CENTCOM confirmed it had engaged in a new round of air strikes against Iranian military missile launch sites.

The post U.S. Confirms Latest Iran Strikes Target Its Ability to Bomb Ships appeared first on Breitbart.

U.S. — Following yet another controversial incident in recent days involving federal immigration enforcement involvement in the death of a motorist, a new study showed a mysterious link between trying to run over ICE agents and bullets striking the windshield of your vehicle.

Capital Research Center recently published a report worth everyone’s attention: “Enemies of Energy: The Myths, the Movement, and the Money.” Its findings deserve a wider audience because they run counter to nearly everything Americans are told about energy today.

For much of the last century, America understood a simple truth. Abundant, affordable, reliable energy formed the foundation for every other national success.

Our economic strength, manufacturing base, technological leadership, and rising quality of life all rest on the same footing: energy we can count on. It powers our factories, heats our homes, keeps commerce moving, and fuels our prosperity.

Somewhere along the way, parts of the environmental movement lost sight of that.

Conservation was once about protecting America’s natural treasures while embracing human ingenuity. The early Sierra Club fought to save the landscapes and creatures people cherished, helping to give us our national parks and foster the return of the bald eagle. Today, too many influential activist organizations have adopted a different mission. They oppose nearly every major source of reliable energy that powers modern life.

The report puts hard numbers to that shift. It profiles the 15 largest anti-energy nonprofits in America, whose combined annual revenue tops $2 billion.

That works out to an average of $5.4 million per day spent making energy scarcer. Their largest donors include some of the wealthiest people on Earth, several of whom cross oceans on mega-yachts that burn more fuel in a single year than hundreds of middle-class people do.

That shift carries real consequences because energy touches everything.

The price a family pays to heat a home. Whether a manufacturer builds a factory here or overseas. The cost of groceries. The competitiveness of American business. The reliability of the grid we all depend on.

Energy is not just another political issue. It is the foundation beneath nearly every other one.

Much of today’s debate is driven less by curiosity than by certainty. Americans are told the country must rapidly abandon oil, natural gas, and coal, and increasingly even nuclear power, in favor of systems that depend on the weather, heavy subsidies, and technologies still wrestling with storage and transmission.

Meanwhile, China continues to expand conventional energy at a staggering pace. By 2024, it was burning nearly 12 times as much coal as the United States and accounting for nearly a third of the world’s industrial carbon emissions, even as some of the same American groups praised it as a responsible climate leader.

That should trouble anyone who cares about both prosperity and honesty.

Consider nuclear power, which the report singles out for a special defense.

It is America’s largest source of emissions-free electricity and one of the safest sources of any kind. Across nearly 70 years and more than 20,000 reactor-years of operation worldwide, nuclear accidents have caused fewer than 30 radiation deaths. Yet all 15 of the anti-energy groups profiled in the report oppose nuclear power, either outright or by amplifying fears about safety and waste.

If we were serious about cutting emissions, we would be building reactors at scale. Instead, the nuclear industry’s own tally does not credit the U.S. with a single full-scale power reactor under construction, and total American nuclear capacity has been flat for more than two decades; only a few small demonstration reactors have recently broken ground.

This is not an argument against protecting the environment. Just the opposite. Americans want clean air, clean water, healthy forests, and thriving wildlife. Those goals should unite us. The real question is whether we pursue them through innovation and human ingenuity or through policies that make energy pricier and less reliable.

There is a meaningful difference between conservation and opposition.

Conservation seeks balance and recognizes that a growing economy and a protected environment can strengthen each other.

Opposition seeks elimination and often measures success by how much reliable energy production it can shut down, whatever the cost.

America deserves better than false choices.

We do not have to choose between a strong economy and a healthy environment, or between reliable electricity and cleaner technology.

The U.S. has repeatedly reduced emissions through innovation while remaining the world’s leading energy producer.

Our per-person carbon emissions are now lower than they were in 1940.

Advances in natural gas, cleaner industrial processes, and next-generation nuclear all show that progress comes from unleashing human ingenuity, not restricting it.

What we need is an energy strategy rooted in realism rather than ideology. Produce oil and natural gas responsibly. Expand safe nuclear power. Invest in new technologies where they make economic sense. And keep American families, not activist organizations, at the center of our energy policy.

Reliable energy should never be a partisan issue. It is the lifeblood of a modern economy.

The nations that lead this century will not be the ones that deliberately make energy scarce. They will be the ones who produce it abundantly, efficiently, and responsibly. America has every opportunity to remain that nation. The question is whether we still have the confidence to remember the lesson that built our prosperity in the first place. Energy abundance is not something to apologize for. It is something to protect.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s team in 2023 bypassed certain procedures to obtain and review text messages from 44 members of Congress in an investigation of President Donald Trump, according to Justice Department documents released by senators Tuesday.

The Justice Department must follow a filter review process when obtaining documents or communications related to members of Congress, under the principle of separation of powers and to prevent privileged materials from being swept up in a criminal prosecution. Communications from members of Congress about their official legislative duties are generally protected from criminal prosecution under the Constitution’s speech or debate clause.

A letter from Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., stated that “the special counsel’s Investigative Team apparently bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages.” The Justice Department attached documents to the letter outlining the Filter Team’s review process.

Grassley noted the matter Wednesday morning in his opening remarks at the confirmation hearing for Todd Blanche to be attorney general.

“Based on the information provided to the committee, Smith’s operation cut corners and blew through constitutional stop signs, instead of respecting them, and has been advised about the constitutional problems,” Grassley said during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Even if Smith’s team had been instructed to look for congressional or other privileged information, it wouldn’t matter. Because in this example, it appears the filter routine was entirely bypassed.”

Smith investigated Trump’s challenge to the outcome of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, as well as Trump’s retention of government documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago. The text messages obtained by Smith’s team appear to be related to the election probe.

“This is yet another grotesque example of the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department,” Johnson said in a public statement Tuesday. “Jack Smith’s team acted with impunity as they disregarded their own protocols to obtain and access White House text messages, including messages to and from 44 members of Congress. At this point, no one should be shocked by Jack Smith’s recklessness and blatant abuse of power, but they should be outraged.”

Of the 44 lawmakers whose records were obtained by Smith’s team, 40 were Republicans, including Grassley and Johnson. The records also involved four Democrats: Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey; Reps. Adam Smith of Washington and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey; and then-Rep. Karen Bass of California, now the mayor of Los Angeles.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member, defended Smith.

“Perhaps six months ago, maybe longer, he volunteered to appear before this committee under oath and testify about what he did as special counsel, and to answer the questions of the committee,” Durbin said. “For reasons I cannot explain, the Republican majority does not want to bring Jack Smith before this committee and having testified under oath. They continue on a regular basis to take exception to things that he said or did or allegedly did.”

According to the Justice Department documents, of the texts obtained, 20 were from senators, and the rest were from House members. Not all Republicans involved in the probe were entirely pro-Trump. For example, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky have frequently voted against Trump’s policies, but their texts were nevertheless swept up in the investigation.

In June 2023, the special counsel’s office subpoenaed the National Archives and Records Administration to provide all text messages from October 2020 through Jan. 20, 2021, from phones associated with White House staff during Trump’s first term, including Trump himself; former Vice President Mike Pence; former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; senior administration officials and Trump associates Dan Scavino, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, John Ratcliffe, Kash Patel, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway.

The Daily Signal reached out to Smith’s current law firm, Heaphy, Smith, Harbach & Windom, for comment. Smith or a spokesperson did not respond by publication time.