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 guitarist and singer Robert Cray. Enjoy!
Robert Cray - Phone Booth
"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield ... To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
-- George Orwell
News and Opinion
This Is What They Want
This is the unspoken subtext of what the vandalism is all about. This is the real motivation behind all the tricornered hats and the incantations about liberty and all the conjuring words that have summoned up the latest crisis in our democracy. Corporate money is the power behind all of it, and that corporate money has but one goal -- the creation of a largely subjugated population and a workforce grateful for whatever scraps fall from the table. To accomplish this, the corporate money not only had to disable the institutions of self-government that are the people's only real protection, it had to do so in such a way that the people expect less and less of the government and, therefore, less and less of each other, acting in the interest of the political commonwealth. (The dismantling of organized labor is a sideshow to the main event in that the goal there was to cripple organized labor's political power within the political institutions so that there would be no countervailing force that could be brought to bear against the destruction of its power in the workplace.) For all the endless bloviation about the dead-hand of government, what the vandals in Washington are shooting for right now is a subject population whose tattered freedoms depend on the whimsical ethics of the American corporate class. This is the really deep game being played here, and they're more than halfway to winning it.
The Government Shutdown Versus the Debt Ceiling
The debt ceiling is another matter. Nobody really knows what will happen if we breach the debt ceiling because it’s never happened before. And everyone worries that it will be awful because nobody’s created any legal provision for not making it awful. A breach is sometimes characterized as a default on the national debt. But it’s actually weirder than that. Normally the way things work is that the Treasury Department cuts the checks Congress has told it to cut, collects the taxes Congress has told it to collect, and borrows to cover the difference. But the statutory debt ceiling also instructs Treasury not to borrow more than a certain amount of money. When we hit the debt ceiling on Oct. 17, Treasury will lack the legal authority to borrow any more money to close the gap between spending and tax revenue. ...
And in general, simply nobody knows what anyone should do about anything if the debt ceiling is breached. Unlike with the shutdown, there is no overriding OMB guidance. There are no rules to spell out essential versus nonessential services. Officially, at least, there’s no contingency planning at all. It’s just a kind of terrifying world of uncertainty.
... There’s no guarantee that it’ll lead to a worldwide financial panic and a massive global depression, but there’s honestly no guarantee that it won’t. Nobody knows what will happen, and you should find that prospect terrifying.
Gov't Shutdown Reflects Struggle Within Capitalist Republican Elite
"At the editorial board of The New York Times, they're right to point out that it's sometimes an exaggeration to say that the whole government is being held hostage, the nation's politics is being held hostage just by a small faction called the Tea Party.
The vote two days ago to deny the continuing resolution, you know, to fund the government unless Obama care was repealed (you know, an incredible demand, right, to roll into a budget process) was 231 House votes in support of that. And that's far more than the numbers of people in the Tea Party Caucus, which I think is about 45, 50 at the most. [incompr.] pretty much a straight-line party vote. The vote yesterday to deny continuing resolution unless Obamacare was delayed for one year was 228 votes--again, much bigger. And this was also true during the debt ceiling crisis. It was pretty much a rump vote of a much broader right-wing House Republican group that's much larger than just the Tea Party phenomenon."
Just What Are the Republicans Thinking?
Theory #1: Republicans are just trying to negotiate a deal.
Problems with the theory: ... If the GOP was suggesting that they might trade a delay of Obamacare for, say, expanded background checks on gun purchases — that's a negotiation. A "negotiation" of the sort in which the choice is between a bad thing happening and someone giving up something of value to them is the sort of negotiating that kidnappers employ.
Theory #2: This is a protest over a dire issue.
Problems with the theory:... [T]he problem is that politically-motivated obstructionism was the strategy of the Republican caucus at large since the beginning of the year. On Monday, New York's Jonathan Chait outlined the "Williamsburg Accord," an agreement stemming from a caucus meeting in January that was approved by leadership to provide exactly the sort of tension that is now obvious. In other words, this isn't the Tea Party swarm, motivated by the base, taking up arms against a Socialist Obamacare under the mantra "Don't Blink." This was always the plan.
