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 blues piano player Charles "Cow Cow" Davenport, composer of the influential standard, "The Cow Cow Boogie." Enjoy!
Cow Cow Davenport
"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
News and Opinion
Bradley Manning Trial: After 3 Years, Army Whistleblower Begins Court Martial Shrouded in Secrecy
Bradley Manning trial 'dangerous' for civil liberties – experts
The trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the internet into a danger zone, legal experts have warned.
Of the 21 counts faced by the army private on Monday, at his trial at Fort Meade in Maryland, by far the most serious is that he knowingly gave intelligence information to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the open information website WikiLeaks. The leaked disclosures were first published by the Guardian and allied international newspapers.
Manning is accused of "aiding the enemy", in violation of Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. By indirectly unleashing a torrent of secrets onto the internet, the prosecution alleges, he in effect made it available to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, for them to inflict injury on the US.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be the foremost liberal authority on constitutional law in the US and who taught the subject to President Barack Obama, told the Guardian that the charge could set a worrying precedent. He said: "Charging any individual with the extremely grave offense of 'aiding the enemy' on the basis of nothing beyond the fact that the individual posted leaked information on the web and thereby 'knowingly gave intelligence information' to whoever could gain access to it there, does indeed seem to break dangerous new ground."
Tribe, who advised the department of justice in Obama's first term, added that the trial could have "far-reaching consequences for chilling freedom of speech and rendering the internet a hazardous environment, well beyond any demonstrable national security interest."
Bradley Manning Supporters Say Exposing Criminals is not a Crime
New entry in the dictionary for irony:
US rebukes Turkey over Taksim Square crackdown
The United States issued a rare rebuke to its ally Turkey over its crackdown on environmentalists in Istanbul angry at plans to raze a park across from the city's Taksim Square.
"We are concerned about the number of people who were injured when police dispersed protesters in Istanbul's Gezi Park," said State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki.
A Turkish Spring? Over 1,000 Injured as Anti-Government Protests Spread Outside of Istanbul
Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM
'Social media is the worst menace to society,' says Recep Erdogan after thousands take control of Istanbul's main square
Thousands of protesters have controlled Istanbul's main square once more after two days of violent clashes with rampaging riot police, as Turkey's prime minister vowed to press on with the controversial redevelopment that provoked the clashes.
Calling the protesters an "extremist fringe", Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the opposition Republican People's party for provoking the protests.
"We think that the main opposition party, which is making resistance calls on every street, is provoking these protests," Erdogan said on Turkish television, as an estimated 10,000 demonstrators streamed into the area waving flags and calling on the government to resign.
"There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Erdogan said. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."
Protesters again clashed with riot police into the early hours of Monday, Reuters reported.
Across Europe, People 'Rising Up' Againt Austerity and the 'Profiteers of Crisis'
Street demonstrations in Germany, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere call for end of failed policies
Europe's anti-austerity movement was flexing its muscles again on Saturday as tens of thousands joined street protests in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and elsewhere to voice their opposition and anger at the ongoing and worsening economic crisis on the continent. ...
In Frankfurt, Germany a second straight day of protest was targeted at the European Central Bank, one of the three institutions in Europe known collectively as "the Troika" which also includes the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. Under their authority, the struggling national economies of Europe have been forced to slash public budgets, cut services, reduce pensions and benefit plans, and privatize public entities like hospitals, energy companies, and transportation
On Friday, protesters under the banner of "Blockupy Frankfurt' shut down the ECB from "business as usual" by surrounding the institution's headquarters and blockading the entrances. Following that, the group said many more thousands had joined for Saturday's march, with more than 20,000 reportedly attending. ...
Calling its government a "profiteer of crisis," the group said in a statement, it was the labor market reforms pushed through in Germany in 2004, including "slashing long fought-for workers’ rights and securities" that is now serving "as the model for the neoliberal reforms that the German government and European financial elites try to push in all of Europe."
Blockupy Battle: Cops teargas anti-austerity activists in Frankfurt
The Astonishing Collapse of Black and Latino Household Wealth
Despite growing economic inequality and mass unemployment, Washington is focused on austerity. Politicians and pundits debate how much to cut and how much revenue to raise rather than creating jobs or alleviating the suffering of millions of people. What also gets lost in the dominant discourse about the economy is the suffering of the black community. The Great Recession has increased racial inequality and set back the modest socioeconomic gains of the civil rights movement.
Recently, the Urban Institute released a study on the racial wealth gap titled "Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation." The study found that, while the racial wealth gap has existed for decades, it's drastically expanded during the last 30 years. It says the "average wealth of white families was $230,000 higher than the wealth of black and Hispanic families in 1983." In that year, white families had an average wealth of nearly $300,000 in 2010 dollars. Wealth for all families increased, but not evenly.
The 2007-2009 recession devastated the American economy and all families suffered decreasing wealth. However, African American and Latino families were hit the hardest. According to the study, "between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families saw their wealth cut by over 40 percent, and black families saw their wealth fall by 31 percent." In comparison, white family wealth "fell by 11 percent."
Does Austerity Increase Inflation?
