Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 12, 2015 11:24 am

Nordic » Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:24 pm wrote:
seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:02 pm wrote:This is just another story about how Israel is trying to influence U. S. policy.... nothing to be outraged about



Well ok there's that, but as far as I can tell that aspect is completely lost upon the main audience. To them it's all about those Dastardly Republicans usurping their quarterback's Presidential Authority.


true and I fully expect to be chastised for saying that when someone returns from vacation

meanwhile there's this


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/1 ... er-to-Iran
It is a privilege to serve in the US military. With that privilege comes obligations. Following military law is one of them. When Lt. Col. Joni Ernst signed the seditious letter to Iran, she broke a serious law.

Lt. Col. Joni Ernst, the junior senator from Iowa, is an active duty lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard. As such, she is bound by the Iowa State Code of Military Justice. Her signing of the seditious letter to Iran is a clear and direct violation of Chapter 29B.85 of the Iowa State Code of Military Justice.

29B.85 CONTEMPT TOWARD OFFICIALS.
Any person subject to this code who uses contemptuous words against the president, the governor, or the governor of any other state, territory, commonwealth, or possession in which that person may be serving, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby conniption » Fri Mar 13, 2015 7:23 am

counterpunch
(embedded links)

March 12, 2015

Tom Cotton's Act of Political Sabotage
The Message Behind the Senate GOP’s Letter to Iran

by JIM LOBE

The story of the day on the Iran front is the publication of what its authors titled “An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

It was signed by 47 Republican senators led by freshman Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who, as reported by LobeLog, received nearly $1 million in advertising support from Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel in the closing days of last November’s campaign. The basic thrust of the letter is to warn the recipients that once President Barack Obama leaves office, any deal that he and his P5+1 partners may have reached with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear program could be revoked “with the stroke of a pen.”

There are already lots of arguments breaking out over whether the basis of the letter was an accurate statement of U.S. law.

One prominent Harvard law professor who also served as a top Justice Department official under George W. Bush, Jack Goldsmith, called at least one of the letter’s assertions about the ratification process “embarrassing.” It was especially embarrassing not only because Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School, but also because Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who earned a M.A. and PhD in international law at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver — Condoleezza Rice’s alma mater — felt compelled to correct Cotton’s understanding of Washington’s international legal obligations.

There is also a dispute over whether the letter constitutes a violation of the Logan Act, which provides:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.


For those who might claim that the letter is protected by the First Amendment, it’s interesting to note that when he was serving in the U.S. Army after law school in 2006, Cotton wrote another “open letter” published by the far-right website Power Line calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of three New York Times reporters for allegedly violating the Espionage Act by disclosing how the government was tracking terrorist financing.

I’ll leave the legal analysis to the specialists, but the political implications of this truly remarkable effort to undermine the duly elected president of the United States and sabotage an international negotiation in which our closest NATO allies are also deeply invested need to be digested and understood. This is a clarifying moment and one which Obama himself made abundantly clear when he said that “it’s somewhat ironic to see some members for Congress wanting to make common cause with the hard-liners in Iran. It’s an unusual coalition.”

For those who follow Iran policy closely, this observation comes as no surprise. The Republican senators who signed that letter are desperate to block any agreement with Iran, just as hard-liners in Iran have long opposed anything that could lead to détente with the “Great Satan.” It’s not that they want a “much better agreement” with Tehran, as Benjamin Netanyahu insisted in his address to Congress. They want no agreement.

Indeed, it was Cotton himself who made this, as I put it, “Kristol clear” in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in mid-January:

The United States must cease all appeasement, conciliation, and concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But, the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended consequence of Congressional action, it is very much an intended consequence. A feature, not a bug, so to speak.


And let’s please remember that veteran neoconservative activist Bill Kristol was up there in the same section of the House gallery where Netanyahu spoke as Bibi’s spouse Sara Netanyahu, Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, and, of course, multi-billionaire casino magnate and staunch Bibi-backer, Sheldon Adelson, who spent at least $150 million for Republican candidates in the 2012 election cycle.

