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 Chicago bluesman Fenton Robinson. Enjoy!
Fenton Robinson - Somebody Loan Me A Dime
“Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
-- Jeffrey Rosen
News and Opinion
Another neocon fearleader steps up to shake the pom-poms of doom.
Hat tip dharmafarmer:
Eliott Abrams Calls privacy advocates "Hysterical," Thinks another terrorist attack would be useful
There’s a kind of hysteria developing this week, and only two things can stop it. One is leadership. ...
The second thing that could stop or reverse this drive to prevent NSA from doing its work would be another terrorist attack. Then, just as after 9/11, there would be calls for more active intelligence gathering, and we would find ourselves asking “who were the fools who stopped us from collecting the data we need? Who stopped us from collecting and connecting the dots?”
Bruce Schneier and Eben Moglen discuss a post-Snowden Internet
GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germans, Israeli PM and EU chief
• Unicef and Médecins du Monde were on surveillance list
• Targets went well beyond potential criminals and terrorists
• Revelations could cause embarrassment at EU summit
British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU's competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top secret documents reveal.
The papers show GCHQ, in collaboration with America's National Security Agency (NSA), was targeting organisations such as the United Nations development programme, the UN's children's charity Unicef and Médecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones. The head of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) also appears in the documents, along with text messages he sent to colleagues. ...
One GCHQ document, drafted in January 2009, makes clear the agencies were targeting an email address listed as belonging to another key American ally – the "Israeli prime minister". Ehud Olmert was in office at the time. Three other Israeli targets appeared on GCHQ documents, including another email address understood to have been used to send messages between the then Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, and his chief of staff, Yoni Koren.
Britain's targeting of Germany may also prove awkward for the prime minister, David Cameron; in October, he endorsed an EU statement condemning NSA spying on world leaders, including Merkel. They have both been in Brussels, attending an EU summit that concludes on Friday.
Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts
Matt Blaze has been pointing out that when you read the new White House intelligence task force report and its recommendations on how to reform the NSA and the wider intelligence community, that there may be hints to other excesses not yet revealed by the Snowden documents. ...
In the recommendation concerning increasing security in online communications, the second sub-point sticks out like a sore thumb:
Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial system.
... It seems a bit odd to come out of the blue like that, and certainly suggests that this particular bullet point likely came as a result of a rather specific thing that came up during the task force's review.
Congressmen seek investigation into Clapper's false testimony on NSA
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should face consequences for lying to Congress, say members of the House Judiciary Committee.
Seven of the panel's members, including USA Patriot Act author Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., say the veteran intelligence official lied under oath to Congress, and are calling for an investigation in to Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March of 2013. The group sent a letter to the Justice Department today requesting the investigation. ...
“Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony—witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress,” the letter reads. “Accordingly, we request you investigate Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s ‘erroneous’ statements to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence earlier this year.
The NSA review panel didn't answer the real question: was any of this legal?
President Obama's NSA review panel makes it clear that many of the things NSA has been doing are bad from a policy perspective. But the real question we should be asking is: are they legal? ...
That's what the report should have tackled, but it didn't. Instead, we have tame sounding "policy recommendations" as if this is all just a matter of political disagreement over the budget or farm bill.
A later statement on the phone dragnet is equally ambiguous:
We have not uncovered any official efforts to suppress dissent or any intent to intrude into people's private lives without legal justification.
Fine, but this leaves the possibility of unofficial efforts to suppress dissent or intruding into people's lives with dodgy legal justification.
Perhaps one signal the report won't comment on legality is it is conspicuously silent about President George Bush's "presidential" wiretap program, which top Department of Justice officials refused to authorize as lawful in 2004, in its section on legal issues. Later in the report, it briefly notes that Bush's program operated outside Fisa. Funny, that's the same thing some of President Obama's programs currently do.
NSA Surveillance Program Needs to be Torn Apart
Data brokers sell rape victim names for 7.9 cents each, congressional hearing reveals
Speaking to members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon described herself as a “moderate” when it came to data brokers, but shocking research convinced her that the industry was in need of regulation.
“The data broker industry as it is today, does not have constraints and it does not have shame,” she explained. “It will sell any information about any person regardless of sensitivity for 7.9 cents a name, which is the price of a list of rape sufferers which was recently sold.”
