RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 1 to October 7, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly reports that Matthew Graves and Fatima Goss Graves are quite the Washington power couple: As U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, he focuses on prosecuting Jan. 6 offenders years after the fact - rather than the current deadly crime wave in the nations’ capital, or Hunter Biden – while his activist wife has an open door at the White House of President Biden, MAGA world's sworn enemy: -
Graves’ office has prosecuted at least 1,100 Jan. 6 defendants – including roughly 200 people so far this year, while D.C. homicides passed the grim milestone of 200 last month. -
Republicans claim Graves’ prosecutions sustain one of Biden’s core narratives – that, as the president put it, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” -
Republicans demand Graves explain why he, according to IRS whistleblowers, overruled tax charges against Hunter Biden. -
Goss Graves has visited the Biden White House dozens of times. As head of the National Women’s Law Center, she amplified unproven rape accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh and has pressed for unrestricted “abortion forever.” -
The Graveses seem particularly close to Vice President Kamala Harris. Graves and the Veep’s husband were both partners at DLA Piper law firm in Washington.
In RealClearInvestigations, Kevin Mooney reports that Washington’s revolving door is getting a fresh green paint job: Federal architects of a new rule requiring businesses to measure their carbon footprints throughout their supply chains have joined a start-up company poised to reap millions by performing those calculations. -
At least three ranking Securities and Exchange Commission officials have joined Persefoni, a company formed in 2020 for the purpose of measuring such footprints of large business enterprises. -
Among them is Allison Herren Lee, former acting SEC chair. She left just before the commission unveiled its proposed climate rule -- and soon joined Persefoni. -
Documents show that the SEC relied on input from the for-profit company to draft the proposed rule. -
Critics argue that the estimates from Persefoni low-balled the price tags unrealistically for such accounting to make them more politically palatable. -
A critic says “there’s no limiting principle" to estimates of indirect emissions across supply chains. -
Persefoni and outfits like it stand to profit from the new rule since most companies do not have the staff or expertise to calculate their carbon footprints. -
Persefoni executives have not been shy in discussing the windfall they expect if the rule is finalized. One called Persefoni the “TurboTax of greenhouse gas reporting.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books $4.5 Billion to Pay Ukraine's Debts, RCI
Lab That Lacked Scientific Rigor on Costs, RCI
Michigan Energizes Chinese Battery Firm, RCI
Cost Control to NASA! Do You Copy?, RCI
$100B+ Buys Wackiest Ship in the Navy, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Beyond Hunter: All About James and Frank Biden, Wall Street Journal
Memo: Feeling Heat, Burisma Pushed Hunter to Call Dad, Federalist
Despite Denials, Biden's DOJ Involved in Hunter Case Early On, Just the News
FBI Laptop Censorship Witness a No-Show Daily Caller
Biden Challengers Nearly Nonexistent in Google Results, Just the News
Contractor Charged for Leak to ProPublica of Trump Taxes, Wall St Journal Other Noteworthy Articles and Series One more reason why airports can feel like parking lots for people: This article reports that major airlines, including American, United and Southwest, have pulled jets from their fleets amid reports that thousands of jet-engine parts with fraudulent safety certificates have been installed onto passenger planes: The scandal has zeroed in on a dubious airplane parts supplier named AOG Technics, which allegedly mass-produced fake safety certificates in order to sell its engine parts to airlines. AOG Technics has also faced allegations it faked employees and was using stock photographs for fictitious staffers on LinkedIn. … With parts from the problematic company so far found in 126 engines across several airlines, questions are being raised over the effectiveness of the aviation industry's safety oversight measures. This article reports that the most affected engine model was found to be a CFM56, which alarmingly holds the record for most engines ever sold to airlines at over 33,900. It is currently installed in numerous jets across the world, most notably Boeing's predecessor to the 737 MAX and the initial version of the Airbus A320. The airlines say passenger safety has not been compromised. School book challenges reached historic highs in America in 2021 and 2022, according to the American Library Association. And just a handful of people are driving those records. A Washington Post analysis of thousands of challenges nationwide found that 60 percent of all challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from 11 adults, each of whom objected to dozens of books in their districts – sometimes close to 100 books. This article focuses on a Virginia woman who is part of that small but influential group: Jennifer Petersen keeps 73 school books she detests in her basement. She ordered most from Amazon. In the last year, she read each one. She highlighted and typed up excerpts from more than 1,300 pages – of the 24,000-plus pages