SECSTATE TILLERSON: Trump Underscores Terror Fight ‘Has Nothing to Do with Religion’

ROGER SIMON: Huge Arms Sale to Saudis Makes Trump-Russia Collusion Ridiculous.

I’m so old, I remember when the DNC-MSM scoffed at the notion of Russians under every bed. But I’m sure they’ll keep looking for them here.

DRAINING THE SWAMP? Trump moves to block ethics inquiry centered on ex-lobbyists.

The New York Times reports that the White House sent a letter to the head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) challenging its legal authority to request that information.

“It is an extraordinary thing,” Walter Shaub Jr., the director of the ethics office, told the Times. “I have never seen anything like it.”

The letter sent by Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, questions whether the ethics office has the authority to demand information regarding ex-lobbyists who are currently working in the federal government.

“This data call appears to raise legal questions regarding the scope of OGE’s authorities,” the letter reads. “I therefore request that you stay the data call until these questions are resolved.”

Trump signed an executive order in January that enacted a two-year ban on lobbyists being hired for federal government positions in “particular” agencies as part of a broader “ethics pledge.”

This looks more like a turf battle than anything sinister, but that doesn’t mean it looks good.

CHANGE: North Korea says missile meets all specifications, ready for mass-production.

The North fired the missile into waters off its east coast on Sunday, its second missile test in a week, which South Korea said dashed the hopes of the South’s new liberal government under President Moon Jae-in for peace between the neighbors.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised the test of the Pukguksong-2, which confirmed reliable late-stage guidance of the warhead and the functioning of a solid-fuel engine, the KCNA state news agency said.

It quoted Kim as saying the Pukguksong-2 met all the required technical specifications so should now be mass-produced and deployed to the Korean People’s Army strategic battle unit.

Pyongyang has defied all calls to rein in its nuclear and missile programs, even from China, its lone major ally, saying the weapons are needed for defense against U.S. aggression.

Next up: More nuclear tests for making warheads small enough to be delivered by the Pukguksong-2.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? OPEC’s Coffers Are Drying Up.

OPEC’s members brought in less cash from selling oil in 2016 than in any of the past dozen years. That grim reality comes to us courtesy of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. . . .

That 15 percent year-on-year decline is a dramatic example of the fiscal pain these petrostate regimes are enduring as a result of the collapse in crude prices. Those low prices come to us courtesy of American shale producers, whose output contributed to a global glut that brought prices from their $100+ per barrel levels down to the $50 range they occupy today.

Those lost export revenues are why OPEC, along with a group of 11 other petrostate producers (including Russia), have agreed at last to reduce their collective output in an attempt to rebalance the market. But a look at the latest data shows that that rebalancing is going to take a lot more time than was initially envisioned, and Riyadh and Moscow both think they’ll be constraining production through March of next year.

In the meantime, U.S. producers are seeing their own output rise and the numbers in their balance books turn black once again.

This is huge, and isn’t getting enough attention. It’s the biggest power realignment since the end of the Cold War.

IRAQ: After ISIL Comes The Iranian Threat.

JACK DUNPHY ON TRUMP AND THE DNC-MSM’s CONTINUOUS FREAKOUT: Keep Watching the News, But Be Very Skeptical of Everything You Are Told.

That’s always good advice when consuming the news.

WONDERFUL RADIO, MARVELOUS RADIO: Earth’s radio signals may be protecting it from space radiation.

KURT SCHLICHTER GIVES TRUMP AN A+ SO FAR: “There can be no serious debate. Donald Trump has done a truly outstanding job of not being Hillary Clinton. His not being Hillary Clinton was and remains my sole expectation of Donald Trump’s presidency. Nothing else matters in the end; it is enough that Trump foiled Felonia von Pantsuit’s creepy scheme to subjugate forever the deplorable mass of normal people she despises.”

Plus:

Here’s the brutal reality: No matter what Trump does, he will always be evil, awful, criminal, and/or treasonous. It doesn’t matter if he does something good. It’s doesn’t matter if Obama famously did the same thing – or worse. It doesn’t matter if it’s an outright and obvious lie. It will never stop. The soft coup plotters’ plan is to generate a constant barrage of bullSchumer designed to eventually browbeat the weak-hearted among the GOP into going along with their impeachment scheme as the first step on the road to the left retaking power and consolidating it so that we normals can never again have our voices heard.

If you want to blame Trump for the phony “controversy” surrounding him, ask yourself – what actions could he take that would stop the liberal feeding frenzy? Be nicer and gentler and act like “the bigger man? Worked great for W.

