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.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Chicago bluesman Magic Slim. Enjoy!
Magic Slim & the Teardrops - Going to Mississippi
“Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.”
-- Giuseppe Prezzolini
News and Opinion
Shutdown Standoff Shows Signs of a Thaw
Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, outlined a plan Wednesday to fellow conservatives to extend the nation's borrowing limit for four to six weeks, paired with a framework for broader deficit-reduction talks, according to lawmakers briefed on the proposal. The greater the spending reduction the talks produced, the longer the next extension of the debt ceiling would be under Mr. Ryan's plan.
Top House Republicans prepared to head to the White House Thursday to discuss the issues underlying the standoff that has resulted in the nine-day partial government shutdown and that now threatens the country's ability to borrow.
The White House said the session isn't a negotiation, in keeping with Mr. Obama's demand that lawmakers raise the debt ceiling and fully reopen the government without conditions before policy talks are held. But the meeting may allow House Republicans to say they had a policy conversation with the president, which they have been saying is a condition of resolving the impasse. ...
Mr. Obama said Tuesday—and again in a Wednesday meeting with House Democrats—that he was open to a short-term debt-limit increase. ... At the White House meeting Wednesday, Mr. Obama told House Democrats they "need to be prepared to give and take" and reminded them "we weren't going to win everything," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.), who attended the session. The president, he said, seemed to express "some sympathy for the position Republicans have put themselves in."
A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning
Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government. ...
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight.
Koch Industries deflects blame on government shutdown
Koch Industries, the multibillion-dollar company led by David and Charles Koch, tried to distance itself Wednesday from any blame for the government shutdown and congressional quagmire.
But doing so requires some explaining given the long track record that the Koch brothers have of supporting conservative Republican causes.
In a letter sent to Senate offices Wednesday, the company’s president of government and public affairs, Philip Ellender, said claims that Koch Industries pushed for a shutdown are “erroneous or misleading.” ...
Ellender, seeking to separate the company controlled by the Koch brothers from the Koch brothers themselves, wrote that Koch Industries is focused on “educating the public about reducing our nation’s debt and controlling runaway government spending.”
Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said that Ellender was technically correct in his effort to distinguish the company from the brothers.
But, she said, “it’s a distinction without a difference.”
Some longtime Republican donors are unnerved by the GOP’s shutdown strategy
Veteran Republican fundraisers are increasingly alarmed by the defiant stance of hard-line conservatives amid the federal government shutdown, prompting fears that many key donors may be restrained in their giving going into the 2014 midterms.
The growing unhappiness among longtime GOP check-writers and party elders underscores the deepening divisions over the ascendant tea party wing, which fueled this past week’s shutdown and is demanding Democratic concessions in exchange for reopening the government and raising the nation’s debt limit.
The tensions bubbled up this past week at a three-day gathering in Washington for backers of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the GOP-allied groups founded with the help of strategist Karl Rove that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the past two elections. ...
One top party fundraiser said the Wall Street financiers and corporate executives he counts on for support are “having fits” over the GOP’s brinkmanship strategy, especially related to a potential default if Congress does not agree to raise the debt ceiling later this month.
“The donors I raise money from understand the vital importance of credit markets and are upset that the U.S. credit system is being put at risk,” said the fundraiser, who requested anonymity because of his position in the business world.
Handicapping the outcomes, this author argues that since the Fed used the emergency, "exigent circumstances" clause in the Fed Act to save Bear Stearns, the Fed is quite likely to invoke that authority again to save the larger economy from the idiocy of the politicians:
The Most Likely Debt Ceiling Outcome
The US government will not default because, if the Congress can’t come to its senses, then the adults at the Fed and Treasury will simply circumvent their authority in an effort to avoid calamity. They have no choice because they either have to break the 14th amendment or the Fed Act (which is arguable to begin with given that the exigent circumstances clause is extremely vague).
[Explanation in the comment section:]
What the Fed did with Bear Stearns was highly controversial. They utilized the same clause without technically breaking any laws. Are we saying that we will bailout a stupid investment bank, but we won’t bailout the US Treasury using the same clause? That would be madness.
The point is, we’re going to break a law here no matter what. So we might as well put the pressure on the Fed instead of forcing the Tsy to break the law by breaching the debt ceiling. Instead, you actually have the Fed issue the loans so the Tsy breaks the debt ceiling, but it’s the Fed who’s really in the driver’s seat here. So all the attention will be on the fed breaking the Fed Act. It’s as clean a way around all this mess as there is.
'Gestapo' tactics meet senior citizens at Yellowstone
Pat Vaillancourt went on a trip last week that was intended to showcase some of America’s greatest treasures.
Instead, the Salisbury resident said she and others on her tour bus witnessed an ugly spectacle that made her embarrassed, angry and heartbroken for her country.
Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.
The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.
When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route.
“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm.
