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 the legendary musician Ray Charles. Enjoy!
Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack
“The way our government treats Americans is no longer inspiring to other peoples but rather it appalls them. German Chancellor Angela Merkel accused Barack Obama of running a STASI domestic spying operation via the NSA. (The STASI were the feared East German domestic surveillance organization, which kept files on most citizens and encouraged their neighbors to inform on them). Indian crowds are protesting over having their diplomat strip-searched. The spectacle of the humiliation of once-free Americans by an increasingly tyrannical incipient police state is causing other democracies to cringe in disgust.”
-- Juan Cole
News and Opinion
Ex-CIA Director Calls For Snowden To Be “Hanged By His Neck Until He Is Dead”
Former CIA Director James Woolsey has one wish for the holidays: for Edward Snowden to be tried for treason and “hanged.” That was Woolsey’s response to the suggestion of amnesty for Snowden. Of course, the National Intelligence Director can commit perjury and CIA officials can lie to Congress without nary an investigation let alone prosecution. Intelligence officials can run a torture program in violation of treaties and international law without punishment. CIA officials can openly destroy evidence so that it cannot be used against them in a criminal case and continue in office without penalty. The CIA director can even reveal classified evidence to a filmmaker working on a pro-torture movie. All of that is perfectly correct, but Snowden must die.
Woolsey was appearing with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton when he proclaimed that Snowden “should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead.”
Vindication for Snowden? Obama Panel Backs Major Curbs on NSA Surveillance, Phone Record Data Mining
Obama review panel: strip NSA of power to collect phone data records
The National Security Agency should be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet and stripped of its power to collect telephone records in bulk, a White House review panel recommended on Wednesday.
In a 300-page report prepared for President Obama, the panel made 46 recommendations, including that the authority for spying on foreign leaders should be granted at a higher level than at present. ...
The White House was stung into releasing the report weeks earlier than expected after meeting America’s largest internet companies on Tuesday. The firms warned that failure to rebuild public trust in communications privacy could damage the US economy. ...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the privacy advocates suing the Obama administration over the bulk surveillance, expressed disappointment with the review group report. “The review board floats a number of interesting reform proposals, and we're especially happy to see them condemn the NSA's attacks on encryption and other security systems people rely upon,” attorney Kurt Opsahl said.
“But we’re disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue untargeted spying. Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers.”
McGovern: NSA Consistently Violates its Oath to Uphold the 4th Amendment
The Snowden Effect, Continued
The review panel put together by the president in the wake of the revelations of NSA skulduggery -- a panel that did not impress the invaluable Marcy Wheeler not one bit -- has released its report and its recommendations and, from early reports, the recommendations sound like they were written by 20 politicians, 15 spies, 10 lawyers, and five human-resource directors. ...
The problems are ongoing and manifest. These recommendations are just that. The White House can tell the panel to pound sand. And, even if it doesn't, there is no reason on god's earth why anyone should believe that the NSA actually would abide by any agreement going forward.
NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Details Gov’t Retaliation After Helping Expose "Gross Mismanagement"
AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Kirk Wiebe worked for the NSA for 32 years. Did he have—once he realized—once Edward Snowden realized what was going on, what were his options? And what protections, Kirk, did he have? You wrote a piece, "Who Broke the Law, Snowden or the NSA?" Was Edward Snowden protected as a NSA contractor? ...
KIRK WIEBE: No, he did not. It’s important to realize first that there are no formal whistleblower protections for members of the United States intelligence community—not just NSA, but DIA, CIA, all of the components of intelligence in the government structure. None of those employees have formal whistleblower rights.
Now, are there any logical paths one could take? Yes, the inspector general. There’s one at the NSA. But if you believe the director of NSA is at least in part a culprit in the wrongdoing, that IG works for him. So if you really want to put the director of NSA on report as having made high-level decisions playing in this whole privacy issue, you must then go above the director of NSA, which is the IG resident with the U.S. Department of Defense—
AMY GOODMAN: Inspector general.
KIRK WIEBE: —since NSA is an agency subordinate to the DOD. And that’s what we did. We did the 2002 complaint to DOD IG, even though that report was heavily classified and really very few people saw it. It was designed to be buried, because it was very embarrassing to the NSA. So, it didn’t—the IG function really was no function. So, if you think Snowden had a path through the IG, he didn’t. These things are there. They’re almost cosmetic. There are investigations, lots of reports written, but they’re buried, hidden from public view, when they don’t come out favorably.
