Ah Yes…, By Its Loud Squeal, We Know A Bad Piglet Got Caught Under The Gate

justsecurity |  Dear U.S. Attorney Durham:

On May 13, 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed you to review the origins of the 2016 Justice Department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. At some point, this review turned into a criminal investigation of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to undermine our democracy.

The need for your appointment was hard to understand at the time it was made, since the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General was already conducting a similar investigation that began in March 2018 into the same issues.  On December 9, 2019, the Inspector General issued his report and concluded that the 2016 Russia investigation had had a legitimate purpose and that there was no evidence of political bias against President Trump in how the investigation had been initiated or undertaken.

We are now in the closing stages of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Longstanding Department policies issued by the past three Attorneys General who served during an election year make plain that Department actions should not be taken in an election year that could influence or affect an election.  George J. Terwilliger III, who served as deputy attorney general under Attorney General William Barr in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, said in 2016, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.”

I strongly urge you to follow this policy and not to issue any report, or bring any indictments, resulting from your investigation in these closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

Any public action by the Justice Department in this pre-election period that is associated with your investigation – which by its very nature involves actions taken during the Obama-Biden Administration – is bound to be used by President Trump for partisan political purposes to promote his re-election effort against Vice President Biden.

In testifying during his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Barr was asked whether there are “policies in place that try to insulate the investigations and the decisions of the Department of Justice and FBI from getting involved in elections?” Barr said yes and explained that the party in power has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.” But that is precisely what would occur here if a report is issued on your investigation of the Russia investigation or if indictments are brought at this critical stage of the presidential election.

You should not permit your long and distinguished career in the Justice Department to be permanently tainted, or your personal integrity to be irreparably impugned, by what would plainly be an effort to use your investigation to influence or affect the 2020 presidential election.

Once You See The Deep State Government Criminal Enterprise You Cannot Unsee It

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton go back a long way.  George H.W.Bush headed the CIA and Bill Clinton was Gov.of Arkansas when the drug smuggling operation with the Nicaraguan Contras occurred. Mena Airport in Arkansas was a valued node on that drug trafficking network.

• Foreign aid money laundering is part of the deal – it’s like a grub stake courtesy of the US tax payer.
• Congress appropriates money
• Money goes out as foreign aid
• Foreign aid dispersed to companies that employ family and friends (Hunter Biden)
• Family of Congress critters invested in companies that received the foreign aid.
• Biden and company pulled the scam in Ukraine, Clinton’s did it in Haiti, Panama Papers etc….

shadowproof |  According to documents filed by former NSA Director Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA was speculating in commodities linked to China and Russia while receiving asymmetric information on the countries as part of his job. The use of asymmetric or non-public information for financial gain is a crime known as insider trading.

The shares Alexander bought and sold while head of the NSA include those connected to the secretive and politically sensitive potash market. The potash market is largely controlled by Russia and Belarus and one of the largest consumers of potash is China. With Russia and China – two countries the NSA targets for intelligence – as major players it is not hard to see how information coming across Director Alexander’s desk could be useful in getting an information edge on other speculators. Did he use his edge to profit?

Alexander also bought and sold shares in other commodities where asymmetric information on Russia and China could have been beneficial.

On the same day he sold the potash company shares, Alexander also sold shares in the Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., a state-owned company headquartered in Beijing and currently the world’s second-largest producer of aluminum. U.S. government investigators have indicated that the company, known as Chinalco, has received insider information about its American competitors from computer hackers working for the Chinese military. That hacker group has been under NSA surveillance for years, and the Justice Department in May indicted five of its members…
U.S. officials have long insisted that the information that intelligence agencies steal from foreign corporations and governments is only used to make political and strategic decisions and isn’t shared with U.S. companies. But whether that spying could benefit individual U.S. officials who are privy to the secrets being collected, and what mechanisms are in place to ensure officials don’t personally benefit from insider knowledge, haven’t been widely discussed.

And who knows if these were the only times Alexander was in a position to have non-public information while trading? The NSA comes across quite a bit of information that could be advantageous if someone was looking to make some financial trades. Did Alexander ever use that non-public information to trade in the financial markets?

Also troubling is former NSA Director Alexander’s attempts to seemingly privatize knowledge and relationships gleaned from his government service. Alexander has filed technology patents related to network intrusion and was recently forced to back off having an employee at his new company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, that still currently works for the NSA.

Alexander appears to be having some nice private benefits from his public service.

