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 Chicago bluesman Howlin' Wolf. Enjoy!
Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lightning
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-- Harry S. Truman
News and Opinion
Glenn Greenwald Says His Partner Was Questioned SOLELY About What Guardian Was Publishing Next!
Governments harassing journalists in the name of national security isn’t new — but it is dangerous
Last year the Turkish government jailed 21 journalists working for the DIHA news agency on trumped up anti-terrorist charges. The reporters were covering the Kurdish separatist movement, but Ankara maintains the journalists reporting endangered national security.
This last weekend, the UK government detained and interrogated for nine hours, under the parameters of an anti-terrorist law, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been reporting on the excesses in the US and UK governments’ surveillance programs.
Harassing and intimidating journalists and their family members has no place in a democratic society. Doing it under the guise of national security is particularly odious, but nothing new. It’s an old trick used by dictators who fear public scrutiny of their actions. ... The UK’s Metropolitan Police, after giving the US a “head’s up,” jailed and interrogated David Miranda for nine hours - without allowing the Brazilian citizen the right to contact his embassy and without giving him access to a lawyer. There is no indication that Miranda is or was ever a terrorist. Indeed, the six agents quizzed him primarily about Greenwald and his reporting. This can only be seen as a gross misuse of power and an attempt to intimidate Greenwald.
In a dictatorial society, the first right that is lost is free speech. Journalists in Turkey - and Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Russia, North Korea, Azerbaijan and China - know that all too well. In the name of national security, we in the western world are discovering our right to speak out is also being muted in the name of national security.
'UK orders Guardian hard drives destroyed to gag Snowden leaks'
David Miranda's lawyers threaten legal action over 'unlawful' detention
Lawyers for the partner of the Guardian journalist who exposed mass email surveillance have written to home secretary Theresa May and the head of the Metropolitan police warning them that they are set to take legal action over what they say amounted to his "unlawful" detention at Heathrow airport under anti-terror laws.
In their letter to May and Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe they warn they are seeking immediate undertakings for the return David Miranda's laptop and all other electronic equipment within seven days.
His lawyers at the London firm Bindmans are seeking an official undertaking that there will be "no inspection, copying, disclosure, transfer, distribution or interference, in any way with our client's data". ...
Gwendolen Morgan, the lawyer at Bindmans dealing with the case, said: "We have grave concerns about the decision to use this draconian power to detain our client for nine hours on Sunday – for what appear to be highly questionable motives, which we will be asking the high court to consider. This act is likely to have a chilling effect on journalists worldwide and is emphatically not what parliament intended schedule 7 powers to be used for."
David Miranda detention - latest developments and reaction
Theresa May, the home secretary, strongly defended the right of police to detain David Miranda at Heathrow airport. In an interview with broadcasters, she suggested that Miranda was stopped because he had secret information that could help terrorists. ...
May said that she was told in advance that there was a possibility that Miranda would be detained. But she said that she did not order his detention, and that the decision to stop him was taken by the police.
We live in a country where those decisions as to whether or not to stop somebody or arrest somebody are not for me as home secretary. They are for the police to take. That's absolutely right, that they have their operational independence, and long may that continue.
How Our Government Is Becoming Increasingly Secretive
Hat tip Cosmic Debris:
Guardian bombshells in an escalating battle against journalism
Prior restraint is the nuclear option in government relations with the press and unfortunately, the British don’t have a First Amendment. But Rusbridger, having gone through the fire with Wikileaks, was prepared for that. The paper’s journalism is mostly being done in New York and the Snowden documents are dispersed in other countries.
Combine Rusbridger’s revelations with news of the detention of Greenwald’s partner David Miranda by UK authorities and you have a DEFCON 2 journalism event.
Miranda was serving as a human passenger pigeon, shuttling encrypted files on USB drives between filmmaker Laura Poitras and Greenwald because, as the whole world now knows, the Internet is fully bugged by the US and UK governments. So the UK, using an anti-terrorism statute, arrested Miranda on arrival at Heathrow, interrogated him for 9 hours, threatened to arrest him, and took his stuff. The war on whistleblowers has now escalated to disrupting journalists’ communications.
In light of Rusbridger’s disclosures, it’s even clearer that the detention of Miranda is part of an attack on American journalists authorized at the highest levels of the British government, and it’s an attack that is at the very least implicitly backed by the Obama administration.
"They'll Be Laughing in Moscow and Beijing." A Former British Defence Minister Writes...
"They'll Be Laughing in Moscow and Beijing." A Former British Defence Minister Writes...
The spooks are not going to get the NSA files back; that genie is well and truly out of the bottle. So why do it? The conclusion must be, as Greenwald speculates, that we were just roughing up his boyfriend in order to psyche him out. I am no Carrie Mathieson but I think the wrong case officer is in charge of this investigation if they think this will shut Greenwald up. He thrives on this stuff. The UK intelligence services have created a global audience for the spectacle of him beating them with a big stick of indignant rebuke. ...
