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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Should we trust the CIA on Russian hackers? By Gamaliel Isaac

Democrats are creating a big brouhaha over the possibility that Russia
tried to influence the American presidential election by
leaking information to WikiLeaks. The argument is that it wasn’t a fair
election if a foreign power influenced it.

That is true only if the foreign power deceived American voters. If the
information was true, then that foreign power did us a favor in
informing our voters. The better informed our voters, the fairer the
election.

Catholics and Evangelicals who were considering voting for Hillary could
make a decision that was more in their own interest once they knew that
her campaign advisers and liberal allies mocked them. Likewise,
Southerners, Latinos, and other victims of Clinton campaign vitriol were
better off knowing the true attitude of members of the Clinton campaign
toward them. The email revelations exposing corruption of the Clinton
Foundation and the unethical tilting of the primary election playing
field against Bernie Sanders are revelations that helped voters make
informed choices.

The Democrats would have us believe that the blame lies with the
Russians, but the Russians are not to blame for the corruption of the
Democrats. The Democrats are.

Democrat outrage that an outside country may have influenced the recent
American election is hypocritical when one considers the steps Obama’s
and Hillary’s State Department took to influence the Israeli election
against Netanyahu, including supporting an Organizing for America-type
campaign with digital ads, billboards, and phone calls.

Democrat hypocrisy becomes even more apparent when one remembers Mr.
Obama’s admission to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d be more
flexible in meeting Russian demands after the 2012 American election.
Obama was willing to withhold information about his plans to make
concessions to Russia from the American people in order to get elected.
An American president hiding the truth from the American people in order
to sway an election is much worse than a foreign leader revealing the
truth to the American people.

Trump Gave $10,000 to West Bank Settlement in 2003, Report Says U.S. presidents from both parties have criticized West Bank settlements, saying they are an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians By Damian Paletta

President-elect Donald Trump donated $10,000 to a prominent Jewish West Bank settlement in 2003, according to the Jerusalem Post, taking a position that many Republican and Democratic presidents have refused to endorse.

The Jerusalem Post cites Trump Foundation records to show that Mr. Trump gave the sum to American Friends of Beit El. Beit El is an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, territory Palestinians seek for the establishment of their own state.

Mr. Trump said last week he would nominate his friend and lawyer David Friedman to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Mr. Friedman has served as president of American Friends of Beit El for the past several years.

Beit El was founded in 1977 as a small settlement but has expanded since then. Yaakov Katz, one of the original settlers, told Galei Israel Radio Sunday that the donation was made in Mr. Friedman’s honor.

U.S. presidents from both parties have criticized the West Bank settlements, saying they are an obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Mr. Friedman has supported the development of Jewish settlements there, and he has also expressed skepticism that a two-state solution agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians can be achieved. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Rust Belt Is Right to Blame Obama The risk that regulators pose to business is up 79% from 2010—a burden that falls heavy on industry. By Clark S. Judge

Donald Trump hasn’t wasted time moving to revive America’s economic growth, with an emphasis on manufacturing. Critics may say the recent Carrier deal, which will save 800 American jobs, is small potatoes, but Mr. Trump’s pledge to reduce regulation is decidedly not. A new analysis confirms that the average industry’s regulatory risk has increased nearly 80% from 2010—and that this burden particularly hurts manufacturing and heavy industry.

The analysis was developed by a small group of quantitative hotshots under the guidance of Alex Vogel, an old Washington hand, and Jeff Hood, a 30-year finance veteran. Instead of considering the question of regulatory risk like D.C. think tankers, they approached it like Wall Street analysts.

Their most inventive technique involved natural-language processing, an essential tool of the big-data era that has been used to analyze Shakespeare and fight spam email. Messrs. Vogel and Hood used the technology to analyze the language in the 10K reports that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Every 10K report includes a formal assessment of the company’s vulnerabilities. Messrs. Vogel and Hood flagged any words and phrases that signaled regulatory exposure. They included general terms like “regulation” and “Congress” as well as specific ones like “fraud,” “inversions” and “Dodd-Frank.” They did something similar with the Federal Register to capture economically significant rule-making.

Then, firing up a suite of algorithms and formulas, they generated a regulatory-risk score for every company in the Fortune 500. Hedge funds are using the findings to gauge how potential investments could be affected by new regulations, court filings and other breaking events.

