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RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
December 4 to December 10, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten flags a significant if overlooked development in this year’s elections: a nascent comeback for organized labor. Illinois voters approved a constitutional amendment dramatically expanding the power of unions -- four years after a landmark Supreme Court defeat. Weingarten reports: -
Opponents say Illinoisans will pay an outsized cost for these “protections” in the deep-blue state -- where businesses are already fleeing high costs. -
One projection: a property tax hike of more than $2,100 for the average family. -
But labor stalwarts are heartened because the amendment bucks the trend of states legally enshrining “right to work" measures against unions that extract fees from non-union members. -
Such fees were at issue in the landmark 2018 Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case that public-sector unions lost. But some say that in a future court challenge, the Illinois constitutional amendment might carry more weight than the Illinois law that was overruled. -
Legal snarls loom elsewhere too. The amendment protects “employees” – not specifically “public-sector employees” – implying it could govern their private-sector counterparts. That’s an apparent conflict with federal labor law.
In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski reports on a dark lining of solar power that’s becoming difficult to ignore: It is consuming vast expanses of land as the Biden administration and green advocates push aggressively to their goal of net-zero emissions -- converting farms, fields, and wildlife habitats into geometric rows of indigo panels. Murawski reports: -
The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act includes what is called the “the largest package of subsidies ever” for the industry -- $220 billion for electric utilities to invest in solar power, battery storage systems and other carbon-free technologies. -
Expanding solar power could gobble up as much as 3,900 square miles nationwide, with some Eastern states losing up to 6% of their undeveloped land.
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Achieving a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050 could directly impact a cumulative land area the size of Virginia, with forests the most directly impacted by solar deployment in Eastern states. -
Environmental groups have been largely silent on the issue of deforestation -- the same vocal groups that have launched waves of lawsuits to fight oil-and-gas pipelines and natural gas fracking. -
Instead, resistance to solar land conversions is generally a local affair: Governments in nearly every state have enacted restrictions, moratoriums or bans on renewable energy facilities. -
Quote from a Virginian who lost his farmland patrimony to a development lease: “Those damn solar people destroyed my life.”
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series From the Annals of Solutions That Made the Problem Worse: The Biden administration took a public stand last year against the abuse of spyware to target human rights activists, dissidents and journalists by blacklisting the most notorious maker of the hacking tools, the Israeli firm NSO Group. But, this article reports, the use of spyware has proliferated since, with new firms – which employ former Israeli cyberintelligence veterans, some of whom worked for NSO – stepping in to fill the void left by the blacklisting: With this next generation of firms, technology that once was in the hands of a small number of nations is now ubiquitous — transforming the landscape of government spying. One firm, selling a hacking tool called Predator and run by a former Israeli general from offices in Greece, is at the center of a political scandal in Athens over the spyware’s use against politicians and journalists. … Predator was found to have been used in another dozen countries since 2021, illustrating the continued demand among governments and the lack of robust international efforts to limit the use of such tools. Even the Drug Enforcement Administration is secretly deploying spyware from a different Israeli firm, according to five people familiar with the agency’s operations, in the first confirmed use of commercial spyware by the federal government. Since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion program in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters: The abortions mostly were carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witness accounts. The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant, and some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed. … Central to the abortion program is a notion widely held within the military and among some civilians in the northeast: that the children of insurgents are predestined, by the blood in their veins, to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government and society. … “It’s just like sanitising the society,” said a civilian health worker, one of seven people who acknowledged performing abortions under army orders. Bodybuilders around the world are risking their lives and sometimes dying for the sport they love because of extreme measures that are encouraged by coaches, rewarded by judges and ignored by leaders of the industry, according to this Washington Post investigation, which focused on the deaths of more than two dozen bodybuilders, most of whom died leading up to or in the aftermath of competitions. : Unlike other professional sports, the IFBB Pro League, the largest professional bodybuilding federation in the United States, does not routinely test athletes for steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. … Several of the industry’s top coaches, without formal training or medical licenses, supplied their clients with illegal steroids or other illicit substances; instructed them on dosages for using performance-enhancing drugs; or advised athletes not to seek medical care before competitions. … Bodybuilders and coaches say the risks have intensified in recent years as contest judges increasingly reward athletes with nearly impossible-to-achieve physiques. Those who’ve warned against the dangers say they have faced pressure to stay silent and suffered backlash from federation officials and coaches after speaking out. For years, ComCor and many other halfway house operators in Colorado’s community corrections system have been cited by the state for failing to comply with security standards. Audits, staff incident reports and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica revealed that the facilities have been host to sexual assaults, frequent escapes, recurring drug use and overdose deaths. Yet regulators rarely use their authority or financial leverage to force facilities to improve their safety practices. Quote: The problems persist, in part, because although the [state] Office of Community Corrections oversees the system, 22 local community corrections boards also regulate what happens inside individual facilities. ProPublica found that most of the local boards – which are staffed by elected officials, parole officers, law enforcement, prosecutors and judges – work in tandem with halfway house operators, often looking past violations and failing to follow up when audits identify problems. Many boards haven’t audited the facilities they oversee in five years, or ever, meaning operators make millions of dollars from state contracts with minimal oversight. Pre-natal screening tests exist in a regulatory black hole. Manufacturers of many common commercial tests – for COVID-19, say, or pregnancy – are required to inform the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about so-called adverse events. This doesn't happen with prenatal screenings, which are relied upon to determine, for example, if an unborn child has genetic abnormalities. The stakes for families are increasing, this article reports. Upwards of half of all pregnant people now receive one of these prenatal screenings. And with many states banning abortions or limiting them to early in pregnancies, the need for fast, accurate information has become more urgent. Quote: No federal agency checks to make sure these prenatal screenings work the way they claim before they’re sold to health care providers. The FDA doesn’t ensure that marketing claims are backed up by evidence before screenings reach patients. And companies aren’t required to publicly report instances of when the tests get it wrong — sometimes catastrophically. The broader lab testing industry and its lobbyists have successfully fought for years to keep it this way, cowing regulators into staying on the sidelines. … “This is a Wild West scenario where everybody is on their own,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in bioethics. Coronavirus Investigations The CDC took nearly two years to formally recognize distinctions in masks for mitigating COVID-19 spread, finally saying in January that cloth masks offer "the least" protection and N95 respirators, which meet strict federal standards, "the highest." But, this article reports, a new peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial of N95s versus surgical masks, considered the midrange of protection, is undermining the late federal pivot to higher-quality masks and calls to reimpose mask mandates in schools, among other settings. Quote: Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM) this week and led by researchers at Canada's McMaster University, the study found no statistically significant difference in protection between the two kinds of masks in healthcare facilities in Canada, Israel, Pakistan and Egypt. … Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt claimed that retiring National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, whose flip-flops on masking led to mass public confusion early in the pandemic, couldn't name any studies showing mask effectiveness in his recent deposition in state-led litigation against alleged federal censorship. |
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| December 09, 2022 The California Public Health Department inked a $192 million no-bid contract with a marketing and communications firm to make Covid-19 graphics — two years after the pandemic began. The details of the contract,... |
| December 08, 2022 In 1985, The U.S. Navy spent $792 – $2,193 in 2022 dollars — on a single designer doormat, buying an unknown amount of them, earning it a Golden Fleece award. Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from... |
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