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 songwriter and piano player Mercy Dee Walton, composer of the blues standard "One Room Country Shack." Enjoy!
Mercy Dee Walton - Romp and stomp blues
"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
-- Mark Twain
News and Opinion
White House rules out using legal veto to force Congress's hand as economists warn of potentially catastrophic standoff
The White House has ruled out using a legal veto to force Congress to extend the US debt limit as conservative Republicans threaten to take what the Treasury described as a potentially catastrophic economic standoff to the brink of a 17 October deadline.
President Obama had been encouraged by senior Democrats to call the bluff of hardline Republicans who want to add a debt limit refusal to an existing spending impasse that has already shut down much of the federal government.
Some Democrats argue that powers granted under the 14th amendment to the constitution, which was introduced to control southern states after the civil war, would allow the president to unilaterally borrow money if there was such a threat to the credit-worthiness of the US. ...
But the White House ruled out the option on Thursday, ending days of Washington debate about whether this obscure legal authority might provide a way out for Obama – at least from one half of Republicans' fiscal pincer movement. "The administration does not believe the 14th amendment gives power to the president to ignore the debt ceiling," said spokesman Jay Carney.
Alan Grayson on “Democrats In Name Only”: They betray our side
Howie Klein writes:
[T]wo of the worst of the worst [Democrats are] Jim Matheson [UT-04], a Utah Blue Dog with a ProgressivePunch score this year of 26.42 (worse than half a dozen Republicans) and Mike McIntyre [NC-07] who is both a Blue Dog and a New Dem from North Carolina. They were the only two Democrats who voted with all but two Republicans to shut down the government unless Republican policy agenda items were met.
Debt Ceiling Chicken and Trench Warfare
In the US, despite all the media frenzy over the Federal shutdown, the attention of the insiders has already moved to the real cliffhanger: the debt ceiling impasse, which starts to bind on October 17. Treasury is already fulminating how putting the sanctity of payments on Treasury bonds in doubt is a seriously bad idea. We also have the curious spectacle of Grover Norquist making the rounds of Vichy Left outlets (see Ezra Klein and Huffington Post) to condition liberals as to where the political professionals see a budget deal shaking out. (You know we’ve past an event horizon when Norquist is playing Republican good cop). Congress passes a continuing resolution to buy a couple of months to negotiate the prize sought by both parties, the middle class shellacking Grand Bargain that “reforms”, as in erodes, Medicare and Social Security.
The wee problem here is that the two sides wanted that last year. Remember the 2011 budget fight? Obama and Boehner were trading big deficit cut numbers, with Obama at one point proposing deeper reductions than Boehner. But a deal never came together. Boehner could not deliver the House. Obama wanted some token tax increases on the rich and the Republicans would have none of it.
So what has happened since then? The Tea Partiers, in classic Mafia style, have lowered their bid as time goes on. They’ve added a delay to ObamaCare to their demands and appear unwilling to make other concessions.
In addition, Obama has been hoisted on the petard of the sequester. He had hoped it would apply enough pressure to both his left flank and to the less doctrinaire Tea Party types to help him get his have old people die faster safety net cuts through. But the sequester didn’t inflict enough pain. Now the shutdown has upped the ante. But even though polls show that most Americans oppose using the shutdown as a way to force changes to Obamacare, the flip side is that those polls may not be germane to the block of intransigent Republicans in the House
‘Exasperated’ Obama warns Wall Street over shutdown’s financial implications
US President Barack Obama sent Wall Street a blunt warning Wednesday that it should be very worried about a political crisis that has shut down the government and could trigger a US debt default. ...
Asked whether Washington was simply gripped by just the latest in a series of political and fiscal crises which get solved at the last minute, Obama warned that investors should be worried.
“This time’s different. I think they should be concerned,” Obama said, in comments which may roil global markets. ...
“Absolutely I am exasperated, because this is entirely unnecessary,” Obama said. ...
Some signs of incremental movement emerged, with Democrats pledging to appoint negotiators to thrash out a long-term budget — provided that the Republicans agree to an immediate six-week federal spending measure with no anti-Obamacare provisions.
