RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 25 to October 2, 2021 The FBI’s recent report of a 40% rise in anti-black hate crimes in 2020 was seized upon by some in the media as evidence of an epidemic rooted in rising “white nationalism” and a backlash to last summer’s George Floyd riots. But a deeper dive into the data prompts experts to caution against sweeping conclusions, John Hirschauer reports for RealClearInvestigations: The experts cite the small absolute and relative size of the reported increase; reporting disparities across jurisdictions; and the nebulous nature of “hate” crimes, making it difficult to discern a real trend from mere statistical noise. Even Derek Chauvin, the white cop cast as a racist who murdered Floyd last year, was not charged with a hate crime – illustrating the subjective nature and evidentiary challenges of hate crimes. Some of the biggest increases in anti-black hate crimes occurred in Democratic Party strongholds often associated with progressive racial views – and largely outside of cities where the summer turmoil took place. There were 2,755 anti-black hate crime incidents in 2020, inflicted upon 3,769 victims – a paltry number in a country of 330 million, even considering the rise. Most anti-black offenses were non-violent. By comparison, in 2020 there were 30 times more blacks assaulted than there were reported victims of hate crimes. Homicides of blacks, typically by other blacks, also dwarfed the total number of victims of all anti-black hate incidents. Democrats have met the enemy of a fast-track cleaner energy future and it is ... them, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations. Natural gas is emerging as a survivor in Washington’s trillion-dollar spending struggle even though progressives have lately villainized the lower-carbon fuel. Bielski reports: Sen. Joe Manchin, the linchpin Democratic vote from West Virginia, a state with a large fossil-fuel footprint, vows to block President Biden’s ambitious plan for a quick natural-gas phase out. He says that would make the nation’s aging power grid more prone to dangerous blackouts because of less reliable wind and solar. Manchin and environmental groups are also at odds over carbon capture, a technology that could eventually clean up gas plants, which emit about half the carbon of coal. Greens argue capture would needlessly extend the life of fossil fuels and delay renewables. Tina Smith, a self-described Democratic pragmatist from Minnesota, now finds herself at center stage in negotiations with Manchin – and under pressure to disappoint the left anew by giving a further break to natural gas. Americans have had only a limited view of this consequential battle over energy in Congress – which is unfolding in secret even though it affects pretty much everyone’s pocketbook. Bielski also reports that computer models – a bete noire of climate skeptics – live on in the debate over the clean energy transformation, providing ammunition for each side. Biden, Trump and the Beltway The Administrative State Grew – Even Under Trump Forbes
FBI Jan. 6 Informant: Capitol Riot Not Planned NY Times
Durham Issues New Russiagate Subpoenas CNN
Cyberexperts in Alfa Bank Affair Push Back New York Times
Justice Dept. Report Reveals More FISA Abuses Techno Fog/The Reactionary
Soros-Aided TDIP Hyped Russiagate via McCain Just the News
How DC's Elites Gerrymander Parking at Expense of Poor City Journal Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 131 Federal Judges Broke Financial-Conflict Law
Wall Street Journal
This exhaustive investigation by the Wall Street Journal (on the heels of its influential Facebook exposé) found that more than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing 685 court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock during the last decades. In New York, Judge Edgardo Ramos handled a suit between an Exxon Mobil Corp. unit and TIG Insurance Co. over a pollution claim while owning between $15,001 and $50,000 of Exxon stock, according to his financial disclosure form. … In Colorado, Judge Lewis Babcock oversaw a case involving a Comcast Corp. subsidiary, ruling in its favor, while he or his family held between $15,001 and $50,000 of Comcast stock. … At an Ohio-based appeals court, Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote an opinion that favored Ford Motor Co. in a trademark dispute while her husband held stock in the auto maker. After she and the others on the three-judge appellate panel heard arguments but before they ruled, her husband’s financial adviser bought two chunks of Ford stock, each valued at up to $15,000, for his retirement account, according to her disclosure form. Although the violations reported appear to involve relatively small amounts of stocks the hundreds of recusal violations found by the Journal breach a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence: No one should be a judge of his or her own cause. Alerted to the violations by the Journal, 56 of the judges have directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings. CIA Options vs. WikiLeaks: Abducting or Killing Assange
Yahoo
