Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Current Events - February 11, 2014


Obama: 'I Can Do Whatever I Want'


By Daniel Halper

President Obama "quipped" today during a visit to Monticello with the French president, "That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want." 
Via the pool report:
Monticello
At 4:45 POTUS and president Hollande walked out from a portico and strolled in Front of your pool with Leslie Bowman, president of the Monticello Foundation. Looking at a terrace she said that Jefferson loved to admire the landscape from there. POTUS said that he'd like to take a look and seemed delighted to "break the protocol".
"That's the good thing as a President, I can do whatever I want" he quipped, walking to the terrace with his guest and Ms. Bowman. Pool now in the mansion as the leaders will come and visit Jefferson's study.
The comment came around the time the White House announced it would be delaying the Obamacare mandate for some businesses unilaterally.

Krauthammer: These ObamaCare changes are getting so endemic, “nobody even complains” anymore

By Erika Johnson
....Generally speaking, you get past the next election by changing your policies, by announcing new initiatives, but not by wantonly changing the law, lawlessly. I mean, this is stuff that you do in a banana republic. It’s as if the law is simply a blackboard on which Obama writes any number he wants, any delay he wants and any provision. It’s now reached a point where it is so endemic that nobody even notices or complains. I think if the complaints had started with the first arbitrary changes, and these are are not adjustments or transitions. These are political decisions to minimize the impact leading up to an election, and it’s changing the law in a way that you are not allowed to do. … It’s not incompetence. Willful breaking of the constitutional order — where in the Constitution is the president allowed to alter a law 27 times after it’s been passed?
And besides the utter lawlessness of the whole thing, there’s still the question of the tangible price of the White House’s non-legislative mood swings: After the Obama administration’s initial employer-mandate suspension through 2015 that they made back in July, the CBO estimated that it would add an additional $12 billion onto the total cost of ObamaCare because employers wouldn’t be paying penalties (i.e., taxes) on not insuring people, while more people would likely need to seek subsidized insurance through the exchanges because their employers wouldn’t be required to offer it yet. Won’t delaying the employer mandate again add at least ten billion or so more onto the total ObamaCare price tag? Especially if the Obama administration does decide to go through with the rumored (and, incidentally, also lawless) three-year extension of the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” fix for the cancelled plans in the individual market, doesn’t that all increase the likelihood of major “risk corridor” bailouts and/or the law’s fiscal implosion? What is going on?!

Obama Rewrites ObamaCare


Another day, another lawless exemption, once again for business.

 'ObamaCare" is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law's employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever.
ObamaCare requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, but last summer the Treasury offered a year-long delay until 2015 despite having no statutory authorization. Like the individual mandate, the employer decree is central to ObamaCare's claim of universal coverage, but employers said the new labor costs—and the onerous reporting and tax-enforcement rules—would damage job creation and the economy.
Liberals insisted that such arguments were false if not beneath contempt, but then all of a sudden the White House implicitly endorsed the other side. Now the new delay arrives amid a furious debate about jobs after a damning Congressional Budget Office report last week, only this time with liberals celebrating ObamaCare's supposed benefits to the job market.
Well, which is it? Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker's paradise, in which case by the White House's own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.
...Changing an unambiguous statutory mandate requires the approval of Congress, but then this President has often decided the law is whatever he says it is. His Administration's cavalier notions about law enforcement are especially notable here for their bias for corporations over people. The White House has refused to suspend the individual insurance mandate, despite the harm caused to millions who are losing their previous coverage.
Liberals say the law isn't harming jobs or economic growth, but everything this White House does screams the opposite.


