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A firestorm erupted Tuesday over the letter by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. and 46 other Senators to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, laying out their view of the ongoing negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program. Critics of the letter started throwing around words like unprecedented, illegal, even treasonous.

The summit on countering violent extremism convened by the Obama administration last month was a lavish affair, full of pomp and circumstance and awash in foreign dignitaries. But substantive strategies for combatting radical ideologies, particularly those of Islamist groups, were far less in evidence.

From today's diary entry of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:

Ah, the Americans. When it comes to our nuclear weapons program, they leave us with only good choices!

On the one hand, I can drag out the talks beyond this month's latest deadline because the desperate Americans certainly will agree to keep talking. That's how we went from the six-month interim deal in November 2013, through a deadline in July 2014, and then through another deadline in November 2014.