Iranian officials say it is up to the Syrian people to decide whether he stays in power as part of any peace settlement.
The Syrian people have decided. But here is Iran, with Russian help, dictating at gunpoint that the Syrian people must accept the Iranian/Russian decreed government, the government against which the Syrian people have been rebelling these last several years.
“Other countries mustn’t dictate Syria’s political future.” No, Iran has reserved that task to itself.
…those seized weapons. The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iranian-backed Houthi…rebels…in Yemen has seized an Iranian “fishing” boat laden with missile launchers and anti-tank weapons bound for those Houthis.
It would be good if the Saudis pass those weapons along to the Kurds, who are fighting the Daesh in northern Iraq. Those weapons would be put to good use by folks who know how to fight.
And they’ll be better than those un-armored “MRAPs” we shipped to them.
What Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake actually said:
It’s a very delicate balancing act. Because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.
What she said she meant in the next day’s press conference:
I was asked a question about the property damage that was done, and in answering that question I made it very clear that we balance a very line between giving protesters—peaceful protesters—space to protest. What I said is, in doing so, people can hijack that and use that space for bad.
That’s an entirely legitimate reading of her initial statement: “In the course of,” not “by deliberate, separate decision.”
I think there are a number of factors in play that led to the NLMSM’s distortion (in my view) of Rawlings-Blake’s original statement:
It didn’t help that the Detroit police official interviewed so extensively, especially on Fox News, and so many other allegedly responsible public officials who were interviewed apparently took the mayor’s words under the NLMSM’s interpretation at face value rather than themselves asking whether a mayor really could intend such a thing.
…especially, the aim of those clauses of the First Amendment, free political speech. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, had this to say in striking down aggregate limits to political contributions:
There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders. Citizens can exercise that right in a variety of ways: They can run for office themselves, vote, urge others to vote for a particular candidate, volunteer to work on a campaign, and contribute to a candidate’s campaign. This case is about the last of those options.
And
Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects. If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.
And [bold added, italics in the original]
The Government has a strong interest, no less critical to our democratic system, in combatting corruption and its appearance. We have, however, held that this interest must be limited to a specific kind of corruption—quid pro quo corruption—in order to ensure that the Government’s efforts do not have the effect of restricting the First Amendment right of citizens to choose who shall govern them. For the reasons set forth, we conclude that the aggregate limits on contributions do not further the only governmental interest this Court accepted as legitimate in Buckley. They instead intrude without justification on a citizen’s ability to exercise “the most fundamental First Amendment activities.”
What he said. The Supremes’ ruling can be seen here.
Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren (for a few more days), has one, which he offered in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:
The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran. … We understand that they are pretty bad guys. Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.
Would that our own national leadership, including a President who’s a better policy guy than his policy guys, had such clarity of thought.