RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 9 to August 15, 2020 David Brock, the onetime anti-Clinton journalist turned pro-Hillary Clinton message-meister, faces legal actions and disclosures portraying his tax-exempt nonprofits as working so closely with the Clinton campaign in 2016 that they broke the law. Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations: - In a new lawsuit, a conservative group alleges an improperly porous relationship among four Brock-founded groups - including Media Matters - amounting to illegal coordination with the Clinton campaign.
- "They all work from the same offices," the Patriots Foundation says. "Brock was paid by all of them."
- A report in the liberal New Republic substantiates this, saying Media Matters acted openly as an arm of the Clinton campaign.
- New Republic: "In our numerous conversations with past Media Matters staff, there was a consensus that in the lead-up to Clinton's announcement of her candidacy in 2015, the organization's priority shifted away from the mission stated on its website — ‘comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation' — and towards running defense for Clinton."
- In 2008, the New York Times described Media Matters as a "nonprofit, highly partisan research organization."
- Internal Clinton campaign emails disclosed by WikiLeaks further reveal that the campaign was treating Media Matters as a surrogate, using it to "muddy the waters" to Clinton's advantage.
Trump-Russia/2020 Election News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series More Deaths of Homicide Than Covid in KC
KCTV5
Since March there have been more homicides (94) than deaths due to the coronavirus (76) in Kansas City. There have also been more non-fatal shootings (233) than virus-related hospitalizations, according this report, which does not explore the causes for the surge in violence. The New York Times tries to do that in a separate article focusing on Kansas City, to explore why murder in 20 major cities spiked an average of 37 percent between the end of May and the end of June. The article seems to criticize President Trump for using "the rising homicide numbers to paint Democratic-led cities as out of control and to blame protests against police brutality that broke out after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May." But then it reports that police officials in several cities have said the protests diverted officers from crime-fighting duty or emboldened criminals. An article in the Chicago Tribune suggests another reason for the surge - the reluctance of some prosecutors to, well, prosecute crimes. In Cook County, State Attorney Kim Foxx is dropping felony cases involving charges of murder and other serious offenses at a higher rate than her predecessor. In all, a total of 25,183 people had their felony cases dismissed under Foxx through November 2019, up from 18,694 under her predecessor. Why Police Unions Have So Much Power
Mother Jones
Public employee unions are notorious for keeping bad actors on the job. The harm this does to schoolchildren doesn't seem to bother the left very much; police violence is another matter. This article reports on police unions that often serve and protect their worst members, who, until recently, avoided the broader push to reform the criminal justice system. A main reason is politicians on both sides of the aisle,who have accepted millions of dollars in campaign donations from them. Democrats don't want to come down against unions, and Republicans, who are normally happy to attack unions, don't want to mess with the police. For example, when former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker reformed collective bargaining rights for his state's public sector unions in 2011, he left police unions mostly unscathed. The AFL-CIO, the country's largest labor coalition, has referred to police unions as rightful beneficiaries in the movement for workers' rights. TikTok Used Tracking Tactic Google Banned
Wall Street Journal
Fears that the Chinese government was using TikTok to track U.S. citizens kicked up a notch this week after this story reported that the popular app skirted a privacy safeguard in Google's Android operating system. TikTok collected unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices, data that allows the app to track users online without allowing them to opt out. The tactic, concealed through an unusual added layer of encryption, appears to have violated Google policies limiting how apps track people, and wasn't disclosed to TikTok users. TikTok ended the practice in November, the Journal's testing showed. Washington: Prison Health Care's Death Sentence (Parts 1-3)
Crosscut
This three-part series on the health-care system in Washington state prisons says delays in care may be a death sentence for men and women behind bars. While homicides and suicides in prison get the most press, prisoners in Washington are more likely to die of untreated or undertreated illness. It also reports that inmate death rates are rising even as prison populations shrink, in part because an aging population makes cancer a growing cause of death. Woman Dead Since '71 Got $459K in Social Security
Washington Times
This article is a collection of head scratchers unified by the incompetence of government. The story starts in 1971 when a woman, identified only as AV, died in Brooklyn. Six years later, she received her first social security check - which was dutifully cashed by her nephew. The payments kept coming for 43 years as the man collected a staggering $459,000 over the years, federal prosecutors said. The Feds even sent AV a $1,200 stimulus check this year - just before she would have celebrated her 114th birthday. Coronavirus Investigations Virus Was Certain. Why Wasn't Response? (Part 1)
Wall Street Journal
Scientists warned of a pandemic for decades, yet when COVID-19 arrived, the world was unprepared to handle it. This article tries to explain why. It reports that governments had ignored clear warnings and underfunded pandemic preparedness. They mostly reacted to outbreaks, instead of viewing new infectious diseases as major threats to national security. And they never developed a strong international system for managing epidemics, even though researchers said the nature of travel and trade would spread infection across borders. In the United States federal money to help states and cities prepare for pandemics, which was ramped up following the SARS outbreak in 2002-03, fell by 35% in fiscal year 2020. "We have a cycle of crisis, and then we become complacent, and [then] the tendency is for the focus and the investment to be repurposed for other issues," said Julie Gerberding, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pennsylvania: Nursing Home a Covid Death Trap
Trib Live
In one of the worst outbreaks in Pennsylvania, 73 people died and more than 300 others were infected by the coronavirus at Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in Beaver County. This investigation reveals a series of red flags in the facility's troubled history, including: - Three years of inspection reports showing serious problems with infection control, management and patient care, including a failure to separate coronavirus-infected patients from healthy patients.
- Thirty months on a federal watch list for underperforming nursing homes, a situation that continues more than four months after the first death at the facility.
- A significant difference in the amount of actual care time - 40 percent to 50 percent less - devoted to each patient at Brighton versus other facilities in Pennsylvania and across the nation.
Also Coronavirus-Related How Cruise Lines Left Workers Adrift for Months Wall Street Journal
Russia, China, India Cut Corners for Vaccine Der Spiegel
Latest Research: Kids Carry, Transmit Corona Wall Street Journal
Dentists Warn of Smelly Rise of 'Mask Mouth' New York Post
|
