Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features West Coast blues songwriter, piano player and singer Jimmy McCracklin. Enjoy!
Jimmy McCracklin - At The Club
“Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.”
-- Matt Taibbi
News and Opinion
Obama Blames Shutdown on Lobbyists, Bloggers, “Talking Heads” and “Professional Activists”
You cannot make this stuff up.
Obama gave his usual adult talking to the children, meaning American citizens, type of speech to mark the cease-fire in the budget battle so that the two sides can work out a peace accord. Of course, it goes without saying that both sides keenly want a pact that will inflict cuts on middle and low-income Americans while only imposing at most token costs on the wealthy, and in particular, secure the prize that the leadership of both parties keenly desire, namely, cuts in Medicare and Social Security, dressed up as “reforms”. ...
One of the unintended bits of irony is that near the top of his lecture, Obama starts on a litany of costs of the shutdown is less dire than the consequences of his decision to protect the banks rather than rescue ordinary Americans:
We know that families have gone without paychecks or services they depend on. We know that potential homebuyers have gotten fewer mortgages, and small business loans have been put on hold. We know that consumers have cut back on spending…
Contrast that with the millions who lost their homes to foreclosure, including the ones who were used to foam the runway for banks in HAMP mods (many were told falsely to default in order to be considered, put through “the dog ate your paperwork” chicanery by banks, and told repeatedly they were on track for a permanent mod only to lose their home), or the new college grads who are un or under-employed, and many with heavy student debt loads. Obama would have you believe the crappy state of the economy pre-shutdown was something to be proud of.
The Real Problem
Why is it that I think, when the president was decrying the effect of professional activists who profit from conflict, he probably wasn't talking about these eternal grifters? ...
Fix the Debt, the organization that took flight last year from the very deep pockets of octagenarian Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson, held an afternoon event at the National Press Club to remind everyone that, crisis averted, the real problem in this country remained our crushing long-term debt. You might think that the fiasco of the past few weeks would have prompted some soul-searching within the organization - after all, its well-broadcast doomsday warnings of a nation drowning in red ink have only helped to feed conservative Republican fury about out of control spending, even as budget deficits steadily decline and the long-term fiscal picture brightens. It is that fury that, as much as anything, drove the brinksmanship over the government shutdown and debt ceiling, but Fix the Debt officials spoke as if they have had no role in bringing us to this point - as if, to the contrary, we arrived at this point precisely because we were not listening to them.
...
This is the real threat to the recovery right here. Not partisan bickering. Not the temporizing in the deal cut last night. Not even Ted Cruz and the members of the monkeyhouse on the other side of the Capitol. It is this permanent class of deficit fetishists and austerian fantasts. These are the people who will wreck lives. These are people who get heard in the White House instead of being told to go pound sand until we elect Paul Ryan to be president. Every time the president mentons the deficit, these guys get their semi-annual woodies and a little bit of actual progressive politics dies again. These are the people whose credentials really should have been revoked last night, if there actually was the kind of Democratic triumph that we're being sold today. Pete Peterson must have bought Purina short. I am so dreading that conference committee.
The GOP Has Surrendered for Now -- But It Will Try More Extortion Soon and Dems Have to be Strong
[I]t’s a mistake for Democrats, liberals especially, to celebrate this deal – because we can still lose.
Let’s be clear: Republicans got something for their bad behavior: tougher income verification requirements for Affordable Care Act subsidies, and a shorter debt-ceiling hike than Democrats said they wanted. And Republicans gave…nothing. They merely did their jobs and reopened the government and averted a global economic disaster. They put down the gun, and they released the hostage. That’s all.
They’re also getting a promise of formal negotiations over the budget. Now that should happen anyway, so that’s not a big deal. But Democrats have spent the last month on GOP turf: conceding that they must talk about deficit reduction, with pious nods to Saints Simpson and Bowles and now, yuck, Blessed Leon Panetta — and that they’re open to everything. And most of them mean it.
Hat tip dharmafarmer:
Sequestration still matters
House and Senate lawmakers reacted this year to the sequester’s impact on defense spending, but did little about domestic programs. Democrats talked about domestic impact, but they acted on defense. ...
There was endless publicity of the impact of the fiscal 2013 defense sequester that cut $42.7 billion out of about $528 billion, including money from overseas operations such as Afghanistan. Training was cut, ship movements reduced, troop numbers lowered.
Less attention went to the $38.7 billion that was cut out of $489 billion in fiscal 2013’s non-defense spending. ... For the fiscal 2014 budget, both houses of Congress took care of defense, pushing numbers far above the BCA cap. ...
Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.) put her finger on how Democrats look at the problem in a Sunday floor speech.
“The House,” she said, “is willing to take the sequester ... but what they do — which is very disingenuous and what the Democrats will not be for — is basically take the lower number overall, but keeping defense at a very high number, and therefore cutting the heck out of everybody else.”
Mitch McConnell Says There Will Be No More Shutdowns
The day after Congress voted to end the government shutdown, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared there would be no repeat of the shutdown that he didn't want in the first place. "A government shutdown is off the table," McConnell told The National Review. "Weâre not going to do it." In raising the debt limit and opening the government on Wednesday night, Congress set December 13 as the deadline for Democrats and Republicans to come to a budget agreement. Government funding runs out January 15. But those deadlines won't bring another crisis, he said. ...
The second edition of the budget fight in January and February will be similarly bitter, and McConnell said the focus should not be on Obamacare â as Cruz and his allies demanded â but on locking in the sequestration level spending of the Budget Control Act. "Keeping the BCA levels is a huge success, and I know because Democrats hate it," McConnell said.
'Brand America lost in shutdown, public patience ran out'
Food Stamp Outage Highlights Problems With Privatization of Public Services
Over the weekend, low-income shoppers in 17 states were unable to use their electronic food stamp debit cards. In this reporter's neighborhood in downtown New Orleans Saturday evening, rumors swirled around grocery store cash registers and street corners. Was the government shutdown to blame? Did the deadlock in Washington mean nutritional assistance was gone for good?
The public soon learned that government shutdown was not to blame. Xerox, a private company that state welfare agencies had contracted for computing services, admitted that a "routine test" caused a computer glitch that temporarily shut down the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) system in Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan and 14 other states.
It turns out that the EBT incident is not the first screwup under Xerox's watch. Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a subsidiary of Xerox since 2000 that specializes in privatizing government administrative services for the most economically vulnerable Americans, has taken heat in the past for siphoning excessive fees from welfare recipients, mismanaging Medicaid payment systems, and failing to complete multimillion dollar contracts for public agencies.
For the first time since the 1960s, majority of public school students in 17 states are low-income
For the first time since the 1960s, a majority of the children in public schools in the South and West of the United States come from families living below, at or not far above the poverty line, according to a new study. The study’s findings are part of a trend that is set to continue across the nation.
While the percentage of low-income students in public schools has grown across the nation over the last 20 years, there are now 17 states in which they represent the majority. Thirteen of those states are in the South; four are in the West.
The report, which was released this month by the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), a nonprofit group supporting education improvement, also found that schools with the largest proportion of low-income children spent the least in support of students.
NY Federal Reserve Examiner Fired After Submitting Critical Report of Goldman Sachs
Meet the man who could be next in line to control the NSA’s spying apparatus
...According to his Navy biography, he was originally a surface warfare officer, but selected for "re-designation" to cryptology in 1986. Since then he's served in numerous cryptological roles, ... Rogers took over his current role as the head of the Navy’s cyber command in September 2011.
Someone who views the Internet as an offensive zone
Rogers told CHIPS, the Department of the Navy's Information Technology Magazine, that the role of his team of "cyber warriors" was both to defend naval networks and achieve "information dominance." But he also had somethings to say about how the Naval force should approach cyberspace in general.
"While cyberspace has been traditionally thought of as an enabler (supporting combat) in the traditional sea, air and land environs, today, it is a primary warfare domain of equal importance. Because the Navy’s combat power is drawn from a highly networked and electromagnetic spectrum dependent force, the Navy will need to lead, engage and win the fight across these critical enironments[SIC]."
How the Government Tracks You
Snowden Says He No Longer Has Any Secret NSA Documents
Edward Snowden no longer has a copy of the secret NSA files he leaked to a handful of journalists, according to a new interview with the whistleblower published in the New York Times on Thursday. Snowden, still living in Moscow, gave the Times's James Risen an outline of how he decided to become a whistleblower in the first place, and what's happened to those documents since then. The former NSA contractor faces three felony charges, including two under the Espionage Act, for his disclosures.
"What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward? Snowden said of his decision to distribute all of his documents to journalists, without retaining copies of the documents himself. That hand-off, which apparently happened in Hong Kong, would mean that Russian officials can't access the secret documents through Snowden. "There's a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents, he added, noting that he's familiar enough with Chinese intelligence from his work at the NSA to know how to counter their attacks. Snowden believes the NSA knows the documents were secure from the Chinese, too: his final target while working for the NSA was China. He had "access to every target, every active operation against the Chinese through his work there, he argued.
