He’s way better at golf than foreign policy, and he sucks at golf
Everything is awesome!
The normally-leftist Associated Press explains how awesome everything is:
Iran will be allowed to use its own inspectors to investigate a site it has been accused of using to develop nuclear arms, operating under a secret agreement with the U.N. agency that normally carries out such work, according to a document seen by The Associated Press.
[…]The agreement in question diverges from normal procedures by allowing Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment in the search for evidence of activities it has consistently denied — trying to develop nuclear weapons.
[…]The Parchin agreement was worked out between the IAEA and Iran. The United States and the five other world powers were not party to it but were briefed by the IAEA and endorsed it as part of the larger package.
Everything is fine, stop worrying. Obama and Kerry and Clinton think that there is nothing wrong with this side deal. We can trust Iran to inspect themselves, it’s not like they’ve cheated on any agreements in the past. Oh wait, they have.
Secretary of State John Kerry has said he hasn’t read the side deal, though his negotiating deputy Wendy Sherman told MSNBC that she “saw the pieces of paper” but couldn’t keep them. IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has told Members of the U.S. Congress that he’s bound by secrecy and can’t show them the side deals.
That secrecy should be unacceptable to Congress—all the more so after the AP dispatch. The news service says it has seen a document labelled “separate arrangement II.” The document says Iran will provide the IAEA with photos and locations that the IAEA says are linked to Iran’s weapons work, “taking into account military concerns.”
In other words, the country that lied for years about its nuclear weapons program will now be trusted to come clean about those lies. And trusted to such a degree that it can limit its self-inspections so they don’t raise “military concerns” in Iran.
Foreign policy expert Charles Krauthammer is not pleased:
But let’s just trust Iran again, because Obama needs a legacy. What are you, a racist? You better shut up before the IRS audits you.
If you’re the pro-life governor of one of the states that has been at the forefront of stopping the abortion industry, how do you counter a rally to support the Planned Parenthood abortion business at a time when it’s been exposed selling aborted babies and their body parts? If you’re Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, you screen the shocking expose’ videos outside the governor’s mansion for the public to see.
Jindal’s office said Tuesday that the pro-life Republican presidential candidate will set up a huge screen outside the governor’s mansion and run each of the seven shocking expose videos of Planned Parenthood on a loop. The move will generate further publicity for the videos that the mainstream media have either defended or virtually ignored.
Assuming the shorter versions of each of the videos is shown, that’s approximately an hour of footage Jindal’s office will show the public over and over again. If Jindal shows the full unedited versions of the videos, that would consume even more time.
ns into Planned Parenthood in light of undercover video footage from an anti-abortion-rights group that scrutinizes the health provider’s fetal tissue donation program.
The group says the footage shows Planned Parenthood illegally profiting from fetal tissue donations, among other claims.
Make no mistake, the showing of these videos is being done specifically to target the pro-Planned Parenthood demonstrators. Most people who are still defending Planned Parenthood have not watched the videos. In that sense, they are similar to Western journalists who defended Stalin because they refused to learn the truth about what Stalin was doing, for example, by starving millions of Ukrainians to death. But Governor Jindal has a cure for that: show them the videos. Confront them with exactly what it is they support. They are lining up to be impacted, and he is not going to miss his chance to attack the ringleaders of the pro-abortion movement.
UPDATE: Governor Jindal has posted a video about the Planned Parenthood protest:
They ran away from the videos to a far corner of the lawn, where they wouldn’t have to watch them. Ran away from the truth.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley
Meanwhile, other Republican governors have also been busy. Another Indian-American Republican governor, Nikki Haley, has launched an investigation against Planned Parenthood in South Carolina:
Following shocking videos showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business selling aborted babies and their body parts, pro-life South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has launched an official investigation. The state is one of 12 that have officially launched investigations while other states have de-funded Planned Parenthood.
[…]Haley asked the South Carolina health department to look into the practices at the state’s abortion clinics, according to a local news report, and complained that the state health department has been lax about inspecting abortion clinics…
Florida officials are today reiterating to the Planned Parenthood abortion business that it may not do 2nd-trimester abortions on unborn babies in the state in violation of state laws. Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in Florida are not happy they were caught illegally doing 2nd-trimester abortions, so they sued the state to keep doing them and the state is once again saying no.
The state of Florida launched an investigation into the Planned Parenthood abortion business aftermultiple expose’ videos have caught the abortion business selling the body parts of aborted babies. State health department inspectors found Planned Parenthood illegally doing the kind of later abortions that allow Planned Parenthood to gather the body parts of aborted babies for sale.
Florida became the 11th state to launch a investigation into Planned Parenthood after the abortion company was exposed selling the body parts of aborted babies. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who is pro-life, ordered an investigation of 16 statewide Planned Parenthood offices.
Scott asked the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) to immediately begin investigating the 16 Planned Parenthood offices in Florida that perform abortion procedures to ensure they are in full compliance with the law.
They found three have performed procedures outside the scope of their licenses and one has not kept proper records on disposing fetal remains.
There are lots of protests against Planned Parenthood going on nationwide, this Saturday. You might want to consider attending one, if what Planned Parenthood is doing upsets you.
Peter J. Williams is the Warden (CEO) of Tyndale House and a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He received his MA, MPhil and PhD, in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. After his PhD, he was on staff in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University (1997–1998), and thereafter taught Hebrew and Old Testament there as Affiliated Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic and as Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge (1998–2003). From 2003 to 2007 he was on the faculty of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he became a Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. In July 2007 he became the youngest Warden in the history of Tyndale House. He also retains his position as an honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen.
Summary of the lecture:
What if the stories about Jesus are legendary?
were the gospels transmitted accurately?
were the gospels written in the same place as where the events happened?
do the gospel authors know the customs and locations where the events happened?
do the gospels use the right names for the time and place where the events took place?
do the gospels disambiguate people’s names depending on how common those names were?
how do the New Testament gospels compare to the later gnostic gospels?
how do the gospels refer to the main character? How non-Biblical sources refer to Jesus?
how does Jesus refer to himself in the gospels? do the later Christians refer to him that way?
how does Jesus teach? do later Christians teach the same way?
why didn’t Jesus say anything about early conflicts in the church (the Gentiles, church services)?
did the writers of the gospels know the places where the events took place?
how many places are named in the gospels? how about in the later gnostic gospels?
are the botanical details mentioned in the gospels accurate? how about the later gnostic gospels?
And here are the questions from the audience:
how what about the discrepancies in the resurrection narratives that Bart Ehrman is obsessed with?
what do you think of the new 2011 NIV translation (Peter is on the ESV translation committee)?
how did untrained, ordinary men produce complex, sophisticated documents like the gospels?
is oral tradition a strong enough bridge between the events and the writers who interviewed the eyewitnesses?
what does the name John mean?
why did the gospel writers wait so long before writing their gospels?
do you think that Matthew and Luke used a hypothetical source which historians call “Q”?
which gospel do critical historians trust the least and why?
I really enjoyed watching this lecture. He’s getting some of this material from Richard Bauckham’s awesome book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, so if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get an idea of what’s in it. Peter Williams is a lot of fun to listen to – an excellent speaker.
WINTERY KNIGHT 