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.
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Hey! Good Evening!
Tonight's music features guitarists Smokey Wilson from Los Angeles by way of Mississippi and Chicagoan also by way of Mississippi Johnny B. Moore. Both of these guitarists styles have remained very close to their delta roots. Enjoy!
Smokey Wilson - Standing at the Crossroads
November 19 is the anniversary of Wobbly labor organizer and songwriter Joe Hill's 1915 execution in Utah on the basis of a trumped up murder charge.
News and Opinion
Gilad Sharon, Son Of Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Writes Op-Ed:
'We Need To Flatten Entire Neighborhoods In Gaza'
Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote an op-ed on Sunday calling for even more aggressive Israeli strikes in Gaza.
"We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza," states Sharon in The Jerusalem Post.
The violence between Israel and Hamas this week has reportedly claimed the lives of 81 Palestinians, including 37 civilians, as well as 3 Israeli civilians. Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that "the Israeli military is prepared to significantly expand the operation."
Sharon writes in his op-ed, entitled "A decisive conclusion is necessary," that "the residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences." After saying that Israel needs to "flatten all of Gaza," he goes on to say, "The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too."
Sharon isn't alone in his militant tone. Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai is reported by The Yeshiva World News to have said, "We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water." Haaretz also reports that Yishai stated, "The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages."
Palestinian Civilians Bear the Brunt of Unrelenting Bombings in U.S.-Backed Attack on Gaza
Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine. ...
In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.
As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel, is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security, the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is treason.
U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls for Global Protection of Gaza Civilians from U.S.-Backed Israeli Assault
Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, calls on the international community to help defend the people of Gaza from the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli assault. "It’s time, it seems to me, for the international community to take some responsibility for protecting the people of Gaza," Falk says. "The responsibility to protect norm was very self-righteously invoked in relation to Gaddafi’s Libya, but there’s utter silence when it comes to the people of Gaza."
Turkey's Erdogan calls Israel a "terrorist state"
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan described Israel on Monday as a "terrorist state" in carrying out its bombardment of Gaza, underlining hostility for Ankara's former ally since relations between them collapsed in 2010.
His comments came after nearly a week of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip. An Israeli missile killed at least 11 Palestinian civilians including four children in Gaza on Sunday.
"Those who associate Islam with terrorism close their eyes in the face of mass killing of Muslims, turn their heads from the massacre of children in Gaza," Erdogan told a conference of the Eurasian Islamic Council in Istanbul.
"For this reason, I say that Israel is a terrorist state, and its acts are terrorist acts," he said.
Ties between Israel and Turkey, once Israel's only Muslim ally, crumbled after Israeli marines stormed an aid ship in 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip. Nine Turks were killed in clashes with activists on board.
As Civilian Toll Mounts, Israel Again Bombs Palestinian Journalists
The Real Scandal of the Petraeas affair
Still No Jail Time for Bankster Bigwigs - JPMorgan and Credit Suisse to Pay $417 Million Slap on Wrist in Mortgage Settlement
JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse agreed to pay $417 million in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over their handling of subprime mortgages, the agency said Friday.
The banks did not admit or deny guilt. JPMorgan agreed to pay $296.9 million to settle the charges and Credit Suisse agreed to pay $120 million.
Robert Khuzami, director of the S.E.C.’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement called mortgage products like those sold by the banks “ground zero in the financial crisis.”
Friday’s settlement ends the agency’s investigation into how JPMorgan dealt with its mortgage securities acquired through Bear Stearns, the troubled unit it purchased in the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.
Coal plants smothering communities of color, report finds
New NAACP analysis pinpoints the disproportionate impact from coal-fired power plants on minorities and the poor.
Coal plants place a disproportionate burden on poor and largely minority communities, exposing residents to high levels of pollutants that affect public health, according to a new report led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The report ranks all 378 coal-fired power plants in the United States according to a plant's impact on the health, economics and environment of nearby communities. People living near coal plants are disproportionately poor and minorities, the report found; the six million people living within three miles of those 378 plants have an average per capita income of $18,400 per year; 39 percent are people of color.
"The message arising from this report is simple: These polluting, life-compromising coal plants must be closed," the NAACP concluded in its report, Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People. ...
The report also found that not all coal plants are equal. The impacts of some plants on the public health of nearby communities are measurably worse than others, the authors said. And more often than not, the most offending plants are located in poor and largely minority communities.
Human Waste Continues to Pour into NY Harbor After Sand
Human waste has been pouring into New York Harbor from the fifth largest sewage treatment plant in the nation since it was hit by Sandy, and the operator of the plant cannot predict when it will stop.
A 12-foot surge of water swamped the Newark plant that serves some three million people when Sandy struck on Oct. 29. The plant has pumped more than three billion gallons of untreated or partially treated wastewater into local waterways since then.
Mike DeFrancisci, executive director of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, would only say "ASAP" when asked when repairs to the sprawling facility could be made.
Until then, the main outfall will continue dumping millions of gallons of partially treated human waste a day at a point close to the Statue of Liberty across from Manhattan.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Palestinian Family Trapped Under Rubble Thrilled To Hear 'Gaza' Trending On Twitter
The Brutality of the Rich and the Morality of the President
Anonymous leaks personal information of 5,000 Israeli officials
Bush Crimes Back On The Table !!!!
A Little Night Music
Smokey Wilson - You Don't Love Me
Johnny B. Moore - I'm King Bee
Smokey Wilson - Why I sing the blues
Johnny B. Moore - Sittin' here thinkin'
Smokey Wilson - I Got Something On You Baby
Johnny B. Moore - Liquor Store Blues
Smokey Wilson - 44 Blues
Johnny B. Moore - Cut you loose
Smokey Wilson w/William Clarke - Howlin' Wolf
Johnny B. Moore - Rockin' In The Same Old Boat
Smokey Wilson - LouDella
Johnny B. Moore - Memphis Bound
Smokey Wilson w/Ron Levy - Not Pickin' Your Nasty Cotton
Johnny B. Moore - Broke Man
Smokey Wilson - Low rider
Johnny B. Moore - Back Door Friend
Smokey Wilson - You Took Everything
Johnny B. Moore - Same Thing
Smokey Wilson - How many more years
Mary Lane & Johnny B. Moore - You Don't Want My Loving No More
Smokey Wilson - I wonder why
Jimmy McCracklin & Smokey Wilson - Help the Bear
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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