PrairiePundit

BBC: Iraq's military has cast doubt on reports that an air strike by the US-led coalition caused the deaths of dozens of civilians in west Mosul. Instead it blamed explosive booby-traps set by so-called Islamic State (IS). The US said on Saturday that it was investigating an air strike on 17 March at "the location corresponding to allegations of civilian casualties". The Iraqi government offensive to drive IS from west Mosul continued on Sunday with helicopter gunships in action. "Ignore reports Iraq forces have paused Mosul offensive," the BBC's Jeremy Bowen tweeted from Mosul. "It continues. Have seen gunships firing and heard much activity in the last few hours." ... The Iraqi claim is plausible.  It is just the kind of thing that could be expected from ISIS forces.  ISIS is in a desperate fight and appears willing to pull down all those around them as they lose.

streiff: ... While at Heritage, Severino was a prolific writer and that is what is causing splody-heads. He is a defender of religious liberty. He believes there are only two sexes. Both of which make him anathema to “public health” professionals who generally believe religion is fine as long as you don’t practice it and that any sexual perversion should be honored. Of particular concern is the effort by HHS to impose upon the US healthcare system the same view of this “transgender” nonsense that Department of Education tried to impose upon our education system. While Education was primarily interested in getting men into women’s restrooms and locker rooms, HHS has focused on bullying all doctors and hospitals into treating transgender individuals as sane and requiring those institutions to do whatever surgical mutilation is necessary to help them live out their delusions. One such case is in the courts right now that would force a Catholic hospital to perform “gender reassignment s...

Washington Post: North Korea’s leader is a lot of things — but irrational is not one of them World leaders, military chiefs and Hollywood have painted Kim Jong Un as an unhinged maniac. North Korea watchers said this is not just wrong but also risks a dangerous miscalculation. The belief that their hell hole of a country is worth conquering seems to be the driving force about their pursuit of nuclear weapons.  It is a self-defeating irrational move.  The world has been content to let North Korea alone if it would just let the rest of the world alone.  It is now bent on provoking an attack that might lead to the demise of the regime.  The world would be a better place without the current leaders of North Korea.

NY Times: North Korea’s Rising Ambition Seen in Bid to Breach Global Banks An attack late last year targeting more than 20 Polish banks suggests that hackers linked to North Korea are becoming more sophisticated and brazen. The North Koreans are likely to become more desperate if new sanctions cut them off from the world banking system.  I suspect that is the next move by the US in countering their nuclear ambitions.

NY Times: The 33 Republicans Who Stopped the Bill They were united in their resistance, but from opposite ends of the spectrum. The main problem that most had with the bill was the "replace" portion which left intact most of the provisions that made Obamacare unaffordable.  The arguments against removing the mandates which are the main cost drivers were that it would take 60 votes in the Senate.  This contention was challenged by Ted Cruz who I think had the better argument. The bottom line is that without removing the mandates, the deal to many was not worth doing and was seen as counterproductive politically too.

Fox News: The U.S. Department of Defense has confirmed that a U.S. counter-terrorism airstrike conducted March 19 in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, resulted in the death of Qari Yasin, a well-known al Qaeda terrorist leader responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent victims, including two American service members. Yasin, a senior terrorist figure from Balochistan, Pakistan, had ties to Tehrik-e Taliban and had plotted multiple al Qaeda terror attacks, including the Sept. 20, 2008, bombing on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed dozens of innocent people, among them U.S. Air Force Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez and Navy Cryptologic Technician Third Class Petty Officer Matthew J. O’Bryant. Yasin was also responsible for the 2009 attack on a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Six Pakistani policemen and two civilians were killed and six members of the team injured. "The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately ...

Victor Davis Hanson: It is a bit rich to hear Europeans insist that any Trump Administration doubts about NATO’s usefulness is heresy—given their occasional popular indifference to and ambiguity about the alliance. In current journalistic groupthink, Donald Trump has endangered NATO by suggesting a) it does not have a clearly defined role and needs to find one for the 21st century; and b) the vast majority of European members have welched on their defense spending commitments, on the expectation that the U.S. defense budget would always take up the slack, protect Europe, and thus indirectly subsidize the European social welfare project. No one really disputes the logic of Trump’s criticisms, only his supposed recklessness in daring to be so rude as to voice them. ... A European solution at a time of a strengthening euro and widespread loathing of George W. Bush was greater autonomy. The long overdue reification of an all-European Union defense agreement (“Common Security and De...

They do not really have an answer for people who have been screwed by Obamacare.  All they focus on is those who have gotten "free" healthcare from it and not the victims who have been devastated by it.

Patrick Cockburn: Isis's losses in Syria and Iraq will make it harder for it to recruit another Khalid Masood Isis portrayed its victories as a sign of divine intervention, but reverses in the battlefield will make it difficult to inspire individuals abroad to kill and to die for its monstrous version of Islam I am not sure radical Islamist will lose hope if ISIS is defeated.  It should be a blow to their centralized recruiting, but al Qaeda has been successfully recruiting without a caliphate for decades.  Their hope is wrapped up in their interpretation of specific verses of the Koran. Many in the West refuse to focus on this because they want to pretend that Islamic terrorists have nothing to do with Islam.

NY Times: London Attacker: Quiet and Friendly, but With Hostile Side Investigators are trying to grasp how a former English teacher with a degree in economics and leading an outwardly quiet life slipped into extremism. Some things become clear with this event.  It was not a lack of education or a lack of a job that made this guy want to go out a commit mass murder of people he did not even know.  Within Islam and its religious text, there is a strain that appears to command the followers to kill those who do not accept their "prophet."  Many of these people are also willing to kill other Muslims if they do not buy into the weird beliefs of the radicals. Notice how the lead of this story discusses this killers action like they would someone who became addicted to a dangerous drug i.e. "slipped into extremism."  It should be clear that former Obama officials who thought the answer to radical Islam was a jobs program could not have been more wrong.

