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 the jump blues and doo wop group The 5 Royales. Enjoy!
The 5 Royales - Think
"No. That's someone else's business. Quagmire is -- I don't do quagmires."
-- Donald Rumsfeld, (Former) Secretary of Defense
News and Opinion
Obama to send up to 300 'military advisers' to help Iraqi army repel Isis
Barack Obama announced on Thursday that a contingent up to 300 “military advisers” will be sent to help Iraq's beleaguered army repel the advance of Sunni insurgents, but insisted the US would not be dragged into another bloody war in the country.
The troops, drawn from US special operations forces, will assist the Iraqi military to develop and execute a counter-offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis). Their mission is likely to spread to the selection of targets for any future air strikes, but Obama stopped short of accepting a plea from Baghdad to order US air power into the skies over Iraq immediately.
Instead, Obama said the option of air strikes would be held in reserve. Any such strikes would be “targeted” and “precise”, Obama said, warning that the fate of the country “hangs in the balance”. ...
Mindful of the long shadow cast by the last Iraq war, Obama said the deployment of military advisers, expected to be taken from US special operations forces, would not be drawn into combat. Only Iraq would be able to heal the sectarian divisions ripping the country apart, he said.
“American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again,” he said. “We do not have the ability to simply solve this problem by sending in tens of thousands of troops and committing the kinds of blood and treasure that has already been expended in Iraq.”
However, he said it was in America's national interest not to see “an all-out civil war in Iraq”, warning that it could become a haven for terrorists.
Military advisers also fight, history tells us
President Barack Obama's announcement that he's sending military advisers to Iraq raises questions — in some quarters, red flags — about whether that could mean a return to warfare under another name. ...
Modern American history has examples of military advisers limiting themselves to just that job, such as times during the Cold War when the U.S. helped arm and train military forces in developing countries aligned with Washington. It also has examples of mission creep, most infamously in Vietnam. ...
U.S. involvement began with the deployment of fewer than 1,000 military advisers by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and mushroomed. U.S. personnel grew to more than 16,000 in 1963 and 23,000 in 1964, according to CQ's Guide to the Presidency and the Executive Branch. And while they were still called advisers at that point, they were in combat. More than 500,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam by 1968 in a conflict that became known as America's quagmire.
Central America: During the Cold War, the U.S. trained thousands of Latin American soldiers as part of an effort to secure the alliance of states in the region. In Ronald Reagan's era, Americans offered training to Costa Rica's national police force against threats from Nicaraguan-trained socialists, poured advisers into Honduras and El Salvador and hatched an ill-fated plan to use proceeds from illicit arms sales to Iran to help Nicaraguan rebels as part of an effort to free U.S. hostages held by Iranians.
America’s War Crime in Iraq
Beginning in 1991 the United States government brought what has become a never ending hell to Iraq. President George H.W. Bush’s war that year was followed by devastating sanctions which were continued by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It was bad enough that 500,000 children died because of shortages of food and medicine but in 2003 Bush the younger and his henchmen and women rolled the dice on invasion and an occupation that lasted for more than ten years. The Project for a New American Century, the 21st century version of Manifest Destiny, demanded a Pax Americana which set out to make the United States the master of the world.
It is unfortunate that Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and company became the only faces of American aggression. They are indeed responsible for the 2003 invasion but imperialism is still on the move and now has a more shrewd personification in the person of Barack Obama. ...
ISIS, translated into English as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is the latest head of the fundamentalist Jihadi hydra created by the United States and gulf monarchies. ISIS is making huge territorial gains as the Iraqi army collapses in its wake. The history of American and Saudi collusion to destabilize that region is a long and sad tale. For many years these partners in crime have left a trail of death and devastation in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria as well as in Iraq.
