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Complaint: Kidnapping suspect kept Wisconsin girl under bed
BARRON, Wis. — For nearly three months, prosecutors say, 13-year-old Jayme Closs was forced to hide in a 2
But when Jake Thomas Patterson left the remote cabin on the 88th day of her captivity, she finally made a break for freedom, authorities said. She put on Patterson’s sneakers so hastily that they ended up on the wrong feet. After a
“She’s 13 years old, and if you read the criminal complaint, you can see the amount of control that he was exerting over her,” Barron County District Attorney Brian Wright said. “And at some point, she found it within herself at 13 years old to say, ‘I’m going to get myself out of this situation.’ I think it’s incredible.”
The complaint filed Monday offered the most detailed account yet of the attack on the Closs couple and the cruel conditions under which their daughter was held.
Patterson, 21, was charged Monday with two counts of intentional homicide, one count of kidnapping and one count of armed burglary. A judge set his bail at $5 million cash. Prosecutors say more charges could come later. The murder charges are each punishable by life in prison and the kidnapping charge carries a maximum term of 40 years. Wisconsin doesn’t have the death penalty.
His
“It’s been an emotional time for this community and a difficult time for this community. We don’t take that lightly. But we have a job to do in protecting our client,” Jones said.
Patterson’s relatives, including his father, Patrick, declined to comment after his initial court hearing.
The suspect grew up an hour north of Barron, which is about 90 miles (144
According to the complaint:
Patterson was working at a cheese factory west of Barron when he stopped behind a school bus on his way to work and saw Jayme getting on. He decided then that she “was the girl he was going to take.”
He made two trips to her home meaning to kidnap her but broke off both attempts because he thought too many people were at the house. He returned to the home a third time on Oct. 15.
Dressed almost entirely in black and wearing a face mask and gloves, he armed himself with a shotgun. He told detectives he attached stolen license plates to his car so police would not be able to track him. He disabled the dome light, removed a cord that allowed the trunk to be opened from inside and coasted down the Closs driveway with his lights off just before 1 a.m.
Jayme told police that her dog began to bark. She woke her parents. Her father went to the front door while she and her mother hid in the bathroom, hugging each other in the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled closed.
Hearing a shotgun blast, Jayme said she knew her father was dead. Patterson told investigators he shot James Closs through the front door, then blew the lock apart with a second blast.
He battered down the door to the bathroom, then pulled out a roll of black duct tape and demanded Denise Closs tape her daughter’s mouth shut. When Denise struggled to do it, he took the tape from her and did it himself. He taped the girl’s hands behind her back and taped her ankles together, pulled her out of the bathroom and then shot her mother in the head, the complaint said.
The entire attack took four minutes, he said, according to the complaint.
Patterson dragged Jayme outside, nearly slipping in the blood on the floor. He pulled her across the yard and threw her in his trunk. Squad cars racing to the Closs residence passed him on the highway. Jayme told police she could hear the sirens. He told detectives he would have opened fire if officers had tried to stop him.
He took her to his cabin in Gordon, a township of 645 people in thickly forested Douglas County. He told police he ordered a weeping Jayme to strip and dress in his sister’s
It’s unclear what Patterson may have done to her over the months she spent in the cabin. Prosecutors have not charged him with sexual assault, and the charging documents do not say he ever attempted that.
He told investigators that whenever he left the cabin or people visited him, he forced Jayme to crawl into the narrow space under his twin bed. He slid tote boxes and weights against the side of the bed so she could not see out and to make it harder for her to wriggle free.
He said Jayme tried to get out twice. The first time he screamed and banged the wall and made her so scared that he thought she would never try it again. Whenever he left the house, he told her “bad things would happen” if she tried to leave. During the Christmas holidays he left, forcing Jayme to endure 12 hours under the bed without a bathroom break, according to the complaint.
On Thursday he left again. He returned to find Jayme gone. He found her tracks and was out looking for her when police stopped him .
Patterson is due back in court on Feb. 6.
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Richmond reported from Madison. Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
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For more stories on Jayme’s abduction and her parents’ deaths: https://apnews.com/JaymeCloss
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Follow Todd Richmond on Twitter: https://twitter.com/trichmond1
Amy Forliti And Todd Richmond, The Associated Press
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Trump Needs To Take Away What Politicians Love Most — Pork
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in an interview on CSPAN, Sept. 30, 2000
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Stephen Moore
Shortly before his death in 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Milton Friedman over dinner in San Francisco. The last question I asked him was: What are the three things we had to do to make America more prosperous?
His answer I have never forgotten: “First, allow universal school choice; second, expand free trade; third and most importantly, cut government spending.” That was long before Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden came along.
There are not too many problems in America that cannot be traced back to the growth of big and incompetent government.
It is notable that the two big bursts of inflation during modern times both occurred when government spending exploded. The first was the gigantic expansion of the LBJ “war on poverty” welfare state in the 1970s with prices nearly doubling, and then the post-COVID era spending blitz in the last year of Trump and then the Biden $6 trillion spending spree with the CPI sprinting from 1.5% to 9.1%.