Who Will Hold the Line if Dems Offer Cuts to Social Security, Try for 'Grand Bargain'?
With plenty of evidence of Democrats' propensity to cave to Republican "hostage politics" in recent years, concerned citizens, progressive members of Congress, and advocacy groups were taking no chances on Thursday as they formed a "human-chain" outside the Capitol Building in Washington to declare their opposition to any cuts to vital social programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Amid an ongoing shutdown of the federal government, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus held a news conference and after joined hands with members of the Alliance for Retired Americans, Social Security Works and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare in order to protest the idea of a "Grand Bargain" between Democrats and Republicans that has been repeatedly floated over a series of budget battles in recent years.
“Folks are scurrying around here, trying to figure out how to end the shutdown. And sometimes I’ve heard [Democrats] say ‘You know, maybe we should give them something.’” said Representative Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Some folks say ‘We’ll give you Chained CPI.’”
What Do They Really Want, Part XXIV
Remember when we all assumed that sequestration could never hold and they’d just have to pull the plug and negotiate a reasonable budget when the going got tough? Yeah, that’s worked out for us. I’m going to suggest that we all (myself included) stop assuming that reality must bite and start to figure out where this is actually likely to lead. ...
As I’ve been asking for a while now, what would they settle for if they wake up to the fact that they can’t get their holy grail? I personally think they might settle for cutting Social Security and Medicare without any tax increases, which I would guess will be presented by the Democratic leadership as a small capitulation. After all, they are the ones who offered up the cuts in the first place.
Maybe that’s not good enough for the Republicans anymore. They seem to have convinced themselves that they have super-powers so they’ll hold out for Obama’s resignation. Still, if I had to guess, I’d say that 2011 deal without the revenue is probably going to end up being on offer if this thing drags out.
So, after the Ringmaster and his corporate backers finish robbing you of Social Security, Medicare and a few other things with the help of a diversionary sideshow by the red clowns, they've got another show pretty much ready to go. The audience is going to love this stuff:
"A Corporate Trojan Horse": Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact, Would Rewrite Swath of U.S. Laws
LORI WALLACH: Well, one of the most important things to understand is it’s not really mainly about trade. I guess the way to think about it is as a corporate Trojan horse. The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters either handcuff our domestic governments, limiting food safety, environmental standards, financial regulation, energy and climate policy, or establishing new powers for corporations.
For instance, there are the same investor privileges that promote job offshoring to lower-wage countries. There is a ban on Buy Local procurement, so that corporations have a right to do sourcing, basically taking our tax dollars, and instead of investing them in our local economy, sending them offshore. There are new rights to, for instance, have freedom to enter other countries and take natural resources, a right for mining, a right for oil, gas, without approval.
And then there’s a whole set of very worrisome issues relating to Internet freedom. Through sort of the backdoor of the copyright chapter of TPP is a whole chunk of SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, that activism around the country successfully derailed a year ago. Think about all the things that would be really hard to get into effect as a corporation in public, a lot of them rejected here and in the other 11 countries, and that is what’s bundled in to the TPP. And every country would be required to change its laws domestically to meet these rules. The binding provision is, each country shall ensure the conformity of domestic laws, regulations and procedures.
Now, the only reason I know that level of detail is because a few texts have leaked, and I have been following the negotiations and grilling negotiators from otherwise, totally secret.
Will DiFi and Patrick Leahy slug it out in Ring 3?
Key Senator wants to ban bulk surveillance, leading to Democratic showdown
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) expressed support yesterday for serious surveillance reform, saying he will introduce legislation that calls for an end to the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass dragnet of phone data. The bill would also add some type of public advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) who could argue against the positions presented by intelligence agencies.
... Diane Feinstein (D-CA), has made it clear she will fight such a bill.
At a hearing yesterday, Feinstein said the bulk data collection could prevent another event like the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. ... The justification for bulk data collection was "strained at best," said Leahy. He doesn't believe the position of the intelligence community that the bulk data program stopped 54 terrorist plots, citing "inaccurate" reports from the Obama Administration. "That’s plainly wrong. These weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all thwarted,” he said.