Very few Americans remember that millions of people around the world foresaw the calamity and acted to try and prevent it. Not only were there huge protests in many nations but there was serious discussion of the extent of American criminality. The World Tribunal on Iraq held a series of meetings from November 2003 through June 2005 in New York, London, Rome, Lisbon, Stockholm, Mumbai, Tunis, Hiroshima, Beirut and other cities. The culminating session in Istanbul produced a Declaration of the Jury of Conscience which spelled out in stark detail the violations of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremburg Principles. The tribunal spared no one, condemning the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom for acts of aggression and the United Nations Security Council for its inaction. One of the tribunal’s charges is particularly prescient:
“Engaging in policies to wage permanent war on sovereign nations. Syria and Iran have already been declared as potential targets. In declaring a ‘global war on terror,’ the US government has given itself the exclusive right to use aggressive military force against any target of its choosing. Ethnic and religious hostilities are being fueled in different parts of the world.”
The Contradictions of the U.S. Riding the Jihadist Tiger
Attack on Iraq Would Violate US Law, Experts Warn
'An attack on Iraq would violate the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution," warns Paul Findley, author of War Powers Resolution
Prominent legal scholars and the key author of the War Powers Resolution—which checks the president's power to launch military attacks—warned Thursday that an attack on Iraq would violate U.S. law.
Paul Findley, 22 year veteran of the U.S. House of Representatives, who was a key author of the War Powers Resolution, warned in a statement, "Just as with threats to attack Syria last year, an attack on Iraq would violate the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. As with any president, he [President Obama] commits an impeachable offense if he does not follow the Constitution.”
Marjorie Cohn, Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, agrees:
Under the War Powers Resolution, the President can introduce U.S. troops into hostilities, or into situations ‘where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances,’ only after (1) a Congressional declaration of war, (2) ‘specific statutory authorization,’ or (3) in ‘a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.’
This is the current situation: First, Congress has not declared war. Second, neither the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) (which Bush used to invade Iraq), nor the 2001 AUMF (which Bush used to invade Afghanistan), would provide a legal basis for an attack on Iraq at the present time. Third, there has been no attack on the United States or U.S. armed forces. Moreover, the UN Charter only allows a military attack on another country in the case of self-defense or when the UN Security Council authorizes it; neither is the case at the present time.
Rep. Colleen Hanabusa Proposes Ban on U.S. Military Deployment in Iraq Without Congressional Backing
At the very end of this article which chronicles the ups and downs of the US relationship with Nouri al-Maliki are a couple of paragraphs that just leapt of the page.
Chalabi?!?
This week, one of the US's former "winners", Ahmed Chalabi, has slowly re-emerged as a potential consensus candidate if, as seems increasingly likely, Maliki finds himself adrift. Once a Pentagon favourite, but for the past 10 years a US pariah, Chalabi sat down with the US ambassador to Baghdad this week, according to the New York Times. It is a move that, in such a combustible political climate, is sure to further threaten Maliki's tenure.
The Guardian can confirm that Chalabi, a former deputy prime minister and source of some of the intelligence that led the US to war in Iraq, also met with [Iranian general Qassem] Suleimani [long a kingmaker in Baghdad]. The stars may be aligning for him. But they are rapidly dimming for Maliki.
Freaking Chalabi!!!
Iraq’s Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi, Chief Peddler of False WMDs, Meets U.S. Officials as Malaki Falters
Iraqi PM’s Rivals Aim to Be US-Approved Successor
[Here are the three candidates that have come forward, so far...]
Adel Abdul Mahdi, a former VP and top figure in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), is one of the candidates, and was close to getting the post in 2006. He is seen as favorable by the Kurdish political blocs, which could help him
Former Badr Brigade commander Bayan Jabar is another possible SIIC candidate, and as a former Interior Minister has some claim to being the most militarily savvy choice. His Interior Ministry term saw widespread torture of prisoners, however, and would not be viewed favorably by Sunnis.
Finally, we have the notorious Ahmed Chalabi, from the Iraqi National Congress. One of the main architects of the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, Chalabi is trying to position himself as the “moderate” choice, insisting he opposes the De-Ba’athification Laws that he was previously in charge of enforcing. His long history of harsh mistreatment of the Sunnis is likely to harm his credibility as a unifier, but his long history of support from the US and Iran might give him the inside track to being the “US-approved” ruler.
