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Ruth King

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Madmen and Nukes: North Korean Edition By Brandon J. Weichert

By on July 7th, 2017

The North Koreans put on their own pyrotechnic display over the July 4th weekend with a successful launch of an ICBM into the Sea of Japan. With a working ICBM, Kim Jong-Un’s regime is now capable of reaching Alaska. If they continue testing and learning from their previous launch, it is only a matter of time before the North Koreans could strike any major American city.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/06/madmen-nukes-north-korean-edition/

Time is all that stands in the way between Kim and the ability to incinerate Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. It wasn’t that long ago the North didn’t have nukes at all.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration wanted to strike a nuclear reactor in Yongbyon to prevent the North Koreans from recovering the raw materials necessary for making nuclear bombs. However, after looking at his options—the costs, both in terms of lives and treasure, that another Korean war would incur—former President Clinton chose to create a multilateral framework that would encourage the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for Western concessions.

The North’s demand was simple: if the United States did not want to see a nuclear-armed North Korea, they had to pay the Kim regime not to develop nukes.

The international community happily agreed. As it is with most blackmailers, however, paying the ransom only encouraged them to double down on bad behavior. The only difference in this instance was that the international community became complacent about the threat that North Korea posed because an “agreement” had been reached.

Meanwhile, the North Koreans took the blackmail money and invested it in their military—including their nuclear program—and in a program of enriching the corrupt members of the regime. They then systematically raised the stakes on the international community.

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, different combinations of carrots-and-sticks were paraded in front of the North Koreans in an attempt to stabilize relations and bring security and stability to the Korean Peninsula. Each time, the Kim Regime was unfazed. Indeed, in spite of sanctions, the North Koreans successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 2006. So, whether you’re Hillary Clinton demanding that Trump replicate her husband’s schemes from 1994, or if you’re Elliot Abrams insisting that Trump reinstitute the George W. Bush-era sanctions regime, you’re making an argument that—however different in particulars—is the same in its level of utter ineffectiveness. .

Over the last two decades, the North has become the hub of international criminal schemes, a critical point in the global human trafficking system; it has suborned international terrorism; and more importantly, it has become a major player in a global, illicit network of nuclear proliferation. On the international stage, North Korea’s nuclear shenanigans are protected by the Chinese and the Russians. The primary beneficiaries of all this are other rogue states, such as Iran. Clearly, this is not the kind of regime with which Americans should feel comfortable in the knowledge that it possesses nuclear weapons.

Many (until recently, myself included) had hoped China would apply pressure to goad Pyongyang into being more cooperative. It’s clear now that China won’t lift a finger to help (though Beijing will happily string the United States along, so the Chinese can extract more concessions from us). China fears what would happen if the Kim regime collapsed: their worst nightmare is for a human tidal wave of North Korean refugees to swamp their borders and destabilize their country. Plus, the Chinese historically favor “stability” above all else. They cannot be relied upon. And, now with Russia getting involved on behalf of North Korea, there is little hope for an international settlement on this issue. The autocrats will have each other’s backs.

Pyongyang has paid close attention to what has happened to similar autocratic dictatorships around the world that did not possess nuclear arms: America toppled them. Whether speaking about Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, a lack of nuclear arms makes such regimes susceptible to being overthrown by the United States. Meanwhile, similar regimes that may have nuclear arms—such as Iran—are given a wide berth by the United States.

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‘Collusion’ as Farce: The Hunt for Hillary’s Hackers By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 7th, 2017

Do you know what federal prosecutors do when a thief brings the FBI incriminating documents that he has swiped from his victim’s home?

They use the documents to convict the victim.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/06/collusion-farce-hunt-hillarys-hackers/
And they would use such stolen evidence to convict the victim even if the thief were a hacker. Even if the thief were a hacker from Russia!

If you find such government behavior unseemly, the New York Times will really give you the heebie-jeebies. The Paper of Record, as we shall see, would not only use stolen information; it would encourage the theft—arguably, a felony violation of federal law.