Theory #4: Republicans are resorting to extortion.
Problems with the theory: There aren't many problems with the theory. Instead, there are problems with the practice. "I've got this thing, and it's fucking golden," said former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich in the aftermath of Obama's election in 2008. "I'm not just giving it up for fucking nothing." He was empowered to appoint the state's next senator, and he wanted to see what he could get for it. He's now in prison, convicted of extortion. That's the extreme, of course. But the parallels here are enough to make anyone wary. ...
Ultimately, the problem with this is that if this the thinking, no one's allowed to say it out loud. Inevitably it gets reframed as just "negotiation." In which case, see #1.
Digby:
Crazy Like Foxes
I think one of the major misunderstandings (willful, in many cases) of this budget mess is that it’s about Republicans just running around willy-nilly screaming “nonononono” like toddlers having a temper tantrum. I know it looks that way, but that’s not what’s happening. This is a strategy. And it’s one they’ve even written down.
Jonathan Chait wrote about this in a widely read piece yesterday in which he explains what they’ve been up to:
In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama’s second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought assurances from their leaders that no further compromises would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which Republicans called “The Williamsburg Accord,” received obsessive coverage in the conservative media but scant attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase “Williamsburg Accord” has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at all in the New York Times.) But the decision House Republicans made in January has set the party on the course it has followed since.
If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.
... And yet this fact is all too real: they’ve got the Ryan budget already. And they’ve already moved on to the debt ceiling, which all the Fox freaks were going on about last night. Krauthammer suggested they could get Obamacare defunded if they are willing to hold out. ... So, they are going to play this all the way out.
But why wouldn’t they? With the exception of some chump change from millionaires in the last round, the Democrats have been losing on policy every step of the way since these budget battles began, even as they seem to be winning the politics. What could be more telling than the fact that the numbers in Paul Ryan’s budget are now considered the starting point in any new negotiations to end the shutdown.
The House GOP’s Legislative Strike
The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.
The Government Can't Even Figure Out How To Shut Down Its Websites In A Reasonable Way
With the government shutdown, you have may have come across a variety of oddities involving various government agency websites that were completely taken offline. This seems strange. Yes, the government is shut down, but does that really mean they need to turn off their web servers as well, even the purely informational ones? I could see them just leaving them static without updating them, but to completely block them just seems... odd. Even odder is that not all websites are down and some, such as the FTC's website appears to be fully up, including fully loading a page... only to then redirect you to a page that says it's down.
KKK Rally At Gettysburg Canceled Because Of Government Shutdown
A Ku Klux Klan rally planned for Saturday, Oct. 5 has been canceled because of the government shutdown.
On Sept. 26, officials at Gettysburg National Military Park granted a special-use permit for a rally to a Maryland-based KKK group. According to NBC 10 Philadelphia, the event was canceled when park officials rescinded all permits for special events because of the shutdown, which began 12 a.m. ET on Tuesday.
Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown
The Pentagon pumped billions of dollars into contractors' bank accounts on the eve of the U.S. government's shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed.
All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month. ...
This goes to show that even when the federal government is shutdown and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else.
Selective Shutdown: NSA Spying Funded, FOIA Requests Denied
Government takes 'we can watch you but you can't watch us' position as funding stopped for select programs
The government might be shut down, but both parties have agreed that the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance programs will not be impacted by the stoppage.
However, fulfilling the requests of citizens or journalists trying to obtain information about the government's activities has been deemed not "an essential service."
A NSA/CSS press statement which reads:
Due to the government shutdown, FOIA/PA requests or inquiries submitted to the FOIA/PA Office will not be addressed until the office reopens.
