RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/the-left-can-finally-admit-what-it-wants/

I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather. 

At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it? 

Twenty or 30 years ago, before my generation metastasized, it was tacitly understood on both sides of the political aisle that leftists—mostly Democrats—had to lie about what they wanted to do. They had to pretend, for instance, that they didn’t want to raise taxes. SNL made fun of this in their famous 1988 sketch “Dukakis After Dark”: “Mike, now that it’s all over, you can tell me. You were going to raise taxes, weren’t you?” “You bet I was!”

Leftists likewise had to pretend they liked the military. This led to Dukakis’ disastrous Abrams tank photo op.  

It wasn’t Dukakis’ fault exactly—as “he” says in the SNL sketch, “We represent unpopular, discredited views.” But if only he’d been more fortunate in his timing, and could have waited 20 or 30 years: Precisely those discredited views were being indoctrinated into school children across the country. The children grew up, and the ideas have found new life. 

Walter Mondale’s 1984 pledge to raise taxes helped destroy his presidential campaign. In 2020, Biden’s pledge to do the same went essentially unnoticed—in part because the press, now run by the kids who were in school when Mondale ran, didn’t want to report it. But also because those kids like the idea of higher taxes. In a sense we’ve come full circle. The Left can finally admit in public all the things it used to hide.  

The Left is finally out of the closet. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/deregulation-energy-independence-fracking-hydraulic-fracturing-11633462282?mod=opinion_lead_pos10
The U.S. in 2019 became a net exporter of energy and achieved energy independence. Once at the mercy of hostile foreign governments that used energy supply as a cudgel, the U.S. is now the third-largest energy exporter in the world—a stunning reversal that has driven down prices for American consumers and created more than 10 million jobs in domestic energy.

Technological innovation and broad deregulation are responsible for transforming the U.S. into a global energy powerhouse. The development by American oil and gas companies of new horizontal drilling techniques and the perfection of the process of hydraulic fracturing were key elements in this turnaround. Inventing and adding additional energy supply options reduced the need for oil and gas supply to provide for domestic energy uses, freeing more up for exports.

Almost all these advances were made possible by collaboration among the Energy Department’s national laboratories, colleges and the private sector. The U.S. leads investment in basic discovery of new energy technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, photovoltaic solar, and the lithium-ion battery chemistry. The Nobel Prize winners who developed lithium-ion batteries were funded by the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department. The department’s Sunshot program reduced solar photovoltaic costs by more than 90%. And early hydraulic-fracturing test wells were supported by the department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Deregulation also helped spur the American energy renaissance. Two efforts in particular shifted the bulk of energy toward domestically produced and lower-emitting production. The first was the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which exempted horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing from oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency. This allowed states to authorize energy production where the EPA would have certainly restricted it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-non-compliant-fbi-inspector-general-michael-horowitz-report-department-of-justice-fisa-surveillance-abuse-11633472138?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Congress has failed to reform federal surveillance laws, despite the FBI’s 2016 abuse of a secret court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The latest report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the FBI’s other surveillance abuses is more evidence of the need to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Mr. Horowitz’s 2019 report found the FBI had gulled the FISA court into letting it spy on former Trump aide Carter Page by presenting false information. The scandal inspired the Horowitz team to conduct a broader audit of FBI compliance, and the results are damning.

The FBI must abide by what are known as Woods Procedures that include a file supporting every factual assertion in a warrant application. As the IG notes, surveillance warrants are among the Justice Department’s “most intrusive investigative authorities” and must be “scrupulously accurate.”

The IG’s preliminary look last year into a sample of 29 wiretap applications said the FBI couldn’t locate Woods files for four applications, and the IG found errors in the remaining 25. As last week’s full report explains, the FBI and Justice have since acknowledged the 29 applications contained a total of 209 errors. These range from typographical (38) and date (42) errors, to unsupported facts (17), misidentified sources of information (15), and deviations from source documents (93).

The IG also found 209 examples in the 29 applications of the FBI failing to provide “adequate documentation to support factual assertions.” In all “there were over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures.”

Most alarming are the four errors that DOJ and the FBI admit were “material”—serious enough to have potentially changed the FISA court’s determination of “probable cause” to issue a warrant. The errors related to three applications in which the FBI omitted important or relevant information about targets, or provided outdated or unverified facts.