Iran Nuke deal reached with 6 major powers

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiggghht!

You're always the last to know what's going on in the House. Events are rapidly unfolding. People are reporting it. Tomorrow should hold an important vote on whether Obama failed to meet Corker's requirements.

Oh, and a car completely painted with the ScareFest 8 logo went past my house today. I think it was a PT Cruiser, or something similar.

And it's done! From The Hill

The House passed a resolution Thursday contending that President Obama hasn’t provided Congress with all of the documents related to the Iran nuclear deal, thereby violating the terms of the congressional review law.

The party-line vote of 245-186 came a day after House GOP leaders recalibrated their strategy to reject the deal following a conservative revolt.​

So the House has said that Obama didn't meet the requirements under Corker, which means Corker's provisions to allow Obama to lift the sanctions in the absence of a specific Congressional resolution of disapproval doesn't come in to play. So the sanctions will remain in effect, and Iran will have to renounce the deal, since the US didn't meet our part of the agreement.

So help me understand this. If this interpretation of Corker is upheld, that means the US will have to scrap all cooperation with the IAEA, right? So it's basically the end of all existent non-proliferation policies? We're letting everyone on the planet have nukes now because the Republicans didn't like the way in which Obama wanted to keep nukes out of Iran's hands?

Either that or @gturner is full of shit and the Republican House is just doing what Republicans do (symbolic acts, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing) and the adults will continue to do what they do (govern).

Which would you like to bet on? (B/c @gturner has demonstrated HE is too big a pussy to make a bet)

Corker himself doesn't seem too enamoured of the House shenanigans:

"I think the best way to express your displeasure with not getting all the documents is to vote against the deal itself, not to raise some other issues," Corker told reporters on Tuesday.

I doubt anyway that it'll be upheld against the White House that they didn't supply documents which they themselves do not have access to.

Corker is the idiot who put forth the legislation in the first place. It is part of the Republicans "surrender then play-fight strategy" where they pass a bill that makes it trivial for Obama to get what he wants while allowing them to vote against it in a meaningless and futile charade of pretending to try and stop Obama, even though they have a majority in both houses of Congress.

And agreement with Iran on an extremely serious national security issue would normally require a treaty, which requires the assent of two-thirds of the Senate. Kerry explained that the administration didn't seek a treaty because there was no chance of passing one, so they decided to call the Iranian negotiations an "agreement", whatever that means.

So Corker put for the bill whereby the administration had to give them all the details of the agreement, and if the administration did that within 5 days of reaching an agreement with Iran, Congress would have 60 days to review it. If Congress passed a resolution of condemnation of the agreement, the agreement would fail. If Congress passed a resolution in support of the agreement, it would pass. But Corker stuck in option C, where if Congress failed to pass any resolution for or against the resolution, it would also pass. He's an idiot for sticking that in there, because instead of the two-thirds majority required by a treaty, it meant it could pass if just 40 percent of the Senate decided to filibuster, which is what happened.

But if the House plays hardball, they'll point out that the "IF" clause of Corker was not met, so none of the "THEN" clauses are activated. Some of the House Republicans are still stuck on the stupid "surrender then play-fight" strategy, with The Hill reporting:

"In the House, conservatives rallied around a proposal from Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), co-chairman of the House Republican Israel Caucus, to delay a vote on the Iran deal until the Obama administration provides Congress with the text of side deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)."​

His idea is to FAIL harder. Obama didn't meet the requirements of Corker because it didn't provide Congress with the details of the agreement within five days. Game over. Next issue. All Roskam's idea does is let the agreement pass a few days later than it otherwise would have, while he gets to claim that he opposes the thing he just let pass. He must be retarded.

When any of us have to go to court because we didn't meet some legal requirement placed on us by a judge, such as paying some amount of child support by a certain date or losing visitation, we don't get to argue that we'll just pay now, several months later, and we're all good. We don't get to make such arguments with the IRS or anywhere else.

