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 jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. Enjoy!
Ella Fitzgerald - I Ain't Got Nothin' But The Blues
“If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.”
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton
News and Opinion
Bradley Manning Trial: WikiLeaks Lawyer Sees Spurious "Enemy" Claims & Bid to Scare Whistleblowers
Even the mushy middle thinks that the government is overreaching in the Manning case:
Give Manning a Plea Deal
The treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been excessively harsh, as far as I can tell. If he is found guilty of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, he deserves some punishment—probably—but should not be at risk of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Apparently.
I have to throw in all those qualifiers because Manning’s prosecution has been largely a secret process. Portions of his court-martial, which opened Monday at Fort Meade, Md., will be secret as well—the important parts, presumably. The public may never know whether justice is properly done unless someone leaks the details of this trial about leaks.
But we do know that Manning has offered to plead guilty to a host of charges that could bring up to 20 years in prison. Rather than agree to what strikes me as more than adequate punishment, prosecutors insist on trying to convict him under the 1917 Espionage Act as, essentially, an enemy of the state. ...
The government should make a plea deal. Twenty years is enough penalty to deter other potential leakers—and enough time to begin crafting history’s verdict on Pfc. Bradley Manning.
What the media should be learning from Bradley Manning's trial
Major trade union launches two-day strike backing Turkey protests
One of Turkey’s main trade union confederations joined protests against the government, after another night of clashes between police and demonstrators in Istanbul and Ankara.
Turkey’s Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions (KESK) has called a two-day strike from Tuesday to protest against the police crackdown.
“The state terror implemented against entirely peaceful protests is continuing in a way that threatens civilians’ life safety,” the KESK said Monday in a statement on its website.
The police crackdown showed the Islamist-rooted government’s “enmity to democracy”, it said.
240,000 Turkish Workers Join As Mass Protests Reach More Than 67 Cities
Juan Cole on recent events in Turkey:
On Sunday, the Taksim demonstrations and kindred ones across Turkey grew to be significant, amounting to tens of thousands of people. Police withdrew from Taksim Square in Istanbul, but in Akara and other cities continued to use tear gas and water cannon in ways that injured dozens of people. Some 1600 have been at least briefly detained, though most have been let go.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went on television to ridicule the charge made by many in the streets, that he is a ‘dictator.’ Erdogan’s party has consistently grown in parliament since it first won in 2002, and they gained over 50% of the vote in June of 2011.
The unrest reflects a sense among young people that Erdogan’s AK Party is invading and attempting to control public space. When I was in Istanbul last August, friends took me for a walk in the bohemia of Istiklal Street (scene of some of these demonstrations), and showed me how the sidewalk cafes and restaurants where people went to drink beer had been confined to a few side streets by the AK-dominated municipality. But I think the larger issue is a sense of police and other governmental regimentation and brutality. One Turkish youth suggested to me that the police in particular seem to have become in some cities a kind of militia for the prime minister. I can’t confirm such a thing, but the sentiment is revealing.
'I thought I'd die': Turkish police brutality shocks & enrages protesters
Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister apologizes to the injured, asking ‘responsible citizens’ to stop protesting
Turkey’s government apologised on Tuesday to protesters hurt in clashes with police during days of demonstrations and called for an immediate end to the protests.
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc moved to calm tensions after days of street clashes that have left at least two people dead, saying the government had “learnt its lesson” from the disturbances.
“Responsible citizens will stop today,” he told a televised news conference in Ankara after meeting with President Abdullah Gul.
“We expect all unions, political parties and everyone who loves and cares about Turkey to do this today.” ...
He updated the government toll of those injured in the disturbances, saying 64 civilians and 244 police officers were hurt, but doctors and rights groups have put the figure much higher.
Income gap is just one similarity between the United States and tumultuous Turkey
Why Aren't the 50% Living in Poverty Protesting in the Streets?
This Is Capitalism Now: How a Coal Company Bilked 20,000 Workers Out of Health Benefits
Corporate America is coming for your retirement
Just look at Patriot Coal. That's the spin-off company of Peabody Energy, the country's biggest coal producer, that was larded up with 40 percent of its parent company's healthcare liabilities and just 13 percent of its assets back in 2007. A year later, Patriot saddled itself with even more obligations when it bought Magnum Coal, itself a subsidiary of Arch Coal, the nation's second-largest coal company. The end result of all this financial chicanery was Patriot getting stuck holding the bag of retiree health benefits for 22,000 people -- 90 percent of whom never worked a day for Patriot, but rather for Peabody or Arch.
