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 and r&b singer Sugar Pie Desanto. Enjoy!
Rock Me Baby - Sugar Pie Desanto
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
News and Opinion
Senators grill spy chiefs, accuse them of lies
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee lambasted the nation’s top intelligence chiefs on Wednesday, complaining of lies about gathering the phone records of Americans and failing to cooperate with Congress in an investigation of the CIA’s controversial interrogation programs.
Committee members grilled Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan at the first intelligence committee hearing since President Barack Obama proposed reforms to the spy program.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told them an ongoing “culture of misinformation” has undermined the public’s trust in America’s intelligence leadership.
“That trust has been seriously undermined by senior officials’ reckless reliance on secret interpretations of the law and battered by years of misleading and deceptive statements senior officials made to the American people,” Wyden said. ...
Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Mark Udall of Colorado criticized Brennan, the CIA chief. They said Brennan is failing to cooperate with the Intelligence Committee’s probe of the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. It included secret prisons and techniques such as waterboarding often equated with torture.
“Recent efforts undertaken by the CIA, including but not limited to inaccurate public statements about the committee study, are meant to intimidate, deflect and thwart legitimate oversight,” said Heinrich.
ooooOOOOoooohhhh! Getting a public drubbing for all of the lies, parsing and just plain bullshit they've been spreading must have stung. The spooks responded by doubling down on their fearleader schtick. There are terrorists in your woodpile...
Intel chief warns Syria's militants want to attack US
Terrorists! Terrorists! They're reading your newspapers, I tell you!
James Clapper calls for Snowden and 'accomplices' to return NSA documents
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
Testifying before a rare and unusually raucous public session of the Senate intelligence committee that saw yet another evolution in the Obama administration’s defense of bulk domestic phone records collection, Clapper called on “Snowden and his accomplices” to return the documents the former National Security Agency contractor took, in order to minimize what he called the “profound damage that his disclosures have caused and continued to cause”. ...
Asked if the journalists who possess leaked surveillance information counted in Clapper's definition of an "accomplice", Clapper spokesman Shawn Turner clarified: "Director Clapper was referring to anyone who is assisting Edward Snowden to further threaten our national security through the unauthorized disclosure of stolen documents related to lawful foreign intelligence collection programs."
Angry Birds site defaced with 'spying birds' spoof after NSA revelation
The Angry Birds site was defaced by hackers, the company behind the game has confirmed, after revelations that America's National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ have been targeting the site's “leaky” user data.
An image employing the NSA logo and a “spying birds” caption replaced the official Angry Birds website for a brief time on Tuesday.
The hack was in response to the revelation that the Angry Birds apps, among others, were leaking personal data via advertising networks on which the UK and US intelligence agencies were spying.
For the NSA, espionage was a means to help Obama scuttle meaningful progress in climate negotiations
Enormous economic interests were at stake in the countries’ negotiation of CO2 reductions. Governments worried that commitments would slow them down in the global race to increase competitiveness and maximize growth. In order to ensure the best possible position in the negotiations, the Americans employed the technological capacities of the NSA spies.
According to another top secret document, the NSA was already involved in climate related intelligence activities several years before the COP15. ... James R. Clapper, who now oversees the NSA as Director of National Intelligence, is quoted from an internal NSA conference:
Increasingly the environment is becoming an adversary for us. And I believe that the capabilities and assets of the Intelligence Community are going to be brought to bear increasingly in assessing the environment as an adversary.
... [T]he document suggests that the NSA's actual focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes. It describes the US as being under pressure because of its role as the historically largest carbon emitter. ...
In the end, however, the US managed to arrive at a result that supported American interests. On the final night of the summit, December 18, President Obama led intense negotiations between heads of states and representatives from a small group of twenty-six countries, including China, India, South Africa, Brazil, and a number of EU countries. These negotiations resulted in the so-called Copenhagen Accord. ... The declaration did not legally obligate the countries to deliver specific CO2 emissions reductions; it did not prepare the ground for a continuation of the Kyoto protocol; and it allowed countries to define individual goals for their own CO2 reduction. In the case of the United States: the same 4-6 percent that the Americans had proposed prior to the negotiations.