But the news here is in the next steps. The Vogel and Hood team analyzed corporate lobbying and turned out company-by-company ratings of its effectiveness. They put into the calculations the amounts that firms spend on government relations, the size of government-relations staffs, the expertise of the outside lobbyists hired, and the number of lobbying registration reports filed. Each company can then be ranked in the hierarchy of Washington influence.

Messrs. Vogel and Hood say their method is like a capital asset pricing model with one exception: In place of the standard measure for market risk, they substituted their metrics for regulatory risk and corporate response. What were the results?

The EPA’s Science Deniers The agency changes its view on fracking and water without evidence.

Speaking of fake news, the political scientists at the EPA have rewritten the conclusion of a report in order to cast doubt on the safety of hydraulic fracturing. Consider this EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s parting gift to Donald Trump.

Last week the EPA issued the final version of a five-year study evaluating the impact of hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas drilling method known as fracking, on groundwater contamination. The draft report released last year for public comment concluded that fracking has not “led to widespread, systemic impact on drinking water resources in the United States.” The EPA’s findings haven’t changed, but its conclusion has.

After being barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities, the EPA in its final report substituted its determination of no “widespread, systemic impact” with the hypothetical that fracking “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” and that “impacts can range in frequency and severity” depending on the circumstances.

Any technology has the potential to inflict some damage—self-driving cars can be hacked to go haywire—and the EPA explains that drinking-water contamination could occur if wastewater is incorrectly disposed or wells are poorly sealed. In Pavillion, Wyo., the EPA’s faulty construction of a monitoring well caused contamination.

Yet after reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the EPA couldn’t find more than limited evidence—mostly alleged by plaintiff attorneys—of operational failures causing contamination. That the EPA uncovered only a few instances of contamination among a million some wells reinforces its prior conclusion that fracking doesn’t threaten the drinking-water supply.

The EPA now asserts that “significant data gaps and uncertainties” prevent it from “calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts.” For instance, water-quality data was not collected everywhere prior to the introduction of fracking, which has allowed plaintiff attorneys to ascribe any contamination to oil and gas companies.

Methane can leak into groundwater naturally, and the EPA even notes that “site-specific cases of alleged impacts” are “particularly challenging to understand” because “the subsurface environment is complex.” Scientists have documented methane in the shallow subsurface of Susquehanna County, Pa.—one area of alleged fracking contamination—dating back more than 200 years.

Report: RNC Security Stopped Russian Hackers From Infiltrating Networks By Debra Heine

Russian hackers tried to breach the computer networks of the Republican National Committee but failed to get past their security defenses, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday evening. According to U.S. officials briefed on the intrusion, the hackers used the same techniques that allowed them to successfully infiltrate the Democratic National Committee, suggesting that they had intended to compromise Republicans, too. People close to the investigation said that only one email account linked to a long-departed RNC staffer was targeted, indicating a less aggressive effort, however.

The disclosures came as a political furor grows over suspected Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Russian hackers, whom analysts say work for that country’s military and intelligence apparatus, stole emails from the DNC, as well as another Democratic organization and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to harm her candidacy and boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning. Russia has denied the allegations.

The possibility that Russians tried and failed to infiltrate the RNC doesn’t necessarily conflict with the CIA’s conclusion. A senior U.S. official said analysts now believe what started as an information-gathering campaign aimed at both parties later took on a focus of leaked emails about Mrs. Clinton and Democrats.

This news contradicts what the the New York Times reported last week — namely, that senior administration officials had concluded with “high confidence” that the RNC systems had been penetrated by the Russians but they didn’t release any of their information because they only wanted to burn Hillary Clinton.

President Barack Obama said in an NPR interview Thursday that the U.S. is considering retaliatory moves against Russia. “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections, that we need to take action, and we will,” he said. “At a time and a place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”

The WSJ continues:

Until now, few details had been disclosed about the nature of the targeting of Republican organizations, especially the flagship Republican National Committee, where hackers sent so-called phishing emails last spring to an email address there. Those emails were quarantined by a filter meant to detect spam as well as potentially malicious traffic that may carry viruses or trick recipients into divulging passwords, two officials said.

A third person familiar with the investigation said RNC staff members didn’t realize they had been the target of spies until June, after Democratic committee leaders revealed that hackers had successfully gained a foothold inside their networks. Once inside, they reportedly were able to access a trove of DNC opposition research on Mr. Trump, then a candidate. CONTINUE AT SITE

Facebook’s Fake Fix for Fake News Liberal fact-checkers are not the way to ensure a more informed public.