Newsnight "journalist" sketchy on the concept of the purpose of journalism. Greenwald obligingly gives a lesson.
NEWSNIGHT: Glenn Greenwald full interview on Snowden, NSA, GCHQ and spying
Committee to investigate US government's treatment of reporters
For three decades, the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported on assaults on press freedoms in China, Iran, Syria and other countries with government regimes traditionally hostile to a free and robust news media.
This year, for the first time, the Committee is conducting a major investigation of attacks on press freedoms by the U.S. government, led by an Arizona State University professor.
“Journalists working in the United States have told us that their work has become more difficult as aggressive leak investigations and prosecutions have chilled certain kinds of reporting,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Earlier this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists asked Leonard Downie Jr., the former Washington Post executive editor now serving as the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, to lead a study focusing on press treatment by the Obama administration.
“Given his experience as both an academic and media professional, Len Downie is the right person to look at these complex issues with clarity and purpose,” said Simon. “We look forward to his findings, which we hope will help lead to improved conditions for journalists in this country and ensure the United States continues to set a press freedom example for the world.”
The Downie report will be released at a news conference at 10 a.m., Oct. 10 in the Newseum’s Knight Studios at the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street N.W.
Knee-Slapper: Ex-NSA/CIA chief Hayden jokes of putting Snowden on kill list
Thirteen alleged members of Anonymous indicted on hacking charges
Thirteen alleged members of the loosely organized hacker collective known as Anonymous were indicted Thursday in connection with a series of online attacks on US companies and trade groups.
The indictment unsealed in Alexandria, Virginia, charged the 13 with attacks between September 2010 and January 2011 on the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and others. ...
The 13 “planned and executed a coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant Internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the websites unavailable to customers and users of those websites,” the indictment said.
Syria: massacre reports emerge from Assad's Alawite heartland
Alawites are fleeing their homes, recounting gruesome tales of executions and other atrocities
For more than two years, as fighting has escalated throughout Syria, a group of villages peopled by government supporters in the mountains above this coastal city has been spared any attacks. ...
At dawn on 4 August their peace was shattered. Armed rebels, led by local jihadis as well as members of Jabhat al-Nusra and the al-Qaida linked group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, left their headquarters in the largely Sunni town of Salma. They sneaked into the al-Akrad mountains, taking control of five Alawite villages. The rebels called it Operation Liberation of the Coast and the aim was to send the government a message that even the Alawite heartland was no longer safe.
Rumours of massacres spread as some 25,000 Alawite villagers fled to Latakia. The next day the rebels captured more Alawite villages and reached Aramo, about 12 miles north of Qardaha, the Assads' home town where Hafez al-Assad, the former president, is buried in a mausoleum. ... The Syrian army has not allowed foreign reporters into the Alawite villages to check the massacre reports, but in Latakia city the Guardian spoke to three officers who took part in recapturing the villages. Each was interviewed in separate locations. Two were relaxing off-duty in beach-front hotels and villas. They spoke of executions and other atrocities.
Rebel Infighting: Secular & extremists clash as radicalism grips Syria
Voters to Decide Limits On Patients per Nurse
Up to 98,000 patients die unnecessarily in U.S. hospitals every year, 2,000 of them in Massachusetts. Bay State nurses have launched a campaign to end this travesty once and for all through a November 2014 statewide ballot question that would put safe limits on nurses’ patient assignments.
Falls, infections, medical and surgical errors—all result from the transformation of health care into an assembly line. Dozens of scientific studies in the last decade have shown how many preventable deaths are attributable to one simple fact: patients are forced to share their nurse with too many other patients.
California nurses convinced their legislature in 1999 to mandate that hospitals hire enough nurses to create safe RN-to-patient ratios, and battled on to full implementation in 2004.
Studies in 2008 and 2010 revealed marked improvements in California patient care. Nurse-researcher Linda Aiken found that “if they matched California ratios in medical and surgical units, New Jersey hospitals would have 13.9 percent fewer patient deaths and Pennsylvania 10.6 percent fewer deaths.”