Report: ‘Avalanche’ of Regulations Still to Come Under Obamacare

28 paperwork rules will cost $1.4 billion a year to comply with

 By Elizabeth Harrington
The Obama administration has yet to finalize 28 additional regulations under Obamacare that could lead to an “avalanche” of regulatory burden on the economy, according to an analysis by the American Action Forum.
A report released Monday by Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at American Action Forum, details the billions in cost and millions in paperwork hours that will result from the pending regulations, including the individual mandate, which has yet to be finalized.
“In total, these 28 paperwork burdens total more than 45.7 million burden hours,” the report said. “For perspective, it would take more than 22,800 employees working full-time to complete the new paperwork (assuming 2,000 employee hours annually).”
“Using an average wage rate, these regulations will cost $1.4 billion annually,” it said.
The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has not completed final regulations for the individual mandate. The mandate is set to go into effect this year and carries a penalty—or “individual responsibility payment,” according to Healthcare.gov—at the end of the tax year for those who do not purchase “minimum essential coverage,” as dictated by Obamacare.
The American Action Forum report explains that once finalized, the individual mandate will take millions of hours in paperwork to comply.

How Obamacare’s work incentives could impact future Social Security payouts

By Joanne Butler

A significant thing the CBO left out in its report is the impact on future Social Security benefits due to continued high unemployment and people choosing to work less to take advantage of Obamacare’s subsidies.
TheDC’s Mickey Kaus has described Social Security benefits as ‘work-tested’ (not means-tested). Thus, the amount of Social Security benefits a worker receives at retirement are directly tied to what the person earned in their lifetime.
Let’s say Sam (age 40, high school grad) was earning $50,000 a year, but lost his job when his company downsized, and was unemployed for the entire 2012 year. In Social Security terms, it means his earnings for 2012 are zero. In 2013 Sam gets a job, but it pays $40,000.
Looking ahead, Sam manages to hang on to that $40k job for 10 years, but his pay increases are minimal, perhaps rising to $45k. Then he’s laid off again (and posting zero earnings to Social Security), but now he’s in his fifties, and finds it very hard to get another job. When he does, it’s at a big-box store, and his pay shrinks further. He hangs on until age 62, when he applies for early retirement at Social Security – and is shocked at the small amount he’ll receive.
A Social Security employee prints out Sam’s earnings statement and explains how his earnings decreased after age 40, with significant periods of zero earnings.
Policy wonks (in their comfy ergonomic chairs) might say that Sam should just work until he’s 65 — or even 70. But his knees and back are killing him, and he just can’t keep up with his twentysomething co-workers. It’s the last chapter in a story of how long-term unemployment can have an impact that goes on for decades.
Now let’s look at Eric and Tiffany (married, late 30s). They both have stable jobs, but they’re not making a lot of money. They also have children. Tiffany pores over the Obamacare information and decides that if she cuts back on her hours, they’ll qualify for a subsidy – and she continues to do this for the rest of her working life.
At age 62, Tiffany applies for Social Security early retirement, and is shocked to learn that her earnings are so low, that it would be better to apply for a spouse’s benefit (based on her husband’s earnings). But at age 62, that’s equal to about one-third of what her husband would receive in benefits. If she waits until age 67 (her full retirement age), it would be half of her husband’s benefit.

The Social Security employee tactfully doesn’t tell Tiffany that if she had worked more hours over her lifetime, she could have retired on her own earnings record and received a larger benefit. But that would have meant giving up her Obamacare subsidy – a tradeoff that Tiffany didn’t realize when she made her decision over thirty years ago.
It’s also a trade-off that Democrats don’t mention as they natter on about how Obamacare gives people the freedom to work less.
My suggestion to Speaker Boehner: ask CBO to do a report on how long-term unemployment and Obamacare’s incentives to work less will affect future Social Security benefits. He should do it because the American people deserve to have information about how these things will impact their retirement years.

Confirmed: Boehner's Debt Limit Plan Raises Spending

By Conn Carroll
House Republicans used to be against amnesty and for spending cuts. But now on both issues, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has entirely capitulated to liberal Democrats.
Yesterday, House Republican leaders released the official text of Boehner's latest proposal to raise the debt limit. And it was just as terrible as conservatives thought it would be.
Boehner's plan would increase spending by over $8 billion over the next 10 years. Most of that spending would go towards restoring the military pension cuts Boehner agreed to earlier this year. The rest would go to higher Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors.
Not a cent of any of this new spending would be paid for until 2023 when Congress would supposedly extend sequester cuts to some mandatory budget programs for another year.
Just as Boehner wants conservatives to believe that if they give illegal immigrants amnesty now, the federal government will begin enforcing immigration law tomorrow, he also wants conservatives to believe that if we raise federal spending now, we can pay for it by cutting spending ten years from now.
No honest person with half a brain believes either scenario will ever play out as advertised. 

