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“Regardless of the ongoing litigation I am not in a position — nor should I be expected to — to speak of the scheduling habits of a previous secretary of State,” Kirby told reporters. “I’m not able to do that.” “It’s a case of ongoing litigation and I’m simply not able to discuss it further.” ======================================= During the State Department’s daily press briefing on Friday, Kirby said that Secretary John Kerry’s calendars “are being maintained and preserved as they should be.” “I can’t speak to how it was done in the past,” he sad. “But the secretary’s calendars are being...

Iran, the nation that has built a well-deserved reputation as the world’s premier state-sponsor of terrorism has a new lobbyist and he is none other than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the Obama administration inked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in January, Kerry has been busying himself with ensuring that European banks start doing business with the Iranians. Yes, you read that correctly. Not only has the United States and its European allies agreed to lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the administration is now encouraging the private banking sector to do the same. It appears however,...

Tom Cotton Rips Obama's Foreign Policy Team of 'Van Drivers and Campaign Flacks and Failed Novelists' 'As if any of them had ever seen anything more dangerous than a shoving match ...' Arkansas senator Tom Cotton hammered the president's foreign policy staff Tuesday morning, explaining why he's become "public enemy number one at the White House" over his opposition to the Iran deal. "I guess I became public enemy number one at the White House because I'm telling the truth about the Iran deal. Look, what you just played, and some of the coverage of Ben Rhodes is what happens...

Sen. Tom Cotton ?79% alleged Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s administration officials say one thing in classified briefings with members of Congress and another thing in public to the American people. “It’s time that the administration came clean and told the American people exactly what they tell Congress in a classified setting,” Cotton insisted. Appearing on the Hugh Hewitt Show on Tuesday, Cotton said that he “became public enemy number one at the White House… because I’m telling the truth about the Iran deal.” On Monday, during the White House press briefing, press secretary Josh Earnest claimed that Cotton “time

After embracing the notion that gender is as much mental as it is physical, the Obama White House on Tuesday rejected the suggestion that it has been particularly aggressive on transgender issues. “This is a confrontation that Republicans have sought out rather cynically, because they are seeking a political advantage,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at Tuesday's briefing. Earnest said Republicans in North Carolina started the controversy by passing legislation (HB2), which negated a Charlotte city ordinance allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice. …

A number of people at AT and elsewhere have written about the New York Times’ fascinating but also deeply disturbing story of how Ben Rhodes, a callow, unsuccessful but well-connected short-story writer became the Obama administration’s primary foreign policy mandarin. This should come as no surprise to careful observers of this administration. Rhodes, according to the Times piece, is Obama’s foreign policy “guru” a man who has a “mind meld” with the president. What Rhodes and the president share though, is not so much a leftist approach to foreign affairs -- though presumably that plays a role -- but rather...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkqn6wsrUfs

Obama’s Master of Deceit on the Iran Nuke Deal From aspiring novelist to chief spinner of the president's lies. May 11, 2016 Joseph Klein    Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes confirmed what FrontPage Magazine has been saying all along. President Obama and senior members of his administration sold his nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with a pack of lies.  Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer, who fulfilled his aspirations for make-believe as a senior member of the Obama administration.  In a profile of Rhodes, written by...

resident Obama's political appointees are not only celebrated by the media as the best and brightest America has to offer; they are promoted as being so bright that they are allowed to boast about how they masterfully manipulate the press, like sculpting a can of smelly, journalistic Play-Doh. The New York Times Magazine wrote a long profile of Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communications -- his foreign-policy communications whiz -- Ben Rhodes, lauded as "the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand...

The internet was abuzz following a story by David Samuels on the jerk who admitted he manipulated the truth to get the president’s absurd deal with Iran accepted (accepted, that is, by the Democrats in Congress who blocked a Republican resolution to reject it). In case you missed it I’ll provide a quick summary of the salient parts, but that shouldn’t be the end of the story: the press having allowed itself to be flimflammed into being mere White House megaphones needs to redeem itself, should it care to win back even the tiniest shred of credibility. It probably won’t,...

