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Longwood Gardens. Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Longwood Gardens. Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Longwood Gardens. Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
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The Police - Every Breath You Take
News & Opinion
Emptywheel did two posts on the internet search surveillance issue. This is the most recent one. Also, what I've been wondering is, if the six law enforcement agents who searched the Catalano house did tell her husband that they do 100 of these raids every week, 1) Is this just in Suffolk county or are they talking nationwide (which would be odd for county officers to say) and 2) Are all of those raids based on tips from employers? That doesn't seem likely and if not, then where are these leads coming from? I have a feeling that emptywheel and others will pursue this Catalano story further.
I read that Michele Catalano's husband left his job in April (and I need to find another source to fact check that). The raid happened on July 31, three months later. And she says that the internet searches done from their home were "weeks ago". Anyway, check out this interesting exchange in the Senate hearing days ago. You can find a lot of other posts over the past several years by emptywheel on this general subject where she uses beauty supplies as the example product.
James Cole: “Of Course We’d Like Records of People Buying” Pressure Cookers
a lot of people are suggesting it would be crazy to imagine that the Feds might have found Catalano via online searches.
Which is funny. Because just a day before this story broke, this exchange happened in the Senate between Senate Judiciary Chair Patrick Leahy and Deputy Attorney General James Cole. (after 1:45, though just before this exchange Leahy asks whether DOJ could use Section 215 to obtain URLs and bookmarks, among other records, which Cole didn’t deny)
Leahy: But if our phone records are relevant, why wouldn’t our credit card records? Wouldn’t you like to know if somebody’s buying, um, what is the fertilizer used in bombs?
Cole: I may not need to collect everybody’s credit card records in order to do that.
[snip]
If somebody’s buying things that could be used to make bombs of course we would like to know that but we may not need to do it in this fashion.
Snowden is also responsible, apparently, for a rise in the price of food and flowers.
After Snowden, no business as usual for U.S. and Russia
(Reuters) - After causing weeks of embarrassment for the U.S. intelligence community, the Edward Snowden saga has now cast a shadow over international efforts to end the Syrian civil war and deal with Iran, and could also undermine White House hopes for a nuclear arms reduction deal.
Russia's decision on Thursday to grant asylum to Snowden threatens to send already-strained relations between the United States and Russia to the lowest point in years and further complicate efforts to work out geopolitical challenges.
U.S. gives seal of approval to Egypt's new leaders
Almost 300 people have died in political violence since Mursi was overthrown on July 3, including 80 of his supporters shot dead by security forces in a single incident last Saturday.
[...]
The new civilian government installed by the military received a boost on Thursday from the United States, which had previously given mixed messages about events in a country that has long been a bulwark of Washington's Middle East policy.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in Pakistan Egypt's army had been "restoring democracy" when it toppled Mursi.
"The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people, all of whom were afraid of a descendance into chaos, into violence," he told Pakistan's GEO TV.
"And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment so - so far."
What the heck?
Going East! Transcanada to Build Tar Sands Pipeline to Atlantic
'They're in for a fight' say environmentalists on both sides of the US/Canada border
With the passage of the Keystone XL pipeline uncertain and under financial pressure to find export terminals so to justify expansion of vast tar sands operations in Alberta, the Canadian pipeline company—with backing from the Harper government— announced on Thursday that it will seek to build an enormous eastward pipeline so it can bring what critics call "the world's dirtiest fuel" to market.
Called the "East Energy Pipeline," the $12 billion project would connect with existing pipeline networks in Quebec province and will be able to move up to 1.1 million barrels of tar sands oil a day up and over the northeastern United States to the coast of New Brunswick.
The new project, according to TransCanada's CEO Russ Girling, is not intended to signal that the company has given up on building Keystone but shows it is willing (and able) to push for multiple pipelines at any given time.
Krugman.
Sex, Money and Gravitas
Can a woman effectively run the Federal Reserve? That shouldn’t even be a question. And Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, isn’t just up to the job; by any objective standard, she’s the best-qualified person in America to take over when Ben Bernanke steps down as chairman.
Yet there are not one but two sexist campaigns under way against Ms. Yellen. One is a whisper campaign whose sexism is implicit, while the other involves raw misogyny. And both campaigns manage to combine sexism with very bad economic analysis.
[...]
Also, there was a time not along ago when almost everyone in the gravitas crowd, if asked who possessed that mystical quality in its purest form, would surely have answered “Alan Greenspan.” How well did that turn out?
Janet Yellen, Donald L. Kohn and Larry-Smart.
Obama Narrows Field for Fed Chairman to 3
Mr. Obama was visibly annoyed and mounted a defense of Mr. Summers, his former economic policy adviser who also served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Summers, who the president said had become something of a “progressive whipping boy,” appears to be a strong contender to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
[...]
Mr. Summers has long wanted the Fed position, and smarted after being passed over in favor of Mr. Bernanke, who was renominated for a second four-year term in 2009. He was also floated as a potential World Bank president in 2012, but the administration ultimately chose the physician Jim Yong Kim.
[...]
People close to White House officials said that many of them considered Mr. Summers perhaps the most brilliant economic policy mind of his generation. One former member of the White House economic team has even taken to using a certain shorthand to denote someone of truly superior intellect: “Larry-smart.”
Moon of Alabama.
After Snowden's NSA Exposure People Wake Up
But as can be gleaned from the comment sections of U.S. news outlets and various polls in all these issues many, many people are not on the side of their government. With currently some 50 recommendations the most reader valued comment on the NYT report is this one by one Mark Thomason from Clawson, MI.
I am disgusted. The Russians, THE RUSSIANS, are on the right side of all four issues, and we look like evil.
In Syria, we are backing al Qaeda, and the whole machine of the same Sunni fanatics we were fighting in Iraq.
With Snowden, we are exposed in crimes against a vast number of friends and allies and our own people, exposed in lies we told and still tell (some under oath), and we are begging people to believe we won't torture or kill him while many for good reason don't believe us.
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Alan Parsons Project - Eye In The Sky