The Hill: A majority of registered voters are in favor of an independent commission to investigate the potential ties between President Trump's campaign and the Russian government, a new poll finds. According to a Quinnipiac University survey released on Friday, 66 percent of those polled favor an independent commission, and 29 percent do not. ... I think this is really a bad idea.  Most of those same voters don't think Russia "hacked the election."  The commission would just become a vehicle for Democrats and their cohorts in the media to attempt to sabotage the Trump admistration.  The Democrats should not be given another platform to push their bad politics.

John Nolte: 12 Pieces Of Proof: The MSM Knew Obama Spied On Trump and LIED To Cover It Up The media should also read this in case they are wondering why they have a credibility problem with Republican voters.  Nolte quotes extensively from the same media that now denies there was surveillance of the Trump team during the transition.

Fuel Fix: The Trump administration issued a construction permit Friday for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, reversing a decision by former President Barack Obama that allowing the project to move forward would undermine U.S. leadership on climate change. The decision marks the latest twist in a years-long fight between environmental groups and the energy industry over the $8 billion pipeline, which would bring carbon intensive oil sands from western Canada to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast. The State Department, responsible for reviewing the project because it crosses an international border, said Friday it determined that building it serves U.S. national interests, citing the importance of Canadian crude in maintaining U.S. energy security and the administration’s goal of improving the country’s energy infrastructure. “It’s a great day for American jobs and a historic moment for North America and energy independence,” President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Of...

Clinton had a way of telling half truth sometimes convincingly.  He was like the witches in MacBeth  who told the title character that he would not be killed by any man of woman born, only to find out at the end that he was in a fight with a guy who had a cesarean birth are as Shakespeare wrote, "I was from the womb untimely plucked." Trump, on the other hand, is a layman in a political office, but he still speaks like a lot of Americans.  When he talks about being wiretapped he is not speaking in legalese, but speaking about the fact that conversations of his and his campaign workers keep showing up in transcripts given to the media, and knows that just does not happen by itself.  In other words, the so-called fact checkers are applying a different standard to him and in the process misreading the situation and trying to protect their sources, i.e. the leakers. Johnathon Turley captures the essence of the situation with the surveillance. ... Now, R...

Daily Mail: Chicago experiences the largest population dip of any metro area as residents flee violence-plagued city More people are moving out of Chicago than any other U.S. city, census data released Thursday revealed. Chicago is a city that does not work very well anymore.  Will it be the next Detroit ruined b y Democrats and liberalism and an inability to stop gang violence and murders?  It is hard to blame anyone for leaving that high-priced mess.  People are also leaving Illinois in general too.  The high tax high regulation blue model is being rejected,

Reuters: U.S. shale producers are drilling at the highest rate in 18 months but have left a record number of wells unfinished in the largest oilfield in the country – a sign that output may not rise as swiftly as drilling activity would indicate. Rising U.S. shale output has rattled OPEC's most influential exporter Saudi Arabia and pushed oil prices to a near four-month low on Wednesday. U.S. production gains are frustrating Saudi-led attempts by the world's top oil exporters to cut supply, drain record-high inventories and lift prices. Investors watch data on the number of rigs deployed in North American oil and gas fields as a leading indicator for output. But the rising rig count and frenetic drilling activity in the Permian Basin in West Texas is not all about pumping oil. During the 2014-2016 downturn in global oil prices, the number of wells left incomplete grew as companies shut down rigs, laid off workers and retreated from the fields. When prices picked up, ope...

NY Times: Pages From Trump’s Tax Returns Raise Many Questions Filings from 1995 and 2005, incomplete as they are, offer tantalizing clues about how the Trumps might have minimized their liability over several years. This should qualify as the bottom story of the day.  It would be bigger news if someone was not minimizing the amount of taxes they pay.  Who in the world thinks this is newsworthy?

Forbes: Labor unions have been known to do many despicable things to grab dues money from workers who don’t want anything to do with them. A current Minnesota case is about as bad as you’ll ever find. In 2013, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) got one of its favored politicians, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, to sign an order declaring that home healthcare providers who receive Medicaid money to care for disabled family members were government employees. But they were “employees” only because that made them eligible for unionization. The SEIU figured that it had a good shot at finagling a victory in an election, which would then lead to a nice infusion of new dues money. The election, conducted under the auspices of the friendly state bureaucracy, was done entirely through mail-in ballots and under its rules, a victory required only a majority of the votes cast. When the votes were counted in 2014, 3,543 were in favor of the union and 2,306 against. There were abo...

Washington Examiner: The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump's transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities "unmasked" after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials. The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain "masked" if American communications are swept up during surveillance of foreign individuals. During an interview on Fox News, Woodward said that if that information about the unmasking is true, "it is a gross violation." .....

The Drive: US--backed Syrian fighters and US special operations personnel, along with a cadre of Marines, have been deployed to the al Tabqa Dam, also known as the Euphrates Dam, located roughly 25 miles west of ISIS's self-proclaimed capital of al Raqqa. The dam and the nearby town that shares its name are placed along two highly strategic routes that if left unsecured could give ISIS militants an escape route out of al Raqqa once the offensive to take back the city officially begins. The surprise deployment to the dam was said to have been largely made possible via US airlift capabilities and fire support. Although the number of troops involved in the operation remains unconfirmed, multiple reports put it around 500. The dam provides electricity to the region, making it an especially high-value asset, and the BBC reports that a military airbase and a detention center holding prisoners of ISIS are also nearby. The airfield in particular could provide a valuable hub of operat...