May 8, 2018

Trump Frees Iran to Pursue Nuclear Weapons

Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua via ZUMA

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President Trump has officially announced that he will withdraw from the Iran deal. For something that everyone’s known for weeks or months, he sure got a lot of media mileage out of it. But I wonder if this is really true:

A second person familiar with negotiations to keep the 2015 accord in place said the talks collapsed over Mr. Trump’s insistence that sharp limits be kept on Iran’s nuclear fuel production after 2030. The deal currently lifts those limits.

It sure doesn’t sound true. I can’t believe that Trump cares a whit about what happens in 2030, and I doubt that anyone else does either. But I suppose it’s a handy excuse.

Anyway, I guess we’re now back to the North Korea strategy: keep ratcheting up sanctions in hopes that their economy will collapse before they successfully build a nuclear bomb. That worked great! I’m sure it will work great with Iran too.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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