RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 7 to June 13, 2020 Investigating sexual misconduct involving schoolkids is about to get more complicated than marching students down to the principal's office, John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations. Now the kids can lawyer up. - In replacing disputed Obama-era campus-rape policies with more robust protections for the accused, the Trump administration is also expanding federal oversight to K-12 education - giving even prepubescent pupils the right to a lawyer in a sexual misconduct investigation.
- Come next school year, an accused grade-schooler, the accuser and their parents will get to review each other's evidence, such as social media posts, texts, and photos. Then they can submit written responses for the opposing parties and questions for witnesses.
- Lawyers say the new protocols mean quasi-judicial proceedings lasting a month or more.
- The Education Department says K-12 sexual harassment and sexual violence complaints have increased nearly 15-fold in a decade.
- Under particular scrutiny: Chicago Public Schools.
- The coronavirus pandemic is a wild card: No one could have foreseen it when the rulemaking process began years ago. Now no one knows how classes will resume this fall.
- Critics say the rules favor male perpetrators and have filed lawsuits to block them.
- Democratic standard-bearer Joe Biden has vowed to kill the rules if he's elected President this fall.
- The policies expand the reach of the Education Department under Republicans, who for decades sought to curb or even abolish it after President Jimmy Carter created it.
With fragmentary early returns in, an emerging non-favorite in Election 2020 is mail-in voting prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. In RealClearInvestigations, seasoned vote-fraud reporter Steve Miller surveys the national scene on the irregularities, alleged shenanigans and confusion so far: - A postal carrier in rural West Virginia allegedly tampered with ballot applications sent out for today's state primary, changing affiliations to deny Democrats their choice.
- In Democrat-dominated Paterson, N.J., mail-in ballots were improperly delivered and hundreds wound up in a neighboring town. More than 3,000 ballots, or 19% of the mail-in vote, were disqualified.
- They were still counting votes this week from the first mostly mail-in election last week in Baltimore, where hundreds never got ballots and printing errors sowed confusion about others.
- And in Nevada's Clark County including Las Vegas - where roughly 200,000 voters on the rolls are considered inactive - mail-in ballots were reportedly found stacked outside apartment buildings.
- Mail voting, loudly opposed by President Trump, has long been associated with fraud through ballot harvesting, vote buying, voter intimidation, and misrepresentation.
- In courts, opposing sides are locking horns over purging rolls of ineligible voters -- the rolls officials rely on to generate mail ballots. Conservatives stress opportunities for fraud while liberals warn of voter disenfranchisement.
- Although five states - Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, and Washington - have for years automatically sent ballots to all registered voters, the worry is that communities nationwide may not have the time, resources or expertise to put protections in place in the five months before the general election.
- The few reported cases of fraud are cold comfort. They are in part a function of election officials not having the resources to look for them. Alleged mischief is investigated typically only after someone notices and blows the whistle.
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 30,000 Cops in 44 States Banned for Misconduct
USA Today
This USA Today investigation confirms that many police officers abuse the public trust. It reports that officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women. They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk, and abused their spouses. But it also challenges the narrative that they do so with impunity, reporting that at least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the country have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade; and more than 30,000 officers were decertified by 44 state oversight agencies. In a separate article, CNN reports, however, that cops in Minneapolis - where George Floyd was killed at the hands of police - appear to be disciplined at relatively low rates. It reports that "only about 1.5% of complaints filed against Minneapolis police have resulted in suspensions, terminations or demotions between 2013 and 2019. … While no national data exists on the outcome of police complaints filed across the country, former law enforcement officials and oversight organizations agreed that the ratio of complaints filed to officers disciplined in Minneapolis seems low." 'Non-Lethal' Weapons Cause Life-Threatening Injuries
The Intercept
Law enforcement agencies have employed "non-lethal" weapons to quell recent civil unrest, but this article reports that it's long been known that such munitions regularly cause serious and sometimes fatal injuries: "Studies have found that both pepper spray and tear gas can cause serious eye injuries and respiratory problems — an issue intensified amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic." Rubber bullets and other"kinetic projectiles "have long caused permanent injury or death, particularly when fired at the head or neck. Tasers have long been identified as lethal — even as proponents have worked overtime to deny that." In a separate article, Fast Company details the history of rubber bullets which, it turns out, are rarely made of rubber anymore - some even have metal components, just like conventional bullets - and are usually shot from grenade launchers, though shotgun rounds are also popular. Instead of piercing the skin, the rounds are meant to strike someone with blunt force, incapacitating them like the swing of a baton but from afar. Small Towns Pitting Armed Groups vs. Antifa
