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.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Louisiana bluesman Lightnin' Slim. Enjoy!
Lightnin' Slim and Whispering Smith - Walkin', Texas Flood
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
-- Howard Zinn
News and Opinion
"This War is Continuing": As U.S. Prepares 2014 Pullout, No End in Sight to Afghan Occupation
House Democrats demand Obama release ‘full legal basis’ for drone strikes
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) is leading a small group of House Democrats in calling on President Barack Obama to release information regarding the Administration’s use of drone strikes.
In a letter sent Monday, Lee said a leaked Department of Justice memo showed an “increasing devolution of accountability, transparency, and Constitutional protections in U.S. counterterrorism operations.” The 16-page memo provided an outline of the Obama’s administration legal justification of targeted drone strikes against U.S. citizens. ...
The House Democrats were particularly concerned that the memo appeared to have no defined geographic boundaries, did not identify officials with the authority to approve so-called “kill-lists,” provided a vague definition of feasible, and used a broad definition of “imminent threat.”
After Vowing Greater Transparency, Obama Admin Increasingly Censoring, Withholding Info From Public
'Meteroic Rise' of US Gov't Censorship of Public Records Under Obama
The Obama Administration, which came to power promising unparalleled transparency, is reportedly now censoring more public records—citing issues of "national security"—than any previous time since the President took office.
According to a new analysis by the Associated Press of citizen requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the administration fully rejected over one third of the requests made in 2012, a slight increase over 2011. However, the government withheld or censored items more than 479,000 times citing "exemptions built into the law"—a roughly 22 percent increase over the previous year. ...
"We've seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government's interpretations of laws or its understanding of its own authority," said Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project. "In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."
Humanitarian Catastrophe in Syria
“I Begged for Them to Stop”
In recent years, it wasn’t merely low-level brutalizers and their immediate superiors who sanctioned and approved torture techniques, but senior White House officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney. From George W. Bush’s own memoir, we know that the previous president gave an enthusiastic order (“Damn right!”) to subject other human beings to water torture, just as we know that President Obama has made certain no one in the government involved in ordering or facilitating such acts would ever answer for any of them.
In 1901, an American officer was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor for waterboarding a Filipino prisoner. By the late 1940s, the centuries-old practice was so reviled that significant prison time or even death lay in store for those using it. In the late 1960s, it was still viewed as a cruel and unusual punishment, even if U.S. troops who tortured Vietnamese and American captives weren’t subject to prosecution for it. In the twenty-first century, as water torture moved from Southeast Asian prison showers to the White House, it also morphed into an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Today, the president’s pick to head the CIA refuses even to label waterboarding as “torture.”
What does it say about a society when its morals and ethics on the treatment of captives go into reverse? What are we to make of leaders who authorize, promote, or shield such brutal practices or about citizens who stand by and allow them to happen? What does it mean when torture, already the definition of “cruel,” becomes usual?
NYPD surveillance had ‘devastating’ impact on Muslim communities
A new report on the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslims suggests the program has impacted nearly every facet of Muslim life in a negative way. ...
The NYPD launched its surveillance program in 2001 following the September 11 terrorist attacks, monitoring Muslims in New York City and beyond. The intelligence gathering effort was revealed by the Associated Press has faced heavy criticism for both trampling the rights of Muslims and failing to produce any leads of terrorist activities. ...
Many Muslims reduced their involvement with mosques or refused to be seen in them altogether after news of the surveillance program broke, the report stated. Many also became skeptical of new congregants, worrying they could actually be police informants. An imam complained Muslims stopped coming to his mosque for daily prayers due to the NYPD camera placed right outside the building.
The report also noted that many Muslims engaged in self-censorship and avoided political events after learning of the surveillance program, fearing they could become a target of the intelligence gathering operation. The owner of a hookah bar refused to allow Al Jazeera to be aired, while another Muslim avoided discussing the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The stifling of free speech extended to college campuses as well.
Austerity and the Death of Logic
So here, to review the bidding, this is what we've got. We have the Republicans, and the Republicans hate everything European. Everything European is as you know, it's a laugh line, it's a derisive line and such, except austerity. So they take the one policy that everybody can see has produced a disaster in Europe, thrown the Eurozone back into recession, and is potentially even going to tear the European Union apart, is going to cause government after government to fall, and they say, that's the policy we need in the United States, we need to emulate Europe, and with no discussion that maybe that's insane. So that's the Republican version of insanity.
Then we have the White House version of insanity. And the White House version of insanity is: austerity bad—would cause the United States to go back into recession, and therefore sequester terrible—not only forces us back into recession, but causes us to cut all kinds of great programs. So what do we see out of the White House? We have the Conyers bill. And Representative Conyers has this very intelligent bill. It is the most wonderful thing in Washington, D.C. It is literally one sentence. And the bill says: the sequester is repealed. Right? And they will not—the administration will not support this. And this is what I've been talking about. This really is smoking out the true intentions of the White House. And what you're seeing time after time, now expressly, is that the president wants to cut the safety net, wants to cut Social Security, wants to cut Medicare, wants to cut public programs. Indeed, he wants to cut public programs in comparison to raising taxes at a ratio of two to one—in other words, $2 of spending cuts for every increase of $1 in taxes.
hat tip to
bobswern:
FDIC Agrees To Bankster Demands For Secrecy In Settlements Hidden From Public
Three years ago, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. collected $54 million from Deutsche Bank in a settlement over unsound loans that contributed to a spectacular California bank failure.
