Tag Archives: political parties

Iranian Nuclear Weapons Capability

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It never was seriously hindered by the JCPOA, and the US withdrew from it over that failure. Now the Biden-Harris administration is back-handedly acknowledging that, even as it continues to beg Iran to agree to another ineffective agreement.

Administration officials concluded late last year that Iran’s nuclear program had advanced too far to re-create the roughly 12-month so-called breakout period of the 2015 pact[.]

Ineffective agreement:

Under a restored deal…[t]he constraints on Iran’s nuclear research and development would gradually relax from 2024. Iran’s new breakout time could then fall rapidly after 2026 when the deal allows Tehran to deploy some advanced centrifuges.

In other words, the new agreement that Biden-Harris is so desperate to get still would permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons, just over a (maybe) longer time frame.

That time frame, though, is itself misleading, even were it to last as long as Biden-Harris hopes. One metric for this, and one that Biden-Harris seems to be hanging his hat on, is the breakout time, the time required to go from the end of any agreement to the production of enough weapons grade uranium to produce a single bomb.

The breakout time is different from how long it would take Iran to attain a nuclear weapon because, according to Western officials, Iran is believed not to have mastered all the skills to build the core of a bomb and attach a warhead to a missile.

There are two things about this question of breakout time and an agreement’s claimed delay in an Iranian nuclear weapons program. One is that the added time, to the extent there actually is any, is plainly usable by Iran to develop and execute the needed skills to build and attach a bomb to a missile. That’s in addition to the lack, in the JCPOA, of any constraints on an Iranian missile development program.

The other is that business of attaching a nuclear bomb to a missile. There are lots of ways to deliver a nuclear warhead to its target besides missiles, or aircraft. One of those other ways is by land. One of the reasons (albeit far from an exclusive one) for Iran’s zeal in keeping a land bridge from Iran into Syria open and operational is for land delivery of weapons to its Syrian terrorist surrogates. Such a land bridge easily could accommodate nuclear bomb delivery either for Iran’s Syrian terrorists to deliver over the last mile into Israel or for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to deliver directly.

And there’s the dishonesty of Iran’s blandishments that their nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes. A peaceful nuclear program, for developing and building out nuclear reactors for electricity generation, for instance, needs only the 3.67% uranium purity that always has been allowed. Yet Iran already has 2.5 tons of 20% and greater purity uranium. That level of purity in uranium has no intrinsic use—it’s too rich, for instance, to be usable in a reactor. 20% purity has utility only as an intermediate step on the path to weapons-grade purity.

Taxing the Rich

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Washington State is at it.

Washington state multibillionaires would pay a wealth tax under a proposal that got a public hearing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 5426 would impose a 1% tax on intangible financial property such as stocks, and bonds, futures contracts, and publicly traded options. The first $1 billion of assessed wealth would be exempt from the tax, which “equals one percent multiplied by a resident’s taxable worldwide wealth.”

Leave aside questions of the legitimacy of taxing an American citizen’s foreign-held wealth, intangible or otherwise. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Sam Hunt (D, Olympia) has given the larger game away.

This is a great attempt to bring fairness to our tax structure which is pretty upside down with the lower income paying 17% of their income in taxes and the upper 1% paying 1% or less[.]

That is pretty upside down.

Another solution would be to lower the tax rates on those with the lower income. However, that would involve lowering tax rates rather than increasing them, and lowering tax rates is completely inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.

Update: Some have interpreted my “lower the tax rates on those with the lower income to mean lowering income tax rates. Washington has no income tax, only sales taxes (State and local), business taxes, and property taxes. Sales and property taxes are highly regressive and hit the lower income folks the hardest, the former directly through taking a far higher per centage of their income and the latter through driving up the cost of housing, whether owning or renting.

Lowering business taxes (eliminating them, I say) would foster job growth, which would benefit the lower- and no-income folks the most.

Biden-Harris Administration’s Level of Preparedness for its Afghanistan Withdrawal

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How prepared was Biden-Harris? What is an outcome of that level of preparedness?

…a news outlet said it obtained leaked notes from the White House Situation Room that showed “just how unprepared” it was to evacuate Afghan nationals who assisted Americans during the conflict.

Per AXIOS, the news outlet in question:

  • Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on August 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.
  • …they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States….”
  • …they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

Biden-Harris, though, is disputing all of that. The Spokesperson for his National Security Council, Emily Horne, insists,

While we’re not going to comment on leaked internal documents, cherry-picked notes from one meeting do not reflect the months of work that were already underway[.]

Wow. I’m not sure I’d want to insist that the debacle of Biden-Harris’…departure…from Afghanistan was carried out in accordance with carefully developed, long-time prior planning.

If that’s the quality of Biden-Harris planning, it’s no wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin is just weeks away from invading and conquering Ukraine, and People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping isn’t far behind in his plan to invade and conquer the Republic of China. Those Presidents are playing chess while our President is playing Chutes and Ladders.

It’s Appropriate

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Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D, IL) says it’s entirely appropriate to select a Supreme Court Justice first on the basis of her race and gender. He then says,

If they have achieved the level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence, they’ve done it against great odds.

We’ll never know whether that’s true of President Joe Biden’s (D) nominee, though, since he’s made plain he’ll nominate on the basis of race and sex, and not on the basis of any level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence.

But this degree of racism, much less of sexism, shouldn’t be a surprise from a party with a history of racist bigotry stretching back into the pre-Civil War years and today whose racist and sexist bigotry is demonstrated through Party’s insistence on proselytizing its identity politics.

As a side note, Durbin also justifies his President’s racist and sexist choice criteria on the claim that other Presidents did it, too. There’s the concept of morality with which we’re so familiar in the Progressive-Democratic Party and its predecessor, the Democratic Party: the morality of a behavior isn’t at all intrinsic in the behavior; on the contrary, morality is rooted in whether somebody else behaved that way, too; morality is a matter of situation, of what’s personally convenient to the behaver.

A Party’s Legacy

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David Marcus had a piece in Thursday’s Fox News regarding the Progressive-Democratic Party’s (Marcus still calls Party by its legacy name, Democratic Party) move as far Left as it has gone.  He posited two reasons for Party’s behavior.

The first is that by focusing their energy on the nation’s big cities, progressive Democrats can gain cultural power. While radical agendas on welfare, gender, and education, to name a few, may play better in New York and Los Angeles than in the heartland, it is reasonable to believe that controlling politics in urban centers will influence television, movies and news in ways that will eventually spread, especially to younger voters.

And

[A] second reason may be that the far left sees more benefit than harm in a shellacking for their party in the midterms. After all, the Democrats who will be swept out of office are not the progressives, but the moderates. By losing this election, the former can gain institutional power in the party, possibly for a generation.

There’s a third explanation, too, that’s corroborated by the Progressive-Democrats’ behavior with Obamacare. This third reason also dovetails nicely with Marcus’ second reason. Since the last election, Progressive-Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. With that, even with the slimness of their control, they’ve decided to go for it all and get their far Left (relative to the American political spectrum but center Left relative to Party) transformational, fundamentally socialist agenda enacted. They know that if they can get it rammed through, their policies won’t be repealed, even if they’re badly whipped in the next election. Just as with Obamacare.