RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9, 2024 Urgent demands for donations to support Democrats by a group called Pro-Choice Majority 2024 continued almost until the polls opened last Tuesday, raising the question: How could this political action committee use money to defeat Trump on Election Day when voting was virtually over? RCI contributor Lee Fang reports on his Substack that “the donation demands to tip the balance of the presidential race appear to have been a bait and switch to fool donors.” Fang reports: Pro-Choice Majority 2024, formed in January of this year, raised over $3.6 million, yet spent most of its funds on a group of consultants and fundraisers. Federal Election Commission records show that the group spent zero dollars on independent expenditures opposing Trump or supporting the Harris campaign. The group did not make any transfers to the Harris campaign either. Instead, much of the group's funds flowed to Mothership Strategies, a DC firm founded in 2015 by former Democratic Party staffers. Federal Election Commission records show that Mothership Strategies, which has been scrutinized in the past for its aggressive fundraising tactics, has collected at least $48,712,448 over the last two years from advising an extensive array of Democratic political action committees. Many of the PACs tied to Mothership Strategies similarly used alarmist messages demanding donations to defeat Trump yet funneled vast sums of donor money back to consulting firms. Pro-Choice Majority 2024, for instance, provided nearly half a million dollars to Mothership Strategies. Stop Gun Violence PAC, another group with alarmist messaging, raised just under one million dollars. Over two-thirds of Stop Gun Violence PAC’s fundraising went to consultants, the largest of which was Mothership Strategies. Defend the Vote PAC is another example. The group uses hyperbolic language for donation drives. One appeal from the group urged supporters to sign a request “to demand Congress invoke the 14th Amendment to BAN Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress.” The organization raised at least $5.6 million. Records show that $3.7 million of the funds went to consultants and lawyers, with about $2 million of that slice of the funds going to Mothership Strategies. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Police Buy Cybertruck to Keep Kids off Drugs, RCI
Pentagon Research Made in China, RCI
2024 Deficit Among Largest Ever, RCI
Transport Grant For 'Flying Bus', RCI
NYC Bribery Suspects Got $13 Million in Pay, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway It's Good to be a Lobbyist With Ties to Trump, New York Times
Open Secrets: $14.7 Billion+ to Influence 2024 Election, Bloomberg
Joe Biden’s Vengeance: Dems Descend into Civil War, Daily Beast
The Trump Ads That Pushed Transgenderism to Center Stage, WSJ
To Fight Trump, the Media Contemplate Vast Censorship, Reason
Gov. Newsom Moves to Trump-Proof California, Los Angeles Times
Say Goodbye to Trump’s Legal Cases, Politico
Donald Trump's Sweeping Plans for His Second Term, Associated Press
Against Advice, Trump Insisted on Being Trump, Reuters
Chinese Use Biden’s Climate Law for Solar Dominance, Politico
How Obama Turned the Democratic Party Into a Machine, Tablet
Biden Spent Billions to Delay Medicare Premium Spike, Just/News Other Noteworthy Articles Over the past three months, an avowed left-wing organization has spent more than $9 million on Facebook ads boosting Vice President Kamala Harris and attacking former president Donald Trump, this article reports. The spots have reached scores of swing state voters using a Facebook feature that allows advertisers to submit their own data – for political groups, that is, data they've compiled on voters – to reach a precise audience: The practice is considered standard operating procedure for campaigns and PACs. But the group behind the $9 million digital ad blitz is neither a campaign nor a PAC—at least not on paper. Instead, it's Courier Newsroom, liberal operative Tara McGowan's organization that pushes Democratic talking points under the guise of local "news" outlets. Courier's Facebook ad spending – and its targeting tactics – reflect the extent to which Democrats rely on McGowan's media project to reach voters online. In a separate article, Mark Hemingway reported in RealClearInvestigations that Courier Newsroom is just one prong of a vast effort by left-leaning nonprofits and other organizations to influence local news coverage. From the Annals of We Have Tried Socialism and It Has Failed, this article focuses on one family among the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have arrived at the U.S. border during the last four years – more than at any other point since the socialist government of Hugo Chávez was sworn into power in 1999, whose policies have continued under the autocratic rule of his successor, Nicolás Maduro. For many years, Ingrid [Orasma] and her children enjoyed a solidly middle-class life. She worked as a teacher at a primary school, dyed her hair platinum blond and manicured her nails. Her school often had leftover cafeteria food that she would donate to poor families. Things started to change a decade ago. Venezuela’s once lucrative oil sector was collapsing. Corruption and crime were mounting. The abundance that the family once took for granted began to disappear. Ingrid’s salary no longer covered their basic needs as inflation rose. They started