Well, guess what. Patriot went bust. And now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, a bankruptcy judge has ruled that it can discharge its $1.6 billion of union healthcare obligations and replace it with ... a $300 million trust, "tens of millions" more in revenue sharing, and 35 percent of the stock of the new Patriot Coal. Not much. Now, it's not completely clear if Peabody deliberately designed Patriot to fail -- that got a "maybe" or "maybe not" from the judge -- as Temple University business professor Bruce Rader has argued. But it is clear that Peabody dumped the legacy liabilities and assets it didn't want in Patriot, which, being generous, added several degrees of difficulty to it being a going concern. ...
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) had collectively bargained lower wages and fewer vacation days in the past for higher healthcare benefits in the future. That looked like a smart trade in an industry where lifetime medical problems are rife -- but no longer. All it takes, apparently, is spinning-off the liabilities you decide are standing between your chief executive and an eight-figure payday into a not-long-for-this-world subsidiary for those promises to be moot.
Deficit is Dropping but is there a Real Recovery?
Obama’s Covert Trade Deal
...the deal would include even more expansive incentives to relocate domestic manufacturing offshore than were included in Nafta — a deal that drained millions of manufacturing jobs from the American economy.
The agreement would also be a boon for Wall Street and its campaign to water down regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. Among other things, it would practically forbid bans on risky financial products, including the toxic derivatives that helped cause the crisis in the first place.
Of course, the agreement must eventually face a Congressional vote, which means that one day it will become public.
So why keep it a secret? Because Mr. Obama wants the agreement to be given fast-track treatment on Capitol Hill. Under this extraordinary and rarely used procedure, he could sign the agreement before Congress voted on it. And Congress’s post-facto vote would be under rules limiting debate, banning all amendments and forcing a quick vote.
US police allowed to take DNA from suspects
Supreme Court: DNA Samples Can Be Taken From Arrestees Without Warrant
A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for police to take a DNA swab from anyone they arrest for a serious crime, endorsing a practice now followed by more than half the states as well as the federal government.
The justices differed strikingly on how big a step that was.
"Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court's five-justice majority. The ruling backed a Maryland law allowing DNA swabbing of people arrested for serious crimes.
But the four dissenting justices said the court was allowing a major change in police powers, with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia predicting the limitation to "serious" crimes would not last.
"Make no mistake about it: Because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason," Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom. "This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA when you fly on an airplane – surely the TSA must know the `identity' of the flying public. For that matter, so would taking your children's DNA when they start public school." ...
Kennedy, who is often considered the court's swing vote, wrote the decision along with conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. They were joined by liberal-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer, while the dissenters were the conservative-leaning Scalia and liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Nestle to begin draining millions of gallons of Arkansas River water
If things go according to plan, in about a month someone at Nestle Waters North America will turn a valve and water will begin running out of a pipeline near Buena Vista and will splash into an empty 8,000-gallon tanker truck. It will take roughly an hour for the truck to fill, and then another truck will take its place. The water will run 24 hours a day, filling approximately 25 trucks each day, every day.
The trucks will drive 120 miles to a Nestle bottling plant in Denver where the water will be used to fill hundreds and thousands and millions of little plastic Arrowhead Springs water bottles, which will then be trucked to convenience markets, grocery stores, movie theaters, and sports palaces around the West. Each month, Nestle will fill roughly 40.4 million 16.9 ounce bottles with the water from the area’s Nathrop spring. By the end of a year, 65 million gallons of Arkansas Valley water will have been driven to Denver, bottled, driven somewhere else, and sold.
Not everyone is happy about this. Buena Vista and Salida have birthed a protest movement that has been more noisy than effective. By some estimates, 80 percent of the roughly 17,000 people in Chaffee County are opposed to this diversion of water. Still, when it came time to issue permits, the three-member Board of County Commissioners was unanimous in approving Nestle’s plans. ...