Snowden Docs: U.S. Spied on Negotiators At 2009 Climate Summit
The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden. ...
The Copenhagen summit was the first big climate meeting after the election of President Barack Obama, and was widely expected to yield a significant breakthrough. Other major developed nations were already part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emissions limits, while the United States -- the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases when the protocol went into effect in 2004 -- had famously declined to join. The two-week meeting was supposed to produce a successor agreement that would include the U.S., as well as China, India and other countries with rapidly increasing emissions.
[The Snowden-released document] refers to another report that "provided advance details of the Danish proposal and their efforts to launch a 'rescue plan' to save COP-15." ... Danish officials wanted to keep U.S. negotiators from seeing the text in the weeks ahead of the conference, worried that it may dim their ambitions in the negotiations for proposed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
[Advance knowledge from intercepted documents] could be why U.S. negotiators took the positions they did going into the conference, a Danish official told Information. "They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document," the official said. "They made no constructive statements. Obviously, if they had known about our plans since the fall of 2009, it was in their interest to simply wait for our draft proposal to be brought to the table at the summit." ... Members of the Danish delegation indicated in interviews with Information that they thought the American and Chinese negotiators seemed "peculiarly well-informed" about discussions that had taken place behind closed doors. "Particularly the Americans," said one official. "I was often completely taken aback by what they knew."
The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.
"It can't help in the sense that if people think you're trying to get an unfair advantage or manipulate the process, they're not going to have much trust in you," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a seasoned veteran of the U.N. climate negotiations. Meyer said he worried that the disclosure might cause the parties to "start becoming more cautious, more secretive, and less forthcoming" in the negotiations. "That's not a good dynamic in a process where you're trying to encourage collaboration, compromise, and working together, as opposed to trying to get a comparative advantage," he said.
'Insane, Disgusting' and 'Epic Treachery': NSA Spied on Climate Talks
'Obama admin. clearly never wanted Copenhagen talks to work,' says Bill McKibben following latest NSA revelations concerning climate talks
While climate activists from around the world gathered outside the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 called for "System Change, Not Climate Change' while demanding to be heard by world leaders, the U.S. delegation inside the talks was busy listening to something else: a steady stream of surveillance intelligence on other nations provided by the National Security Agency.
That's according to new documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published Thursday by reporters at the Huffington Post and the Danish newspaper Information, with help from American journalist Laura Poitras. ...
Even more troubling, according to Information's assessment, is that the top secret "document suggests that the NSA's [...] focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes."
Defence lawyers granted access to Fisa surveillance documents in terror case
A representative of a criminal defendant has for the first time been granted permission to view evidence gathered against him under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the wellsprings of authority for terrorism surveillance.
Judge Sharon Coleman, a federal district judge in Illinois, issued an order on Wednesday permitting a lawyer for Adel Daoud, who is accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb near a Chicago bar, to learn the origins of the information the FBI or other US authorities collected about him under an order from a secret court that permits surveillance on terrorists or “agents of a foreign power”.
Never in the 36-year history of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) has anyone but the government and a judge seen the basis for a Fisa application or material derived from one. ...
Fisa surveillance is supposed to occur for intelligence purposes – a “significant purpose” must be intelligence gathering – rather than criminal prosecutions. The standard for obtaining Fisa warrants is lower than the “probable cause” guaranteed under the fourth amendment, raising concerns that the use of Fisa materials in criminal cases, as well as information derived from them, might circumvent the standard.
After Snowden: using law and technology to counter snooping
Leaked official document records 330 drone strikes in Pakistan
The Bureau is today publishing a leaked official document that records details of over 300 drone strikes, including their locations and an assessment of how many people died in each incident.