“Lists of rape sufferers, victims of domestic violence, police officers’ home addresses, people who suffer from genetic illnesses,” Dixon continued. “Complete with names, home addresses, ethnicity, gender and many other factors. This is what’s being sold and circulated today.”
'NSA ruined it!' Brazil ditches Boeing jets, grants $4.5 bln contract to Saab
Brazil has rejected a contract for Boeing’s F/A-18 fighter jets in favor of the Swedish Saab’s JAS 39 Gripens. The unexpected move to reject the US bid comes amid the global scandal over the NSA’s involvement in economic espionage activities.
The announcement for the purchase of 36 fighters was made Wednesday by Brazilian Defense Minister Celso Amorim and Air Force Commander Junti Saito. The jets will cost US$4.5 billion, well below the estimated market value of around US$7 billion. ...
Boeing was considered to have the inside track to win the contract earlier this year, yet revelations of intrusive surveillance of global officials’ communications, including those of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, by the US government’s National Security Agency led to distrust of the American company.
“The NSA problem ruined it for the Americans,” a Brazilian government source told Reuters.
Political centrism is not objectivity
How the media wrongly treats deficit reduction as non-ideological
How should the United States choose among the difficult tradeoffs it faces in setting the federal budget? There’s no one correct answer, but you wouldn’t know it from coverage of the budget deal between Senator Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan, which passed the Senate last night and will soon be signed into law.
Under the norm of objectivity that dominates mainstream political journalism in the United States, reporters are supposed to avoid endorsing competing political viewpoints or proposals. In practice, however, journalists often treat centrist policy priorities—especially on fiscal policy—as value-neutral. That’s wrong. While it’s widely accepted that the federal government faces limits on what it can borrow in the financial markets, there is significant disagreement, including among experts, over the priority that should be given to reducing current deficit and debt levels relative to other possible policy objectives. It is, in other words, a political issue. Reporters often ignore this conflict, treating deficit-cutting as a non-ideological objective while portraying other points of view as partisan or political. That’s why it’s not accepted for reporters to explicitly advocate, say, abortion bans or recognition of gay marriage, but criticism of the president for not advocating entitlement cuts with sufficient fervor can run in a “factcheck” column. ...
The root of these problems is the philosophy of “objective” journalism itself, which forces reporters to try to draw lines between opinion and fact that often blur in real life. But even if reporters aren’t willing to rethink objectivity, they should try to understand why prioritizing deficit reduction over other competing values is a kind of ideology of its own.
Judge smacks Obama secrecy in unique FOIA case
Chastising what she called "the government’s unwarranted expansion of the presidential communications privilege at the expense of the public’s interest in disclosure," U.S. District Judge Ellen Seal Huvelle ruled the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development is not exempt from FOIA.
Judge Huvelle's 20-page decision took a shot or two, or three, at the Obama administration's penchant for secrecy.
"The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight, to engage in what is in effect governance by 'secret law,'" Huvelle wrote.
Yves has an excellent article up over at naked capitalism, well worth reading in full:
Yes Virginia, Obama and the Democrats Are Mussolini-Style Corporatists, Just Like the Republicans
Reader dSquib flagged a “bizarre” article by Mike Konczal in the New Republic titled, “Corporatism” is the Latest Hysterical Right-Wing Accusation: The secret history of a smear.” dSquib seemed quite perplexed that anyone would deem calling Obama a corporatist, which as we’ll demonstrate is patently true, a smear.
I’m actually a bit miffed that Konczal treats the “corporatism” appellation as the sole property of the right wing (in the style sheet of the Vichy Left, calling them “hysterics” is redundant but necessary for the rubes), since I have a prior claim. And what is particularly rich is that Konczal apparently regards the allusion to Mussolini to be unfair:
Right-wing critics have a new favorite word to malign President Obama’s economic policies: corporatism. Naturally, it’s an ugly word. Whether it evokes Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy or just an image of the rich growing richer through government collusion, it’s a vision nobody would defend. Nobody is for corporatism.
“Nobody is for corporatism”? Huh? Why does Konczal think K Street and “think tanks” which for the most part the arms and legs of corporations, exist? There is an entire large, well funded, and extremely effective business apparatus that extracts lucrative programs, explicit subsidies, guarantees, and various other gimmies from government bodies at all levels. Tom Ferguson has been meticulously documenting since the early 1980s how campaign finance in America works, which he calls he calls the “investment theory of politics“: that political parties in the US respond not to popular will or the interests of broader society, but the patronage of large money blocks, with certain industries preferring one party to the other.
