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 r&b singer Sam Moore. Enjoy!
Bruce Springsteen + Sam Moore - Hold On/Soul Man
“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
-- Winston Churchill
News and Opinion
NSA's mass phone data collection is illegal, says government privacy board
President Barack Obama rebuked over his defence of security agency’s gathering of Americans' phone data
The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch, issued a report on Thursday that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act. ...
Not only did the PCLOB conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.
“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”
The PCLOB tacitly rejected the NSA’s public claim that the bulk phone records collection may have made the difference in stopping a terrorist plot connected to cab drivers in San Francisco – a rare case in which a government review body has specifically refuted the NSA’s aggressive post-Snowden PR campaign.
“We believe that in only one instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in planning a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program,” it found. ...
The privacy board, which briefed Obama on its findings before his speech last week, reportedly recommends instead that the bulk collection ought to be ended outright, owing to its assessed lack of necessity and dubious legality.
We’re All Suspects in Barack Obama’s America
Barack Obama’s speech Friday on surveillance was his worst performance, not as a matter of theatrical skill, though he clearly did not embrace his lines, but in its stark betrayal of his oft proclaimed respect for constitutional safeguards and civil liberty.
His unbridled defense of the surveillance state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible Russian spy.
Instead of crediting Snowden for forcing what the president concedes is a much-needed debate, Obama bizarrely cited the example of Paul Revere and the other early American rebels in the Sons of Liberty to denounce their modern equivalent. But the “secret surveillance committee” Obama referenced that Revere and his fellow underground conspirators established was intended to subvert rather than celebrate the crimes of the British controlled government in power.
Somewhere in law school, Obama must have learned that the whole point of our Bill of Rights, inspired by American revolutionaries like Sam Adams, a Sons of Liberty co-conspirator, was to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom. Thus was Adams’ insistence on the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment, banning the warrantless searches that Obama now seeks to justify.
Snowden requests extra security after receiving death threats
U.S. brings fraud charges against firm that vetted Snowden
The U.S. Justice Department accused United States Investigations Services (USIS), the largest private provider of security checks for the government, of bilking millions of dollars through improper background verifications.
USIS, which also vetted Edward Snowden before he leaked documents about U.S. spying efforts, has a contract with the U.S. government since 1996 to vet individuals seeking employment with federal agencies. Such background checks include investigative fieldwork on each application.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a court filing on Wednesday that between March 2008 and September 2012, USIS filed at least 665,000 flawed background checks, which was about 40 percent of the total submissions.
A former employee of USIS filed a whistleblower lawsuit in July 2011 under the False Claims Act, which lets people collect rewards for blowing the whistle on fraud against the government.
The lawsuit alleged that USIS failed to perform quality control reviews in connection with its background investigations.
Netflix warns ISPs: We’ll mobilize our 44 million customers if you slow down our streams
You want a war? We have the bigger army.
This is Netflix’ message to shareholders, customers and the Internet service providers ready to charge content streaming firms a higher rate for bandwidth than other customers, in a shareholder letter released Wednesday, a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the FCC’s long-standing network neutrality rules for cable service providers.
“In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide,” wrote Reed Hastings, Netflix’ CEO, in the quarterly shareholder letter. “The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.”
Netflix, the letter notes, currently has more than 44 million members, 33 million of whom live in the U.S. ... “Consumers purchase higher bandwidth packages mostly for one reason: high-quality streaming video,” Netflix’ letter said. “ISPs appear to recognize this and many of them are working closely with us and other streaming video services to enable the ISPs subscribers to more consistently get the high-quality streaming video consumers desire. In the long-term, we think Netflix and consumers are best served by strong network neutrality across all networks, including wireless. To the degree that ISPs adhere to a meaningful voluntary code of conduct, less regulation is warranted. To the degree that some aggressive ISPs start impeding specific data flows, more regulation would clearly be needed.”
More Than 2,400 Dead as Obama’s Drone Campaign Marks Five Years
Five years ago, on January 23 2009, a CIA drone flattened a house in Pakistan’s tribal regions. It was the third day of Barack Obama’s presidency, and this was the new commander-in-chief’s first covert drone strike.
Initial reports said up to ten militants were killed, including foreign fighters and possibly a ‘high-value target’ – a successful first hit for the fledgling administration.
But reports of civilian casualties began to emerge. As later reports revealed, the strike was far from a success. At least nine civilians died, most of them from one family. There was one survivor, 14-year-old Fahim Qureshi, but with horrific injuries including shrapnel wounds in his stomach, a fractured skull and a lost eye, he was as much a victim as his dead relatives.
Later that day, the CIA attacked again – and levelled another house. It proved another mistake, this time one that killed between five and ten people, all civilians. ...
