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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 21 to May 27, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, S.A. McCarthy reports from Ireland that the nation is on the verge of passing the most aggressive hate crime law in the European Union, including the EU’s first legal protections for transgender individuals. -
Critics say the bill’s vague language could be used to enforce the increasingly progressive Irish government’s increasingly woke agenda and forcibly muzzle critics of unpopular policies. -
The controversy opens a window into how quickly Ireland, which legalized abortion only in 2018, is moving from its long Roman Catholic traditions. -
Leo Varadkar -- the present Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, whom President Biden visited in April -- is openly gay. -
The legislation reflects a wide rift between Ireland’s leaders and many of its people, who during a consultation phase decried it as an unnecessary expansion of the country’s existing hate crimes law. -
The bill treats not just public presentation or dissemination of material deemed hateful, but also private preparation or even storing of material deemed hateful, such as memes on your phone or books on your shelf.
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Legal scholar: The bill’s circular definition of hate “manifestly fails -- for no coherent attempt to define a term ‘X’ can include X in the proposed definition.” -
Last year a schoolteacher was thrown into solitary confinement in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison after refusing to call a student by they/them pronouns, citing his Christian faith. -
A critic cautions: "George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is not an instruction manual.”
In a column for RealClearInvestigations, academic Christopher J. Ferguson crunches the numbers on race relations, violent crime, and policing to undercut much conventional wisdom about the forces behind bleak perceptions of race in America today: Ferguson concludes that race relations are unrelated to actual police shootings, but instead correlate highly with news media coverage about them. -
Media tend to obsess over shootings of black Americans while ignoring shootings of other individuals. That explains calls to defund police as "systemically racist." -
Police killings of unarmed suspects are rare, according to the Washington Post, and they’ve been declining. White suspects are shot more often than black suspects. -
Black suspects are indeed proportionally overrepresented in those numbers, but victims of homicide are mstoly the same race as the killers. The overpolicing hypothesis does not fit the data.
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Race itself is not a determinant of violent crime. Rather, class issues, particularly mental health problems in certain communities, better predict reports of excessive police force. -
Progressive theories on race have often made practical situations worse through decreased policing and officer attrition.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series At least 10% of the federal government’s $600 billion of annual spending on contracts, and often higher percentages of the $1.3 trillion state and local governments spend on contracts, go to minority contractors who do not have to bid for the work, or who compete only against similar contractors thanks to “set-aside” programs. This article reports: Federal agencies can directly award contracts to minority firms, without a normal bidding process and through a no-bid deal, if they cost less than $5 million. This arrangement, of course, has caused abuse. After 9/11, the federal government, hoping to accelerate security purchases, expanded awards to “Alaska Native Corporations,” which had a special exemption that allowed them to get no-bid minority contracts of unlimited amounts. Federal contracts to these corporations increased 20-fold in the decade ending in 2009, when spending totaled almost $6 billion. … Local governments also encourage no-bid minority deals. New York City had permitted minority firms to get no-bid contracts of up to $150,000. The city increased the limit to $500,000 in 2019, and recently increased it again to $1 million. Mayor Eric Adams wants to raise it to $1.5 million. Union County, New Jersey, recently awarded a $1.8 million no-bid design contract to DIGroup Architecture for a new government complex, citing, in part, the company’s “diversity.” For firms that cannot get no-bid contracts, “set-aside” deals are the next best thing. Here, agencies must conduct public bids, but only minority firms can compete for them. Federal set-asides follow a “rule of two,” meaning that only two minority firms must be available to compete for contracts. Unsurprisingly, competition is often not fierce. This article reports that this effort often encourages corruption, including rigged bids, the awarding of contracts to political allies and the creation of firms with token minority representation. More than 450 credibly accused child sex abusers have ministered in the Catholic Church in Illinois over almost seven decades, according to a new report by the office of the state’s attorney general. This article reports that the 696-page report found that clergy members and lay religious brothers had abused at least 1,997 children since 1950 in the state’s six dioceses, including the prominent Archdiocese of Chicago. One case among many documented in the report involves Thomas Francis Kelly, a priest who abused more than 15 boys ranging in age from 11 to 17 in several parishes in the 1960s and 1970s. A victim contacted the attorney general’s investigators to describe being singled out by Father Kelly as an 11-year-old altar server. The priest invited the boy to drive-in movies and to spend the night in the rectory, where the priest offered him beer. The boy awoke in the night to find Father Kelly performing oral sex on him, the report says. The priest’s tactics were well enough known that they became a topic of conversation among the victim’s peers. Two other victims of Father Kelly shared similar experiences with investigators. The archdiocese moved the priest from parish to parish, the attorney general’s report notes. The priest died in 1990. The article also reports that much of the abuse documented in the report happened decades ago. Criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits will be impossible for many victims, because of statutes of limitations and the fact that most of the perpetrators have died. But the report is being issued to establish “public accountability” and to recognize the experiences of the victims. A blue wall of silence and lies protects many prison guards in New York state who allegedly use excessive force. This article reports that in three quarters of the 290 cases examined by the Marshall Project, in which the corrections department tried to fire guards or supervisors accused of abusing prisoners, the agency also accused officers of covering up misconduct, often by acting in concert: At Auburn Correctional Facility, west of Syracuse, guards kicked a man, called him a racial slur and broke three of his ribs in what a judge called a “barbaric assault.” At Elmira Correctional Facility, near the Pennsylvania border, officers beat a handcuffed man and threw him down a flight of stairs, fracturing his skull. At Clinton Correctional Facility, near the Canadian border, guards kicked and punched a handcuffed man, breaking his rib. In all three cases, the staff members filed false reports to cover up the assaults, court records show, and faced no discipline. In addition, a Marshall Project analysis of lawsuits involving excessive-force incidents that the state lost or settled in the decade ending in 2020 found that the corrections department “did not try to discipline officers in 88% of the lawsuits, including some in which prisoners were permanently injured or even killed.” Over the last decade alone, at least 540 doctors and healthcare practitioners collectively paid the government hundreds of millions of dollars to negotiate their way out of trouble via civil settlements, then continued to practice medicine without restrictions on their licenses despite allegations that included fraud and patient harm, a Reuters investigation found. One cardiac surgeon described in this article “performed scores of medically unnecessary cardiac procedures on elderly patients” and just paid a fine of $150,000 to resolve the dispute. Based on the first-ever comprehensive analysis of federal civil settlements and state disciplinary actions, this article also reports: Separately, more than 2,200 hospitals and healthcare companies likewise negotiated civil deals to sidestep prosecution for alleged offenses that included paying bribes, falsifying patients records and billing the government for unnecessary patient care, the Reuters analysis shows. In many of those cases, the physicians, staffers and top brass who purportedly committed those misdeeds were not named publicly by prosecutors or forced to pay settlements themselves. Federal enforcers said they sometimes withhold names of individuals in these situations because of ongoing or planned investigations. The U.S. government collected more than $26.8 billion in healthcare-related civil settlements and judgments from 2013 to 2022, the Reuters analysis found. In a separate article, ProPublica reports that the federal government’s decision 15 years ago to shift more procedures for clogged arteries from hospitals to doctor’s offices without much oversight means many patients are undergoing unnecessary procedures, costing the government billions of dollars. Two-thirds of America are at “elevated risk” of suffering power blackouts this summer as the country increases its reliance on green energy instead of more reliable energy sources such as coal and gas. "The system is closer to the edge," said John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). "More needs to be done." Moura is far from the only expert sounding the alarm on America's unreliable power grid. Both state and federal officials in recent weeks have warned that high summer temperatures, combined with low nightly winds, could bring power blackouts across the country. "I'm afraid to say it, but I think the United States is heading towards a catastrophic situation," Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Mark Christie said during a May Senate hearing. Despite those warnings, this article reports, President Joe Biden has moved forward with plans to accelerate U.S. coal plant retirements. With nearly half of America's coal power already set to disappear by 2030, Biden's Environmental Protection Agency this month unveiled new standards that force coal and gas power plants to slash their carbon emissions by 90 percent between 2035 and 2040. Grand Theft Auto isn’t just a game; it’s a virtual lifestyle. Players become gun-toting crooks in a vast digital city in which any car can be stolen and any passerby gunned down. They can amass wealth, pick up prostitutes, and even work part-time as taxi drivers. This article reports that many Arabs have begun acting out fantasies, where they can “man Israeli checkpoints in broken Hebrew, join the ranks of a beefed-up Palestinian Authority, or set off on terrorist rampages without the prospect of jail time”: One recent [GTA] video, titled “Release of Special Forces Commander From the Hands of Occupation Soldiers,” follows two Arab players as they spot an exchange of fire between Palestinians and Israeli forces. They refer to their own as muqawameen, the Arabic word for “resistance fighters” typically used within the Palestinian territories. Israeli forces kidnap one of the Palestinians, code-named Basel, who turns out to be dressed in the all-black Palestinian SWAT uniform. After a long gunfight, Basel is liberated from enemy hands and tells of how “they attacked, we responded; they came, hit me, and took me.” At the end of the article, the reporter writes that it “wouldn’t surprise me if, when all is said and done, it turned out that Hamas were responsible {for some of the videos] … It’s hard to keep up a fight without an element of fantasy.” |
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| February 03, 2023 Included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus package supported by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was a provision to give $200 million to the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency headed by Manchin’s wife, Gayle. The... |
| February 02, 2023 In 1986, the U.S. Air Force spent $600,000 — over $1.6 million in 2023 dollars — to operate a luxurious private jet exclusively for top generals in the Strategic Air Command. Sen. William Proxmire, a... |
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