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 r&b singer and sax player Bull Moose Jackson. Enjoy!
Bull Moose Jackson - Big Ten Inch
"[George W.] Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
-- Downing Street Memo
News and Opinion
Inquiry Weighs Whether ISIS Analysis Was Distorted
The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.
The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said. ...
The prospect of skewed intelligence raises new questions about the direction of the government’s war with the Islamic State, and could help explain why pronouncements about the progress of the campaign have varied widely.
Centcom Skewed ISIS War Intel To Be More Upbeat
Inspectors General Inform Congress Intel Was Likely 'Reworked'
The perennial positivity of all public Pentagon assessments on the war against ISIS, despite major, glaring losses on the ground, has been a matter of no small controversy for awhile, and has also successfully kept the elected officials who are on the receiving end of those assessments maintaining the war strategy as-is. ...
According to one of the DIA analysts, the agency was providing “draft” versions of their analyses to Centcom, and Centcom was editing the conclusions wholesale to make the war sound like it was going better, then passing along the edited versions to policymakers.
Details of exactly which reports were the result of Centcom’s editing are as yet unclear, but it does explain why, in the wake of every major loss to ISIS, Centcom officials would start crowing about the great progress they are making and how overall, the war is on track. ...
How much of this will ever go public is unclear, but the implications are potentially enormous, as both the White House insistence on staying the course in the war and Congressional talk of doubling down were predicated on these Pentagon assessments that the war was going more or less acceptably, and were subsequently deliberately misled by faulty conclusions being appended to reports which, conclusions aside, were painting the war as going worse and worse.
Bradley Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes
Can the Supreme Court Force Congress to Own the War on ISIS?
Judicial intervention may be the only way left to break the political impasse on authorizing Obama’s use of force.
The biggest casualty in the struggle against the Islamic State so far has been the American Constitution. One year into the battle, the president and Congress threaten to destroy all serious restraints against open-ended war-making by the commander-in-chief. President Obama waited for half a year before even submitting a draft resolution authorizing his initiative. But it is now obvious that the Republican-controlled Congress finds it politically convenient to stand on the sidelines and let Obama take the blame for the escalating instability. That leaves only the Supreme Court to halt this transformation of the president into a latter-day King George III.
As The Atlantic’s Garrett Epps rightly emphasizes, allowing the president to go unchallenged will produce a terrible precedent. As the rise and rise of Donald Trump suggests, future presidents may make aggressive use of their powers as commander in chief—and they will predictably point to Obama’s unilateral war on ISIS to justify their own military adventures. ...
Existing case-law establishes that individual soldiers can go to court if they are ordered into a combat zone to fight a war that they believe is unconstitutional. During the closing years of the Vietnam War, two federal courts of appeal carefully considered, and unanimously affirmed, the standing of soldiers to bring such complaints.
Assad 'confident' of Russian support for Syria regime
The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has expressed “strong confidence” that Russia will continue supporting his embattled regime.
“We have strong confidence in the Russians, as they have proven throughout this crisis, for four years, that they are sincere and transparent in their relationship with us,” Assad said in an interview with Hezbollah’s al-Manar television network.
He also described as “legitimate” the presence in Syria of fighters from Hezbollah backing his forces. The powerful Lebanese Shia movement, along with Russia and Iran, has backed Assad since Syria’s revolt broke out in 2011.
The rare television interview came as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, discussed the Syrian crisis with Jordan’s King Abdullah on the sidelines of the Maks-2015 aerospace show in Moscow.
Assad described Russia as “principled”, while “the United States abandons its allies, abandons its friends”.
Turkey denies allegations it tipped off al Qaida abductors
The Turkish government Tuesday denied accusations by Syrian rebels that its intelligence service had tipped off an al Qaida-linked group that then abducted the commander and 20 members of a U.S.-trained group of Syrian fighters about to confront the Islamic State.