Obama closes the gates of America to inconvenient truth. It's a bad sign when an emperor cannot stand the sound of a critical voice.
Author and NSA critic denied entry into US
Ilija Trojanov, who has spoken out against mass surveillance by America’s National Security Agency (NSA) revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, wanted to fly from the Brazilian city of Salvador with American Airlines to attend a conference of German academics in Denver.
But the 48-year-old said he was barred without reason on Monday from getting onto the plane at the airport in eastern Brazil.
Trojanov was one of the leading figures behind an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this year about the NSA scandal which revealed a mass spying programme in Germany. The letter spoke of an “historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state.”
He said: “It is more than ironic when an author who has used his voice for years to stand up to the danger of surveillance and of a secret state within a state is rejected entry into the ‘land of the brave and free’.”
US to Drone Victims: Shut Up
Rafiq ur Rehman would be entitled to a lawyer if he were a murderer. But when a CIA drone kills your mother and wounds you and your two young children, you don’t warrant the same rights as criminals.
Rehman was scheduled to testify before Congress on October 1. He will not be heard because the State Department has denied his lawyer a visa.
Representative Alan Grayson of Florida asked the Rehmans and their lawyer Shahzad Akbar to come to Capitol Hill. This would have been the first time Congress has heard directly from survivors of U.S. drone strikes.
Akbar contacted the Rehmans a week after the October 24, 2012 drone strike in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas which took the life of the children’s grandmother. A prominent human rights attorney who has handled several high-profile cases against U.S. drones, Akbar is founder and director of Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and a legal fellow with the United Kingdom human rights NGO Reprieve.
Akbar has traveled to the United States several times. For two years, he even held a US diplomatic visa while a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Akbar told the London Guardian that he never had problems coming to the United States until he began representing drone victims.
Talking Jamie Dimon
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of joining old friend Sam Seder on The Majority Report. Among other topics, we talked about the surreal exchange between CNBC dingbat Maria Bartiromo and Salon's amazed and incredulous Alex Pareene about Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Pareene hilariously told the CNBC panel that anybody could do Jamie Dimon's job as badly as he's done it, offered himself in half-seriousness as an option and made the absolutely accurate point that any other boss in any other industry who had overseen the regulatory problems that took place at Chase under Dimon would be looking for work.
No Triumph for Austerity
It was, I suppose, predictable that Europe's austerians would claim vindication at the first hint of an economic upturn. Still, an op-ed by the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in the Financial Times, in which he claims complete vindication because Europe has had one, count it, one quarter of growth, is pretty awesome even relative to expectations.
It takes quite a lot of chutzpah — do they have that word in German? — to claim that this is a record of successful preparation for structural transformation. What about all the livelihoods, and in some cases lives, destroyed? What about the millions of young Europeans who still have no hope of getting a decent job? ...
What we have to realize here, however, is that at this point it's not just a matter of ideology: egos and careers are at stake.
The evidence suggests that Europe's austerians did a terrible thing, ruining the lives of millions. They will never admit it; they will seize on anything that gives them an out.
Report Exposes the Right-Wing Tag Team Plotting Against Pensions
News stories around the country have trumpeted a public pension “crisis” in various states, featuring elected officials who insist that these crises justify slashing the retirement benefits of public employees.
What these stories usually don’t say is that conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.
Leading this effort is the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Sector Retirement Systems Project and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Their role in ginning up the sense of crisis, and in pushing state legislatures to dismantle pension systems that have served workers well for decades and could serve them well for decades more, is exposed in an Institute for America’s Future report released today, “The Plot Against Pensions.”
“This is the story not merely of two nonprofits, nor merely of one set of economic issues; it is a microcosmic tale of how, in the Citizens United age, politically motivated billionaires can quietly implement an ideological agenda in local communities across the country,” the report states.
