Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
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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Good Morning!
July, 2012 by joanneleon
“The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of common man.”
~ William Beveridge
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Fanfare for the Common Man
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News
You Can't Ever Stop Being Vigilant: The Role of Alternative Media in Protecting Democracy
Beverly Bell interviews Leslie Thatcher, content relations editor at Truthout, one of a number of independent, non-commercial news sites that offer an alternative to corporate-controlled media. In a world where corporations are considered persons and a few individuals are funding the lion's share of the presidential elections, independent media is critical to keeping citizens informed and motivated defenders of democracy.
LT: We hope that by reporting what's really happening, we'll be able to change things because once people understand what's happening, they'll respond to it, rise up and do something about it.
Alternative media is hopefully not controlled by the dominant storyline in America, which I once heard someone describe as, "Everything is really okay. No matter what's happening, it's all right; just go out there and buy stuff." And that's whether it's NPR or Time Warner or Fox. Whatever they're reporting on, it seems to lull people to sleep or alarm them in ways that are not constructive. The things that they want you to respond to are putative threats, instead of what I would define as the real threats to our autonomy, our democracy, our integrity as human beings, real threats to life and love.
So I really strongly feel that I'm doing this because it gives me the opportunity every day to offer an alternative to the prevalent worldview in this country. Though sometimes I wonder whether it's really the prevalent worldview or whether it's simply the one that's dosed out to us. People in communities that are not white, that are not middle class, certainly have a different view of the world, I think, from the one that prevails in mainstream media.
NYC Cleans Up From Twisters After Eastern Storms
NEW YORK -- Strong storms that pummeled the East Coast spawned at least two damaging tornadoes in New York City, flooded the streets of some New England towns and left tens of thousands in the dark in the Washington, D.C., area.
No serious injuries were reported when a twister hit a beachfront neighborhood Saturday on the edge of New York City and a second, stronger tornado followed moments later about 10 miles away. Residents got advance notice, but still the storm took people by surprise.
A Summer of Extremes Signifies the New Normal
by Bill McKibben
In fact, you could argue that the North American summer actually started two days before the official end of winter this year, when the town of Winner, South Dakota turned in a 94-degree temperature reading. It was part of that wild July-in-March heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country, a stretch of weather so bizarre that historian Christopher Burt called it “probably the most extraordinary anomalous heat event” that the nation has ever seen. International Falls, “the icebox of the nation,” broke its heat records 10 straight days, and Chicago nine. In Traverse City, Michigan, on March 21, the record high was 87 degrees. But the low was 62 degrees, which was 4 degrees higher than the previous record high. The technical word for that is, insane.
And it wasn’t just the U.S. — new March records were set everywhere from Perth to Reykjavik, not to mention (this is the gun on the wall in Act One) Summit Station at the top of the Greenland Ice Cap.
'Renoir painting' found at flea market in US
Possible original Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting said to be worth up to $100,000, bought for about $50 in Virginia.
An original painting which may be the work of French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir has been discovered in the US state of Virginia.
The painting was bought by a woman as part of a box lot that included a doll and a plastic cow, and cost about $50 at a flea market.
Experts believe it is "Paysage Bords De Seine", one of Renoir's river scenes along the Seine river.
Kill Lists and Giant Triplets: Obama and the Neoliberal Government
[Author’s note: This essay is an excerpt from The Substance of Truth (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2011). It is offered for reflection on the day the president would, should all go right, accept his party’s nomination for re-election. The begging question, then, is four more years of what? Neoliberalism and imperialism unhinged?]
[ ... ]
Asked often why he, then a one-term U.S. Senator, chose to run for a post many believed he lacked qualifications for, Obama invoked Reverend Martin Luther KingJr.'s exhortation, "the fierce urgency of now," which King applied in a bold April 4, 1967, speech against the Vietnam War efforts of the LBJ Administration, refusingto surrender to "the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world." Nothing short of "a radical revolution of values," Kingordered, to force a rapid "shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society." Societies on the brink of defeat against spiritual death need no pointing out,he said. They celebrate "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights" as "more important [than] people." They make like ants and cower before thetrampling wrath of "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism."