The undercovered dark cloud in the shrinking-deficit story
The federal budget deficit has been shrinking like a wool sweater in a clothes dryer, but that fact seems mostly lost on the American people. A Bloomberg poll found in February that 62 percent of Americans thought the deficit was growing; only 6 percent knew it was shrinking. ... So it was encouraging that new projections from the Congressional Budget Office a few weeks ago, forecasting even more rapid reductions in the deficit—the CBO now projects that the fiscal 2013 deficit will be $642 billion, or 24 percent less than its February estimate of a $845 billion shortfall—prompted a flurry of news reports.
Unfortunately, there’s a potential dark cloud to this silver lining. Some of the unexpectedly sharp additional drop in the 2013 federal deficit—and in rebounding state revenues—reflects a temporary effect and a one-time event ... Annie Lowrey’s May 15 New York Times article cites the economic recovery and fiscal austerity (both tax increases and spending cuts) as causes of the shrinking deficit... :
The C.B.O. said it had bumped up its estimates of current-year tax receipts from individuals by about $69 billion and from corporations by about $40 billion. The office said the factors lifting tax payments seemed to be “largely temporary,” due in part, probably, to higher-income households realizing gains from investments before tax rates went up in the 2013 calendar year.
That means that the rise in revenues that helped reduce the 2013 deficit may not owe much to broadly-shared growth—and a good bit of it may just reflect the richest households shifting the earnings away from future years into 2012. A similar surge occurred in 1986, when wealthy Americans took income to avoid paying more the following year once the Tax Reform Act took effect.
Frank Lautenberg Dead: New Jersey Senator Dies At 89
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) has died at the age of 89 of viral pneumonia, The Bergen Record reported Monday, citing the senator's office.
Lautenberg had struggled with health issues earlier this year, missing more than six weeks in the Senate while in recovery.
The senator's office confirmed Lautenberg's death in a Monday morning statement:
United States Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the last remaining World War II veteran serving in the Senate, passed away due to complications from viral pneumonia at 4:02 a.m. today at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell. He was 89 years old.
CIA Whistleblower's Tips On How Not to Get Killed in Jail
What the government isn’t telling us
You probably haven’t heard of “Operation Boulder,” a Nixon-era program that scrutinized the activities of Arab Americans and profiled visa applicants with Arab-sounding names. Possibly you should know about it—it’s one of the clearest precedents to the sort of policies the US government pursued after September 11 when it starting building anti-terrorism tools, like the no-fly list, around questionable metrics. But the State Department is pretty interested in keeping the program secret.
Matthew Connelly, a professor of history at Columbia University, came across Operation Boulder after a tool he and his colleagues built pointed right to it. They had just started up the Declassification Engine, a project led by Connelly and Columbia statistics professor David Madigan, with the idea that they would develop analytic tools that could coax new information out of secret or declassified documents. One of their inaugural research efforts began with a group of 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department. The cables were classified, but their metadata—bits of information about the embassy where a cable originated, the topic, the sender—were not. Analyzing the metadata, Connelly says, he and his colleagues found they could reveal what topics the State Department has chosen to hold most closely to its chest. And the word that stood out most prominently was “Boulder.”
This analysis is just one of the widgets that make up the Declassification Engine, which uses statistical and machine learning to better understand government secrecy. The project aims to aggregate archives of once-secret material and help historians, journalists, and other snoops understand it in ways they couldn’t have in the past.
Documents Reveal Exxon Mobil Lied and Downplayed Contamination from Pipeline Rupture
On March 29 Exxon Mobil, the most profitable company in the world, spilled at least 210,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from an underground pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas. The pipeline was carrying tar sands oil from Canada, which flooded family residences in Mayflower in thick tarry crude. Exxon’s tar sands crude also ran into Lake Conway, which sits about an eighth of a mile from where Exxon’s pipeline ruptured.
A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.
When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway.
Peak Water, Peak Oil…Now, Peak Soil?
REYKJAVÍK, Iceland - Soil is becoming endangered.This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík. ...
Each year, 12 million hectares of land, where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown, are lost to land degradation. In the past 40 years, 30 percent of the planet’s arable (food-producing) land has become unproductive due to erosion. Unless this trend is reversed soon, feeding the world’s growing population will be impossible. ...
Plowing, removal of crop residues after harvest, and overgrazing all leave soil naked and vulnerable to wind and rain, resulting in gradual, often unnoticed erosion of soil. This is like tire wear on your car – unless given the attention and respect it deserves, catastrophe is only a matter of time.
Erosion also puts carbon into the air where it contributes to climate change
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
Justice Department tries to force Google to hand over user data
Last night in Istanbul... this is amazing.
Crime and Punishment in the 21st Century
ObamaCare’s Relentless Creation of Second-Class Citizens
“Breaking” News: DoJ, Holder Parse Emily Litella In Clarification On Rosen Prosecution (Updated)
A Little Night Music
Cow Cow Davenport - Cow Cow Blues
Cow Cow Davenport - I've been Hoodooed
Cow Cow Davenport - Chimes Blues
Cow Cow Davenport - Alabama Strut
Cow Cow Davenport - State Street Jive
Cow Cow Davenport - Texas Shout
Cow Cow Davenport - Atlanta Rag
Walter Lantz Cartoon - Cow Cow Boogie 1943
Cow Cow Davenport - I'm Gonna Tell You In Front So You Won't Feel Hurt Behind
Ray Charles - Mess Around
Johnny Burnette Train Kept A Rollin'
Meade Lux Lewis - Cow Cow 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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