RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 18 to October 24, 2020 In the legal reckoning over America's lethal addiction scourge, big pharmacy chains are damned if they did restrict opioids and damned if they didn't, Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations. And Walmart is a case in point: - Contradictory regulations, demands, and threats from Washington and the states have combined to create a tangle trapping Walmart and other pharmacy chains, leaving them exposed to plaintiffs' lawyers in a massive "multi-district litigation" playing out in an Ohio court.
- Walmart is preemptively suing the Department of Justice, asking a federal district court to untangle the contradictory requirements that have left the retail giant open to investigation for doing too little or, conversely, too much.
- The "DOJ is threatening to sue Walmart for not going even further in second-guessing doctors," Walmart said in a press release, while "state health regulators are threatening Walmart and our pharmacists for going too far and interfering in the doctor-patient relationship."
- Pharmacies don't make the drugs; nor do pharmacies sell opioids on their own authority.
- Nevertheless, Walmart not only has a large footprint in the business of selling prescription drugs -- 5,000 pharmacies -- but some of the deepest pockets in all of retail.
In North Carolina, a white university doctor says he's being pressured to admit he's a racist and repent. In Arkansas, Christian grocery workers have been fired for refusing to wear rainbow hearts. They're not alone. As John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations, workers nationwide are coming under increasing pressure to confess to unearned white privilege in diversity training sessions -- and some feel they're being shamed and forced into it, possibly illegally, even as others go all in on workplace wokeness. Murawski reports: - After the death of George Floyd, companies are adopting anti-racist advocacy as an organizational mission, moving well beyond voicing pieties like color-blindness.
- Employers' target is the so-called complicity of America and its citizens in "structural racism" and "oppression."
- Backlash: Kroger Co. was slapped with a federal bias complaint for firing Christian grocery employees who refused to wear rainbow hearts.
- President Trump banned federal racial-sensitivity workshops pushing "critical race theory."
- But Whole Foods and Whataburger workers have taken legal action for the right to wear "Black Lives Matter."
- Corporations are moving to revamp their cultures and pledging big dollars to diversity causes.
- Starbucks and Microsoft are tying executive compensation to the aggressive goals. A few companies are even experimenting with reparations to black customers.
- Labor lawyer: "Employees need to be aware that they may not have a right to say ‘no' to this."
- But another lawyer disputes the idea that "at will" employment law means workers can't fight a hostile work environment under federal anti-discrimination bans.
Never mind Florida's "hanging chads" of 2000. Trump vs. Biden is already showing signs of giving Bush vs. Gore a run for its money in the Election Litigation Debacle Derby. Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations that lawsuits are mushrooming across the country amid a pandemic-forced surge in mail-in ballots - and there is every expectation that the battles will continue and intensify after Nov. 3. Miller reports: - More than a dozen mail ballot cases have landed in federal and state courts,
- In dispute are extended deadlines for voter registration and returning absentee ballots. Also: whether ballots must be signed in the presence of witnesses or whether a third party can deliver ballots.
- In many instances, the courts are rewriting election laws at the behest of Democrats looking to increase voter participation.
- This week, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Pennsylvania court's decision to increase the number of days during which ballots can be accepted.
- President Trump and many Republicans insist that such moves increase the chances of mail ballot fraud or error.
- And in fact mail ballots are often problematic: Around 1 percent - roughly 3 million - were rejected nationwide in 2016.
- To handle the increase in mail ballots, most elections offices have beefed up their temporary staffing. But the heightened scrutiny those votes will receive, especially in close states, promises prolonged litigation after Nov. 3.
Why, in the days before an election fraught with political squabbling over Russia and computer hacking, would the Justice Department weigh in this week with indictments of six Russian state hackers? Writing for the Investigative Issues feature on RealClearInvestigations, Eric Felten has a skeptical take. He notes: - The threat the Russians pose is hardly new, and adding a new set of indictments doesn't bring them closer to justice in a U.S. court.
- There's nothing in the charges that even hints that they pose an imminent threat.
- On the other hand, the charges could bolster the narrative that to ask questions about Hunter Biden is to be complicit in a Russian plot.
- And since the DoJ gave a shoutout to Facebook and Twitter for help in its probe, could it be that the indictments were a way to give social media some good press before facing senators on the ugly question of digital censorship?