The Plot Against Pensions
The Pew-Arnold campaign to undermine America’s retirement security – and leave taxpayers with the bill
This report evaluates both the general state of the national debate over pensions and the specific effects of the partnership between the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Sector Retirement Systems Project and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
Here is a summary of the report’s findings:
- Finding: Conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.
States and cities have for years been failing to fully fund their annual pension obligations. They have used funds that were supposed to go to pensions to instead finance expensive tax cuts and corporate subsidies. That has helped create a real but manageable pension shortfall. Yet, instead of citing such a shortfall as reason to end expensive tax cuts and subsidies, conservative activists and lawmakers are citing it as a reason to slash retiree benefits.
- Finding: The amount states and cities spend on corporate subsidies and so-called tax expenditures is far more than the pension shortfalls they face.
- Finding: The pension “reforms” being pushed by conservative activists would slash retirement income for many pensioners who are not part of the Social Security system.
- Finding: The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation are working together in states across the country to focus the debate over pensions primarily on slashing retiree benefits rather than on raising public revenues.
- Finding: The Laura and John Arnold Foundation is run by conservative political operatives and funded by an Enron billionaire.
Is that a gun in your pocket or...? Darwin stalks Arizona:
Arizona man accidentally shoots and kills girlfriend while hugging her
An Arizona woman died on Tuesday after being accidentally shot and killed by her boyfriend while the couple was hugging.
Phoenix police said that the 18-year-old man was embracing his 24-year-old girlfriend at a home on Tuesday morning when the gun he was wearing in his waistband went off, according to KTVK.
The man told police that the gun had been causing his girlfriend discomfort during the hug so he attempted to move it. That’s when the weapon discharged.
The Evening Greens
Government Shutdown Affects Weather, Climate Programs
With the federal government shut down for the first time in 17 years, many of the nation’s weather forecasters remain at work, but longer-term climate research is taking a hit. According to Commerce Department documents, 6,601 of the 12,001 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) -- or 55 percent of the agency's workforce -- have been sent home without pay. That leaves 5,400 “excepted” from the shutdown, mainly because they are needed for the protection of life and property.
In particular, the National Weather Service will continue operating its network of 122 local forecast offices to provide weather forecasts, watches, and warnings, and NOAA will also continue to operate its weather and climate computer models, as well as satellite data feeds to ensure that forecasters have uninterrupted access to weather information.
But while the weather service forecast offices are open, employees are not allowed to engage in their typical full range of activities, according to a NWS meteorologist. ...
However, much of NOAA’s research activities have stopped or been slowed. For example, Harold Brooks, a top tornado researcher who works at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., reported his furlough notice on Facebook on Tuesday. Much of the staff at NOAA's Earth Systems Research Lab and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, except for positions related to maintaining computing resources, have also been furloughed. Those two labs are heavily involved in NOAA's climate research programs.
Rally Against Mass Surveillance
October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
Right now the NSA is spying on everyone's personal communications, and they’re operating without any meaningful oversight. Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA.
On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the US Patriot Act, we're taking the next step and holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. We’ll be handing the half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us -- and we won’t tolerate mass surveillance any longer.
StopWatching.us is a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy organizations and companies from across the political spectrum.
Click here for more information
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Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Drone Crash In NYC, PCJF Protest, As We Learn What DHS Really Thinks About 4th Amendment (Updated)
Breaking! It was about the Grand Bargain all along
A Little Night Music
Robert Cray - Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark
Robert Cray - Sadder Days/(Won't Be) Coming Home/I'm Done Cryin'
Robert Cray - Love Struck Baby
Robert Cray - Who's Been Talkin'
Robert Cray - Consequences
Robert Cray - Nothin' But A Woman
B.B King, Robert Cray Band, Jimmie Vaughan, Hubert Sumlin - Paying the cost to be the boss
John Lee Hooker and Robert Cray - Baby Lee
Shemekia Copeland & Robert Cray - I Pity The Fool
Robert Cray - Smoking Gun
Robert Cray: Cookin' in Mobile
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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