RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 11 to August 17, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that Dr. Kevin O'Connor holds sway over the fate of the nation and world as chief medical judge of the aging Joe Biden’s fitness to continue as commander in chief to the end of his term. But he has given his 81-year-old boss a clean bill of health -- to the consternation of friends and foes alike: O’Connor looms as perhaps the biggest obstacle to removing the president under the 25th amendment, to ward off foreign adversaries eager to exploit his prolonged lame duck period. O’Connor has been the most reticent White House physician in the modern presidency. He’s declined to be interviewed by a medical reporter as is customary – arguably imperative given that the nation’s oldest president has a history of brain aneurysms. O’Connor insists he’s non-partisan, but he has donated thousands to Democrats -- including Biden’s own campaigns. The House is investigating O’Connor’s role in the Americore hospital debacle involving Biden family members including Joe’s brother Jimmy and son Hunter. “Doc” O’Connor is said to be “like a son” to First Lady Jill Biden. He vacations with the Bidens in Nantucket every Thanksgiving. Echoing his current rosy outlook on the president’s health, O’Connor repeatedly downplayed Biden son Beau’s condition before he succumbed to brain cancer. O’Connor has doubled as media consultant: He advised a sickly Vice President Biden to cancel a foreign trip to hide the fact “you look like shit,” according to Biden's memoir. In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten analyzes proposed and enacted state and federal laws and warns the fight over noncitizen voting is only likely to intensify for this year’s election. Weingarten reports: More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats – including Washington D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities – allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. Given the millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, many Republicans fear a widespread effort to give noncitizens the full benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote in all elections, on top of benefits already available to illegal aliens in some places, notably drivers licenses, food stamps, government health care, and work visas. Battlegrounds from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Arizona to North Carolina and beyond report that thousands of noncitizens have been discovered on voter rolls in the past decade, with unknown numbers already having voted. Republicans argue that such examples expose weaknesses in the voter registration process – including that registrants need not provide proof of citizenship. Critic: There is “almost nothing” the public or political parties can do after an election to identify and invalidate noncitizen votes prior to election certification. States generally seem unfazed by the prospect of noncitizen voting. Arizona official: “Someone would have to knowingly and intentionally commit a class 6 Felony if they did vote as a noncitizen, and it would result in the revocation of their legal status in the USA, and they would likely face deportation.” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Paying Dearly for Rail Cars ... in 2037, RCI
IRS Staff Owe a Bundle In Unpaid Taxes, RCI
'The Rock' Body-Slams Army's Budget, RCI
Cleaning Up a Building Before Demolition, RCI
Coloradans Face $3B in Oil Well Closings, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway Now that Joe Biden is irrelevant to the Democrat’s future, the Biden administration has released records it “had withheld for years” that indicate “Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government [including the Ambassador to Italy] for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president.” The energy company in question is Burisma, the Ukrainian concern that paid Hunter millions of dollars to serve on its board while his father was in office: The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses. Hunter Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires people to disclose when they lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests. While noting President Biden’s denial of any knowledge of his son’s conduct in this matter, the Times notes that his administration is still not being entirely forthcoming: While Mr. Biden’s letter to the ambassador [to Italy] is referred to in the correspondence, The Times was unable to review its contents because the State Department appears to have redacted it in its entirety. The department cited exemptions allowing the withholding of records that would compromise individual privacy, attorney client privilege or the government’s deliberative process. While reporting that Special Counsel David Weiss does not plan to charge Hunter Biden with what appear to be clear FARA violations, the Times fails to note the true reason why. As Andrew McCarthy wrote in the National Review: “at this point, they can’t file FARA charges. That is because Weiss intentionally allowed the statute of limitations on Hunter’s FARA charges to expire. Just as Weiss intentionally allowed the statute of limitations to expire on Hunter’s tax charges from the years when Joe Biden was vice president.” Other Election 2024 and the Beltway DOJ Must Account for Jan. 6 Killing of Ashli Babbitt, Examiner
Unspecified 'Affiliation' Spurred Spying on Tulsi Gbbard, Racket
Walz Has Close Ties to Hitler-Promoting Islamist, Examiner
Deception? Harris-Sponsored Google Ads Look Like News, Axios
Harris Was for Taxing Tips Before She Was Against It, Daily Wire
Loopholes for Dems' Foreign Funding Probed, Just the News
Inside Biden’s Decision to Drop Out, New York Times
