Man, this is the biggest bunch of "BULL" that I have heard in many years.  How can you criticize an agreement when there hasn't even one completed to be critical of yet?

There is only one reason this letter has been signed and sent, it is to undermine the office of the President of the United States.  The feeble minded people who signed that letter should be indited for Treason against the U.S.  This includes Earnst and Grassley from Iowa.  Earnst especially since she is supposedly a combat ZONE vet.  There is no difference between this stunt and that of the Rosenberg's giving the Atom bomb to Russia and they tried.  Both were an effort to unseat the U.S. Government by a foreign power.

We should call for both of our Senators to resign immediately before they can get access to a gun and shoot us.  Come of Senators, grow up and get some sense of loyalty and don't forget, you are suppose to represent us, not some idiot who wrote a treason letter.

Both were an effort to unseat the U.S. Government by a foreign power.

The Senate and House ARE the U.S. Government dumbo!!!

Stop acting like a fool:

Monica Bauer

Writing Fellow at Quinnipiac University

The Logan Act and the Treason Meme: Click Bait for Liberals

There are important debates to be had about brand new baby senator Tom Cotton's ill-advised letter to the leaders of Iran. But none of those debates have anything to do with treason, or the so-called Logan Act. All the stuff flying around the Internet about Republican senators violating the Logan Act is click bait. I haven't seen a single Constitutional Law professor say this is a real thing, for good reason. I used to teach Constitutional Law. Nobody's going to charge anybody with this. It's not treason either under any reasonable definition. I'd call it a stupid counter-productive political stunt. That's what Hillary called it.

This click bait is all over my Facebook feed, growing like kudzu. My friends are smart people. But even smart people don't know much about interpreting the language of a very old federal statute that sounds as if it actually might mean something. Laws are much more than the words on the page; there is precedent, and context, which can make the difference between a law with teeth and a meaningless piece of claptrap.

Near as I can tell, this Logan Act nonsense got started when a petition was put up on MoveOn's petition page calling for Speaker Boehner to be prosecuted for inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress. Petitions are a big part of the click bait culture, as they give the illusion of activism; this illusion is sometimes called slactivism. You don't have to spend long hours organizing or turning out the vote, just click here, sign here!

I've been trying to explain this to my friends for a couple of days now, and was glad to see Lawrence O'Donnell take the time to do so during his Tuesday night MSNBC broadcast of The Last Word. O'Donnell's a lawyer and a former senate aide, and he decimated both the Logan Act meme and the treason meme with admirable clarity here.

There are sites which send around petitions to charge Republican senators with treason, stating erroneously that the senators who signed the letter to Iran could be arrested for violating the Logan Act, and other nonsense. These sites get money for each click. Then they have your email or your Facebook and maybe all your Facebook friends, and will continue to send click bait. People waste time signing useless petitions and sharing them. This click bait money is not the same as supporting a political party, or a candidate. The click bait money props up the organization sending the click bait, and in my opinion this is all money and time that would be better spent funding candidates or real activists (who do more than send out crap on the internet).

The worst part is, the more outrageous and partisan their posts, the more click bait, the more money they raise. This creates a bias against real debate and discussion, which is complex, and a bias toward what is simplistic, but most likely to raise blood pressure enough to generate a quick click. I'm tough on right-wing media, but feel strongly we have to be equally tough on left-wing media that doesn't educate or help, but really exists to raise money by appealing to the most rabidly partisan arguments. In my humble opinion, sites peddling click bait are like Fox News for liberals. They gin up the emotions of good people to make money.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monica-bauer/the-logan-act-and-the-treason-meme-click-bait-for-liberals_b_6849040.html

Republicans’ letter to Iran is far from unprecedented

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-letter-to-iran-is-far-from-unprecedented/2015/03/11/6e247750-c80b-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_story.html

By Marc A. Thiessen March 11 at 2:30 PM 

The Obama administration has excoriated Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and 46 other Republicans for writing to Iran’s leaders informing them of the Senate’s constitutional role in approving international agreements. Vice President Joe Biden went so far as to declare that “In 36 years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which senators wrote directly to advise another country — much less a longtime foreign adversary — that the president does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them.”

