9/23 One Louisville Ex- Police Officer Indicted for Wanton Shooting at Breonna Taylor’s Apt; News Roundup & OT
A grand jury indicted Brett Hankison on charges of wanton endangerment for his actions on the night of the shooting that killed Breonna Taylor. No other charges were announced.
A grand jury indicted a former Louisville police officer on Wednesday for wanton endangerment during a botched drug raid that led to the death of Breonna Taylor in March. No charges were announced against the other two officers who fired shots, and no one was charged for causing her death.
The three-count indictment concerns Brett Hankison, a detective at the time, who fired into the sliding glass patio door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment building, both of which were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight.
He is the only one of the three officers who was dismissed from the force, with a termination letter stating that he showed “an extreme indifference to the value of human life.”
In a news conference following the announcement of the grand jury’s decision, Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, said, “The decision before my office is not to decide if the loss of Breonna Taylor’s life was a tragedy — the answer to that question is unequivocally yes,” he said.
USA Today points out some other key developments related to the case:
Attorney General Daniel Cameron said his investigation determined that Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove were justified in their actions and that they did announce themselves as police officers before the shooting.
The mayor of Louisville imposed a 72-hour curfew on Wednesday a day after declaring a state of emergency. Police have cut off access to downtown Louisville and set up barricades and fences around buildings.
Six Louisville police officers – including the three who fired their weapons into Breonna Taylor’s apartment – are under internal investigation into whether officers broke department policies. The review is separate from the one the department sent to the Kentucky attorney general to determine whether criminal charges should be filed.
Last week, the city of Louisville announced a $12 million settlement with Breonna Taylor’s family, which included a host of police reforms. The police union said it felt betrayed by the mayor, while activists said arresting the officers involved is the only way to get justice.
Also last week, the Louisville metro council declared a no confidence vote in the mayor over his handling of the Taylor case.
In other news, Planet Is Burning, But First Presidential Debate Set to Ignore Humanity’s Most Pressing Issue: Climate
Even as devastating wildfires across the U.S. West Coast and rapidly shrinking Arctic sea ice offer alarming evidence of the reality and immediacy of the climate crisis, the planetary emergency was apparently deemed not worthy of inclusion on the list of official topics for next Tuesday’s presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Unveiled Tuesday by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the featured topics of the 90-minute event—moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News—are expected to be the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, the Supreme Court, the two candidates’ records, election integrity, and “race and violence in our cities.”
While the topics are subject to change, the initial exclusion of the greatest crisis facing humanity sparked backlash from environmentalists, who characterized the ongoing neglect of the climate emergency as yet another dereliction of duty by the corporate media.
“At a time when wildfires are burning down an entire coast, it’s absolutely unconscionable for the media to dismiss climate change as a topic in the first presidential debate,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in a statement late Tuesday. “Poll after poll shows the climate crisis looms large on the minds of voters across the country; an NPR survey released yesterday showed it was the single most important issue among Democrats. Young Republican voters also list climate as their top concern.”
Prakash said her organization is “committed to mobilizing our movement to protest at the presidential debates until Chris Wallace and other mainstream reporters address climate head on.”
“The American people are crying out for a real solution to the crises we find ourselves,” said Prakash continued. “We need to open up conversations around how we can mobilize our government to fight the climate crisis while also creating millions of good jobs in the process of recovering from an economic collapse and global pandemic. It’s an abdication of the media’s role to keep people informed for climate to be completely erased from the docket.”
Throughout his first term, Trump repeatedly dismissed or downplayed the climate emergency and contributed to it by gutting basic environmental protections and rushing to expand domestic fossil fuel production at a time when rapid planetary warming demands an urgent transition away from polluting energy sources.
Biden, for his part, put forth a $2 trillion green energy plan in July that climate groups said is a good first step but ultimately insufficient to deliver the needed transformational change.
Earlier this month, as Common Dreams reported, Biden slammed the president’s ongoing climate denial in the face of the catastrophic wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington state and said that “in the years ahead, there will be no challenge more consequential to our future than meeting and defeating the onrushing climate crisis.”
“The science is clear, and deadly signs like these are unmistakable—climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to our way of life,” Biden said in a statement. “President Trump can try to deny that reality, but the facts are undeniable. We absolutely must act now to avoid a future defined by an unending barrage of tragedies like the one American families are enduring across the West today.”
Despite the marked contrasts between the two candidates on climate policy, it is unclear whether their differences will receive any attention or discussion at next Tuesday’s debate, which will come less than 40 days ahead of the November 3 election.
Evan Weber, co-founder and political director of the Sunrise Movement, tweeted Tuesday that if Wallace fails to mention the climate emergency in his questions, Biden must bring up the topic on his own.
“Polling shows it’s the biggest wedge he’s got” said Weber. “It’s just smart politics.”
More news, tweets, videos, and jibber-jabber in the comments. See you there!
