From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Great News! Obama’s Drawing a New ‘Red Line’ With Iran! We Can Relax Now!
Fascinatingly, President Obama walks around completely unaware of how little credibility he has left – with skeptics in both parties, with the American public, with our allies, or with our enemies. His latest assurance on his rapidly-forming deal with the Iranian regime:
Iran must commit to a verifiable freeze of at least 10 years on sensitive nuclear activity for a landmark atomic deal to be reached, but the odds are still against sealing a final agreement, U.S. President Barack Obama told Reuters on Monday.
A ten year freeze… and then what? There was once a time when Obama said Iran could “never” have a nuclear weapon. Now we’re leaving the door opened a crack.
Obama’s comment about the time frame for a freeze represents one of the U.S. government’s strongest signals yet of its red line for a successful deal.
Ah. It’s another “red line.” How reassuring.
“If, in fact, Iran is willing to agree to double-digit years of keeping their program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist … if we’ve got that, and we’ve got a way of verifying that, there’s no other steps we can take that would give us such assurance that they don’t have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Trust but verify, eh? Except we know – and President Obama himself has announced in the past – that the Iranians cheat, lie, and hide their nuclear program! They built a secret uranium enrichment plant deep inside a mountain. Why are we so confident they won’t try the same trick, or a different trick, again?
The U.S. goal is to make sure “there’s at least a year between us seeing them try to get a nuclear weapon and them actually being able to obtain one,” Obama said in the interview, carefully timed by the White House a day ahead of Netanyahu’s polarizing speech to Congress.
Think about it – breakout capacity within one year, and that’s if they don’t cheat!
The new explanation is that this is an “alarm system”… except this is a fire alarm system that the fire can choose to disable any time they want.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), author of legislation that would trigger new sanctions on Iran if negotiations fail to reach agreement on its nuclear program, harshly criticized the Obama administration’s current position in the talks on Monday night as “simply not good enough.”
“It is not a good deal if it leaves Iran as a threshold nuclear state, or if Iran decides to kick out inspectors,” Menendez told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. “It’s not a good deal if Iran proceeds on a covert path and we have no more than a year to respond. It’s not enough time for us to do anything other than exercise a military option.”
“Here we are, near the end of negotiations, and the goal posts have moved from dismantlement to reconfiguration, Menendez said. “From a peaceful nuclear program to just enough to detect break out. From no right-to-enrichment to getting an alarm system.”
Menendez also pointed out that United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron came to Capitol Hill to “lobby Congress against Iran sanctions,” and raised the good point: If it’s fine for one allied prime minister to come to Congress and speak his mind on a mutual interest, why is it not okay for Israel’s Benyamin Netanyahu to do the same?
You may recall the Constitution giving the U.S. Senate the power to ratify treaties. The Obama administration insists, in defiance of our own eyes, that any deal with Iran is “only an agreement, not a formal treaty.”
The deal is bad, secret, and unconstitutional all at the same time. Quite a feat.