Once you grasp this, you get a sense of what drivel is the Hunt for Hillary’s Hackers, the latest Russia molehill that the Trump-deranged have fantasized into Mount Elbrus. Served up by the Wall Street Journal, it is the tale of a now-deceased Republican activist’s quest for the 33,000 emails former Secretary of State Clinton hoarded on a private server and attempted to destroy, in violation of various federal laws.

The heavy breathing belies a principle that should come as no surprise to journalists, as it is their bread and butter. As long as one is not complicit in a theft and has no fiduciary obligation to the victim, he is permitted to exploit stolen information that he chances upon.

Under the Fourth Amendment, for example, you are protected from the prosecutor’s use against you of evidence the government’s own agents have unlawfully seized from you; you have no protection, though, from a prosecutor’s using against you evidence stolen from you by some non-government actor—as long as the government was not a participant in the theft.

To be sure, federal and state laws exist that bar trafficking in stolen property. They are tough to enforce, however, due to difficulties in proving the receiver’s knowledge that the property was stolen (and, in most jurisdictions, assessing the property’s value). These laws, moreover, are geared toward fencers of stolen goods for profit. They are largely irrelevant in the realms of law-enforcement, media, and politics, where what matters is the information value, not the acquisition and sale of stolen items.

It is worth noting, then, that there was a time, not so long ago, when one might have thought the Wall Street Journal would be more interested in finding Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails than in identifying others who were looking for them.

The Journal’s story is yet another moving of the collusion goalpost. Remember (though doing so gets more and more difficult): the original allegation was that the Trump campaign conspired with the Putin regime to steal the 2016 election. There is no evidence of this—Russia did not steal the election, and Trump did not conspire with the Kremlin. So, the story shifted to the studiously vaporous claim that 1) Russia tried to “influence” the election—basically, by putting out information that was true but embarrassing to Democrats; and 2) Trump must have “colluded” in this effort because . . . well . . . because.

The problem for “collusion” is twofold. The embarrassing information in question (emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta), while interesting to political wonks, had no impact on the public, the vast majority of whom have no idea what a John Podesta is. More importantly, there is neither evidence nor commonsense reason to believe that Putin involved Trump in his shenanigans.

Thus, the narrative is morphing from “collusion” into “obstruction”—a half-baked accusation based on actions that were within Trump’s lawful discretion and defensible on the merits (viz., recommending against the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and dismissing FBI Director James Comey). The obstruction narrative reportedly has its own rabbit holes: suppositions about bribery, money laundering, and who knows what else wishful thinking will conjure up.

As the saga lumbers toward its final Mueller ex machina, the trick for the anti-Trump camp is to keep the Russia theme alive with new disclosures that are sensational (or at least sensationalized)—all the while hoping no one notices that each new disclosure makes the original “steal the election” allegation increasingly implausible.

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Zimbabwe’s Freedom Pastor Evan Mawarire, the anti-Mugabe By Jay Nordlinger

By on July 6th, 2017

One day last year, Evan Mawarire was feeling very low. He had just turned 39 — and he considered himself a failure. He had a wife and two children, which was great. And there was a third child on the way — also great. But Mawarire could barely make ends meet.

The family was living hand to mouth. Mawarire could not afford school fees for the children. He owned no home of his own. Prospects seemed negligible.

“I was dejected and frustrated,” Mawarire says, “but also, for the first time in a long time, I was angry.”

That was April 19. The 18th had been Zimbabwe’s independence day. And on the 19th, Mawarire sat down and made a four-minute video, with the Zimbabwean flag wrapped around his neck.

That flag is a colorful one. And all the colors have meanings. For example, red is supposed to stand for the blood that patriots shed in the liberation effort. But what would those patriots say about Zimbabwe now? What had they died for? That’s the kind of thing Mawarire asked in his video.

