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 piano player Eddie Boyd composer of a number of blues standards including, "Five Long Years and "Third Degree." Enjoy!
Eddie Boyd - Praise To My Baby
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
-- George Orwell
News and Opinion
ACLU Calls Out "Orwellian" Censorship of CIA Torture
On Monday, a judge will oversee pretrial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo prisoners who are accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. One of the key issues Army Col. James Pohl will decide on is whether or not there will be any public testimony by the prisoners regarding their torture and detention in CIA custody.
The defense lawyers are asking to abolish a "presumptive classification" process that treats any discussion of what happened to the defendants their time in secret CIA detention as a top national security secret. Mohammed’s defense attorney, David Nevin, called the war court system a "rigged game,” reports the Miami Herald. According to Nevin, attorneys and defendents "are forbidden to discuss between themselves anything from what Mohammed says the CIA did to him to his 'historical perspective on jihad.'"
The ACLU is at the hearings this week and will give a statement arguing that the censorship of torture is a constitutional challenge. In a press release, the ACLU cites the government's most recent filing:
The government has effectively claimed that it owns and controls the defendants’ memories, 'thoughts and experiences' of government torture. These chillingly Orwellian claims are legally untenable and morally abhorrent.
American Boy Killed By U.S. Drone Strike
Which Millionaire Are You Voting For?
Elections are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones. In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.
If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.
And these trends don’t stop at the federal level. Since the 1980s, the number of state legislators whose primary occupations are working-class jobs has fallen from 5 percent to 3 percent. In City Councils, fewer than 10 percent of members have blue-collar day jobs. Everywhere we look in government, almost no one with personal experience in working-class jobs has a seat at the table. ...
Although there are many white-collar lawmakers with good intentions, with so few leaders with experience in working-class jobs (from 1999 to 2008, the average member of Congress had spent 1.5 percent of his or her adult life in working-class jobs), economic policy routinely tilts toward outcomes that help white-collar professionals at the expense of the working class. Social safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier, tax policies are more regressive, and protections for workers are weaker than they would be if our lawmakers came from the same mix of classes as the people they represent.
Vote Stalkers: Obama, Romney Campaigns Mine Trove of Voters’ Online Data to Win 2012 Election
A new Mother Jones report looks at how the Romney and Obama campaigns are digitally mining personal data in order to get out the vote. Focusing their efforts online, the campaigns have been using cookies and various data mining techniques to determine which voters to target and how to do it on a scale and scope that has never been seen before. The Obama campaign pioneered the data mining strategy, and the Romney team put one together once he won the primary.
The labor market is not self-regulating; governments must support worker's fight for higher wages
Presidential campaigns don’t want debate moderator asking questions
Presidential debate moderator Candy Crowley’s stated intent to ask questions of both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during Tuesday night’s town hall encounter has led to concerns from both candidate’s campaign teams.
Time Magazine reported Sunday night that both campaigns have asked the Commission on Presidential Debates, which organizes each event, to make sure Crowley adhere to a format she was not involved in designing.
A memo signed by both campaigns earlier this month specifies that the moderator would not be allowed to ask the candidates follow-up questions or to rephrase or comment on the questions asked by audience members as part of the town hall format. ... Crowley’s only role would be to “acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.”
ACLU sues Morgan Stanley for racial bias in mortgage business
The American Civil Liberties Union sued Morgan Stanley on Monday, alleging racial discrimination over packaging subprime mortgage loans into securities.
Morgan Stanley encouraged a unit of now-bankrupt New Century Financial Corp to target black borrowers disproportionately with loans that had a strong possibility of foreclosure and unjustifiably high costs, the suit alleges. The investment bank received significant fees from packaging and selling these loans as securities to institutional investors, while the borrowers faced high risks of default, the ACLU said.
"It is literally the first case of Main Street holding Wall Street accountable" for the financial crisis that led millions of Americans to lose their homes and that devastated the U.S. economy, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said at a news conference.
Tepco admits that Fukushima nuclear disaster could have been avoided
Texas Landowners Join Environmentalists for Historic Blockade of Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Questions on Drones, Unanswered Still - By Margaret Sullivan, New York Times Public Editor
Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech
A Little Night Music
Eddie Boyd - Five Long Years
In Performance at the White House - Five Long Years
Eddie Boyd + Peter Green - Too Bad
Eddie Boyd & Peter Green - Night Time Is The Right Time
Eddie Boyd & Peter Green - You Got To Reap
Eddie Boyd - Third Degree
Eric Clapton - Third degree
Eddie Boyd and the Chess Men - Nothing But Trouble
Eddie Boyd - Blue Coat Man
Eddie Boyd - Early Grave
Eddie Boyd - Hard Headed Woman
Eddie Boyd - Just a Fool
Eddie Boyd - Chicago Is Just That Way
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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