RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word “woman” into a term of exclusion and oppression.

This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what passes for liberalism today eats itself.

No doubt you’ve heard: Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner. I can’t muster much outrage about this. If someone born a man wants to live as a woman, or vice versa, they are free to do so as far as I’m concerned. What does bother me is the way everyone is expected to celebrate Jenner’s decision and courage. Why can’t I just not care? Or, maybe I just don’t want to be part of a massive public-relations effort tied to the rollout of yet another reality show?

Seven Candidates on Harleys? Mad Voter Goes to Joni’s ‘Roast and Ride’

The Mad Voter (meaning me) is heading for Iowa Friday to attend Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” Saturday in someplace called Boone. Not only have I never been to Boone, I’ve never been to Iowa. But never mind. I’m going now and probably will several times more before this is over because Iowa is — as we all know — the number one caucus state, having injected itself into a poll position in every presidential election, for good or ill, for long as we can remember. (Yes, I’ll be asking people “Why Iowa?”)

So you may be asking, wazza ”Roast and Ride“? Well, you may recall former Senator Tom Harkin — the putative Navy flying ace – gives an annual steak fry in Iowa that is a Democratic Party must-attend. Ernst — an actual military hero unlike her predecessor — seems to be going him one better with a pig roast cum motor cycle ride to Boone for the GOP presidential candidates. The kickoff will be at Big Barn Harley-Davidson in Des Moines on Saturday at 11.

This tilts somewhat to Scott Walker, who is attending and, like Ernst herself, is a known Harley rider. No word on the others who are coming, but they are Ben Carson (doing surprisingly well), Carly Fiorina (whom I wrote about here), Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry (just in Thursday with a rousing speech) and Marco Rubio, who has been, with Walker, an early frontrunner and is said by the NYT to put the fear of God in the Democratic establishment. Each candidate has been allotted eight minutes to speak, which probably will be about three times as much as they will get in the debates. Before and after there will be fun and games at the Central Iowa Expo with people playing cornhole and eating Iowa foods that we can assume (thankfully) will be very short on kale.

Which leads to the question — why only these seven of the umpteen candidates are showing for what promises to be a lot of free publicity in a benign environment. Where are Ernst’s Senate colleagues Ted Cruz and Rand Paul? Where’s the soon-to-be announcing Jeb Bush and former Iowa (narrow) victor Rick Santorum (not to mention George Pataki, Donald Trump and my Uncle Sid) ? I don’t know, but will ask when I’m there, once I wipe the fried ice cream off my face. (Hey, there’s no hurry. It’s a long campaign.)

Tough break, enviroloons.

A long-awaited EPA report released Thursday found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution caused by fracking — a conclusion that offers a victory to the oil and gas industry and a major blow to a wave of grassroots anti-drilling movements sprouting across the country.

The results of EPA’s years-long fracking study should bolster natural gas producers, who have benefited from Obama administration climate and environmental policies that have shrunk the coal industry’s hold on the electricity industry.

After years of denial, the U.S. response must now go beyond countering ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

As Islamic State advances in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, there is a deadly twist in the war. The radical Islamist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is now expanding in roughly a dozen countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia by exploiting local grievances, doling out money and leveraging its battlefield successes.

Even as the United States struggles to combat Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, swift U.S. action is urgently needed in these new Islamic State outposts to stop and ultimately reverse the group’s spread. The May 29 suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque in Saudi Arabia, the second recent attack on that predominantly Sunni nation, shows how undaunted Islamic State has become.

So even the Environmental Protection Agency now concedes that fracking is safe, which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the reality of unconventional oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. But if no less than the EPA is saying this, then the political opposition doesn’t have much of a case left.

“We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” the EPA observes in a 1,399-page report and multiple appendices. By mechanisms, the researchers mean the practice of injecting water and chemicals into shale at high pressure to extract oil or natural gas.

‘Potential vulnerabilities’ should be addressed to prevent water contamination, EPA says after four-year study

Fracking isn’t causing widespread damage to the nation’s drinking water, the Obama administration said in a long-awaited report released Thursday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—after a four-year study that is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue to date—concluded that hydraulic fracturing, as being carried out by industry and regulated by states, isn’t having “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water.”

However, the EPA said there were a small number of contaminated drinking wells and highlighted potential vulnerabilities, including the disposal of wastewater and construction of durable wells.

The report was issued nearly a decade since fracking began helping unlock vast reserves of oil and natural gas across the U.S. It also bolsters the position staked out by the energy industry and its supporters: that fracking can be carried out safely.

Employment rolls for the Clinton Foundation show scads of political operatives—but this doesn’t seem to bother the IRS.

The scandal of the century at the IRS was that agency’s secret targeting of conservative nonprofits. Perhaps a close second is the scandal of what the IRS hasn’t been investigating: the Clinton Foundation.

The media’s focus is on Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and whether she took official actions to benefit her family’s global charity. But the mistake is starting from the premise that the Clinton Foundation is a “charity.” What’s clear by now is that this family enterprise was set up as a global shakedown operation, designed to finance and nurture the Clintons’ continued political ambitions. It’s a Hillary super PAC that throws in the occasional good deed.

Bill Gertz, top Pentagon reporter for the Washington Times has just reported that “Obama secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood is literally a fascist Muslim radical group from the Nazi period.

Writes Gertz:

President Obama and his administration continue to support the global Islamist militant group known the Muslim Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State.” (Aka ISIS).

The policy of backing the Muslim Brotherhood is outlined in a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive-11[.] … The directive was produced in 2011[.] …

Efforts to force the administration to release the directive or portions of it under the Freedom of Information Act have been unsuccessful. …

The directive outlines why the administration has chosen the Muslim Brotherhood, which last year was labeled a terrorist organization by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as a key vehicle of U.S. backing for so-called political reform in the Middle East. …

Communism may have collapsed in Russia, but the people who brought you the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall haven’t. Now they are classed as biznessmen. Now, they court Western politicians and use their oil money to lubricate international diplomacy. And they’re rushin’ with rubles to make friends.

Bill Clinton is one of those friends. The Russians paid him $500,000 to deliver a speech. Even Joe Klein in TIME Magazine calls the Clintons’ money-grubbing from the heirs of Stalin and Brezhnev troubling. Klein refers to the Clintons’ “blind spot” in accepting vast sums from the former masters of the Gulag.

As president, Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act. But as former president, he has had no problem associating himself with – and collecting large checks from – some of the worst violators of religious freedom. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) issues annual country reports. It says this about Russia:

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Praetorian Guard of Iran’s regime, controls most of the economy, as well as the black-market, alternative economy. The IRGC therefore actually benefits from sanctions; it is private firms, such as those involved in international commerce, that suffer. Why would IRGC operatives want to see the playing field made more level by private investment, transparency and a competitive economy?

Sanctions never hurt the regime’s ruling class; lifting them only helped the regime solidify its power over its people.

The objective of these two demands [an immediate lifting of all sanctions and no, or severely limited, inspections] is either to have them accepted, or to render it untenable for the Obama administration to offer Congress any deal that could be accepted – thereby shifting blame for the collapse of the talks to the U.S.

The U.S should also be on guard against the mullahs’ belief that the Obama administration is weak both politically and its aversion to using force. The mullahs might find great pleasure in humiliating Obama, as they did President Jimmy Carter, by dragging out hostage crisis negotiations by running out the clock until his term was over. They clearly believe that the Obama administration, simply to say it got “a deal,” is ready to sign anything.