RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 7 to May 13, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Maggie MacFarland Phillips reports on a possible watershed test for religious liberty: Wisconsin is denying a Catholic charity a religious exemption, saying it is not operated for “primarily religious purposes.” And the charity is fighting back. This case and others like it hinge on this question: To what extent can religious organizations manage their own personnel according to the dictates of their faith? Wisconsin says because the Catholic Charities Bureau offers its services free of proselytizing, it’s essentially a secular organization ineligible for a religious exemption from paying into the state’s unemployment insurance system. “Saying Catholic Charities Bureau is not religious is like saying the Milwaukee Bucks is not a basketball team,” retorts a lawyer representing the charity. Wisconsin is not the only government challenging religious groups. A proposed Biden administration rule “would require religious hospitals and doctors to perform deeply contested procedures ‒ including abortion and ‘gender transition’ surgery,” two Notre Dame lawyers warn. Texas is bearing down on groups it suspects may be aiding illegal border crossings. Four Republican members of Congress have begun a similar effort. If the Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds the exemption denial, it may threaten the operations of less hierarchical or independent faiths. Amicus brief lawyer: “We need to make sure we have a legal test that’s broad enough to cover Rastafarians and Independent Fundamental Baptists and Catholics.” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Poof! Goes Calif.'s $300M Housing Aid, RCI
Trashy Baltimore Streets Despite $631M, RCI
National Park Service Outsources Website, Loses $140M, RCI
Dinner for $10 Million, RCI
Federal Debt Interest Payments Rise 41%, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway President Biden had a bad week. On Wednesday, House Republicans said documents show Biden’s family received more than $10 million from foreign entities, mostly while he was vice president. At least nine Biden family members received foreign income through an array of shell companies, including Hunter, James, James’s wife Sara, Hallie, Hunter’s ex-wife (Kathleen Buhle), Hunter’s current wife (Melissa Cohen), and three children or grandchildren of Joe or James. Their benefactors included people with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and a Romanian businessman later convicted of bribery in a case not connected to the Bidens. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page wrote: The Bidens have a right to make a living, but one important question is what Hunter did to earn these payments. Hunter’s spokespersons aren’t saying, and his attorney scorned the Comer report as “repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” But a fair conclusion is that these foreigners were buying influence with a powerful family. In a separate article, the New York Post reports that the FBI is defying a congressional subpoena by refusing to hand over an informant file alleging that President Biden took bribes. The FBI said complying might jeopardize a confidential source. In a separate article, Fox News reports that “President Biden’s White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates has been implicated in the effort to discredit Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation during the 2020 presidential election, according to emails published by House Oversight Committee Republicans.” This article underscored the growing evidence that just as Hillary Clinton’s campaign helped manufacture the bogus Trump-Russia collusion scandal, the Biden campaign orchestrated the creation and dissemination of a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials claiming the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” – an allegation Joe Biden used in his final debate with Donald Trump to defuse the explosive issue. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Ex-CIA Man: Sham Laptop Letter Meant to Aid Biden in Debate, Examiner
CIA Solicited Signatures For Hunter Biden Laptop Letter, Federalist
How CIA's William Burns Became Nation's Most Powerful Spook, New York Times
Rep. Rashida Tlaib Hosting Event Mourning Israel's Founding, Free Beacon
Trump Sex Abuse, Defamation Ruling: $5M, New York Post
Untruthful Rep. George Santos Charged in Federal Probe, CNN
Repression-Decrying Biden Sells Arms to World’s Dictators, Intercept