Puh-leeze.

True. Weirdly, it’s the people claiming that Trump’s a tool for Putin to destabilize American politics who are taking the actions that destabilize American politics.

CHOOSING SIDES: Berkeley Invited Pro-Terror Groups to Planned Forum on ‘Responding’ to Conservative Speakers.

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STANDING UP AGAINST FAKE NEWS:

KIM DOTCOM: ‘I Knew Seth Rich. I Know He Was the Wikileaks Source.’

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIALIZES: Student loan payments are keeping young people from getting on with life, delaying marriage and homeownership.

If only there had been some kind of warning.

FLIGHT OF THE VALKYRIE: North American XB-70A Valkyrie — a beautiful plane. The photo is tentatively dated 1964.

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: DNC Chair Tom Perez heckled by Sanders’ camp in California.

RECALIBRATING PRODUCTIVITY STATISTICS: Walter Russell Mead explores the implications of Daniel Yergin’s argument that energy markets are experiencing “cost recalibration.”

Information technology has contributed to the drop in energy prices, so much so that productivity statistics may need to be recalibrated.

But this points to two even bigger stories. One is that the same forces that are making oil and gas so much cheaper and easier to find and extract will also be affecting other commodities. We can expect mining to become more efficient as well, and in fact there’s already evidence of that happening.

And there’s more. One of the big mysteries of the information revolution is the question of productivity. We keep using all this tech that clearly lets us do more with less, but instead of galloping higher, productivity levels have stagnated. What’s going on?

It’s possible that the productivity increases are appearing as lower prices rather than as higher incomes. If the price of oil falls from $100 per barrel to $50 per barrel due to increasingly cheap and efficient methods of production, then everybody in the industry is more productive in terms of barrels of oil per hour of work, but since the oil price has gone down, that productivity increase won’t be captured by statistical methods that calculate productivity in terms of money.

A TRILLION HERE AND A TRILLION THERE… Trump’s Budget Will Slash $1.7 Trillion In Entitlements, Cut Food Stamps By 25%.

Either we apply the brakes to the Gravy Train, or it derails.

IT IS UNWISE FOR FACULTY AT A STATE INSTITUTION TO GO TO WAR AGAINST THE STATE LEGISLATURE: GOP Senate Cuts UNC Law School’s Budget 30% As Payback To Liberal Faculty (Especially Gene Nichol), Rankings Slide From 20 (1979) To 39 (2017).

SALENA ZITO: The crisis in American journalism benefits no one.

Beginning in the 1980s, Washington and New York City newsrooms began to be dominated by people who had the same backgrounds; for the most part they went to the same Ivy League journalism schools, where they made the right contacts and connections to get their jobs.

Yes, elite networks are a thing not just in law schools, as “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance so aptly described of his experiences in law school. They also exist in Ivy League or elite journalism schools.

And the journalists who came from working-class roots found it in their best interest to adopt the conventional, left-of-center views that were filling the halls of newsrooms.

In short, after a while you adopt the culture you exist in either out of survival or acceptance or a little of both. Or you really just wanted to shed your working-class roots for a variety of reasons: shame, aspiration, ascension, etc.

That does not make them bad people – aspiration is the heart of the American Dream — but it did begin the decline of connection between elite journalism institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and the rest of the country.

So when fewer and fewer reporters shared the same values and habits of many of their consumers, inferences in their stories about people of faith and their struggles squaring gay marriage or abortion with their belief systems were picked up by the readers.

Pro-tip, don’t think people can’t pick up an inference, even the most subtle, in the written word. It is as evident as a news anchor rolling his eyes at someone on his panel he doesn’t agree with.

Same goes for job losses, particularly in coal mines or manufacturing. News reports filled with how those job losses help the environment are not going to sit well with the person losing their job. Also: Just because they have a job that faces an environmental challenge does not mean they hate the environment.

For 20 years these news organizations, along with CBS, NBC and ABC, were the only game in town. They served as gatekeepers of information, and as their newsrooms became more and more detached from the center of the country, consumers began to become detached from them.

And then along came the Internet. Not only were different sources now available, but news aggregators such as Drudge made it easy to find things giving everyone access to “alternative facts.”

The universe of information expanded, and it became clear that what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or the New York Times told consumers was not the whole story, and if you were a conservative (and a plurality of Americans self-identify as center right) you lost all trust in the mainstream media.

If you wish to be trusted, be trustworthy.

OPEC’S CRISIS: Iraq needs money, so it produces an extra 80,000 barrels of oil a day. But non-compliance (cheating) by cartel members isn’t OPEC’s biggest strategic problem.

Brent crude tumbled below $50 a barrel this month as data showed U.S. shale producers were alive and kicking, confounding OPEC’s efforts to control the supply glut. While oil recovered losses after Saudi Arabia and Russia threw their weight behind extending the six-month output reductions, it’s still 7 percent off post-deal highs.

More:

Under the November deal, OPEC envisioned curbing 1.2 million barrels per day of output, with Iraq trimming 210,000 barrels a day to 4.351 million barrels a day. In the first quarter, Iraq met only 61 percent of its targeted cut, though compliance improved to 90 percent in April, according to OPEC data. It’s not the only straggler. The United Arab Emirates achieved just 57 percent of its cut in the first quarter, though the U.A.E. exceeded its target in April, and many non-OPEC producers including Russia also missed their goals.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Putin calls flap over Trump’s meeting with Russian diplomats ‘political schizophrenia’

The Kremlin has ridiculed the flap in the U.S. over allegations of possible collusion between members of Trump’s campaign during his run for the White House and the president’s seemingly cozy relations with Putin. Moscow has denied meddling in U.S. elections and political affairs.

Putin warned that the United States’ anti-Russian rhetoric could backfire.

“You know what surprises me? They are destabilizing the internal political situation in the United States under anti-Russian slogans,” Putin said, according to Tass. “They either do not understand that they are harming their own country, which means they are just shortsighted, or they understand everything, and that means that they are dangerous and unscrupulous people.”

The denial stinks — Putin’s technique is to sow chaos and reap whatever may come from it. But his analysis of what Democrats and not-just-a-few Republicans are doing to this country is spot-on.

(This story is from last week, but it got lost in the flow — thanks to several Instapundit readers for bringing it to my attention.)

OPEC’S DEAD, BABY: OPEC’s Worst Cheater Will Get Harder to Ignore as Curbs Falter.

Iraq pumped about 80,000 more barrels of oil a day than permitted by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries curbs during the first quarter. If that deal gets extended to 2018, the nation will have even less incentive to comply because capacity at key southern fields is expanding and three years of fighting Islamic state has left it drowning in debt.

“Leaving that productive capacity idle will come with an opportunity cost that Iraq may prove reluctant to bear,” said Harry Tchilinguirian, the London-based head of commodity markets strategy at BNP Paribas SA. He’s nonetheless optimistic that global inventories will fall by year-end as members like Saudi Arabia pick up the slack for Iraq’s transgressions.

A risk, though, emerges if Iraqi compliance worsens to such an extent that other countries in the 13-member group start cutting corners too, exacerbating a global surplus that’s already erased much of the gains that unfolded after the deal was struck in November.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Some Black Lives Don’t Matter: Black-on-black homicide is rampant, but professional agitators couldn’t care less.

Another cell-phone video that didn’t make it to CNN or MSNBC: Last November, 33-year-old Antwan McNutt beat a man to death with a bottle of liquor on the South Side of Chicago. Onlookers took video and posted it to Facebook; no one intervened to help. McNutt, who was charged with murder this week, has prior convictions for manufacturing and delivering a controlled substance, attempted aggravated carjacking, possession of a stolen motor vehicle, and battery and resisting arrest, according to DNA Info. But he was back on the streets committing more mayhem, contrary to the “mass incarceration” conceit that black males are targeted with endless draconian punishment for minor transgressions of public order.

We rightly hold our police officers to the highest standards of conduct. Had a cop beaten a black man to death it would justifiably have been international news, especially if the beating had been caught on video. Likewise, if a white man had beaten a black man to death, it would have been international news and cause for public mourning and admonition. But the routine taking of black lives by other blacks generates no interest in the mainstream media. Forty-three hundred people, including two dozen children under the age of 12, were shot in Chicago last year. Had 4,300 white people been shot, there would have been a revolution, and the media would have set up headquarters in the city to cover the breakdown of law and order. But because the victims were nearly all black, few pay attention—besides the police.

Nor have the Black Lives Matter activists, who pour out by the thousands, sometimes to riot, in the case of alleged officer misuse of force, ever protested the killing of blacks by other blacks.

Black Lives Matter might more accurately be named White Killers Matter, because it only seems to care about black lives that are ended by white people. And that, of course, is because Black Lives Matter isn’t about justice, but about racial agitation.