Monday roundup

"Science" advisors to the EPA don't like that agency's fracking report, and want it to keep trying to prove that the practice is some kind of sin:

The draft report on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the EPA is nearing the end of its more than five year journey and the findings were a major blow to the green energy crowd. Try as they might, there simply was no evidence of systemic contamination to ground water or other resources and the report essentially gives the practice a qualified thumbs up. That didn’t sit well with the major environmentalist donors to the Democrats, so plans have been in the works to sabotage the report. That showed up this week when the ad hoc panel of science advisors to the EPA released their own rebuttal, claiming that the wording of the report isn’t up to par. (Washington Post)

Science advisers to the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday challenged an already controversial government report on whether thousands of oil and gas wells that rely on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” systemically pollute drinking water across the nation.

That EPA draft report, many years in the making and still not finalized, had concluded, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” adding that while there had been isolated problems, those were “small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.”…

But in a statement sure to prolong the already multiyear scientific debate on fracking and its influence on water, the 30-member advisory panel on Thursday concluded the agency’s report was “comprehensive but lacking in several critical areas.”

It recommended that the report be revised to include “quantitative analysis that supports its conclusion” — if, indeed, this central conclusion can be defended.

This board isn’t even arguing that they have evidence to the contrary. (Which would have been a neat trick since such “evidence” doesn’t appear to exist.) They simply don’t like the positive nature of the wording and would like to see even more test results than have already been submitted. They’re not saying that they have proof that fracking is dangerous… they’re just saying that the industry hasn’t proven that it isn’t.

The WSJ editorial saying Pubs should drop Squirrel-Hair if he can't make good on his promised ability to instantly become someone besides who he's always been ('"presidential," as he put it ti Sean Hannity) is behind a paywall, but there's a lot of discussion about it all over the punditsphere.  NRO mentions it in a piece about the pressure on Reince Preibus to quit pouring good money after bad. More quotes from it at this Daily Caller piece.

Second night of "unrest" in Milwaukee.

Bracing John Schindler piece on Russia's impact on the post-American election:

The news keeps getting worse. Alarming evidence of how deep the Kremlin’s got its tentacles in Washington mounts by the day. Large-scale hacking by Russian cyber-warriors didn’t just hit the Democratic National Committee, it stole emails from a wide array of top power-players, including the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s military boss.

Systematic Russian cyber-attacks on the DNC and related political targets in Washington were detected over a year ago by the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign cyber shenanigans, but the highly classified nature of this intelligence made it difficult to alert Congress about Kremlin espionage.

That the Russians stood behind this operation, using well-known hacking cut-outs, was established early by NSA. “It was the Kremlin, we had them cold,” explained an NSA official with direct knowledge of the case: “Moscow didn’t care we knew, they were unusually brazen.”

Although Democrats were the main focus of this espionage effort, prominent Republicans got hit too. Sen. John McCain was a target of the Russians, which is no surprise given his reputation as a hardliner on Kremlin matters. When President George W. Bush stated that he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul,” McCain famously retorted, “I looked in Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G, and a B.”

Under President Putin, Moscow again refers to United States as their Main Adversary, just as the KGB did during the last Cold War, and there can’t be many American politicians that Putin and his Kremlin loathe more than straight-talking John McCain.

To be clear, there’s nothing strange about a country spying on its adversaries. Everybody spies, and here the Russians are merely doing what any state would do—and what NSA does to the Russians and others right now. Espionage, human or electronic, is a normal aspect of the SpyWar that’s technically illegal but everybody participates in.

What the Russians are now engaged in, though, is something different and more serious. The Kremlin is weaponizing stolen information for political effect. This is something like what American spies term covert action, which includes the use of propaganda for political advantage over foreign adversaries.

Important Jed Babbin piece at The American Spectator entitled "Politicized Intelligence: Telling the Boss What He Wants to Hear". It's going on now, but don't look to either of the main-party presidential candidates to fix it next year:

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump would fix this if he were elected because he has evidenced no interest in these matters. And, if the past is prologue, we can predict that Hillary Clinton will follow her husband’s example.

Her husband's example? I thought the subject at hand was recent book-cooking.

Well, it was happening under the last Freedom-Hater administration as well:

On April 28, 1998 President Bill Clinton dropped in on a meeting National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was having with supporters of legislation that would have applied sanctions to nations that limited religious freedom. Clinton told the group:

“What always happens if you have automatic sanctions legislation is it puts enormous pressure on whoever is in the executive branch to fudge an evaluation of the facts of what is going on. And that’s not what you want. What you want is to leave the president some flexibility, including the ability to impose sanctions, some flexibility with a range of appropriate reactions.” [Emphasis added.]

Clinton didn’t want the facts. He admitted that he’d change them to suit his agenda. He clearly preferred not to get intelligence information that wouldn’t suit his political agenda.

A report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, issued almost a year later, contained what was called an “Intelligence Side Letter.” Its principal author, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, brought it to my attention years ago to illustrate his belief that intelligence — especially unfavorable facts — had to be honestly reported. The Side Letter said, in part:

The President’s recent discussion of “fudging” occurred in the context of a discussion of the effects of sanctions laws on his flexibility to conduct diplomacy.… However its effects are manifested, “fudging” has a corrupting influence on both the policy making and intelligence communities. A symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the provider of intelligence can easily be established in which they shape their questions and answers to satisfy the needs of the moment or to avoid unwanted, unpleasant and uncomfortable longer-term consequences.

In plainer terms, unless the relationship between intelligence providers and consumers is one of trust and cooperation, the falsification of intelligence or the conclusions drawn from it pose a serious threat to the nation.

Christian Toto at PJ Media on the somber concluding panel discussion among Katie Pavlich, Guy Benson and Leon Wolf at RedState Gathering.  It will make you hate 2016 all over again.