PrairiePundit

David Goldman: In 2015, the last time Palestinians rioted over the Haram-al-Sharif – the Temple Mount to Christians and Jews – a handful of pious Jews had committed the offense of attempted prayer. This week’s protest over the presence of metal detectors takes the dispute to a new level of unreality. After Israeli-Arab gunmen killed two Israeli policemen with weapons hidden on the site, Israel installed metal detectors, a common sight at mosques in many Muslim countries. After Israel removed the metal detectors under apparent pressure from Washington, the Muslim religious authorities announced that they would not accept any Israeli security measures of any kind, including cameras and remote sensing devices. Cairo’s Al-Azhar University denounced any and all Israeli security measures as “irresponsible and provocative,” adding, “All measures taken by the occupation authorities at Al Haram Al Sharif in occupied Jerusalem are null and void and are not based on any humanitarian or civilize...

Washington Free Beacon: Major cable news networks have given no coverage to the burgeoning scandal involving IT staffers to former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Reporting by the Daily Caller News Foundation has revealed that Wasserman Schultz's top information technology staffer Iman Awan was arrested Monday after trying to flee the country amidst investigations into Awan concerning banking fraud and a criminal cybersecurity probe. Awan wired over $280,000 to Pakistan after the FBI recently recovered multiple smashed hard drives from Awan's home. Despite being blocked from the House computer network since February amid allegations of "committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network," Awan remained employed by Wasserman Schultz's office. He and four of his relatives have received $4 million by working for Democratic members of Congress since 2009. Wasserman Schultz finally ...

Guardian: Four migrants die trying to cross Rio Grande, days after Texas truck deaths Three Guatemalans, including two children, and woman of unconfirmed nationality die in effort to reach Texas after torrential rain swelled river It is not clear why they chose to try to cross the river at El Paso which is hundreds of miles further than the mouth of the river from Central America.  I suspect they were misled by the Mexican cartel. The US needs to publicize the deaths in Central America to discourage the dangerous journey.

BBC: The US government has imposed sanctions on 13 senior Venezuelan officials as pressure mounts on President Nicolás Maduro ahead of a controversial vote for a new constituent assembly. The sanctions freeze the US assets of those affected, and US entities are barred from doing business with them. Those targeted include the interior minister and the head of the army. Last week, President Donald Trump vowed "strong and swift economic actions" if Mr Maduro held the poll, due on Sunday. The vote, which Mr Maduro says will proceed as planned, is to choose the 545 members of a new constituent assembly that would rival the opposition-held National Assembly. Critics say the president is trying to cement a dictatorship. He argues it is the only way to bring peace back to the divided nation. The US sanctions also target the head of Venezuela's National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, and former vice president Elias Jaua, who is leading the presidential commissions organisin...

Washington Times: Anti-Trump dossier firm did work for corrupt regimes, rights group claims Corrupt Russian and Venezuelan officials benefited from the work of the Washington-based firm that also commissioned the largely unsubstantiated anti-Trump campaign research dossier, according to testimony from a leading South American human rights campaigner submitted to a congressional panel probing the 2016 Russian election-meddling scandal. Thor Halvorssen, head of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, said in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Fusion GPS operated a smear campaign against journalists who threatened to expose a multibillion dollar fraud involving faulty South American electric power plants, the laundering of its proceeds in U.S. banks, and a kickback scheme to pay off Venezuelan officials. ... It appears that Fusion may become the central focus of the hearings.  This could jeopardize the Democrats' Russian collusion conspiracy theory. Mo...

Salena Zito: Why the Rust Belt just gave Donald Trump a hero’s welcome Zito was one of the few reporters who caught the trend toward Trump in the Rust Belt and she finds that trend has solidified despite the caterwauling coming out of the Washington and New York media.

