Donald Trump is expected to tell Congress as early as Friday that he will not to re-certify Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The Iran Nuclear Review Agreement Act, also known as Corker-Cardin, obliges the president to make this certification every 90 days. If he does not, Congress has a period of 60 days when it’s able to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions that had been lifted as part of the nuclear deal. Despite grudgingly agreeing to approve the deal twice earlier this year, the president made plain over the summer that he didn’t believe Iran was in compliance and would not certify again. While decertification will not mean an immediate U.S. withdrawal from the agreement, it will set into motion a process that’s very likely to lead to the same result, and send a clear signal of the administration’s determination to be rid of the deal in its current form.

This is folly.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/for-war-hawks-iran-deal-...

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald Trump said on Friday that his I.Q. is “even higher” now that he knows that the United States Virgin Islands are part of the United States.

“Quite frankly, a few weeks ago, when I learned that Puerto Rico was a part of the U.S., I thought that that boosted my I.Q. to a whole new level,” Trump said. “Now that I also know about the Virgin Islands, my number must be off the charts.”

He said that he was eager to retake his I.Q. test because of “all the amazing things I learned this week.”

“For example, I just learned that the stock market can’t reduce the national debt,” he said. “If there was a question about that on an I.Q. test, I would nail that question.”

Trump said that his one concern was that an I.Q. test does not exist that can accurately measure his ballooning intelligence.

read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-says-iq-even-highe...

Only "he" can measure his fabulous I.Q. between his thumb and his index finger while telling the faithful that the I. Q. of the President of The Virgin Island is not as high as his... "it is not even a question of a choice" he said gravely.

Donald Trump should be the last person to speak on moral values. Yet, on Friday, he received standing ovations for his speech at the Values Voter Summit in which he claimed that his administration is “stopping, cold, attacks on Judeo-Christian values.” This accentuates the moral hypocrisy of the religious right which has wedded itself to arguably the most immoral president in the history of the United States.

The writing was on the wall. In 2016, white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his or her performance in public office. So much for the Moral Majority. Perhaps this explains why religious conservatives have stood by Trump even as a greater number of business leaders and Republicans have abandoned him.

Trump exposes the religious right’s moral pretension for the veneer it’s always been. There’s nothing moral about a president who is an alleged sexual predator. There’s nothing pro-family about a president intent on separating immigrant families. Religious freedom is a misnomer for a president who is hell-bent on discriminating against Muslims and the free speech of journalists and athletes.

The “pro-life” position is grotesque when it narrowly defines life as a fetus while remaining pro-guns, pro-death penalty and pro-war. In reality, pro-life often really means anti-abortion. Yet, it still fails here on its own grounds. Studies have continuously found that making abortion illegal does not reduce the number of abortions that take place within a country.

Now, the pro-life movement has found a strong ally in Trump who has shown little regard for human life. He’s lashed out at protestors denouncing police brutality against black lives.

His attempts to eliminate Obamacare have threatened the healthcare of millions. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Trump has been heartless towards Puerto Rican lives and has recently threatened to pull resources from the island in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/14/trumps-religious-r...

Americans have long struggled with the question of whether this country should be more involved in world affairs, or less. The contest of ideas between internationalists and isolationists has been particularly fierce among Republicans, going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and continuing on to the beginning of World War II.

But since the end of that war, whatever the differences in their priorities and points of emphasis, every president has chosen engagement rather than retreat, sometimes with surprising and positive outcomes. Richard Nixon forged relations with communist China; Ronald Reagan, having consigned the Soviet Union to “the ash heap of history,” went on to negotiate arms control treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev. Even those like Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama who argued in various ways for scaling back America’s commitments overseas insisted on a leadership role, if not the leadership role, in building an international system grounded in democratic and free-market principles.

There have been plenty of mistakes and unforeseen developments that have tested the United States and raised questions about the wisdom of its policies. But, on the whole, the world has benefited greatly from America’s guidance and its willingness to engage with allies at every step of the way. NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are all part of the architecture of global security and development that American presidents helped create.

President Trump is now taking a sledgehammer to that system. His argument, if that term can apply to such an inchoate position, is that America for too long has been “losing,” a situation he has set out to correct with nonnegotiable demands and gratuitous confrontations. He promises both to achieve more and to retrench. He promises to put “America first” while at the same time condemning it to a secondary role in global deliberations. It is a bizarre and contradictory policy: In seeking to liberate the United States from international obligations, and in waging war on multilateral institutions, he is not only destroying America’s reputation as a trusted ally but also ceding the future to the very same aggressive powers, especially the authoritarian regimes of China and Russia, that he purports to protect Americans from. Meanwhile, his running feuds with the free press, the courts and Congress are diminishing America’s standing as a bastion of constitutional liberties.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/opinion/trump-america-international-surrender.html

Forbes said the value of some of Trump’s Manhattan real estate holdings had declined recently.

Forbes ranked the first billionaire president as the 248th-wealthiest person in America. The year before, he was ranked 156th.

As a candidate, Trump said his net worth was more than $10bn, but Forbes pegged that figure at $4.5bn in September 2015. By Forbes’ estimates, Trump’s wealth has fallen 31% in two years.

Forbes’ list is once again topped by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with a net worth of $89bn, followed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett. 

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/17/donald-trump-forbes-rich...