Gov. Pritzker puts Illinois National Guard ‘in a state of readiness’ ahead of Kentucky announcement in Breonna Taylor case
American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
One thing to keep in mind about the WOW V Milwaukee cty. If Byedone gets Obama like turnout in Milw. county that will more than neutralize the WOW counties. The R count on off prez. elections to do their damage in WI
(repeat from yesterday)
The Election That Could Break America
More from that piece.. A proper despot would not risk the inconvenience of losing an election. He would fix his victory in advance, avoiding the need to overturn an incorrect outcome. Trump cannot do that. But he’s not powerless to skew the proceedings—first on Election Day and then during the Interregnum. He could disrupt the vote count where it’s going badly, and if that does not work, try to bypass it altogether. On Election Day, Trump and his allies can begin by suppressing the Biden vote. There is no truth to be found in dancing around this point, either: Trump does not want Black people to vote. (He said as much in 2017—on Martin Luther King Day, no less—to a voting-rights group co-founded by King, according to a recording leaked to Politico.) He does not want young people or poor people to vote. He believes, with reason, that he is less likely to win reelection if turnout is high at the polls. This is not a “both sides” phenomenon. In present-day politics, we have one party that consistently seeks advantage in depriving the other party’s adherents of the right to vote. Just under a year ago, Justin Clark gave a closed-door talk in Wisconsin to a select audience of Republican lawyers. He thought he was speaking privately, but someone had brought a recording device. He had a lot to say about Election Day operations, or “EDO.” At the time, Clark was a senior lieutenant with Trump’s reelection campaign; in July, he was promoted to deputy campaign manager. “Wisconsin’s the state that is going to tip this one way or the other … So it makes EDO really, really, really important,” he said. He put the mission bluntly: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes … [Democrats’] voters are all in one part of the state, so let’s start playing offense a little bit. And that’s what you’re going to see in 2020. That’s what’s going to be markedly different. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.” (Clark later claimed that his remarks had been misconstrued, but his explanation made no sense in context.) Of all the favorable signs for Trump’s Election Day operations, Clark explained, “first and foremost is the consent decree’s gone.” He was referring to a court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The expiration of that order was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” Clark said. His audience of lawyers knew what he meant. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked. The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police. This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, “We’re going to have sheriffs and we’re going to have law enforcement and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys” to keep close watch on the polls. For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.” Trump’s crusade against voting by mail is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count. Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents. An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact. Nonetheless, Republicans and their allies have litigated scores of cases in the name of preventing fraud in this year’s election. State by state, they have sought—with some success—to purge voter rolls, tighten rules on provisional votes, uphold voter-identification requirements, ban the use of ballot drop boxes, reduce eligibility to vote by mail, discard mail-in ballots with technical flaws, and outlaw the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. The intent and effect is to throw away votes in large numbers. These legal maneuvers are drawn from an old Republican playbook. What’s different during this cycle, aside from the ferocity of the efforts, is the focus on voting by mail. The president has mounted a relentless assault on postal balloting at the exact moment when the coronavirus pandemic is driving tens of millions of voters to embrace it. This year’s presidential election will see voting by mail on a scale unlike any before—some states are anticipating a tenfold increase in postal balloting. A 50-state survey by The Washington Post found that 198 million eligible voters, or at least 84 percent, will have the option to vote by mail. Trump has denounced mail-in voting often and urgently, airing fantastical nightmares. One day he tweeted, “mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud and abuse. it will also lead to the end of our great republican party. we can never let this tragedy befall our nation.” Another day he pointed to an imaginary—and easily debunked—scenario of forgery from abroad: “rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. it will be the scandal of our times!” By late summer Trump was declaiming against mail-in voting an average of nearly four times a day—a pace he had reserved in the past for existential dangers such as impeachment and the Mueller investigation: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.” Summer also brought reports that the U.S. Postal Service, the government’s most popular agency, was besieged from within by Louis DeJoy, Trump’s new postmaster general and a major Republican donor. Service cuts, upper-management restructuring, and chaotic operational changes were producing long delays. At one sorting facility, the Los Angeles Times reported, “workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.” In the name of efficiency, the Postal Service began decommissioning 10 percent of its mail-sorting machines. Then came word that the service would no longer treat ballots as first-class mail unless some states nearly tripled the postage they paid, from 20 to 55 cents an envelope. DeJoy denied any intent to slow down voting by mail, and the Postal Service withdrew the plan under fire from critics. If there were doubts about where Trump stood on these changes, he resolved them at an August 12 news conference. Democrats were negotiating for a $25 billion increase in postal funding and an additional $3.6 billion in election assistance to states. “They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?” What are we to make of all this? In part, Trump’s hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general. Democrats, he said on Fox & Friends at the end of March, want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Some Republicans see Trump’s vendetta as self-defeating. “It to me appears entirely irrational,” Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, told