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 delta bluesman Johnny Shines. Enjoy!
Johnny Shines - Sweet Home Chicago
"This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary."
-- Candidate Obama
News and Opinion
Can You Hear Me Now?
Hat tip to Burned!
Fisa chief judge defends integrity of court over Verizon records collection
The chief judge of the secretive court that granted an order permitting the US government to sweep up the phone records of millions of Verizon customers has strongly defended the panel's integrity.
In the wake of the Guardian's revelations, Reggie Walton, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), said claims that the body was unduly acquiescent to the government's requests for surveillance orders were "absolutely false". ...
The Fisa court is in the habit of granting wide approval to the government. In 2012, the government requested its imprimatur for surveillance 1,856 times, an increase of 5% over its 2011 petitions. The court approved every request in both years.
Civil libertarians have long expressed alarm that the only judicial body charged with protecting Americans from undue, intrusive federal surveillance so frequently endorses the government's requests.
"A Massive Surveillance State": Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails
Everyone who attended OWS with a cell phone had their identity logged, says security expert
I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn't turn their cell phone off, or put it -- and sometimes even if they did -- the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID'd, whether an informant pointed them out, it's known they were there anyway. This is routine.
I can tell you that if you go into any police station right now, the first thing they do is tell you, "Oh I'm sorry you're not allowed to bring a cell phone in there. We'll hold it for you." Not a joke. And by the way it's a legitimate investigatory technique. But cell phones are now the little snitch in your pocket. Cell phones tell me where you are, what you do, who you talk to, everbody you associate with. Cell phone tells me [sic] intimate details of your life and character, including: Were you at a demonstration? Did you attend a mosque? Did you demonstrate in front of an abortion clinic? Did you get an abortion?
NSA Spying: Sweeping US data-mining program revealed
Anonymous Just Leaked a Trove of NSA Documents
In the wake of last night’s revelation that everyone in the world has a creepy NSA-shaped stalker, defenders of online liberty and generally angry internet people Anonymous have leaked a treasure trove of NSA documents, including seriously important stuff like the US Department of Defense’s ‘Strategic Vision’ for controlling the internet.
The documents seem to mostly relate to PRISM and supporting operations, and mostly date from around 2008, supposedly not long after PRISM first reared its ugly head. One of the key things Anonymous has highlighted from the documents is the existence of an “intelligence-sharing network” that shares data gleaned from PRISM with “intelligence partners” around the world. Although we’re still in the process of combing through the documents, you can bet your last Bitcoin that ‘intelligence’ has been shared with British security services.
Cenk Uygur on NSA Scandal: ‘Barack Obama is a liar.’
'Beyond Orwellian': Outrage Follows Revelations of Vast Domestic Spying Program
As government officials and Verizon itself responded to the Guardian's NSA domestic spying story throughout the day, concern over the program's scope and implications only deepened among its army of critics.
Responding to the news report, Sen. Diane Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that she has been well aware of the NSA's collecting of vast amounts of personal phone record data, but said the practice was totally "legal."
Verizon acknowledged the program as well, but said the order gave it no choice but to comply.
The only thing of concern to Sen. Feinstein, who demanded an investigation into the source of the leak, seemed to be finding the individual who passed the FISA Court order to the Guardian in the first place.
Responding to Feinstein's comments, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, part of the team who broke the story, tweeted:
The New York Times Quietly Softened Its Scathing Obama Editorial
When the Paper of Record published a blistering editorial on President Obama's overbearing national security precautions today, one line stood out from the dozens of others as being the most vicious: "The administration has now lost all credibility." ...
This evening, after a full day of news outlets sharing the Times editorial, and after the Guardian dropped yet another bombshell about governmental spying, the website NewsDiffs (and others) are reporting that the Times editorial board appears to have quietly crept into its now famous rebuke and, for reasons undeclared, updated the claim that the administration is no longer credible. The sentence now reads, "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue," which is quite a different statement altogether.
On Whistleblowers and Government Threats of Investigation
There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they've done we're all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner. These endless investigations and prosecutions and threats are designed to bolster that fear-driven dynamic. But it isn't working. It's doing the opposite.
The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That's what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that's what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency - the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions - the more quickly that backlash will arrive.
I'm going to go ahead and take the Constitution at its word that we're guaranteed the right of a free press. So, obviously, are other people doing so. And that means that it isn't the people who are being threatened who deserve and will get the investigations, but those issuing the threats who will get that. That's why there's a free press. That's what adversarial journalism means.
As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point
If I was working for the Pentagon's PR department as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the nearly five billion dollars the armed services spends annually on advertising and public relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and over again with the same angle. ...
Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn't keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man's body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely? ...
[I]n reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the "classified" materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.
This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.
Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.
Ten Revelations From Bradley Manning's WikiLeaks Documents
- During the Iraq War, U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, according to thousands of field reports.