US Airmen on Standby to Launch Iraq Air War - Surveillance Flights Expected to Give Way to Attacks
Amid an increasing number of surveillance overflights, US airmen in the region around Iraq are on standby to launch airstrikes against Iraq as soon as they given the go-ahead by President Obama. ...
Because of the scope of the air war likely to be used, the Pentagon says the 621st Contingency Response Wing would be ready to start managing airfields inside Iraq, from which the strikes could be launched.
The aircraft carrier in the region, the USS George H.W. Bush, has F/A-18 Hornets, which are what the administration is using for surveillance flights right now.
US Precision Attacks Will Hurt the Jihadists But They Won’t Defeat Them
US air strikes aimed at stopping Isis from advancing on Baghdad or taking more territory would be very different from previous American air campaigns in Iraq in 1991, 2003 and during the guerrilla campaign against the US occupation between 2004 and the departure of US troops in 2011. ...
More ambitious use of air power by the US is likely to show diminishing returns because Isis leaders like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are careful to hide their movements. ... Isis commanders, believed in many cases to be well trained military professionals from Saddam Hussein’s security forces, are likely to be very careful not to expose themselves or their men to air attack.
The Isis offensive has turned into a Sunni uprising with many trucks full of young men from Sunni villages waving their rifles and taking little care to protect themselves. Killing many of these will only further anger the Sunni community. The US will also not want to appear as the saviour of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who is detested in Sunni districts.
It is important to recall that much greater air power than is now available, notoriously failed to win the war in Iraq for the US from 2003 to 2011 when it had air bases all over the country along with 150,000 soldiers. The same is true of US air strikes in Afghanistan, which often turned out to have mistakenly targeted wedding parties and other social gatherings.
Reviving the ‘Successful Surge’ Myth
A beloved myth of Official Washington – especially among Republicans, neocons and other supporters of the Iraq War – is the fable of the “successful surge,” how President George W. Bush’s heroic escalation of 30,000 troops in 2007 supposedly “won” that war; it then follows that the current Iraq disaster must be President Barack Obama’s fault. ...
[S]ince almost no one who promoted this criminal and bloody enterprise was held accountable after Mission Accomplished wasn’t, these opinion leaders were still around in 2007 at the time of the “surge” and thus in a position to cite any positive trends as proof of “success.” ...
Any serious analysis of what happened in Iraq in 2007-08 would trace the decline in Iraqi sectarian violence mostly to strategies that predated the “surge” and were implemented by the U.S. commanding generals in 2006, George Casey and John Abizaid, who wanted as small a U.S. “footprint” as possible to tamp down Iraqi nationalism.
Among their initiatives, Casey and Abizaid ran a highly classified operation to eliminate key al-Qaeda leaders, most notably the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. Casey and Abizaid also exploited growing Sunni animosities toward al-Qaeda extremists by paying off Sunni militants to join the so-called “Awakening” in Anbar Province, also in 2006.
And, as the Sunni-Shiite sectarian killings reached horrendous levels that year, the U.S. military assisted in the de facto ethnic cleansing of mixed neighborhoods by helping Sunnis and Shiites move into separate enclaves – protected by concrete barriers – thus making the targeting of ethnic enemies more difficult. In other words, the flames of sectarian violence were likely to have abated whether Bush ordered the “surge” or not.
Radical Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr also helped by issuing a unilateral cease-fire, reportedly at the urging of his patrons in Iran who were interested in cooling down regional tensions and speeding up the U.S. withdrawal. By 2008, another factor in the declining violence was the growing awareness among Iraqis that the U.S. military’s occupation indeed was coming to an end. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was demanding a firm timetable for American withdrawal from Bush, who finally capitulated.
New attack in Lebanon reflects ISIS’s resolve to disrupt wide region
IRBIL, Iraq — The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria apparently expanded its operations to Lebanon Friday narrowly failing to assassinate a top Shiite Muslim security official with a suicide car bomb just hours after a series of government raids captured at least 20 suspected militants in a central Beirut hotel described as being members of ISIS.
Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the director of the powerful General Security Directorate, had passed a checkpoint in the Beqaa Valley on the highway linking Beirut and Damascus on Friday morning when a suicide car bomber exploded killing at least two people and wounding dozens but left his convoy unscathed.
Lebanon went on high alert last week after ISIS, which has been occasionally fighting Hezbollah in Syria, took over a large swath of northern Iraq as part of its declared program to turn the entire Levant region, which includes Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, into an Islamic Caliphate. They presently control much of eastern Syria and western and northern Iraq and have been pressing a conventional military offensive backed by disenfranchised Sunni tribes on Baghdad
5yo boy dies after 30 head wounds as Kiev shells Slavyansk
Seven Ukrainian soldiers killed and 30 injured in fighting in the east
Seven Ukrainian troops have been killed since Thursday in the east, Ukrainian officials have said, as hostilities between government forces and pro-Russia rebels continued two days after President Petro Poroshenko said he would soon call a unilateral ceasefire.
Vladislav Seleznev, spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, said seven soldiers were killed and 30 injured in fighting against pro-Russia separatists outside the village of Yampil in the Donetsk region. Seleznev said 300 rebels were killed, but that could not be immediately verified.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has voiced concern about the Ukrainian military onslaught, while Nato reported on Thursday that Russia was resuming a military buildup at the Ukrainian border.
New battles as Ukraine says 300 separatists killed in fighting
Fighting raged for a second successive day in the east of Ukraine on Friday, a day after clashes in which Ukrainian government forces said about 300 separatists were killed.
The casualty figures for the pro-Russian separatists could not be independently confirmed though a rebel commander said on Thursday the rebels had sustained "heavy losses" when they were outgunned by government forces backed by heavy armor. ...
The government forces have been gradually squeezing rebels in the area though separatists, who rose up against central rule from Kiev following the overthrow of a president sympathetic to Moscow, still control the strategic city of Slaviansk.
Talk of 'Third Intifada' Rises as West Bank Tensions Boil
As the death toll rises and clashes mount between Palestinian communities and Israel security forces, the conditions for a widespread street uprising—or intifada—are again taking shape in the occupied West Bank.
Two Palestinians, a teenager and a young man, were killed in separate incidents overnight as violence escalated in the occupied territories with Israeli military units continuing a week of aggressive raids in response to three missing Israeli teenagers who are believed kidnapped.
The Israeli government has said the three missing Israeli teenagers—Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaer and Naftali Frankel—were kidnapped by Hamas, but Hamas leaders deny involvement.
Leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has said that Israel is now using the teenagers' disappearance as "a pretext to impose tough punishment against [the Palestinian] people" living in the West Bank and Gaza.
House of Representatives moves to ban NSA's 'backdoor search' provision
Surveillance reform gained new congressional momentum as the US House of Representatives unexpectedly and overwhelmingly endorsed stripping a major post-9/11 power from the National Security Agency late Thursday night.
By a substantial and bipartisan margin, 293 to 121, representatives moved to ban the NSA from searching warrantlessly through its troves of ostensibly foreign communications content for Americans' data, the so-called "backdoor search" provision revealed in August by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden.
The move barring funds for warrantless searches "using an identifier of a United States person" came as an amendment added by Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, to the annual defense appropriations bill, considered a must-pass piece of legislation to fund the US military. Also banned is the NSA's ability, disclosed through the Snowden leaks, to secretly insert backdoor access to user data through hardware or communications services.
"I think it's the first time the House has had the opportunity to vote on the 4th Amendment and the NSA as a discrete item. It was an overwhelming vote," Lofgren told the Guardian. She said the vote succeeded despite efforts of what she called "the intel establishment."
It swiftly circumvented a carefully crafted legislative package [the USA Freedom Act], backed by the White House and the NSA, presenting President Obama with an uncomfortable choice about vetoing the entire half-trillion dollar spending bill. ...
Lofgren cautioned that appropriations bills containing controversial provisions do not have smooth roads to passage. But, she said, the vote "helps the Senate understand that the House of Representatives on an overwhelming basis, bipartisan, wants the 4th Amendment respected."
