RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 21 to March 27, 2021 Fresh from defeating the Trump campaign’s 2020 election challenges, Democrat power lawyer Marc Elias is trying to unseat a newly elected Iowa Republican congresswoman with a novel constitutional legal theory that could signal a far more ambitious effort to allow Congress to overturn elections, Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations: - Elias’s effort to kick out Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks relies on a reading of Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution that would make Congress, not the states, the ultimate arbiter of election results.
- Elias contends the House and Senate may overrule elections because each body is the “Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members,” and that there are enough uncounted ballots to flip Miller-Meeks’ six-vote victory in favor of Democrat Rita Hart -- despite Iowa’s certified recount.
- While gearing up for the removal effort, Elias’s website published and promoted an article by a Harvard Law professor arguing that under Article I, Section 5, Congress should refuse to seat any candidate who “benefited” from “voter suppression”—i.e. any policy “that makes it hard for people to register and vote”—or gerrymandering.
- Elias was Al Franken’s attorney in the comedian-turned-candidate's successful 2008-09 legal effort challenging a vote deficit to win a U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota.
- Elias was also a major force behind the Democrat-funded and discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier.
The prevailing narrative among Democrats, and much of the media, is that there was little if any fraud in the 2020 election, and therefore nothing to fear from Congress’s efforts to make mail balloting the new normal after its trial by fire in the pandemic. But a ballot audit from an unlikely place challenges this narrative, John R. Lott Jr. reports for RealClearInvestigations: - A comprehensive audit of the 2020 vote in Montana’s Missoula County found irregularities on a scale large enough to easily swing local elections, not to mention statewide elections in cycles past.
- The audit of the sprawling county—antithesis of the large urban centers typically associated with election fraud—found 6.33% of the county’s 72,491 ballots lacking signed cover envelopes with official registration information crucial to verifying votes. It is against the law to count such votes.
- Auditors estimated an even higher percentage of problematic votes after factoring in other irregularities.
- Auditors also reported seeing dozens of signatures bearing strikingly similar, distinctive styles—some coming from the same location, a nursing home—leading them to strongly suspect one or more people cast fraudulent ballots.
- While the Missoula audit found more than 5,000 votes with unexplained irregularities, fewer than 500 votes separated the candidates in two local races for state legislature, and at least one previous statewide race was determined by fewer than 3,000 votes.
The Biden administration touts America’s transition to clean energy as a win-win: millions of good-paying jobs while fighting climate change. But interviews with workers, union organizers, developers and regulators tell a different story, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations -- one of poor pay, inadequate training, and hazardous working conditions in much of the country: - In regions lacking strong labor practices, manual workers, electricians, ironworkers, and heavy-machine operators travel almost year-round from state-to-state and job-to-job, sleeping in cheap hotels and campgrounds.
- Hired through temp agencies and brokers, workers earn depressed pay and have little recourse when labor disputes break out.
- Laborers commonly find themselves in dangerous or life-threatening working conditions, with crews suspended from towers hundreds of feet in the air as huge cranes swing massive steel parts into place in windy conditions.
- That’s made worse by reckless contractors who cut corners on safety.
- After a wind farm in Kansas went bust, construction workers and others who traveled there are out thousands of dollars in wages, overtime and travel expenses, according to a lawsuit against the utility.
- As a result, despite record growth in the clean energy industry in 2020, it suffers from a shortage of managers, engineers, technicians and installers.
- Trade unions are taking their fight to Washington, pressing for a prevailing wage standard (i.e., union-scale pay). That’s likely to set up partisan battle royal.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Emails Heighten Mystery Vote Count in Georgia's Election Just the News
Schumer Protects Bailouts for Beachfront Homes Reason
How a Sham Candidate Helped Flip a Florida Election New York Times
Email Directs Agencies to Refer to 'Biden-Harris Administration' Outspoken The Week's Top Reads on RCI
U.S. Commandos Getting Beaten by Terrorists in Africa Vice
Woke Insurer Cigna: Don't Hire White Men Washington Examiner
Florida: How a Sham Candidate Helped Flip an Election NY Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series New Videos Show How Officer Brian Sicknick Was Attacked
New York Times
First the New York Times reported that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died after rioters struck him with a fire extinguisher during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Now that that false story has been debunked, the newspaper is pushing another narrative – tying Sicknick’s death to pepper or bear spray a rioter shot into his face during the assault. Sicknick was sprayed around 2:23 pm but didn’t collapse until around 10 pm that evening. The article reports that bear and pepper spray are made from the same ingredient, and that of the two, bear spray is far more powerful and “not meant for use on humans.” It does not, however, address whether such chemicals are deadly to humans. The Washington Post has reported that “an EPA spokesperson said the agency isn’t aware of any human deaths from bear repellents and has only two bear-spray incidents in its database.” Nevertheless, the Times article ends on this note: “Michael R. Sherwin, who as acting U.S. attorney in Washington had been leading the Capitol riot investigations, told “60 Minutes” that if evidence connected the chemicals sprayed at Officer Sicknick with his death, ‘that’s a murder case.’” How and Why Minors Surge the Border Alone