Who Is The Target Of This Epstein Appeasement And Why Right Now?

tatler |  The news comes following a public back and forth between the US Department of Justice and Prince Andrew’s legal team over the royal’s alleged lack of cooperation in the ongoing investigations into Epstein. But one of the US prosecutors leading the enquiries, Geoffrey Berman, has now been sacked from his role as Attorney for the Southern District of New York by Donald Trump after refusing to stand down.

According to the Times, the US Attorney General, William Barr, asked President Trump to remove Berman – who had also overseen the prosecution of a number of Trump’s associates. Berman initially responded by stating that he had ‘no intention of resigning’ after Trump ally Barr unexpectedly announced that Berman was ‘stepping down’.

Earlier in June it was reported that the US Department of Justice had asked the Home Office to help it question Andrew over his links to Epstein. The Duke of York’s legal team accused the DoJ of ‘breaching their own confidentiality rules’, claiming that the royal had ‘offered his assistance as a witness’ on at least three occasions this year.

Berman retaliated by stating that Andrew had ‘yet again sought to falsely portray himself to the public as eager and willing to cooperate.’ He added that in fact, the Duke ‘has not given an interview to federal authorities, has repeatedly declined our request to schedule such an interview, and nearly four months ago informed us unequivocally – through the very same counsel who issued today's release – that he would not come in for such an interview… If Prince Andrew is, in fact, serious about cooperating with the ongoing federal investigation, our doors remain open, and we await word of when we should expect him.’

It was subsequently reported that Andrew would not cooperate with the Epstein investigation unless American investigators offer him ‘an olive branch’. The Duke of York has consistently denied any wrongdoing in regards to his links with his former friend.

Philadelphia Special Weapons Attack Team Did THE Most

American Police Violence Toward Blacks Is A Subset Of Its Violence Toward Americans

quillette |  Tony Timpa was 32 years old when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016. He suffered from mental health difficulties and was unarmed. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He had called the cops from a parking lot while intoxicated because he thought he might be a danger to himself. By the time law enforcement arrived, he had already been handcuffed by the security guards of a store nearby. Even so, the police officers made him lie face down on the grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes until he suffocated. During the harrowing recording of his final moments, he can be heard pleading for his life. A grand jury indictment of the officers involved was overturned.

Not many people have seen this video, however, and that may have something to do with the fact that Timpa was white. During the protests and agonizing discussions about police brutality that have followed the death of George Floyd under remarkably similar circumstances, it is too seldom acknowledged that white men are regularly killed by the cops as well, and that occasionally the cops responsible are black (as it happens, one of the Dallas police officers at the scene of Timpa’s death was an African American). There seems to be a widespread assumption that, under similar circumstances, white cops kill black people but not white people, and that this disparity is either the product of naked racism or underlying racist bias that emerges under pressure. Plenty of evidence indicates, however, that racism is less important to understanding police behavior than is commonly supposed.

Timpa was, of course, just one case and might be dismissed as an anomaly. On the other hand, we are told that what happened to George Floyd is what happens to black people “all the time.” But because the killing of black suspects by white police officers receives more media attention and elicits more outrage, such instances leave us vulnerable to the availability heuristic—a cognitive bias that leads us to form judgements about the prevalence of phenomena based on the readiness with which we can recall examples. Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too. And just as the Timpa case tragically parallels the Floyd one, there are countless episodes paralleling those we hear about involving black people.

Police Work For The Ruling Elite - PERIOD!

WSWS |  It is now just over three weeks since the Memorial Day murder of George Floyd set off mass protests throughout the United States and around the world. The political representatives of the ruling class have responded with, on the one hand, brute force and threats of military repression, and, on the other hand, pledges of “reform” and “accountability.”

Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order that would embed more social workers and mental health professionals with the police, create a national database to track officers fired or convicted for using excessive force, and ban chokeholds, with the exception, as the president explained, of “when an officer’s life is at risk.”

Trump announced his executive order in an address before police officers filled with calls for “law and order” and denunciations of protesters. Trump’s caveat on chokeholds leaves the window wide open for the continued use of the deadly practice, since police officers routinely claim that they fear for their lives when they grievously wound or kill someone.

The Democrats have offered up their own slate of cosmetic changes largely mirroring Trump’s, including banning chokeholds and creating a national database of abusive officers, while also explicitly rejecting the demand, popular among protestors, to “defund” the police. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee, has called for $300 million in additional federal funding to shore up police departments across the country, while Senator Bernie Sanders has said that cops need to be paid higher salaries.