- Felten concludes that hyping Russian hacking just ahead of a U.S. election can only create the impression on all sides that it lacks legitimacy.
Trump-Russia/2020 Election News Hunter Biden's Ex-Partner: Joe Knew, Wall Street Journal
Hunter Biden-China Email Mentions Split for 'the Big Guy', Fox News
Photo Shows Joe Biden With Son's Alleged Kazakh Partner, New York Post
New Hunter Biden Twist: White House Visit for Chinese, National Review
Docs Shed Light on Hunter Biden's Links to Russian Oligarch, Daily Caller
Hunter Allies' Emails: He Was 'Currency', Breitbart
Video: The Hidden Political Agenda of Google's Top Managers, Project Veritas Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Why 4,998 Died in U.S. Jails Before Their Day in Court
Reuters
The U.S. government collects detailed data on who's dying in which jails around the country - but won't let anyone see it. So, Reuters conducted its own tally of fatalities in America's biggest jails, pinpointing where suicide, botched health care and bad jailkeeping are claiming lives in a system with scant oversight. In this first part of a series, Reuters reports that it documented 7,571 inmate deaths in an unprecedented examination of mortality in more than 500 U.S. jails from 2008 to 2019. Death rates have soared in those lockups, rising 35% over the decade ending last year. Many of those who died were held on minor charges and died without ever getting their day in court. At least two-thirds of the dead inmates identified by Reuters, 4,998 people, were never convicted of the charges on which they were being held. ‘Narco-Sub' Caught After Crossing Atlantic
Wall Street Journal
Forget the sun -plashed speed boats made famous in "Miami Vice." Today's drug smugglers ferry cocaine far longer distances across the Atlantic in "narco-submarines" - including a 66-foot craft that sank off the coast of Spain. Narco-subs have ferried cocaine from Colombia to Central America since the 1990s but are proliferating along longer routes to meet European demand. Rarely true submarines, they are generally semisubmersibles that float mostly but not completely below the waterline and are nearly undetectable. Low-tech, uncomfortable and hazardous, they have been nicknamed "water coffins" for crews who share a cramped cabin with bales of cocaine, wedged between a thundering diesel motor and more than 5,000 gallons of fuel. Most are built out of sight in South American jungles for around $1 million apiece. This article draws on various sources to recreate the journey of the Spanish wreck. Americans Took Prevagen for Years as FDA Doubted Safety
Wired
An estimated three million people who were afraid they were losing their memory have purchased Prevagen since it was first launched in 2007 by Quincy Bioscience, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer. Its "extra strength" variety retails for about $60 at Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart, and sales reached $165 million by mid-2015. Commercials for Prevagen have insisted that "it's safe and effective," an assurance Quincy echoed to regulators. But a Wired investigation found that FDA officials have long questioned the basis for the company's claims. Thousands of Americans have reported experiencing "adverse events" while taking Prevagen, including seizures, strokes, irregular heartbeats, chest pain, and dizziness - though there is no proof the problems were caused by the supplement. Ivy League-Obsessed Parents' Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports
Atlantic
Football, basketball and other major sports have long offered poor minority children a path to higher education. While that is still true, this article reports that rich white kids are increasingly turning to minor sports - such as fencing and hockey - to increase their chances of gaining admissions to prestigious schools. The focus here is different from venality of the Varsity Blues scandal, in which hedge fund managers and celebrities paid bribes to gain prestigious college admissions for children who fraudulently claimed to be, say, expert sailors. Here the focus is legitimate athletic recruits from a wealthy section of Connecticut that pumps more of them into Ivy League schools than any other area in the nation. Kids' sports look a little different here - as they do in upscale neighborhoods across America. Backyards feature batting cages, pitching tunnels, fencing pistes, and Olympic-size hockey rinks complete with floodlights and generators. Hotly debated zoning-board topics include building codes for at-home squash courts and storm-drainage plans to mitigate runoff from private ice rinks. Whereas the "Hoop Dreams" kids from the Chicago projects pursued sports as a path out of poverty and hardship, the kids of Fairfield County aren't gunning for scholarship money. The special boost for recruited athletes, known as preferential admission, can be equivalent to hundreds of SAT points. One Darien, Connecticut, parent said families are using athletics to escape "the penalty that comes from being from an advantaged zip code." She continued: "Being who you are is not enough. It might be enough in Kansas. But not here." |
