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 harmonica player Big John Wrencher, a fixture on Chicago's Maxwell Street. Enjoy!
Big John Wrencher - Maxwell Street Alley Blues
"I think its very significant that a large segment of the population wants to see more candidates in the debates. I'm almost ashamed that our system has not opened arms to let these folks in and have an opportunity to present their views. If people in the Republican and Democratic parties have good ideas, they should be willing to state them and defend them."
-- FEC Commissioner Scott Thomas
News and Opinion
Expanded Debate on Democracy Now
Remember what Progressives used to sound like? Check it out:
Vijay Prashad and Lawrence Wilkerson comment on Presidential debate on US foreign policy
"It's unfortunate that the American leading political class has no sense of what are the germane issues for today. Instead, there's still this kind of saber-rattling underneath the talk of peace. You know, you can say the word peace as much has you want, but if right behind that is a cruel grimace, it doesn't come across as peaceful."
Climate Silence: It’s the Right, Stupid
The sharp conservative turn against climate was part and parcel of the Tea Party phenomenon. When Obama and congressional Democrats championed legislation to address climate change — legislation not that different from what McCain championed in 2008 — the right immediately aligned against it, like a school of fish. Once cap-and-trade failed spectacularly, the issue went underground. The right is united in implacable opposition to all solutions. Burdened with so many coal states, the Dem coalition doesn’t have the votes to overcome the right’s opposition. So there’s just nothing to say. There’s no margin in talking about it. It doesn’t get Dems any votes they don’t already have. It doesn’t — despite the festival of self-delusion going on lately — move any independent or undecided votes. And it activates furious right-wing activism. So … who has incentive to talk about it? No one.
NATO kills four children in Afghan East
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday condemned a NATO operation that he said killed four children in the country's east, a claim the coalition said was possible.
The operation took place in the Baraki Barak district of Logar province on Saturday, a statement released by Karzai's office said, adding: "It resulted in the killing of four innocent children" who were tending to livestock. ...
"Despite repeated pledges by NATO to avoid civilian casualties, innocent lives, including children, are still being lost," Karzai said in the statement.
A spokeswoman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it was aware of possible ISAF-related civilian casualties from the October 20 operation.
Joe Klein: We have to kill their kids with drones to protect ours
Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: "the bottom line is: 'whose 4-year-olds get killed?'"
On MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday's night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama's ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine's Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange is quite revealing in several respects.
This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media's most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it's left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC - the progressive network - who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama's ongoing killings.
Obama has led all sorts of progressives and other Democrats to be the most vocal supporters of unrestrained aggression, secret assassinations, and "crippling" the Iranian people with sanctions. It is completely unsurprising that the most sociopathic defense of drones comes from one of the most committed Obama supporters, and that it's now left to a former GOP Congressman to raise objections. As much as anything, that is the Obama legacy.
Informant: NYPD paid me to 'bait' Muslims
A paid informant for the New York Police Department's intelligence unit was under orders to "bait" Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.
Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called "create and capture." He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests. ...
Rahman's account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighborhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using. ...
Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD's wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as "mosque crawlers" — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there's no evidence they committed a crime.
The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
The Nation magazine and the campaign to reelect Obama
With just weeks to go before the US presidential election on November 6, the Nation magazine is ramping up its campaign for the reelection of Obama. ...
The Nation speaks for a layer of the upper-middle class that has done quite well under Obama—sections of the trade union bureaucracy, tenured professors at elite universities, well-paid journalists in the orbit of the political establishment and employed by Democratic Party think tanks, better-off sections of minority populations. Obama has offered them “space,” soliciting their services in policing the working class and maintaining the political order.
They are upset at the prospect of a Romney victory, but not because of Romney’s viciously anti-working class agenda, which Obama shares. Rather, they are concerned about their own positions and privileges, which are linked to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
In the end, the anti-working class and militarist policies of the Obama administration are not disappointments at all. The writers of the Nation are far more concerned about the danger of an independent movement of the working class than they are about wage cutting, unemployment and attacks on education and health care.
The upper-middle class layers for which the Nation speaks are sensitive to the potential for a movement from below, outside of the Democratic Party, which would threaten their own social and political position. Their social grievances, and their opposition to the Republicans, reflect dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent, not the lowering of the living standards of the bottom 60 percent. They exclude any genuinely popular and democratic alternative to the two-party system—that is, a socialist alternative.
FBI releases documents that confirm they spy on anarchists
Two anarchists remain locked up as prosecutors attempt to coerce the testimonies they’ve been subpoenaed to give about acts of vandalism in the Pacific Northwest. In the meantime, though, the FBI has accidentally blown the cover off its own case. ...
On Thursday, legal documents intended to be cloaked indefinitely were accidently unsealed in US District Court in Seattle for a moment, finally offering a small bit of insight as to why the FBI has been targeting adherents to a specific ideology and intensifying what some have equated to a politically-motivated witch-hunt aimed at anarchists. ...
"Although many anarchists are law abiding, there is a history in the Pacific Northwest of some anarchists participating in property destruction and other criminal activity in support of their philosophy," the affidavit reads, according to the newspaper.