Report Finds Police Worldwide Criminalize Dissent, Assert New Powers in Crackdown on Protests
In a major new report, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations details a global crackdown on peaceful protests through excessive police force and the criminalization of dissent. The report, "Take Back the Streets: Repression and Criminalization of Protest Around the World," warns of a growing tendency to perceive individuals exercising a fundamental democratic right — the right to protest — as a threat requiring a forceful government response. The case studies detailed in this report show how governments have reacted to peaceful protests in the United States, Israel, Canada, Argentina, Egypt, Hungary, Kenya, South Africa and Britain.
Obama's efforts to control leaks 'most aggressive since Nixon', report finds
Barack Obama has pursued the most aggressive "war on leaks" since the Nixon administration, according to a report published on Thursday that says the administration's attempts to control the flow of information is hampering the ability of journalists to do their jobs.
The author of the study, the former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, says the administration's actions have severely hindered the release of information that could be used to hold it to account. ...
"Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records," the report says.
This had a chilling effect on government accountability, even on matters that were less sensitive, it said.
David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and one of 30 journalists interviewed by Downie, says in the report: "This is the most closed, control-freak administration I've ever covered."
US Whistleblowers Converge in Moscow to Honor Snowden as Truth-Teller
Snowden, accompanied by Sarah Harrison of Wikileaks, met with four U.S. intelligence and security officials-turned-whistleblowers in the Russian capital on Wednesday. The former NSA operative personally received an award for ‘Integrity in Intelligence,' granted by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence—an organization of U.S. whistleblowers. This award has been given each year since 2002 to intelligence officials who 'speak truth to power,' Consortium News reports.
The delegates who delivered the award—Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Andrews Drake, Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley—say they met with a man who demonstrated striking confidence in the decision he made to expose dragnet surveillance on the part of the NSA and governments around the world, despite the personal hardship and global manhunt he has faced since taking this action.
“He’s convinced that what he did was right," former CIA analyst turned whistleblower McGovern said of the meeting, RT reports. "He has no regrets. And he’s willing to face whatever the future holds for him."
'US unchained itself from constitution': Whistleblowers on RT after meeting Snowden
Beware the business-as-usual brigade's efforts to sabotage new NSA oversight
[From remarks by Ron Wyden at a Cato Institute conference]
Now is the time for Americans to demand safeguards to liberty, for the enemies of surveillance reform are out to thwart us
A good way to measure the credibility of scholars and thinkers in Washington is by watching to see whether they stay true to their views regardless of the impact that their views have on partisan politics. That's why Cato scholars like Jim Harper and Julian Sanchez are go-to leaders on the issues of security and liberty. Big thanks for inviting me today.
This conference could not be more timely. The Senate intelligence committee will soon be marking up a new surveillance bill, and the House and Senate judiciary committees are working on legislation, as well. Two weeks ago, a bipartisan group of senators – myself included – kicked off this debate by introducing the first comprehensive surveillance reform bill to follow the June disclosures. Our legislation would end the bulk collection of Americans' records, close the backdoor searches loophole that allows Americans' communications to be reviewed without a warrant, make the Fisa court operate more like a court worthy of the United States, and expand the ability of our citizens to have their grievances heard in federal courts.
I know these issues will be discussed here today, so I'll start with my bottom line: the goal of our bipartisan bill is to set the bar for measuring meaningful intelligence reform. We wanted to put this marker down early because we know in the months ahead we will be up against a "business-as-usual brigade" – made up of influential members of the government's intelligence leadership, their allies in thinktanks and academia, retired government officials, and sympathetic legislators. Their game plan? Try mightily to fog up the surveillance debate and convince the Congress and the public that the real problem here is not overly intrusive, constitutionally flawed domestic surveillance, but sensationalistic media reporting. Their end game is ensuring that any surveillance reforms are only skin-deep.
FBI pushed Lavabit founder to provide information they were not entitled to under court order
Lavabit’s founder offered to work with the American authorities if they would pay him $3,500 for his time, according to documents unsealed by the US courts. ...
The order only covered email metadata, and so content and passwords would not have been provided. “The headers I currently plan to collect are: To, Cc, From, Date, Reply-To, Sender, Received, Return-Path, Apparently-To and Alternate-Recipient.” ...
Levison also explained that his motivations were driven by the knowledge that the FBI had tried to get him to reveal information not covered by the court order.
In his 28 June meeting with the FBI, where he was served with the trap and trace order, he said he was told that “they would be collecting content and passwords, which really caused a lot of friction with me. If they had been more honest and said that at that point they were only trying to collect metadata, the situation may have developed differently.
“It was a textbook example of the FBI lying to me in order to get more information, and it ended up backfiring… I think they really wanted that information, I just know, retroactively, that they didn’t have authorisation from the court to collect it.”
Glenn Greenwald to publish Snowden leaks on France and Spain
Testifying before a Brazilian congressional panel, Greenwald accused Washington and its allies of waging a “war against journalism and the process of transparency.”
“I am learning now that the United States is using this surveillance system to punish the journalistic process,” said Greenwald, who, without elaborating, added he was working on material relating to France and Spain.
“We are undertaking high-risk journalism. We shall continue doing so until we publish the last document I have,” Greenwald told senators investigating allegations that Washington spied on Brasilia.