Some progressives will do anything to avoid confronting the realities of why Hillary Clinton lost the election, and one diversion is the complaint about fake news, which is provoking even worse responses. Facebook announced this week that the social-media platform will weed out some stories, and that the company will deputize “fact-checkers” to decide if an article is credible. What could go wrong?

Facebook says it is testing technology so that a story shared on its site that is flagged by users, among unknown other indicators, will be checked out by the Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact or others. If these high priests declare a story fake, it will be denoted as “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” and perhaps demoted in a news feed.

This appears to be a response to the fake news story that Mrs. Clinton lost the election because false information duped people into voting for Donald Trump. There is zero evidence that invented events—an article that said “The Pope Endorsed Donald Trump,” for example—swayed the election.

More than 80% of Americans told Pew Research in a recent poll that they can spot fake news, and only a third report seeing it often. Fakery and exaggeration exist on the web. But this does not qualify as a democracy-killing “epidemic,” which is how Mrs. Clinton described it last week.

It’s certainly curious that the consternation over fake news seems aimed above all against Mr. Trump. Politico this fall rolled out a fact check of the Republican, claiming that every three minutes he told one “untruth.” Here’s one of those supposed falsehoods: Mr. Trump said Islamic State is evil “the world has not seen.” Politico concluded that this was false because “judging one ‘level of evil’ against another is subjective.” Well, judging what is true is also often subjective.

That’s certainly the case with PolitiFact, which pretends to be even-handed but has its own biases. In 2008 PolitiFact helped bless ObamaCare with a “true” rating for candidate Barack Obama’s claim that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” In 2009 the website demoted the remark to “half true,” adding the non-insight that ObamaCare would “surely change the current health system.” By 2013, as Americans lost their insurance, PolitiFact changed its judgment and called Mr. Obama’s line the “lie of the year.”

Tendentious PolitiFact ratings are a classic genre of bad journalism. When Texas libertarian Ron Paul said the U.S. federal income-tax rate was zero until 1913, PolitiFact called that “half true.” (We would have called that true.) Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb later said the same thing and notched a mark of “mostly true,” and maybe he earned extra points for being a Democrat.CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Can End the War on Cops Stop treating police as racist and pushing lower hiring standards as a way to achieve ‘diversity.’By Heather Mac Donald

Donald Trump’s promise to restore law and order to America’s cities was one of the most powerful themes of his presidential campaign. His capacity to deliver will depend on changing destructive presidential rhetoric about law enforcement and replacing the federal policies that flowed from that rhetoric.

The rising violence in many urban areas is driven by what candidate Trump called a “false narrative” about policing. This narrative holds that law enforcement is pervaded by racism, and that we are experiencing an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men.

Multiple studies have shown that those claims are untrue. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. Yet President Obama has repeatedly accused the police and criminal-justice system of discrimination, lethal and otherwise. During the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July by an assassin who reportedly was inspired by Black Lives Matter, Mr. Obama announced that black parents were right to “fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be fatally shot by a cop.

The consequences of such presidential rhetoric are enormous, especially when amplified by the media. Officers working in high-crime areas now encounter a dangerous level of hatred and violent resistance. Gun murders of officers are up 68% this year compared with the same period last year.

Police have cut way back on pedestrian stops and public-order enforcement in minority neighborhoods, having been told repeatedly that such discretionary activities are racially oppressive. The result in 2015 was the largest national homicide increase in nearly 50 years. That shooting spree has continued this year, ruthlessly mowing down children and senior citizens in many cities, along with the usual toll of young black men who are the primary targets of gun crime.

To begin to reverse these trends, President Trump must declare that the executive branch’s ideological war on cops is over. The most fundamental necessity of any society is adherence to the rule of law, he should say. Moreover, there is no government agency today more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police.

The nationwide policing revolution that originated in New York City in 1994—based on proactive enforcement—saved thousands of minority lives over 20 years, and provided urban residents with newfound freedom. While police agencies and their local overseers must remain vigilant against officer abuses, the federal government will no longer deem cops racist for responding to community demands for public order.