The President has been embarrassed by his intelligence services over the Snowden affair. And now the UK’s PM will have to account for the behavior of our own anti-terrorist forces. Our Prevention of Terrorism Act allows detention for any suspicion of terrorist activity. The broad interpretation of "suspicion" in this case will inevitably lead to a discussion about whether safeguards should supplement the clause in the PTA that allows this kind of detention.
So well done officer 203654 – you have united journalists from far left to far right. Questions will be asked in Parliament. You've embarrassed the PM. And Glenn Greenwald leads the global news again.
They'll be laughing in Moscow and Beijing.
‘Guardian’ editor: Destroying hard drives allowed us to continue NSA coverage
Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, has said that the destruction of computer hard drives containing information provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden allowed the paper to continue reporting on the revelations instead of surrendering the material to UK courts.
Rusbridger told BBC Radio 4′s The World at One on Tuesday that he agreed to the “slightly pointless” task of destroying the devices – which was overseen by two GCHQ officials at the Guardian’s headquarters in London – because the newspaper is in possession of digital copies outside Britain. ...
“It was a rather bizarre situation in which I explained to them that there were other copies and, as with WikiLeaks, we weren’t working in London alone so destroying a copy in London seemed to me a slightly pointless task that didn’t take account of the way that digital information works these days,” said Rusbridger. ...
Rusbridger added that the alternative to destroying the computer hard drives would be “essentially surrendering control of that material” to the courts while fighting a lengthy legal case with only a small prospect of winning.
Obama's Sinister Crackdown on the Press
It is becoming perfectly clear that the outrageous detention of American journalist Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian partner David Miranda by British police during a flight transfer at London’s Heathrow Airport was, behind the scenes, the work of US intelligence authorities. ... The give-away that this was not something that the British dreamed up on their own, however, is their admission that they had “notified Washington” of their intention to detain Miranda, a Brazilian national, before the detention actually occurred.
Note that they did not notify Brazilian authorities. It was the Americans who got the call.
And why was that? Because, clearly, Miranda was on one of America’s “watch lists” and the British police needed instructions from their superiors in the US regarding what do do with him. ...
What started out as universal monitoring by the NSA of all electronic communications is now metastasizing into arrests of journalists and their assistants at the airport. This will no doubt in no time metastasize further to night-time SWAT raids on journalists’ homes and offices. We’ve already seen such things being visited upon political activists, so the new development should not come as much of a surprise.
This latest escalation of the US government’s assault on truth and journalism exposes the puerile sham of President Obama’s claim to want to “reform” the National Security Agency’s spying program and to limit the “Justice” Department’s invasive actions against journalists.
Minority Misery: 'Jihadists cleansing Kurds in Syria', thousands flee
US Govt: 'We Want to Make an Example Out of Bradley Manning'
"This court must send a message to those who release confidential information," prosecutor Army Capt. Joe Morrow declared to judge Col. Denise Lind who is overseeing the case, urging a stiff 60-year minimum sentence, as well as a dishonorable discharge from the Army and a $100,000 fine.
Manning "deserves to spend the majority of his remaining life in prison," Morrow insisted.
Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network told Common Dreams, "The prosecution insisted there has to be deterrence and we need to set an example out of Bradley Manning. They made it clear that anyone else thinking of releasing classified info should look at Manning. They want to go above and beyond what would be considered a reasonable sentence."
Manning's "biggest crime is that he cared about the loss of life," declared defense lawyer David Coombs in court, urging no more than 25 years for the defendant.
Speaking after court, Coombs declared, "Our elected leaders don't want us to question national security."
Oiling the War Machinery, From Oslo to Heathrow to Washington
Last week, I met with the Research Director of the Nobel Committee at its headquarters in Oslo. We sat at one end of a long polished conference table, next to boxes of petitions signed by 100,000 people urging that the Nobel Peace Prize go to Bradley Manning.
The Nobel official, Asle Toje, remained polite but frosty when I urged -- as I had two hours earlier at a news conference -- that the Nobel Committee show independence from the U.S. government by awarding the Peace Prize to Manning. Four years after the prize went to President Obama, his leadership for perpetual war is incontrovertible -- while Manning’s brave whistleblowing for peace is inspiring.
In recent times, I pointed out, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some dissenters who were anathema to their governments’ leaders -- but not to any recipient who profoundly displeased the U.S. government. Toje responded by mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., a rejoinder that struck me as odd; King received the prize 49 years ago, and more than two years passed after then until, in April 1967, he angered the White House with his first full-throated denunciation of the Vietnam War.
I motioned to the stacks of the petition, which has included personal comments from tens of thousands of signers -- reflecting deep distrust of the present-day Nobel Peace Prize, especially after Obama won it in 2009 while massively escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
We were in the grand and ornate building that has housed the Nobel Committee for more than a hundred years. Outside, a bust of Alfred Nobel graces the front entrance, and just across a small traffic circle is the U.S. Embassy, an imposing dark gray presence with several stories, hundreds of windows on each of its three sides and plenty of electronic gear on its roof. (That intersection is widely understood to be a base for American surveillance operations.) More than ever in recent years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee building’s physical proximity to the U.S. Embassy is an apt metaphor for its political alignment.
