JOHN SCHINDLER: Turning the FBI into the White House’s political pawn may be Obama’s single worst legacy.
Archive for 2016
September 26, 2016
THANKS, FRACKERS! Don’t Look Now, but the Global Oil Surplus Just Tripled.
Way back in June of 2014, oil was trading above $110 per barrel and producers were sitting pretty. Now, some 27 months later, those same producers have been put through the wringer and been forced to endure prices that dipped as low as $27 per barrel at the start of this year before recently settling in the $40-50 range. A global oversupply precipitated this price collapse, and its persistence has been as much of a boon for buyers as it has been a headache for sellers. Now, as Bloomberg reports, that glut appears to have tripled over the course of the past month. . . .
This ought to give the delegates from various petrostates assembling in Algiers next week extra motivation to come to an agreement to freeze their collective agreement. The Saudis, for their part, seem more willing to play ball this time around, and have reportedly agreed to cut production by 1 million barrels per day if Iran joins in and other countries roll back their output to levels they hit earlier this year.
But while we wait for that meeting and analysts vacillate back and forth on the likelihood of a consensus emerging, it’s worth taking a step back to look at the bigger energy picture here: the world is awash in oil (and natural gas too, for that matter), and those cheap hydrocarbon inputs will be welcomed by all sectors of the global economy besides, of course, the oil and gas industry. Moreover, it bodes well for future global energy security that after all the peak oil hand wringing, suppliers around the world keep finding and extracting more and more of one of civilization’s most important commodities.
I remember when “Peak Oil” was settled science, and if you didn’t believe in it you were a shill for Exxon or something.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Students Scream, Swear at U of Kansas Classmates for Questioning Safe Spaces.
When do the SJWs break out the dunce caps for dissenters and heretics?
SIMON TISDALL: Barack Obama’s ‘Asian pivot’ failed. China is in the ascendancy.
The China dilemma extends far beyond the South China Sea. Having made nuclear disarmament a top priority in 2009, Obama has failed dismally to halt North Korea’s accelerating pursuit of nuclear weapons. The threat was underscored by Pyongyang’s biggest ever test explosion earlier this month. China, the only country with real leverage, has helped impose additional UN sanctions on North Korea. But it has consistently balked at taking game-changing measures, such as cutting off fuel oil supplies, which could force Kim Jong-un to think again. Beijing also says it will block “unilateral” measures by other countries.
Obama’s impotence has intensified questions in Japan and elsewhere about the credibility of the American security umbrella, encouraging nationalists who argue that Tokyo should re-arm in earnest – or even deploy its own nuclear weapons. But their main concern is not North Korea – it is China.
Xi is not looking for a fight. His first-choice agent of change is money, not munitions. According to Xi’s “One Belt, One Road” plan, his preferred path to 21st-century Chinese hegemony is through expanded trade, business and economic partnerships extending from Asia to the Middle East and Africa. China’s massive Silk Road investments in central and west Asian oil and gas pipelines, high-speed rail and ports, backed by new institutions such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, are part of this strategy, which simultaneously encourages political and economic dependencies. Deng Xiaoping once said to get rich is glorious. Xi might add it is also empowering.
Read the whole thing — and, mind you, this is coming from The Guardian.
ANDREW KLAVAN POSTS AN EXCERPT FROM HIS NEW BOOK, THE GREAT GOOD THING.
SCOTT ADAMS: Why I Switched My Endorsement From Clinton To Trump: “As most of you know, I had been endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, for my personal safety, because I live in California. It isn’t safe to be a Trump supporter where I live. And it’s bad for business too. But recently I switched my endorsement to Trump, and I owe you an explanation. So here it goes.”
Plus: “Clinton wants to insult Putin into doing what we want. That approach seems dangerous as hell to me.”
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JOURNALISM AS STENOGRAPHY: Where did all those ‘Trump Lies’ articles come from this weekend? The Clinton campaign, of course. “So the weekend before the first presidential debate, four major news publications all print the same story, the content and tone of which (calling out one candidate over the other as a serial liar) Stelter concedes is ‘extraordinary,’ and it’s all just a ‘coincidence’ with no coordination between the publications and certainly none with the campaign? Uh huh. Hey wait… what’s this over here on the Hillary Clinton campaign website published on Friday, the day before all the articles published at the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Politico?” . . . As if the message wasn’t clear enough in the post, the Clinton campaign was sure to hammer the story assignments home by conducting a special conference call on the topic for members of the media. According to Jason Easly at PoliticsUSA, the conference call included more pressure on debate moderator Lester Holt.”
FEELGOOD HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Nude Mike Rowe Sees Drone Outside Bedroom Window, Pulls Shotgun.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
"Trump has all the right enemies" in the eyes of his supporters says @mikeallen
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) September 26, 2016
TRUMP MEETS WITH NETANYAHU.
Read the whole thing.
Related: You stay classy, New York — Netanyahu booed by audience at Hamilton.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.
But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.
Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.
—“Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing,” Paul Farhi, the Washington Post, Friday.
Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.
It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.
But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.
—The late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman (a job the Post has since eliminated), November 16, 2008.
—Button worn by the late Ginny Carroll to the 1992 Republican convention. Carroll was a bureau chief for Newsweek, then owned by the Washington Post.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that Farhi has tried to play these semantic games: As Tim Graham of NewsBusters paraphrased a similar Farhi column in 2012, “WashPost Writes The Public Be Damned: They’re Biased If They Think We’re Biased.”
