Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 7:00 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!
Tonight's music features Jimmy McCracklin and Robert Ward, two r&b/blues performers with unique styles. Enjoy!
Jimmy McCracklin with Ry Cooder and Wayne Bennett - After Hours
"Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction."
-- Barack Obama
News
At Guantanamo tribunals, don't mention the "T" word
CIA agents have written books about it. Former President George W. Bush has explained why he thought it was necessary and legal. Yet the al Qaeda suspects who were subjected to so-called harsh interrogation techniques, and the lawyers charged with defending them at the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, are not allowed to talk about the treatment they consider torture.
Defense attorneys say that and other Kafkaesque legal restrictions on what they can discuss with their clients and raise in the courtroom undermine their ability to mount a proper defense on charges that could lead to the death penalty. ...
Prosecutors say every utterance of the alleged al Qaeda murderers, and what their lawyers in turn pass on to the court, must be strictly monitored precisely because of the defendants' intimate personal knowledge of highly classified CIA interrogation methods they endured in the agency's clandestine overseas prisons.
"Everything is presumptively top secret. So if my client had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, I couldn't tell you that," Cheryl Bormann, who represents defendant Walid bin Attash, said after the May arraignment of the men charged with plotting the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Human Rights Critics of Russia and Ecuador Parade Their Own Hypocrisy
Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador's poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it.
It's because feigning concern for these oppressive measures is a convenient instrument for demeaning and punishing Ecuador for the supreme crime of defying the US and its western allies. The government of President Rafael Correa granted asylum to western establishmentarians' most despised figure, Julian Assange, and Correa's government then loudly condemned Britain's implied threats to invade its embassy. Ecuador must therefore be publicly flogged for its impertinence, and its press freedom record is a readily available whip. As a fun bonus, denunciations of Correa's media oppression is a cheap and easy way to deride Assange's supposed hypocrisy.
(Apparently, activists should only seek asylum from countries with pristine human rights records, whichever countries those might be: a newly concocted standard that was conspicuously missing during the saga of blind Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng at the US embassy; I don't recall any western media outlets accusing Guangcheng of hypocrisy for seeking refuge from a country that indefinitely imprisons people with no charges, attacked Iraq, assassinates its own citizens with no due process on the secret orders of the president, bombs funerals and rescuers in Pakistan, uses extreme force and mass arrests to try to obliterate the peaceful Occupy protest movement, wages an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecutes its Muslim citizens for posting YouTube videos critical of US foreign policy, embraces and arms the world's most oppressive regimes, and imprisoned Muslim journalists for years at Guantánamo and elsewhere with no charges of any kind.)
Todd Akin’s "Legitimate Rape" Comment Sheds Light on Paul Ryan’s Extreme Stance on Abortion
Massacre in South Africa: Police Defend Killing of 34 Striking Workers at Platinum Mine
NYPD spy program against Muslim community produced no leads
The New York City Police Department’s heavily-criticized spying on Muslim residents did not produce any leads or help any investigations of terrorist activities, in a report a civil rights group calls a “vindication” of the city’s Muslim community. ...
The discovery of the unit led to criticism from civil rights groups, and CAIR had called on the state legislature to investigate the practice, though Rep. Peter King (R-NY) at one point denied the department was engaging in racial profiling.
“All they got from it was a complete chill in relations with the Muslim community and its leaders, who they spied on as they were meeting with them,” Hooper said.
Record radiation in fish off Japan nuclear plant
A pair of greenlings have shown the highest level of radioactive caesium detected in fish and shellfish caught in waters off Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, its operator said Tuesday.
The fishes, captured 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) off the plant on August 1, registered 25,800 becquerels of caesium per kilo, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said -- 258 times the level the government deems safe for consumption.
Illinois Nuke, Coal Plants Dumping Millions of Gallons of Near 100-Degree Water into Waterways
As fish die in record numbers across Illinois this summer because of the intense heat and drought, state officials are granting power plants special exemptions to flush massive amounts of hot water into already stressed lakes and rivers.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is allowing power plants to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day at temperatures approaching 100 degrees into the state's waterways, the Tribune has learned.
Temperature-sensitive fish already have been swimming deeper to find cooler water or have been abandoning environmentally inhospitable areas during the heat and drought. But with power plant operators dumping hot water at record amounts, environmentalists say the fish, along with the rivers and lakes they live in, could face increased risk.
Passage of California’s Prop. 37 would make it first state to label genetically modified food
Another multimillion-dollar fight over a ballot initiative – with big implications for the country – is brewing here in California. The initiative, which is on the ballot this November, has a mouthful of a name: the “California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.”
If Proposition 37 passes, California will become the first state in the nation to require that food manufacturers appropriately label all food – raw and processed – that contain ingredients made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs). That term refers to scientific procedures that have altered the genetic material in various organisms.
Proponents say that consumers have a right to know what kinds of food they are buying and eating, while opponents say it would produce a system too burdensome on food sellers and distributors and needlessly costly to consumers.
To date, similar labeling laws have failed in 19 states. Also, a law requiring the labeling of bovine growth hormones was struck down in federal court in 1996.
Occupy Activists Prepare to Protest Political Conventions
Occupy Wall Street activists are preparing to travel to Tampa and Charlotte for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions. The group is planning to charter busloads of protesters south as part of demonstrations beginning in Tampa on August 27. ...
“We invite everyone to come and take advantage of the preparations we have made, to help ensure that all occupiers and other supporting groups can use this moment of national attention to confront the political status-quo,” Occupy Tampa states. ...
"Both the Democratic and Republican Parties are controlled by moneyed interests and the 1%, and the Occupy Movement will hold both Parties accountable at the RNC in Tampa in August and at the DNC in Charlotte in September. We cannot allow this two-party system and its corporate puppeteers to determine our country’s destiny. While we recognize the historical significance of President Obama’s election, we will not sit idly by as the Administration favors corporations and the 1%, tramples civil liberties, and wages tragic wars,” Occupy Charlotte says in its statement, emphasizing to visitors that they are a nonviolent movement, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department has treated their chapter with respect and “vice versa.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
No Person Shall Be Deprived of Life, Liberty or Property… Unless the Oil and Gas Industry Says So
Levi needs some help
John Cusack & Jonathan Turley on Obama’s Constitution
A Little Night Music
Robert Ward & Ry Cooder Forgive Me Darling
Jimmy McCracklin - At The Club
Jimmy McCracklin w/Ry Cooder + Wayne Bennett - The Walk
Jimmy McCracklin - Get Together
Jimmy McCracklin - Think
Jimmy McCracklin - R.M. Blues
Jimmy McCracklin - Let The Door Hit You
Jimmy McCracklin - Gotta cut out
Jimmy McCracklin - Steppin' Up In Class
Jimmy McCracklin & His Blues Blasters - I Wanna Make Love To You
Robert Ward & Ry Cooder Blood Run Cold
Robert Ward at the Chicago Blues Festival
Robert Ward - Your Love Is Amazing
Robert Ward - Potato Soup
Robert Ward - You Ought To Stop It
Robert Ward - Your Love Is Real
Ohio Untouchables (Robert Ward) - Hot Stuff
Robert Ward - I'm Gonna Cry a River
Robert Ward - White Fox
Robert Ward - Never Alone
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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