Yet despite this disastrous start the Obama administration markedly stepped up the use of drones. Since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the CIA has launched 330 strikes on Pakistan – his predecessor, President George Bush, conducted 51 strikes in four years. And in Yemen, Obama has opened a new front in the secret drone war.
New proposal offers U.S. a choice: Keep 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, or none at all
Military leaders have proposed keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after NATO’s combat mission ends in December — or else pull out all American forces, a US official said Wednesday.
The commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, General Joseph Dunford, presented the option last week to the White House, which is weighing the proposal, the official said, confirming reports in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
“It’s fair to say that the intelligence community, the State Department, the Pentagon, all believe that if we’re going to have a footprint in Afghanistan after 2014, it should be about that number,” said the official, referring to the 10,000 troop level.
“If that can’t be, we also believe it would be most prudent to have nothing,” the official told AFP, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ...
Any future force after December still hinges on Afghan President Hamid Karzai signing a bilateral security agreement between the two countries, which lays out a legal framework for a US military presence beyond 2014. Karzai has so far refused to sign the deal.
Top Israel Lobby Group Loses Battle on Iran, But War Not Over
Stephen Rosen [a former top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], who was forced to resign from AIPAC after his indictment – later dismissed — for allegedly spying for Israel, told Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that AIPAC needed to retreat from its confrontation with President Barack Obama after getting only 59 senators – all but 16 of them Republicans – to co-sponsor a new sanctions bill aimed at derailing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany). ...
“AIPAC and other hard-line groups remain a potent force in guaranteeing generous U.S. aid to Israel and hamstringing U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but their clout declines when they advocate a course of action that could lead to another Middle East war,” Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told IPS in an email exchange.
“The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience,” according to the influential Harvard international relations scholar.
No one, however, believes that AIPAC and its allies have given up. If the P5+1 negotiations should falter, the Kirk-Menendez bill is likely to be quickly re-introduced; indeed, one influential Republican senator said it should be put on the calendar for July, six months from Jan. 20 the date that Nov. 24 interim accord formally went into effect.
“It seems likely that advocates [of the bill] are getting ready to shift to some form of ‘Plan B’ [which], …one can guess, will look a lot like Plan A, but, instead of focusing on derailing negotiations with new sanctions, [it] will likely focus on imposing conditions on any final agreement – conditions that are impossible to meet and will thus kill any possibility of a deal,” according to Friedman.
That could include conditioning the lifting of sanctions on an agreement that includes a ban on any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil – a condition favoured by Netanyahu that Tehran has repeatedly rejected and that most experts believe would be a deal-breaker.
Iran moving quickly to normalize relations with the West
Iran on Thursday stepped up its efforts to woo investors and normalise its relations with the West with an offer to help create a new multilateral body tasked with stabilising global energy supplies.
President Hassan Rouhani told the World Economic Forum in Davos that Tehran was ready to put some of its extensive oil and gas reserves at the disposal of the proposed new body in an initiative designed to underline his government’s desire for a new relationship with the West following the partial easing of crippling sanctions under an interim deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity.
Rouhani told the annual gathering of business and political leaders from across the world that energy provided an important link between economic and security interests.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to engage in constructive cooperation in promoting global energy security by relying on its vast energy resources in a framework of mutual interest,” Rouhani said.
“We are prepared to engage in a serious process to establish a reliable institution for this long-term partnership.”
As Kiev protests turn deadly, boxing champ turned politician Vitali Klitschko vows ‘attack’
Ukrainian opposition leaders issued President Viktor Yanukovich with an ultimatum on Wednesday, threatening to launch an offensive if he does not dismiss the government, call early elections, and repeal legislation limiting acts of protest.
The demand came after three of the opposition’s main leaders met with the president for direct negotiations on Wednesday, following the deaths of at least three demonstrators during clashes with police in the capital Kiev. ...
Emerging from the failed talks, boxer-turned-politician Vitaly Klitschko told the thousands of protesters gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square said that he was ready to face police bullets.
“Today they are preparing to clear us out of the ‘Maidan’ (Independence Square),” Klitschko declared, urging protesters to camp out overnight to defend the square. “We must do all we can to stop them clearing us out.”
‘We will go on the offensive’
“Tomorrow if the President does not respond … then we will go on the offensive,” he said, drawing a roar of support from the crowd.
Understanding the Imperialist System Changed My Life - Gar Alperovitz (1/5)
Hat tip dharmafarmer:
Credit Ratings and Broken Knees: Did Geithner Threaten S&P's Chairman?
The Justice Department’s $5 billion fraud case against Standard & Poor’s is starting to sound like a Godfather movie. Or that, anyway, is what the chairman of the rating agency’s corporate parent, McGraw Hill Financial (MHFI), would have you believe.