One suspects the reason for the sensitivity within the ranks of the Democratic party water-carriers to the “corporatist” label is that Obamacare is a textbook case.
Global Elites Terrified By Income Inequality
EU Summit Blockaded Over 'Economic Poison' of Austerity
As European leaders gathered in Brussels Thursday for the EU summit, thousands of protesters marched through the streets, blocking roads and confronting police to express opposition to the free-market laissez-faire policies that have brought about harsh austerity measures, and to a pending trade deal they say puts corporate interests above those of the people.
Roughly 10,000 people gathered in central Brussels by midday in coordination with 50 citizens' groups and labor organizations know as "Alliance D19-20"—a reference to the dates of the two-day summit. ...
In addition to the anti-austerity message, protest organizers and participants also expressed opposition to a U.S.-EU trade agreement currently being negotiated known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Pizza outlet attacked as India, U.S. fail to cool diplomat row
Indian protesters ransacked a Dominos Pizza outlet in a Mumbai suburb on Friday, demanding a ban on U.S. goods as officials from the two countries struggled to defuse a row over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York.
Police and the Indian franchise of the U.S. chain said no-one was hurt in the attack, which came amid unrelenting rage in India over the arrest and subsequent strip-search of Devyani Khobragade for visa fraud and under-payment of her housekeeper.
India has demanded that the charges be dropped against the diplomat and her father threatened to start a fast if U.S. authorities pressed ahead with the case.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed regret over the case in a phone call to India's national security adviser this week, but U.S. prosecutors have defended the investigation against Khobragade and her treatment.
US war on Syria was averted, but White House appears lost on how to help wage peace
Three months after averting a military strike against Syria with a last-minute deal to deprive it of its chemical weapons arsenal, U.S. policy toward the world’s most violent conflict appears increasingly at sea. ...
“What’s really significant about this past year is that any pretence that there are important moderate, secular or liberal forces fighting in Syria has really been swept away,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, told IPS. “What you’re left with are radical forces: those behind Assad and those behind Islamist and jihadist groups.”
“America is paralysed, as well as most of the West, because they can’t support Assad, but they won’t support these radical Islamists either,” according to Landis, whose blog, Syria Comment, has an influential readership here.
That paralysis – as well as a civil war that most analysts believe remains stalemated – is of growing concern here. At least 125,000 people are believed to have been killed over the last two-and-a-half years, while 6.5 million, or a third of the population, are internally displaced.
Another 2.3 million have fled the country to neighbouring countries that are mostly ill-equipped to take them because of the demand on infrastructure and, in the cases of Lebanon and Jordan, the impact on political stability.
President Obama Orders US Troops to South Sudan
President Obama on Thursday announced that he has sent a team of combat-ready soldiers to the country of South Sudan amid growing violence and increasing talk of "civil war" in the African nation.
The death of several UN peacekeeping soldiers this week and reports of large numbers of civilian casualties as fighting intensified between militias and government soldiers on opposite sides of a recent coup attempt have stirred international focus on the country, with Obama telling Congress in a written statement that the recently formed country is "at the precipice" and the UN Security Council scheduled to hold an emergency meeting in New York on Friday to address the worsening situation.
Though framed as a both a political and ethnic power struggle, one of the clear fault lines in the growing tensions is centered around control of the country's oil fields that are located in the north, as Reuters indicates:
China National Petroleum Corp, India's ONGC Videsh and Malaysia's Petronas are the main firms running the oilfields. Total has exploration acreage in country. South Sudan, a nation the size of France, has the third largest reserves in Sub-Saharan Africa after Angola and Nigeria, according to BP.
Oil production, which had been about 245,000 barrels per day, supplies the government with most of its revenues.
Why the West loves Mandela
In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death, hosannas continue to be sung to the former ANC leader and South African president from both the left, for his role in ending the institutional racism of apartheid, and from the right, for ostensibly the same reason. But the right’s embrace of Mandela as an anti-racist hero doesn’t ring true. Is there another reason establishment media and mainstream politicians are as Mandela-crazy as the left?
According to Doug Saunders, reporter for the unabashedly big business-promoting Canadian daily, The Globe and Mail, there is. ...
Saunders writes that Mandela’s “great accomplishment” was to protect the South African economy as a sphere for exploitation by the white property-owning minority and Western corporate and financial elite from the rank-and-file demands for economic justice of the movement he led.
