RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/29/trumps_accusers_harmed_us_all_hold_them_accountable_139889.htmlBy

“Our government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

Would that Brandeis could rise from the dead to oversee the investigation and likely prosecution of those whose determination to oppose Donald J. Trump was so fierce that they conspired to create a narrative of treason that has now been revealed to be a charade.

Let the reckoning begin.

I’m not talking about settling scores with the dozens of mainstream media figures who spent the last two years “informing” their viewers/listeners/readers that President Trump and his campaign had broken the law to conspire with the Russian government to fix the 2016 election. They were wrong, and they now have been proven wrong, by the very man in whom they placed their deep and abiding faith.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/20/mccains-key-role-in-fueling-post-election-trump-russia-hysteria/

In his 2018 book, The Restless Wave, the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) wondered aloud why he was sought out and given the infamous Steele dossier shortly after the 2016 presidential election.

After suggesting that anyone who questioned his role in handling the political document was indulging in “conspiracy theories,” McCain offered his explanation: “The answer is too obvious for the paranoid to credit. I am known internationally to be a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime and I have been a long while.”

It is true that McCain was an outspoken critic of Putin. But the big problem with McCain’s defense is that by the time he wrote those words—presumably the end of 2017, since the book was published in late May 2018—it already was public knowledge that the dossier had been authored and distributed by political pimps funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. When McCain was writing his book, many of the culprits were in serious legal jeopardy.

Christopher Steele, the dossier’s author, was being sued for defamation and was under congressional scrutiny in 2017. (McCain had sent his close associate, David Kramer, to meet Steele in London shortly after the 2016 election to track down gossip about the president-elect.) Steele also remains the subject of a criminal referral at the Justice Department for lying to federal officials.

McCain’s Senate colleagues were investigating Fusion GPS and its owner, Glenn Simpson, who produced and peddled the fabricated document, in the summer of 2017. (It was Simpson, not Steele as McCain suggested in his book, who gave Kramer the dossier in late November 2016; McCain would later provide that copy of the dossier to former FBI Director James Comey, who already had used the sleazily obtained and Democrat-funded opposition research to get a secret court’s approval to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.)

Kramer also testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 related to its probe of the dossier, and he later invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid further questioning.

And if his book was still in production in February 2018, McCain would have known that the FBI withheld crucial details about the dossier’s political provenance in a shameful scheme to violate the privacy rights of a U.S. citizen whose only offense was volunteering to help Trump in 2016. McCain knew it because he vehemently opposed the release of the bombshell memo authored by Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which detailed how the dossier was presented as evidence to the FISA court. The senator accused Trump and Nunes of attacking the FBI and for “looking at the investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows,” McCain wrote in a statement the day the memo was released. “If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

None of these facts are addressed in McCain’s book. Simpson and Fusion GPS are not mentioned, even though Simpson was McCain’s source for the dossier. There was no acknowledgement that McCain and his associates were complicit—either unwittingly or intentionally—in a wide ranging plot to sabotage the incoming president of the United States by sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the election and Trump’s alleged fealty to Putin. Instead, McCain wrote that anyone who doubts his actions can “go to hell.”