At the end of it, he asked Zimbabweans to stand up: for themselves, for their flag, and for their country.

He hesitated to post this video, naturally: He lives in a dictatorship. He knew the video could get him into big trouble. But post it he did, around midnight. After a hard, emotional day, he went to bed.

The next morning, he received a call from a friend, who had unexpected news: The video was going viral. It had struck a nerve among Zimbabweans. And it would lead to a democracy movement that travels under a hashtag, #ThisFlag.

Evan Mawarire does not see himself as a political leader. “I’m someone who has been able to express the views, the frustrations, and the hopes of an oppressed population.” But others see him as a political leader, including the regime. “I didn’t find it,” says Mawarire, of politics. “It found me.”

A word about pronunciation. That name is pronounced “Mah-wah-REER-ay.” And his first name, interestingly enough, is pronounced “Ee-VAHN” (though he also answers to the familiar “EH-vin”).

He was born in 1977, during the final days of Rhodesia. He spent his early childhood in a ghetto of Salisbury, the capital city (now Harare). In 1980, when independence came, Robert Mugabe took power. He still has it, 37 years later.

At 93, he is one of the oldest men ever to rule a country. Next year, there will be another of those sham elections that dictators sometimes feel the need of holding. Mugabe will run. If he dies, his wife has said, the ruling party will run his corpse.

Mawarire was brought up in a Christian home. His parents were civil servants. Evan worked in business for a while. But he also worked at church, teaching Sunday school and the like. And he found this much more fulfilling. “So I decided I would give my life to pastoring,” he says. He quit his job, went to Bible school, and indeed became a pastor. That was 15 years ago.

When he made his “flag” video, he did not stop there: He made 25 more videos, one a day from May 1 to May 25, which is Africa Day on the continent. Mawarire wanted Zimbabweans to think, “What kind of African nation do we wish to be?” In those videos, he discussed the various problems of Zimbabwe.

And he continued to strike nerves. The democracy movement grew. Mawarire’s repeated message was, It’s up to us to save ourselves. No one’s going to swoop in and help us. We have to claim our own country.

He tells me that, year after year, he watched rigged elections. “And I always yearned for someone to come to our rescue: regional powers, or the African Union, or the United Nations. But there is so much happening across the world, there is no one to listen to your own troubles. We have to rescue ourselves.”

Mawarire and his movement have a slogan: “If we cannot cause the politician to change, then we must inspire the citizen to be bold.”

Zimbabwe is in desperate shape — it is desperately poor. Unemployment is something like 95 percent. And more than half the population is under the age of 25. Silvanos Mudzvova has something funny to say, regarding this mass joblessness.

He is a Zimbabwean actor, playwright, and activist. He is also a guest of the Oslo Freedom Forum, as is Pastor Mawarire. (It is in Oslo that I talk with Mawarire.) In Zimbabwe, Mudzvova used theater as a form of protest. In a country where nobody’s working, he quips, “you are assured of an audience within minutes.”

They arrested him many, many times — so many times, he lost count. Finally, they tortured him almost to death, leaving him paralyzed on one side. Mudzvova now lives in exile, in Britain.

Last July 6, there was a mass protest in Zimbabwe. And, six days later, Evan Mawarire was arrested. The charge was incitement to violence. What happened next, as people have noted, is straight out of a movie.

The courthouse for Mawarire’s hearing was packed to the rafters. People were singing: worship songs, church songs. Outside, there were thousands of people, also singing. Mawarire could hear it from his prison cell. The young guards were amazed: They had never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else.

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The Canadian Terrorist Who Killed a U.S. Soldier Has Been Awarded $8 Million Omar Khadr has been awarded millions in compensation for his alleged mistreatment while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. By Elliot Kaufman

By on July 6th, 2017

Omar Khadr has been tremendously lucky, all things considered. In July 2002, he killed U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer, a medic, with a hand grenade. The grenade also injured Sergeant Layne Morris, costing him an eye. Luckily for Khadr, however, another American medic saved Khadr’s life — all while working next to the corpse of his slain comrade.