So much political coverage is just a channel for anonymous sources to smear their opponents that it is often hard to know what to believe. This article, co-bylined by a purveyor of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, Michael Isikoff, alleges that the CIA and the Trump administration had serious discussions with Britain in 2017 about kidnapping and killing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London. It reports that President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange for publishing extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history." The CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.) A shootout with the Russians on the streets of London to nab and then kill one of the most famous people in the world? Did the U.S. government seriously discuss this? Were the Brits really ready to sign on to this James Bond-esque plan? Or were they imbibing something shaken, not stirred? Mass Student Loan Forgiveness Is Already Happening
Reason
While progressive Democrats in Congress have yet to pass a universal student loan forgiveness bill, the Biden administration says it has erased "$9.5 billion, affecting over 563,000 borrowers." This article reports that the total includes the reinstatement of $1.3 billion in loan discharges for 41,000 borrowers who had lost a previous discharge because they "did not submit the requested documentation.” To prevent their discharges from being revoked in the future, the Department of Education announced that it “will indefinitely stop sending automatic requests for earnings information even after the national emergency [COVID pandemic] ends.” Covert Postal Service Unit Probed J6 Social Media
Politico
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor Tweet stays the U.S. Postal Service from its appointed rounds. This article reports that in addition to losing taxpayer money hand over fist, the USPS also operates a robust surveillance program – the Internet Covert Operations Program – that tracks the media posts of American citizens. In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, this article reports, it sent bulletins to law enforcement agencies around the country, including the FBI, on how to view social media posts that had been deleted. The article also describes the postal service’s scrutiny of posts on the fringe social media network Wimkin. After reporting that basic fact, however, the rest of the article provides few details about the unit’s work. It does quote a critic of broader law enforcement efforts to monitor social media: Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI agent focused on domestic terrorism, said he believes FBI counterterrorism efforts over-emphasize social media. “A lot of people online say things that are really scary, and if law enforcement is using its resources to focus there, it might explain why so much of this violence that occurs on the streets is unpoliced, because they’re spending their resources searching out bad words online,” he said. German said he thinks the FBI should focus more of its resources on investigating violent crimes committed by far-right extremists, rather than trying to predict which ones will turn violent based on their social media posts. In a separate article, Wired reports that the FBI has been using controversial geofence search warrants – intended to locate anyone in a given area using digital services – “at a scale not publicly seen before.” Wired reports that has found 45 federal criminal cases that cite Google geolocation data to place suspects inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, including at least six where the identity of the suspect appears to have been unknown to the FBI prior to the geofence warrant. White Scholars Colonizing Research on Health Equity
Stat
Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million to research it: health equity. But a Stat News "investigation," displaying the recent but growing woke sensibility in journalism, shows what it calls "a disturbing trend: a gold-rush mentality where researchers with little or no background or training in health equity research, often white and already well-funded, are rushing in to scoop up grants and publish papers." Stat reports it has "documented dozens of cases where white researchers are building on the work of, or picking the brains of, Black and brown researchers without citing them or offering to include them on grants or as co-authors." A glaring example occurred in August when the Journal of the American Medical Association — a leading medical journal already under fire for how it handles issues of race — published a special themed issue on racial and ethnic health disparities in medicine. Meant to highlight JAMA’s new commitment to health equity, it served up an illustration of the structural racism embedded in academic publishing: Not one of the five research papers published in the issue included a Black lead or corresponding author, and just one lead author was Hispanic. Beyond such intersectional head-counting, the article is unconvincing about how actual research is affected positively or negatively by the race or ethnicity of those conducting it. And it casts opportunistic grant-grubbing as characteristic of whites, when this could be a flaw of the money chase in research that knows no color boundary. And it refers to "structural racism" as a given and a term not subject to debate or examination, when it is very much so. Coronavirus Investigations School Meal Programs Are Running Out of Food, Workers Washington Post
Big Tech Companies Amass Property During Pandemic Wall Street Journal |
