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!
Tonight's music features Lonnie Pitchford and Eugene Powell aka Sonny Boy Nelson. Lonnie Pitchford was a Delta blues musician in the tradition of the early generations of the form and was a protege of Robert Jr. Lockwood. Eugene Powell was a first generation Delta blues player who was associated with the Chatmon family (Mississippi Sheiks) who worked on the same plantation in Mississippi. Enjoy!
Eugene Powell & Lonnie Pitchford - Fourty Four
"Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell
News
"500 Days": Author Kurt Eichenwald's New Book on How Bush Admin Ignored Warnings Before 9/11
Judge Orders Twitter to Produce Protester's Tweets
Twitter must produce the tweets from Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris by Friday or face a fine, a New York judge ruled Tuesday.
"You have until Friday to cure any potential contempt," Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. told Terryl Brown, the lawyer representing Twitter, adding, “I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily.”
Twitter asked for a stay to block the order while it filed an appeal, Bloomberg reports, but that decision was denied on Sept. 7.
Case details from EFF:
New York v. Harris
This case began early in 2012, when the New York City District Attorney's Office requested information about Malcolm Harris, one of the 700 protesters arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011 in connection with an Occupy Wall Street protest. The prosecutors requested Twitter turn over reams of information, including the content Harris's of tweets, IP addresses from where he accessed Twitter, and any email addresses it had on file.
Harris contested the subpoena, but the court ruled Harris didn't have legal standing to challenge it because the information—including all of his tweets —belonged to Twitter. It allowed the government to get the content of communication—tweets—with simply a subpoena, and not a search warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. It gave the keys to location information—IP addresses that could be used to determine where a person is when he logs into Twitter—without a search warrant. Twitter also moved to quash the subpoena. As we say in our brief, individuals have long had the legal ability to challenge government requests to third parties that implicate constitutional rights.
Infiltrating Occupy: Austin Activists Face Charges for Equipment Given by Undercover Police
Journalists allege assault at hands of undercover police at DNC
Foreclosure Fail: Study Pins Blame on Big Banks
As a result of banks' disorganization and understaffing — particularly at the peak of the crisis in 2009 and 2010 — homeowners were often forced to run a gauntlet of confusion, delays, and errors when seeking a mortgage modification.
But while evidence of these problems was pervasive, it was always hard to quantify the damage. Just how many more people could have qualified under the administration's mortgage modification program if the banks had done a better job? In other words, how many people have been pushed toward foreclosure unnecessarily?
A thorough study released last week provides one number, and it's a big one: about 800,000 homeowners.
The study's authors — from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the government's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Ohio State University, Columbia Business School, and the University of Chicago — arrived at this conclusion by analyzing a vast data set available to the OCC. They wanted to measure the impact of HAMP, the government's main foreclosure prevention program.
Vast crowds demand Catalan autonomy from crisis-hit Spain
Surging unemployment and financial disarray have stoked a fever of separatism in Catalonia, a comparatively prosperous part of Spain whose leaders say their wealth is being sucked dry by the central government. ...
Crowds waved red and yellow striped Catalan flags – one of the oldest still in use in Europe – and sang the Catalan anthem on a national day marking the conquest of Catalonia by Spain’s King Philip V in 1714 after a 13-month siege of Barcelona.
The regional government said the crowd was 600,000 strong. Local police gave figures as high as 1.5 million. ...
With Spain’s economy in free fall from the euro zone debt crisis, Catalans complain of paying billions of euros more in taxes than they receive back from Madrid, even as their regional government has been forced to fire workers and cut services.
Widespread distrust of US extends beyond Middle East, poll shows
American influence on the world stage is being sapped by widespread distrust of US intentions, not just in the Middle East and south Asia but also among traditional European allies, according to a survey of global opinions.
Suspicion of America outweighed faith in its good intentions by large margins in the Arab world and Pakistan, and even its heavyweight European ally Germany was more sceptical than trusting, a YouGov survey found. British and French opinion was more positive but still deeply divided.
Negative Arab and Pakistani perceptions of America as overweening and untrustworthy clearly pose a daunting foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration. The fact that 78% of Pakistanis questioned by YouGov said they did not trust America to act responsibly underlines Washington's serious lack of soft power in the region as it attempts to extricate itself from Afghanistan.
US Public Satisfied With Less Militarized Global Role
Disillusioned by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. public is becoming increasingly comfortable with a more modest and less militarised global role for the nation, according to the latest in a biennial series of major surveys.
That attitude is particularly pronounced in the so-called Millennial Generation, citizens between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the poll. They are generally much less worried about international terrorism, immigration, and the rise of China and are far less supportive of an activist U.S. approach to foreign affairs than older groups, it found.
Political independents, who will likely play a decisive role in the outcome of November’s presidential election, also tend more than either Republicans or Democrats to oppose interventionist policies in world affairs, according to the survey, which was released at the Wilson Center for International Scholars here Monday by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA).
Storms cause flooding in Nev., Southern Calif.
Intense thunderstorms drenched parts of the Southwest on Tuesday, delaying flights and stranding motorists in the Las Vegas area and flooding two mobile home parks in Southern California.
East of downtown Las Vegas, television news video showed yellow school buses inching slowly along swamped roads in some neighbors and muddy brown water up to the lower window sills of stucco homes in others.
National Weather Service meteorologist Michael Staudenmaier said more than 1.75 inches of rain were reported in downtown Las Vegas.
The rainfall amounts put the region on pace to exceed the 4.5 inches of rain it normally gets in a year, he said.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The Persecution of John Kiriakou: Torture and the Myth of 'Never Again'
Occupy the TPP: Civil Disobedience Actions Blockade Entrance to Site of TPP Negotiations in VA
A Little Night Music
Lonnie Pitchford - If I had Possession Over Judgement Day
Lonnie Pitchford - Walking Blues
Lonnie Pitchford - Sweet Home Chicago
Sam Chatmon & Eugene Powell - You're gonna look like a monkey when you get old + How long has that evening train been gone
Sonny Boy Nelson (Eugene Powell) - How You Want Your Rolling Done?
Lonnie Pitchford - My Babe
Lonnie Pitchford - National Down Home Blues Festival
Lonnie Pitchford - the land where the blues began
Eugene Powell - Texas Santa Fe
Sonny Boy Nelson - Low Down (1937)
Eugene Powell - Suitcase Full of Troubles
Sonny Boy Nelson - Matchbox Blues
Mississippi Matilda w/Eugene Powell - Hard Working Woman Blues
Sonny Boy Nelson - Street Walkin'
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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