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!
This evening's music features jazz musician and bass player Charles Mingus. Enjoy!
Charles Mingus - Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
“The government lies to gain credibility. Interestingly enough, it often works."
-- Hannah Arendt
News and Opinion
House Judiciary investigating whether Attorney General Holder lied under oath
The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether Attorney General Eric Holder lied under oath during his May 15 testimony on the Justice Department’s (DOJ) surveillance of reporters.
The panel is looking at a statement Holder made during a back-and-forth with Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) about whether the DOJ could prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act of 1917, an aide close to the matter told The Hill.
“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material — this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy,” Holder said during the hearing.
However, NBC News reported the following week that Holder personally approved a search warrant that labeled Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen a co-conspirator in a national security leaks case.
The panel is investigating whether NBC’s report contradicts Holder’s claim that he had not looked into or been involved with a possible prosecution of the press in a leaks case.
Medea Benjamin: The Obama administration's drone policy is 'totally counterproductive'
Despite Ongoing Protest, Obama Resumes Drone Attacks in Pakistan
Despite repeated and recent warnings that such attacks are destabilizing and an affront to its territorial sovereignty, reports indicate the US military executed a pair of drone missile strikes in Pakistan on Wednesday in what appears to be an attempt to assassinate a high-level Taliban commander.
It remains unclear whether or not Wali-ur-Rehman—the reported target of the attack— was, in fact, killed, but reports from various media outlets suggest between four and seven fatalities resulted from the attack that occurred in the North Waziristan tribal region. ...
Wednesday's bombing in Pakistan comes less than a week after a highly publicized speech by President Obama regarding the use of US drones and the practice of targeted killing on foreign soil.
Pakistan officials on Friday responded to Obama's policy announcements by saying he did not go far enough in his promises to "reform" the US targeted killing and drone program.
This is a really interesting interview with Julian Assange, if you only have time to listen to one of the segments, I'd probably choose the last one where a little ways into the segment, he has an interesting discussion about an interview he gave to Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO and apparently informal State Department asset. (transcript of the last segment
here)
Julian Assange: Stratfor Hacker Jeremy Hammond Guilty Plea Part of Crackdown on Journalism, Activism
[T]he Obama administration is becoming a sausage factory for making political prisoners. And now we have Jeremy Hammond, John Kiriakou, Bradley Manning, and it is after a number of others, as well. The example that it is trying to set, of course, is: Don’t criticize this new power bloc at all. We don’t care what means that you do it by; there will be a way found to criminalize it. And people like Hammond and Manning, John Kiriakou, they’re used as examples: Do something we don’t like, and we’re going to go after you, in order to decrease criticism and embarrassment on behalf of this new dominant political institution in the United States.
Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond pleads guilty to Stratfor breach
Hacker and activist Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty Tuesday morning in a New York courtroom to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as a member of the Internet collective known as Anonymous.
Hammond, 28, was arrested last March and charged with hacking into the computers of Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor — a global intelligence company based out of Austin, Texas. He has been held in jail for nearly 15 months since being apprehended and faced a potential life sentence if convicted by a jury. After spending more than a year behind bars — with weeks spent in solitary confinement — Hammond pleaded guilty early Tuesday for his role in the Stratfor hack as well as eight other computer network intrusions.
n a statement penned by Hammond and released by his Defense Committee after the plea was made, the hacktivist explained that he opted to make a plea in lieu of letting his case go to trial to avoid complicating his legal woes even further.
“If I had won this trial I would likely have been shipped across the country to face new but similar charges in a different district. The process might have repeated indefinitely,” he wrote. “Ultimately I decided that the most practical route was to accept this plea with a maximum of a ten year sentence and immunity from prosecution in every federal court.”
Class Of 2013 Student Debt Reaches New Heights
In what is now an annual ritual, a new crop of college graduates has been crowned the most indebted class in American history.
Students in http://blogs.wsj.com/..., according to an analysis by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly double the average amount of debt students graduated with 20 years ago.
A separate study released Thursday by Fidelity Investments painted a bleaker picture. The class of 2013 carried an average of $35,200, Fidelty’s study found, which includes credit card debt and money owed to family members. Half of all graduates with debt said in the survey that they were surprised at how much they accumulated.
GOP Austerity Enriches Billionaires at Workers' Expense
The bank bailout cost US taxpayers nothing? Think again
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report (pdf) with what seemed like good news: the bailout of 2008 – which fronted $700bn in taxpayer funds to prop up the financial institutions that brought the economy to the brink – ended up cheaper than expected. The price tag was revised down to $21bn from $24bn. ...
This is the line the banks and the US Treasury would like us to swallow. It is, of course, totally false. The bailout cost us plenty, and continues to do so. Sadly, it is the gift that keeps on giving to the very banks that drove our economy over a cliff – and took trillions in housing wealth, retirement funds and millions of jobs with it.
... $21bn is no bargain. It's a hefty sum for a government we're constantly told is broke – and needs to cut everything from air traffic controllers to Medicare, and from meals for needy seniors to public defenders and housing aid. Broke – but somehow able to front $700bn for reckless, wildly mismanaged banks. ...
The government took a massive gamble with our money and demanded almost nothing in return. Even if we didn't max out our potential losses in this particular gamble, we easily could the next time around. ...