to go hungry. Earlier this year, Ingrid, 47, decided there was only one choice: to try to reach the United States and hope that “Papa Biden” would let them in. This article follows the family on their perilous 6,600 mile journey by bus, train, canoe and on foot, across rivers and jungles, often with the help of human smugglers they paid along the way, who operate like toll booth operators. When they finally made it, Ingrid “had about a dollar left by the time they reached New York. Texas officials had bought them tickets for the final leg of the journey – a train ride from Newark to Penn Station – and then left them on their own.” The court date for her asylum claim is not scheduled for another year. Two incendiary devices found at DHL facilities in Europe last summer are believed to be part of a covert Russian operation that aimed to start fires aboard planes flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies. Quote: The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits. Now investigators and spy agencies in Europe have figured out how the devices – electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance – were made and concluded that they were part of a wider Russian plot, according to security officials and people familiar with the probe. Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America. This article reports that Lithuanian police arrested a suspect who sent four incendiary devices, including two from a DHL shop in the capital Vilnius. Poland’s national prosecutor’s office said authorities there have arrested four people in connection with the fires and charged them with participating in sabotage or terrorist operations on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency. As Americans went to the poll this week, every state except Alaska and Kentucky was facing drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Put another way, this article reports, 54% of the land in the 48 contiguous states were affected by drought, an unprecedented number: Even as the country experiences autumn and heads further away from a summer of record heat, the droughts continue to rise. More than 150 million people in the country – and 149.8 million in the 48 contiguous states – are in a drought this week. That is about a 34% increase since last week and an over 150% increase since last month. The drought is also affecting more than 318m acres of crops, a 57% increase since last month, according to the tracker. … Drought conditions are not simply caused by a decrease in rain – but are driven and exacerbated by abnormally high temperatures that can quickly suck moisture from the atmosphere and the earth. The problem, however, is more complicated than simply counting rainy days. Droughts can occur even when there is slightly more rain than usual, depending on the frequency of rainfall. If there is a lot of rain all at once, it’s difficult for the water to be properly absorbed into the ground. This article reports that droughts increase an area’s reliance on groundwater, which now provides more than 40% of the water used for U.S. agriculture and domestic water supplies. Increased pumping during droughts can reduce the future availability of those supplies. In a separate series of articles, the New York Times reported on America’s groundwater crisis. Over the past month, the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter Bob Dylan has turned his talents to X, producing non sequitur posts that run the gamut from comedy (“I didn’t know there were so many book publishers in the world”) and pathos (“I just found out the other day that Bob Newhart was gone”) to restaurant reviews (“Last time in New Orleans we ate at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on the corner of North Miro and Orleans. If you’re ever there I highly recommend it”). One time he even replied: After a commenter recommended a restaurant in Prague to him, he posted that he’d try it next time. It all has Dylan’s most die-hard fans glued to their screens, trying to decode the missives and watching for the next one. Not surprisingly, this has inspired legions of fans to try to figure out what’s going on: Among the Dylanologists tangled up in clues is Britt Eisnor, a 27-year-old researcher in Massachusetts. Like many fans, she initially wondered if Dylan’s inaugural “Mary Jo” tweet on Sept. 25 was a text message gone awry. Why was Dylan wishing Mary Jo a happy birthday on a platform he’d never been on before? While there was speculation Dylan had misspelled the German city of Frankfurt, Eisnor had her doubts. Employing her professional-grade googling skills, she deduced that Dylan was referring to Frankfort, the state capital of Kentucky, which happens to be approximately 30 minutes from Pleasureville, the location of Dylan’s new “Heaven’s Door” whiskey distillery. (Exactly who Mary Jo is, however, remains a complete unknown.) “I really like the challenge of researching something,” Eisnor said. This article confirms that the 83-year-old Dylan is the man behind the tweets. Some consider the late-life embrace of social media by the famously private performer an exciting head-scratcher. “Imagining Dylan pulling up his phone and doing tweets is like imagining a monkey riding a bicycle,” said the rock critic Steven Hyden. While some are concluding the explanations for Dylan’s new habit may be blowing in the wind, others recall what the man himself once wrote: “he not busy being born is busy dying.” |