Not one jot or tittle of King's words needs revision 40 years after, even with a Black president warming the highest seat of the land. And if Barack Obama would be remembered years later as a president with rare rigor to "go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism,"[5] hewould have to substitute strikingly different agendas for those currently underway in the first two years of his Administration. So far, the triple giants haven't faced much opposition.
Obama Ruling Shields Torturers
by Ray McGovern
Nowhere is this clearer than in reluctance of the Obama administration to hold practitioners of the most flagrant abuses – torture, for example – to account. As Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, Attorney General Eric Holder, in announcing on Aug. 31 the closure of the last two criminal investigations of deaths apparently from CIA torture, Holder conferred amnesty on countless officials, lawyers and interrogators who set and carried out the policy of cruel treatment.
[ ... ]
The Seven Moral Dwarfs
One of the most powerful pressures intimidating Obama was the vocal opposition of seven previous CIA directors, supported by a sympathetic “mainstream” media, to the very thought of holding CIA officials accountable for torture and other abuses. Although it has been long since forgotten, Obama and Holder initially gave some lip service to the concept of no one being above the law.
[ ... ]
Afraid of the CIA?
In these circumstances, Obama refused to honor his Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” For the same reason – fear – he kept on duty the CIA managers, lawyers and operatives implementing the kidnapping, torture, secret prisons and other abuses of the Bush/Cheney years.
The CIA director in place before Obama took office, Michael Hayden, made the mistake of threatening Obama, none to subtly, that there would be insubordination in the ranks, were he to allow CIA officials to be held accountable for war crimes and other abuses. So Obama dispatched Hayden unceremoniously, replacing him with a much more politically astute, malleable, well-connected politician/lawyer named Leon Panetta as CIA director.
Behind the Scenes, the Bloodiest Beltway Battle
‘The Price of Politics,’ by Bob Woodward
As a plethora of election-year polls and surveys indicate, Americans are fed up with a deeply dysfunctional Washington paralyzed by partisan gridlock and increasingly incapable of dealing with the daunting problems facing the nation: a White House plagued by infighting, disorganization and inconsistent leadership; a Republican Party bent on obstruction and increasingly beholden to its insurgent right wing; and a Congress riven by party rivalries, intraparty power struggles, petty turf wars and an inability to focus on long-term solutions instead of temporary Band-Aids.
[ ... ]
Most of “The Price of Politics” sticks like Velcro to its narrow focus on the debt-ceiling negotiations, declining really to grapple with broader questions about the Obama administration’s handling of the economic crisis it inherited after the 2008 crash: the perceived successes and failures of its stimulus program; the infighting among members of its economic team; its much debated stewardship of the banking crisis and Wall Street reform; and its continuing struggles with unemployment and an underwater housing market. For these issues, the reader is better off turning to books like “The Escape Artists” by Noam Scheiber, “Confidence Men” by Ron Suskind, or Michael Hirsh’s “Capital Offense.”
Bob Woodward: Obama lacked ‘Plan B’ in debt limit negotiations
When Obama expressed skepticism over the agreement, saying he didn’t trust Boehner and McConnell, Woodward says, Krone pushed back.
“I am sorry — with all due respect — that we are in this situation that we’re in, but we got handed this football on Friday night,” Krone said. “And I didn’t create this situation. The first thing that baffles me is, from my private-sector experience, the first rule that I’ve always been taught is to have a Plan B. And it is really disheartening that you, that this White House did not have a Plan B.”
Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber insurgents
In March this year came the news of how it happened: the FBI had turned a LulzSec member in New York, a 28-year-old Puerto Rican father of two called Hector Xavier Monsegur, known online as “Sabu”, and used him as their informant. It was like The Sopranos, but instead of organised crime and Italian hitmen it involved teenagers sitting at computer screens. And perhaps most confusing of all, the vast majority of the main players seemed to be living in Britain or Ireland.
