PrairiePundit

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix: A U.S. energy regulator filed his letter of resignation on Thursday. And with that letter, he may have just brought federal decisions on multi-billion-dollar natural gas pipelines to a halt. Norman Bay said he’ll leave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission effective Feb. 3. His announcement followed President Donald Trump’s decision to replace him as the agency’s chairman with his fellow commissioner, Cheryl LaFleur. With Bay’s departure, the commission will have just two commissioners and will lack the quorum needed to decide on everything from controversial gas pipeline projects to contested utility mergers. His resignation comes just as developers are rushing to build a network of pipelines to accommodate booming gas production from shale reserves in the Northeast, unlocking bottlenecks that have caused prices to plunge. In Houston, the law firm Baker Botts, which has a large energy practice and represents clients before the commission, said it was co...

NY Times: How a Civilian Prosecution Gave the U.S. a Key Informant A Somali who pleaded guilty to supporting terrorists was not tried before a military commission. Still, he became one of the nation’s most important informants. The US got extremely important information from al Qaeda leaders held at Gitmo, but liberals are so prejudiced against the facility and interrogation techniques they do not want to admit it and would rather trot out a rare success from the lawfare model.

Washington Post: Trump's blunt, harsh rhetoric hasn't softened from the campaign trail, speech experts say Who knew?

Peggy Noonan: ... More important still—the most important moment of the first week—was the meeting with union leaders. Mr. Trump gave them almost an hour and a half. “The president treated us with respect, not only our organization but our members,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, by telephone. Liuna had not endorsed Trump in the campaign, but Mr. O’Sullivan saw the meeting’s timing as an expression of respect: “He’s inaugurated on Friday and we’re invited in Monday to have a substantial conversation.” The entire Trump top staff was there, including the vice president: “His whole team—we were very impressed.” They talked infrastructure, trade and energy. “The whole meeting was about middle class jobs, how do we create more?” Mr. O’Sullivan believes the Keystone pipeline will eventually generate more than 40,000 jobs. Mr. O’Sullivan said he hopes fixing “our crumbling transportation infrastructure” will be “the largest j...

Byron York: There's one fundamental difference between the new White House and the old when it comes to immigration: Barack Obama ordered his administration not to enforce a number of immigration laws. Donald Trump has ordered his administration to enforce them. Trump's two immigration executive orders, issued Wednesday, are long, far-reaching, and complicated. But perhaps the most consequential passage in the two combined orders is a single sentence: "The purpose of this order is to direct executive departments and agencies to employ all lawful means to enforce the immigration laws of the United States." That is the heart of Trump's immigration strategy. "We do not need new laws," the president said at the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday. "We will work within the existing system and framework." ... There is much more on the specifics of the enforcment.  There will be no more catch and release.  Nor will there be more releasin...

Washington Times: Hillary Clinton garnered more than 800,000 votes from noncitizens on Nov. 8, an approximation far short of President Trump’s estimate of up to 5 million illegal voters but supportive of his charges of fraud. Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion. Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton , who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump. Mr. Richman calculated that Mrs. Clinton would have collected 81 percent of noncitizen votes. “Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clinton ’s margin? Yes,” Mr. Richman wrote. “Is it p...

Washington Post: Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his crowd size claims In a phone call, President Trump expressed anger over a retweet sent from the National Park Service’s account showing side-by-side photographs of his swearing-in and Barack Obama’s, and he ordered the agency to produce additional pictures of crowds on the Mall, according to individuals with knowledge of the conversation. The media seems more obsessed by the crowd size than Trump is with these constant stories about his obsession.  Both the media and Trump should just let it go.

NY Times: As Migrants Strain Border Towns, Pressure Builds on Mexico to Act With shelters in Tijuana already teeming with Haitians, some advocates fear President Trump’s plan could spur a far bigger crisis that Mexico may not be able to handle. Well, they could deport them. It is what Mexico would do if Americans were illegally living in Mexico. Why did they let them in, to begin with?   There is no reason that migration can't be an orderly and legal process beyond laziness and attempts by some liberals to change the ethnic makeup of the country for political reasons.

NY Times: A Trump Lie on Illegal Voters Leads to a Promise to Investigate Voting Rolls Vice President Pence’s promise of a “full evaluation of voting rolls in the country” has Democrats worried that ballot access will be tightened to exclude minorities. It is not a lie to say that illegal voting may have effected the vote totals.  There is a dispute between liberals and the media and the Trump administration over whether it happened and having an investigation is a reasonable means to determine who is right. Calling someone on the other side of a dispute a liar is not good journalism, it is a reflection of bias.  There were some prosecutions for vote fraud in recent elections and the argument really is over the scope of the problem.  To suggest that voter integrity laws would exclude minorities is just absurd and is racist on the part of the opponents to the measures.  Minorities are perfectly capable of getting proper identification. ...

NY Times: Hitting ISIS Harder Said to Be Among Directives for Mattis Plans for American artillery and attack helicopters in Syria may be included in a White House directive for Defense Secretary James N. Mattis. Artillery units would also mean more ground troops to establish a force protection perimeter around the big guns.  Attack helicopters could be effective in blocking ISIL movement to contact and adding to surveillance of the enemy. The quickest way to defeat ISIL and capture its caliphate would be to use combined arms operations involving infantry and mechanized units to go along with the air attacks.   That would require pulling the tanks and APC's out of mothballs in Kuwait and sending in the troops to operate them as well as the infantry units.  I am not sure Trump is ready to go that far.