she read – that she says depict sexual acts. Then she filed challenges against 71 of the books with Spotsylvania County Public Schools, the Virginia district where one of her children is a student and the other is a recent graduate. (Two books were removed before she could challenge them.) Across 434 pages of challenges – longer than many of the books she objected to – Petersen offered variations on a theme. “This book reads like a how to guide for raping teens,” she wrote of one. “The book normalizes teen sex and ... glorifies and incites teens to have sex,” she wrote of another. “What is the fascination,” she asked of a third, “with so many of these books containing detailed sexual content?” The Post does not quote from the material Petersen objects to being made available to children because the language is “too explicit to be printed in this newspaper.” When Brian Conrad, director of undergraduate studies in math at Stanford University, learned of California’s 1,000-page proposal to transform math education in public schools, he decided someone had to read the whole thing. “So I did.” His well-written piece – which echoes Richard Bernstein’s 2021 reporting about the math framework for RealClearInvestigations – observes: I could scarcely believe what I was reading. The document cited research that hadn’t been peer-reviewed; justified sweeping generalizations by referencing small, tightly focused studies or even unrelated research; and described some papers as reaching nearly the opposite conclusions from what they actually say. The document tried hard to convince readers that it was based on a serious reading of neuroscience research. … The CMF is meant only to guide local districts, but in practice it influences the choices they make about what and how to teach. Even so, the version ultimately adopted by the State Board of Education is likely to distort math instruction for years to come. Armed with trendy buzzwords and false promises of greater equity, California is promoting an approach to math instruction that’s likely to reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students—in the state and wherever else educators follow the state’s lead. Conrad concludes: The students who are most reliant upon public schools are the most harmed when districts embrace policies based on superficial appeals to equity or false promises about future job opportunities. When only the children of families with resources beyond the public schools are gaining preparation for the lucrative degrees and secure jobs of the future, public education is failing in a primary duty. Fred was diagnosed with autism – technically ADHD with autistic traits – at age four, struggled with depression and anxiety as he got older, and was expelled from three different special-needs schools due to behavioral problems, stemming in part from an impulse control disorder. In December 2022, this article reports, the then 17-year-old announced that he was a transgender woman. Fred’s parents tried to enroll their son, whom they were now calling by a female name at home, in the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Hospital, the only gender clinic in the country specializing in autistic youth. Fred was determined to take hormones, they told the clinic, which is known for its lengthy assessments. Before he did, they wanted to be sure his dysphoria wasn’t transient or peer-driven. The clinic informed them in March that it had a waitlist of about a year. And Fred, who would be turning 18 in two months, wasn’t willing to wait. In late July, while his parents were out of town and after he had come of age, Fred went to Planned Parenthood, which prescribes hormones to any legal adult without a letter from a therapist or a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The only requirement is a brief consultation, usually with a nurse practitioner, about the drugs’ effects, which range from mood swings and male pattern baldness to permanent infertility. How brief? Fred arrived at his local clinic, on North Fullerton Ave. in Montclair, New Jersey, at around 11:00 a.m., according to phone tracking data his parents used to monitor his whereabouts. By 11:39, they received a text message from CVS: Fred’s estrogen prescription was on its way. The scam is called financial sextortion: Predators befriend victims online under false pretenses, entice them to send incriminating or embarrassing photos such as nude selfies and then demand payment by threatening to expose the photos to family and friends. This article reports that young men are a favorite target: The number of sextortion cases targeting young people “has exploded in the past couple of years,” with teen boys being specific targets, said Lauren Coffren, executive director of the Exploited Children Division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). “They’re using shame, embarrassment and fear, and they’re tapping into that,” Coffren said. “They’re exploiting children’s worst nightmares.” NCMEC, which serves as a clearinghouse for records of abuse, received more than 10,000 tips of financial sextortion of minors, primarily boys, in 2022 from the public as well as from electronic service providers, such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, which are required by law to report cases. This article reports that the repercussions of the abuse can be devastating: At least a dozen boys died by suicide in 2022, after they were blackmailed, according to the FBI. |