Washington Post: A Boy Scout jamboree. A controversial Trump speech. And the backlash that followed. The president’s speech prompted an outcry from many current and former Scouts and their families, who said Trump’s remarks were inappropriate and undermined efforts to diversify and modernize the century-old organization. Liberals have been at war with the Boy Scouts ever since they rejected gay scout leaders.  Some even compared Trump's speech and its reception to Hitler.  What is it about liberals who keep comparing the President to Hitler?  Hitler was a socialist who killed millions of Jews.  Trump is a capitalist whose family includes Jews whom he has placed in his administration. This looks like the typical overreaction of some to the President and those who support him.  Obama largely ignored the Scouts when he was President and did not personally appear at any of their jamborees.  Trump shows up and gets a warm reception from thousand...

NY Times: The Health Care Travesty Ignoring public disgust, the Senate will now debate proposals that would leave millions more without insurance. It is interesting that liberals who ignored the public disgust with Obamacare for years are concerned about Congress ignoring their big lies about the changes to the program.  The fact is that the changes would allow people to make a decision about what health care insurance they want and whether they would rather take their chances without it.  The removal of the mandate to buy is not the same as "leaving millions without insurance."  What liberals seem to oppose is giving people a choice.

Times: A sailor on board a US Navy destroyer pressed the wrong button during an exercise last month, ruining a $100 million missile test. It was the fourth test of a new super-interceptor, designed as part of a joint US and Japanese military programme to combat an intermediate-range ballistic missile attack by North Korea. Three earlier tests had been successful. The crew of the USS John Paul Jones, a guided-missile destroyer, fired an SM-3 block IIA interceptor targeting an unarmed ballistic missile that had been launched from Hawaii. It was the first test of this interceptor from a warship equipped with the US Aegis combat system that is supposed to manage the whole “hit-to-kill” operation. The interceptor should have hit the target with the force of a ten-ton lorry travelling at 600mph, destroying it. When the interceptor exploded before reaching the incoming missile, the Pentagon feared that the flight test had failed because of some disastrous technical fault. After an...

The Hill: The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules. The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department's national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016. The intelligence community isn't due to report on compliance issues for 2017, the first year under the Trump administration, until next spring. The NSA says that the missteps amount to a small number — less ...

Washington Free Beacon: The State Department under Secretary Rex Tillerson has been locked in a growing power struggle with the White House that has angered officials in the West Wing and sparked claims that the Trump administration's top diplomatic organ is now in "open war" with the White House on a range of critical issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, Iran, the crisis with Qatar, and other matters, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the situation. The State Department is said to be in a state of "massive dysfunction," with top officials working under Tillerson ignoring White House directives on critical staffing issues and key policy matters, according to multiple sources, including administration allies who are said to be increasingly frustrated with what is perceived as the White House's inability to control its own federal agencies. The tensions have fueled an outstanding power battle betwe...

Seeking Alpha: “Array fracking” has arrived: operators increasingly use a full-volume approach to stimulating thick or stacked shale formations. With dozens of wells typically drilled and completed off the same pad simultaneously, operational efficiencies are powerful. The elimination of “over-capitalization” – drilling less wells to recover the same amount of oil – is the next big saving the industry is likely to realize in full development. ... This is the summary of arguments made in the piece.  If you consider the various layers under the Permian Basin, the efficiency of using one well to access them all is one reason why the costs of production have come down.

David Harsanyi: So-Called Fact Checkers Keep Butchering The Facts About Obamacare This genre has become a scam to hide Democrat political fraud. If these guys were lawyers for Obama they would be laughed out of court for the arguments they make defending the lies he used to sell Obamacare.

Daily Caller: Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s top information technology (IT) aide was arrested attempting to leave the country just a few hours after The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group revealed that he is the target of an FBI investigation. The employee, Imran Awan, had wired $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union in a House office building to two individuals in Pakistan. Credit union officials permitted the wire to go through, and his wife has already fled the country to Pakistan, after police confronted her at the airport and found $12,000 in cash hidden in her suitcase but did not stop her from boarding. “On January 18, 2017 at 12:09 pm, an international wire transfer request form was submitted [at the Congressional Federal Credit Union] at the Longworth House Office Building in the District of Columbia, in the amount of $283,000.00, to two individuals in Faisalabad, Pakistan,” according to an affidavit obtained by TheDCNF...

