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.
|
Hey! Good Evening!
This evenings music features Frank Stokes, an influential early Memphis bluesman sometimes referred to as the father of the Memphis blues guitar style. Enjoy!
Frank Stokes - Downtown Blues
“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi
News
Obama Tells Supporters to Expect 'Bitter Pills'
In a conference call with key supporters Tuesday night, President Obama urged Democratic activists to stay engaged in the coming budget negotiations concerning the so-called "fiscal cliff" but also telegraphed plainly his intent to give away much in his showdown with Republican lawmakers
As the Huffington Post, who listened in on the call, reports:
The president, speaking from a White House phone, cautioned listeners to expect disappointments during his second term. As he has in the past, Obama warned that he was prepared to swallow some bitter pills during the negotiations, including some that would agitate the base.
"As we move forward there are going to be new wrinkles and new frustrations, we can't predict them yet," he said. "We are going to have some triumphs and some successes, but there are going to be some tough days, starting with some of these negotiations around the fiscal cliff that you probably read about."
If the call to his supporters on Tuesday is any indication, and as Obama meets with a cadre of corporate CEOs Wednesday to discuss their budget ideas, it's becoming hauntingly clear that Obama is perhaps dangerously close to making many of the same mistakes again.
Greenwald: Starting w/ Fiscal Cliff, Obama's 2nd Term Rests on Organizing, Not Cheerleading
Corporations Calling To ‘Fix The Debt’ Want $134 Billion In Tax Breaks
Ahead of negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff” and what promises to be another fight over raising the debt ceiling, 63 CEOs representing the largest U.S. corporations, including several Wall Street firms, launched a campaign to supposedly “fix the debt.” However, this campaign calls for additional corporate tax cuts by switching the U.S. to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, along the lines of that proposed by Mitt Romney.
According to a report by Institute for Policy Studies, the corporations involved could gain up to $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves such a system, which exempts foreign earnings from the U.S. corporate income tax.
Number Of Unemployed Adults Living With Their Parents Has Doubled Since 2007
The economic downturn has postponed growing up, as millions of adult children are unemployed and stuck at home with Mom and Dad.
The number of jobless adult children living at home with their parents has doubled since 2007, from 1.3 million then to 2.5 million this year, according to Moody's Analytics data cited by The New York Times. ...
Young Americans have been hit disproportionately hard by the economic downturn, largely because they have less job experience. The unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 13.2 percent in October, according to the Labor Department: double the unemployment rate for workers aged 25 and older.
Even those young people that have jobs are often underemployed, with many stuck in part-time work or working in a low-paying jobs that does not use their skills.
General Strike Sweeps Europe as Millions Reject Austerity as Solution to Economic Crisis
The Places Where America's Drones Are Striking, Now on Instagram
So far this year the American military has launched more than 330 drone strikes in Afghanistan alone -- an average greater than one per day. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia the numbers are smaller -- 80 altogether -- but the lesser frequency doesn't make the strikes any more comprehensible. From this side of the war, America's drone strikes feel very remote, their consequences quite abstract, their targets unmoored to actual physical locations.
But with our powerful maps and comprehensive satellite images of the world over, visuals of each of those places lives online, a few clicks away, if we would bother to look. A new project, Dronestagram, is doing the searching for you, marrying the images of Google Maps satellite view to the episodic, image-sharing capacities of Tumblr and Instagram. When drone strikes are reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (which focuses on Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia but not Afghanistan), writer James Bridle tracks down the locations on Google Maps and then Instagrams the picture. He annotates each drone's-eye-view with a caption about the strike, noting any known casualties.
It can be hard to pinpoint exactly where the drone strike occurred. As Bridle explains on his website, "Many are in outlying areas and the information on exact locations is scarce; where a precise location is not given, the view should be within a few kilometres in most cases. ... Nevertheless: the landscapes and the places and their names are real."
The idea is to make these places more real to us.
Absolution done dirt cheap...
