RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/26/the_next_shoes_to_drop_after_the_mueller_report_139856.html

Footwear aplenty will fall as more details from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report are disclosed. The reckoning will come in several baskets and will fall on Democrats and Republicans alike, with major ramifications for 2020.

Basket No. 1: More information about the Mueller Report and the basis for its conclusions.The public wants that information and deserves it. Democrats will cry “coverup” if they don’t get everything. While Republicans emphasize “no collusion,” Democrats will concentrate their attention on Mueller’s indecision regarding President Trump’s possible obstruction of justice. Democrats will press Attorney General William Barr about the special counsel’s ambiguous conclusion—and Barr’s own definitive one–about the obstruction issue. Other Trump critics, who heretofore have described Bob Mueller as a modern-day Eliot Ness, will start crying, “Whitewash!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/collusion-clingers-and-their-flat-earth-forebears/

Democrats just won’t take ‘no collusion’ for an answer.

Even after Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the New World and back, some naysayers surely clung to their shattered superstitions like life preservers after a shipwreck. “Who cares what Columbus says?” they likely whined. “The Earth IS flat. Columbus must have turned around and come home before he fell over the edge.”

Today’s Democrats resemble those 15th-century bitter-enders. No matter what, many insist that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to win the White House. Even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation finally repudiated their destructive myth, they still scream: “Collusion!”

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) is the spiritual leader of the Congressional Collusion Caucus. He told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday: “I did say that there is ample evidence, and indeed there is, of collusion of people in the Trump campaign with the Russians.” Schiff told the Washington Post, “Undoubtedly there is collusion.” He added: “We will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president, or people around him, compromised in any way by a hostile foreign power?”

Rather than extract proof of these grave charges this week, my three phone calls and three e-mails to Schiff’s office and communications director Patrick Boland yielded silence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/natural-gas-global-energy-trend-clean-growing/

Renewables get the press, but natural gas is growing much faster.

While the Green New Deal continues to dominate energy discussions in the United States, the rest of the world continues to rely on coal, oil, and natural gas. And of those three, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency, natural-gas consumption grew faster last year than any other form of energy, including renewables. That jump in global gas use reflects the soaring growth in U.S. production and exports of that same fuel.

Much of the media attention to the new IEA report focused on the increase in global carbon dioxide emissions, which rose by 1.7 percent last year. The IEA said the increase was due to “higher energy demand propelled by a global economy that expanded by 3.7 percent in 2018.” The report also noted the continuing growth in renewables, which increased by 4 percent.

Renewables such as wind and solar get lots of positive press. But last year renewables were eclipsed by the growth in global gas use, which jumped by 4.6 percent. At that rate, global gas demand could double within the next 16 years or so. The good news about the growth in global gas demand is that it is helping displace coal and liquid fuels for electricity generation — a change that, in turn, is helping reduce air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. During combustion, gas emits almost zero sulfur dioxide, and it produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal and about 30 percent less than diesel fuel or fuel oil.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/28/campaign-colluded-russians-2016-hillary-clintons/

For more than two years, the campaign, presidential transition, and official government administration of Donald Trump operated under a cloud of suspicion that they had engaged in a treasonous conspiracy to steal the 2016 election from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump and his top associates were accused of collusion and of conspiring with the Russians to subvert American democracy.

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency publicly declared Trump to be guilty of treason, an offense punishable by death. The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country’s premier law enforcement agency, intimated that the president had illegally obstructed justice.

In the end, none of it was true. After a nearly two-year-long investigation that issued 2,800 subpoenas, interviewed 500 witnesses, and used nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.

But that doesn’t mean 2016 was free of Russian collusion. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that a 2016 presidential campaign willfully and deliberately colluded with Russians in a bid to interfere with American elections. It wasn’t Trump’s campaign that colluded with shady Russia oligarchs and sketchy Russian sources to subvert American democracy: it was Hillary Clinton’s.