RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 15 to October 21, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that the Internal Revenue Service recently awarded a lucrative new computer contract to the same Washington firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, that employed the man who pleaded guilty last week to stealing and leaking thousands of private tax returns of wealthy Americans, including President Trump. - The massive IRS theft is the third major breach of confidential and classified government information by Booz Allen contractors over the last decade -- including Edward Snowden's 2013 leak exposing the National Security Agency’s worldwide anti-terror surveillance program.
- Cyber-thief Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn stole more than two decades of Trump’s personal tax records from IRS computers. He later leaked them to the New York Times, which published negative stories on Trump’s long-sought returns several weeks before the 2020 election.
- After the election, Littlejohn leaked a trove of sensitive IRS data on Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires to ProPublica. Congressional Democrats cited ProPublica’s resulting series in their push for higher taxes on the wealthy.
- A Democrat donor, Littlejohn struck a deal with federal prosecutors in which he copped to a single count of disclosing tax information without authorization.
- Trump lawyer Alina Habba said that smacked of "a Hunter Biden plea deal."
- The name of Booz Allen is being revealed only now. It was withheld from court proceedings and from stories about the plea deal and the earlier ones based on Littlejohn’s leaks.
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports on the large mismatch that has developed in climate politics between ill-funded dissenters and monied progressive interests pushing aggressively for renewable energy. It reflects a reversal of fortunes for a movement that likes to demonize Big Oil but skeptics now call Big Green: - The David vs. Goliath dynamic is powered by taxpayer funding, especially lately the hundreds of billions of dollars in largesse provided through the Inflation Reduction Act to address what President Biden calls an “emergency” that is “literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”
- Ultimately, the law will likely cost some $1.2 trillion, according to Goldman Sachs.
- Academic funding for environmental research also goes almost exclusively to projects hewing to the climate emergency narrative.
- On top of that, philanthropists have donated billions, together with a who’s who of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
- Also enlisted in the “climate emergency” camp: white-shoe law firms; prosecutors paid privately but operating in public district attorneys’ offices; and media and academics who hammer home the narrative.
- Illustration: The Sierra Club's $151 million budget is well over 300 times that of the dissenting Global Warming Policy Foundation.
- Despite such disparities in funding, skeptics are often dismissed as shills for energy companies. Yet “Big Oil” appears to have largely stopped funding research challenging the climate emergency narrative, in some cases bending to the prevailing winds – or solar rays – of political expediency.
- RCI reached out to numerous major energy companies. They had nothing to say.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Costly Office Furniture as Feds Work at Home
Execs at Losing Amtrak Ride the Gravy Train
GOP Lawmakers Top the Earmarks List
Education Dept. Does Math in the Billions
Early Start to Indigenous Day Weekend Biden, Trump and the Beltway Biden Secret Documents Scandal Tied to Family Business, Daily Signal
Biden's Brother Jim Got Football Tix in Loan Fraud: Documents, Daily Mail
Liberal Judge Gags Trump, Top '24 Foe vs. Biden, Politico
Trump Hauling Steele Into British Court Over Bogus Dossier, Associated Press
Israel Envoy Nominee Jack Lew's $14M Private Equity Pay, Leefang.com
The Perils for Trump and Allies in Sidney Powell's Guilty Plea, CNN
A 7-Month Term for an Anti-Hillary Twitter Meme, Courthouse News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Under a program critics call “pay-to-slay,” the Palestinian government is expected to dole out nearly $3 million this month to the families of Hamas terrorists responsible for an unprecedented attack on Israel that killed some 1,500 civilians and wounded many more, according to a watchdog group: The Palestinian government has long administered a program that awards imprisoned and killed terrorists who attack Israel, using international aid dollars to funnel cash to the families of those terrorists killed. In the wake of Hamas’s slaughter, "each family of the 1,500 dead Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel will receive 7,400 shekels (around $1,900) for this first month." "Families of those terrorists who were married and had children will receive even more," according to Palestinian Media Watch’s calculations. The Palestinian government "will pay at least 11,100,000 shekels ($2,789,430) this month as a reward for participating in last week’s murders and atrocities against Israeli civilians." This article reports that the Biden administration has “pump[ed] nearly half-a-billion dollars into the Palestinian government upon taking office.” In a separate article, City Journal reports that many of anti-Israel rallies in the U.S. have included people affiliated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which, this article reports, has a long history of militancy and connections to the terrorist group Hamas. In a separate article, the Washington Examiner reports on research by the watchdog group Canary Mission that asked what happened to some 300 people whom it identified as “promot[ing] hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses” before graduating. The most common career was