In a statement to McClatchy, which first reported on Monday the allegations from multiple Syrian rebel groups that the Nusra Front had been alerted by the Turkish government, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s office said it denied “the allegations in the strongest terms possible. The idea that Turkey, a key supporter of the Train and Equip Program, would seek to undermine its own interests in Syria is ludicrous.” ...
The dispute centers around the arrival into Syria of the first 54 members of a program by a coalition of anti-Islamic State members – including the U.S., Jordan, the United Kingdom and Turkey – to train and equip carefully vetted Syrian rebels for the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. ... On July 29, the 54 fighters and their commander, Col. Nadim Hassan, arrived in Azaz, along the Turkish border, where they were immediately abducted or attacked by the Nusra Front.
The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended
In July 2013, GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, forced journalists at the London headquarters of The Guardian to completely obliterate the memory of the computers on which they kept copies of top-secret documents provided to them by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
However, in its attempt to destroy information, GCHQ also revealed intriguing details about what it did and why. ...
Footage of Guardian editors physically destroying their MacBooks and USB drives, taken by Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons, wasn’t released until months later, in January 2014. The GCHQ agents who supervised the destruction of the devices also insisted on recording it all on their own iPhones.
The Guardian’s video reveals editors using angle-grinders, revolving drills, masks that GCHQ ordered them to buy, and a “degausser,” an expensive piece of equipment provided by GCHQ, which destroys magnetic fields and thereby erases data. The procedure eliminated practically every chip in the device, leaving almost no recognizable piece of machinery behind. The whole process lasted over three hours. ...
“Normally people just destroy the hard drive,” said technologist Mustafa Al-Bassam. But GCHQ took it several steps further. The spy agency instructed Guardian editors to destroy parts of multiple MacBook Airs’ track pad controllers, power controllers, keyboards, CPUs, inverting converters, USB drives, and more. ...
The track pad controller, Al-Bassam and Privacy International's Richard Tynan said, can hold up to 2 megabits of memory. All the different “chips” in your computer — from the part that controls the device’s power to the chips in the keyboard — also have the capacity to store information, like passwords and keys to other data, which can be uploaded through firmware updates. According to the public documents from other members of Five Eyes, it is incredibly difficult to completely sanitize a device of all its content. New Zealand’s data deletion policies state that USB memory is only destroyed when the dust is just a few millimeters in length. “This wasn’t a random thing,” said Tynan, pointing to a slide displaying a photo of a completely destroyed pile of USB chip shards.
These hidden memory storage locations could theoretically be taken advantage of, Tynan and Al-Bassam said, by a computer’s owner, hackers, or even the government itself, either during its design phase or after the computer is purchased.
Many police departments spy on you without oversight. This must end
Local police around the country are increasingly using high-tech mass surveillance gear that can vacuum up private information on entire neighborhoods of innocent citizens - all to capture minor alleged criminals. Even worse, many cops are trying to put themselves outside the reach of the law by purposefully hiding their spying from courts to avoid any scrutiny from judges.
Stingrays facilitate a particular controversial and invasive form of surveillance, where the police essentially own a roving, fake cell phone tower that force all the cell phones in its vicinity to connect to it. They then vacuum up the cell phone data of their suspect, as well as that of potentially hundreds of innocent citizens. Police departments have previously claimed they would only use it in “emergencies,” but as predicted by nearly everyone, those vows have almost immediately went out the window once they got their hands on the technology.
Stringrays are so controversial that some state legislatures have already passed laws restricting their use – which is exactly why police want to keep it secret. Police and the FBI have claimed extreme secrecy is needed to prevent alleged criminals from finding out about how they use the devices, but they are so well-known at this point that they’ve been featured in virtually every major newspaper in the country. The real reason they want to keep them secret is to protect them from judges ruling their use illegal, as well as from state legislatures cracking down on them. ...
All of this is especially disturbing considering the recent reports - confirmed by the government’s own documents - that both the Department of Homeland Security and local police departments are closely monitoring peaceful activists in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, in some cases with police counterterrorism officers. If local police departments are willing to use these powerful devices on minor criminals, in many cases without court orders, and have no problem hiding their practices from judges, what’s the prevent them from spying on citizens merely expressing their First Amendment rights? The answer seems to be nothing, and that is exactly why this reckless snooping must end.