Given ECI’s support for Cotton in the 2014 Senate race, it’s hard to imagine that Netanyahu and his Republican ambassador here, Ron Dermer, would not have approved of this latest initiative to sabotage prospects for an Iran deal.

Democrats on Notice

So let’s be clear: All the commentary and Israeli spin in the Times and elsewhere suggesting that Bibi’s speech had subtly signaled an openness to an agreement with Iran that settles for less than the total dismantling of its nuclear program, including its enrichment capabilities, is — to put it bluntly — bullshit.

For Netanyahu, Kristol, and Adelson, no deal is better than any deal because an agreement between Washington and Tehran could begin a process of rapprochement. And anyone — like Sen. Bob Corker (who, to his credit, did not sign the Cotton letter) or Robert Menendez — who says otherwise is either lying or deluding themselves. Cotton’s letter — and the fact that he spearheaded this effort — makes that abundantly clear.

Hopefully wavering Democrats now understand that.

Certainly, the Democratic leadership is holding up Cotton’s initiative as evidence of bad faith. Calling the letter “juvenile,” Minority Leader Harry Reid accused the Republicans of “undermining our commander in chief while empowering the Ayatollahs.”

He also rightly noted that the letter constituted a “hard slap in the face of not only United States but also our allies” — a point that, in my opinion, has not received nearly enough attention. I’m sure the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany greatly appreciated the Republican warning that their own efforts to achieve a peaceful settlement to Iran’s nuclear program have been a waste of time because the president of the United States can’t really negotiate an agreement with them on behalf of his country.

The Democrats’ number two, Sen. Dick Durbin, warned that Republicans “should think twice about whether their political stunt is worth the threat of another war in the Middle East,” while the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, was quite direct in her assessment of the letter:

I am appalled at the latest step of 47 Republicans to blow up a major effort by our country and the world powers to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the Iranian nuclear program.

This is a highly inappropriate and unprecedented incursion into the president’s prerogative to conduct foreign affairs and is not befitting this chamber. This letter only serves one purpose — to destroy an ongoing negotiation to reach a diplomatic agreement in its closing days.


All of this should result in a major reality check by Democrats and the dwindling number of relatively reasonable Republicans who remain in Congress.

Indeed, seven Republicans apparently decided against adding their names to the letter: Mississippi’s Thad Cochran, Maine’s Susan Collins, Indiana’s Dan Coats (which surprises me because he’s been very hawkish on Iran), Arizona’s Jeff Flake, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and the two Tennessee senators, Lamar Alexander and Corker.

Perhaps this will prompt Corker to reassess the problematic provisions that he and Menendez (who will now be preoccupied with defending himself against anticipated federal corruption charges) have included in the legislation they crafted to ensure congressional review of any comprehensive deal with Iran. In any event, this really brazen and exclusively partisan effort to undermine presidential authority will almost certainly solidify Democratic support for a veto, if one is needed, of any legislation designed to sabotage the negotiation.

A Rift in the Israel Lobby

This episode is also likely to create even deeper divisions within the Israel lobby, particularly between mainstream groups like the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which are finding it ever more difficult to retain their bipartisan image and who were, apparently as a result, kept in the dark about House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Bibi — about which they were clearly unhappy.

Cotton’s initiative was an exclusively Republican affair, which, like Boehner’s invite, puts these groups in a very difficult position. This marks an intensification of the tensions generated by AIPAC’s decision a year ago to suspend its lobbying for the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill after it ran into a brick wall of Democratic opposition in the Senate.

That decision drew scorn from Kristol’s ECI, Adelson’s Republican Jewish Coalition, and the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which receives substantial support from Adelson. As Kristol himself wrote at the time:

It would be nice if there were universal bipartisan support for acting now to stop a nuclear Iran. But there apparently is not. And it would be terrible if history’s judgment on the pro-Israel community was that it made a fetish of bipartisanship — and got a nuclear Iran.


As this latest maneuver shows, this coalition of right-wing groups, clearly backed by Netanyahu and Dermer and fueled by the largess of Adelson and other RJC billionaires, has essentially taken over the Republican Party’s leadership, at least as it pertains to U.S. policy in the Middle East. Even Rand Paul signed the letter.