The deal might have made big headlines, given that the bad loans contributed to the largest payout in FDIC history, $13 billion. But the government cut a deal with the bank's lawyers to keep it quiet: a "no press release" clause that required the FDIC never to mention the deal "except in response to a specific inquiry." ...
"In the old days, the regulators made it a point to embarrass everyone, to call attention to their role in bank failures," said former bank examiner Richard Newsom, who specialized in insider-abuse cases for the FDIC in the aftermath of the S&L debacle. The goal was simple: "to make other bankers scared."
Newsom said he couldn't understand the shift, unless the agency doesn't "want people to know how little they are settling for."
I missed this story when it first came out; apparently the European banksters have set things up so that they can loot Greek assets at will now. The regular people of Greece are so screwed.
Growing Air of Concern in Greece Over New Bailout
ATHENS — Even as the European Union signed off Tuesday on a sweeping new arrangement to help avert a Greek default and stabilize the euro, many people here on the streets saw no end to their country’s woes.
“They don’t want to kill us but keep us down on our knees so we can keep paying them indefinitely,” said Eva Kyriadou, 55, as she stood in a square in downtown Athens where the smell of tear gas and the smashed facades from last week’s violent riots still lingered. ...
“This is the first time ever that a European and probably an O.E.C.D. state abdicates its rights of immunity over all its assets to its lenders,” said Louka Katseli, an independent member of Parliament who previously represented the Socialist Party, using the abbreviation for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. She was one of several independents who joined 43 lawmakers from the two largest parties in voting against the loan agreement.
Ms. Katseli, an economist who was labor minister in the government of George Papandreou until she left in a cabinet reshuffle last June, was also upset that Greece’s lenders will have the right to seize the gold reserves in the Bank of Greece under the terms of the new deal, and that future bonds issued will be governed by English law and in Luxembourg courts, conditions more favorable to creditors.
Belgium protesters block border crossing
Hundreds of steel workers in Belgium are blocking a border crossing with The Netherlands. They're protesting near the city of Liege against 1,300 proposed job cuts by one of the world's biggest steel and mining firms. Arcelor Mittal's plans are the latest blow to local industry.
PR Firm Advises U.S. To Cut Ties With Alabama
Voucher school history book: Hippies didn’t bathe, worshipped Satan
Voucher schools in Louisiana and Indiana are using a “US History” textbook in their eighth grade classes that teaches that the “hippies” of the 1960s were draft dodgers who were rude, didn’t bathe, and worshipped Satan. ...
The Louisiana voucher schools under GOP Governor Bobby Jindal had already gotten into trouble last year for using a variety of religious right schoolbooks that teach a number of crazy, and racist, theories, including:
The Ku Klux Klan was a force for good, the majority of slaves in the old south were treated well, dinosaurs and humans lived side by side and fire-breathing dragons may actually have existed.
'Funeral for Our Future': 26 Arrested Blockading TransCanada Office
Escalating resistance to Keystone XL: 'If President Obama will not reject the pipeline, we will stop it ourselves.'
Climate activists in Westborough, Massachusetts were being arrested on Monday after blockading the entrance to corporate offices of the TransCanada corporation, the Canandian tar sands pipeline company hoping to receive approval for its controversial Keystone XL project.
Calling it a "Funeral for Our Future" and carrying a coffin emblazoned with the words “Our Future,” the protesters held flowers and sang an elegy as they marched in procession. As supporters gathered outside—chanting and singing songs in unison—dozens of protesters were inside where they refused to move, despite warnings from local police. ...
According to organizers, the blockade is part of a leadup to national solidarity actions expected to take place the week of March 16th-24th in which protestors from across the country are expected to target the offices of TransCanada, its investors, and political backers.
Action Center
The New York Times calls on Obama to cancel KXL:
When to Say No
The State Department’s latest environmental assessment of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline makes no recommendation about whether President Obama should approve it. Here is ours. He should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem. ...
Supporters of the pipeline have argued that this is oil from a friendly country and that Canada will sell it anyway. We hope Mr. Obama will see the flaw in this argument. Saying no to the pipeline will not stop Canada from developing the tar sands, but it will force the construction of new pipelines through Canada itself. And that will require Canadians to play a larger role in deciding whether a massive expansion of tar sands development is prudent. At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030.
The State Department will release a fuller review in early summer, and at some point after that the White House will decide. That decision will say a lot about whether Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, are willing to exert global leadership on the climate change issue.
Huge Ozone Hole Over Arctic
The red in the video represents the ozone loss:
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Negative Salaries, Negative Bailout And Now Negative Gold - Greece Just Became The Bankster's Paradise
Why the Police in Michael Premo's Occupy Wall Street Trial Are Unlikely To Face Perjury Charges
LA Times: FDIC Covertly Settled “Scores” Of Bank Fraud Cases Since 2007
We're back in Iraq
Winning in the Four-letter States
Fabulous news: Japan a bit closer to exploiting a way to heat the planet yet more: methane hydrates
A Little Night Music
Lightning Slim - Mean Old Lonesome Train
Lightnin' Slim - It's Mighty Crazy
Lightnin' Slim - That's Allright
Lightnin' Slim - Voodoo Blues
Lightnin' Slim - Feelin' awful blue
Lightnin' Slim - Rooster Blues
Lightnin' Slim - Love Me Mama, I'm A Rolling Stone
Lightnin' Slim - Bad Luck Blues
Lightnin' Slim & Lazy Lester - Hoodoo Man
Lightnin Slim - New Orleans bound
Lightnin' Slim - Oh Baby
Lightnin' Slim - Crazy 'Bout You Baby (Can't Hold Out Much Longer)
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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