Such measures will amount to less than nothing. They might as well propose to change the color of police uniforms. Inevitably, “reforms” from these representatives of the ruling class will end up strengthening the police as an oppressive apparatus of the state.

The promise of police reform has repeatedly been offered up by the ruling class as a supposed solution to excessive violence. In the aftermath of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, the Democrats claimed that more black police officers on the beat, more black police chiefs overseeing forces and more black mayors would solve the problem.

Half a century later, African Americans account for more than 13 percent of police officers, an overrepresentation compared to the population as a whole. Black police chiefs head departments across the country, and cities large and small have elected black mayors. In the last decade, the introduction of police vehicle dash cams and body cameras has been offered up as yet another panacea.

And yet the killing and abuse continue, and indeed have escalated.

What is absent from all of the media commentary on police violence, let alone the statements from bourgeois politicians, is any examination of what the police are and their relationship to capitalist society.

Police Simple Hard Men Hurt People Because They Want To

medium |  In an ironic — and entirely predictable — twist, police officers in city after city responded to the demonstrations against their brutality with yet more violence.

Cop cars in Brooklyn mowed down crowds of protestors. The National Guard in Minneapolis shot paint canisters at residents standing on their own porches. A Pennsylvania officer was filmed kicking a teenager who was already sitting on the ground, her hands covering her face. An officer in Utah knocked over an elderly man walking with a cane. And across the country, officers shot journalists with rubber bullets (once on live TV), arrested reporters, and pepper-sprayed members of the press, even as they clearly identified themselves as working journalists.

With each new video shared on social media, it became increasingly clear that police officers were the ones escalating the violence. Their attacks on civilians were not made in self-defense or because they were needed to maintain order — police hurt people because they wanted to.

In response, conservatives bemoaned property destruction and theft — the president even tweeted that “looters” should be shot — as if broken windows or stolen clothing could compare to the thousands of lives lost to police violence. This focus is not accidental: By painting mostly peaceful protestors as criminals, those on the right hope it will provide cover for — and distract from — the unchecked thuggery of police officers across the U.S.

But there is no “both sides” argument to be made here. Police officers, armed and armored, act with the power of the state behind them. Protestors have no such power. Cops are tasked with protecting the community and de-escalating tensions. Protesters have no such responsibility. To act as if this is a fight between equals is ridiculous.

LAPD Sent 400 Slave Catchers To Keep Officer Chris Dorner From Talking

Heavy |  Comedian Dave Chappelle released a new Netflix segment on Thursday, 8:46, in which he spoke about the death of George Floyd in police custody, Candace Owens, Black Lives Matter protests, CNN’s Don Lemon, and former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Jordan Dorner, a wanted man who took his own life in 2013 following one of the largest manhunts in the area’s history.

During the half-hour special, Chappelle connects the Minneapolis police officers who stood by and watched while Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until Floyd died, with the cop-killing spree Dorner embarked on following his dismissal from the LAPD after he complained about a fellow officer kicking a handcuffed mentally ill suspect in the head.

 Dorner sat before a Board of Rights hearing in December 2008 and was accused of making the story up about his fellow officer’s actions. Starting on February 3, 2013, he engaged in a series of targeted shootings in Orange County, Los Angeles County and Riverside County, California.

Dorner, who previously served in the Navy, killed four people in 10 days to avenge what he described in his lengthy manifesto as wrongful termination from the LAPD. Following an intense manhunt, Dorner died of a self-inflicted gun wound in Big Bear, California, on February 12, 2013.

Unconstitutional Livestock Management Is American Policing's Raison d'Etre

NPR |  Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.

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If you would like to read more about the topic:

• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
• The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill

Where Do Local PoPo Get The Nerve To Unconstitutionally Surveil Black Folks?!?!?

niemanlab |  On Aug. 20, 2018, the first day of a federal police surveillance trial, I discovered that the Memphis Police Department was spying on me.

The ACLU of Tennessee had sued the MPD, alleging that the department was in violation of a 1978 consent decree barring surveillance of residents for political purposes.

I’m pretty sure I wore my pink gingham jacket — it’s my summer go-to when I want to look professional. I know I sat on the right side of the courtroom, not far from a former colleague at The Commercial Appeal. I’d long suspected that I was on law enforcement’s radar, simply because my work tends to center on the most marginalized communities, not institutions with the most power.