As a result, they’ve become by far the most aggressive force in “pro-Israel” activity in Washington, leaving to AIPAC, the ADL, and the AJC the increasingly difficult task of reassuring increasingly alienated Democrats that supporting an Israel headed by the likes of Bibi Netanyahu is somehow consistent with their values and the national interest. This also means that long-faithful congressional champions of AIPAC who pride themselves on working “across the aisle” — notably Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez — have found themselves playing second or third fiddle to upstart and ultra-partisan extremists like Cotton and Ted Cruz.

As a result of changes in election laws, we don’t know which specific donors provided ECI with that $960,000 that was then passed along to a pro-Cotton ad campaign in the closing days of the election last November, but the choice of ECI — and the obviously tight relationship between ECI and the Republican Jewish Coalition — as the conduit suggests that it came from people who think very highly of Bibi Netanyahu.

We do know, however, the identity of one important source of direct financing for Cotton’s campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website, the second biggest donor to his campaign was Elliott Management, a hedge fund headed by billionaire Paul Singer. While the Club for Growth provided more than half a million dollars to Cotton’s campaign, Elliott supplied $143,100 — about 50 percent more than the Senate Conservatives Fund and four times as much as Koch Industries.

Singer sits on the RJC board and has contributed to such hard-line neoconservative organizations as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the American Enterprise Institute — all of which, consistent with Netanyahu, have denounced negotiations — let alone any deal with Iran.

Jim Lobe, the former Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service, is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy.

This article originally appeared on Lobelog.
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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 13, 2015 10:16 am

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby conniption » Tue Mar 17, 2015 4:02 am

Tom Cotton: Iran must be stopped because 'they already control Tehran'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX8y-91tfCo
Raw Story
Published on Mar 15, 2015
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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 17, 2015 8:39 am

^^^^ :P

3/16/2015

Five Annoying Things About Sen. Tom Cotton's Appearance on Face the Nation
Yesterday, fresh, new GOP savior, this year's Marco Rubio, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, he of the authorship of the Republican Senators' "Dear Mullahs" letter, appeared on CBS's Face the Nation with Bob "Sick of All Your Shit" Schieffer. As you might expect, Cotton was an annoying fucker for reasons big and small, and it's got little to do with his saying that Iran controls Tehran (which was a minor slip-up and, really, ain't that big a deal).

1. He kept putting himself before anyone else in how he spoke. Multiple times, he explained things with "I and..." For instance, "I and 46 other senators are focused on stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon." Not the significantly less awkward "46 other senators and I," oh, no, not for this Ivy League puke. He comes first, bitches.

2. He's a smug little fuck because he tried to pretend that the pissy 47 were actually teaching Iran's leaders some kind of great and grand lesson in constitutional democracy. Everything wrong with the letter on that level was revealed when Cotton said, "[W]hat we did was to send a clear message to a dictatorial regime." Motherfucker, what part of "dictatorial" don't you understand? 'Cause, see, one of the things about dictators is they don't give a shit about how great your form of government is. If they did, well, hell, they're dictators. They could just proclaim that's the new way shit will be done in the country.

3. He has no answer other than obstruction. When Schieffer asked a perfectly logical, oughta-be-easy question, about what his big plans are if no deal is made with Iran, Cotton didn't even try to address it. "Well, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said, the alternative to a bad deal is a better deal," he said. What is that "better deal"? Fuck you. That's the better deal. And we should listen to Israel's leader instead of ours? Okay, man, but you better shut your Ozark meth whore mouth if a Democrat ever says, "Well, as Sweden's Prime Minister said" when a Republican is president.

4. "The Islamic Revolution of Iran has been killing Americans, hundreds of Americans, for 35 years in Iraq and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia," Cotton explained. First of all, who the fuck is "the Islamic Revolution"? Is he talking about what happened in 1979? But that was over and done. It'd be like saying that the American Revolution is responsible for the Vietnam War.