The document is the fullest official record of drone strikes in Pakistan to have yet been published. It provides rare insight into what the government understands about the campaign.
It also provides details about exactly when and where strikes took place, often including the names of homeowners. These details can be valuable to researchers attempting to verify eyewitness reports – and are often not reported elsewhere. But interestingly, the document stops recording civilian casualties after 2008, even omitting details of well-documented civilian deaths and those that have been acknowledged by the government. ...
Now the Bureau has obtained an updated version of the document, which lists attacks up to late September 2013.
The document contains estimates of how many people have been killed in each strike, as well as whether the dead are ‘local’ or ‘non-local’ – a broad category that includes those from elsewhere in Pakistan, as well as foreigners. ...
Although the document records civilian casualties in the early years, from 2009 these almost disappear. Even well-documented cases of civilian deaths are omitted. These include at least two incidents where the tribal administration is known to have admitted to the families that it knew civilians had died.
Obama Digging in on Drones and other Flawed Foreign Policy Strategies
Obama wants to impose “prudent limitations” on the drone war. But the only “prudent” limit would be to end the drone war. It violates international law, kills civilians, foments more terrorism and doesn’t work. The president admitted “we will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” Yet the only way to solve problem is to stop striking without regard for consequences — not to just strike prudently. Obama can and should end the drone war by executive action.But the U.S. Constitution’s division of power makes unilateral presidential action easiest, almost required, in foreign affairs and use of the military. Obama made a strong statement that “America must move off a permanent war footing.” That should’ve been a Wow! moment. We should’ve heard plans to shutter the 700-plus U.S. military bases scattered across the globe, creating huge social and environmental problems and fomenting anti-U.S. tensions. We should’ve heard plans for massive cuts in military spending on those bases, on wasteful and giant weapons systems, on illegal wars. That’s what ending permanent war means. But we didn’t hear of any moves to actually do so.
The Real State of the Union
The state of the Union is crap. 20% of the country is doing OK. 1% is doing fantastically. 0.001% is doing so well it’s criminal, literally. They don’t own everything yet but they do own the politicians, judges, regulators, academics, and reporters. So they’re getting there. The other 80%, the rubes, the muppets, the serfs, are mired in an undeclared, ongoing depression.
50 years on I can safely state that the War on Poverty has been won. The poor have been defeated, the middle class conquered. They just don’t know it. Many sense that something is wrong, even drastically wrong, but few realize they have been totally and thoroughly betrayed by those they trusted with the governance of the country and themselves. They cannot admit –they have been admirably taught not to admit — even the possibility of the class war waged against them and which they have definitely and definitively lost. They continue to look to those who did this to them to fix things and make them better. They may grumble but there is no hint of real opposition or organized rebellion. Theirs is a Union of misery, lost hopes, lesser lives. The Union of the rich and elites is triumphant.
So we have two states of the Union because we have two Unions, one of the many and one of the few, the haves and have-nots, the winners and the losers. We have one Union based on reality and hard work and another which feeds off it.
For most Americans, their wages minus inflation have stayed flat every day of their working lives, that is for the last 35 years. College is no longer a passport to a better life but a trap of lifelong debt. Hard work avails nothing as millions of American jobs have been sent abroad in “free” trade agreements. These agreements are not free for those who lost their jobs. And they make all of us among the many poorer because it has all become not about how hard you work but how cheaply. The meltdown of 5 years ago destroyed much of the wealth of the middle class and virtually all the wealth of the lower classes. But those who drove the economy over the cliff in 2008, the rich, have come roaring back. They have made back the money they lost and more as the government and Fed have thrown trillions at them and encouraged them to blow new and bigger speculative bubbles. Stock markets are at or near historic highs. Statistics have been bent and twisted until they scream. As a consequence, GDP is up. Unemployment is down. Life is good. The numbers prove it. So suck it up, ignore reality, and stop complaining.