One of the first witnesses called to the stand: Sgt. Timothy Reynolds, who is white. To get intel on activists and organizers, including those in the Black Lives Matter movement, he’d posed on Facebook as a “man of color,” befriending people and trying to infiltrate closed circles.

Projected onto a giant screen in the courtroom was a screenshot of people Reynolds followed on Facebook.

My head was bent as I wrote in my reporter’s notebook. “What does this entry indicate?” ACLU attorney Amanda Strickland Floyd asked.

“I was following Wendi Thomas,” Reynolds replied. “Wendi C. Thomas.”

I sat up.

“And who is Wendi Thomas?” Floyd asked.

She, he replied, used to write for The Commercial Appeal. In 2014, I left the paper after being a columnist for 11 years.

It’s been more than a year since a judge ruled against the city, and I’ve never gotten a clear answer on why the MPD was monitoring me. Law enforcement also was keeping tabs on three other journalists whose names came out during the trial. Reynolds testified he used the fake account to monitor protest activity and follow current events connected to Black Lives Matter.

My sin, as best I can figure, was having good sources who were local organizers and activists, including some of the original plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit against the city.

In the days since cellphone video captured white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd, a black man, residents in dozens of cities across the country have exercised their First Amendment rights to protest police brutality.

Here in Memphis, where two-thirds of the population is black and 1 in 4 lives below the poverty line, demonstrators have chanted, “No justice, no peace, no racist police!”

The most recent protests were sparked by the killings of Floyd and of Breonna Taylor, a black woman gunned down in her home by Louisville, Kentucky, police in March. But in Memphis, like elsewhere, the seeds of distrust between activists and police were planted decades ago. And law enforcement has nurtured these seeds ever since.

An Unflinching Review Of The History Of Policing In America

plsonline.eku.edu |  In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place.

These "modern police" organizations shared similar characteristics: (1) they were publicly supported and bureaucratic in form; (2) police officers were full-time employees, not community volunteers or case-by-case fee retainers; (3) departments had permanent and fixed rules and procedures, and employment as a police officers was continuous; (4) police departments were accountable to a central governmental authority (Lundman 1980).

In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.

The key question, of course, is what was it about the United States in the 1830s that necessitated the development of local, centralized, bureaucratic police forces? One answer is that cities were growing. The United States was no longer a collection of small cities and rural hamlets. Urbanization was occurring at an ever-quickening pace and old informal watch and constable system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages (Walker 1996). But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking. So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to?

More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to "disorder." What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the "collective good" (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.

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As Goes Blackness, So Goes America....,

libertarianinstitute |  Murray Rothbard pointed out in his book Anatomy of the State how the state is far more punitive against those that threaten the comfort and authority of government institutions and workers than they are against crimes against citizens.

This, according to Rothbard, exposed as a myth the notion that the state exists to protect its citizens.

“We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?” Rothbard wrote.

“The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.”

Boy how recent events have proven Rothbard right.

For weeks, we saw police aggressively pursuing and punishing peaceful people merely violating arbitrary lockdown orders to go surfing, cut hair, or host a child’s play date.

But in the first nights of the George Floyd protests, police allowed rioters to run amok destroying property, with political leaders dismissing the damage as unimportant.

This stark contrast in police responses dramatically underscores Rothbard’s point.

Is This "Change the Subject" Diversion Wall St.-DC's Occupy Main Street?

Police have been recorded doing this kind of stuff for a long time and qualified immunity from prosecution has kept them out of trouble - always protected. This one happened right in the middle of the pandemic, after years of escalating economic pain culminating in the "flatten the curve" lockdown. 

You have a set of cops in Minneapolis murder a black man in broad daylight with lots of people with camera phones around. Why kill a man in broad daylight, including allowing ‘beauty pics’ of the cops? Of course they knew they were being recorded. 

The predictable outrage erupts across cities. You have news network camera crews arrested or shot at by cops. You have what sure looks like cops acting as provacateurs, breaking window, etc. It all seems very highly coordinated.  

A lot of noise about the looting of Main Street by Wall St. in the so-called pandemic bailouts has started to get traction. A lot of people are going to be unemployed and probably evicted soon. A lot of people will lose their homes in mortgage foreclosure - again. A lot of people are going to be very, very angry at DC and Wall St, if they aren’t already.