Corker gave Obama a gimme putt. All Obama had to do was be the least bit transparent. But he failed. He had to hide the side deals, which Congress was lucky to find out even existed. So the special Corker path is gone, and the agreement should require more than the approval of one third of Congress before sanctions are lifted.

Interesting sidebar from this treaty - now that the sanctions have been lifted, Iran has bought over 60,000 tons of rice from the USA which has in turn created a shortage and higher current prices despite the USA having good carryover from last year and a decent crop this year.

Great news if you are a rice farmer.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ires-a-new-precision-guided-ballistic-missile

There is a question of if Iran just violated the nuke deal. The deal requires them to not build missiles which are capable of carrying nukes but today Iran tested a new missile which looks like it was designed to carry a nuclear warhead or at least could carry one.

Given that most nuclear weapons only weigh a few hundred pounds theoretically virtually any missile could carry one. At any rate, why should anyone be surprised at Iran cheating? They have no fear of sanctions being reimposed.

No matter. The Begin doctrine remains in force. If future president Clinton or Rubio won't do anything about the Iranian nuclear program, then Israel will regardless of consequences or cost.

That declaration didn't stop Iran, Iraq, Iran, or Libya getting chemical weapons. Though Iran is the only one of those still to have them.

We make a big deal about chemical weapons but they are several orders of magnitude less dangerous overall than nuclear weapons.

Even the monstrous Soviet chemical weapons arsenal at the height of the Cold War was mainly meant for battlefield use. Not as a mass terror weapon against civilians.

http://www.npr.org/sections/paralle...deal-milestone-that-tehran-wants-to-play-down

An alternative view is that "adoption day", the day the agreement goes into effect, is this coming Sunday so it appears the Iranians were trying to get one more missile test in before the agreement goes into effect.

^yep, that's right.

Allow me to quote John McCain:

"Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran".

Did he actually say that?

Well yeah. Welcome to big business

Iranian hard liners lose big in parliament election

But the reformers and moderates have enough to dominate in coalition:

Contrast that with the previous election, leaving the reformers with only 20 seats. As some of us have repeatedly pointed out, Iranians are mostly not the wild eyed radicals of popular caricature. They want peace with the U.S., and Obama's diplomatic carrots are having an impact.

I miss Chardman.

This is good news but you should temper it with the knowledge that the mullahs block most candidates from running and only the extreme right gets to run. So we are talking about the most moderate of the extremists and not real moderates.

It is still less extreme but not a whole lot.

This is massive news. But you wouldn't know that because you're an uneducated fuckwit who thinks he knows it all but really doesn't. The WP article is slightly frustrating in that it doesn't clearly explain that the moderates made major gains in the Assembly of Experts. This is the body that picks the supreme leader. With Khamenei aging and ill it will soon become time for a new supreme leader and it's akin to picking the next Pope. If a moderate is installed as supreme leader it could fundamentally shift Iran's position in the world to a far greater degree than you have seen with the recent nuclear deal.

Oh, but none of that matters, because Iranians are all savage animals who just want to blow up the world, right?

Not least because two thirds of them are under 40 and the hardliners area dying breed.

Why do I bother showing ignored content? I should already know Chup is an idiot and a waste of space but for some reason I keep giving him more chances only to be perpetually disappointed. Suffice it to say Cup doesn't know half of what he thinks especially to the positions he attempts to attribute to others. He has his head so far up his own ass he thinks his own shit is chocolate.

I've been hearing that since the 1990s.

"The hardliners are a dying breed"
"Most Iranians like Americans".
"Most Iranians are not radicals"
"Moderates are gaining strength"

Those might well be true. But when it comes down to Iranian versus U.S. interests, you can bet reliably that the Iranians (even the moderates) come down in favor of Iranian interests at the expense of American ones (which is only natural anyway).

Why should we think anything will change going into the third DECADE of this supposed "moderate era" in Iran?

Because the old "hard line" guys from the revolution days are dying off. Iran has a lot of young people and they see stuff the rest of the world has and they want that shit too. It'll change.

Dayton doesnt believe in warcrimes.