Now, just 15 years later, Khadr, a Canadian citizen, will be awarded roughly $8 million ($10.5 million in Canadian dollars) and an apology from the Canadian government in a settlement negotiated with Khadr’s lawyers. The money is in compensation for Canada’s cooperation with his American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. Sergeant Layne and Sergeant Speer’s widow, Tabitha, have yet to receive a penny.

“Odious. Confessed terrorist who assembled & planted the same kind of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] that killed 97 Canadians to be given $10-million by Justin Trudeau,” Jason Kenney, a former Conservative-party minister, tweeted. Many in Canada feel the same way.

They are right to. This agreement is, on its face, unjust. Khadr was a terrorist, acting in violation of the laws of war. Then, in his apotheosis, surrounded and clearly defeated by American troops, Khadr still chose to lob that grenade. In fact, he pled guilty to doing so in 2010 before a U.S. military commission. You can even watch a video, made by Khadr and his terrorist buddies, of Khadr constructing the type of IEDs that killed so many Western troops.

But the story gets more complicated. Khadr was only 15 years old when he killed one U.S. soldier and blinded another. Born into an extremist family, Khadr is the son of a financier and associate of al-Qaeda. As a boy, Omar once stayed in Osama bin Laden’s house. He went on to be the youngest prisoner in Guantanamo. Khadr also claims that his confession at Guantanamo was coerced, and that he does not know if he threw the grenade.

In 2003, Canadian intelligence obtained evidence from Khadr in Guantanamo and shared it with U.S. officials. According to the supreme court of Canada, this evidence was obtained under “oppressive circumstances.” Canada’s (and, by extension, America’s) actions constituted a failure to uphold the “principles of fundamental justice,” according to the Canadian court.

It is likely that Khadr was mistreated at Guantanamo. It is also likely that the Canadian government failed in its obligation to protect the rights of its citizen, even if that citizen was fighting in Afghanistan against Canada and its allies. Perhaps this made some form of compensation for this failure inevitable. But that doesn’t make the situation right.

Omar Khadr has claimed that he will show Canada he is now a “good person.” If he is a man of his word, he will give his millions to the victims of his crimes. His “youthful indiscretions,” after all, were not like yours or mine; he likely killed a man and blinded another, taking up arms in adherence to a vicious ideology. No matter what Khadr went through, Sergeant Morris and Tabitha Speer are far more deserving of compensation. Now working toward a nursing degree in Edmonton, Alberta, Khadr will be just fine. Indeed, he is lucky (and indebted to American soldiers) just to be alive. But for his victims and their survivors, life cannot simply “go on.”

If Khadr will not do the right thing and give up the money, it should be taken from him. In 2015, an American judge granted Morris and Speer’s widow $134.2 million in damages for their losses. At the time, however, Khadr was penniless. No collection ever happened. Now that Khadr is flush with the Canadian government’s cash, collection should proceed apace. An application has already been filed to that end, but it will require the cooperation of Canadian courts.

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Lord Ismay, NATO, and the Old-New World Order What has become of the prescient post-WWII dictum ‘Russians out, Americans in, Germans down’? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 6th, 2017

The accomplished and insightful British general Hasting Ismay is remembered today largely because of his famous assessment of NATO, offered when he was the alliance’s first secretary general. The purpose of the new treaty organization founded in 1952, Ismay asserted, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Ismay formulated that aphorism at the height of a new Cold War. The Soviet Red Army threatened to overrun Western Europe all the way to the English Channel. And few knew who or what exactly could stop it.

A traditionally isolationist United States was still debating its proper role after once again intervening on the winning side in a distant catastrophic European war — only to see its most powerful ally of WWII, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, become the victorious democracies’ most dangerous post-war foe.

A divided Germany had become the new trip wire of the free world against a continental and monolithic nuclear Soviet Union and its bloc.

