SIGNS POINT TO YES: Is Iran Pushing the Envelope on Its Nuclear Deal?

The comments by Rouhani and Salehi parallel those made last month by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who was quoted in Iranian media saying that Iran had “succeeded to make operational the most advanced centrifuges that were just an idea at the time of approving the [nuclear deal].”

“Zarif has, in a sense, been able to generate a fundamental lie about this whole deal, that somehow these centrifuges make economic sense for a civil program,” said Albright.

Florida senator Marco Rubio told TWS that such statements about advanced centrifuge development cement long-standing concerns about the nuclear deal.

“A bipartisan majority of Republicans and some Democrats in Congress warned President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran would enrich the radical regime and ultimately bring it closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, and that is exactly what is happening,” Rubio said.

Rubio is a co-sponsor of legislation introduced in March that slaps sanctions on Iran over its non-nuclear illicit activities. The bill has the backing of several pro-Iran deal Democrats.

The Iranians may be making progress on centrifuges beyond what’s allowed under the nuclear deal, in part through a so-called “quality assurance” loophole that Iran is exploiting to test centrifuges, Albright said.

“You have this undercurrent where Iran is either violating the deal, it’s inconsistent with the deal, or it’s just pushing the envelope,” he said.

The Obama administration was not willing to rebuff Iran’s inconsistencies with or violations of the deal, Albright added. “There needs to be a really hard push back,” he said. “I’m hoping that the Trump administration will do that, because the Obama administration just refused.”

If President Trump would just release the hidden details of Obama’s deal, we could all judge whether Iran is in compliance.

BREAKING: Former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez Kills Himself in Prison.

OF ALL THE PROBLEMS TO HAVE: F-35 Needs More Potent Adversary Services.

The F-35 Lightning II strike fighter is easily able to counter the adversary services aircraft thrown at it in numbers, said an official of an adversary services contractor, who added that the industry is facing challenges in coming up with a realistic threat aircraft for training for high-end combat.

“Nothing gets close to these things [the F-35s]” said Jeffrey Parker, a former Air Force fighter pilot and chief executive of ATAC LLC, a Textron company that provides opposing aircraft for U.S. fighter squadrons and electronic threat simulation against Navy strike groups. “I’ve flown against the [Marine] F-35Bs down at [Marine Corps Air Station] Beaufort [S.C.] It’s an impressive airplane. Even in the hands of students, it’s a very capable fighter.”

Great plane, kid — now don’t get cocky.

GOOD MORNING: Liz Sheld has your A.M. roundup to get you started.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hillary ran the worst presidential campaign ever.

John Podhoretz:

Campaign honcho Robby Mook “was worried about overspending . . . so he declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign.” Mook had learned from his time on the Obama 2012 campaign, Allen and Parnes write, that “old-school polling should be used for testing messages and gauging the sentiments of the electorate and that analytics were just as good for tracking which candidate was ahead and by how much in each state.”

Guess not.

Allen and Parnes report that the Republican National Committee did know — but just couldn’t accept it. The RNC didn’t brief reporters on early November polling data it had developed in Michigan and Pennsylvania, “because the upticks there were so rosy that party officials didn’t believe their own data.”

The day after the election, Hillary asked Mook “which decisions had been misguided, where they had erred in strategy and tactics. ‘Our data was wrong,’ he said . . . ‘OK,’ she replied.”

It is true that, but for 100,000 votes in three states, Hillary Clinton would be president today. It is also true that she ended the election with 3 million more votes than Trump. But it is also true, as “Shattered” makes indisputably clear, that she was unquestionably the worst major presidential candidate in our lifetime.

Others (like Bob Dole) did far worse. But they likely never really had a shot. Hillary had no business losing an election to Donald Trump — but Allen and Parnes pile up headshaking detail after headshaking detail from the very beginning of her campaign to its end showing that she and her people were incapable of making a good call.

But other than that, the question remains: “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?”

ETHAN EPSTEIN: Bad Reviews For Trump’s Korea Policy — Except in, um, Korea.

The New York Times bemoans Trump’s “recklessness.” Ishaan Tharoor, a Washington Post blogger with the modest remit of covering the entire world, warns of the “dangers” of Trump’s policies. Even Ian Buruma, an expert on Dutch politics most famous for his bizarre attacks on the exceptionally brave Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has weighed in on Trump’s approach to North Korea: Apparently it “plays into North Korea’s hands.”

And yet, the Trump approach is receiving plaudits precisely where it matters most: in South Korea.

South Korea, perhaps because its population is among the world’s oldest, remains a country dominated by print newspapers, which are highly influential. An official affiliated with the country’s dominant conservative party estimates to me that more than half of Koreans still read a daily newspaper. And those newspapers’ editorial boards have praised Trump’s North Korea policy.

The team of Trump, Tillerson, and Mattis have found in just weeks a policy that puts Pyongyang on notice, moves China closer to becoming a responsible player, but hasn’t pushed Seoul any closer to total political chaos.

After three Administrations worth of can-kicking, that’s not bad.

TWO STEPS FORWARD…: New Harvard club courts controversy to foster free speech on campus.

When Conor Healy was a freshman at Harvard, he applied to take a freshman seminar class on free speech. Originally from Toronto, Healy chose the class because free speech seemed to be a popular topic in the United States when he arrived.