The Fake Issue of ‘Fake News’ By Frank Salvato

Facebook in planning to launch a mechanism with which they can brand news feed entries as “fake news.” The information behemoth plans to bring in third party “fact-checkers” and enlist the help of Facebook users to flag content for scrutiny. Some of the third party “fact-checking” entities include Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and ABC News. These anointed entities will determine if the offending post and/or source are “fake news.” Those posts and sources will then be branded with the “scarlet letter.”

Some critical issues arise with this effort and all of them are disingenuous and dangerous. The first issue has to do with the selection of the “deciders.” In the end, the authority to brand a source as a “fake news” source is the authority to destroy credibility.

As with anything that requires a determination, the threshold for what will be deemed “fake news” will rest with the “deciders.” The same quandary exists with “hate speech” laws. Those deciding the fate of the information – and the information sources – will be intellectually hobbled by their biases, i.e. one man’s “hate speech” or “fake news” is another man’s truth. Because we live in an era when journalism schools (and the mainstream media itself) have accepted as standard operating procedure the inserting of opinion into news, truth is now, sadly, subjective. This is significant.

This reality means that the bias of the “fact-checkers” is relevant. Each of the entities tapped by Facebook to act as “fact-checkers” has been accused of – and, in many cases, rightfully so – skewing some of their more critical determinations to a more liberal bent. This presents a fundamental credibility issue, not to mention – where “fake news” fact-checking is concerned, a fundamental danger to free speech. Additionally, installing “deciders” who are even wrongly deemed bias advances the societal fear of censorship and the ability to delegitimize.

Then there is the issue of the coordinated political effort to attain power. As we witnessed during the 2016 presidential race, some political campaigns place more worth on winning than they do in adhering to the truth. The Clinton campaign and her Progressive supporters employed the “slash-and-burn” tactic of the politics of personal destruction in their failed bid to maintain control over the White House. Secretary Clinton, herself, routinely cherry-picked statements from President-Elect Trump’s speeches to inaccurately and disingenuously paint him as a xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobe, among other things. Her claims and rhetoric were anything but honest.

The Fake Hijab Hate Crimes Witch Hunt Are roving Trump gangs hunting for hijabs? Daniel Greenfield

They struck at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Two white males ran out of a car, tore off her hijab, hit her and stole her wallet. One of these mysterious muggers was wearing a Trump hat.

The president of the Muslim Students Association claimed that the attack had rattled the campus. The ACLU was “outraged” and was as eager as the “victim” to connect the attack to Trump. It was even more outraged that the imaginary attackers had, “shouted slurs and wore Donald Trump clothing.”

It was only hours after the election and the media eagerly jumped on the story. But the 18-year-old Middle Eastern student had made it all up and police charged her with filing a false report.

A month later they stuck again. Yasmin Seweid, an 18-year-old Baruch College student in New York City, claimed that “three white racists” tried to tear off her hijab, shouted Trump’s name, along with, “Look it’s a fucking terrorist”, “go back to your country” and “take that rag off your head”.

“The president-elect just promotes this stuff and is very anti-Muslim, very Islamophobic, and he’s just condoning it,” she whined. CAIR got into the game. A hate crimes investigation was launched.

And the NYPD found that she had made it all up. Yasmin now faces charges for her deception. But her lies potentially endangered the “brown-eyed and brown-haired” man whom police had begun to suspect. A man who might have been arrested and charged for a crime that never happened.

What caused two 18-year-old Muslim women 1,400 miles apart to invent the same very specific attack?

On yet another November, a year before the nameless Muslim in Louisiana faked her hate crime, an 18-year-old Muslim woman in the UK claimed that she had been assaulted because of her hijab. The supposed victim, a Miss Choudhury, turned out to be a liar and was fined for wasting police time.

Despite their geographical separation the three cases have a great deal in common. All three of the perpetrators were 18-year-old Muslim women. All associated the fake attacks with their wearing of the hijab. And their lies were calculated to exploit recent events, the Muslim terror attacks in Paris and Trump’s election, which the media had played up as being traumatic to Muslims.

37% of Detroit Precincts Had More Votes Than Voters Daniel Greenfield

Voter fraud is as much a part of Democrat election strategies as the memorial jackass. But some cities are more obnoxious about it than others. This is what happens when urban political machines really get out of control.

Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.

Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

Having more votes than voters is a real problem.

But remember kids, voter fraud is just a fake problem invented by Republicans. Unless a Republican wins and then it was all about the hackers.

The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court.