Endgame: House GOP Abandons Debt Ceiling Demands, Will Seek 'Clean' Hike

By Guy Benson
House Republicans' policy demands in exchange for hiking the debt ceiling have been a moving target in recent weeks. At first, they were rumored to be angling to get the job-creating Keystone pipeline project approved. Next, they were supposedly going to force votes on eliminating the insurer 'bailout' provisions of Obamacare. Finally, it looked like they'd settled on a plan to reinstate cost of living adjustment cuts to military pensions (those reductions were part of December's Ryan/Murray deal), and perhaps include the annual Medicare "doc fix." Most conservatives were on board with all three ideas in theory, but strong disagreements bubbled to the surface over whether to tie any of them to the debt ceiling. Conn has made the case the the third iteration of the GOP's strategy would actually increase spending -- which, even for a good cause, rankled fiscal hawks. When these sorts of quotes started hitting newspapers last week, the possibility of a "clean" debt ceiling hike (the White House's long-standing position) became significantly more likely:
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told the Washington Post Wednesday, “There is a pragmatism here…You’ve got to know when to hold them and when to fold them. My assessment is that most of us don’t think it’s the time to fight.” Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, suggested that the best route for the party is to let Democrats bear the brunt of the responsibility in extending borrowing authority, and also the brunt of the blame.
Those comments come from the right flank of the party, not the squishy centrists. Perhaps chastened by the political fallout of last fall's government shutdown, the GOP seems to have moved away from giving Democrats oxygen to take the spotlight off of, say, the sputtering mess that is Obamacare. The new sentiment: "Let the Dems pass this thing, vote 'no' en masse (for the most part), then go back to hammering them on the 2014 issues that benefit us."

Harry Reid Looks to Change Senate Rules to Ram Through Obama Nominees

By Robert Wilde
A consortium of liberal groups and labor unions are pressuring Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to change Senate rules on filibustering beyond the nuclear option. They argue the additional changes will speed up the confirmation of President Obama's judicial nominees.
The alliance known as Fix the Senate Now includes the prominent liberal advocacy groups Communications Workers of America, Common Cause, Sierra Club, and the Alliance for Justice. The coalition put forth a statement saying, "We strongly urge Majority Leader Reid and Chairman [Patrick] Leahy [D-Vt.] to consider reforms to floor and committee rules that will hasten the confirmation of President Obama’s talented and qualified set of nominees.”
Despite his frustration with Republican hold ups, Reid is hesitant about initiating another set of rules changes after the uproar last year when he broke with four decades of senate tradition and set into motion the nuclear option, which eliminated filibustering for most presidential nominees. Nevertheless, the Senate Majority Leader knows that he will need the help of these outside groups in November’s midterm elections. Already, Reid is feeling the heat from labor unions about his recent failure to advance a three-month extension of unemployment benefits.
Moreover, the unions and progressive organizations know that they have to strike while the iron is hot. If Reid and the Democrats fail to retain their control of the Senate in November, Obama will get very few of his judicial nominees confirmed next year. 
...The rule changes aim to cut the Republicans out of the deliberative process and may undermine the checks and balances that is the foundation of American governance. 

Poof: A Scandal Disappears

 By Mona Charen
Remember the IRS scandal? It's gone. Poof. So flaccid has press interest in the story become that President Barack Obama made bold in an interview with Fox News to say there was not a "smidgen of corruption" in the IRS's conduct.
It requires terrific confidence in the passivity of the press to float the discredited "Cincinnati did it all" dodge since we know that IRS employees in that office were taking direction from Washington. We further know that IRS offices in California, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C. and other places have been identified as singling out groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names.
Obama's confidence in the press is not misplaced. Despite juicy opportunities to delve into the story of government abusing its power, reporters have let the matter drop. 
...To review: When the behavior of the IRS was first revealed in May of 2013, the press furor was considerable. The president was alarmed enough about the damaging story to hold a press conference. "If ... IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on," he said, " ... then that is outrageous, and there is no place for it." He continued, "I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this."
Or not. Now it's just "bone-headed decisions out of a local office." This is tamely accepted. If it concerned just a local office, why did Obama fire the director of the IRS? Why did Lois Lerner plead the Fifth and resign? (Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee erred by not granting her use immunity and intensely questioning her about what really happened. They could still do it.)
It was also a non-scandal when the Justice Department appointed an Obama donor to investigate the IRS. Nor did the press follow up on uncontested accounts of IRS employees leaking confidential taxpayer information -- which is a felony. 