“I am not holding onto relevant documents nor hiding information. All that I had regarding surveillance against Brazil, and now France — I am working with French and Spanish newspapers — I publish. I don’t hold onto it,” he said in Portuguese.
New York Fed fired examiner who refused to go soft on Goldman Sachs: report
In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem. ...
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.
“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.” ...
In hours of interviews with ProPublica, the 41-year-old lawyer gave a detailed account of the events that preceded her dismissal and provided numerous documents, meeting minutes and contemporaneous notes that support her claims. ... Segarra is an expert in legal and regulatory compliance whose previous work included jobs at Citigroup and the French bank Société Générale. She was part of a wave of new examiners hired by the New York Fed to monitor systemically important banks after passage in July 2010 of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, which gave the Fed new oversight responsibilities.
Janet Yellen pledges to help hardest-hit Americans
Barack Obama’s choice for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, pledged to help those hardest hit by the recession and safeguard the financial system, at the official announcement of her nomination on Wednesday. ...
Yellen said she was “honored and humbled” by the appointment. If she is approved by the Senate, Yellen will be the first woman to head the Fed in its 100-year history.
“The past six years have been tumultuous,” she said. “While I think we will agree that more needs to be done to help those hardest hit by the recession, we have made progress,” she said. However, she added that “many Americans still can’t find a job and worry that they can’t pay their bills.”
Yellen also highlighted the Fed’s regulatory role. “We can and must safeguard the financial system,” she said.
Austerity pushing Europe into social and economic decline
Europe is sinking into a protracted period of deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair as a result of austerity policies adopted in response to the debt and currency crisis of the past four years, according to an extensive study being published on Thursday.
"Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it," says the 68-page report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us."
The damning critique, obtained exclusively by the Guardian, of the policy response to the debt crisis that surfaced in Greece in late 2009 and raised fundamental questions about the viability of the euro single currency, foresees extremely gloomy prospects for tens of millions of Europeans.
Mass unemployment – especially among the young, 120 million Europeans living in or at risk of poverty – increased waves of illegal immigration clashing with rising xenophobia in the host countries, growing risks of social unrest and political instability estimated to be two to three times higher than most other parts of the world, greater levels of insecurity among the traditional middle classes – all combine to make a European future more uncertain than at any time in the postwar era.
3 Months After Morsi Coup & Hundreds of Deaths, U.S. Scales Back Military Aid to Egypt
The Evening Greens
Are Utility Companies Out to Destroy Solar's 'Rooftop Revolution'?
In the nation's largest state, California, the major utility companies are trying to limit growth.
Of rooftop solar panels, that is.
According to reporting by Bloomberg, the state's three largest utilities—Edison International, PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy—are "putting up hurdles" to homeowners who have installed sun-powered energy systems, especially those with "battery backups wired to solar panels," in order to slow the spread of what has become a threat to their dominant business model.
Bloomberg reports:
Matthew Sperling, a Santa Barbara, California, resident, installed eight panels and eight batteries at his home in April.
“We wanted to have an alternative in case of a blackout to keep the refrigerator running,” he said in an interview. Southern California Edison rejected his application to link the system to the grid even though city inspectors said “it was one of the nicest they’d ever seen,” he said.
The utilities argue that customers with solar energy-storing batteries might be rigging the system by fraudulently storing conventional energy sent in from the utility grid, storing it in the batteries, and then sending it back to the grid for credit. ... What environmentalists and solar energy advocates see is the utility companies putting barriers up to a decentralized system they will not no longer be able to control or profit from.
Shift to a new climate likely by middle of the century, study finds
Billions of people could be living in regions where temperatures are hotter than their historical ranges by mid-century, creating a "new normal" that could force profound changes on nature and society, scientists said on Wednesday.
Temperatures in an average year would be hotter by 2047, give or take 14 years, than those in the warmest year from 1860-2005 if the greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, with the tropics the first affected area, a new index indicated.
"The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon," lead author Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii said. "Within my generation whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past." ...
In all, the scientists found that between 1 and 5 billion people would be living in regions outside such limits of historical variability, underscoring the impact already under way from a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases.
"Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries," according to the study in the journal Nature that urged cuts in greenhouse gases to limit damage to human society and wildlife.
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'
How The NSA Deploys Malware: An In-Depth Look at the New Revelations
Fact: the NSA gets negligible intel from Americans' metadata. So end collection
A Little Night Music
Magic Slim & the Teardrops - I'm a Bluesman
Magic Slim & the Teardrops - Crazy Woman
Magic Slim feat. Keb' Mo' - Help Me/The blues is alright
Magic Slim & The Teardrops - I Got Some Money
Magic Slim & The Teardrops - Ship Made Of Paper
Magic Slim & The Teardrops, Vienna 1991
Before You 'Cuse Me, You Upset Me Baby, I Ain't Doin' Too Bad, Talk To Me Baby
Magic Slim & The Teardrops - Hard Luck Blues
Magic Slim - Teardrop
Magic Slim & The Teardrops, "Gotta Love Somebody"
Magic Slim - Cold Women With Warm Hearts
Magic Slim - Bad Boy
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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