me. “The Trump campaign and RNC and by fiat their state party organizations are engaging in suppressing their own voter turnout,” including Republican seniors who have voted by mail for years. But Trump’s crusade against voting by mail is a strategically sound expression of his plan for the Interregnum. The president is not actually trying to prevent mail-in balloting altogether, which he has no means to do. He is discrediting the practice and starving it of resources, signaling his supporters to vote in person, and preparing the ground for post–Election Night plans to contest the results. It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” a Trump legal adviser says. Voting by mail does not favor either party “during normal times,” according to a team of researchers at Stanford, but that phrase does a lot of work. Their findings, which were published in June, did not take into account a president whose words alone could produce a partisan skew. Trump’s systematic predictions of fraud appear to have had a powerful effect on Republican voting intentions. In Georgia, for example, a Monmouth University poll in late July found that 60 percent of Democrats but only 28 percent of Republicans were likely to vote by mail. In the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, hundreds of thousands more Democrats than Republicans have requested mail-in ballots. Trump, in other words, has created a proxy to distinguish friend from foe. Republican lawyers around the country will find this useful when litigating the count. Playing by the numbers, they can treat ballots cast by mail as hostile, just as they do ballots cast in person by urban and college-town voters. Those are the ballots they will contest. The battle space of the Interregnum, if trends hold true, will be shaped by a phenomenon known as the “blue shift.” Edward Foley, an Ohio State professor of constitutional law and a specialist in election law, pioneered research on the blue shift. He found a previously unremarked-upon pattern in the overtime count—the canvass after Election Night that tallies late-reporting precincts, unprocessed absentee votes, and provisional ballots cast by voters whose eligibility needed to be confirmed. For most of American history, the overtime count produced no predictably partisan effect. In any given election year, some states shifted red in the canvass after Election Day and some shifted blue, but the shifts were seldom large enough to matter. Two things began to change about 20 years ago. The overtime count got bigger, and it trended more and more blue. In an updated paper this year, Foley and his co-author, Charles Stewart III of MIT, said they could not fully explain why the shift favors Democrats. (Some factors: Urban returns take longer to count, and most provisional ballots are cast by young, low-income, or mobile voters, who lean blue.) During overtime in 2012, Barack Obama strengthened his winning margins in swing states like Florida (with a net increase of 27,281 votes), Michigan (60,695), Ohio… Read more »
if he had spent the season rallying the people who want health, who want shelter, who want to thrive, the people would not let trump stay in.
The 1980 election broke this country. Sad fact. 🙁
Followed by the Air Traffic Controllers Strike broken by Reagan in 1981.
If you haven’t seen this already, Bernie’s addressing this tomorrow in a major speech. From his Facebook page:
I wasn’t certain of the time. I had thought it was in the evening. Good to know!
Liberals Need to Sleep in the Bed They’ve Made
Not sure why the direct election of senators needs a House of Lords, which the Supreme Court fulfills. In any case the House of Lords rarely ( if ever) thwarts the will of the PM and Commons. The Supreme Court constantly does it.
In any case, the Court has been conservative for a lot more of its history than liberal. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires the president or Congress to follow what it says. We don’t need a House of Lords on top of an unrepresentative Senate
The paternalism, and contempt for Democracy of the founding fathers is alive and well, it seems. We need an undemocratic House of Lords the same way you and I need tapeworms.
The author of this utter garbage would have us all be Republicans. The rule of law matters, and is a norm that we should all strive for, rather than sinking to the level of might-makes-right scum.
The US Senate is patterned after the British House of Lords. There are 100 members, 2 per state. They were appointed in the past. The public voting for them was a.recent development in historical terms.
He objects to anything that doesn’t have a tax cut attached.
Signed by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Norman Solomon, Winnie Wong, and 50 other progressive activists.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/23/open-letter-dump-trump-then-battle-biden
That’s where I am at present. I will vote out the supreme leader of the QAnon first to ensure that the victory is more than just a basket. It has to be to be 3 – 5 baskets more to win and sway electors.
This was a joke considering what goes on with Trump and his kids.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/23/gops-hunter-biden-report-doesnt-back-up-trumps-actual-conspiracy-theory-or-anything-close-it/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_source=reddit.com
T and R, Ms. Benny!! :-)Well, they avoided climate change damage in the 2016 POTUS debates, too. What a bunch of corrupted mindset greedballs (includes the craporate media). Any able bodied American who has kids, etc. better figure out how to defeat this prehistoric, corrupt mindset on display.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/23/hunger-food-insecurity-coronavirus-children-census/
i wish bernie would organize a yuge food drive
AOC has been doing them for her district.
Biden is prepping for first debate. Trump is watching TV news and testing attack lines
Must be exhausting for both of them, debating without any core beliefs that support their country.
No mention of the enormous existential threat called human induced climate change. Why not? POX “ News” has a problem with it?
That’s why people like Biden?? Since when? The stuff that comes out of some of these consultants’ mouths never fails to amaze me.
Nearly half of voters polled back Prop. 15, a property tax overhaul aimed at California businesses
There’s a battle in IL about changing the state tax system from flat to progressive it. The initiative is called IL Fair Tax. This would be an amendment to the state constitution.
From Wikipedia:
https://www2.illinois.gov/sites/gov/fairtax/Pages/default.aspx
The link is to a calculator. By its rough estimate, taxes would decrease slightly or stay close to the same for the Benny residence. The ads on TV claim 97% of Illinois won’t see an increase.