Gabriella Coleman, professor of scientific and technological literacy at McGill University, in Montreal, probably knows more about Anonymous than anybody on the planet. She has studied them from the moment they first emerged as a new political force in 2008, and says that it’s no coincidence that so many of the arrests were of British and Irish nationals. Anonymous is a vast, new, poorly understood global force who specialise in “ultra-co-ordinated motherfuckery”, as one of Coleman’s contacts puts it. And it attracts a huge British following.
Suicide bomber kills 6, mostly children, outside NATO forces headquarters in Kabul, reports say
KABUL — A suicide bomber killed at least six people, most of them children, in one of the Afghan capital’s highest-security zones when he detonated his explosives Saturday not far from the walled headquarters of NATO-backed military forces, witnesses and officials said.
[ ... ]
Several sensitive facilities — including a CIA station, the Italian and Spanish embassies and an installation of the Afghan spy service — abut the street. Their entrances are heavily guarded, but no security barriers to the street itself were in place even a few hours after the noonday blast, when a reporter visited the scene.
[ ... ]
A spokesman for the international forces, Brig. Gen. Guenter Katz, condemned the attack, calling the insurgents’ tactics “despicable,” especially given reports that the bomber was a teenager.
“By taking advantage of an impressionable child to carry out this attack, the insurgents display cowardice,” Katz said in a statement. “Attacks like these exploit vulnerable individuals, coercing them into committing horrible acts.”
Note, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until after we invaded.
Wave of deadly bomb blasts hits Iraq
At least 44 people killed in several explosions across Iraq, including a car bomb outside a French consular building.
Suspected al-Qaeda fighters and other armed groups have killed at least 44 people in a wave of attacks in Iraq, gunning down soldiers at an army post and bombing police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs.
Sunday's violence, which struck at least 11 cities and also wounded nearly 240 people, highlighted armed groups' attempts to sow havoc in the country and undermine the government.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but security forces are a frequent target of al-Qaeda's Iraq branch, which has vowed to reassert itself and take back areas it was forced from before US troops withdrew from the country last year.
Potential for a Mining Boom Splits Factions in Afghanistan
KALU VALLEY, Afghanistan — If there is a road to a happy ending in Afghanistan, much of the path may run underground: in thetrillion-dollar reservoir of natural resources — oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals — that has brought hopes of a more self-sufficient country, if only the wealth can be wrested from blood-soaked soil.
[ ... ]
Powerful regional warlords and militant leaders are jockeying to widen their turf to include areas with mineral wealth, and the Taliban have begun to make murderous incursions into territory where development is planned. In the capital, Kabul, factional maneuvering is in full swing, including disputes over lucrative side contracts awarded to relatives of President Hamid Karzai.
Further, a proposed mining law vital to attracting foreign investment is up in the air, with the delay threatening several projects. The cabinet rejected it this summer, saying it was too generous to Western commercial interests. But some Western officials fear other motives are at work, too, including an internal fight for spoils, and perhaps an effort by some neighboring countries to sway sympathetic officials to keep Indian and Chinese state mining companies out.
Greeks protest 'last' austerity cuts
Thousands of Greeks have joined protests against cuts the government say are necessary to keep it in eurozone.
Hong Kong backs down on Chinese patriotism classes
Retreat follows a week of protests by thousands in front of government headquarters over education proposals for schools
Officials in Hong Kong have dropped plans to introduce compulsory Chinese national education classes in schools after massive protests.
Residents of the former British colony resented the prospected of being "brainwashed" by Beijing.
The semi-autonomous Chinese city's leader, Leung Chun-ying, said on Saturday that the government would leave it up to schools to decide whether to launch the classes, and that it would no longer be mandatory.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Elites Cling to Their Jobs by emptywheel
Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Lucky Man
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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