THE BOYS IN TEHRAN ARE GETTING ROUGH – AT 11:57 A.M. ET:  Obama's deadline for Iran to make progress in its nuclear negotiations with the west has passed.  We now get the Iranian response, and it is blunt.  From AFP:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran on Saturday gave the West a one-month "ultimatum" to accept a uranium swap, warning that if there is no deal it will produce its own nuclear fuel for a Tehran reactor, state television reported.

"The international community has just one month left to decide" whether or not it will accept Iran's conditions, otherwise "Tehran will enrich uranium to a higher level," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted as saying.

"This is an ultimatum," he said.

Pretty direct stuff from a regime that's being threatened in its own streets.

Iran, which rejected a December 31 deadline to accept a UN-brokered deal, said on Tuesday it is ready to swap abroad its low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, insisting however that the exchange should happen in stages.

Tehran has rejected a proposal by UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ship out most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium for further processing by Russia and France into fuel for a research reactor.

Absurd.  When done in stages, it's a slow-motion process, allowing Iran to replace whatever enriched uranium gets shipped out.

COMMENT:  It's clearly crunch time.  We await the president's return from his seemingly endless vacation to see what he'll actually do.  Not say, but do.

January 2, 2010