“I took it because I thought I could learn a lot — and I did,” Healy told USA TODAY College.

The students in the course learned about a number of issues: the First Amendment, Holocaust denialism, whether hate speech should be banned, and more.

During the class, Healy met another student, Francisco Trujillo. Inspired by their free speech class and conversations with their peers about politics, they created Harvard’s first club dedicated to free speech: The Open Campus Initiative.

Great idea. But notice, per the headline, that free speech at Harvard “courts controversy.”

VIDEO: Maxine Waters: ‘I Have Not Called for Impeachment…’

(She’s lying.)

SENIOR OBAMA ENERGY OFFICIAL: ‘I Think the Keystone XL Pipeline Should Have Been Built’

Adam Sieminski, the former administrator of the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration, told Axios on the sidelines of a Brookings Institution event that the pipeline should have been constructed.

“One opinion I don’t have to stifle anymore is that I think the Keystone XL pipeline should have been built,” Sieminski told the news outlet.

Sieminski’s decision to come out in support of the pipeline may be a sign that Democrats are willing to compromise on certain liberal energy positions with Republicans controlling both chambers of congress, Axios noted.

Just yesterday two anonymous former Obama officials were whispering in Fareed Zakaria’s ear that of course Obama would have struck that Syrian airbase.

But where were these people when they had the power to influence Obama Administration policy?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Things You Should Know About the Georgia 6 Special Election.

IT’S A TRAP! HuffPo Fell for a Hoax Piece Demanding That White Men Lose Voting Rights.

To be fair, the hoaxer was fishing in chummed waters.

LIBERAL TEARS: Hillary Clinton to President Obama on Election Night: ‘I’m Sorry’ I Lost.

She had to apologize to the man who kept her out of the White House in 2008 for losing the White House in 2016.

JUST WHAT WE NEED — MORE FEDERAL MEDDLING IN DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIPS: Limit Pain Prescriptions to 7 Days to Cut Opioid Abuse, Argue Senators.

PROGRESS: Criticism of Beijing’s North Korea Policy Comes From Unlikely Place: China.

When China’s best-known historian of the Korean War, Shen Zhihua, recently laid out his views on North Korea, astonishment rippled through the audience. China, he said with a bluntness that is rare here, had fundamentally botched its policy on the divided Korean Peninsula.

China’s bond with North Korea’s Communist leaders formed even before Mao Zedong’s decision in 1950 to send People’s Liberation Army soldiers to fight alongside them in the Korean War. Mao famously said the two sides were “as close as lips and teeth.”

But China should abandon the stale myths of fraternity that have propped up its support for North Korea and turn to South Korea, Mr. Shen said at a university lecture last month in Dalian, a northeastern Chinese port city.

“Judging by the current situation, North Korea is China’s latent enemy and South Korea could be China’s friend,” Mr. Shen said, according to a transcript he published online. “We must see clearly that China and North Korea are no longer brothers in arms, and in the short term there’s no possibility of an improvement in Chinese-North Korean relations.”

This NYT report also says that the speech “was a strikingly bold public challenge to Chinese policy,” but you have to wonder if Beijing didn’t allow it to go public to send a message to Pyongyang.

WELL, YES: Lois Lerner got off easy in the IRS scandal. It’s time to reexamine the targeting of conservatives.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Student Sues College, Ex, and NYPD for Acting on Spurious Rape Claim.

RAHM’S KIND OF TOWN: The Murder Rate Jumped Again In 2016. A Handful Of Cities Are Largely Responsible.

The report finds that just a few U.S. cities played an outsized role in the nationwide uptick in the murder rate in recent years and had a distorting effect on the overall murder rate. Three cities ― Baltimore, Chicago and Houston ― “account for around half of the increase in murder in major cities between 2014 and 2016,” the report says.

In the 30 largest cities in the country, the murder rate increased by about 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, but Chicago alone “was responsible for 43.7 percent of the rise in urban murders in 2016,” according to the report.

Damning.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST PAT BUCHANAN… THAT MIGHT NOT BE SUCH A BAD THING: War Cries Drown Out ‘America First’

BREAKING: SecDef Mattis on ramping up military support for Saudi efforts in Yemen.

WHEW! If You Can’t Vote For Jon Ossoff In Georgia’s 6th District, Don’t Worry: Neither Can He.

DISPATCHES FROM THE FALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Dove Soap Goes Full SJW.

BUT OF COURSE:

If the highlighted text is too small for your screen, the Berkeley Police Department’s “Event Planning Checklist” asks protestors:

• Would you like symbolic arrests?

• If so, where and when?

Even the local police are costars in Berkeley’s never-ending Theater of the Absurd.

(Hat tip: Will Collier.)

QUESTION ASKED: Are we on the brink of a second Korean War?

OUR POSTMODERN CINCINATTUS: The Obamas just took a luxurious cruise with Oprah and Bruce Springsteen on this billionaire producer’s yacht.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Shattered’ Picks Through The Broken Pieces Of Hillary Clinton’s Dream.

What’s interesting about Ron Elving’s review is that it reads as though he’s almost as willing to deflect blame away from Hillary Clinton as Hillary Clinton is.