Hackers Expose Vulnerabilities in Vote Machines, Just the News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series George Soros and his son, Alex, have spent at least $117 million since 2016 to reshape America’s justice system. This article reports that they have been successful -- three in 10 Americans now live under a Soros-backed prosecutor: But the Soroses’ influence doesn’t end on Election Day. After Soros-backed prosecutors take office, the family’s apparatus tells them what to do, documents show. The Media Research Center obtained nearly 8,000 pages of internal documents through public records laws that show how a Soros-funded group called Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP) “directed Soros prosecutors to manipulate the rule of law concerning illegal immigration, drugs, abortion, election integrity, capital punishment and laws against childhood sex changes.” This article reports that FJP had the Soros-backed attorneys sign 33 pledges to not enforce certain laws – including election integrity measures and immigration laws – and attend more than 50 meetings or “convenings,” some of which were “mandatory.” FJP pressed prosecutors to let criminals off the hook if they are black, having them pledge to “reduc[e] racial disparities in case outcomes by at least 20%.” On Sept. 26, 2022 three powerful explosions crippled Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines, which carried Russian gas to Europe, providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion? This article reports that “now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told”: The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise. “I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.” This article reports that portions of their account were corroborated by a nearly two-year German police investigation into the attack – the Germans are angry that one of their energy supplies was attacked and has already issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian professional diving instructor for his alleged involvement in the sabotage. Both parties have committed to spending vast sums of taxpayer money to create manufacturing and other jobs in the U.S. But, this article observes, there is a giant fly in the ointment -- a lack of Americans who are willing and capable to fill those positions: The proportion of working-age men out of the workforce – unemployed and not actively seeking employment – has reached unprecedented levels. … A contributing factor is the expansion of generous government welfare programs that discourage recipients from seeking work, such as Social Security Disability Insurance payments – now collected by 3.7 percent of all working-age adults, a significant increase from 1.1 percent in 1970. Further, multiple rounds of Covid relief from the Trump and Biden administrations appear to have led many adults to quit the labor market outright, even as the economy reopened. But the workforce woes run deeper. Ever more adults are unemployable because of worsening social dysfunction, changing youth attitudes toward work, and university and public school failures to prepare students for labor-market realities. Drug legalization has made it harder to find laborers who can pass drug tests – essential to work in industries like construction and transport – leading to worker shortages for key jobs, including truck drivers. A crime spike, meantime, will likely create a new generation of convicts, among the toughest people to employ when they reenter society. Soaring mental-health problems add to the ranks of the unemployable. And many firms hesitate to hire new college grads because they often lack basic skills, starting with knowing how to communicate and function within a group, and often have unrealistic expectations about pay and benefits. Should banks pay for the customers’ foolish mistakes? This article raises that question by reporting that the money-transfer app Zelle not only makes it easy to send funds, but also to bamboozle them: Banks are required to refund customers for transactions they didn’t authorize, but there isn’t legal protection for customers who send the money themselves. Reversing erroneous transfers is usually impossible. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau doesn’t think that is fair and is investigating some of the biggest U.S. banks over their handling of scams and fraudulent transactions. Zelle, created in 2017 to compete with popular money-transfer services such as Venmo and owned by a consortium of seven of the largest U.S. banks, has already made some response: Since last summer, Zelle has required its member banks to reimburse customers for certain disputed transactions even when the victim authorized the payment, such as when scammers impersonate a government official or a customer’s bank. … [At least one bank says it will not bow further to government pressure.] A JPMorgan spokesman said that the CFPB “is fully aware we already go above and beyond what the law requires” and that the regulator “should expect to be challenged to ensure their actions stay within the bounds of the law.” In a separate article on money and responsibility, the James G. Martin Center reports that more than half of student-debtholders are not making payments on their loans: After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called on-ramp is set to expire at the end of September – yet tens of millions of borrowers have not yet made a payment. Nobody wants flawed scientific research, but if it’s going to happen, this seems as good a place as any. The British researcher who has inspired a new crackdown on alcohol based on his claim that there is no safe level of consumption, is coming under fire from some of his respected peers, who, this article reports, question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol. They say Dr. Tim Stockwell confused correlation with causation and cherry-picked studies to support his position. Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told the Telegraph: “Dr Stockwell’s research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations,” Dr Harding said. “You record people’s lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it’s just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own. “And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them.” In defending his work, Stockwell accused Harding of being an “industry-funded person” who has “made a living from putting a good spin on the relationship between alcohol and health.” We don’t know who’s right, but we know who we hope is. | 