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by Judith Bergman
• May 10, 2016 at 5:00 am
- The European
Union may yet come to realize that this latest ill-concealed jab at
the Central- and Eastern European members of the European Union may
signal the beginning of the unraveling of the European Union, an
event which, considering the authoritarian structure of the
organization, might be a good thing. The EU's authority comes,
undemocratically, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up;
it is non-transparent, unaccountable and there is no mechanism for
removing European Commission representatives.
- "We
especially do not like it when people who have never lived in
Hungary try to give us lectures on how we should cope with our own
problems. Calling us racists or xenophobes is the cheapest argument.
It's used just to dodge the issues." -- Zoltán Kovács,
spokesman for Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
- By persisting
in pushing their agendas on European Union member states that still
consider themselves sovereign and not merely provinces of the EU,
Timmermans and his European Commission bureaucrats may just have
given the European Union its kiss of death.
The European Commission, led by Jean-Claude Juncker
and Frans Timmermans (left), is hell-bent on forcing member states to
take "their share" of migrants. In March, Polish Prime Minister
Beata Szydło (right) bluntly stated: "I see no possibility at this
time of immigrants coming to Poland."
The European Union is hell-bent on forcing member states to take
"their share" of migrants. To this end, the European Commission
has proposed reforms to EU asylum rules that would see enormous financial
penalties imposed on members refusing to take in what it deems a
sufficient number of asylum seekers, apparently even if this means
placing those states at a severe financial disadvantage.
The European Commission is planning sanctions of an incredible
$290,000 for every migrant that recalcitrant EU member states refuse to
receive. Given that EU countries such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia and Austria have closed their borders to migrants or
are in the process of doing so, it is not difficult to discern at whom
the EU is aiming its planned penalties.
by A.J. Caschetta
• May 10, 2016 at 4:00 am
- Rhodes even
acknowledges that there is nothing "moderate" about
Rouhani, Zarif or Khamenei.
- The dates and
facts conflicted with the narrative, so they were finessed,
rewritten and sold to the public with different plot-lines and
different themes. Outside Washington, D.C. this behavior is
sometimes called lying.
- At best Ben
Rhodes is the author of a Pyrrhic victory, ensuring that the next
president will face the same choice Obama faced but against an Iran
armed with nuclear bombs.
- This is what
happens to foreign policy when it is entrusted to the unqualified
and undereducated.
Barack Obama works on a speech with Ben Rhodes, Deputy
National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. (Image source:
Pete Souza/White House)
That the Obama administration's Iran deal is a work of fiction has
been known all along, but now Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security
Advisor for Strategic Communications, is taking credit as its author. In
a long interview with New York Times reporter David Samuels on
Sunday, the world learned that Rhodes is "the master shaper and
retailer of Obama's foreign policy narratives" who "strategized
and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign." Samuels lauds
Rhodes as "a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an
agenda packaged as politics."
Welcome to the post-modern techno-presidency where everything is a
text, easily manipulated by skilled writers and disseminated in 140 or
fewer characters. Don't like the facts? Change the narrative. What really
counts is "the optics."
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