Was this all set up to get people mad and in the streets to protest in order to beat them down and take the fight out of them before the greater economic pain that’s coming starts to hit Main Street in full force? Is this Wall St./DC’s “Occupy Main Street” ?  Or is this a “change the subject” in the media moment, change the subject away from the economic crimes of the bailouts to something different and more visibly dramatic? It would be the height of naivete to pretend that this situation has simply taken on 'a life of its own’. There is DEFINITELY some orchestrating going on.  

theamericanconservative |   Darrin Manning’s unprovoked “stop and frisk” encounter with the Philadelphia police left him hospitalized with a ruptured testicle. Neykeyia Parker was violently dragged out of her car and aggressively arrested in front of her young child for “trespassing” at her own apartment complex in Houston. A Georgia toddler was burned when police threw a flash grenade into his playpen during a raid, and the manager of a Chicago tanning salon was confronted by a raiding police officer bellowing that he would kill her and her family, captured on the salon’s surveillance. An elderly man in Ohio was left in need of facial reconstructive surgery after police entered his home without a warrant to sort out a dispute about a trailer.

These stories are a small selection of recent police brutality reports, as police misconduct has become a fixture of the news cycle.

But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.

This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:

What, If Anything, Will The Riots Be Allowed To Accomplish?

theconversation |  A teenager held her phone steady enough to capture the final moments of George Perry Floyd’s life as he apparently suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s knee on his neck. The video went viral.

What happened next has played out time and again in American cities after high-profile cases of alleged police brutality.

Vigils and protests were organized in Minneapolis and around the United States to demand police accountability. But while investigators and officials called for patience, unrest boiled over. News reports soon carried images of property destruction and police in riot gear.

The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration.

They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as “thugs.” But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms.

The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on journalists to get things right. 

My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.

Joe Biden's First Choice For VP Amy Klobuchar Declined To Prosecute Derek Chauvin For Prior Murder

mintpressnews |  The latest example of America’s racist police brutality problem was caught on camera in Minneapolis Monday, as Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old African-American George Floyd’s neck for over seven minutes until he passed out and died. In its headline on its website, Minneapolis police described the event as “man dies after medical incident during police interaction,” laundering themselves of any responsibility. Chauvin continued his assault even as Floyd desperately pleaded that he could not breathe, while bystanders protested his brutality. “You’re fucking stopping his breathing there, bro,” warned one concerned passer-by. Even after passing out, Chauvin did not release pressure on his neck. Chauvin has killed multiple times before while in uniform, has shot and wounded others and is well-known to local activist groups.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who Joe Biden recently asked to undergo vetting to be his running mate for November, issued a very tepid statement about the incident, describing the police killing of an unarmed black man over an alleged forged check as merely an “officer involved death,” – a copaganda word often used by police as a euphemism for “murder.”

Klobuchar also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she did not bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself.

Chauvin was involved in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against him. To be fair to Klobuchar, the Reyes shooting happened in October 2006, as her time as state prosecutor was coming to an end and she was campaigning for the senate. By the time Chauvin’s case finally made it to a grand jury, she had relinquished her role.

Spartans Showed Up in Athens Yesterday and Demonstrated Self-Discipline AHOO! HOO! HOO!

BaltimoreSun | Thousands of mostly white men — many decked out in camouflage and armed with assault-style rifles — packed Richmond’s streets Monday, circling the gun-free Capitol Square, where thousands more waved signs and listened to speeches, all wanting to make one point: They weren’t going anywhere, and their gun rights shouldn’t either.

“I think there’s an assault on the Second Amendment,” said 60-year-old Richmond resident Danny Tumer, who was standing in line to get into the grounds at 6:30 a.m.

Tensions have been building across the state since Democrats gained a majority in the legislature and vowed to enact tighter gun control laws following the May mass shooting in Virginia Beach. As lawmakers filed bills to limit handgun purchases and require universal background checks, gun owners packed local government chambers, demanding localities not enforce any legislation they considered an infringement on their Second Amendment rights.

Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had placed Richmond under a state of emergency prior to the event, saying the annual Virginia Citizens Defense League lobby day and rally Monday — which was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day — had drawn the attention of militia and out-of-state groups who have come to “intimidate” and “cause harm."

He banned weapons from statehouse grounds, and anyone who wanted to be on Capitol Square had to pass through metal detectors and have their bags searched, causing lengthy lines. Many protesters wore orange stickers with the words “Guns SAVE Lives.”

