RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat who was stationed in Washington for many years, said that US President Barack Obama’s interview on Channel Two earlier this week was a showcase for his complete lack of understanding on the situation in the Middle East.

“After all, this is the president who claimed that the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere would lead to democracy in the Arab world,” he told Arutz Sheva.

“This is the president who, in his famous speech in Cairo five years ago, proclaimed that ‘Islam has always been part of American history,’ when of course any grade school student knows that this is not the case,” Ettinger asserted.

Mosaic Magazine, Neal Kozodoy’s website of Jewish ideas, published last month an essay by Tikvah Fund president Eric Cohen entitled “The Spirit of Jewish Conservatism,” and invited an enormous range of Jewish and other conservative thinkers to comment. I couldn’t finish Cohen’s rambling essay, but the responses make for pithy reading. Cohen proposes to nudge American Jews away from liberalism towards conservatism on the strength of nationalism, historical identity and wealth creation. Like his mentor Leon Kass and many of the Chicago political philosophers of the past generation, Cohen wants to reproduce the benefits of religion without the unpleasant bit about fear and trembling. It’s an unsuccessful as well as a dated view, and most of the respondents invited by Mosaic to comment shredded Cohen’s argument.