The Tyranny of Winter

The Left is at war with economic reality. 

By Kevin D Williamson
The Left is at war with economic reality. The intellectual poverty of the Left — which is also a moral poverty — is evident in the fact that its leaders are much more intensely interested in incomes at the top than those at the bottom. Examples are not difficult to come by: Senator Elizabeth Warren is visibly agitated by Jamie Dimon’s recent raise, the AFL-CIO maintains a website dedicated to executive compensation, Barack Obama avows that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money,” et cetera ad nauseam. The entire rhetoric of inequality is simply an excuse to rage about incomes at the top, a generation’s worth of progressive shenanigans having failed to do much about those at the bottom.
It is the case that incomes at the top have gone up while those in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined in real terms. It is not the case that incomes at the top have gone up because those in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined, nor is it the case that incomes in the middle and at the bottom have stagnated or declined because incomes at the top have gone up. There is a relationship between the two phenomena, but it is not the relationship that progressives imagine it to be.
...Incomes are up at the top, stagnating or down elsewhere — but there is no “because” between those two facts. The cause is what some people call “globalization,” but is rightly called “progress,” which is of course what so-called progressives oppose. Nearly 1 billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty in 20 years. We have not abolished war and disease, but we have made great — what’s that word? — progress. (A sobering fact for foreign-policy thinkers: There are seven ongoing conflicts in the world in which more than 1,000 people a year are killed. One — the second-deadliest — involves Mexican drug cartels, the other six involve Islam.) That progress has been made possible by human cooperation on an unprecedented scale in the form of the integration of worldwide markets and worldwide supply chains. Bigger markets mean bigger opportunities, which means bigger rewards, not just for executives like Mr. Dimon but for line workers at successful firms. Integrated markets mean more competition, too, which puts pressure on wages in rich countries, especially on the wages of less-skilled labor. Thus the divergence in wages.
The Starbucks-vandalism faction of the Left likes to rail against globalization, but to do so is like railing against the fact that it is cold in the winter. Winter is an important part of the natural cycle, but it can be unpleasant — even deadly. It is something that must be prepared for, and instead of Ned Stark to warn us that winter is coming, we had Lyndon Johnson, a vicious and corrupt man who presided over the building of a vicious and corrupt welfare state. There are things we should have done to prepare for the future that is now our present, reforming the education system and our labor practices, among other things...But we did not do those things. We can rail against the tyranny of winter, or we can start gathering firewood.

The Highway to Serfdom


By Thomas Sowell
It is amazing how many people still fall for the argument that if life is unfair the answer is to turn more money and power over to politicians. Since life has always been unfair for thousands of years and in countries around the world, where does that lead us?
 ...With his decision declaring Obamacare constitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts turned what F. A. Hayek called “the road to serfdom” into a super highway. The government all but owns us now and can order us to do pretty much whatever it wants us to do.