Really? Biden has an awfully short memory.

In June 2000, when Biden was ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Bill Clinton set off for Moscow to negotiate a new arms control treaty with Vladimir Putin that would have limited the United States’ ability to build defenses against ballistic missile attack. The morning the talks were scheduled to begin, the president was greeted by on op-ed on the front page of Izvestia by committee chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). “After dragging his feet on missile defense for nearly eight years, Mr. Clinton now fervently hopes that he will be permitted, in his final months in office, to tie the hands of the next President,” Helms wrote. “Well I, for one, have a message for the President: Not on my watch. Let’s be clear, to avoid any misunderstandings: Any modified ABM treaty negotiated by this administration will be dead-on-arrival at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . . The Russian government should not be under any illusion whatsoever that any commitments made by this lame-duck Administration, will be binding on the next administration.”

The message was received in Moscow. There was no new arms control deal.

Biden also surely remembers how in 1998, when the Clinton administration was negotiating a U.N. treaty to create an International Criminal Court, Helms did more than send a letter expressing his opposition — he sent his aides to Rome to join the negotiations and make his opposition clear. I was a member of that team. Meeting with the United Nations delegates (with Biden’s aides present), we delivered a clear message from the chairman: Any treaty Clinton negotiated that did not give the U.S. a veto over the ICC in the Security Council was “dead on arrival” in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. However, unlike the Obama administration, the Clinton team smartly tried to use Helms’s opposition as leverage to negotiate more protections for Americans.

Helms did not simply write to foreign leaders explaining the Senate’s constitutional role in foreign policy. Together with Biden, he went to the U.N. headquarters in New York to deliver the message in person. On Jan. 20, 2000, Helms became the first U.S. senator ever to address the U.N. Security Council, where he warned of steep consequences if the U.N. failed to accept the U.N. reforms he and Biden had passed. And he explained to the gathered world leaders what a mistake it was to try to ignore the role of the Senate in foreign policy. Citing the example of Woodrow Wilson’s failure to secure congressional approval for the League of Nations, Helms declared, “Wilson probably could have achieved ratification of the League of Nations if he had worked with Congress.” Helms and Biden then invited the Security Council to Washington, where he gathered all the U.N. ambassadors in the old Senate chamber for a lecture from Senate historian Richard Baker on the Senate’s role in U.S. foreign policy. (Russia’s then-U.N. ambassador, and current foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov turned to Helms’s aide after the lecture and asked, “Where in the bastion of democracy can I have a smoke?”)

In this context, Cotton’s open letter to Iran is mild by comparison. It contains no warning that a nuclear deal is “dead on arrival” or declaration that Obama is a “lame duck.” The letter simply spells out the Senate’s constitutional role in the treaty ratification process and points out that any agreement Obama reaches with Iran that is “not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement.”

The folly here is not in Cotton’s decision to write the mullahs, but in Obama’s petulant response that Cotton and his colleagues were “making common cause with the hard-liners in Iran.” Please. The deal Obama is negotiating is opposed not only by Republicans in Congress, but also by leading Democrats, the government of Israel and most Arab leaders. Are they all “making common cause with the hard-liners in Iran” too?

Rather than having a temper tantrum, Obama should emulate Clinton and use congressional and international opposition as leverage at the negotiating table to get a better deal with Iran. And rather than rail against those who are speaking out against his deal, Obama should ask himself why so many are going to such great lengths to stop it. The problem is not their criticism, but Obama running roughshod over the concerns of Congress and U.S. allies. The fact is that any deal Obama reaches that does not have broad bipartisan backing in Congress and the support of governments in the region is in fact “dead on arrival” — even if Cotton and company are too polite to put it that bluntly.

"There are reasons when you start out in Washington on a Blackberry you stay on it in many instances. But it's also — I don't know, I don't throw anything away. I'm like two steps short of a hoarder. So I have an iPad, a mini iPad, an iPhone and a Blackberry." --Clinton on Feb 24th at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women.

She has always been a P.O.S.