Nonetheless, note carefully what Ismay did not say.

He did not refer to keeping the “Soviet Union” out of the Western alliance (which the Soviets had once desired to join, a request that Ismay compared to inviting a burglar onto the police force).

Ismay did not cite the need to ensure that Nazi Germany never returned.

He did not insist that the inclusion of Great Britain was essential to NATO’s tripartite mission.

Why?

Ismay, a favorite of Churchill’s and a military adviser to British governments, had a remarkable sense of history — namely that constants such as historical memory, geography, and national character always transcend the politics of the day.

Russians from the days of the czars have wanted to extend their western influence into Europe. Russia was often a threat, given its large population and territory and rich natural resources — and it was also more autocratic and more volatile than many of its vulnerable European neighbors.

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Trump Admin Authorizes Strikes on Iranian-Backed Forces Officials: ‘We’re determined to defend ourselves’ against Iran in Syria by Adam Kredo

By on July 6th, 2017

U.S. forces have been instructed to take all measures needed to protect American interests in Syria, including military measures, as part of an effort that comes after top officials in the Trump administration assessed that Iran is deliberately probing American weaknesses and reactions on the Syrian battlefield, according to senior Trump administration officials who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Iran-backed forces, including Hezbollah, have already initiated multiple encounters with the United States by violating agreements worked out between Washington and Moscow aimed at preventing the various factions targeting ISIS inside Syria from coming into conflict. This is part of a campaign that analysts inside and outside the White House believe is aimed at testing the Trump administration’s resolve, sources said.

“That was very clearly a process of the Iranians and Hezbollah and [the] Syrian regime probing and testing our limits, and testing how much we were willing to do,” one senior Trump administration official said. “In every case, it was a matter of them testing and probing, and us responding by defending ourselves.”

These clashes were the result of pro-Syrian regime forces, including Iran and Hezbollah, “violating a de-confliction measure that had been worked out with the Russians,” the official said. “The forces violated the measure.”

The Trump administration has instructed U.S. forces to respond to Iranian attacks with force if necessary.

“What they found out very quickly,” said the official, was “us responding by defending ourselves. What was established was that we’re determined to defend ourselves.”

This defensive action is being implemented at the same time the Trump administration turns its attention to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Islamic Republic’s paramilitary force that coordinates operations in Syria and other warzones.

Trump administration officials view the IRGC as being part of “every malignant protrusion of the Iranian regime,” according to one administration official, who said the White House is dually focused on choking off this force.

The actions by U.S. forces are part of a broader pushback against Iran, ranging from battlefield responses to diplomatic action, according to a veteran Iran policy analyst who has been briefed by the White House both on parts of the Syria strategy and on parts of an ongoing Iran policy review being conducted by the administration.

The Free Beacon first reported many details of the review several weeks ago, including actions by the Trump administration to potentially block the sale of U.S. commercial aircraft to Tehran.

“For the first time since the U.S. intervened into the Syrian conflict, American forces have been authorized to do take all measures to defend U.S. interests against Iranian provocations and aggression,” said the source. “This is part of a concrete strategy that has already been implemented in part, and is being bolstered every day, but very senior Trump officials. No more of watching U.S. forces get rolled in Syria, and also no more of thanking Iran after they seize our sailors in the Gulf.

One senior Trump administration official familiar with the Iran policy review said the White House is currently “in the thick of it,” evaluating a range of options to confront Iran’s global terror operations.

The review expands far beyond the landmark nuclear deal, according to the administration officials.

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Here’s How Anti-Conservative Academic Discrimination Works Students loved Keith Fink’s free-speech classes at UCLA. Other professors did not. By David French

By on July 6th, 2017

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a lengthy report on the curious case of Keith Fink, a part-time lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA refused to renew his contract, writing in a letter that his teaching did not “meet the standard of excellence.” Fink cried foul, arguing that his free-speech classes were popular with students and that he was really fired for his pointed criticisms of the university and his stalwart defense of free speech on campus.