The allegation by Harold McGraw III that former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner threatened S&P with unspecified retribution as punishment for a downgrade of U.S. debt has the ring of a litigation tactic—but a clever one, and one that ought to force the government to clarify why it singled out S&P, as opposed to its rating-industry rivals. ...
Our colleagues at Bloomberg News ably summarize the latest development:
“S&P filed a declaration by McGraw yesterday [Jan. 20] in federal court in Santa Ana, California, as part of a request to force the U.S. to hand over potential evidence that the company says will support its claim that the government filed a fraud lawsuit against it last year in retaliation for its downgrade of the U.S. debt two years earlier. In his court statement, McGraw, 65, said Geithner called him on Aug. 8, 2011, after S&P was the only credit ratings company to downgrade the U.S. debt. Geithner, McGraw said, told him that S&P would be held accountable for the downgrade. Government officials have said the downgrade was based on an error by S&P. ‘S&P’s conduct would be looked at very carefully,’ Geithner told McGraw, according to the filing. ‘Such behavior would not occur, he said, without a response from the government.’”
The Obama administration and Geithner were quick with their denials. There’s “no connection” between the 2011 downgrade and the subsequent government lawsuit, Ellen Canale, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, told Bloomberg. “The allegation that former Secretary Geithner threatened or took any action to prompt retaliatory government action against S&P is false,” Jenni LeCompte, a spokeswoman for Geithner, said in an e-mailed statement.
Did These 68 Words Just Kill IRS Oversight of Dark Money?
Congress rushed to pass a 1,524-page bill last week that funds government agencies for 2014. The bill—which President Obama signed into law last Friday—is full of minor measures that were slipped in to appease various members, but one small section could upend the Internal Revenue Service's ability to regulate political organizations hoping to become nonprofits. Tacked on as a symbolic effort to mollify conservatives' anti-IRS mania, the text is so overly vague that it could mean the dissolution of long-standing rules. Or nothing at all. No one's really sure. ...
The relevant section is buried on page 439 of the gigantic bill. Just nine lines long and 68 words, the two clauses say money designated for the IRS cannot be used to "target citizens of the United States for exercising any right guaranteed under the first Amendment" or to target "groups for regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs."
The section is a clear response to the IRS scandal from 2013. Conservatives were outraged that the agency flagged groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names for extra scrutiny. It wasn't a political vendetta—progressive groups with "occupy" in their name also garnered closer investigation before their applications were approved—just a means to sort through an onslaught of applications before the 2010 election. Nevertheless, Congress slipped in this measure as what seems like a nudge to the agency and a reminder that IRS agents shouldn't single out political groups of a certain ideological stripe. ... The IRS currently says 501(c)(3)s can't engage in any direct political activity, and 501(c)(4)s can't spend more than 50 percent of their budget on politics. According to [former director of the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, Marcus] Owens, the new law could uproot these rules, because the IRS must judge groups based on their speech and the expression of their ideological beliefs to enforce them. "It could have some rather dramatic implications," he says, "including that charities would be essentially free to engage in pretty much any kind of speech that they deem fit."
Physicist says he’s solved the big mystery — how life came from matter
The origin of life is basically inevitable from a mathematical standpoint, according to one physicist, and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
Jeremy England, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he’s developed a mathematical formula to explain his theory that matter necessarily acquires the key attributes for life if placed under certain conditions.
The 31-year-old England theorized that a group of atoms driven by an external energy source, such as the sun, and placed in a heat bath, such as the ocean or atmosphere, will eventually restructure itself to disperse heat – a defining characteristic of life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England told Quanta Magazine. ...
Although his idea is controversial among other physicists, England’s theoretical results are generally considered to be valid – even if his formula remains unproven.
Researchers are eager to test whether his formula, based on the second law of thermodynamics that helps explain the transfer of heat from a source, might represent the driving force that created life.
Democracy Now featured three interesting looking films today:
"Cesar’s Last Fast": How Cesar Chavez Risked Death to Protect the Lives of Farmworkers He Championed
Freedom Summer: How Civil Rights Activists Braved Violence to Challenge Racism in 1964 Mississippi
Through A Lens Darkly: How African Americans Use Photography to Shape Their Cultural Representation
The Evening Greens
Communities Resist as Tar Sands Flow Through KXL South
Sacrificing the health of the people and planet, 590,000 additional barrels of oil will now flow to refineries on the Gulf
Tar sands oil began flowing through the the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline Wednesday as operations commenced delivering the "the dirtiest fuel on Earth" to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.
The southern leg—the lesser known half of Transcanada's pipeline—originates in Cushing, Oklahoma and passes through countless communities in Oklahoma and East Texas before arriving at refineries and shipping ports along the coast.