India Flap derives from America’s Gulag Practices and Far-Right Supreme Court
The militarization of American police and humiliating practices of routine strip and cavity searches are the real culprits in the current diplomatic dispute between the United States and India. Police not only arrested the Indian deputy consul, Devyani Khobragade, who claims diplomatic immunity, on a minor visa and domestic labor charge, they put her in the general prison population and subjected her to a strip search.
Americans think of themselves as brave rugged individualists who enjoy the liberties of an Enlightenment constitution. In fact, they most often are timid and cowed in the face of the world’s most powerful government, which increasingly acts like a medieval tyrant. ... Not only does the US have an enormous number of people in jail but they subject arrestees (people not convicted of a crime) to routine strip and cavity searches. Women are often forced to be naked in front of the other inmates and to spread their labia for a policewoman.
These practices have been challenged. The ninth district federal appeals court in California decades ago found LAPD routine body cavity searches unconstitutional. But last year, our Supreme Court– the same one that thinks corporations are people, that doesn’t think big money campaign donors should have to identify themselves, and thinks it is all right for traditionally discriminatory states to pass voter suppression laws against minorities– weighed in. It found constitutional routine strip searches even in minor traffic violations cases. ...
So the strip search to which the deputy Indian consul in New York was subjected was just business as usual in the United States. She is not accused of carrying a weapon or being violent, but rather of underpaying her hired help. That charge is not frivolous, but it wouldn’t obviously call for a search in her internal organs.
IBM sued for cooperating with NSA for spy program
IBM is being sued by one of its shareholders over its alleged failure to disclose its involvement in the US National Security Agency's (NSA) spy program and subsequent loss of business.
According to Reuters, the Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension and Relief Fund is suing the technology giant's CEO Virginia Rometty and CFO Mark Loughridge for failing to reveal the risk of tying the company to the NSA.
In November, the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington noted that IBM, along with Cisco and Microsoft, appeared to be stonewalled by China in response to media reports that US companies were aiding the NSA.
IBM reported a 22 percent revenue loss from China in October, and a 4 percent drop in its Q3 profits. In September, Microsoft also noted that China is its weakest market.
54 Civil Liberties and Public Interest Organizations Oppose the FISA Improvements Act
Fifty-four civil liberties and public interest groups sent a letter to Congressional leadership Wednesday opposing S. 1631, the FISA Improvements Act. The bill, promoted by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), seeks to legalize and extend NSA mass surveillance programs, including the classified phone records surveillance program confirmed by documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden this summer.
On Monday, a federal judge found the phone records program that Senator Feinstein’s bill supports was likely unconstitutional. In a sharply worded opinion, Judge Leon explained, “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval.”
Senator Feinstein has been promoting the bill as a way to rein in NSA overreach, but legal experts have criticized the bill for attempting to sanction the worst of the surveillance abuses. The letter published today calls on members of Congress to reject the FISA Improvements Act and champion reform that would end mass surveillance by the NSA.
Signers included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Greenpeace USA, PEN American Center, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, TechFreedom, and others.
Secret CIA Torture Report Exposed by Senator
A member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday disclosed the existence of a secret Central Intelligence Agency document that committee members believe supports their conclusions in a study highly critical of "waterboarding" and other harsh counterterrorism practices.
Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, demanded the document - a CIA study of the interrogation techniques - at a confirmation hearing for Caroline Krass, President Barack Obama's nominee to be the CIA's general counsel.
Udall said he would not support Krass' nomination until the previously undisclosed document was provided, raising the possibility that he might use a "hold" to stop the nomination.
Senate report warns of vast data mining 'behind veil of secrecy
The Senate Commerce Committee released a report Wednesday warning of the harms of firms that silently track and label consumers for marketing purposes.
The report — based on an investigation of nine companies that Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) initiated last year — focuses on data brokers, or companies that track consumers online and offline, and encourages continued oversight of the industry from lawmakers. ...
Data brokers typically collect and sell information without consumers’ knowledge — including about purchasing history and social media activity — and that information can be used to target “vulnerable customers,” according to the report. ...
The Committee found that data brokers collect information on consumers purchases, health information and social media activity and get their information from publicly available data sources, social media platforms, direct input from consumers and agreements with other data-collecting companies, including retailers and financial institutions.