Throughout the morning, the overwhelmingly pro-gun crowd, many from out of state, remained peaceful. There were only small groups of counter-protesters. Officials estimated 6,000 people were inside Capitol square, with another 16,000 outside the gates.

Only one person, a 21-year-old woman, was arrested, according to officials who ran the Twitter page VACapitol2020. She was charged with wearing a mask in public after police asked her multiple times to adjust the bandanna around her face.

Many of the participants left on charter buses by 2 p.m.

Localism in the 2020's

libertyblitzkrieg |  Contrary to popular opinion, I think a loss of faith in Washington D.C. and its institutions is entirely rational and healthy. Maintaining faith in something due to tradition or the fumes of hope won’t lead to anything productive, rather, it’s preferable to honestly assess the reality of whatever situation you’re in and reorient your worldview and priorities accordingly.

Whether the issue relates to above the law criminal bankers, a Federal Reserve which systematically funnels free money to the already wealthy and powerful, the societal dominance of free speech and privacy-despising tech giant monopolies, or the national security state’s undeclared forever wars for empire, there’s no good reason to maintain any faith in the federal government and the oligarchs/special interests who control it.

Philosophically speaking, I’ve come to conclude the only way to truly have self-government where community life reflects the desires and needs of the people who live there is by concentrating decision making at the local level. I’ve become increasingly interested in the general idea of localism not just because I agree with it in theory, but because it seems more and more people will begin to gravitate toward this perspective and life strategy out of necessity and frustration.

Rather than groveling to Washington D.C., grassroots movements should focus more on the local level where community can be built and things can get done to reflect the desires of the people living there. The entire notion of a one-size fits all approach to virtually all aspects of life dictated via laws passed by corrupt egomaniacs in the swamp is certifiably deranged.

Did Their Filthy Bidnis, Pulled Out, then DARED YOU TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!!

NYTimes |  Two weeks after Tufts University became the first major university to remove the Sackler name from buildings and programs over the family’s role in the opioid epidemic, members of the family are pushing back. A lawyer for some of the Sacklers argued in a letter to the president of Tufts that the move was unjustified and a violation of agreements made when the school wanted the family’s financial help years ago.

The letter described Tufts’s decision to remove the name as “contrary to basic notions of fairness" and “a breach of the many binding commitments made by the University dating back to 1980 in order to secure the family’s support, including millions of dollars in donations for facilities and critical medical research.”

Institutions that have accepted financial support from the Sacklers have in recent months faced growing cries to distance themselves from the family. 

The forceful response by Sackler family members now may be seen as a signal to other institutions amid a flurry of announcements by major cultural organizations that they would no longer take donations from the family. The response also raised complicated legal questions about what room institutions have to unilaterally remove a donor’s name long after a gift has been accepted.

The lawyer, Robert Cordy, who represents the descendants of two of the brothers who built Purdue Pharma, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, wrote that Tufts chose “to prioritize optics over a fair process.”

Barr's Not Just a Referee, He's An Effective Referee!

npr |  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in a letter to Democrats on Monday that the House will vote to formalize the procedures in the ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

The resolution will outline the terms for public hearings, the disclosure of deposition transcripts, procedures to transfer evidence to the House Judiciary Committee and due process rights for Trump.

Senior Democratic aides said the resolution will be released on Wednesday, with a House vote on Thursday.

"We are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives," Pelosi wrote.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff confirmed that the resolution will establish a format for open hearings. 

"The American people will hear firsthand about the President's misconduct," Schiff said in a statement.

Round this Trash Up On Its Way Back Into the U.S...,

NYTimes |  Speaker Nancy Pelosi has traveled to Jordan to meet with the Jordanian king for “vital” discussions about the Turkish incursion into Syria and other regional challenges, amid uncertainty about whether an American-brokered cease-fire with Turkey in northern Syria was holding.

The visit by senior United States officials came as sporadic clashes continued on Sunday morning along the Turkish-Syrian border, where, according to the Turkish Defense Ministry, a Turkish soldier was killed by Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad. 

Confusion and continued shelling have marred the cease-fire deal announced by Vice President Mike Pence last week, with both Turkey and Kurdish leaders accusing each other of violating the truce.

Ms. Pelosi, a California Democrat, led a nine-member bipartisan congressional delegation to Jordan that included Representatives Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York; and Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas. The group met with King Abdullah II of Jordan on Saturday evening.