And, in fact, he was popular. As the Chronicle notes, “Student evaluations of the free-speech course Mr. Fink taught this year . . . mostly paint a picture of Mr. Fink as an engaging teacher and his course as stimulating and interesting.” His faculty evaluators, however, believed that there was “more to it than what the students think.” They took issue with his Socratic method of teaching (common in law schools), believed that he pushed his own point of view too much, and raised concerns about the “climate” in the classroom.

As I read the story, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. I’ve litigated cases like this before, I’ve evaluated cases like this before, and I’m familiar with the extraordinary double standards that define how academic freedom works in modern higher education. Perhaps UCLA is right. Perhaps it has even-handedly applied its alleged “incredibly high” standards and has fired popular left-wing lecturers in part because they’ve pushed their views too much on their students. Perhaps it routinely fires even popular teachers for poor teaching performance. In other words, perhaps it’s different from the vast majority of colleges and universities — schools that have consciously and unconsciously created entire systems of anti-conservative discrimination.

First, let’s discuss the challenge of even finding a job in higher education. It’s difficult enough for even well-qualified leftists, but often academic departments define academic positions in such a way that effectively excludes the conservative point of view. Look at this current job posting at Harvard’s divinity school. It’s for a tenure-track professor of “religion, violence, and peace-building.” There’s nothing inherently conservative or liberal about the topic. Indeed, it fascinates me, but hidden within the job description is this gem of a sentence:

It is understood that applicants will employ forms of analysis that address race, gender, sexuality, and/or other intersecting forms of social power, such as womanist, feminist, and/or queer approaches. [Emphasis added.]

Ahh yes, “intersectionality” rears its radical head. While this posting is extreme (though at an important institution), it perfectly illustrates a long-building phenomenon. Academics have redefined and refocused disciplines to such an extent that they essentially exclude conservative inquiry. Thus, they can honestly say they’ve never discussed politics in hiring decisions because the discipline itself has narrowed so much that it closes itself to conservatives.

Consider this statement, years ago, from the American Association of University Professors’ Roger Bowen. He was defending universities from the charge of ideological discrimination in hiring. First, he said this:

I’ve been a department chair, I’ve been a college president. I’ve conducted more searches than I can begin to describe, and I can tell you I have never asked a candidate what his or her party identification is, and I don’t know of a search committee in the country that would do that.

I’d agree with Bowen. In all my years representing conservative professors, I’ve never seen questions regarding party identification. But that’s a red herring. Search committees aren’t that blatant. They don’t have to be. Here’s the key quote:

Anthropologists — which apparently, according to the study, Democrats far outnumber Republicans [among anthropologists] — what do they do? Anthropologists, the discipline itself is focused on questioning religious and cultural myth, particularly myth that celebrates national, cultural or racial superiorities. That in many classrooms will be a shocker for a lot of students.

Sociologists tend to inquire on the origins of inequality as a source of alienation: new concepts to many college students that will seem, I imagine, given illustrations using the American example, rather shocking.

Political scientists, they focus on questions of legitimacy. . . .

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The Fracking Industry Deserves Our Gratitude It has given America virtual energy independence, freeing it from the leverage of often hostile Middle East regimes. By Victor Davis Hanson —

By on July 6th, 2017

Less than ten years ago, America’s energy future looked bleak.

World oil prices in 2008 had spiked to more than $100 per barrel of crude.

“Peak oil” — the theory that the world had already extracted more crude oil than was still left in the ground — was America’s supposed bleak fate. Ten years ago, rising gas prices, spiraling trade deficits, and ongoing war in the oil-rich Middle East only underscored America’s precarious dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Despite news of a radically improved but relatively old technology called “fracking” — drilling into shale rock and injecting water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure to hydraulically “fracture” the rock and create seams from which petroleum and natural gas are released — few saw much hope.