- There were 109,032 “violent deaths” recorded in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including 66,081 civilians. Leaked records from the Afghan War separately revealed coalition troops’ alleged role in killing at least 195 civilians in unreported incidents, one reportedly involving U.S. service members machine-gunning a bus, wounding or killing 15 passengers.
- The U.S. Embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country that opposed genetically modified crops, with U.S. diplomats effectively working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto.
- British and American officials colluded in a plan to mislead the British Parliament over a proposed ban on cluster bombs.
- In Baghdad in 2007, a U.S. Army helicopter gunned down a group of civilians, including two Reuters news staff.
- U.S. special operations forces were conducting offensive operations inside Pakistan despite sustained public denials and statements to the contrary by U.S. officials.
- A leaked diplomatic cable provided evidence that during an incident in 2006, U.S. troops in Iraq executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. The disclosure of this cable was later a significant factor in the Iraqi government’s refusal to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution beyond 2011, which led to U.S. troops withdrawing from the country.
- A NATO coalition in Afghanistan was using an undisclosed “black” unit of special operations forces to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. The unit was revealed to have had a kill-or-capture list featuring details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida, but it had in some cases mistakenly killed men, women, children, and Afghan police officers.
- The U.S. threatened the Italian government in an attempt to influence a court case involving the indictment of CIA agents over the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. Separately, U.S. officials were revealed to have pressured Spanish prosecutors to dissuade them from investigating U.S. torture allegations, secret “extraordinary rendition” flights, and the killing of a Spanish journalist by U.S. troops in Iraq.
- In apparent violation of a 1946 U.N. convention, Washington initiated a spying campaign in 2009 that targeted the leadership of the U.N. by seeking to gather top officials’ private encryption keys, credit card details, and biometric data.
Police Attack Union Strikes in Ankara
Turkey’s prime minister calls for opponents and supporters to ‘go home’
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for an immediate end to mass protests against his rule Friday but urged supporters to “go home” after they staged a major show of strength welcoming him home from an overseas trip.
Waving Turkish flags and chanting “We will die for you, Erdogan” and “Let’s go crush them all”, supporters of the premier’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) staged their first rally after keeping largely silent during seven days of violent anti-government demonstrations across the country.
“I call for an immediate end to the demonstrations, which have lost their democratic credentials and turned into vandalism,” Erdogan said in a speech at the Istanbul airport where he returned from a North Africa trip, to roaring cheers from the crowd. ...
Earlier, tens of thousands of angry anti-government protesters again packed cities across the country to call for the premier’s resignation. ...
Opposition to Erdogan is intense, but the 59-year-old has won three elections in a row and gained almost 50 percent of votes in 2011, having presided over strong economic growth in recent years.
Nasser al-Awlaki to Obama: Why Did You Kill My U.S.-Born Son, Grandson in Drone Strikes?
The execrable Bipartisan Party has struck again and is massing it's strength to drown the 99% in the bathtub:
Bipartisan Victory as Republicans and Democrats Agree Poor People Should Go Hungry
The Senate pushed its version of a Farm Bill through a procedural cloture vote on Thursday, paving the way for a full Senate debate on the massive piece of legislation that will guide agricultural and food policy over the next five years. ...
As the new Farm Bill moves towards its final stage in the Senate, proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) threaten to cut at least $4 billion from the key program over the next decade.
Michigan's Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, who authored large portions of the Senate's bill, has defended the slashed funding to SNAP by saying the cuts are not nearly as drastic as those put forth by the GOP-controlled House.
But anti-poverty advocates, not to mention numerous economists, say the current economy demands increased support for those living on or near the edge of hunger, not an erosion of the life-saving assistance.
Left Forum Takes on Ecological Transformation
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Here's Exactly Who to Blame in Congress for Authorizing Government Spying
What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know
The US Remains Guilty in Guatemala
Ron Wyden Calls Bullshit on Mike Rogers’ Claims
The OPOL Report: Say What?
To Paul
A Little Night Music
Johnny Shines - Too Wet To Plow
Johnny Shines + Snooky Pryor - Trouble In Mind
Johnny Shines - Ramblin'
Johnny Shines - Two Steps to Hell
Johnny Shines - Sitting On top Of The World
Johnny Shines + Robert Lockwood, Jr. - They Call Me The Little Wolf
Johnny Shines -- Black Spider Blues
Johnny Shines & Walter Horton - Evening Sun
Johnny Shines - Glad Rags
Johnny Shines Blues Band - Dynaflow Blues
Johnny Shines - Cool Driver
Johnny Shines - Last Night's Dream
Johnny Shines - Brutal Hearted Woman
Johnny Shines - You Got To Pay The Cost
Johnny Shines - Two Trains Runnin'
Johnny Shines -- Layin' Down My Shoes & Clothes
Johnny Shines - So Cold in Vietnam
Johnny Shines - You Don't Have To Go
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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