The Massachusetts Nurses Association/National Nurses United began fighting for similar limits, but years of legislative campaigns were repeatedly frustrated.
So now MNA members are sidestepping the legislature—where hospital companies wield so much power—and taking the question straight to the people.
Citigroup fined $30 million for tip-off to big clients
Massachusetts on Thursday fined Citigroup $30 million for improperly releasing market-sensitive information on an Apple supplier to large clients including hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors.
In December 2012 Taiwan-based Citigroup Global Markets analyst Kevin Chang divulged to a handful of clients a lowered production forecast for Apple iPhones and iPads made by supplier Hon Hai a day before the research was published, the state said.
The publication of the revised forecast suggesting lower demand for Apple products helped to propel a 5.2 percent drop in Apple’s share price over a two-day period.
Massachusetts alleged that SAC Capital; Citadel, another hedge fund; and T. Rowe Price sold Apple stock after receiving the information and before it was released to the public. A fourth firm, hedge fund GLG Partners, also received the early tip-off.
Coming Soon? An Occupy Wall Street Debit Card
To mark the second anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement last month, an assortment of protests, marches and rallies were held, to support or oppose mostly predictable causes.
At the same time, a far more surprising undertaking began with far less fanfare: creating a prepaid Occupy debit card. ...
But not everyone associated with the Occupy movement likes the idea; the notion of the Occupy name emblazoned on a financial product, even one made by people with some connection to the movement, has prompted questions about who controls the name and message. ...
The cooperative has also drawn criticism over its plan to establish a relationship with Visa, which some activists condemn because the company declined to process donations to WikiLeaks, the international organization known for publishing leaked information, much of it classified. ...
While some organizers acknowledged that the debit cards could be put to good use, they said the term “Occupy Card” wrongly implied that the project had been vetted and approved by the movement as a whole.
The Evening Greens
What The Government Shutdown Means For The Environment
The U.S. government was officially shut down yesterday, and those responsible for the shutdown are already singing its praises. Among other things, they were finally able to achieve their years-long goal of shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), even if only temporarily. ...
While the government remains shut down, less than 1,100 of the EPA’s 16,205 employees will remain on the job, which means that less than 7% of the agency will be functioning as normal. While officials claim that law enforcement, public health, and property protection employees will still be working, if the agency runs out of contingency money, those employees too could soon be off the clock.
However, according to The Washington Post, the agency will not be monitoring air and water quality during the shut down, a note that runs contradictory to the claim that public health and safety employees will still be working. This could easily give industry a free pass to surpass acceptable pollution levels when they know they won’t have anyone looking over their shoulder.
Nobel Laureates to EU: Classify Tar Sands Oil As 'Dirty Fuel' It Is
There is no proposed pipeline to pump Canada's tar sands oil direct to customers in Europe, but that hasn't kept twenty-one Nobel Prize laureates from demanding the European Union make a stand against the dirty and damaging fuel source.
In a letter this week to the EU president José Manuel Barroso, EU ministers and heads of state, the prominent group of peace advocates and scientists implored the government leaders to enact a law that would classify the heavy bitumen that comes from tar sands mining as a dirtier fuel than conventional crude oil. Such a move, the letter argues, would provide incentives for cleaner energy choices within the EU and also help discourage further development of Canada's destructive tar sands industry.
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'
The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ
Gloria Steinem does a 180
A Little Night Music
Mercy Dee Walton - One Room Country Shack
Mercy Dee - Red Light
Mercy Dee Walton - Dark Muddy Bottom
Mercy Dee - Have You Ever Been Out In The Country
Mercy Dee And Lady Fox - Get to gettin'
Mercy Dee Walton - Please Understand
Mercy Dee Walton - The Main Event
Mercy Dee - Lonesome cabin blues
Mercy Dee And Lady Fox - Rent Man Blues
Mercy Dee - My Woman Knows the Score
Mercy Dee - Danger Zone
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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