Judicial Watch Seeks End to IRS Anti-Tea Party Reg

By Tom Fitton
...And this is the message Judicial Watch brought to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a letter requesting that the agency direct the Treasury Department to withdraw a new IRS proposal to redefine “political activity” in a way that could place a “substantial … record-keeping and collection of information burden” on more than 100,000 nonprofit organizations.
Here’s what the Obama administration attempted to do: Under a new Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Guidance for Tax-Exempt Social Welfare Organizations on Candidate-Related Political Activities (NPRM), the Obama IRS seeks, without the approval of Congress, to replace the decades-old definition – “participation of intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office” – with a new term – “candidate-related political activity.”
It may seem to some that this slight change in phraseology would yield insignificant results, but this is far from the truth.
As noted by The Daily Caller, “Communications and activities including voter registration drives and publishing voter guides, among others, are now classified as political activity. Grants and donations that 501(c)(4)’s give to other nonprofits are now subject to new record-keeping and increased scrutiny to prevent the money’s use for broadly-defined political activity.”
And then there’s the paperwork.
...And while this could impact organizations on both sides of the political aisle, according to some members of Congress, given the Tea Party hate-fest ongoing at the IRS, it is clear the Obama administration intended for this policy to hamper conservative organizations disproportionately.
...In short, the Obama IRS wants to kill the conservative movement with paperwork and regulation. These new IRS rules violate the law and could, through First Amendment-killing paperwork, freeze millions of patriotic volunteers – from both sides of the political divide.  President Obama and his administration ought to start obeying the law rather than rewriting it.


By Victor Davis Hanson
If there are executive orders overriding federal immigration law to extend amnesty to foreign nationals, without legal residence, and to continue their educations, there are also de facto all sorts of un-Dream Acts that simply allow anyone wishing to enter the United States without much audit. In other words, one of the strangest things about illegal immigration is that a nation that is monitored, taped, videoed, and bugged, that is struggling now with the AP, IRS, and NSA scandals whose common theme is excessive government intrusions in our private lives, knows absolutely nothing about those who arrive illegally into the U.S.
...The point of this disturbing story is simply this: We are told the victims are those who enter the United States illegally and without our language and customs. I grant that they may be victims sometimes, but the surrounding community is even more victimized by extending unsustainable social and state services to those who are often not cooperative and honest with them, often at the expense of citizens who are struggling in recessionary times to pay for it and in frustration will not use the services themselves that they need and must pay for.  At some point, Americans must grasp that each time a foreign national chooses not to apply for legal entrance but simply breaks federal law and crosses the border, that is the beginning, not the end, of an entire chain of events that so often do not end well for anyone.

Is It Over, and We Just Don’t Know It?

Have we lost our Founders' government?


By Tom Blumer
...There’s little doubt that the United States of America has reached a point where, relatively unhampered by legislative or judicial barriers, its president and his bureaucracy exceed the limits of the nation’s Constitution “as a matter of course.” They in turn are quietly but effectively under the control of our “independent” central bank.
Decades from now, it’s possible that historians will look back and conclude that the American experiment, which began with its declaration of independence from and defeat of Great Britain, ended sometime between 1999 and 2014. As with Rome, the pivotal event isn’t obvious, and the list which follows isn’t all-inclusive.
...I certainly hope I’m wrong, and I’m not suggesting that we hang our heads and give up. But it sure feels like we are already in the grip of post-constitutional despotism. The best counter-argument right now is that some in Congress have finally determined that passing laws or even discussing legislation while a lawless president is in office is a pointless exercise. Will enough of them figure that out in time to begin taking the country back?
 
It Sucks to Be an American

Welcome to the New Normal, comrades.

 By Stephen Green
...Washington, I might add, continues to do just fine. The politicians vote for their own perks and pay raises. The lobbyists get their fat paychecks for getting the politicians to write the loopholes benefitting America’s “connected class” of big banks, financiers, particular tech companies, Hollywood, and of course the legal profession.
For them, it’s pretty good to be an American — if we can still really call them that.

Against Reinterpreting the Constitution

Just because we ignore its meaning doesn’t mean it changes. 

By Charles W Cooke
...Last time around, I noted that the Constitution is not a mere suggestion booklet but instead a charter “of ultimate law — the provisions of which were fought over line by line,” and that, in consequence, it is incumbent upon us to hew closely to the text as it was written and, later, formally amended. I contended, too, that the Progressive amendments of the early 20th century dramatically changed the document’s scope and cannot therefore be used to link modern action with original intent. And I finished by arguing that one should be wary of anybody who approaches settled law by disparaging “abstract theories” and by referring vaguely to the “prescient mindset” of those who wrote the rules, lest they slide into living constitutionalism. “Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” Whether they mean to or not, my submission was that Wehner and Gerson’s line of argument will lead us inexorably to that very state, subordinating timeless meaning in favor of contemporary convenience and driving a fatal hole through the originalists’ cause.
...During a recent examination of alleged executive overreach, Justice Scalia asked the government’s counsel whether his position was that “if you ignore the Constitution often enough, its meaning changes.” The suggestion is, of course, preposterous.