Heh, note that Obama didn't call to apologize for spying on Japanese officials, he called to apologize because the spying was revealed:
Obama calls Japanese leader to express regret for WikiLeaks spying scandal
Barack Obama has called Japan’s leader to express regret over recent WikiLeaks allegations that the US had spied on senior Japanese officials.
Obama told prime minister Shinzo Abe that he thought the trouble the revelations caused Abe and his government was regrettable, a Japanese government spokesman told reporters. ...
Abe told Obama that the allegations could undermine trust between the countries, and reiterated his request for an investigation of the matter.
Whistleblowers Band Together To Sue FBI, NSA And DOJ For Malicious Prosecution, Civil Liberties Violations
Thomas Drake, Diane Roark, Ed Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe and William Binney have filed a civil rights lawsuit against the NSA, FBI, DOJ, Michael Hayden, Keith Alexander, Chris Inglis, Robert Mueller and a handful of others. They will be represented by Larry Klayman, who has some experience suing intelligence agencies.
The claims arise from the government's treatment of these whistleblowers after they started making noise about the NSA's surveillance programs. More specifically, the lawsuit points to the short-lived internet surveillance program THINTHREAD, which was ignored and abandoned in favor of something more expensive, but less protective of Americans' communications.
Request to impeach Guatemalan president approved by supreme court
The country’s congress will decide whether President Otto Perez, whose administration is reeling from corruption allegations, will be removed from office
The Guatemalan supreme court on Tuesday approved a request by the country’s attorney general to impeach President Otto Perez over his suspected involvement in a racket to siphon customs revenue from the government, and passed the matter to congress for approval.
A number of corruption investigations have devastated Perez’s cabinet and led to the resignation in May of vice-president Roxana Baldetti.
On Sunday, Perez angrily dismissed corruption allegations that have been leveled against him by prosecutors, and he adamantly said he would not resign despite mounting pressure on the government and calls for his impeachment as a presidential election looms. ...
Perez’s conservative administration has spent much of this year mired in public protests and scandals over corruption allegations against senior officials, several of whom the retired general fired during a cabinet purge in May.
Two Separate Americas: David Simon’s New Mini-Series Looks at "Hypersegregation" in Public Housing
Cops Say They Needed to Kill John Berry — But Video Footage May Contradict That
"Stop beating him" a woman can be heard screaming over and over again in the shaky cellphone video that captured the last moments of John Berry's life.
In the video, which was taken in broad daylight by a neighbor and released by the attorney representing Berry's family on Monday, five sheriff's deputies from Los Angeles County attempt to pull Berry, 31, out of a car parked outside his Lakewood family home. After repeated efforts to remove him, the deputies' first pepper spray him, hit him with batons, fire a Taser device at least four times, before finally firing the gunshots that killed him.
Berry, 31, had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was prescribed medication to treat it. On July 4, two days before his death, he arrived at his family's home in apparent distress, and refused to leave his car. His family suspected he had stopped taking his medication. His brother, Chris Berry, a federal police officer, called the Lakewood sheriff's station on July 6 and requested a mental evaluation team.
The sheriff dispatched a team of deputies instead.
The newly released footage challenges the deputies' version of events that led to Berry's death. They contend that Berry accelerated his vehicle — which the video shows was flanked by parked police cars — before ramming it into a patrol car. ... "They said he accelerated and crashed into the police car. That did not happen — I was there for the whole thing," Chris Berry, 37, said. "But they have to say that because it justifies their aggressive actions. I believe in my heart and I know Johnny wasn't trying to hurt them."
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature news from David Bruce in Chihuahua: "Those who have starved others should themselves taste hunger." ~General Villa
Tune in at 2pm!
