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 harmonica ace James Harman. Enjoy!
James Harman - Ooh Baby
“The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope."
-- Aldous Huxley
News and Opinion
Your life is in peril. Terrorists could attack anything at any time using “a variety of means and weapons.” Have a kick-ass summer!
Twenty-two embassies and other diplomatic posts have been closed in the Middle East and North Africa. Unlike similar vague warnings in the past, this one is not suspiciously close to Election Day. There is likely some genuine intelligence about some sort of attack that led to this. But that raises questions posed by Philip Bump this weekend: If the American intelligence community was crippled by the recent leaks about its operations and tools, as so many have claimed, how did it manage to collect the intelligence that led to this alert? The head of the National Security Agency told us that the terrorists read all those Guardian stories and immediately took action. Presumably they now no longer use “telephones” or “the Internet,” whereas before they were all blissfully unaware that the United States had the ability to spy on them at all.
So maybe comrade Snowden’s leaks didn’t cripple the NSA? Perhaps the NSA, and our other intelligence-gathering agencies, can still monitor the communications of terrorist organizations despite the fact that people know that our intelligence-gathering agencies are trying to monitor the communications of terrorist organizations. (I mean, how could it have been news to them? Have they not seen “Homeland”?) ...
CNN reports that an intercepted message “among senior al Qaeda operatives” led to the alert and embassy closings. Lawmakers like Graham, Saxby Chambliss and Peter King all went on television yesterday and essentially confirmed that the U.S. had access to this message involving “high-level” al-Qaida people. And now these terrorists know that we are monitoring them, correct? I thought we weren’t supposed to tell them!
US & UK Pull Out Yemen Embassy Staff After Series of Drone Strikes
Broad U.S. terror alert mystifies experts; ‘It’s crazy pants’
U.S. officials insisted Tuesday that extraordinary security measures for nearly two dozen diplomatic posts were to thwart an “immediate, specific threat,” a claim questioned by counterterrorism experts, who note that the alert covers an incongruous set of nations from the Middle East to an island off the southern coast of Africa. ...
[D]oes it make sense for the State Department to close embassies as far afield as Mauritius or Madagascar, where there’s been no visible jihadist activity? And why is it that countries that weathered numerous terrorist attacks – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, for example – were excluded or allowed to reopen quickly? ...
If ordinary Americans are confused, they’re in good company. Analysts who’ve devoted their careers to studying al Qaida and U.S. counterterrorism strategy can’t really make sense of it, either. There’s general agreement that the diffuse list of potential targets has to do with either specific connections authorities are tracking, or places that might lack the defenses to ward off an attack. Beyond that, however, even the experts are stumped. ...
“It’s crazy pants – you can quote me,” said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on counterterrorism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
“We just showed our hand, so now they’re obviously going to change their position on when and where” to attack, said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who was part of the team that hunted Osama bin Laden for years.
Catapulting The Propaganda
Mikey Hayden Haz A Feargasm!
Former NSA chief warns of cyber-terror attacks if Snowden apprehended
The former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA speculated on Tuesday that hackers and transparency groups were likely to respond with cyber-terror attacks if the United States government apprehends whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?" said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years".
"They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States," Hayden said, using a shorthand for US military networks. "So if they can't create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida."
Hayden provided his speculation during a speech on cybersecurity to a Washington group, the Bipartisan Policy Center, in which he confessed to being deliberately provocative.
Mikey goes on a promotional tour!
Former NSA Chief on Latest Leaked Dragnet Spy Program: It's Real, and It's Spectacular
Last week, the Guardian published a series of leaked documents revealing new details about an NSA surveillance program called XKEYSCORE. The newspaper said that the program enabled the agency to “search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals,” and secret slides dated 2008 showed how people could be deemed a target for searching the Web for “suspicious stuff” or by using encryption.
Following the disclosures, Hayden appeared on CNN to discuss the agency’s surveillance programs. The general, who directed the NSA from 1999 through 2005, was remarkably candid in his responses to Erin Burnett’s questions about the Guardian’s XKEYSCORE report. Was there any truth to claims that the NSA is sifting through millions of browsing histories and able to collect virtually everything users do on the Internet? “Yeah,” Hayden said. “And it's really good news.”
In the CNN interview, Hayden described XKEYSCORE as “really quite an achievement” and said that it enabled NSA spies to find the needle in the haystack. But his ardent defense of the system is unlikely to reassure civil liberties advocates. Having Hayden’s support is a rather dubious stamp of approval, particularly because he was responsible for leading the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program, which was initiated post-9/11 and exposed by the New York Times in 2005. Hayden later went on to lead the CIA from 2006 through 2009, where he oversaw the use of the waterboarding torture technique and the operation of a controversial black-site prison program that was eventually dismantled by President Obama. The former NSA chief retired in 2009, but he has since become a regular media commentator, using a recent column at CNN to blast Snowden for leaking the secret NSA documents and implying that he’d like to see the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald prosecuted as a “co-conspirator” for his role reporting the surveillance scoops.
Not to be outdone by a rank amateur like Hayden, President Obama primes the propaganda pump and delivers this gem:
Obama: ‘We don’t have a domestic spying program’
“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” [Obama] said. “What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.”
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John Kiriakou:
Obama's abuse of the Espionage Act is modern-day McCarthyism
Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, declared a war on whistleblowers virtually as soon as they assumed office. Some of the investigations began during the Bush administration, as was the case with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, but Espionage Act cases have been prosecuted only under Obama. The president has chosen to ignore the legal definition of whistleblower – any person who brings to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse or illegality – and has prosecuted truthtellers.
This policy decision smacks of modern-day McCarthyism. Washington has always needed an "ism" to fight against, an idea against which it could rally its citizens like lemmings. First, it was anarchism, then socialism, then communism. Now, it's terrorism. Any whistleblower who goes public in the name of protecting human rights or civil liberties is accused of helping the terrorists.
That the whistleblower has the support of groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the American Civil Liberties Union matters not a whit. The administration simply presses forward with wild accusations against the whistleblower: "He's aiding the enemy!" "He put our soldiers lives in danger!" "He has blood on his hands!" Then, when it comes time for trial, the espionage charges invariably are either dropped or thrown out.
The administration and its national security sycophants in both parties in Congress argue that governmental actions exposed by the whistleblower are legal. The Justice Department approved the torture, after all, and the US supreme court said that the NSA's eavesdropping program was constitutional. But this is the same Justice Department that harassed, surveilled, wiretapped and threatened Martin Luther King Jr, and that recently allowed weapons to be sold to Mexican drug gangs in the Fast and Furious scandal. Just because they're in power doesn't mean they're right.
NSA's partner corporation, Google, demonstrates again how concerned they are about their users privacy:
‘Serious’ Google Chrome security flaw offers unrestricted password access - Google has "no plans" to fix it
A serious flaw in the security of Google’s Chrome browser lets anyone with access to a user’s computer see all the passwords stored for email, social media and other sites, directly from the settings panel. No password is needed to view them.
Besides personal accounts, sensitive company login details would be compromised if someone who used Chrome left their computer unattended with the screen active.
Seeing the passwords is achieved simply by clicking on the Settings icon, choosing “Show advanced settings…” and then “Manage saved passwords” in the “Passwords and forms” section. A list of obscured passwords is then revealed for sites – but clicking beside them reveals the plain text of the password, which could be copied, or sent via a screenshot to an outside site.
But the head of Google’s Chrome developer team, Justin Schuh, said he was aware of the weakness and that there were no plans to change the system.
Feds Are Suspects in New Malware That Attacks Tor Anonymity
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.
“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsyrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”
If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.
How The Washington Post’s New Owner Aided the CIA, Blocked WikiLeaks & Decimated the Book Industry
The Detroit Bail-In Template: Fleecing Pensioners to Save the Banks
The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.
Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG have been given priority over other bankruptcy claimants, meaning chiefly the pensioners, for payments due on interest rate swaps they entered into with the city. Interest rate swaps – the exchange of interest rate payments between counterparties – are sold by Wall Street banks as a form of insurance, something municipal governments “should” do to protect their loans from an unanticipated increase in rates. Unlike ordinary insurance, however, swaps are actually just bets; and if the municipality loses the bet, it can owe the house, and owe big. The swap casino is almost entirely unregulated, and it is a rigged game that the house virtually always wins. Interest rate swaps are based on the LIBOR rate, which has now been proven to be manipulated by the rate-setting banks; and they were a major contributor to Detroit’s bankruptcy.
Derivative claims are considered “secured” because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but “super-priority” in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as “unsecured” claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.
Detroit to pay Christie's $200K to value DIA art
Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr announced Monday he has contracted with Christie’s Appraisals, the New York-based international auction house, to appraise the value of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The city will pay Christie’s $200,000 to appraise what Christie’s described as “a portion of the city-owned collection” at the DIA, according to Orr’s spokesman Bill Nowling.
Outside experts also will be hired to provide valuations for other city-owned assets such as parking garages and parking meters, the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the Coleman A. Young International Airport and certain real estate holdings.
The city’s move to put a price tag on city assets will help negotiations with creditors but could fuel demand for a fire sale, legal experts said.
That possibility is especially controversial in the case of the DIA, with a value estimated in the billions. “It’s an absolutely unprecedented situation,” says Graham W. Beal, the DIA director, who contends the museum holds its collection in a public trust.
SEC Winding Down Financial-Crisis Investigations, Leaving Sad Track Record
After managing to pin the entire financial crisis on one Goldman Sachs vice president, the Securities and Exchange Commission is apparently close to declaring victory and going home.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the SEC has decided to take no action against the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, which allegedly helped build toxic securities that Merrill Lynch sold to unsuspecting investors before the financial crisis. What's more, the SEC is "quietly winding down some of [its] highest-profile investigations related to the crisis," the WSJ writes, citing "people familiar with the situation." The article is consistent with earlier reports that the SEC had few crisis-era cases left in the pipeline.
This likely means the SEC is unlikely to extract much more from Wall Street than the $2.73 billion in penalties and restitution it has already gotten in crisis cases, a figure that pales in comparison to the $14 trillion in damage the financial crisis is estimated to have caused.
Help to Hellas: Chinese cash to breathe life into bankrupt Greece
Activists Identify DC Cop Who Infiltrated Bangladesh Sweatshop Protests
Rumors have flown for many years that DC police routinely infiltrate and spy on the frequent protests in the nation’s Capitol. But until now, activists have never been able to identify a specific undercover cop at a protest. Now, after months of piecing together evidence, attorneys Jeffrey Light and Sean Canavan working with United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) have confirmed that under an assumed name, Metro police officer Nicole Rizzi has participated in USAS protests against companies doing business in Bangladesh who refuse to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh following the death of as many as 1,129 workers in the Rana Plaza factory collapse.
USAS and its lawyers have numerous pieces of evidence placing Rizzi at protests under a pseudonym. District of Columbia Public Employee Information List records obtained by In These Times confirm that Rizzi has been on the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) force since December of 2003.
USAS filed suit on Monday against the District of Columbia seeking an injunction to stop police from spying on the group’s activities.
Reports Islamists massacre 450 Kurds in Syria, including 120 kids
The Evening Greens
Hat tip to Keith930:
New Mexico is the driest of the dry
With water supplies at the breaking point and no relief in sight, a domino-effect water war has broken out, which might be a harbinger of the West's future. Texas has filed suit, arguing that groundwater pumping in New Mexico is reducing Texas' share of the Rio Grande. Oklahoma has successfully fended off a legal challenge from Texas over water from the Red River.
New Mexico's stretch of the once-mighty Rio Grande is so dewatered that, sadly but aptly, it is referred to as the "Rio Sand." ...
John Clayshulte, a third-generation rancher and farmer near Las Cruces, removed all his cattle from his federal grazing allotment. "There's just not any sense putting cows on there. There's not enough for them to eat," he said.
"It's all changed. This used to be shortgrass prairies. We've ruined it and it's never going to come back."
Pa. shuts down fracking wastewater facility
After several spills and at least four violation orders, state environmental regulators have shut down a gas drilling wastewater treatment facility built at a former rodeo arena in Indiana County.
The state Department of Environmental Protection announced Monday that it has revoked the permit issued to Aquatic Synthesis Unlimited and will use the company's $1 million bond to begin cleaning up the site, which holds 1 million gallons of shale gas drilling wastewater and at least 5 tons of contaminated soil.
John Poister, a DEP spokesman, said URS Energy and Construction, a Pittsburgh firm, has been hired to do the soil remediation and wastewater disposal work. URS will submit a work plan in the next few weeks.
On the site now are several wastewater holding impoundments and at least 54 mobile tanker trailers, each with a capacity of 21,000 gallons, used to haul used wastewater from Marcellus Shale gas well hydraulic fracturing operations. Mr. Poister said it's not clear how full they are.
California's Fracking Regulatory Bill: Less Than Zero
A year after buying his dream home in Los Angeles, Gary Gless started falling down and breaking bones.
Fourteen years and one thousand doctors visits later, his neuromuscular disorder hasn’t been specifically diagnosed. He survives on painkillers and sleep aids.
Gless’s backyard overlooks the Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the nation. Within the field, gas companies have been secretly fracking in the middle of this community of 300,000 residents for nine years.
Many of Gless’s neighbors also suffer from neurological, auto-immune and respiratory diseases and several types of cancers. Many have died. Homes and swimming pools are cracking.
None of these people will be helped by passage of the only fracking bill still alive in California’s legislature: Senate Bill 4. That’s because the regulations in SB 4 do nothing to actually make fracking safer.
Instead, the flawed bill sets up a process for notification, disclosure, monitoring and permitting and simply calls for future regulations by other agencies and a scientific study.
Telling someone when you're going to frack, where you're going to frack and what chemicals you will use, is like a murderer telling you he's going to shoot you on your front porch at noon tomorrow using an AK-47.
Chesapeake Energy drops legal fight over fracking leases in New York state
Chesapeake Energy has given up a two-year legal fight to retain thousands of acres of natural gas drilling leases in New York state, landowner and legal sources told Reuters.
Landowners in Broome and Tioga counties, who had leased acreage to Chesapeake over the past decade, had battled the pioneering oil driller in court to prevent it from extending the leases under their original terms, many of which were agreed to long before a boom in hydraulic fracturing swept the United States.
But Chesapeake is now ready to walk away from the leases, according to a letter some landowners received two weeks ago from their attorney at Levene Gouldin & Thompson, potentially allowing the landowners to renegotiate new deals with other drillers at a higher rate, if New York state eventually ends a five-year fracking ban.
The decision, expected to be finalized next week, is a sign of energy firms’ growing frustration over operating in the Empire State, where most drilling is on hold, and also an indication of how Chesapeake is reining in spending after years of aggressive acreage buying left it with towering debt.
Abandoned Walmart is Now America’s Largest Library
There are thousands of abandoned big box stores sitting empty all over America, including hundreds of former Walmart stores. With each store taking up enough space for 2.5 football fields, Walmart’s use of more than 698 million square feet of land in the U.S. is one of its biggest environmental impacts. But at least one of those buildings has been transformed into something arguably much more useful: the nation’s largest library.
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States.
The design won the International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Competition.
Occupy Madison starts building an eco-village one 'tiny home' at a time
Tiny houses are turning out to be the hottest thing in downsizing since the condominium. Economical and sustainable, houses of less than 100 square feet are being embraced by ecology-minded pioneers who can afford a lot more house, but don’t want it.
Occupy Madison is adapting the model to build affordable housing for homeless people, whom the group has tried to assist over the past few years, with mixed success. OM Build, an initiative of the nonprofit Occupy Madison that incorporated late last year, plans this summer to build several tiny homes for what it hopes will eventually be a cooperative eco-village for the (formerly) homeless on private land.
“We’re obviously addressing the problem of people without homes. But all the people who live in the community may not be homeless,” said Bruce Wallbaum, an Occupy Madison member who is organizing the project. “There are people who are not homeless involved in Occupy Madison who want to live in a tiny home.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The Surveillance Reforms Obama Supported Before He Was President
10 Ways to Reduce the Threat of Terrorist Attacks on Americans
Obama's Domestic Drones Run by General
DC starts hoped for snowball effect over transgender documentation
A Little Night Music
James Harman - I Got News For You
James Harman Band - Stranger blues
James Harman - Phonebill Blues
James Harman - Mad About Something
James Harman with Steve Freund & the Blues Survivors - Crapshoot
James Harman - Back Door Rhumba
James Harman - Convenience Store Party Bag
James Harman Band - Icepick's Confession
James Harman Band - Grit Soup
James Harman - Extra Napkins
James Harman Band - Memory Foam Mattress Blues
James Harman - Night Ridin' Daddy
James Harman - Green Snakeskin Shoes
James Harman - Tall skinny mama
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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