Saunders doesn’t put it in quite these terms, hiding the sectional interests of bond holders, land owners and foreign investors behind Mandela’s embrace of “sound” principles of economic management, but the meaning is the same.
But it was not Mandela’s betrayal of the ANC’s economic program that Saunders thinks merits the right’s admiration, though the right certainly is grateful. Mandela’s genius, according to Saunders, was that he did it “without alienating his radical followers or creating a dangerous factional struggle within his movement.”
Thus, in Saunder’s view, Mandela was a special kind of leader: one who could use his enormous prestige and charisma to induce his followers to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good of the elite that had grown rich off their sweat, going so far as to acquiesce in the repudiation of their own economic program.
One out of Every Four Activists Could Be a Corporate Spy
The Evening Greens
Indigenous Groups Win Right to Seize Chevron’s Canadian Assets over $18 Billion in Amazon Pollution
BP Attempts To Misdirect Public With Claims Of Fraud
Oil giant BP is again attempting to convince the public that the oil spill settlement process for their destruction of the Gulf of Mexico resulting from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and leak, is completely riddled with fraud.
The company filed a fraud lawsuit earlier this week to stop payments on the claim process while investigators look into the fraud allegations. According to BP, one of the law firms representing oil spill victims has been submitting and receiving payment for claimants who don’t actually exist.
The specific payments that BP is hoping to stop come from the Seafood Compensation Fund, a fund that was set up to pay fishermen and others who rely on the seafood industry as their source of income. The company says that Louisiana attorney Mikal Watts has filed 648 claims on behalf of seafood industry workers, and that 8 of those have been verified as accurate with 17 more still pending approval.
Watts’ attorney has fired back at BP, saying that Watts did nothing illegal during the spill process, and submitted the appropriate documentation for every spill claim that he has filed. BP insists that at least half of Watts’ clients don’t exist.
We Feed Cows Chicken Poop
Anyone who pays even scant attention to where our food comes from is likely aware that some pretty unsavory things happen between the farm and your fork. ... But some of these farming methods are more than just unappetizing: they could be deadly. One practice in particular could allow for the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the gruesome and fatal neurodegenerative disorder more commonly known as mad cow disease.
The practice in question is feeding what’s known as "poultry litter" to farmed cattle. Poultry litter is the agriculture industry’s term for the detritus that gets scooped off the floors of chicken cages and broiler houses. It’s mainly a combination of feces, feathers, and uneaten chicken feed, but in addition, a typical sample of poultry litter might also contain antibiotics, heavy metals, disease-causing bacteria, and even bits of dead rodents, according to Consumers Union (the policy and action arm of the nonprofit that publishes Consumer Reports).
Aside from the fact that we’re feeding our cows chicken crap, this practice is worrisome because both the excrement and uneaten pellets of chicken chow found in poultry litter can contain beef protein, including ground-up meat and bone meal. Which means—if you can follow the gruesome flow chart here—that cows could be, indirectly, eating each other.
As the US Department of Agriculture has made quite clear, cows really, really shouldn’t be doing that. Meat and bone meal containing infected bovine protein, the USDA says, is the chief culprit behind the spread of mad cow disease. (The closely related illness in humans is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.)
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Prime-time’s global warming omission
Elliott Abrams Types LIHOP So We Can "Relearn" Lesson About NSA "Work"
Another transgender teen suicide: the combined effects of depression and bullying
Rachel Maddow On Workers Organizing, Then & Now
Bank fined $32,400 for laundering money for terrorism
A Little Night Music
Fenton Robinson - You Dont Know What Love Is
Fenton Robinson - I Hear Some Blues Downstairs
Fenton Robinson - stormy monday
Fenton Robinson - The Getaway
Fenton Robinson - Going To Chicago
Fenton Robinson - From my heart
Fenton Robinson - Checking On My Woman
Fenton Robinson - Blue Monday
Fenton Robinson The Sky Is Crying
Fenton Robinson - Slick and Greasy
Larry Davis w/Fenton Robinson(g) - I Tried
Larry Davis w/Fenton Robinson(g) - Texas Flood
The Blues Hall of Fame - Fenton Robinson
Fenton Robinson - Mississippi Steamboat + Crazy Crazy Loving
Fenton Robinson - I Believe
Fenton Robinson - Special Road
Fenton Robinson - As The Years Go Passing By
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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