Is Eliot Spitzer Still Wall Street's Worst Nightmare? -
Not Too Big to Jail
Before Eliot Spitzer’s infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers.” The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.
Five years later, Spitzer has set out to take some of that local regulatory power back, in his run for New York City comptroller. Mounting the attack against him, however, are not just Wall Street banks but women’s groups opposed to this apparent endorsement of the exploitation of women. On August 17th, the New York Post endorsed Spitzer’s opponent and ran a scathing cover story attempting to embarrass Spitzer based on the single issue of his personal life.
Lynn Parramore, who considers herself a feminist, countered in an August 8th Huffington Post article that it is likely to be in the best interests of the very women who are opposing him to forgive and move on. His stand for women’s reproductive rights and other feminist issues is actually quite strong, and his role as Wall Street watchdog protected women from predatory financial practices. As New York Attorney General, he was known as the “Sheriff of Wall Street.” He is one of the few people with not only the insight and experience to expose Wall Street corruption but the courage to go after the perpetrators.
Matt Taibbi: U.S. Student Loan Bubble Saddles a Generation With Debt and Threatens the Economy
Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and Other Telecoms Fighting to Cash In... on You
Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, DIRECTV, and other giant U.S. cable and telecommunications companies are going hard-core with an aggressive anti-consumer agenda aimed at turning your private behavior into dollar signs. Citing antiregulatory buzzwords like "competition" and "economic growth', they are lobbying hard to loosen privacy rules in Washington for a very simple reason: They’ve got their hands on the wires that connect millions of homes with Internet and television services, and they want to sell information about your use of them to the highest bidder. ...
The regulatory change would mean getting a new law passed in Congress. So the industry has gotten up a new lobbying group with an Orwellian name: the 21st Century Privacy Coalition. It is led by two revolving-door champions, Jon Leibowitz, who just left his post as chairman of the FTC and former Rep. Mary Bono Mack, a California Republican, who, as Mike Ludwig of Truthout put it “raked in thousands of dollars of donations from the telecom industry before leaving Congress last year.”
Barack Obama has very close ties to the cable industry, which lavished his campaign with money in the 2012 election cycle. Recently while vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, he hit the golf course with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who also came over to the house for a friendly visit.
Gee, wonder what they discussed over lemonade?
The Evening Greens
Keystone Clones
Fracking Free Riders on the Highway - Texas begins replacing paved roads with gravel due to lack of funding
The oil and gas boom in Texas has produced an unintended effect: The state plans to covert some roads to gravel to save money.
The oversized vehicles and overweight loads used by energy companies has had a devastating impact on many roads, but the state has not appropriated enough money to fix them.
The Texas Department of Transportation began converting more than 80 miles of paved roads to gravel on Monday, according to the Texas Tribune. The speed limit on the new gravel roads will be reduced to 30 mph. ...
The Texas Department of Transportation said $400 million was needed to repair immediate damage caused by energy sector traffic across the state. The department said it needed an additional $1 billion per year to keep the roadways in good condition
Burst Pipeline's Spill Plan Is None of Your Business, Suggests Regulator
Federal regulators have released ExxonMobil's 2013 emergency response plan for the pipeline that ruptured in an Arkansas residential neighborhood on March 29, but the document is so heavily redacted that it offers little information about Exxon's preparations for such an accident.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) completely blotted out more than 100 pages of the 290-page document, including Exxon’s worst-case scenario hypothesis and its plans to repair any damage caused by an accident. What remains is emergency contact information for local authorities and Exxon officials and maps of the 850-mile route of the Pegasus pipeline, which also include a few redactions.
PHMSA even redacted part of the ExxonMobil watermark that appears on more than 150 pages of the document.
Wrecked Fukushima plant springs highly radioactive water leak
Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the clean up of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.
The storage tank breach of about 300 tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.
The latest leak, which is continuing, is so contaminated that a person standing 50 centimeters (1.6 feet) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers. ...
"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse," said Michiaki Furukawa, who is professor emeritus at Nagoya University and a nuclear chemist.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Is there a link between Edward Snowden's asylum drama and fracking?
Ally responds to transphobia in Washington Post
European Broadcasting Union Sells Out Greece's Public Broadcaster
A Little Night Music
Rolling Stones and Howlin Wolf - How Many More Years
Howlin' Wolf - Evil
Howlin' Wolf - Shake For Me
Howlin' Wolf 'splains the blues - Goin Upstairs
Howlin Wolf - Highway 49
Howlin' Wolf - Meet Me In The Bottom
Howlin Wolf - Back Door Man
Howlin' Wolf - Dust My Broom
Howlin' Wolf - Sittin' On Top Of The World
The Howlin' Wolf - Moanin' At Midnight
Howlin' Wolf - Forty Four
Howlin' Wolf - If you hear me howlin'
Howlin' Wolf - Tail Dragger
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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