My Visit With Edward Snowden
Being the first Americans to see Snowden since he left Hong Kong, we all had serious concerns about our trip—not about getting into Russia, but about getting back into our own country. We left Washington, DC, having a lawyer on retainer and no electronics—cell phones, laptops or any of today’s normal lifelines—knowing that the United States could geo-locate our whereabouts and find Snowden, and also knowing we could have our devices searched and confiscated upon our return. ...
Snowden’s exile has fueled a universal, obsessive fixation on where he is and who is protecting him—rather than looking at why he is in hiding and why he needs sanctuary. The answer to his whereabouts is simple: I don’t know, and even if I did, I would not compromise his safety. “Finding Snowden” belies his actual status. He is an “asylee,” not a “fugitive,” as the mainstream media in America describe him routinely—even some of the trusted journalists who write exclusives based on his revelations. An asylee has the right to be left alone, not hunted like an animal. But similar to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Snowden is in a new purgatory the US has created: free but not free. Snowden is technically free, but still circumscribed by the specter of his home country, which refuses to recognize Russia’s grant of political asylum under international law and human rights agreements. ...
I can say with certainty: Edward Snowden is not being controlled by the Russians, or anyone for that matter. He is fiercely independent and makes his own decisions, leaving him perplexed and understandably frustrated by the continuous insinuations that he is giving the Russians information. He ticks off abundant evidence to the contrary. First, he points out, he didn’t destroy his life to become a Russian asset. Second, he’s in Russia only because of the United States, which revoked his passport while he was en route to Latin America. Third, WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison has been by his side the whole time, in part to bear witness to the fact that he is not engaged in spying activity. Fourth, it is obvious that he chose to give information about NSA’s secret dragnet surveillance to the US people, not foreign adversaries. Fifth, and perhaps most significantly considering the contrary narrative promulgated in the United States, he has not had access to the information he revealed since he left Hong Kong.
The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture
This isn’t just another startup.
What makes this extraordinary is the combination of muckraking—and, dare I say, dissident—journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill with the gargantuan fortune of one of the first Internet billionaires.
The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo. Billionaires tend to have a finger in every pie: powerful friends they don’t want annoyed and business interests they don’t want looked at. The Way Things Are may not work for most of us, but it ain’t bad if you’re an American billionaire.
By hiring Greenwald & Co., Omidyar is making a clear statement that he’s the billionaire exception. ... NYU’s Jay Rosen interviewed Omidyar and breaks the news that he was one of the few people approached about purchasing the Washington Post. That process led Omidyar to “ask himself what could be done with the same investment if you decided to build something from the ground up,”
Jeremy Scahill Talks About Glenn Greenwald Website
Jeremy Scahill spoke out for the first time on Thursday about the much-hyped website he is launching with fellow journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.
News of the site, which does not have a name yet, leaked on Tuesday, when BuzzFeed reported that Greenwald was departing the Guardian to help run the new venture. It soon emerged that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was backing the site, and that Scahill and Poitras would be a part of it. (Omidyar is also the founder of Honolulu Civil Beat, which is partnering with The Huffington Post on its HuffPost Hawaii site.)
UN expert calls for increased transparency over armed drones
The report examines the thorniest issues in the US’s covert drone campaign – although it does not refer directly to the US. Heyns explores civilian harm, ‘double-tap’ strikes, sovereignty and the consent of other nations, accountability, and the pillars of the US’s legal justification for using armed drones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, where it is not on a formal war footing.
He cautions that drone technology lowers the bar for lethal action, making it ‘easier for States to deploy deadly and targeted force on the territories of other States’.
Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union said: ‘Once again, a top UN rights official has confirmed that the international legal framework restricting the use of lethal force is clear and doesn’t need to change, but that the ease with which lethal drones can be used threatens that framework and the right to life. Violations of law and the right to life are real under the US targeted killing program, and the precedent it is setting for other countries such as China, Russia, or Iran is a very dangerous one, which the U.S. may well come to regret.’
U.S. Weapons and Arms Parts Continued to Flow to Egypt After June Coup & Deadly Crackdown
The Evening Greens
Fracking Coming to Washington D.C.'s Drinking Water?
Over the past several years, the battle over fracking has brought Congressional hearings, protests and huge industry money to Washington DC. But in recent months the topic has taken on a new, more local turn in the nation's capital as oil and gas companies push to drill in a national forest near in the city's backyard and an unusual cast of charaters are lining up to oppose it.