Times of Israel: Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday leveled harsh criticism of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, claiming the Palestinian leader does not represent his people, and has no intention of reaching a final peace agreement with Israel. ... Abbas has never stood for election since the end of hs four-year term nearly a decade ago.  Besides his problem with legitimacy, he can't deliver on his side of a trade.  He is incapable of delivering peace in return for land.  He can't control the genocidal religious bigots of Hamas or other factions consumed with ethnic hatred of Jews.  It is absolutely delusional to think that giving him even most of what he wants would result in peace.

Kimberley Ross: Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media would rather cover pro-abort masses as they clamor on about “rights” than a march proclaiming the worth of unborn human life. The 2017 March for Life is Friday in D.C. This annual event protests the legal homicide of abortion, and draws hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country. But the media isn’t very interested in covering it since it disrupts their obvious pro-abort agenda. According to NewsBusters, the media’s coverage of this year’s Women’s March compared to the 2016 March for Life was grossly lopsided. During their morning and evening news shows, the three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) covered the women’s march 129 times more than they did the 2016 March for Life last year. And it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not they will cover the 2017 March for Life Friday. ABC, CBS and NBC spent at least one hour, 15 minutes and 18 seconds on the women’s march. But for the 2016 March for Life, they devo...

Fuel Fix: Protesters expect more than 100 to rally against Texas Parks & Wildlife Department commissioner Kelcy Warren at this morning’s commission meeting in Austin. Activists are ramping up protests against the Energy Transfer Partners chief executive, urging the state senate to reject Warren’s appointment. The protesters argue that Warren is conflicted: His company is building pipelines that run through culturally sensitive Indian land and ecologically fragile wilderness — though not through state parks, they say. Energy Transfer is building the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs above the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, site of turbulent and sometimes violent protests this fall, and has nearly finished the Trans-Pecos pipeline from the Permian Basin in West Texas to Mexico. The rally is being organized by Alpine-based Big Bend Defense Coalition and the Society of Native Nations. ... The so-called "Native Americans" are just being used by the a...

Daily Mail: US Navy ships to fire SUPER LASERS capable of dazzling and destroying the enemy within the next year Speaking at the Surface Naval Association national symposium in northern Virginia, Rear Admiral Ronald Boxall said that testing of a 150-kW laser weapon could happen soon. There is a video of a smaller laser in action in the piece.  This weapon would be especially effective against Iranian swarm attacks.

Washington Free Beacon: The Department of Homeland Security stopped more than 22,000 “high-risk” travelers from entering the United States in 2015, but officials remain uncertain about how effective these security screening methods are, opening the possibility that risky individuals such as terrorists are still being approved for entry into America, according to a new government report highlighting these flaws. More than 8,100 “known or suspected terrorists, or individuals with connections to known or suspected terrorists, attempted to apply for travel to the United States or board U.S.-bound flights” in 2015, according to the report, which chides U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for failing to determine how effective its current screening methods are. The report, authored by the Government Accountability Office, details potential flaws in CBP’s pre-flight screening methods and recommends the agency make a greater effort to measure the effectiveness of its pre-departure i...

Glenn Reynolds: Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist. The first thing to understand is that one of the changes going on with Trump generally is the renegotiation of various post-World War II institutional arrangements. One of those is the institutional arrangement involving the press and the White House. For decades, the press got special status because it was seen as both powerful and institutionally responsible. (And, of course, allied with the Democrats, who were mostly in charge of setting up those postwar i...

Washington Post: Trump administration chooses to replace senior State Department diplomats When Rex Tillerson is confirmed as secretary of state next week, he will face an unusual leadership vacuum after several career Foreign Service officers were informed that they will not be asked to stay on in senior or sensitive posts that are under direct White House control. I suspect that Trump and his team want people with no ties to Clinton or Kerry.  The State Department has been seen as hostile territory by many Republicans.  So far Trump has not indicated who he will replace them with.

John Fund, Hans A. von Spakovsky: Why Trump's probe of voter fraud is long overdue ... ... just last week, President Obama told a whopper at his last news conference that went almost completely unnoticed, much less criticized. He promised he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed. This is demonstrably false. All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting. Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption. The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system. What we do know, despi...

NY Times: Spokesman Outlines Proposal to Cover Costs of Border Wall The proposal, intended to raise billions of dollars to cover the cost of the new barrier, could have far-reaching implications for the economy. The new tax would be imposed on Mexico as part of a tax overhaul that President Trump intends to pursue with the Republican Congress. The tax would go into the price of the goods that are being shipped.  It would make many products uncompetitive.  I suspect that those countries would impose taxes on US goods going in also which would make those goods uncompetitive. A tax on remittances along with confiscation of assets of drug dealers from Mexico would likely do less damage to the economy.  Such a tax and confiscation of assets of Mexican criminals could be directed to pay for the wall.

Spectrum News: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Escalates Standoff Over Sheriff's 'Sanctuary Cities' Policy Abbott doesn't have the power to remove local officials. But Texas Republicans have filed multiple bills that would punish local governments for not arresting or detaining immigrants living in the country illegally. What they are really upset about is the failure to turn over people who have been arrested for other crimes to ICE for deportation.  The legislature may also make it possible to remove officials who failed to cooperate with immigration officials.