5. Speaking of Israel, he's really, really concerned about the Jews. Even worse than killing Americans, "They also -- they killed Jews around the world from Israel, to. . . Argentina," Cotton informed us. You know who Iran has killed more of than Americans or (presumably non-American) Jews? Muslims. You know who killed a lot of Iranians? Iraq, with arms that we provided it. Mistrust all around, man, but that's complexity and not what Bibi told you to say when it was your turn to suck him off.

This is the new demi-god of the GOP? Damn, the bar is so low at this point that any rat can crawl over it.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Tom Cotton Has A New Pen Pal

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 23, 2015 9:19 am

:lol: :P :lol:

He went silent again and removed the dildo from his anus, pulling up his pants after. He took out an anti-bacterial cloth and wiped it down before carefully placing it back in the velvet and shutting the case. As he walked away, Lindsey Graham was heard telling an aide, "Find out where I can get one of those Bibi penises."


3/20/2015

Tom Cotton Pleasures Himself in Front of the Senate
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas sauntered to the microphone yesterday in the august chamber of the World's Most Deliberative Body with a long leather box in his hands. He placed the box down on the lectern and opened it to reveal a black velvet interior. Nestled into the velvet was a dildo, a veiny, thick mock dick, circumcised, about ten inches long. It was colored with a desert camouflage pattern. Without saying a word, he unbuckled his pants and pulled them down just enough in the back to reveal his ass. Still silent, some would later say disturbingly so, he took the dildo, held it up for all to see, and then, with one hand, he inserted it into his asshole. The only indication on his face that he was pushing a hard plastic phallus into his sphincter was a determined stare and a couple of sudden intakes of air.

Then he started his speech, one hand on the mic, the other manipulating the dildo, in, out, a twist every now and then. He began by congratulating Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu on his party's wins in the recent elections overseas "for myself and on behalf of 3 million Arkansans," most of whom were on the edge of their seats Tuesday, no doubt, wondering if Likud would keep its plurality in the Knesset.

Hitting his prostate with tickling probing that would soon become thudding force, Cotton continued, "Apparently, President Obama harbors such deep-seated and irrational antipathy for Prime Minister Netanyahu that he is now willing to upend this decades-long alliance. President Obama's antagonism toward Prime Minister Netanyahu is longstanding and well known." And, after bringing up an administration official who called Netanyahu "chickenshit" last year (and was roundly condemned by the White House) and talking about how much Obama just wants to destroy Israel with his love of all things Muslim (or words to that effect), Cotton pulled his pants down in front and grabbed his balls just in time to ejaculate all over the Senate floor.

For Cotton really said that comments from the Obama administration about broadening option as regards an Israeli government no longer even paying lip service to a two-state solution "could very well startle some of the smaller parties and their leaders with whom Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently in negotiations. This raises the question, of course, if the administration intends to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to assemble a coalition by suggesting a change to our longstanding policy of supporting Israel's position with the United Nations."

You got that, right? Tom Cotton, the author of the letter from 47 GOP senators telling Iran not to trust the president on a deal to give up nuclear arms, is worried that the words of the president and his aides might have negative influence on Israel. No, wait. On Netanyahu. Because you can sure as hell bet that had the Zionist Union and Isaac Herzog had won, Cotton wouldn't have said a goddamned word.

Cotton concluded with threats to the United Nations should it say mean things to Israel, too. And, without a hint of shame, his jizz on the ground in front of him, the dildo being moved slowly, delicately, even, Cotton said, "For decades, the relationship between Israel and the United States has transcended political and personal differences. Our shared interests were enough to overcome any ideology or personal disagreement, but I fear mutual respect is of little concern to this administration. The President and all those senior officials around him should carefully consider the diplomatic and security consequences of their words. This Congress certainly will."

He went silent again and removed the dildo from his anus, pulling up his pants after. He took out an anti-bacterial cloth and wiped it down before carefully placing it back in the velvet and shutting the case. As he walked away, Lindsey Graham was heard telling an aide, "Find out where I can get one of those Bibi penises."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
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