RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 28 to September 3, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Eric Felten reports on the Biden administration’s move to triple the budget for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which has a documented record from the Obama era of fraud, embezzlement, kickbacks, and gimcrack construction. It’s already setting off alarm bells internally, Felten reports: The Energy Department’s Inspector General this year warned Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm that the enormous new budget for the program – slated to grow to $1 billion a year from $315 million – threatens to overwhelm the department’s ability to protect taxpayers’ money. The weatherization program uses a template for many federal anti-poverty programs: Cash goes out the door to local “community action agencies” to manage and spend – or misspend, as the case may be. Supposedly low bids are often followed by post-approval bloat, with “work scope changes” – extra parts or labor added on well after the bid, and even added to final bills. At the top of the IG’s list of threats is “senior leadership fraud” -- aka embezzlement. Case in point: Randi Smith, who with her son pleaded guilty in 2018 to embezzling over $1 million from the New York State Weatherization Directors Association. Proponents say they’ve learned the errors of past ways, and are determined that this time will be different: “We’ve got to be on our A-game. We just have to prove them wrong.” Biden, Trump and the Beltway As the Biden administration pushes to expand telework options for its growing number of federal workers, several agencies still have no system in place to monitor whether remote workers are actually clocking in for the job: Four federal agencies told the Washington Free Beacon they have no specific oversight of remote employees: the Department of the Interior, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) [who is raising concerns about the issues] received a similar response from the Department of Labor. Although the Department of Health and Human Services has tracking software, a Free Beacon investigation in June found that at least a quarter of remote employees failed to clock in with it. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Merrick Garland’s Perilous Path to Prosecuting Trump Politico
Why a Trump Indictment Is Coming National Review
Biden Admin Worked With FB, Twitter to Censor Users Daily Caller
FBI Skates as Spy Victim Carter Page's Suit Is Tossed Politico
FBI Man Out Amid Pro-Hunter Biden Suspicions Washington Times
Warnock Income Up 2X After He Decried Monetizing Office Free Beacon
IRS Official in Tea Party Scandal to Oversee 87K New Agents PJ Media
Political Backgrounds of the Stewards of Woke Capital American Accountability
U.S. Forces Ordered to Stop Using 'He' and 'She' Washington Free Beacon Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Two Mexican crime rings, the rival Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, have come to dominate the market for supplying fentanyl to the United States. Crude labs that can be set up inexpensively and torn down quickly to evade security forces can churn out hundreds of thousands of doses each week of the synthetic opioid that killed about 70,000 Americans last year. This article reports that the cartels rose to the fore a few years ago when the former prime source of the drug, China, cracked down on those who manufacture drugs but not as much on those who make its chemical ingredients. Mexican cartels were primed to take advantage. They already had established trafficking networks built around drugs like cocaine, marijuana and heroin … And they had relationships with Chinese chemical makers, and expertise running drug making labs, through their production of methamphetamine, another synthetic drug they are sending to the U.S. … The Sinaloa cartel is the market leader, said Renato Sales, Mexico’s former security chief. U.S. and Mexican officials likened it to how a company works, manufacturing and marketing an array of illegal drugs and cultivating links to suppliers in dozens of countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia. The cartel is believed to have different units handling jobs such as security, money laundering, transportation, production and the bribing of public officials. New York Times The bottom of the sea is a goldmine for essential metals required by the clean energy economy and many companies are seeking to harvest its sunken treasure. But – you knew that was coming – the ocean floor is also a fragile ecosystem that is home to rare creatures whose underwater existence is threatened by the desire to address problems in the atmosphere. This fascinating article, full of magnificent photos and videos of this submerged world, provides a captivating overview of the situation -- including the ocean floor “nodules” that mining companies call “batteries in a rock” but which many lifeforms call home. The actual mining is straightforward: Dredge or vacuum the nodules up from the muddy sediment. But removing nodules destroys everything that lives on them. Mining the seafloor also stirs up gritty plumes that can travel as far as five miles. These sediment clouds can bury fields of nodules, choke the filters of sponges and anemones living outside the mining zone and obscure bioluminescence that squid and fish use to hunt and mate. The Navy SEALs’ training course began with 210 candidates. But by the middle of the course’s third week – “a continual gut punch of physical and mental hardship, sleep deprivation and hypothermia that the SEALs call Hell Week” – just 21 remained. One of them, Seaman Kyle Mullen ... ... kept on slogging for days, spitting blood all the while. The instructors and medics conducting the course, perhaps out of admiration for his grit, did not stop him. And he made it. When he struggled out of the cold ocean at the end of Hell Week, SEAL leaders shook his hand, gave him a pizza and told him to get some rest. Then he went back to his barracks and lay down on the floor. A few hours later, his heart stopped beating and he died. This article reports on harsh training regimen the Navy uses to identify those few people capable of performing some of the military’s most difficult missions, including lightning-fast hostage rescues and the killing of high-level terrorists like Osama Bin Laden. It also details how some candidates, including Mullen, use steroids, hormones and performance-enhancing drugs to give themselves an edge. Their prevalence “has some men in the top reaches of the SEALs deeply unnerved – not just because drugs may have contributed to the death of a sailor, but also because they see their spread, and the lack of discipline and order it implies, as a threat to the entire SEAL organization that could grow in unpredictable and ugly ways.” Coronavirus Investigations The Food and Drug Administration is authorizing new COVID-19 booster shots without a staple of its normal decision-making process: data from a study showing whether the shots were safe and worked in humans. Instead, this article reports, the agency plans to assess the shots using data from other sources such as research in mice, the profiles of the original vaccines and the performance of earlier iterations of boosters targeting older forms of Omicron. “Real world evidence from the current mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, which have been administered to millions of individuals, show us that the vaccines are safe,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a recent tweet. The FDA pointed to Dr. Califf’s tweets when asked for comment. Clearance of the doses, without data from human testing known as clinical trials, is similar to the approach the FDA takes with flu shots, which are updated annually to keep up with mutating flu viruses. This article reports that some vaccine experts are concerned. “I’m uncomfortable that we would move forward – that we would give millions or tens of millions of doses to people – based on mouse data,” said Paul Offit, an FDA adviser and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. More than 1.1 million incarcerated individuals received COVID-19 stimulus checks, totaling around $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly 163,000 of those recipients are individuals serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, the IRS told Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The IRS’s disclosure of criminals receiving stimulus checks highlights how the federal government’s unprecedented spending spree passed with little oversight. The Small Business Association admitted in May that it had no plan to stop fraudulent loan applications for its nearly $1 trillion Paycheck Protection Program. … Experts estimate at least $80 billion from the program was paid out to phony businesses, in what former U.S. attorney Matthew Schneider called "the biggest fraud in a generation." From the Annals of The Cure Is Worse than the Disease, while children were largely spared the lethal impacts of COVID-19, the school closures they were forced to endure continue to have devastating effects on them. This article reports that national test results show the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact. The declines in test scores mean that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they are reading, fewer can infer a character’s feelings from what they have read. In math, students may know simple arithmetic facts, but fewer can add fractions with common denominators. The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on. | 