That’s where the Pacific Northwest Three fit in: investigators had hoped that by subpoenaing Plante, Olejnik and Duran to testify, they’d learn more about anarchists in the region who may have been vocal about any attempts to wreak havoc during the May Day protests. ...
"What (prosecutors) decided to do is choose people and punish them for their association," Jenn Kaplan, an attorney for Olejnik, tells the Seattle Times. To the paper, a counsel for Olejnik adds that the grand jury investigation specifically sought answers from the anarchist about someone she knows.
The United States Will Not Go Into A Debt Crisis, Not Now, Not Ever
If there’s one article of faith in Washington (and elsewhere), it’s the idea that the United States might get into a debt crisis if it doesn’t get its fiscal house in order.
This is not true.
The reason why it’s not true is because we live in a fiat currency system, where the United States government can create an infinite number of dollars at no cost to meet its obligations. A Treasury bill is a promise that the government will give you US dollars–something that the United States government can produce infinitely and at no cost. ...
While in theory printing tons of money could create inflation, in practice demand for the dollar is so high–and for structural reasons that have very little to do with how the US economy is doing at a particular point in time–that it’s hard to imagine a circumstance under which the US government would have to print so much that it would cause significant inflation.
Suddenly, Everyone On Wall Street Is Taking The 'Red Pill' Of Economics
On Saturday, we wrote that more and more people are starting to wonder if central banks like the Bank of England and The Fed can just "rip up" the debt that they've bought via Quantitative Easing, and reduce the national debt of these countries with the stroke of a key.
Asking this question, and thinking about the implications of it, is the equivalent of taking the 'Red Pill' of economics. The Red Pill, of course, is what Neo took in the Matrix, and it exposed his mind to an entirely different view of the world that was far less comfortable than the one he inhabited. If you start thinking about the possibility that the central bank could just rip up a government's debt, with few negative ramifications, then you might start thinking about government finances in a totally new way that makes you uncomfortable.
You might start to realize that this whole construct of a broke government, deeply in hock to the Chinese (and everyone else) is an illusion, that complete distorts the realities of sovereign finance.
But it's too late. More and more people are taking the red pill, and thinking about this question.
New Robin Hood Tax Introduced In Congress
Murdoch aims to buy the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune
Two US newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, are reporting that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is gearing up to acquire them.
The titles are currently owned by the debt-laden Tribune Company, which is likely to end up in the hands of two investment firms and a bank in an expected exit from bankruptcy protection in the near future.
According to the LA Times, Murdoch “is said to be in early talks” about the acquisition and cites as its source “two ranking News Corp executives and others familiar with the situation.” ...
Federal Communications Commission rules prevent media companies from owning a newspaper and TV stations in the same market. News Corp owns two Fox stations in LA and two in Chicago. But exceptions have been granted in the past, to both Tribune and News Corp.
Pussy Riot band members sent to remote prison camps
Two members of the anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot have been sent to remote prison camps to serve their sentences, the group has said.
Maria Alyokhina, 24, will serve the rest of her two-year term at a women’s prison camp in Perm, a Siberian region notorious for hosting some of the Soviet Union’s harshest camps. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, has been sent to Mordovia, a region that also hosts a high number of prisons.
“These are the harshest camps of all the possible choices,” the band said via its Twitter account on Monday.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for performing an anti-Putin “punk anthem” in a Moscow cathedral in February. They argued that their conviction was part of a growing crackdown on free speech and political activism in Russia.
Uruguay president announces plans to sell nationalized marijuana
The president of Uruguay, José Mujica, has announced plans to legalise the production and sale of marijuana under a state monopoly, triggering a lively controversy in Montevideo. The relevant bill will soon be tabled in parliament, where the governing centre-left coalition led by the Broad Front (FA) enjoys a majority but is divided on this issue.
Possessing and consuming marijuana was decriminalised in 2000. “There is no question of Uruguay producing and distributing drugs, but the state will control and regulate the market,” said interior minister Eduardo Bonomi.
“We have a progressive tradition,” said Bonomi who, with Mujica, belonged to the Tupamaros urban guerrillas in the 1970s. “At the beginning of the 20th century our country ended the prohibition of alcohol, prostitution and gambling.” Abortion is currently in the process ofbeing legalised. “Our approach to marijuana is equally pragmatic,” Bonomi said. “The negative effects of consuming marijuana are far less harmful than the outbreak of violence associated with the black market.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Seven Ways Apple Is Fleecing The American Sheeple
Investigating the size and composition of the LGBT community
N14: Europe-wide general strike against austerity
A Little Night Music
Big John Wrencher - How Many More Years?
Big John Wrencher - Honeydripper
Big John Wrencher - Moonshine Blues
Big John Wrencher - Lucille
Robert NightHawk & Big John Wrencher - Blues Before Sunrise
Rubbin' My Root - Big John Wrencher & His Maxwell Street Blues Boys
Joe Carter & Big John Wrencher - Honey Bee
Robert NightHawk & Big John Wrencher - Take It Easy,Baby
Big John Wrencher & Joe Carter - Take A Little Walk With Me
The Chicago String Band - Trouble On Your Hands
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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