, as if we just fell off the turnip truck?

Because those who run Iran realize they are engaged in a global war. Those who now run American foreign policy, on the other hand, think “war on terror” is passe. Peace must be given a chance first, they think. And “yes, we can” make it work, without firing a shot. Hope will triumph. …

Think? Those who now run American foreign policy think?

Does this burble (from The Times of India) by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – delivered in Pakistan on Friday  when Iran said  ‘no’ – sound like thinking?

“We are working to determine exactly what they are willing to do, whether this was an initial response that is an end response or the beginning of getting to where we expect them to end up,” Clinton said.