West doesn't mind if Assad stays as extremists massacre Syria
Secret detention part of Syria 'campaign of terror:' U.N.
Syrian activists and other citizens have vanished into secret detention as part of a "widespread campaign of terror against the civilian population" by the Damascus government, U.N. investigators said on Thursday.
The state-run practice of enforced disappearances in Syria - abductions that are officially denied - is systematic enough to amount to a crime of humanity, they said in a report.
Some armed groups in northern Syria, especially the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), have also abducted people into incommunicado detention and denied their captivity, tantamount to the crime of enforced disappearances, it said.
In a separate report, London-based Amnesty International said ISIL was perpetrating "a shocking catalogue of abuses" in secret jails across northern Syria, including torture, flogging and killings after summary trials. ...
"After years in which they were prey to the brutality of the Assad regime, the people of Raqqa and Aleppo are now suffering under a new form of tyranny imposed on them by ISIL, in which arbitrary detention, torture and executions have become the order of the day," [Philip] Luther [Amnesty's Director for the Middle East and North Africa] said.
With The Lights On, 99 Senators Voted Against Wall Street. The Lights Went Off And They All Fled
The nation’s biggest banks have quietly dodged a measure expressing Congress’s desire to eliminate the unfair advantages they may enjoy because they're perceived as “too big to fail.”
The provision, aimed at institutions with more than $500 billion in assets, was sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), and passed the Senate in March by a 99-0 vote in a show of lawmakers’ reluctance to be tagged as big-bank sympathizers. ... Despite the unanimous vote in the Senate, congressional negotiators declined to include it in the bipartisan budget deal hammered out by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Instead, negotiators included a measure sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) that effectively declares that no bank should be too big to jail.
No one has explained why. ...
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of three lawmakers to co-sponsor Vitter’s amendment, said, “The budget deal provided Congress with a chance to address the problem of ‘too big to fail’ banks and the unfair taxpayer subsidies they receive. It failed to do so.
“Our amendment was approved 99-0 in the light of day, and then removed in the dark. It should have been included in the budget deal,” Brown added.
Mayor Bloomberg On Homeless Girl Featured In The New York Times: ‘That’s Just The Way God Works’
Outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I-NY) went on the defensive when asked whether he was moved by the New York Times’ powerful series on a homeless family struggling to survive in New York City. Bloomberg defended his homelessness policies and claimed that 11-year-old Dasani, the star of the piece, ended up in dire straits due to bad luck.
“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” he told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.” ...
The New York Times series explicitly tied Bloomberg’s homelessness policies to Dasani’s destitute situation. “The Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant,” the Times’ Andrea Elliott wrote. “They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent.”
As a result, Dasani’s family and others like hers found themselves unable to escape the shelter system. Homelessness swelled by 60 percent during Bloomberg’s term, despite his vow to reduce the city’s homeless population by two-thirds in five years. The mayor told the New York Times last year that families were staying in shelters longer because he had improved them to be “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before” — a quote that stood in stark contrast with Elliott’s descriptions of Dasani’s decrepit shelter, which is still operating after inspectors cited it for violations 400 times.
Workplace loans turn Americans into slaves
How America Created a Low-Wage Work Swamp
For decades, both parties supplanted a push for higher wages with well-intended public aid. The result: calamity
The U.S. now has the highest proportion of low-wage workers in the developed world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. One in four make less than two-thirds of the median wage, which is the same proportion that rely on public aid. It’s becoming more widely accepted that the spread and persistence of low-wage work is behind rising income inequality and reduced social mobility. What’s less well known is the role Democrats have played in creating this trap. ...
The truth is, a bipartisan consensus emerged in the 1990s, that a job, practically any job, was better than long-term public assistance for so-called “able-bodied” adults, including mothers with young children. It led to controversial 1996 welfare reform legislation that had ramifications way beyond the realm of welfare.
Republicans demanded work from welfare recipients; (most) Democrats went along, but demanded new support for low-wage workers: an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, wider Medicaid and food stamp eligibility, new (though not nearly sufficient) child care subsidies. (As an Illinois state senator, Obama was critical, but later endorsed the deal.) The new support programs also helped millions of low-wage workers who never relied on welfare; as wages continued to stagnate and even decline, more people became eligible.