Coincidence? Maybe. But I doubt it.
The connection between government flab and the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is obvious. In both cases the Washington spending blitz was funded by Federal Reserve money printing. The helicopter money caused prices to surge. (I still find it laughable that 11 Nobel prize-winning economists wrote in the New York Times in 2021: Don’t worry, the Biden multi-trillion-dollar spending spree won’t cause inflation.)
The avalanche of federal spending hasn’t stopped even though COVID ended more than three years ago. We are three months into the 2025 fiscal year and on pace to spend an all-time high $7 trillion and borrow $2 trillion. If we stay on this course, the federal budget could reach $10 trillion over the next decade.
This road to financial perdition cannot stand. It risks blowing up the Trump presidency.
Upon entering office, Trump should on day one call for a package of up to $500 billion of rescissions — money that the last Congress appropriated but has not been spent yet. Cancelling the green energy subsidies alone could save nearly $100 billion. Why are we still spending money on COVID?
We could save tens of billions by ending corporate welfare programs — such as the wheel barrels full of tax dollars thrown at companies like Intel in the CHIPS Act. The Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency is already identifying low hanging fruit that needs to be cut from the tree.
Along with extending the Trump tax cut of 2017, this erasure of bloated federal spending is critical for economic revival and for reversing the income losses to the middle class under Biden.
This is especially urgent because the curse of inflation is NOT over. Since the Fed started cutting interest rates in October, commodity prices are up nearly 5% and the mortgage rates have again hit 7% — in part because the combination of cheap money and government expansion is a toxic economic brew — as history teaches us.
Nothing could suck the oxygen and excitement out of the new Trump presidency more than a resumption of inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump. Trump’s record-high approval rating will sink overnight if the cost of everything starts rising again.
Cutting spending won’t be easy. The resistance won’t just come from Bernie Sanders Democrats. Trump will have to convince lawmakers in his own party — many of whom are already defending green-new-deal pork projects in their districts.
This is why Trump should make the case in his inaugural address that downsizing government is the moral equivalent of war. Borrow a line from Nancy Reagan: just say no — to runaway government spending. Say yes to what Friedman titled his famous book: “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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What is ‘productivity’ and how can we improve it
From the Fraser Institute
Earlier this year, a senior Bank of Canada official caused a stir by describing Canada’s pattern of declining productivity as an “emergency,” confirming that the issue of productivity is now in the spotlight. That’s encouraging. Boosting productivity is the only way to improve living standards, particularly in the long term. Today, Canada ranks 18th globally on the most common measure of productivity, with our position dropping steadily over the last several years.
Productivity is the amount of gross domestic product (GDP) or “output” the economy produces using a given quantity and mix of “inputs.” Labour is a key input in the production process, and most discussions of productivity focus on labour productivity. Productivity can be estimated for the entire economy or for individual industries.
In 2023, labour productivity in Canada was $63.60 per hour (in 2017 dollars). Industries with above average productivity include mining, oil and gas, pipelines, utilities, most parts of manufacturing, and telecommunications. Those with comparatively low productivity levels include accommodation and food services, construction, retail trade, personal and household services, and much of the government sector. Due to the lack of market-determined prices, it’s difficult to gauge productivity in the government and non-profit sectors. Instead, analysts often estimate productivity in these parts of the economy by valuing the inputs they use, of which labour is the most important one.
Within the private sector, there’s a positive linkage between productivity and employee wages and benefits. The most productive industries (on average) pay their workers more. As noted in a February 2024 RBC Economics report, productivity growth is “essentially the only way that business profits and worker wages can sustainably rise at the same time.”
Since the early 2000s, Canada has been losing ground vis-à-vis the United States and other advanced economies on productivity. By 2022, our labour productivity stood at just 70 per cent of the U.S. benchmark. What does this mean for Canadians?
Chronically lagging productivity acts as a drag on the growth of inflation-adjusted wages and incomes. According to a recent study, after adjusting for differences in the purchasing power of a dollar of income in the two countries, GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) in Canada was only 72 per cent of the U.S. level in 2022, down from 80 per cent a decade earlier. Our performance has continued to deteriorate since 2022. Mainly because of the widening cross-border productivity gap, GDP per person in the U.S. is now $22,000 higher than in Canada.
Addressing Canada’s “productivity crisis” should be a top priority for policymakers and business leaders. While there’s no short-term fix, the following steps can help to put the country on a better productivity growth path.
- Increase business investment in productive assets and activities. Canada scores poorly compared to peer economies in investment in machinery, equipment, advanced technology products and intellectual property. We also must invest more in trade-enabling infrastructure such as ports, highways and other transportation assets that link Canada with global markets and facilitate the movement of goods and services within the country.
- Overhaul federal and provincial tax policies to strengthen incentives for capital formation, innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth.
- Streamline and reduce the cost and complexity of government regulation affecting all sectors of the economy.
- Foster greater competition in local markets and scale back government monopolies and government-sanctioned oligopolies.
- Eliminate interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility to bolster Canada’s common market.
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