"We are the story that isn't often told," East Texas resident Maya Lemon said in a statement circulated by the group NacSTOP (Nacogdoches County Stop Tar Sands Oil Permanently), "the story where Obama's decision to delay on KXL north was paired with an endorsement to fast track KXL south."
While opposition to the project has lacked the national attention given to protests against the northern section, local activists and community members on the front lines of the pipeline have long-fought the project and the eminent domain laws that bullied it through.
"We are dissatisfied with the process that allows this pipeline to begin operation, we are frustrated that landowner rights and issues related to eminent domain have never been fully resolved, and we are concerned that our communiies are not prepared to respond safely from this pipeline," NacSTOP writes in a letter calling for solidarity action nationwide.
NTSB: Federal regulators should improve safety of crude oil trains
The National Transportation Safety Board called Thursday for federal regulators to take steps to protect the public and the environment from oil spills and fires from trains, but stopped short of calling for a ban on transporting crude oil in tank cars long known to be vulnerable.
The NTSB, an independent agency makes recommendations but has no regulatory powers, asked the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to develop oil-spill response plans that account for the large volumes of crude oil now moving by rail.
It also called for regulators to identify routes for such shipments that would avoid population centers and environmentally sensitive areas. And it said regulators should make sure that crude oil, especially from North Dakota's Bakken region, is properly classified to reflect its higher level of hazard.
Wall Street Journal Investigation: High-Tech Oil Pipeline Monitors Catch Less Than 20 Percent Of Leaks
Last September, a farmer harvesting wheat in North Dakota smelled crude oil in his fields. That was the first indication anyone had that a Tesoro pipeline had ruptured and spewed some 20,000 barrels of oil into the environment.
Tesoro says it has beefed up its monitoring of the pipeline, as the pressure sensors it had installed before the spill did not detect the slow seep of oil, even though it had soaked a surrounding area the size of six football fields.
This may sound like an outlier case, but as it turns out, it is pretty much the industry standard. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, it is all too common that oil companies are the last to know when their pipelines spring a leak.
Coming just a week after Canada’s foreign minister traveled to Washington, D.C., and called on the Obama administration to make a decision on Keystone XL pipeline, the results of the paper's analysis contradict the oil industry’s claims that the safety of pipelines can be ensured through existing measures.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which looked at Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration data on 251 spills that occurred on private property since 2010, the industry's pipeline monitoring equipment was the first to detect a leak in just 19.5 percent of incidents.
David Suzuki: Rail Versus Pipeline Is The Wrong Question
Debating the best way to do something we shouldn’t be doing in the first place is a sure way to end up in the wrong place. That’s what’s happening with the “rail versus pipeline” discussion. Some say recent rail accidents mean we should build more pipelines to transport fossil fuels. Others argue that leaks, high construction costs, opposition and red tape surrounding pipelines are arguments in favour of using trains.
But the recent spate of rail accidents and pipeline leaks and spills doesn’t provide arguments for one or the other; instead, it indicates that rapidly increasing oil and gas development and shipping ever greater amounts, by any method, will mean more accidents, spills, environmental damage – even death. The answer is to step back from this reckless plunder and consider ways to reduce our fossil fuel use.
If we were to slow down oil sands development, encourage conservation and invest in clean energy technology, we could save money, ecosystems and lives – and we’d still have valuable fossil fuel resources long into the future, perhaps until we’ve figured out ways to use them that aren’t so wasteful. We wouldn’t need to build more pipelines just to sell oil and gas as quickly as possible, mostly to foreign markets. We wouldn’t have to send so many unsafe rail tankers through wilderness areas and places people live.
We may forgo some of the short-term jobs and economic opportunities the fossil fuel industry provides, but surely we can find better ways to keep people employed and the economy humming. Gambling, selling guns and drugs and encouraging people to smoke all create jobs and economic benefits, too – but we rightly try to limit those activities when the harms outweigh the benefits.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers
Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST
A Little Night Music
Tower of Power w/Sam Moore - I Thank You/Mr. Pitiful
Sam Moore - When Something Is Wrong With My Baby
Sam Moore with The Funk Brothers - Higher and Higher/Ain't Too Proud To Beg
Blues Brothers Band & Sam Moore - I've been loving you
Sam Moore - Plenty Good Lovin
Springsteen, Sam Moore, Irma Thomas - In the Midnight Hour
Sam And Dave - Soothe Me
Sam And Dave - You Don't Know Like I Know
Sam And Dave - Don't Turn Your Heater Down
Sam And Dave - You Got Me Hummin'
Sam And Dave - Wrap It Up
Sam and Dave - I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
Elvis Costello and The Attractions - I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
Sam and Dave - Broke Down Piece of Man
Sam and Dave - I Need Love (Their first record, 1962)
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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