Robertson absolves Petraeus: Broadwell was ‘throwing herself at him… he’s a man’
Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday suggested that former CIA Director David Petraeus, who recently resigned over an affair with his biographer, was the victim in the scandal because there was “a good-looking lady throwing herself at him” and “he’s a man.”
Michael Hastings discusses Petraeus' record
Obama's climate change challenge
Barack Obama can take pride in having fought off a formidable array of deep-pocketed revanchists. As President, however, he is faced with an infinitely larger challenge, one that went unmentioned in the debates but that poses a graver threat than any “fiscal cliff.” Ever since 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen, a leading climate scientist, testified before the Senate, the public has been exposed to the issue of global warming. More recently, the consequences have come into painfully sharp focus. In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and the intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Pentagon, that bastion of woolly radicals, did what the many denialists in the House of Representatives refuse to do: accept the basic science.
The economic impact of weather events that are almost certainly related to the warming of the earth—the European heat wave of 2003 (which left fifty thousand people dead), the Russian heat waves and forest fires of 2010, the droughts last year in Texas and Oklahoma, and the preëlection natural catastrophe known as Sandy—has been immense. The German insurer Munich Re estimates that the cost of weather-related calamities in North America over the past three decades amounts to thirty-four billion dollars a year. Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, has said that Sandy will cost his state alone thirty-three billion. Harder to measure is the human toll around the world—the lives and communities disrupted and destroyed.
“If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it,” Obama said, when he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, future generations will look back and say, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Those generations assuredly will not. Although Obama, unlike his predecessor, recognized the dimensions of the problem, he never pursued measures remotely equal to it.
The Ugly Canadian
Two Thirds of Fossil Fuel Reserves Must Stay Underground to Stabilize Climate
Two thirds of all proven fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if the world is serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World Energy Outlook 2012 report released today.
“The IEA’s conclusion reflects sound science. CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are destabilizing our climate. We cannot burn fuels like coal and oil indefinitely without paying the price in the form of climate instability, droughts, heat waves and superstorms. The IEA has done the only responsible thing by prominently highlighting this in its report,” says World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Global Climate and Energy lnitiative leader Samantha Smith.
“This scientific and blunt assessment should be clearly heard by all countries, investors and the fossil fuel industry itself. This is not only about stopping all new large-scale fossil fuel exploration, such as those in the Arctic; this is about retiring existing dirty energy infrastructure as well, and it is the price to pay to avoid global climate disaster. We quickly needed to transition our energy economies if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe,” says Smith.
The Solar Sandy Project
Solar One, SolarCity and Consolidated Solar are partnering to connect communities rebuilding from Sandy to mobile solar generators so that they can get much-needed temporary electricity. So far, we have two 10kw solar generators deployed: one in Staten Island and one in Rockaway Beach. Three more of these generators are on their way to community gathering places where folks are already getting warm clothes, a bite to eat, and some basic medical services, and should be fully in service on Monday November 12, 2012.
With solar generators, we can provide clean, quiet power hubs that don’t need refueling. People can charge phones, power tools, and laptops; heat food; and run other critical equipment.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
David Petraeus, Gen. John Allen, And Shirtless FBI Agent Sent Sexy Emails All The Time, To Everyone
'The Raiders of Your Lost Retirement' #5: Will PBO Bridle Trojan Horse? "Stop The Grand Swindle"
Elites Demanding Austerity Also Ignored Housing Bubble
A Little Night Music
Frank Stokes - How Long
Frank Stokes - I Got Mine
Frank Stokes - Mr. Crump Don't Like It
Frank Stokes - 'Tain't Nobody Business If I Do
Frank Stokes - It Won't Be Long
Frank Stokes - Stomp That Thing
Frank Stokes - You Shall
Frank Stokes - Chicken You Can Roost Behind the Moon
Frank Stokes - Frank Stokes' Dream
Frank Stokes - Memphis Rounders Blues
Frank Stokes - Old Sometime Blues
Frank Stokes - Mistreatin' Blues
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
|