In 2012, when gas prices were hitting $4 a gallon in some areas, President Obama admonished the country that we “can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” That was a putdown of former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s refrain “Drill, baby, drill.”

Obama barred new oil and gas permits on federal lands. Steven Chu, who would become secretary of energy in the Obama administration, had earlier mused that gas prices might ideally rise to European levels (about $10 a gallon), thereby forcing Americans to turn to expensive subsidized alternative green fuels.

But over the last five years, frackers have refined their craft on private properties, finding ever cheaper and more efficient ways to extract huge amounts of crude oil and natural gas from shale rock.

In 2017, despite millions of square miles being off limits to drillers, America is close to reaching 10 million barrels of crude-oil production per day, the highest level in the nation’s history. The U.S. may soon surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest petroleum producer.

When American natural gas (about 20 percent of the world total) and coal (the largest reserves in the world) are factored into the fossil-fuel equation, the U.S. is already the largest producer of energy in the world.

While environmentalists worry about polluting the water table and heightening seismic activity through hydraulic fracturing, fracking seems to become more environmentally sensitive each year.

When OPEC and other overseas producers tried to bankrupt frackers by flooding the world with their supposedly more cheaply produced oil, the effort backfired. American entrepreneurs learned to frack oil and natural gas even more cheaply and undercut the foreign gambit. The result is a windfall for all sectors of the American economy.

From 2014 to 2016, fracking helped cut the price of gasoline by $1.50 a gallon, saving American drivers an average of more than $1,000 per year.

Due to the fracking of natural gas, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions by about 12 percent over the last decade (according to the Energy Information Administration) — at a far greater rate than the environmentally conscious European Union.

Fracking and cheaper gas are allowing a critical breathing space for strapped American consumers, as alternative energy production and transportation slowly become more efficient and competitive.

Fracking has created a national savings of about 5 million barrels of imported oil per day over the last decade. That translates to roughly $100 billion in annual savings by avoiding foreign oil.

Fracking has allowed the U.S. to enjoy some of the lowest electricity rates and gas prices in the industrial world. The result is that cheap energy costs are luring all sorts of energy-intensive industries — from aluminum to plastics to fertilizers — back to the United States, with the potential of creating millions of new, high-paying jobs.

Fracking has given America virtual energy independence, freeing it from the leverage of unstable and often hostile Middle East regimes. The result is less need to interfere in the chronic squabbling in the oil-rich but unstable Persian Gulf.

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Gangsta News Network Trump-deranged CNN extorts online satirist for making fun of it. Matthew Vadum

By on July 6th, 2017

CNN’s case of Trump Derangement Syndrome has become so monstrously acute the network is now hunting down and extorting those who mock it online.

And if there is one thing mendacious, entitled, left-wing journalists hate, it’s being ridiculed in public. So the network, whose anti-Trump stories outdo even the Soviet echo chamber that is MSNBC, threatened to “dox” the mocker. “Doxing” is putting a person’s private information such as a home address, telephone number, or Social Security Number online for the world to see.

This, the latest in a long line of CNN intrigues, began Sunday when President Trump tweeted a modified 10-year-old video of his guest-star appearance at a wrestling match. What apparently earned CNN’s ire was the fact that its corporate logo was superimposed over the face of the person Trump is shown pretending to rough up. After Trump finishes with “CNN,” a graphic for a made-up “FNN: Fraud News Network” is conspicuously displayed.

CNN’s KFile investigative squad, run by world-class sleaze and character assassin Andrew Kaczynski, then claimed to have found the Reddit user who created the now-wildly popular animated meme – in Internet parlance, a GIF file – showing a hands-on Trump making America great again by putting the hurt on the Atlanta-based fake news network whose singular mission at the moment is to take down the nation’s democratically-elected 45th president.

CNN’s Kaczynski declared the network would not reveal the true identity of Reddit user, HannAssholeSolo, who generated the meme, “because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again.”