The water itself comes from an underground aquifer. Nestle drilled wells and built a five-mile pipeline to deliver the water to a facility in Johnson Village, where its trucks can be filled. Because Nestle does not own the rights to haul off all of this water, it has leased augmentation water from the City of Aurora, which will be released into the Arkansas River about 15 miles upstream from where Nestle will be getting its water. Nestle’s water will come mostly from the underground aquifer, which also feeds springs that flow into the Arkansas. No one knows to what extent that flow will be curtailed.
Monarchs of Life
Chip Taylor, biology professor at the University of Kansas, reports in his latest study that during this year's winter, monarch migration was 1/20 of its normal size, or down to 5 percent of its former glory. This may very well be the last year we see those magnificent beings engage in a most mysterious yearly migration that takes several generations to complete and covers up to 6,000 miles round-trip from central Mexico in early spring to Eastern Canada, in two or three generations, and back in the fall to Mexico to overwinter, in one single generation. ...
On their journey, they feed on pollen and nectar from many flowers and
plants, milkweeds being the preferred genus on which they lay their eggs, procreate, and leave their larvae, which feed and later pupate on milkweed. Milkweed sap is poisonous to many species, including humans, and gives the caterpillars a distinctive stripped coloration of yellow and black stripes.
While 1 billion monarchs overwintered on 50 acres during peak migrations of just a few years ago, fewer than 3 acres were occupied by December of 2012, less than half as many as the previous year, a dramatic reduction. At this rate, this may very well be the last year we have the opportunity to witness this awe-inspiring migration.
[Things you can do:
Make a Monarch Waystation
Eat organic, non-GMO food, grown without nasty chemicals, don't use synthetic pesticides and herbicides on your plants and land.
Pester your legislators to protect the monarch's habitat]
After Years of Progress, a Setback in Saving the Wolf
Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service now plans to remove wolves from the endangered list in all 48 contiguous states and transfer control over their fate to the states. This may save the department from running battles with Congress, state officials and hunters about protecting the wolf. ...
Thanks entirely to federal protections, wolves have rebounded remarkably in some places. There are now about 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and 1,600 or so more in the Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Interior has gradually delisted the wolves in all these places because, it says, their numbers are enough to guarantee survival. And it is not necessary to their survival, the service says, to protect wolves elsewhere.
But many scientists argue, persuasively, that these delistings are premature — that the service is giving up on recovery before the job is done. For one thing, they note a 7 percent decline in Rocky Mountain wolves since they were delisted and controlled hunts were authorized. They also note that other recovered species — notably the bald eagle and the American alligator — were allowed to expand into much of their historical range before they were removed from the list.
Study: Wolf Attacks Still Leading Cause Of Death In U.S.
BETHESDA, MD—According to a new study released Monday by the National Institutes of Health, for the 25th straight year, violent wolf attacks remain the leading cause of death in the United States.
The human health agency’s latest findings revealed that being viciously killed by a ravenous wolf resulted in more fatalities than any other malady, claiming the lives of more than 800,000 Americans in the last year alone. The NIH’s annual mortality report also confirmed that one person in the United States dies every 40 seconds from a wolf attack. ...
Accounting for over $328 billion in health care expenditures and lost productivity, wolf attacks have ravaged American workplaces, and the number of victims in offices, factories, as well as bars and restaurants has tripled in recent years.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart
Turkey’s Culture Wars: The Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, the Topçu Barracks & the AKM
Manning Prosecution: What You Put on the Internet Could Endanger Soldiers & Land You in Jail
Mijo: Healing the earth through permaculture
Transgender Heroes #3: Kristin Beck
Not If But When: A democratic Uprising in the United States
A Little Night Music
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - Learnin' The Blues
Ella Fitzgerald - Cry Me A River
Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie Orchestra - Booty's Blues
Ella Fitzgerald & Chick Webb - St. Louis Blues
Ella "Satchmo" Fitzgerald - Basin Street Blues
Ella Fitzgerald - Black Coffee
Ella Fitzgerald - It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Let's Call The Whole Thing Off
Chick Webb & Ella Fitzgerald - The Dipsy Doodle
Ella Fitzgerald - Makin Whoopee
Ella Fitzgerald - Trouble in Mind
Ella Fitzgerald - Blues In The Night
Ella Fitzgerald - Sugar Blues
Ella Fitzgerald - I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues
Ella Fitgerald - Happy Blues
Ella Fitzgerald - Ella's Contribution to the Blues
Ella Fitzgerald - Beale Street Blues
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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