Ukrainian opposition party rejects amnesty bill for protesters
Ukraine’s opposition on Wednesday defiantly refused to back an amnesty bill that would free activists and ease the country’s worst crisis since independence, as Germany urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to use his sway to push for dialogue.
The amnesty bill was passed by parliament with the backing of the ruling Regions Party in a chaotic late night session, but opposition MPs refused to vote and it appears unlikely the law could mark any breakthrough in the standoff.
President Viktor Yanukovych has granted several concessions to protesters who have packed the centre of Kiev for the last two months, including accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov. But the opposition want the head of state to go. ...
Protesters, some from right-wing radical groups, remain camped out in much of the city centre of Kiev and have now erected wooden watchtowers at their barricades. They are still occupying key municipal buildings including the Kiev city hall.
Defiant Yanukovych attacks opposition after sick leave announcement
Ukraine's embattled president, Viktor Yanukovych, has accused the opposition of escalating the situation in the country and insisted that his government is doing all it can to solve the crisis.
Yanukovych's defiant statement – released on the presidential website – followed an earlier announcement that he is taking sick leave due to an acute respiratory illness and high fever. There was no indication of how long he might be on leave or whether he would be able to do any work. The chief medical officer said the president was suffering from a "severe cold with a high temperature".
Vitali Klitschko's UDAR opposition party responded with a statement saying that the sick leave "gives the impression he is trying to stay aloof from the political crisis rocking the country". ...
Yanukovych's illness is another unpredictable element in Ukraine's already combustible political drama. His predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, fell dramatically ill in 2004 after apparently being poisoned with dioxin, while standing against Russian-backed Yanukovych in the presidential election.
Debate: Is Ukraine’s Opposition a Democratic Movement or a Force of Right-Wing Extremism?
Gaza warned of looming water crisis
Last November, the World Bank completed construction of a wastewater treatment plant designed to prevent pollution of the underground aquifer that provides fresh water to 400,000 people in the northern Gaza Strip, but it stands idle, silenced by political wrangling. Gaza is dependent on Israel for most of its electricity supply but Israel is refusing to provide the extra three megawatts required to power the plant until Gaza's existing electricity bills are paid. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority cannot agree on who should settle the debt.
"Until a solution is found to provide electricity, untreated sewage will continue to contaminate the coastal aquifer and flow into the Mediterranean," said Bromberg. He said the waste also threatens to pollute an Israeli desalination plant in nearby Ashkelon.
Unicef says that more than 90% of the water extracted from Gaza's sole aquifer is unfit for human consumption. More than four out of five Gazans buy their drinking water from expensive, unregulated private vendors. Most of it is contaminated.
"Some families are paying as much as a third of their household income on water," said June Kunugi, Unicef special representative for the State of Palestine.
From Al Jazeera on Trial to Bloggers Behind Bars, Army-Run Egypt Sees Growing "Silencing of Dissent"
Obama promotes retirement savings plan on State of Union road trip
Obama signed a presidential order directing Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to establish a government-backed investment option called myRA that permits people with little to no savings to set aside as little as $5 in payroll deductions.
"If you worked hard all your life, you deserve a secure retirement," Obama told about 1,500 plant workers.
The program seeks to address the problem that Americans have not made proper plans to set aside money for their old age and have neither pensions nor a 401(k) retirement savings plan.
The myRA plan is similar to the tax-advantageous Roth Individual Retirement Account, but with investment holdings backed by the U.S. government like savings bonds. The accounts would be available to households earning no more than $191,000 a year.
Obama's myRA Plan Doesn't Go Far Enough To Fix Broken U.S. Retirement System
Here’s how to tackle this problem, as outlined by the Center for American Progress:
“The Secure, Accessible, Flexible, and Efficient, or SAFE, Retirement Plan would automatically enroll workers in a collective defined-contribution plan, offer low fees and professional fund management, collectively pool participants’ assets, and turn these assets into lifetime payments in retirement at a low cost. Additionally, a Universal Savings Credit, which would replace all existing deductions with a new flat tax credit based on their contributions to a savings account, would flip the upside-down pyramid of tax benefits to better help low- and middle-income families save for retirement.”
