RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
Dec. 22 to Dec. 28, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney examines energy as a case study in Biden-era government inertia that could undermine the new Trump administration, deliberately or otherwise, as a President tries to undo diametrically opposed policies of his predecessor: Trump’s options may be limited in cases where spending was enshrined in law, contracts were signed, or even where he encounters pushback from reluctant “green” enterprises that have won government largesse in the push for a “NetZero” future. Trump can counter Biden’s support of unpopular electric vehicles via subsidies, incentives and mandates, but that ironically would likely face strong pushback from automakers looking to protect the huge investments they’ve made. Biden’s “National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure” plan could be a prime Trump target. This ambitious proposal includes $7.5 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations around the country. But because only a handful have been built, much of the money has not been spent. One of Trump’s easiest paths would be reversing the Biden administration’s restrictions on drilling leases on federal lands. New wild card: the Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s expected to suggest widespread reductions or eliminations of federal programs to trim the national debt now at more than $36 trillion. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books NY Medicaid Fraud Costs $20 Billion, RCI
'Ghost Town' Capital Costs Almost $16 Billion Per Year, RCI
DEI Chief Gets Raise Instead of Demotion, RCI
Recession of 2008, The Video Game, RCI
Billions in Federal Use-It-or-Lose-It Spending, RCI Election 2024 and the Beltway Rich Pay to Play in Trump’s 2025 Inauguration, Daily Beast
Biden Spares Nearly All on Federal Death Row, Politico
Biden Withdraws Proposed Shield for Transgender Sports, Reuters
House Ethics Draft Accuses Gaetz of Statutory Rape, Just The News
Schumer's Plan to Block the MAGA Revolution via Judges, Politico
Pro-Trump Group’s Bet on Infrequent Voters Paid Off, New York Times
It's Chaos Agent Musk vs. the DC Establishment, Politico Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Five years after COVID-19 began its deadly march across the globe, we still do not know conclusively whether it developed in the wild or a Chinese lab. This article reports that efforts were taken at the highest reaches of the U.S. government to sideline those who argued for the lab leak theory: [In 2021] the dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines ... had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies. … At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” Yet, the FBI was not invited to that August 24 meeting: “Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” [the FBI’s Jason] Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.” A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the president and that divergent views within the intelligence community were fairly represented. This article reports that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate’s review didn’t tell the whole story. After nearly a year of war between Israel and the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, Lebanon was sent reeling in September when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded. This piece draws on interviews with two recently retired senior Mossad agents who were among those spearheading the years-long operation. They detail the inside story of how the devices were built and then sold to Hezbollah. The plan was set in motion when the Mossad learned that Hezbollah was buying pagers from Gold Apollo, a company in Taiwan. The first problem was that while the Gold Apollo pagers were sleek, shiny and could fit into pockets, Mossad needed a larger pager to fit explosives inside. As a redesign was not practical, the Mossad launched a YouTube advertising campaign, where the pagers were touted as being robust, dustproof and waterproof, with a long battery life. They posted fake online testimonials, too: Mossad did such a good job promoting the pager that people outside of Hezbollah wanted to buy it, [Mossad agent] Gabriel said. "Obviously we didn't send to anyone," he said. "We just quote them with expensive price." Mossad set up shell companies, including one in Hungary, to dupe Gold Apollo into working with it, Gabriel said. The spy agency fully manufactured the pagers and had a licensing partnership with Gold Apollo. It had to all look legitimate to Hezbollah. "When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like the 'Truman Show,' everything is controlled by us behind the scene," Gabriel said. "In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher." The piece reports that hints that Hezbollah might be getting suspicious of the devices led Mossad head Dadi Barnea to give the go-ahead on Sept. 17. At 3:30 p.m. that day pagers started beeping all over Lebanon. One day after the pager attack, Mossad finally activated walkie-talkies from an earlier scheme that had been dormant for 10 years. Some went off at the funerals of those killed by the pagers. In all, about 30 people were killed, including two children, in the two attacks. Around 3,000 were injured. The walkie-talkie and pager plots had a profound ripple effect: weakening Iran by leaving its proxy empire in ruins, with Hezbollah crushed in Lebanon and the Assad regime toppled in Syria. This article reports that every 15 seconds or so, a batch of human eggs is extracted from a woman somewhere on the planet. Most IVF treatments involve women using their own eggs. In at least 6% of cases the eggs come from donors – the fertility industry’s term – who agree to have their eggs removed, often in exchange for money. The donors are recruited into a $35 billion-and-growing global market for assisted reproduction. This market comprises would-be parents, agents, doctors and clinics – many of the latter backed by Wall Street and private equity. The article details the very different experiences of donors from a range of countries. They include a poor girl from India, who is probably 13, who is swept from the streets by egg brokers who demand a hefty commission for their efforts; and an adult woman from Greece who learns that doctors harvested some eggs for her personal use they took several others without her knowledge to sell to others. Things have turned out much better for a 30-year-old Taiwanese who asks to be called Amber: She’s a translator and a competitive vogue dancer and an “egg girl,” the term Taiwanese use to describe the hundreds, maybe thousands, of women who sell their eggs in the US. The buyers usually come from China, because it’s illegal to make these kinds of arrangements there. In the middle are recruiters and agents, doctors and nurses. Amber is fine with calling it a marketplace. She’s gone through 11 cycles in the US, sold about 330 eggs, earned $160,000, worked with 4 agents, 4 clinics, 2 egg banks and at least 9 Chinese families. A year-long investigation by the Washington Post has documented that 3,104 students died at boarding schools the U.S. government created for native Americans between 1828 and 1970, three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Department earlier this year. The Post found that more than 800 of those students are buried in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes: The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents, records show. Dozens died in suspicious circumstances, and in some instances the records provide indications of abuse or mistreatment that likely resulted in children’s deaths. A 10-year-old boy was fatally shot in 1912 at an Alaska school, a newspaper reported. A girl from Oregon “fell from a high window there & was brought home a corpse” in 1887, according to a teacher’s diary. The findings show gaps in the federal government’s official accounting of what happened to Native American children who were wrested from their homes in the name of assimilation. They come as many tribes – long denied the chance to mourn and bury their dead – are seeking to find their ancestors’ remains and return them home. Many of the same politicians who rail against the lack of affordable housing are fueling the crisis by raising taxes, this article reports: Soaring costs for home insurance and property taxes are busting homeowners’ budgets. Insurers have pushed big rate increases because of losses from natural disasters and rising costs to repair homes. Surging home values in recent years, meanwhile, have lifted property taxes for many homeowners. These ballooning expenses are rewriting the math of homeownership. In September, 32% of the average single-family mortgage payment went to property taxes and home insurance, the highest rate ever for data going back to 2014, according to Intercontinental Exchange. … But while mortgage rates fluctuate, climbing property taxes and insurance costs show no sign of reversing. This article reports that the rising costs may price some people out of their homes, especially older homeowners on fixed incomes. For example, when Lisa and Michael Landry bought their New Orleans home in 2015, their property taxes, home insurance and flood insurance cost about $725 a month. Now they pay $2,448 a month for property taxes and wind and hail insurance. That exceeds the monthly payment for principal and interest on their mortgage, which has a fixed 3.5% rate. They pay another $2,000 a year for flood insurance and home insurance for other perils. They can afford the rising costs as long as he is working, but they will likely need to move once Michael Landry, who is 70, retires. In a separate article, Reason reports that three of America’s 10 most populous cities held more liabilities than assets at the end of fiscal year 2022. One of these three cities, Chicago, also spent more in fiscal year 2022 than it took in as revenue, leading to a worsening balance sheet. |