But as labor advocates began to realize and protest the extent to which employers were relying on taxpayers to support their workforce a decade ago, some liberals told them not to worry about it. Responding to an earlier wave of organizing against Wal-Mart’s labor practices, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors chair, Jason Furman, wrote a hugely influential 2005 paper, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story.” (Eight years later, it sounds like he was trolling us.) The former Clinton economic advisor argued that the big box chain’s low prices helped poor people, and that its employees’ reliance on public assistance wasn’t a bug but a feature of progressive social policy.
Furman credited President Clinton with presiding over “the transformation of our social safety net from a support for the indigent to a system that makes work pay… expansions in support for low-income workers, including a more generous Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and efforts to ensure that children did not lose their Medicaid if their parents took a low-paid job.” Essentially, Wal-Mart employees’ reliance on such programs represented good social democratic policy, Furman argued. And in a memorable exchange with Barbara Ehrenreich in Slate, he chided Wal-Mart’s progressive critics for “playing on the atavistic anti-welfare, anti-government, anti-tax instincts of some conservatives.” (Leave it to a Clinton-era Democrat to blame progressives for the well-established “atavistic anti-welfare instincts” of the right.)
Sen. Warren Aims to Fix 'One More Way the System Is Rigged'
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced legislation on Tuesday that would ban the widespread practice of employers using prospective employees' credit ratings as a basis for hiring, a practice she said is "one more way in which the system is rigged."
A 2012 poll by the Society for Human Resource Management found that nearly half of all employers used credit checks in the hiring process. ...
"A bad credit rating is far more often the result of unexpected medical costs, unemployment, economic downturns, or other bad breaks than it is a reflection on an individual’s character or abilities. Families have not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and too many Americans are still searching for jobs. This is about basic fairness—let people compete on the merits, not on whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills," Warren stated.
Jobless claims rise to near nine-month high
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level in nearly nine months, casting a shadow on the labor market.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 379,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was the highest level since March and marked the second straight week that claims have risen.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected first-time applications to fall to 334,000 last week.
The four-week moving average for new claims, which irons out week-to-week volatility, increased 13,250 to 343,500.
The Evening Greens
Bill McKibben finally calls out Obama for being a corporate tool
Bill McKibben: Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story
Two years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: "Time to end the tyranny of oil"; "In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow."
Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it's looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we've begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine. ...
When the world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change. ...
Obama loyalists argue that [what Obama has done is] as much as you could expect from a president saddled with the worst Congress in living memory. But that didn't mean that the president had to make the problem worse, which he's done with stunning regularity.
Big Oil Wins Big in Budget Deal
After two years of standoffs, a budget sequester, and a government shutdown earlier this year, bipartisan budget legislation has finally breezed through Congress and is expected to be signed by President Obama today. But while the avoidance of another government shutdown in January is certainly welcome news, the budget deal’s implications for U.S. energy policy and the climate are sobering.
By the Obama Administration’s own estimates, eliminating subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries could have increased federal revenue by more than $4 billion in 2014. More inclusive studies put the value of subsidies – which include tax breaks, cheap access to government land, and many other provisions that favor the fossil fuel industry – even higher, with estimates ranging between $14 and $52 billion per year. Yet instead of closing these loopholes to make fossil fuel corporations pay their fair share to the federal government, the budget deal extends dirty energy subsidies while slashing support for clean energy.
The oil and gas industry makes out particularly well, with the vast majority of its generous subsidies preserved under the new budget. Taking a closer look, only a handful of provisions directly affect the industry
Carl Sagan - Who Speaks for Earth
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
My day at the NSA: A pr campaign for secret surveillance programs
In Praise of Independent Judges, from Learned Hand to Richard J. Leon
Christian anarchists ruin Christmas by stealing bikini calendars in Jesus’ name
Has the Great Barrier Reef just been approved for destruction by the Australian government?
This is Why Capitalism Chose China to be the World's Manufacturer
The pitchforks are coming out in Europe
The American People Are Very "Unserious," Pew Poll Finds
A Little Night Music
Ray Charles - What'd I say
Ray Charles - I Got A Woman
The Blues Brothers - Shake A Tail Feather
Ray Charles - A Fool For You
Ray Charles - Basin Street Blues
Ray Charles - That Lucky Old Sun
James Booker - Lonely Avenue
Night time Is The Right Time
Ray Charles - Let's Go Get Stoned
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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