But then Kaczynski offered what certainly seems like prima facie evidence of extortion against the Reddit user: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

Later the network added this lame explanation to the public record:

CNN decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety. Any assertion that the network blackmailed or coerced him is false. The user, who is an adult male, not a 15-year-old boy, apologized and deleted his account before ever speaking with our reporter. CNN never made any deal, of any kind, with the user. In fact, CNN included its decision to withhold the user’s identity in an effort to be completely transparent that there was no deal.

Sometimes CNN and Kaczynski don’t know when to stop digging.

“It’s unclear what the person did that would necessitate an apology or why the GIF constitutes ‘ugly behavior, but in any case CNN threatened “to publish his identity should any of that change,” Mark Tapson writes. “Now #CNNBlackmail is a top trend on Twitter.”

CNN’s actions are clearly grossly unethical and, as suggested above, are likely criminal.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote that the media outlet’s behavior was “[t]roubling.”

“I assume CNN’s lawyers are examining GA § 16-8-16 Theft by extortion. If CNN constructively obtained the gif-maker’s IP… it’s a GA crime if they threatened to ‘Disseminate any information tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt, or ridicule….’” he wrote.

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The New Left’s Fake Patriotism You can’t hate America and be a patriot. Daniel Greenfield

By on July 6th, 2017

If anyone doubts that patriotism really is the last refuge of a scoundrel, a recent CNN article boasts that liberals are reclaiming patriotism. After going through their musty attics, tossing aside copies of Howard Zinn’s revisionist Marxist history of America and all the “U.S. Out of Everywhere” buttons, they found their patriotism, moth-eaten, covered in dust and a little worse for the wear. But otherwise intact.

That’s right, progressives are patriotic again. Again refers to the brief period between the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union necessitated a sudden outburst of pro-war sentiment and the beginning of the Cold War when the Communists became the enemy again.

When the left acts as if WW2 was the only good war, it’s because it was the only war that didn’t force them to choose between their sympathies for Communism and their United States citizenship.

Every time they did have to make that choice, history records their duplicity and sordid treason.

The new left-wing patriotism doesn’t consist of actually loving this country. Or discarding their conviction that America is the worst thing that ever happened to this continent and this planet.

Instead, conveniently, the new patriotism consists of hating President Trump.

When Hillary’s people decided to shift the blame for losing the election from their unlikable candidate, their incompetent campaign operation and the good sense of the voters to a vast Russian conspiracy, the left became patriotic. And by “patriotic”, they mean blaming the results of an election on Russia.

It’s not that the left actually hates Russia. Before Hillary decided to blame the Russians for her own unlikability, she was mugging for the camera with one of Putin’s henchmen and wielding a misspelled Reset Button.

Why a reset button?

Back then the born-again patriots of the left had accused President Bush of alienating Russia (and the rest of the world) with his cowboy diplomacy. Obama and his team of sensitive diplomats would replace cowboy diplomacy with cowardly diplomacy. That was why Hillary’s people pried a swimming pool button out of a pool so she could show off the new “Reset” with Russia. It was why Obama sold out traditional allies to appease Putin. It was why he was caught on a hot mic telling another of Putin’s people that he would have more flexibility to appease him after the election.

All this has been forgotten in a rush of revisionist patriotism. Traitors now masquerade as patriots. Last year’s appeasers now stick out their chests and act as if they’re Ronald Reagan, not Jimmy Carter.

Don’t expect it to last. If you doubt that, Al Gore once attacked Bush for being soft on Saddam.

As tensions with Russia grow over Syria, the born-again patriots will be reborn as appeasers. The next Democrat will run for the White House promising to restore our relationship with Russia. And he’ll blame President Trump for ruining our previously congenial relations with cowboy diplomacy.

History will once again be rewritten. Russia was always our friend. Lefties were always advocates of diplomatic relations and opponents of wars. But we will have always been at war with Eastasia.

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