teaching children. “In total, 38% of the kinds of people who once marched around campus chanting about decolonization go on to teaching careers.” The size of the military is growing in a new and dangerous way. This article reports that the obesity rate of active-duty service members has doubled in the past decade, jumping from 10.4 percent in 2012 to 21.6 percent in 2022. Even more soldiers are classified as overweight, according to a new report from the American Security Project: Today, 68 percent of active-duty servicemembers are either overweight or obese, and eating disorders in the military increased by approximately 79 percent between 2017 and 2021, the report said. Although obesity in the U.S. and the military is not new, the seemingly rapid increase in the rate of overweight troops could renew concerns over military readiness, as obesity is a primary contributor to in-service injuries and medical discharges, the report said. Furthermore, the report found that the military’s inconsistent use of body mass index (BMI) data and social stigmas surrounding the treatment of obesity are hampering efforts to combat it. The report recommends that the armed forces treat obesity as a chronic disease. “The Department of Defense’s influence over the active-duty environment allows it to successfully mitigate this crisis by applying evidence-based treatments and controlling contributing factors such as diet, exercise, sleep, and stress,” the author, Courtney Manning, wrote. Nearly 20 percent of American children are obese, a rate nearly four times what it was in the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and much higher than those in most other countries. A recent government decision will probably not help counter the problem, this article reports: “For the first time, Lunchables [the highly processed package food kit made by Kraft Heinz,] are eligible to be served to nearly 30 million children under the rules of the National School Lunch Program after the company altered two of its products to qualify. The weak standards that govern federally subsidized school lunches illustrate the power of the food industry in Congress and the outsize influence of food companies on the School Nutrition Association, which represents 50,000 school lunch personnel. While many nations have adopted more nutritious school meals and stricter advertising standards, pizza sauce and french fries still count as vegetables for schoolchildren in the United States, and U.S. food companies remain virtually free to advertise to youngsters any way they like. The article reports that Kraft Heinz sees a $25 billion growth opportunity in the school lunch market, where the company has access to generations of future customers. Were those dedicated employees once celebrated for never missing a day’s work in 40 years just a bunch of chumps? That seems to be the growing attitude as evidence pours in that the younger, “quiet-quitting,” “laptop off at 5” generation has a far different relationship to work than their parents. This article reports that U.S. workers no longer view an unwillingness to take sick days as a badge of honor, as the number of sick days Americans take annually has soared since the pandemic. Although workers are increasingly willing to take “mental health days,” the uptick seems less related to illness than attitude: Unlike older workers, who might have been loath to call in sick for fear of seeming weak or unreliable, younger workers feel more entitled to take full advantage of the benefits they’ve been given, executives and recruiters say. That confidence has only grown as record low unemployment persists. So far this year, 30% of white-collar workers with access to paid leave have taken sick time, up from 21% in 2019, according to data from payroll and benefits software company Gusto. Employees between ages 25 and 34 are taking sick days most often. The article reports that job-hopping has also made workers feel less guilty about calling in sick and leaving co-workers to pick up their slack. “If you don’t stay long enough to build camaraderie with co-workers, you’re more apt to take the time,” said one executive who added that she sees more younger workers, in particular, taking all their sick days. “I don’t think there’s the same work ethic.” Dan Barry is a must-read byline as he invariably combines deep-dive reporting with an elegant prose style that suggests deeper questions and concerns. This article is no exception as it details the efforts of formerly incarcerated Minnesotans who have turned their lives arounds and are seeking pardons for their past deeds. Here’s the opening: The supplicants clustered outside the enormous closed doors. They paced the hallway, fidgeted on benches, knitted their hands and waited, waited, for their 10-minute chance at mercy. A tall man in a sharp blazer, caught a quarter-century ago with 127 doses of LSD. A pony-tailed Navy veteran who critically injured someone while driving drunk in 2008. A burly man twice convicted of assaulting his wife, now sitting beside him. A former addict once found unconscious in a car, syringe jutting from his arm. Others dogged by the past. They had come to the Minnesota capital of St. Paul on this steamy summer day to be forgiven. Restored. Redeemed. The doors opened to reveal Minnesota officialdom personified: the governor, the attorney general and the state’s chief justice — the three members of the Board of Pardons. They sat, unsmiling, at a long table facing a much smaller table that featured tissue boxes and a digital clock set at 10 minutes. Ten minutes: the time allotted the supplicants to prove that they were worthy; that, like St. Paul, they had traveled their own rutted road to Damascus. This buzzer-beating pressure intensified a raw pardon process unlike those in most other states, with the powerless beseeching the powerful in public, and the decision rendered in the moment. |
