RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 13 to September 19, 2020

Featured Investigation: 
The Red-Hot, Hardly Serene
Green vs. Green New Deal

Greens are as green as ever, but peace has left the LEED-certified building. Reporting for RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski finds discord across the country pitting species protectors against advocates of big renewable energy projects to address climate change.

• In Ohio, the first offshore renewable power project in the Great Lakes faces defeat from groups looking to protect birds from lethal collisions with wind turbines.
• In Maryland, a large green coalition protected a forest by defeating a Georgetown University solar farm.
• In California, greens are making parts of the desert – one of the world’s best locations for solar energy – off limits to developers. First they protected the threatened Desert Tortoise. Now it’s the Western Joshua tree.
• As green vs. green conflicts crop up across the country, leaders of the groups are reluctant to talk about the tensions. 
• Some say the birds and the trees needn’t be swapped for clean energy: Just put wind and solar farms on rooftops, parking lots and lands with no other use.
• But states follow other facts of life, like the political imperative for big projects to cut carbon emissions to net zero in two decades. 

Featured Investigation:
A Purple Mountain Travesty
in Tax-Dodging 'Conservation'

The use of a high-minded tax break as a down-and-dirty tax dodge has cost the federal government billions of dollars, John Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations. At issue are conservation easements, which allow ecologically minded landowners to protect sensitive property from development while enjoying a write-off. In recent years unscrupulous syndicates have abused such easements in a mismatch with IRS auditors. Wasik reports:

• Syndicates buy land parcels, whose value they inflate.
• Then they sell shares in the property to investors lured by the promise of a big deduction after the land is donated for preservation.
• These limited partnerships have attracted more than 30,000 investors, many of whom are unaware of the potential tax penalties.
• A San Francisco-area tech entrepreneur was sold $300,000 in easement interests by an investment adviser who guaranteed $4 in tax write-offs for every dollar invested. Instead he was hit with $1.4 million in penalties and back taxes.
• Such deductions are believed to exceed $230 billion – equal to the combined annual budgets of the Education, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs departments.
• In combined acreage, private conservation easements easily exceed National Park Service holdings in the lower 48 states.

Trump-Russia/2020 Election News

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Burisma Allegedly Paid Bribe During Hunter Biden's Tenure
Just the News
This article reports that just eight months after Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings, U.S. officials in Kiev developed evidence that the Ukrainian gas company may have paid a $7 million bribe to the local prosecutors investigating the firm for corruption. State Department officials argued the 2014 bribe amounted to a "gross miscarriage of justice that undermined months of U.S. assistance" to fight corruption in Ukraine, contemporaneous memos show. The anecdote, buried in five-year-old diplomatic files, provides a fresh illustration of the awkward, uncomfortable conflict of interest State officials perceived as they tried to fight pervasive corruption in Ukraine under Joe Biden's leadership while the vice president's son collected large payments as a board member for an energy firm widely viewed as corrupt. In a separate article, Just the News reports that a Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as "suspicious" during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. It says Senate Republicans may finally disclose these transactions publicly next week as the election heats up.

Top General: Taliban Kill 'Bounties' Not Proven
NBC News
The alleged Trump scandals come so fast and furious that it can be hard to remember them all. In June the press was all atwitter over a New York Times report that the president was doing nothing in response to reports that Russians were paying bounties to Afghan soldiers who killed Americans. The Trump administration said the intelligence was inconclusive; the Democrats and press disagreed, arguing it was further proof that the president is Putin’s puppet. This article vindicates Trump, reporting that “two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.”

Excessive ICE Hysterectomies Alleged
The Intercept
A whistleblower complaint to the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General alleges that high rates of hysterectomies, sometimes without “proper informed consent,” have been performed on women detained in a privately owned immigration jail in Georgia. The accounts in the complaint, filed by the human rights group Project South – including that of the whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the jail – were consistent with  interviews conducted by The Intercept with three other current detainees and eight advocates for detainees at the prison. While refusing to comment directly on the complaint, ICE said: “In general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.”

Admitting Racism, Princeton Faces Federal Funding Probe
Washington Examiner
After the death of George Floyd, leaders of many elite schools have issued apologies for the systemic racism that supposedly corrupts their campuses. The president of Princeton University, for example, said “racist assumptions" are "embedded in structures of the University itself" and "anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup." Such admissions are coming back to bite the school. The Department of Education has notified Princeton the the admission raises concerns that the university has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Education Department’s formal records request seeks to determine whether Princeton lied when it promised not to uphold racist standards in accordance with receiving federal funds. In a separate article, The Scotsman reports that a group of leading scholars at the University of Edinburgh are objecting to the school administration’s decision to rename a building named for Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. Evidently the school felt that his enduring contributions to human thought were outweighed by the fact that he held racist views in 18^th century Scotland.

Michigan: When Jerry and Marge Went Large on the Lottery
Highline
This fascinating article profiles a man who is also an American archetype – the homespun genius driven by native intelligence and a burning curiosity to figure out how things work. Jerry Selbee was “the kind of person who saw puzzles all around him, puzzles that other people don’t realize are puzzles: the little ciphers and patterns that float through the world and stick to the surfaces of everyday things.” In a lifetime of passionate puzzle solving, his biggest hit was figuring out how to beat the Michigan lottery, winning millions of dollars fair and square. He figured out that at a certain point, the odds switched to the player’s favor. When that happened, he would go to convenience stores and “print tickets literally all day.” He let the machine pick the numbers because it didn’t matter; he was playing the odds, not hunches. He, his wife Marge and their kids “stacked their tickets in piles of $5,000, rubber-banded them into bundles and then, after a drawing, convened in their living room in front of the TV, sorting through tens or even hundreds of thousands of tickets, separating them into piles according to their value.” 

Coronavirus Investigations

Trump Officials Interfered With CDC Reports on Covid-19 Politico
Behind Covid's Rout of Hospitals: Efficiency Push Wall Street Journal
China's Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign Tablet
Emails: Nashville Mayor's Office Hid Low Restaurant and Bar Infections WZTV