Ex-AG: Time To End Mueller’s Investigation

What’s the harm in giving special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation more time to finish its work? Plenty, says former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey at USA Today. First off, “the law requires that a special counsel investigate a specified crime based on specified facts, not try to be the second coming of the Lone Ranger.” In other investigations, most notably Watergate and Whitewater, “we were told what the crime was and what facts justified the investigation. Not here.” Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, “however fascinating, have nothing to do with Russian campaign influence.” Meanwhile, Mueller’s probe “saps the resources and attention of the Trump administration.” And that’s “potentially more damaging to our politics than any salaciousness that might be tossed up by Robert Mueller.”

Foreign desk: An Arab Plan B for Containing Iran

It wasn’t just Israel: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also welcomed President Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, notes Bloomberg’s Hussein Ibish, because they think it gave Tehran “cover for an intensified campaign of destabilizing the Arab world.” And they’ve got “plenty of ideas” for “drawing up a Plan B.” But they’re not expecting sanctions to do the trick: They hope “that with Islamic State crushed in Iraq and Syria, Washington will now lead a coordinated regional strategy to cut Iran’s power down to size.” That includes “limited and focused military action,” as well as “confronting Iran in Iraq.” They don’t want a repeat of the war in Iraq but “a multi-front effort to roll back Iran’s influence by defanging its proxies, supporting its enemies and insurgents and choking off its economy.”



Economist: Why Are Oil Prices Sky High?

Irwin Stelzer at The Weekly Standard recalls “the good old days when experts decided that the power of the OPEC oil cartel to control oil prices had come to an end” because “fracking had made the United States the swing producer, ramping up production any time prices started to rise.” Well, the oil market is now proving “it is no more predictable than the stock market: it hit more than $71 per barrel. And is headed higher.” No more worldwide oil glut: Inventories of crude oil “are at their lowest level in three years.” So why haven’t the frackers opened their valves and flooded the market? Because “they are constrained by the shortage of labor and materials, and of pipeline capacity in West Texas that is needed to move oil from wellhead to market.”

Law professor: Trump Can Claim Some Vindication

After a year of media denials of his claim of surveillance targeting his 2016 campaign, President Trump “can legitimately claim some vindication,” asserts Jonathan Turley at The Hill. This after disclosure that the FBI “made a conscious effort to use secret counterintelligence powers to investigate Trump officials” and had “a confidential informant” investigating the campaign. For all the open mockery of Trump and denials by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, we now know that surveillance was “ordered repeatedly on Trump campaign figures before and after the election.” Yet rather than acknowledge “the troubling implications of an administration investigating the opposing party’s leading candidate for president, the media shifted to saying that there was ample reason to order the surveillance.” Warns Turley: “All the false statements from FBI officials cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.”

Culture critic: Are We Too Attached to Our Pets?

Clay Routledge, though a self-professed “big fan of dogs,” suggests at National Review that in recent years, “our society’s relationship with pets appears to have changed in unhealthy ways.” Young adults “who aren’t partnering up or starting families” are “turning to their pets to feel loved and purposeful.” Indeed, “the lonelier people are,” studies show, “the more inclined they are to perceive pets as having human-like characteristics.” Some companies are even offering “pawternity leave” to let their young talent “spend time bonding and adjusting” to a new pet. And colleges are receiving more and more requests to accommodate emotional-support animals. Says Routledge: “Pets are great additions to our social world, but they are poor substitutes for the messier human relationships that make life worth living.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann