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 Piedmont blues harmonica player and singer Sonny Terry. Enjoy!
Sonny Terry & Brownie Mc Ghee - Hootin' Blues
"Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people."
-- Michael Parenti
News and Opinion
Pakistani Drone Victim, Who Has Sought to Hold CIA Accountable, Kidnapped & Disappeared
A drone victim, journalist and activist who has spoken out against drone strikes in Pakistan was kidnapped by fifteen to twenty men in the early hours of February 5. He is missing and a judge in Pakistan has ordered the Pakistani intelligence services to produce him by February 20.
Kareem Khan has been pushing a legal case against the CIA and Pakistan government, seeking to hold them accountable for the killing of his son and brother in December 2009. He submitted a complaint against former CIA station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, for his alleged role in the drone attack that left his family dead.
His application to register the case against Banks, according to Channel 4 News, said: “Jonathan Banks is operating from the US embassy in Islamabad which is a clear violation of diplomatic norms and laws, as a foreign mission cannot be used for any criminal activity within a sovereign state.” Khan alleged that Banks had a “business visa,” which meant he did not have “diplomatic status” and was not immune from prosecution.
The human rights organization, Reprieve, indicated, ”Khan was due to fly to Europe on February 15 in order to address “German, Dutch and British Parliamentarians about his personal experience with drone strikes and and his work as a freelance journalist investigating other strikes in the region.”
Judge: Intelligence Forces Must Produce Missing Anti-Drone Activist
A Pakistani judge on Wednesday ordered the country's intelligence forces to produce prominent anti-drone campaigner Kareem Khan, who was abducted from his home in Rawalpindi one week ago and has been missing since.
Shahzad Akbar, who is Khan's lawyer and a fellow for the UK-based charity Reprieve, argued to the Rawalpindi Bench of the Lahore High Court on Wednesday that intelligence services were likely responsible for Khan's kidnapping. In response, the presiding judge ordered Pakistan's intelligence services, overseen by the Ministry of the Interior, to produce Khan by February 20th, according to a statement by Reprieve. ...
“It has now been a week since anyone has seen or heard from Kareem Khan," said Reprieve’s Executive Director Clare Algar. "The Pakistani Government must immediately tell us where he is and why they have tried to silence such an important anti-drones voice. Failure to do so raises disturbing questions of continued PK complicity in the US drone programme.”
UN: Civilian drone deaths triple in Afghanistan
Civilian drone deaths in Afghanistan tripled last year, according to a report by a UN agency. Forty-five civilians died in drone strikes in 2013.
The report, by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), found that drone strikes accounted for at least a third of all civilian deaths in air strikes last year. Unama notes that it is sometimes difficult to establish which type of aircraft carried out a strike, so the true total could be higher.
The UK and US are the only countries to operate armed drones in the conflict. A December 2012 report by the Bureau found that the two forces had carried out over 1,000 drone strikes in the country in the previous five years. British drones have carried out over a fifth of all these strikes, despite having a much smaller fleet.
Unama identifies 19 separate incidents in which civilians were killed. It raises concerns about ‘possible negligence’ by international troops over a drone strike on September 7 2013 in which local officials immediately claimed civilians had died. The governor of Kunar province, where the attack took place, told Reuters: ‘Four women, four children, two drivers, a merchant and three suspected (insurgents) were killed.’
Perhaps the CIA can now respond to ACLU's FOIA since the DNI has just talked about the program that they can't talk about, except of course everybody does...
DNI Clapper Admits CIA's Not-Really-Secret Secret Drone Program
While media outlets and some government officials have publicly admitted the program, the CIA has denied a Freedom of Information Act request made by the ACLU about details of its targeting killing program.
Clapper indirectly acknowledged the CIA program at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday during an exchange with Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), as the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Nelson, who thinks the drone program has been "exceptionally precise" and refuses to believe reports that the strikes have left a high number of civilian casualties, asked Clapper if it was true that the administration was considering shifting the use of drones from the CIA to the Department of Defense.
"Yes, sir, it is. And again, that would also be best left to a closed session," Clapper responded.
Congressional trio criticise James Cole's NSA testimony as misleading
Three powerful members of the House judiciary committee said James Cole, the US deputy attorney general, was “not entirely accurate” in testimony describing limits on the National Security Agency’s powers to surveil the US Congress.
The letter from former committee chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, oversight committee chair Darrell Issa – both Republicans – and New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, came as the Obama administration saw a new front open up in the battle over its surveillance powers: a class-action lawsuit filed by Senator Rand Paul, a 2016 presidential contender, who said he plans to contest the bulk collection of US phone records “all the way to the supreme court.”
Cole told the House judiciary committee on 4 February that while the NSA “probably” collects the phone records of members of Congress – a subset of the dragnet the NSA casts on practically all US phone data – the NSA only studied those records when it has “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of a number’s connection to terrorism, a restriction imposed by the secret surveillance court overseeing the NSA. ...
The NSA’s analysis of a number for which it possesses “reasonable articulable suspicion” is not limited to that number. The agency has been permitted for years to conduct what is known as a three-hop analysis, in which it traces not only the calls sent and received by the phone number, but all the calls sent and received by those numbers and then all the calls sent and received by those.
“The NSA looks at individual numbers when it has low-level, particularized suspicion, but it looks at millions more with no suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever, some of whom may well be members of Congress,” the legislators wrote to Cole.
NSA actions pose 'direct threat to journalism' leading watchdog warns
The National Security Agency’s dragnet of communications data poses a direct threat to journalism in the digital age by threatening to destroy the confidence between reporter and source on which most investigations depend, one of the world’s leading journalism watchdogs has warned.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based body that promotes press freedom around the world, has devoted the first two chapters of its annual report on global threats to an assessment of the impact of the NSA’s data sweep. Its internet advocacy co-ordinator, Geoffrey King, warns that the NSA’s dragnet threatens to put journalists under a cloud of suspicion and to expose them to routine spying by government agencies.
By storing mass data for long periods, the NSA could develop the capability to recreate a reporter’s research, retrace a source’s movements and listen in on past communications, King warns. “It could soon be possible to uncover sources with such ease as to render meaningless any promise of confidentiality a journalist may attempt to provide – and if an interaction escapes scrutiny in the first instance, it could be reconstructed later.”
EU Commission: Time to End US Domination of Internet
Given recent revelations about the National Security Agency's global digital surveillance apparatus, the European commission on digital affairs said on Wednesday that the United States can no longer be trusted to maintain its strong hold on internet governance and that this authority should be made less U.S.-centric and more open to international control and democratic transparency. ...
"Given the U.S.-centric model of internet governance currently in place, it is necessary to broker a smooth transition to a more global model while at the same time protecting the underlying values of open multi-stakeholder governance," the declaration continued. "Large-scale surveillance and intelligence activities have led to a loss of confidence in the internet and its present governance arrangements."
Gitmo Prisoners Can Sue US Over 'Gratuitously Torturous' Force-Feeding
In mixed decision, US appeals court rules force-feeding can continue, but not without legal challenge from detainees
Men indefinitely detained within the walls of the Guantanamo Bay prison will now be able to legally challenge the practice of force-feeding, considered by international human rights organizations to be a form of torture, following a mixed ruling in a federal appeals court Tuesday.
The judges ruled 2-1 that the Federal District Court has jurisdiction over the techniques used to force-feed Guantanamo detainees, meaning the U.S. government may be subject to lawsuits from any of the remaining 155 Guantanamo inmates on the subject of force-feeding. ...
"The appellate court held that the detainees should be allowed a ‘meaningful opportunity’ back in District Court to show that the Guantanamo force-feeding was illegal," said human rights charity Reprieve, which brought the case along with associated counsel Jon B. Eisenberg. "The judges also invited the detainees to challenge other aspects of the protocol. The detainees have alleged that the force-feeding is both a violation of their rights, and gratuitously torturous."
"This is one step towards justice," said Shaker Aamer, a British resident who remains in the prison despite having been cleared for release, in a conversation with his lawyer. Aamer, who is said to be on hunger strike, was one of three detainees who filed a petition to the a D.C. appeals court that lead to the case. Aamer continued:
A general in charge of this place said they were going to make it less ‘convenient’ for us to go on a peaceful hunger strike. The way they force feed us is just torture, using the FCE [Forcible Cell Extraction] team to force us to the feeding room, using the torture chair to strap us down, using tubes that are too big for our noses, and putting the 120 centimeter tubes in and pulling them out forcefully twice each day, with each feeding. Instead of making matters worse here, they should treat us with respect, like human beings.
Karzai tells U.S. to ‘stop harassing’ Afghanistan
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday said Washington should respect his country’s judicial authority after the release of 65 alleged Taliban fighters triggered US condemnation.
“Afghanistan is a sovereign country. If the Afghan judicial authorities decide to release the prisoners, it is of no concern to the US and should be of no concern to the US,” Karzai told reporters in Ankara.
“I hope that the United States will stop harassing Afghanistan’s procedures and judicial authority”.
The release of the prisoners on Thursday dealt a new blow to he relationship between Kabul and Washington, already badly strained by Karzai’s refusal to sign an accord allowing some US troops to remain in Afghanistan after NATO’s withdrawal this year.
Chris Hedges: Crisis Zones, Collapse and the Antidote to Defeatism
Cecily McMillan's Occupy trial is a huge test of US civil liberties. Will they survive?
Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student and activist ... was arrested two years ago during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan. Seized by police, she was beaten black and blue on her ribs and arms until she went into a seizure. When she felt her right breast grabbed from behind, McMillan instinctively threw an elbow, catching a cop under the eye, and that is why she is being prosecuted for assaulting a police officer, a class D felony with a possible seven-year prison term. Her trial began this week.
McMillan is one of over 700 protestors arrested in the course of Occupy Wall Street's mass mobilization, which began with hopes of radical change and ended in an orgy of police misconduct. According to a scrupulously detailed report (pdf) issued by the NYU School of Law and Fordham Law School, the NYPD routinely wielded excessive force with batons, pepper spray, scooters and horses to crush the nascent movement. And then there were the arrests, often arbitrary, gratuitous and illegal, with most charges later dismissed. McMillan's is the last Occupy case to be tried, and how the court rules will provide a clear window into whether public assembly stays a basic right or becomes a criminal activity. ...
The freedom to assemble remains strong – as long as you're a single person holding up your sign on a highway embankment or some other lonely spot. But the right to engage in real public demonstrations has been effectively eviscerated by local ordinances and heavy-handed police tactics like aggressive surveillance, "kettling" protestors with movable plastic barriers, arbitrary closures of public spaces and the harassment and arrest of journalists who would tell the tale. ...
Our clearly enumerated rights are supposed to guarantee our freedom, but in a landscape of extreme inequality – economic, racial and gender inequality – the letter of the law doesn't always amount to much. Changing this socioeconomic landscape requires mass mobilization – often raucous, often messy, and utterly vital to the health of any real democracy. With this channel of political activity overpoliced to the point of blockage, the result is a positive feedback loop of rising inequality and eroding freedoms.
The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division
On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.
However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering. ...
Despite Arnold’s pension-slashing activism and his foundation’s ties to partisan politics, Leila Walsh, a spokesperson for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), told Pando that PBS officials were not hesitant to work with them, even though PBS’s own very clear rules prohibit such blatant conflicts. .... To the contrary, the Arnold Foundation spokesperson tells Pando that it was PBS officials who first initiated contact with Arnold in the Spring of 2013. She says those officials actively solicited Arnold to finance the broadcaster’s proposal for a new pension-focused series. According to the spokesperson, they solicited Arnold’s support based specifically on their knowledge of his push to slash pension benefits for public employees. ...
According to newly posted disclosures about its 2013 grantmaking, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation responded to PBS’s tailored proposal by donating a whopping $3.5 million to WNET, the PBS flagship station that is coordinating the “Pension Peril” series for distribution across the country. The $3.5 million, which is earmarked for “educat(ing) the public about public employees’ retirement benefits,” is one of the foundation’s largest single disclosed expenditures. ... The news of PBS actively soliciting financing from billionaire political activists – and custom tailoring original program proposals for those financiers – follows a wave of damning revelations about the influence of super-wealthy political interests over public broadcasting. Thanks to collusion with PBS executives, those monied interests are increasingly permitted to launder their ideological and self-serving messages through the seeming objectivity of public television.
PBS Pimps Itself Out to Billionaire Who Campaigns Against Pensions for Gov’t Employees to Produce Scaremongering Series About Government Pensions
Now we know how much it takes to buy PBS programming: $3.5 million. It might even be less, but $3.5 million is a proven amount that will induce the soi disant public broadcasting network to fall all over itself and violate multiple written, supposedly sacrosanct policies, to produce shows with a story line consistent with the express aims of a right wing foundation.
And the ugliest part is that it was PBS that sought out and proposed this arrangement. ...
It’s important to understand that the the idea that there is some sort of crisis in public pension funds is a canard. There are particular pension systems that are in terrible shape, but that’s due to deliberate underfunding compounded by mismanagement. ...
PBS is following in the footsteps of other established, once highly revered organizations like Demos in the UK and the Roosevelt Institute here, having conservative parasites gaining control of once-liberal hosts. These organizations are highly prized targets, since loyal audiences accept what their trusted source tells them and finds it hard to believe that their interests are being betrayed. But anyone who is still regularly listening to PBS is either wishful or not paying attention. Its new CEO Gary Knell is a heavyweight conservative propagandist, having been a financial services industry lobbyist, patron of conservative think tanks, and Republican donor.
If you watch or listen to PBS, you need to stop. Now. If you’ve ever given money to them, you need to tell them they are never getting a dime from you again. And send this post to all your family members and colleagues who still might be consuming this toxic-to-ordinary-Americans product.
Turning Back The News Where It Is Safe To Do So
UAW shocked by bombshell dropped by Sen. Bob Corker during VW plant union vote in Tennessee
U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said on Wednesday he has been “assured” that if workers at the Volkswagen AG plant in his hometown of Chattanooga reject United Auto Worker representation, the company will reward the plant with a new product to build.
Corker’s bombshell, which runs counter to public statements by Volkswagen, was dropped on the first of a three-day secret ballot election of blue-collar workers at the Chattanooga plant whether to allow the UAW to represent them.
Corker has long been an opponent of the union which he says hurts economic and job growth in Tennessee, a charge that UAW officials say is untrue. ...
In the past few weeks, Volkswagen officials have made several statements that the vote will have no bearing on whether the SUV will be made at the Chattanooga plant or at a plant in Puebla, Mexico.
National Labor Relations Board expert Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, who is professor of labor at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, said Corker was trying to intimidate workers into voting against the union. ...
The Indiana professor also said Corker’s comments “would be grounds to set the election aside and have to run it all over again at a later date” because it could be ruled to be interfering to the point that it is against federal labor law.
Union vote has nothing to do with adding vehicle line: Volkswagen
German automaker Volkswagen AG, in a brief but bluntly worded statement on Thursday, said a vote this week on union representation at its Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant would have no bearing on whether it will build a new crossover vehicle there.
The statement was contrary to U.S. Senator Bob Corker's announcement on Wednesday that he had been "assured" that if workers at the factory reject United Auto Worker representation, the company would reward the plant with a new product to build. ...
Earlier this week, Tennessee Republican lawmakers said if the UAW is voted into the Chattanooga plant, Volkswagen could lose millions of dollars in state incentives. In order to entice Volkswagen to build its new U.S. plant in Corker's hometown of Chattanooga, the state gave it about $580 million in incentives.
The Economics of the 1%: Deficit Disorders and Debt Delirium
Fake “millennial” anti-debt group completely broke and confused
Everyone is having a bit of a laugh today at the expense of “The Can Kicks Back,” the youth-oriented affiliate of the group known as “Fix the Debt,” which is yet another of the many organizations funded by single-minded deficit hawk billionaire Pete Peterson, along with a few of his similarly wealthy peers. The Can Kicks Back, which was supposed to nurture a youth movement to support Peterson’s goal of social insurance cuts and tax reform, now finds itself “nearly broke,” according to various internal documents obtained by Politico’s Byron Tau. As of November: “The group’s cash reserves were down to $70,000, with more than $75,000 in outstanding donor commitments …” And they’re having trouble with the fundraising.
One fundraising problem The Can Kicks Back has faced is the entirely accurate perception that it is not actually a grass-roots organization of young people deeply concerned with reckless entitlement spending and unsustainable long-term debt, but rather yet another front group — and in this case a particularly ineffective one — for the small network of billionaires who have spent decades advocating tax cuts and the rolling back of Social Security and Medicare benefits, in the name of fiscal responsibility. It turns out that most young Americans, being members of a generation that has had some trouble with the job market, don’t care about the federal government’s 30-year debt projections as much as they care about “having enough money for food and rent.”
The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet
Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.
There are more eclectic interests, too. After 9/11, we found it worrisome when foreigners started to get into the business of running ports, but there's been little controversy as banks have done the same, or even started dabbling in other activities with national-security implications – Goldman Sachs, for instance, is apparently now in the uranium business, a piece of news that attracted few headlines.
But banks aren't just buying stuff, they're buying whole industrial processes. They're buying oil that's still in the ground, the tankers that move it across the sea, the refineries that turn it into fuel, and the pipelines that bring it to your home. Then, just for kicks, they're also betting on the timing and efficiency of these same industrial processes in the financial markets – buying and selling oil stocks on the stock exchange, oil futures on the futures market, swaps on the swaps market, etc.
Allowing one company to control the supply of crucial physical commodities, and also trade in the financial products that might be related to those markets, is an open invitation to commit mass manipulation. It's something akin to letting casino owners who take book on NFL games during the week also coach all the teams on Sundays.
Extremist Greek group vows attacks on German firms, blaming Berlin for crisis
Ok, I saved a bit of good news for the end...
Obama Lame Duck Watch: Pelosi Puts Another Nail in Toxic Trade Deal Coffin, Says She Opposes Giving Administration “Fast Track” Authority
Obama now has another hurdle to overcome if he is to get his toxic trade deals, the TransPacific Partnership and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, passed in time for him to take credit for handing the keys to America over to multinational corporations and turning out the lights. ...
Opposition was already hardening among House Democrats, with over 100 Democrats signing a letter opposing fast track authority and House Republicans circulating their own letter. House Majority leader Boehner had already said he couldn’t pass the bill without bipartisan support. Then Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said flatly that he was against fast track and told the Administration to go to hell back off.
Today Nancy Pelosi has told a gathering of labor leaders that she’s opposed to fast track. This is a significant development since heretofore Pelosi has made much less forceful statements. From the Washington Post:
In an event with labor officials on Capitol Hill today, Pelosi delivered her strongest statement yet of opposition to the bill that would grant the Fast Track Authority sought by the administration to negotiate a sweeping free trade deal with a dozen Pacific countries. The bill — co-sponsored by Dem Senator Max Baucus and GOP Rep. Dave Camp — is strongly opposed by labor, liberal groups and many Congressional Dems.
“No on Fast Track — Camp-Baucus — out of the question,” Pelosi said, according to a transcript of her remarks forwarded to me by her office. She also told assembled steelworkers: “We cannot support Camp-Baucus. We cannot support Camp-Baucus.”
This marks a significant hardening of Pelosi’s opposition to the Fast Track Authority bill. It doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility that she could support some version of Fast Track at some point, if its terms are overhauled to deal with her concerns about job loss from currency manipulation, and to create much more transparency around negotiations and give Dems much more input into them. But it creates a hurdle to the free trade measure, because it will be difficult to meet the conditions for supporting Fast Track that Pelosi is now laying down.
But even though this is another obstacle for Obama to overcome to get these deals done, Pelosi set down conditions that Obama might pretend to meet with artful concessions. So please, if you haven’t contacted Pelosi’s office before, please call or write to tell her you appreciate her tough stance but also to stress that the problem isn’t just secrecy, it’s the sweeping rights of the investor panels to gut national regulation, and the obscene strengthening of intellectual property rights that have to go too. And if you are in her district, please write or call your local paper. The Administration can still try to revive these pacts in the lame duck session, so it’s important to keep up the message that significant parts of the public understand what a massive corporate giveaway these “trade” deals are.
The Evening Greens
Geez, a county government has official secrets!
Documents Reveal Calvert County Signed Non-Disclosure Agreement with Company Proposing Cove Point LNG Terminal
DeSmogBlog has obtained documents revealing that the government of Calvert County, MD, signed a non-disclosure agreement on August 21, 2012, with Dominion Resources — the company proposing the Cove Point Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export terminal in Lusby, MD. The documents have raised concerns about transparency between the local government and its citizens. ...
Cornell University’s Law School explains a non-disclosure agreement is a “legally binding contract in which a person or business promises to treat specific information as a trade secret and not disclose it to others without proper authorization.”
Upon learning about the agreement, Fred Tutman, CEO of Patuxent Riverkeeper — a group opposed to the LNG project — told DeSmogBlog he believes Calvert County officials are working “in partnership with Dominion to the detriment of citizen transparency.”
“We’re unhappy that it does seem to protect Dominion's interest rather than the public interest,” Tutman said. “The secrecy surrounding this deal has made it virtually impossible for anyone exterior to those deals, like citizens, to evaluate whether these are good transactions or bad transactions on their behalf.”
“The drought is a game changer on fracking”
California remains gripped in a vice-like drought, with last year being the driest on record in the state. ...
[T]he state’s dwindling water resources are also under threat from the thirsty fracking industry. One Californian state assemblyman Marc Levine is going to try and push through a Bill that would place a moratorium on fracking in the state.
He told Reuters that “The drought is a game changer on fracking. We have to decide what our most precious commodity is – water or oil? This is the year to make the case that it’s water.”
N.C. Governor No Longer Works for Duke Energy, But After Coal Spill, Is He Doing Their Bidding?
Kentucky Gas Explosion Keeps Fossil Fuel Disaster Streak Alive
A gas pipeline explosion in Kentucky early Thursday that sent at least two people to the hospital, destroyed three homes, two barns, numerous cars, and left a 60-foot crater in the ground is the fourth significant fossil fuel-related disaster in the U.S. in as many days.
According to media reports, the cause of the explosion and subsequent fires in the town of Knifley, Kentucky, about 90 miles south of Louisville, was not known but one witness said the blast lit up the sky "just as plain as day." The section of the pipeline that exploded has been sealed off and an investigation is underway, authorities said.
The incident in Kentucky follows two fossil fuel disasters on Tuesday this week: a coal slurry spill in West Virginia that turned a local river "black" with toxic compounds and a dramatic explosion of a fracking well in western Pennsylvania. On Monday night, a similar explosion to what has happened in Kentucky occurred when a natural gas pipeline "ruptured and exploded" causing a massive fire in North Dakota.
The Oil Industry's Fight to Kill Renewable Fuels—and Why It May Win
The American oil industry could be on the verge of winning its war on the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), as the Obama administration weighs changes that could severely undermine the nation's most successful—and most divisive—effort to cut crude oil consumption in the nation's cars.
Faced with what it called an "inadequate domestic supply of renewable fuels," federal regulators in November proposed lowering the 2014 usage requirements for the total volume of renewable fuel and for advanced biofuels. Last month, regulators said they may also grant oil industry requests for waivers on their biofuel obligations for 2014 as well as for fiscal 2013, which ends in June.
The moves triggered howls from biofuels companies and representatives from corn states fearful that those setbacks will lead to others, and that uncertainty over the program will pull the rug from under the fledgling market for advanced biofuels. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to rule on the proposed biofuel reductions and the oil industry waivers in the coming months.
Of course, the potential unraveling of the RFS is complicated and highly controversial. The program's troubles stem primarily from sinking gasoline demand, overly optimistic biofuels targets and 2012's drought-driven rise in corn prices. In addition, the ongoing dependence on corn-derived ethanol has further inflamed critics who say the rush to produce that kind of ethanol has been gobbling up land and diverting food to U.S. gas tanks.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
The Tell-Tale Heart of Chemical Valley
Did AG Eric Holder Commit Perjury?
Lincoln and Marx
“The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet,” by Matt Taibbi
Texas Court rules transgender marriage legal
A Little Night Music
Sonny Terry - Crow Jane Blues
Sonny Terry - Hooray, Hooray, These Women Is Killin' Me
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Climbin' on Top of the Hill
Sonny Terry - 'Shoutin' The Blues'
Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee - Rock Island Line
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Walk on
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee w/Pete Seeger - Fighting A Losing Battle
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Drinkin' Wine
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Pick a Bale of Cotton
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Stranger Blues
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - Midnight Special
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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