She continued: "It should change the trajectory of this."
Cross-national intelligence and national democracy
Most people have discussed either the question of (a) whether domestic NSA surveillance in the US is appropriate and whether it is breaking US law, or (b) the purely political consequences of international surveillance. There’s been relatively little discussion of whether there is a problem in principle with international surveillance, and most of what there has been has concerned the question of whether or not privacy is a universal human right. But the recent Der Spiegel revelations combined with some earlier material points to a narrower but very troubling set of problems for liberal democracies. Cross national cooperation between intelligence services has exploded post-September 11. This cooperation is not only outside the public space but, very often, isn’t well known to politicians either. Such cooperation in turn means that intelligence services are in practice able to evade national controls on the things that they do or do not do, directly weakening democracy. ...
Spying and surveillance has been transformed from a national problem, in which there is an uncomfortable relationship between nation-state level democracy and intelligence agencies, into a cross national one, in which intelligence agencies collaborate actively to shape politics and share information across countries, not only often effectively evading national control, but sometimes actively reshaping and reinterpreting national controls to permit much broader forms of surveillance.
Police spies tracked Northeastern University’s Occupy events
A controversial Boston Police spy agency tracked Northeastern University students’ involvement in the Occupy Boston movement, as well as academic events the spies admitted were not related to Occupy at all, recently released secret documents reveal.
The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) documents, dating to 2011, show a spy agency obsessed with anything it thought related to the Occupy Boston movement—even yoga classes and rock concerts. BRIC monitored that year’s “Occupy Northeastern” event and other student protests, but also public lectures and workshops at NU.
Robin Jacks, one of the activists who organized the 2011 Occupy Boston camp, appears repeatedly in the files. In an email to the Gazette, she blasted BRIC as distracted and creepy.
“Why were we BRIC’s targets? What is the point of any of this? How did this monitoring help the city? BRIC’s silence on this speaks volumes,” Jacks said.
BRIC, an anti-terrorism agency based at police headquarters at Ruggles and Tremont Streets, right next door to NU, is already controversial for spying on such legal, non-terroristic public events while failing to know anything at all about the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. It is one of many state and federally funded “fusion centers” around the country widely derided—including by a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee—as incompetent, wasteful threats to civil liberties.
'We hope Assange will go free in the next few days' - WikiLeaks spokesperson
Wisconsin's Scott Walker accused in 'criminal' political coordination scheme
Federal prosecutors believe Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, illegally coordinated fundraising with conservative groups as part of a nationwide "criminal scheme" to violate election laws, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.
No charges have been filed against Walker or any member of his staff. The documents were made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit challenging the probe by the conservative group Wisconsin Club for Growth. A federal appeals court judge ordered them publicly released Thursday after prosecutors and the Wisconsin Club for Growth did not object.
One of the filings from lead prosecutor Francis Schmitz outlines previously unknown details about the investigation that began in 2012 as Walker was facing a recall election. No charges have been filed as a result of the investigation.
Prosecutors said Walker, his former chief of staff Keith Gilkes, top adviser RJ Johnson and others were discussing illegal fundraising and coordination with a number of national groups and prominent figures, including Republican strategist Karl Rove. ...
It's been known for months that the investigation, known as a John Doe, focused on allegations of illegal coordination between Wisconsin Club for Growth, Walker's campaign and other conservative groups during recall elections in 2011 and 2012.
But until Thursday it wasn't clear that prosecutors saw Walker as having such a central role.
Destroy Their Economic Livelihoods, and They Will Come
Los Angeles court strikes down ban on sleeping in cars
A Los Angeles law that sought to bar people from living in vehicles on the street has been struck down by a federal appeals court after four homeless people sued the city.
The three-judge panel of the ninth circuit court on Thursday ruled unanimously that the ordinance was vague and opened the door to discriminatory enforcement.
In 2010, the the city council received a spate of complaints about human waste and trash on Venice streets, a three-sq-mile, affluent and colorful beachside neighborhood of about 40,000 in Los Angeles.
