Patrick's Notebook

by Jacob Sullum

The detective who obtained the search warrant cited the deliveries to falsely implicate Taylor in drug traffickingBreonna Taylor (selfie)

Even after Breonna Taylor broke up with Jamarcus Glover, he continued to receive packages at her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. That arrangement had lethal consequences, because it was the main justification for the reckless, fruitless March 13 drug raid that killed Taylor, an unarmed 26-year-old EMT with no criminal record.

Police obtained the no-knock warrant to search Taylor’s apartment by suggesting that Glover, who was arrested for drug dealing that same night, had been stashing “narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” there. But according to newly released transcripts of interviews with Louisville police officers, they knew a month before they invaded Taylor’s home that Glover’s packages contained neither of those things.

The interviews, conducted as part of an internal investigation after the raid, reveal that Joshua Jaynes, the detective who obtained the search warrant that proved to be Taylor’s death warrant, learned in early February that there was nothing suspicious about the packages that Glover had delivered at her apartment, which came from Amazon. Jaynes nevertheless used those packages to imply that she was involved in Glover’s illegal activity, which Glover insists is not true. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Ian Brickey

SAN FRANCISCO — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last night ruled that President Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert $3.6 billion in military construction funds for the border wall is unlawful. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Sierra Club v. Trump, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition challenging President Trump’s abuse of emergency powers to build a border wall using funds Congress explicitly denied. Although the district court previously stayed its own injunction blocking these sections of wall, the court of appeals order lifts that stay and requires that construction cease immediately.

“Today’s decision is monumental for border communities, wildlife and lands. The 9th Circuit court put a stop to Trump’s unconstitutional wall construction with stolen military funds. We should be protecting communities, our democracy, and the environment, not tearing these things apart as Trump was doing,” said Gloria Smith, Managing Attorney at the Sierra Club. “We rise with border communities to stop this administration from further inflicting its relentless agenda– and will continue fighting illegal wall construction at all levels.”

“The courts have once again confirmed what everyone knows: Trump’s fake ‘national emergency’ was just another pretext for targeting immigrants and border communities,” said Dror Ladin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “It’s past time for Trump to finally give up on trying to raid the federal budget for his wasteful and illegal project.” » Read the rest of this entry «

by Patrick Cockburn

The silence of journalists in Britain and the US over the extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is making them complicit in the criminalisation of newsgathering by the American government.

In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the past four weeks, lawyers for the US government have sought the extradition of Assange to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of computer misuse. At the heart of their case is the accusation that in leaking a trove of classified US diplomatic and military cables in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks endanger the lives of US agents and informants.

One of the many peculiarities in this strange case is that the evidence for any such thing is non-existent. The Pentagon has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing.

Other allegations against Assange put forward by the lawyers for the US government are similarly flimsy or demonstrably false, yet he is still in real danger of being sent to a maximum security prison in the US after the court makes its ruling on 4 January. Once there he faces a sentence of up to 175 years and, whatever the length of his incarceration, he is likely to spend it in solitary confinement in a tiny cell. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Col. Lawrence Sellin (Ret.)

There may be some culpability involved, but the huge resistance being mounted by the international scientific elite, the media and vested financial interests against conducting an objective analysis of the origin of the COVID-19 virus is primarily about money.

If it would be determined that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a laboratory leak of a genetically engineered virus, it would not only disrupt the flow of huge sums of research funding, but adversely affect the investments of those vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump’s efforts to make the U.S. economy less dependent on China and, therefore, make the U.S. less vulnerable to Chinese geopolitical blackmail.

There is growing scientific evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted from a vaccine development project gone wrong.

Live-attenuated vaccines are a type of vaccine used for smallpox and childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, in which a weakened or “attenuated” form of the virus that causes the disease is manufactured. » Read the rest of this entry «

by theconservativetreehouse.com Author: sundance

With 30-days left before the election perhaps it’s worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is about…. Something 99% of American voters do not quite understand.

Congress doesn’t actually write legislation. The last item of legislation written by congress was sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to a segment of DC operations known as K-Street. That’s where the lobbyists reside.

Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells the laws; lobbyists then pay congress lucrative commissions for passing their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC.

When we talk about paying-off politicians in third-world countries we call it bribery. However, when we undertake the same process in the U.S. we call it “lobbying”.

CTH often describes the system with the phrase: “There are Trillions at Stake.” The process of creating legislation is behind that phrase. DC politics is not quite based on the ideas that frame most voter’s reference points.

With people taking notice of DC politics for the first time; and with people not as familiar with the purpose of DC politics; perhaps it is valuable to provide clarity. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Desmond Lachman

Some things never seem to change. Every time the U.S. dollar experiences a short bout of weakness, a host of leading economists come out of the woodwork to predict the impending end of the dollar’s long reign as the world’s leading international reserve currency. They do so only to be proven wrong time and again by the dollar’s continued clear advantages over its potential rival currencies.

Judging by the recent dire predictions of a dollar crash next year by Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s former chief economist, this time will be no different. Following a 10 percent decline in the dollar over the past six months, Roach is boldly predicting that the dollar will crash by as much as 35 percent next year. He is doing so in seeming disregard of a very troubling world economic outlook and the many challenges now facing the Euro, the dollar’s main potential rival.

The essence of the dollar bears’ current pessimism about the dollar is that the U.S. savings rate is bound to plummet as a result of the stimulus packages associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, they draw attention to the fact that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that the U.S. budget deficit will widen to some 16 percent of GDP in 2020 and will remain in excess of 8 percent of GDP in 2021.

In the dollar bears’ view, such large budget deficits are bound to lead to a marked widening in the U.S. external current account deficit by contributing to a plunge in the overall U.S. savings rate. That in turn will precipitate their long-awaited dollar collapse. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Hannah Beech

From Myanmar to Canada, people are asking: How did a superpower allow itself to be felled by a virus? And why won’t the president commit to a peaceful transition of power?Although Myanmar is beset with its own coronavirus outbreak, there is a sense of sympathy for the United States.

BANGKOK — Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.

“I feel sorry for Americans,” said Myint Oo, a member of Parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”

The same sentiment prevails in Canada, one of the most developed countries. Two out of three Canadians live within about 60 miles of the U.S. border.

“Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.

Amid the pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election, much of the world is watching the United States with a mix of shock, chagrin and, most of all, bafflement. » Read the rest of this entry «