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Dow Jones surges over 400 points at opening bell as US markets rally
US stock markets rallied strongly on Wednesday as global stock markets attempted to shake off days of sell-offs amid fears that China’s economic boom is stalling.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened up over 400 points (2.62%) while the S&P was up 46.5 points (2.39%) and the Nasdaq was up 135 points (2.75%). All three indices closed down on Tuesday after an early rally proved unsustainable.
The US rally came as Asian and European markets fell. In China a rally on the Shanghai Composite index collapsed and the market closed down another 1.3%, its lowest level since December. Over the last three days the index has lost close to a quarter of its value. In London the FTSE 100 index of leading blue-chip shares had shed 82 points, or 1.3%, as Wall Street prepared to open.
The Sky Is Not Falling? China's Stock Market Impact
Progressives Call on Clinton to End Wall Street-to-Washington Revolving Door
Decrying what they describe as "a barely legal, backdoor form of bribery," a coalition of eight progressive groups representing nine million Americans is asking Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to condemn the controversial practice of Wall Street firms paying large bonuses, or "golden parachutes," to executives who take on government jobs.
"Americans are sick and tired of the Wall Street-to-Washington revolving door, and are looking for a presidential candidate who will take concrete steps to fight it," said Kurt Walters, campaign manager of Rootstrikers, one of the grassroots groups behind the letter (pdf). "Secretary Clinton hasn’t yet shown that she is that candidate, but we hope her responses to these questions will demonstrate she shares these progressive priorities."
Wednesday's letter, which Politico notes "comes as Clinton interrupts her Hamptons vacation to unveil her rural policy platform in Iowa," concludes with two questions:
- "Do you still support the use of this controversial compensation practice?"
- "If you become President, will you allow officials who enter your administration to receive this sort of bonus?"
They're good questions, given Clinton's past. ...
The letter notes that Clinton's two main rivals for the Democratic nomination, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, have both said they support the legislation, with Sanders having signed on as a co-sponsor. To date, more than 115,000 people have signed onto petitions calling on 2016 presidential candidates to support the bill.
Still, Clinton has declined to address the issue.
The Evening Greens
Gold King mine spill: Navajo Nation farmers prohibit Animas river access
Despite watching their sustenance wilt in the summer sun, Navajo Nation tribe farmers near Shiprock, New Mexico, have opted not to reinstate access to river water after a spill at Gold King mine released toxins earlier this month.
The water would have revived subsistence agriculture and livestock operations endangered by chronic water shortages since the spill.
Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye met farmers at the Shiprock chapter to announce plans to reopen irrigation canals on Saturday. Instead, the farmers overruled Begaye and voted 104-0, with nine abstaining, to maintain existing closures for a year.
This decision was made despite assurances from both the US EPA and the Navajo Nation EPA that water quality in the Animas and San Juan rivers has returned to pre-spill levels.
“I’m glad the water samples indicate the water is safe for irrigation use, but I remain concerned over the soil and sediment that lines our river bank,” President Begaye said in a prepared statement. “Every time a heavy storm hits or the soil is disturbed, it can recontaminate the water.”
“There is a lot of concern that farmers have over the US EPA and their testing methods,” Megan Cox, a spokesperson from the Navajo president’s office, told the Guardian.
“Please understand this is very stressful for them, and this is their livelihood. They also recognize that people will be concerned about purchasing an agricultural product that has been tainted with unknown quantities of chemicals,” she added. “They are growing organic crops and do not want to harm the land, their crops or any individuals by exposure to these chemicals.”
Joe Ben Jr, Shiprock’s farm board representative, said: “No testing has been done on the Navajo reservation. And the tests were not disclosed; which metals were present? If we knew, we could make a decision.”
Attorney Hounding Climate Scientists Is Covertly Funded By Coal Industry
Christopher Horner, an attorney who claims that the earth is cooling, is known within the scientific community for hounding climate change researchers with relentless investigations and public ridicule, often deriding scientists as “communists” and frauds.
Horner is a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks and legal organizations over the last decade. He has called for investigations of climate scientists affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, and inundated climate researchers at major universities across the country with records requests that critics say are designed to distract them from their work.
