Wednesday roundup

Eli Lake at Bloomberg on why Trump should not pull out of the JCPOA: according to Lake, his strategy of getting it fixed is working.

. . . to withdraw from the Iran deal now would be a mistake. The U.S. and its allies now enjoy the best of both worlds: Iranian compliance without the international investment Tehran had counted on.

European banks and businesses are wary of the Iranian market at this point. U.S. officials tell me Europe is asking for further clarifications from the Treasury Department on what kinds of investment will not violate existing sanctions. Deals that appeared to be done at the close of the Barack Obama administration -- like Boeing's multi-billion dollar aircraft sale to Iran -- are now in doubt. Iran's rial has been in free fall, losing a quarter of its value in the last six months. 

There are many reasons why Iran's economy isn't attractive in 2018 to significant foreign investment. Its secret police keep arresting dual nationals on false charges; its proxies and revolutionary guard keep waging war in Syria and Yemen; and its banks won't stop laundering money for the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. Add to this a new Saudi-led strategy to pressure businesses not to enter the Iranian market.

While discarding the Iran deal now would be a mistake, Trump does deserve credit for throwing its future into doubt. We all know the drill. Every few months Trump is required to certify Iran's compliance with the agreement. And every few months, he has hemmed, hawed and threatened not to do it. When Trump finally introduced his Iran strategy in the fall, he gave an ultimatum: Unless Congress and European allies commit to fixing the deal's flaws he will withdraw. This is why the May 12 deadline looms so large.

But in order for the current strategy to work in the long term, we need to really leverage this current "safe harbor" period:

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and one of the architects of the strategy to pressure allies to fix the Iran deal, said there are technical ways Trump can claim to be withdrawing from the Iran deal without implementing the sanctions right away. He called this a period of "safe harbor," where there would be six months for any banks and corporations to unwind their business in Iran. "You then prolong uncertainty and give more time for the Europeans to agree to a real fix to the deal," he said.

Perhaps this sort of escalation will be necessary at a future date. For now it is not. Some critics might say that Trump has to follow through on his promise or he will lose credibility. But he can just as easily delay his decision, point to the European negotiations, and follow through on his own promised plan to ramp up non-nuclear sanctions on Iranian entities.

What's more, he can do all this and claim success, if not victory, for his strategy to fix the nuclear bargain he campaigned against.  

Streiff at Red State on why Justice Stevens's NYT call for repeal of the Second Amendment is so badly flawed, and why the general post-American public must have that convincingly explained. The first thing Streiff dismantles is the since-the-Framers'-concern-was-the-threat-of-a-national-standing-army-to-the-individual-states-the-amendment-is-a-relic canard:

There is a lot wrong with the article. The errors are so glaring that it is hard to attribute them to mere carelessness and not to a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

I’m not sure this is entirely true. And by entirely true, I mean true in any respect. Congress did have a fear of a standing army, a fear they inherited from the British experience with Cromwell’s military dictatorship. In fact, the U. S. Constitution copies part of the British Mutiny Act in that it forbids any appropriation to the military for a period longer than two years:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

In common with British law, no such restriction was applied to the Navy. At the time the U. S. Constitution was ratified, the strength of the U. S. Army was about 700 men in a single regiment. Hardly a threat. The Second Amendment is more properly seen as an alternative means for national defense that did not involve a standing army rather than as a check and balance against an army that did not actually exist.

He goes on to look at the Dred Scott  SCOTUS decision, the questions about blacks, citizenship, the right to bear arms, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Particularly juicy is his review of Stevens' employment of his view of the 1939 Miller decision (a case about importing a sawed-off shotgun across state lines) in his dissent over the Heller decision, and Antonin Scalia's smackdown thereof.

Israel is deploying 100 sharpshooters on the Gaza border as Palestinians from several factions set up tent cities on the other side and begin their annual period of ranting about the "catastrophe" and demanding the "right of return."

Michelle Malkin on a particularly creepy jackboot outfit you may not have heard of before: Smiles 4 Keeps:

Mom Trey Hoyumpa shared a letter last week on Facebook from a dental office called Smiles 4 Keeps in Bartonsville, Pa. It informed her that if she did not make a dental appointment for “regular professional cleanings” for her child, she could be charged with “dental neglect.” Citing a law called “Pennsylvania Act 31,” on child-abuse recognition and reporting, the dental office threatened to report the mom to state authorities if she did not schedule an appointment.

Hoyumpa wrote: “Smiles 4 Keeps bullies the parents, controls the care behind closed doors, and turns parents into villains . . . and I will not stand for it anymore!!!”

On social media, parents who’ve encountered the toxic alliance of snoopy medical providers and child-welfare agencies shared their own experiences with government bullies who operate on a presumption of guilt.

Brett Darken wrote: “Anyone familiar with ‘family court,’ DCF, state probate and guardianship courts know well this story. In any other context, it would be considered a threat, coercion, and intimidation under RICO laws. But because it’s the government, it’s legal.”

This is a menacing threat to have hanging over customers of dental practices, or any medical providers for that matter: If you leave, you better tell us where you are going or we could report you to government child-welfare agencies for suspected abuse. 

It gets creepier:

Dr. Ross Wezmar of Smiles 4 Keeps actually boasted to local news station WNEP about the snitch letters’ ability “to jar the parent to realize that with a child comes responsibility.” Benevolent Dr. Marcus Welby he is not. Wezmar claimed his bully notes are the first in the nation to be dispatched. With the encroachment of socialized medicine in America, they certainly won’t be the last.

Think it can’t happen to you? Last year, in Ontario, Canada, Melissa Lopez wanted a second opinion on getting fillings for her daughter and decided to change providers. The jilted dentist, as Lenore Skenazy reported at Reason, called Child Protective Services to report possible “oral neglect.” The case was dismissed, but CPS refuses to remove Lopez’s file from its books — it is part of a permanent record that keeps a permanent cloud of suspicion over her.

Skenazy drills down to the core: “The issue here is how easy it is to drag a family into an abuse investigation, and how hard it is for the family, like an impacted molar, to get itself extracted.”

Indeed, the partnership between medical providers and government child-welfare services has threatened innocent families across the country under the guise of “protecting the children.” It is a short hop from cavity-shaming and misdiagnoses to ripping families apart. 

Students at Bellaire High School near Houston went in a novel direction in response to the recent attention to the school-shooting phenomenon. They organized a unity rally, specifically because, in the words of Adam Hoffman, one of the organizers, "our social fabric is tearing." Both Senator Ted Cruz and House member Joachin Castro, about as diametrically opposed as any two elected officials could be, were both invited, and both attended, as did the Democratic and Republican state party chairs.