Perhaps Iowahawk has the best response to Farhi’s latest column, and its smug headline, “Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.” “Okay, how about we just call you assholes,” he tweeted yesterday.
Or Democrat operatives with bylines. Often the two phrases are quite interchangeable. (Unexpectedly.)
All of which is why, as Kurt Schlichter writes, “We’re Laughing at the Self-Destruction of the Media Gatekeepers.”
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Writer Charged With Insulting Islam Is Killed as Extremism Boils Over in Jordan.
Some of the most extreme elements in Jordan made clear in recent weeks that Nahed Hattar should pay for a provocative cartoon he posted online depicting a bearded man in bed with two women ordering God to bring him cashews and wine.
So when Mr. Hattar, 56, a prominent writer from a Christian family, showed up at a court on Sunday to face criminal charges of insulting Islam, at least one man with a gun decided a trial was not enough. As three bullets ripped through the writer in front of the courthouse, Jordan’s simmering tensions boiled over.
The brazen daylight killing of Mr. Hattar in front of his horrified family was not only the latest example of violence tied to cartoon renderings of Muslim figures, it was also the sort of manifestation of extremism that Jordan’s government has struggled to contain in a nation that finds itself under pressure from multiple directions.
Israel is going to find itself spread awfully thin if Jordan comes apart.
SALENA ZITO: These Are The People Who Could Win Trump The Election. “This little town used to be the hub of the Ohio Valley. Now we are the bottom of the barrel.”
BLOOMBERG: Trump, Clinton Deadlocked in Bloomberg Poll Before Key Debate. “The Republican and Democratic nominees each get 46 percent of likely voters in a head-to-head contest in the latest Bloomberg Politics national poll, while Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent when third-party candidates are included.”
Related: CNN/ORC polls: Trump, Clinton deadlocked in Colorado, Pennsylvania.
ANN ALTHOUSE: It’s kinda misogynistic for John Podesta to be calling Gennifer Flowers a woman of the sewer. “Whatever these people want to say about Trump, they should say it about Trump, but they instinctively jumped to express disgust toward the woman — who’s really just a bystander to the pre-debate mind-games. Is this misogyny? The argument that it is not depends on the idea that the disgust is with sexuality — what happens when the man and the woman — Bill and Gennifer — get together and not with the woman herself. But the instinct — in both Podesta and Cutter — was to take the man out of the picture. Bill, like Mark Cuban, is legitimate. That horrible woman over there should be treated as a nonentity — down in a hole, there in the excrement, a rodent, a filthy pest. Anyone who would name her or treat her with equal dignity has himself fallen down into the sewer with her.”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: An Unarmed White Man Is Shot by a Cop, and Black Activists Rally.
Over the last several months, the phrase “white lives matter” has been derided by many as a willfully obtuse (and usually racist) response to the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly in light of the disproportionate number of African-Americans shot by police.
But one group of mostly African-American civil rights leaders is stepping up to question a deputy’s shooting of an unarmed, white, homeless man in Castaic — because it just might be the right thing to do.
“We can’t only be advocates when black people are killed by police unjustly,” says Najee Ali, founder of Project Islamic Hope.
Viewing the problem through a racial lens has political benefits for some, but it actually makes the problem harder to solve. And it’s not like plenty of white people aren’t shot by police, too (and in many of the recent shootings, the police officer was black, under a black chief). You want police to only shoot people when it’s absolutely necessary, regardless of their race. Like the NRA’s (somewhat slow, but still important) call for an investigation in the Philando Castile case, where a black man with a CCW was shot, we need this stuff to cross racial lines. Making it all about race is a formula for paralysis.
HILLARY DELETED NEARLY 1,000 EMAILS WITH PETRAEUS, and 26 other things we learned from Clinton’s FBI files.
And as Roger Simon noted on Saturday, Obama’s Colossal Email Lie Final Test for Tarnished MSM.
(Via Dan Riehl.)
I THOUGHT THIS WAS JUST A MYTH: CBS4 Investigation Finds Dead Voters Casting Ballots In Colorado.
CUE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: A Millennial’s ObamaCare Lament.
Since ObamaCare’s implementation three years ago, the percentage of enrollees under 34 has remained steady every year at about 28%. According to the Census, some 16% of Americans between 25 and 34 have opted to remain uninsured, which is 71% higher than the uninsured rate for 45- to 65-year-olds.
But without our premiums, health insurers can’t turn the profit they were counting on. Their only options are to raise premiums on everyone else or abandon the ObamaCare exchanges. That’s why premiums are skyrocketing almost everywhere and why more than 40 insurers have abandoned the law in the past two years.
There aren’t enough “I-told-you-so’s” in the world.
(If you need to, you might find a way past the WSJ’s paywall here.)
TOMORROW’S ENVIRONMENTAL SCARE TODAY! Earth’s atmosphere is slowly leaking oxygen, and scientists aren’t sure why.
I blame the Frisbee Ion.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Brookings: End The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Bonanza For Graduate And Professional Schools. Note that this is Brookings, not a right-leaning think tank like Heritage. The graphics are shocking. Here’s just one:
YOUR SCARY-ASS CHARTS OF THE DAY: The Economy in Pictures.