New court documents reveal one source of Horner’s funding: big coal.
Last Thursday’s bankruptcy filing of Alpha Natural Resources, one of the largest coal companies in America, includes line items for all of the corporation’s contractors and grant recipients. Among them are Horner individually at his home address, as well as the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, where he is a senior staff attorney.
History's Lesson for Climate Action: No Other Choice 'But Mass Mobilization'
Joint statement ahead of UN climate talks in Paris declares humanity is "at crossroads" and that only hope is to stop digging up and burning world's remaining fossil fuel reserves
With less than 100 days until high-level UN climate talks take place in Paris, key leaders from the global climate justice movement have come together with a joint statement that affirms their belief that only mass popular mobilizations across the planet demanding a drastic reckoning with the world's fossil fuel paradigm will suffice when it comes to confronting the increasingly dire and intertwined threats of neoliberal capitalism and planetary climate change.
In a pair of "concretely" expressed demands aimed at world leaders, the signatories to the statement say governments must "end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry" and move swiftly to "freeze fossil fuel extraction by leaving untouched 80% of all existing fossil fuel reserves." ...
"For more than 20 years," the statement declares, "governments have been meeting, yet greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased and the climate keeps changing. The forces of inertia and obstruction prevail, even as scientific warnings become ever more dire." ...
Acknowledging their set of demands "implies a great historical shift," the signers of the statement say the globalized justice movement for will no longer "wait for states" to make the needed changes on schedules dictated by the powerful fossil fuel corporations, large agro-businesses, financial elites, or governments in the thrall of such interests.
"Slavery and apartheid did not end because states decided to abolish them," the statement reads. "Mass mobilisations left political leaders no other choice."
Answering 'Resistance From All Sides,' Germany Moves to Ban GMO Crops
Germany on Monday became the latest country in the European Union to take a stand against genetically modified (GMO) crops in its food supply.
German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt told government officials that he will seek to implement the European Union's "opt-out" rule to stop GMO crop cultivation in the country, including those varieties which may be approved by the EU, according to documents seen by Reuters this week. ...
As agriculture ministry spokesperson Christian Fronczak told Bloomberg, "The German government is clear in that it seeks a nationwide cultivation ban." ...
Scotland was the most recent country to ban GMOs across the board, which it announced earlier this month.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Giant Coal Company Bankruptcy Reveals Secret Ties to Climate Denial, GOP Dark Money Groups
What We Don’t Know About Policing, Race and Mental Illness
Gil Scott-Heron: the revolution lives on
Lockheed Martin Took Taxpayer Dollars, Spent Them Lobbying for More Dollars
The Civilian Toll From the War Against ISIS Is Huge. Why Isn’t the Press Covering It?
Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists
The oil bust is a huge danger to the war against ISIS
Document on transgender service leaked
A Little Night Music
Bull Moose Jackson & His Buffalo Bearcats - Meet Me With Your Black Dress On
Bull Moose Jackson - Nosey Joe
Bull Moose Jackson - I Want A Bowlegged Woman
Bullmoose Jackson - Big fat mamas are back in style again
Bull Moose Jackson - Why Don't You Haul Off And Love Me
Bull Moose Jackson - I know who threw the whiskey in the well
Bullmoose Jackson - Sneaky Pete
Bull Moose Jackson & his Buffalo Bearcats - We Can Talk Some Trash
Bullmoose Jackson - Aw Shucks Baby
Bullmoose Jackson - Gimme That
Bullmoose Jackson - Cleveland Ohio Blues
Bullmoose Jackson - Keep Your Big Mouth Shut
Bullmoose Jackson - Oh John
Bullmoose Jackson - Bearcat Blues
Bull Moose Jackson And his Buffalo Bearcats- I Wanna Hug Ya, Kiss Ya, Squeeze Ya
Bull Moose Jackson - Watch my Signals
Bull Moose Jackson - Moose On The Loose