NBC News
Rumors of marauding antifa buses have popped up on local social media networks all across the country, sometimes leading to direct, dangerous action by locals and police departments. In Forks, Washington, locals felled trees with chainsaws to block a road, fearing that a bus filled with antifa was headed to town. According to the Peninsula Daily News, the bus was occupied by a multi-racial family of four heading home from a campsite. It was eventually surrounded "by seven or eight carloads of people in the grocery store parking lot." Police and 911 dispatchers in South Bend, Indiana, were inundated with calls warning of "busloads of people coming in from the toll road." One tweet, posted by several different, brand-new accounts using identical language, warned South Bend residents to "be in by 9 and lock all of your doors." Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot decried a "concerted effort out there to misinform" after the city's police scanner repeatedly warned of antifa buses on their way into town amid protests. In a separate article, The Verge reports that neighborhood-focused social network apps and chat boards have become vehicles for frightened conspiracy theories. The Racial Reckoning in Women's Media
Vox
This article reports that women's magazines and blogs have, "over the course of the 2010s … started to seem more diverse, more representational, more like real life." Diet tips are no longer a mainstay of coverage, and many publications now feature photographs and stories about queer women, indigenous women and black women. Still, in modernizing its content, "women's media often failed to extend the same progressive values to its own employees. Even when publications have tried to hire diverse staff members to create more inclusive content, those workers have been boxed out. Traditional feminist advice, like speaking up about workplace discrimination and attempting to ‘lean in' and climb the corporate ladder, hasn't seemed to apply when the employee is black." In a separate article, the Daily Beast provides a list of people who have "lost their jobs because of the racial reckoning of 2020." Chinese Propaganda Outlet Paid U.S. Newspapers $19M for Ads
Daily Caller
One of China's main propaganda arms has paid more than $4.6 million to the Washington Post and nearly $6 million to the Wall Street Journal since November 2016 for advertising and printing expenses, acccording to documents filed with the Justice Department. Both newspapers have published paid supplements created by China Daily - an English-language newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The inserts, titled "China Watch," are designed to look like real news articles, though they often contain a pro-Beijing spin on contemporary news events. China Daily also paid for advertising in several other newspapers: The New York Times ($50,000), Foreign Policy ($240,000), the Des Moines Register ($34,600) and CQ-Roll Call ($76,000). This practice recalls Russia's paid U.S. newspaper inserts before the 2016 campaign, propaganda that didn't stop the beneficiaries of the Kremlin largesse -- then as now the New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media -- from later blasting social media for uncritically spreading Russian misinformation. Trump-Russia/2020 Election News House Republicans: New Criminal Trump-Russia Referrals Just the News
Declassified File on Dossier Affirms Comey Misled Trump Federalist
Primary Steele Dossier Source Remains Elusive Daily Caller
Joe Biden Let Police Groups Write His Crime Bill Washington Post
Don Jr. Hunt Trip Cost Taxpayers $75,000 CREW
Pelosi Silent on Dad's Dedication of Confederate Statue Breitbart Coronavirus Investigations Dr. Birx in Leaked Call: 70 Test Sites Destroyed in Unrest
Daily Beast
Top officials on President Trump's coronavirus task force privately told governors they were worried about a spike in infections due to mass protests against racial injustice taking place across the country. Deborah Birx, Trump's coronavirus response coordinator, said 70 testing sites at the protests were destroyed, setting back efforts to contain the virus' spread. She advised governors to "scramble now to make sure there is testing available in urban areas." Washington: Covid Tests Sold From Vacant Seattle Hotel
NPR/KUOW
Seattle emergency room physician Dr. Eric Friedland has started a lucrative side business. He has drawn 400 people's blood for antibody testing so far, he says -- at $129 each -- to determine whether they have already had, and recovered from, COVID-19. Friedland attracts clients through blue yard signs posted along busy streets advertising walk-in "FDA approved" antibody tests at a "COVID-19 Test Center." But his test center is, in fact, a gray AirBnB hotel with cardboard hung in the windows. An industrial-size laundry detergent bucket next to the front door has "PCR SWAB COVID test" scrawled on the lid in black marker. This article also reports that his facility is not regulated by the state. And, despite Dr. Friedland's claims, its antibody test is not FDA-approved. That a budget hotel has become a makeshift medical facility offering unproven antibody tests highlights the gaps in regulatory oversight at the local, state and federal levels during the pandemic. Also Coronavirus-Related The Science Behind Orchestras' Careful Covid Comeback, Wired
Michigan Falsely Tags Many as Unemployment Cheats, Undark
Thousands Sick From COVID-19 in Homes for the Disabled, Associated Press
Virus Bares Lack of Nursing-Home Staff, Reuters
COVID-19 Cases Brought Shortage of Hospital Painkillers, Reuters |