In light of Ben Rhodes' revelation over the weekend that he led a White House effort to lie about the Iranian nuclear deal, it is useful to look back at last summer, when the White House attacked the Associated Press and its diplomatic reporter, @APDiplowriter (Matt Lee) for asking too many questions about the deal, particularly about the side agreement that allows the Iranians to 'self-inspect' their weapons production facility at Parchin. What this story is really about is the politicization of expertise, and how far things can go when one group of experts (arms controllers) decides to fight...

It’s hardly any wonder that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has a "mind meld" with his boss, the president. According to a David Samuels New York Times Magazine article to be published Sunday and already posted to the website, Rhodes, like Barack Obama, is contemptuous of "the American foreign-policy establishment." What Obama calls the "Washington playbook" dictating the sorts of responses available to American policymakers, Rhodes calls the "Blob." Blob includes "editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker," etc. It also encompasses, according to Rhodes, Obama's former secretary of state Hillary Clinton,...

Ben Rhodes is perhaps the weirdest foreign policy adviser in the history of the White House. His path to his current position as deputy national security adviser for strategic communications was, as this New York Times profile informs us, "perhaps not strictly believable, even as fiction." Forget his title. Ben Rhodes is "the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself," according to the Times. What makes that so bizarre is that Rhodes has no background in foreign policy at all. He was a failed short story writer who wandered into the orbit of Obama aides...

When it comes to foreign policy, President Obama has spent more than seven years now living the dream. And I mean dream, as in fantasy -- a trip to an alternate universe. Never mind the dangerous and in some cases deadly realities that increasingly beset the rest of the planet. For the White House, it's been one glorious fiction after another. Russia was a "reset." Libya was a success. So was the pivot to Asia. The tide of war is receding. There was a red line in Syria (until there wasn't). The Iran nuclear program is now "exclusively peaceful." America's...

<p>The profile of one Ben Rhodes running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating.</p> <p>But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob."</p>

The Obama administration misled Americans about supposed "moderates" that officials were dealing with in the Iranian theocracy to forge a nuclear proliferation deal — all to make the deal more palatable to the American public, according to The New York Times. {snip}... "We created an echo chamber," he tells the Times in a piece to appear in the Sunday magazine of the newspaper. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say," he adds about so-called experts praising the deal in the press. According to the Times, when Rhodes was asked about his misleading version of...

Deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes orchestrated an 'echo chamber' of media support for Obama's Iran deal He spoke candidly about his tactics to a New York Times Magazine writer Tactics included planting talking points with compliant reporters Also helped arms-control experts land in influential positions where they could parrot the White House's line on the deal's virtues Even then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now says he's not sure the president's aims were what the White House said they were at the time White House routinely 'ventriloquizes' reporters, the Times story explains The Obama White House set up...

We hope Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are giving that devastating new profile of resident Obama’s foreign-policy guru a careful read. Because they’ll learn how they were all played for fools on the Iran nuclear deal by that aide, Ben Rhodes — and the resident. That applies especially to Schumer, who will be the Senate Democratic leader come January. Booker and Gillibrand hewed to the party line in backing the deal. Schumer gave it a thumb’s-down — but then refused to lobby his colleagues to take his side. Sen. Bob Menendez, on the other hand, is looking...

In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality. One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to "ask from society's lottery winners" that they make a "modest investment" in government programs to help the poor. Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just "ask" for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually...

Despite his proclamation that he "saved the world from a Great Depression," the fact is that Obama will be the first President ever to not see a single year of 3% GDP growth - but only cynical fiction-peddlers would mention facts at a time like this. In yet more legacy-defending narrative, Obama told The NYTimes today that his biggest failure was being unable to sell his success in putting the American economy back on track to the American people (no matter the actual realities) careful to blame Republicans for slowing growth "by a percentage point or two." And then in...