President Obama swears such a bailout will never happen again. But it's Psychology 101 that rewarding a behavior encourages repetition of that behavior. Big banks now have incentives to bet recklessly on the latest asset bubble, safe in the knowledge that if it goes horribly wrong, Uncle Sam will sponsor a soft landing.
Scandal and Corruption in Canada's Right Wing Governments
Bleak Future? UK youth lost to austerity fears never finding jobs
Groups Slam Trade Deal for Choosing "Private Interests and Profits" over People and Planet
Following the most recent round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations in Lima, Peru, more than 130 organizations have come out against such international trade agreements calling them a "deadly weapon" against democratic rule, the protection of individual rights and environmental justice.
"These agreements further consolidate the asymmetry of laws that propagate that the rights and power of corporations are protected by ‘hard law’ and are above the rights of peoples and communities," write the groups write in an open letter criticizing the agreements.
"We believe that Nation-states should have not only the obligation but also the full freedom to implement laws and policies in favour of the people and the environment, without the threat of being sued by transnational capital," the letter continued.
According to the alliance—which includes such groups as Friends of the Earth, Global Trade Watch, Institute for Policy Studies, Global Exchange—under International Investment Agreements (IIAs) such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a co-signed country can be sued by a transnational corporation if their laws or policies go against the interests of the corporations, such as legislation that favors people or the environment.
The unintended consequences of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
GMO Crop Sabotage on the Rise: French citizens destroy trial vineyard
Early Sunday morning, French police stood helpless as sixty people, locked inside an open-air field of genetically modified grapevines, uprooted all the plants. In Spain last month, dozens of people destroyed two GMO fields. On the millennial cusp, Indian farmers burned Bt cotton in their Cremate Monsanto campaign. Ignored by multinational corporations and corrupt public policy makers, citizens act to protect the food supply and the planet.
The French vineyard is the same field attacked last year when the plants were only cut. But the security features installed after that incident kept authorities at bay while the group accomplished its mission yesterday.
Speaking for the group, Olivier Florent told Le Figero that they condemned the use of public funds for open-field testing of GMOs “that we do not want.”
Meanwhile, President Obama has stacked his Administration with biotech insiders going so far as to appoint Islam Siddiqui as Agriculture Trade Negotiator. Siddiqui is a former pesticide lobbyist and vice president of CropLife America, a biotech and pesticide trade group that lobbies to weaken environmental laws.
Russia Warns Obama about Monsanto
The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.
According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.
At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.
CBS News Ties Extreme Weather To Manmade Climate Change
We’re Being Watched: How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists
In February 2010 Tom Jiunta and a small group of residents in northeastern Pennsylvania formed the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition (GDAC), an environmental organization opposed to hydraulic fracturing in the region. ... The group of about 10 professionals – engineers, nurses, and teachers – began meeting in the basement of a member’s home. As their numbers grew, they moved to a local church. In an effort to raise public awareness about the risks of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) they attended township meetings, zoning and ordinance hearings, and gas-drilling forums. They invited speakers from other states affected by gas drilling to talk with Pennsylvania residents. They held house-party style screenings of documentary films.
Since the group had never engaged in any kind of illegal activity or particularly radical forms of protest, it came as a shock when GDAC members learned that their organization had been featured in intelligence bulletins compiled by a private security firm, The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR). Equally shocking was the revelation that the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security had distributed those bulletins to local police chiefs, state, federal, and private intelligence agencies, and the security directors of the natural gas companies, as well as industry groups and PR firms. News of the surveillance broke in September 2010 when the director of the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security, James Powers, mistakenly sent an email to an anti-drilling activist he believed was sympathetic to the industry, warning her not to post the bulletins online. ...
Although the Pennsylvania scandal caused a brief public outcry, it was quickly brushed aside as an unfortunate mistake. In fact, the episode represents a larger pattern of corporate and police spying on environmental activists fueled in part by the expansion of private intelligence gathering since 9/11.
The surveillance of even moderate groups like GDAC comes at a pivotal time for the environmental movement. As greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, opposition to the fossil fuel industry has taken on a more urgent and confrontational tone. Some anti-fracking activists have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and the protests against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline have involved arrests at the White House. Environmentalists and civil libertarians worry that accusations of terrorism, even if completely unfounded, could undermine peaceful political protest. The mere possibility of surveillance could handicap environmental groups’ ability to achieve their political goals. “You are painting the political opposition as supporters of terrorism to discredit them and cripple their ability to remain politically viable,” says Mike German, an FBI special agent for 16 years who now works with the ACLU.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Anonymous Government Officials Leak Defense of DOJ's Spying on Reporter
What Obama's New Killing Rules Don't Tell You
They don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our bombs
32 Minutes With Kafka and Orwell: “Naked Citizens” vs. The Naked Truth About Conspiracy Theories
Medea (Benjamin) heckles Obama with a tragic monologue by Euripides
Coroner to British press: Shame on all of you!
A Little Night Music
Charles Mingus - Better Git It In Your Soul
Charles Mingus - Devil Blues
Charles Mingus - Boogie Stop Shuffle
Charles Mingus - Oh Lord Don't Let them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me
Charles Mingus - Flowers For A Lady
Charles Mingus Sextet featuring Eric Dolphy - Take The A Train
Charles Mingus - Haitian Fight Song
Charles Mingus - Work Song
Charles Mingus - Moanin'
Charles Mingus - Shortnin' Bread
Charles Mingus - Hog Callin Blues
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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