‘Down With USA’: Here’s How Iran Is Celebrating the Anniversary of Its Revolution

 By Sharona Schwartz
Iranians took to the streets Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, holding anti-American signs, burning U.S., British and Israeli flags and chanting “down with the U.S.” and “death to Israel.”
The marches came as President Hassan Rouhani vowed that his country would “forever” pursue what he described as peaceful nuclear research.
The Associated Press reported that hundreds of thousands of Iranians gathered in the capital of Tehran to mark the occasion and that similar rallies were seen in other Iranian cities.
Those demonstrating held up banners including the slogan, “We are ready for the great battle,” which Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency described as a reference to threats of military action against Iran. Other signs seen in news photos proclaimed, “Hey, America!! Be angry with us and die due to your anger! Down with U.S.A.” and “We stand up to the end.”
“We don’t trust America. All they want is to plunder our wealth,” a 20-year-old Islamic militia member told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
The anti-American sentiments were voiced despite moves by the Obama administration to ease international sanctions on Iran and the reaching of an agreement in November over the country’s controversial nuclear program.
In his speech marking the 35th anniversary of the revolution, Rouhani – who is widely described in the media as a “moderate” – called the economic sanctions “brutal, illegal and wrong.” Reuters reported that Rouhani said countries in the region had nothing to fear from Iran.
“For the past 200 years, Iran hasn’t attacked or occupied another country, but the nation stands together to defend Iran in case of any threats,” Rouhani said.
Iran appears to have made a point of escalating a belligerent posture in recent days. On Monday, Iran test-fired two new domestically produced missiles.
Over the weekend, Iran announced that its warships in the Atlantic Ocean would for the first time travel close to U.S. maritime borders. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic’s state television broadcast a documentary simulating attacks on an American aircraft carrier and Israeli cities.
On Friday, Iran’s parliament speaker called Israel a “cancer” of the region and accused the U.S. of hindering so-called Arab Spring revolutions.


Carney on Report of Iran Moving Warships Toward U.S.: Is That Just a Fox Thing?

By Bridget Johnson

The White House brushed off Iran’s claim that it’s moving warships toward America’s maritime borders.
“The Iranian Army’s naval fleets have already started their voyage towards the Atlantic Ocean via the waters near South Africa,” Commander of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad announced on Saturday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.
“Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message,” Haddad added.
The news agency added that Iran’s has been vowing to send “a flotilla into the Atlantic” since 2011, but this claim takes on an added dimension with the concessions just granted to Tehran by the U.S. in nuclear talks.
The Fars report said the recent moves are a tit-for-tat, getting back at Washington for its beefed-up presence in the Persian Gulf.
“There was an Iranian announcement that they are moving ships close to the United States, and we have no evidence that Iran is, in fact, sending ships close to the U.S. border,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today.
On the reports that Iran has also been successfully conducting missile tests, Carney said “we have been clear that even as we work with the P5+1 to test the hypothesis that Iran is ready to meet its obligations to the international community with regards to its nuclear program, that we are at odds with Iran on a number of issues.”
When pressed again on whether he was disputing the warships report, Carney quipped, “Is Fox reporting that they’re moving warships closer to the U.S.?”
He was reminded that Iran made the claim, and it was reported by several wire services.
“Again, I don’t have a specific answer to that report. I’m sure we can get it to you, and I’m sure State has it. What I can tell you is that we continue to have major disagreements with Iran, and we press very hard, whether it’s their support for international terrorism, for Hezbollah, or whether it’s enforcement of existing sanctions,” Carney said. “We are not letting up on Iran, on a wide variety of issues where we are profoundly in disagreement with them and have rallied an international consensus around that fact.”
The State Department did not comment on the report at today’s press briefing.

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