Miami Herald: As chaos envelops Venezuela, Caracas spends millions on lobbyists in Washington ... U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s oil market could have major financial implications for the Maduro regime and for average Venezuelans. Although Venezuelan crude makes up a small fraction — about 8 percent in 2016 — of all U.S. oil imports, the U.S. buys nearly half of Venezuela’s oil, and oil revenues account for 95 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings, according to OPEC. ... This is why President Trump's sanction threat is being taken seriously in Venezuela where the regime has run the economy into the ground.

Washington Post: Manafort testifies before Senate Intelligence Committee, submits Trump Tower meeting notes Before his testimony, Paul Manafort submitted to the committee notes that he took at a meeting with a Russian lawyer he and other campaign aides attended during the presidential campaign, a person familiar with the investigation said. I would be surprised if any smart person would ever take notes suggesting collusion with a foreign power.   I suspect the notes probably are consistent with the memories of others in attendance who have already given their recollection of the meeting as a "waste of time."    But Democrats are fond of wasting time on the collusion theory of why they lost an election.  The media will be so disappointed.

CNN: A US Navy ship fired warning shots at an armed Iranian patrol boat Tuesday in the northern end of the Persian Gulf, according to two US defense officials. The Iranian boat is believed to have been operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to a defense official familiar with details of the incident. The officials said the Iranian boat approached and came within 150 yards of the USS Thunderbolt, a US Navy patrol ship. The USS Thunderbolt was accompanied by the USS Vella Gulf, which is a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, and two other US Coast guard vessels at the time. The Iranians did not respond to any warnings from the US ship, including radio calls, firing of flares and five short blasts from the US Navy ship's whistle, which is the internationally recognized communications signal for danger, the officials said. The Navy ship then fired warning shots into the water over concerns about the possibility of a collision, one of the officials s...

Washington Times: Evidence of Russian-built assault weapons, sniper rifles and heavy machine guns reportedly being used by the Taliban  against U.S.-backed Afghan forces in the northern and western parts of the country emerged Tuesday, fueling concerns in Washington that Russia is covertly backing the Afghan insurgents. Video obtained by CNN shows fighters from a Taliban splinter faction based near the western city of Herat, along the Iranian border, brandishing the Russian-made weapons. In the video, the group’s second-in-command Mullah Abdul Manan Niazi says the weapons were taken from Taliban fighters in the area. Clashes between the Taliban and Niazi’s faction have roiled Herat and surrounding areas in recent weeks. Niazi said the weapons had been supplied to Taliban fighters from Russia via Iran. The Russian weapons were then taken by members of Nizai’s group after a recent gun battle. “The Russians are giving them these weapons to fight ISIS in Afghanistan, but they a...

Gail Tverberg: Researchers Have Been Underestimating the Cost of Wind and Solar ... There are two reasons why these percentages are lower than a person might expect. One reason is that the figures usually quoted are the amounts of “generating capacity” added by wind and solar, and these are nearly always higher than the amount of actual electricity supply added, because wind and solar “capacity” tend to be lightly used. The other reason that the percentages on Figure 1 are lower than we might expect is because the places that have unusually high concentrations of wind and solar generation (examples: Germany, Denmark, and California) tend to depend on a combination of (a) generous subsidy programs, (b) the availability of inexpensive balancing power from elsewhere and (c) the generosity of neighbors in taking unwanted electricity and adding it to their electric grids at low prices. As greater amounts of intermittent electricity are added, the availability of inexpensive balanci...

Washington Post: Trump team weighs options for replacing Sessions Some of President Trump’s confidants are floating prospects who could take Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s place were he to resign or be fired, according to people familiar with the talks. It comes as Trump continued to vent his frustration with Sessions. Some of his disappointment is beyond Sessions control.  Perhaps Sessions should have advised the President before he accepted the appointment that he would have to recuse himself.  I suspect both men were surprised that the bogus Russian collusion narrative by the Democrats went as far as it did. While trump was willing to let Clinton off the hook for her mishandling of classified information and the appearance of corruption, the Democrats were not as magnanimous in defeat as he was in victory. Trump would like to see some push back against the Democrats and he now thinks it was a mistake not to pursue an investigation of Clinton, but the way to ha...