In response, the city formed a 21-officer task force and enforced a 1983 law that barred residents from living in their vehicles. Police officers held varying interpretations of what the ordinance outlawed, resulting in selective enforcement against the homeless.
"Despite plaintiffs’ repeated attempts to comply with [the law], there appears to be nothing they can do to avoid violating the statute short of discarding all of their possessions or their vehicles, or leaving Los Angeles entirely," Judge Harry Pregerson wrote in the opinion.
Malcolm X's daughter on Juneteenth: 'We're in denial of the African holocaust'
Speaking at a burial ground for hundreds African slaves in New York in commemoration of Juneteenth – the day in 1865 when Texas learned that the civil war had ended – Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, implored African Americans not to forget their history.
"We're in denial of the African holocaust," Shabazz said. "Most times, people don't want to talk about it. One is often restless or termed a racist just for having compassion for the African experience, for speaking truth to the trans-Atlantic and Arab slave trades, for speaking truth to the significant omission of our history. We don't want to sit down and listen to these things, or to discuss them. But we have to." ...
Shabazz spoke passionately and at times poignantly of the African American experience, and said that understanding the role slavery played in shaping the modern world is a way of paying hommage to their ancestors.
"As we share in a discussion of civil rights, we must reflect on their sacrifices and contributions of their lives," Shabazz said, adding, "The struggle is not over. The struggle continues." ...
Shabazz spokle at the African Burial Ground National Monument in downtown Manhattan that perseveres a colonial-era cemetery. More than 400 men, women and children of African descent – some free, most enslaved – are buried there.
The late 17th century burial site had been forgotten for nearly two centuries until it was rediscovered in the early 1990s during excavation.
NYC’s $40M Central Park 5 Settlement Resolves Wrongful Jailing Fueled by Race-Baiting, Police Abuse
N.Y. City to pay $40 million to end 'Central Park Jogger' lawsuit: source
New York City has agreed to pay $40 million to five men who were convicted, and later exonerated, of brutally raping a female jogger in Central Park in 1989, settling a long-fought civil rights lawsuit, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The violent attack, which became known as the Central Park jogger case, made national headlines as a sign that the city’s crime rate had spiraled out of control, while the outcome of the prosecution raised questions about race and the justice system.
The victim was white and the defendants all black or Hispanic.
The five men – Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam – were between 14 and 16 years of age at the time of the rape and confessed after lengthy police interrogations.
Each soon recanted, insisting they had admitted to the crime under the duress of exhaustion and coercion from police officers. Another man confessed to the crime years later. ...
The settlement still requires approval from the city’s comptroller and from the federal judge in Manhattan who has overseen the case, Deborah Batts, according to the person familiar with the matter.
As in most cases in which the city settles civil rights claims, the municipal government likely will not admit wrongdoing, the person said.
How bad does a trade deal have to be to be classified, not only during negotiations, but for 5 years after the deal is completed? Sounds like some politicians think that revealing what they are doing for their dark overlords worry that their careers could be ended by public knowledge of their treachery.
A Plan Only Banksters Will Love: WikiLeaks Reveals Trade Deal Pushing Global Financial Deregulation
The Evening Greens
Obama freezes out public in meetings on rail safety rules
WASHINGTON — As the White House reviews a package of proposed rail safety regulations, the rail, petroleum and chemical industries in recent weeks have held nearly a dozen meetings with Obama administration officials.
However, state and local governments; safety, health and environmental groups; and emergency responders, who are on the front lines of the issue, so far have not been at the table. Additionally, the meetings are shielded from public view. The White House only discloses the dates, times and participants.
“The details of the conversations are not public record,” said Ronald White, director for regulatory policy at the Center for Effective Government, a Washington watchdog group. “There’s a real lack of transparency there.” ...
Industry officials and lawyers from top-shelf firms have met with regulators 11 times in the past month, according to a publicly searchable log. Industry participants included Matt Rose, executive chairman of BNSF, the nation’s leading hauler of crude oil by rail.