Reuters
Almost 10,000 people under-18 crossed illegally from Mexico into the United States without their parents in February, nearly double the previous month’s figures. This article, which is based in part on interviews with more than a dozen self-identified smugglers in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, reports that smugglers have been encouraging parents to send their children alone as a result of the shift in U.S. policy under the Biden administration. They transport unaccompanied minors by bus, car, boat and even by plane, which one well-connected smuggler called his network’s “faster new method” to bring children up from Central America. The trips cost thousands of dollars per child and are often financed by parents or relatives already in the United States. At least one cartel that controls territory along the border mandates that smugglers use the migrant children as a decoy for its own drug smuggling operations. The Business of Seizing Nigerian Girls
Wall Street Journal
This article reports that heavily armed criminal gangs have abducted and ransomed more than 800 schoolchildren in Nigeria since December. Kidnap for ransom is such a lucrative and common business that it has been normalized there. In the northwest of the country, criminal gangs carry out kidnappings, exploiting the ineffective government and weak security presence. The jihadist group Boko Haram began the wave of attacks in 2009. It is still active and now appears to be collaborating with criminal forces, especially nomadic herders from the Fulani ethnic group, who have been feuding with farmers over access to grazing land for their cattle. Nigeria’s wave of violent crime is widening an arc of instability that has spread into three of its neighboring countries: Niger, Cameroon and Chad. Kidnappers have benefited from the weapons being taken south from war-torn Libya through Niger and across Nigeria’s border. Hospitals Hide Price Data From Search Results
Wall Street Journal
This article reports that hospitals that have published their previously confidential prices to comply with a new federal rule have also blocked that information from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites. The code keeps pages from appearing in searches, such as those related to a hospital’s name and prices. The prices are often accessible other ways, such as through links that can require clicking through multiple layers of pages. “It’s technically there, but good luck finding it,” said Chirag Shah, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies human interactions with computers. “It’s one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it’s another thing to tag it so it can’t be searched. It’s a clear indication of intentionality.” Some hospitals told the Journal that they used blocking code to direct patients first to information they considered more useful than raw pricing data for which they also included links. How Freight Rail Is Allegedly Courting Catastrophe
Vice News
A freight train derails in the United States almost every day. In 2019, this article reports, railroads reported 341 derailments on main line tracks, meaning the parts of the rail system not in yards or other work areas. Of those, 24 were freight trains carrying 159 cars of hazardous material. It’s not clear what we are supposed to think about these facts – though the reporters try. On the one hand, they provide no evidence that the problem is getting worse; one railroad spokesperson is quoted as saying safety has improved in recent years. On the other hand, they assert that the derailments are “the all-too-predictable result of nearly all the major freight rail companies adopting a business approach called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Proponents of PSR say it is about leveraging modern technology to improve efficiency. But those who work on the railroads every day say it is little more than a euphemism for draconian cost-cutting in order to achieve an arbitrary metric that pleases shareholders. That metric, called an ‘operating ratio,’ must get below 60 percent, which means only 60 percent of every dollar earned goes towards actually running the railroads. The rest can go towards executive pay and shareholder dividends. All but one of the seven so-called ‘Class I’ railroad companies, which account for 94 percent of the freight rail industry’s revenue, have explicitly adopted some form of PSR.” Woke Insurer Cigna: Don't Hire White Men
Washington Examiner
Some employees at the health insurance giant Cigna told the Washington Examiner that they are expected to undergo sensitivity training they consider racist and discriminatory. Lessons include reviews of concepts such as “white privilege” “gender privilege,” and something called “religious privilege,” which is described as “a set of advantages that benefits believers of a certain religion but not people who practice other religions or no religions at all.” This article also reports that employees say they are pressured to comply with “inclusive language” outlines that suggest replacing terms like “Brown Bag Lunch” with “lunch-and-learn” or “grab n’ go.” In a separate article, J. Christian Adams describes a Navy program to root out “extremism” in the ranks. This includes a social media ban on “liking any material that promotes discrimination based on … gender identity.” Adams writes: Naturally, all the villains in the hypotheticals in the materials are neo-Nazis, right-wing extremists or domestic terrorists. No mention is made of the hyper-funded effort by the Chinese communists to infiltrate and turn service members. Nor is one single mention of ANTIFA activities to be found in the document despite ongoing acts of violence from that group for almost a year. Coronavirus Investigations Feds Denied Viable Businesses Pandemic Aid ProPublica
Drug Companies Defend Vaccine Monopolies Washington Post
The Mental Cost of Virtual Schooling Reuters
They Had Mild Covid. Then Serious Symptoms Kicked In New York Times |