The fight is over access to drill for shale gas in the George Washington National Forest and officials from the Environmental Protect Agency, Army Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service have come out in opposition, even though some of these same federal agencies have in other contexts they have helped to promote expanded shale gas drilling.
The forest is one of the East Coastâs most pristine ecosystems, home to some of its last old growth forests. ...
The ban was first added to a proposed forest management plan in 2011. But it has faced an aggressive campaign by officials from the shale drilling industry, who argue that a moratorium in the George Washington could set a bad precedent. If drilling is blocked in this federal forrest, it can be blocked in others, they say. Currently, shale drilling is underway in 2 other national forests, including Pennsylvania's Allegheny forest atop the Marcellus shale, with operations planned in a third as well. ...
Earlier this year, the Army Corps of Engineers took a pro-drilling stance by approving a controversial pipeline that would cross protected wetlands and exceptional value streams and rivers in the Delaware watershed to deliver Marcellus shale gas to East Coast markets. But the Corps, which operates the Washington Aqueduct, the source of drinking water for D.C. and surrounding counties, has drawn the line on fracking in this forest. ...
If the Forest Service backs away from the ban, roughly 95 percent of the forest will be available for oil and gas exploration and fracking, local environmental advocates say. The five-acre wellpads, access roads, and pipelines could create fissures across the woods, disrupting animal habitat and bringing run-off, truck traffic and the danger of chemical spills far from outside observerâs eyes. Spills in in the forest could also pollute the drinking water for millions of residents of Washington D.C. and neighboring communities.
Romanian villagers force Chevron to suspend fracking operation
US energy giant Chevron said Thursday it has suspended shale gas test drilling in northeastern Romania after three days of protests by villagers opposed to fracking.
“Chevron can today confirm it has suspended activities in Silistea, Pungesti commune, Vaslui county,” a press release read.
The move comes a day after Romanian police clashed with villagers who have occupied since Monday a field to prevent Chevron from drilling its first exploration well.
Canadian Taxpayers Fund Harper’s $65,000 Keystone XL Advertising Trip
The hotel rental for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s September visit to New York City cost Canadian taxpayers a total of $56,582.91 according to documents recently released by CTV News.
“Canada and the U.S. are making important progress on enhancing trade, travel and investment flows between our two countries, including securing our borders, speeding up trade and travel, modernizing infrastructure in integrated sectors of the North American economy, and harmonizing regulations,” Harper said at the event. “But there is much more that can be done, and must be done, to make our economic relationship more productive and seamless.”
The event, organized by the Canadian American Business Council, gave Harper the opportunity to tell an audience of American business executives that he wouldn’t “take no for an answer” on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, planned to carry tar sands crude from Alberta to oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
The hotel bill for the luxurious New York Palace Hotel, which was mistakenly sent to CTV’s Washington bureau, suggests Harper’s speaking engagement was a staged promotional gathering for the Keystone XL, rather that a typical guest speaker event which are usually paid for by the host.
Rally Against Mass Surveillance
October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
Right now the NSA is spying on everyone's personal communications, and theyâre operating without any meaningful oversight. Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA.
On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the US Patriot Act, we're taking the next step and holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. Weâll be handing the half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us -- and we wonât tolerate mass surveillance any longer.
StopWatching.us is a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy organizations and companies from across the political spectrum.
Click here for more information
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Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Europeans agog at Americans’ inability to compromise, aghast at likely long-term impact
Bigots spreading lies to demonize
tweets so sweet
A Little Night Music
Jimmy McCracklin - The Walk
Jimmy McCracklin - Georgia Slop
Jimmy McCracklin - Get Together
Jimmy McCracklin - Think
Jimmy McCracklin - R.M. Blues
Jimmy McCracklin - Let's Do It
Jimmy McCracklin - Let The Door Hit You
Jimmy McCracklin-Gotta cut out
Jimmy McCracklin- Steppin' Up In Class
Jimmy McCracklin - Everybody Rock
Jimmy McCracklin and His Blues Blasters - I Wanna Make Love To You
Jimmy McCracklin - Blues Blasters Shuffle
Jimmy McCracklin and His Blues Blasters - Reelin and Rockin
Jimmy McCracklin - Just Got To Know
Jimmy McCracklin - My Answer
Jimmy McCracklin - Stay Away From That Monkey
Jimmy McCracklin - Tramp
Jimmy McCracklin - The Wobble
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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