A separate one-on-one meeting took place between the railroad’s top lawyer, Roger Nober, and OMB’s regulatory administrator, Howard Shelanski.
Silent Coup: How Enbridge is Quietly Cloning the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline
While the debate over the TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has raged on for over half a decade, pipeline giant Enbridge has quietly cloned its own Keystone XL in the U.S and Canada.
It comes in the form of the combination of Enbridge's Alberta Clipper (Line 67), Flanagan South and Seaway Twin pipelines.
The pipeline system does what Keystone XL and the Keystone Pipeline System at large is designed to do: ship hundreds of thousands of barrels per day of Alberta's tar sands diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) to both Gulf Coast refineries in Port Arthur, Texas, and the global export market.
Alberta Clipper was approved by President Barack Obama and the U.S. State Department (legally required because it is a border-crossing pipeline like Keystone XL) in August 2009 during congressional recess. Clipper runs from Alberta to Superior, Wis. ...
In April, Enbridge became the first company to declare publicly that it had obtained a license to re-export dilbit from the United States to the global market.
About two months later on June 5, Reuters reported that the European Union (EU) got rid of the legal requirement to label tar sands as dirtier than other forms of oil. The EU decision came in the aftermath of “years of lobbying from top producer Canada.”
Then just a day later on June 6, The Guardian reported 570,000 barrels of dilbit had reached the shores of Spain, the first shipment to reach Europe.
“While all eyes are on Keystone XL's northern leg, Enbridge has sneakily ramrodded in a massive tar sands pipeline system.
Caribou Population Shrinking in Canada's Tar Sands
CALGARY—Caribou populations native to boreal forests in Western Canada where oil sands are extracted have fallen steadily over the past 20 years and are unlikely to see their numbers recover from migration of other herds, a Canadian government-funded study found.
The report, released Tuesday, comes amid growing concerns about the fate of caribou populations as oil and gas production booms in northern Alberta. The provincial government in Alberta has faced criticism for failing to arrest a steady decline in both boreal and mountain caribou resulting from rapidly encroaching economic development.
All six herds of caribou with ranges in the oil-sands region, which comprises about 20% of the province of Alberta's land area, have suffered annual rates of decline ranging from 4.6% to 15.2% from 1999 to 2012, according to a report from the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute.
NASA 0.76C May Anomaly Hints 2014 Will Be Hottest Year
May's global average surface temperature anomaly as reported by NASA was 0.76C. This was the warmest May in the NASA temperature record dating back to 1880. With an El Nino brewing in the Pacific ensuring that global surface temperatures are likely to be elevated then 2014 could be the warmest year on record.
Global average surface temperatures could be on track to chalk up a new record in 2014 if the trend set in the first five months of this year continues.
Data released today (17 June 2014) by US agency NASA shows that May's global temperature anomaly – the variance with the long term average - was 0.76oC. This compares with the previous warmest Mays in 2010 (0.70oC), 2012 (0.70oC) and in 1998 (0.68oC) - an El Nino year.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Confirmed: U.S. Armed Al Qaeda to Topple Libya’s Gaddaffi
Transgender people want to exist without having to prove they are 'real'
The Obama Administration and Climate Change
A Little Night Music
The 5 Royales - I Like It Like That
The Five Royales - Laundromat Blues
The Five Royales - Dedicated To The One I Love
The 5 Royales - Catch That Teardrop
The 5 Royales - Messin' up
The 5 Royales - Say It
The 5 Royales - Don't Let It Be In Vain
The 5 Royales - Right Around The Corner
The 5 Royales - Crazy, Crazy, Crazy
The 5 Royales - They Don't Know
The 5 Royales - Slummer the Slum
The 5 Royales - Baby Don't Do It
The 5 Royales - Take Me With You Baby
The 5 Royales - Too Much of a Little Bit
The 5 Royales - Monkey Hips and Rice
The 5 Royales - I Want it Like That
The 5 Royales - I Got To Know
The 5 Royales - The Real Thing
The 5 Royales - All Righty!
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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