Biden’s Secretive Election Order Plans Shielded From Congress, Daily Signal Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Iran and its proxies are enabling attacks on U.S. troops in Syria by hiding weapons in humanitarian aid shipments sent to the region after the catastrophic earthquake that killed tens of thousands this year. Citing leaks of U.S. secrets circulated on the Discord messaging platform, this article reports: In the earthquake’s immediate aftermath, Iran and its affiliates moved quickly to exploit the chaos, the leaked intelligence document contends. On Feb. 7, a day after the disaster leveled scores of homes and other buildings, setting off desperate rescue efforts, a militia group based in Iraq “allegedly orchestrated the transfer of rifles, ammunition and 30 UAVs hidden in aid convoys to support future attacks on U.S. forces in Syria,” it says. UAV is military shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicle. On Feb. 13, a [member of Iran’s elite] Quds Force … directed an Iraqi militia group to “embed weapons within legitimate earthquake aid,” the leaked U.S. document indicates, noting that another Quds Force officer maintained a list of “hundreds” of vehicles and goods that entered Syria from Iraq after the earthquake, an apparent effort to manage where all of the trafficked weapons were headed. The article reports that “the leaked intelligence findings spotlight an uncomfortable reality: that even as 2,500 U.S. troops continue to serve in Iraq as advisers, working alongside the Iraqi army, the government in Baghdad appears unwilling to pursue … militants who pose a threat to both militaries.” For decades there has been steady, but sporadic stream of reports about teachers and other school employees having sex with young students. This article suggests the problem is becoming common: More than 25 school employees were arrested for sexual misconduct with students in just one recent week alone ‒ including a teacher who bombarded a boy with 600 text messages and another who performed oral sex in a classroom. Indiana high school teacher Paige Simon, 28, was arrested last week for allegedly touching a male student’s groin in front of classmates and sending him 600 text messages ‒ including some that contained explicit language and discussion of sex toys. California teacher Rebekah Blackwell-Taylor was arrested at Orange Vista High School in Riverside County this week for allegedly performing a sex act on a student inside a classroom. In New Jersey, 27-year-old teacher’s aide and marching band director Michelle Jacoby was taken into custody for allegedly sleeping with a student for several years beginning when he was a freshman. Michele Little, 29, a teacher at Sarasota Military High School in Florida, was nabbed last week after hanging a sign on her door that a test was in session so she could be alone with a student. Jacob De La Paz, a former Louisiana math teacher and coach at St. Thomas Moore in Lafayette, was picked up by federal agents last week for sending an explicit SnapChat video to a minor student. Four sons of the notorious Mexican drug dealer Joaquin “El Chapo” have resuscitated a drug empire that was teetering after their father was locked behind U.S. bars by embracing a new line of synthetic drugs. This article reports that their early bet on fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin, has allegedly brought them great riches while placing them squarely in the crosshairs of American anti-narcotics agents: Collectively known as Los Chapitos, or “the little Chapos,” the four siblings were once mocked by adversaries as entitled princelings more concerned with flashing their wealth on Instagram than the grubby work of moving tons of cocaine into the United States. … The earnings have been astronomical. The cartel can turn $800 worth of precursor chemicals into fentanyl pills or powder that reap profits as high as $640,000 … To chronicle the rise of this new generation of “Narco Juniors,” as children of established traffickers are known in Mexico, Reuters spoke with four Sinaloa Cartel operatives and visited a house where gang members assembled pills stuffed with methamphetamine, another cash cow. The news agency also interviewed dozens of sources, including law enforcement, intelligence and government officials in Mexico and the United States, as well as local residents who’ve witnessed the changing of the guard. New York City is spending an average of $213 per night – or $8 million a day – to house the 37,500 asylum seekers currently in its shelters, this article reports: The crisis has grown so dire that Mayor Eric Adams said Friday that he planned to bus several hundred adult male migrants to two hotels in Orange Lake and Orangeburg, in upstate Rockland County. Many of the asylum seekers in New York were bused to the city from Texas and other states, drawing rebuke from Adams. … Adams, a Democrat and backer of President Joe Biden, has recently begun criticizing the White House for its failure to help the city manage a crisis that will likely worsen this week. The article reports that city officials applied in April to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for $350 million in aid to help pay for the costs of the migrant crisis but learned late last week they would receive just a fraction of that amount, some $30.5 million. That figure is “not anywhere close to enough to cover the cost of assistance for asylum seekers,” City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement. The cost of housing the migrants is due in part to New York’s unique “right to shelter” law, the result of a 1981 legal settlement that requires the city to provide housing to every unhoused person. | 