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Iran

Diplomacy is failing. We need to bomb Iran before they can build nukes!

Health Care

America has the best health care in the world!

“He is pretending to be a spy. It’s part of a comedy show,” I answered.

“Tell the truth!” Mr. Rosewater shouted. “What is so funny about sitting in a coffee shop with a kaffiyeh and sunglasses?”

“It’s just a joke. Nothing serious. It’s stupid.” I was getting worried. “I hope you are not suggesting that he is a real spy.”

“Can
you tell us why an American journalist pretending to be a spy has
chosen you to interview?” asked the man with the creases. “We know from
your contacts and background that you told them who to interview for
their program.” The other Iranians interviewed in Jason’s report—a
former vice president and a former foreign minister—had been arrested a
week before me as part of the IRGC’s sweeping crackdown. “It’s just
comedy,” I said, feeling weak.

"Obama's
attitude was, this is an elderly gentleman in a country where this kind
of greeting is customary. It does not seem extraordinary to show this
kind of gesture to him. The Fox news poll said that 67% of
Americans thought it was a good thing for him to have done. When the
president heard that some people had complained, I'd characterize his
reaction as: The notion that the United States is somehow humbling or
humiliating itself by showing respect for a local custom, when it is
transparently the most powerful country in the world, leaves me
speechless."

"We
closed some of the gap but not all of the gap. The Chinese do not wish,
three weeks out of Copenhagen, to be seen working hand in glove with
the US to impose a "G2" solution to the G77. They have their own
reservations about how far things should go. But they also don't want
to be seen as the stumbling block or odd man out.

"We kept making the argument, We're the #1 and 2 emitters, so we
have a special responsibility, a special role. We got some movement.
They are taking substantial mitigating steps, which they didn't
enumerate but we know what they are. As best we can tell, they are
prepared to submit those as their "target" in Copenhagen, and of course
we want them to be "commitments" rather than targets. There is still a
stumbling block on the issue of accountability, which is always a hard
one with the Chinese. We'd like to have an independent peer review of
whether doing what you said you would do.  There are lots of different
ways to do that... But we haven't closed that part of the gap yet.

"Prime
Minister Rasmussen [Lars Loekke Rasmussen of Denmark, with obvious
involvement in the Copenhagen talks] has been saying that while a
binding legal treaty by this December is not possible, he has been
calling for a politically-binding accord at Copenhagen. Then there
would be the task of turning it into a treaty over the next year. The
Chinese have bought into that general framework. And we made a lot of
agreements with them on clean energy [details here]. So on climate change, there were no miracles, but we moved them out out of the position of being
blockers to being part of the game.

A leader in the Iranian political opposition leader who had been a confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Tuesday became the first senior cleric to denounce the takeover of the United States Embassy in 1979.

“The occupation of the embassy, which was approved by Ayatollah Khomeini and I and the majority of people, caused very negative consequences in the United States, and it showed that it was not a right thing to do,” the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Montazeri, wrote in a statement posted on his Web site.