The problem isn’t that Americans don’t have enough ways to save for retirement — they have too many. Look at the alphabet soup of plans from 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 457s to Roth IRAs. Why not consolidate them and make the tax breaks uniform through credits? Make a universal plan with low fees accessible to everyone — regardless of where they work. It’s not only a way to address inequality, it will improve retirement security for everyone.
Good news on TPP/Fast Track. Somebody has replaced Harry Reid and his stand-in has a spine.
Mirabile Dictu! Reid Tells Off Obama on Fast Track, Killing Toxic Trade Deals for 2014
Obama made yet another pitch in State of the Union Address for his gimmies to multinationals known as the TransPacific Partnership and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Today that idea went down in flames, at least as far as getting the deals done this year are concerned. From Huffington Post:
“I’m against fast track,” [Harry] Reid told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill, before suggesting a fast-track bill introduced by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) may not get a vote.
“We’ll see. Everyone knows how I feel about this. Senator Baucus knows, [potential backer] Sen. [Ron] Wyden knows. The White House knows.”
Indeed, Reid cautioned the president and his allies to back off.
“I think everyone would be well advised just to not push this right now,” the majority leader said.
Although Reid was known to be opposed to fast track, it’s quite another matter for him as a Democratic Congressional leader to tell Obama to take a hike.
Representative Waxman, senior Democrat, to retire
Democratic U.S. Representative Henry Waxman of California, a leading liberal who helped craft President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare overhaul, said on Thursday he will retire from Congress at the end of this year.
"In 1974, I announced my first campaign for Congress," Waxman, 74, said in a statement. "Today, I am announcing that I have run my last campaign. I will not seek re-election to the Congress and will leave after 40 years in office at the end of this year."
The Evening Greens
Monarch Butterfly in 'Grave Danger'
Herbicides, deforestation and climate conditions putting the monarch in free fall
A new report from the World Wildlife Fund and Mexico’s National Commission for Protected Areas found that the number of monarch butterflies hibernating in Mexico dropped to its lowest level since records began in 1993. ...
Using satellite and aerial photographs, the new study documented that 1.65 acres of forest were inhabited by monarchs during December of 2013, marking a 44% drop from the same time in 2012.
From study:
There are 3 primary threats to the monarch butterfly in its range in North America: deforestation and degradation of forest by illegal logging of overwintering sites in Mexico; widespread reduction of breeding habitat in the United States due to land-use changes and the decrease of this butterfly's main larval food plant (common milkweed [Asclepias syriaca]) associated with the use of glyphosate herbicide to kill weeds growing in genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant crops; and periodic extreme weather conditions throughout its range during the year, such as severe cold or cold summer or winter temperatures.
Other butterfly experts have pointed to these three factors as well, though Lincoln Brower, a professor of biology at Sweet Briar College who has studied the monarch migrations for decades, told the Washington Post's Brad Plumer that "The most catastrophic thing from the point of view of the monarch butterfly has been the expansion of crops that are planted on an unbelievably wide scale throughout the Midwest and have been genetically manipulated to be resistant to the powerful herbicide Roundup."
Shell suspends offshore drilling in Alaska after court decision
Royal Dutch Shell will suspend drilling in offshore Alaska after a US court decision and as the oil major streamlines operations following a slump in annual profits, it said on Thursday.
The Anglo-Dutch group said it would halt the project this year after a federal appeals court last week ruled that the US government had improperly relied on inadequate information in the process of awarding licences for exploration in Alaska.
“The recent decision … raises substantial obstacles to Shell’s plans for drilling in offshore Alaska,” Shell said in a statement accompanying the earnings release.
“As a result, Shell has decided to stop its exploration programme for Alaska in 2014.”
Obama's Energy Plan Cannot Seriously Address The Impending Climate Crisis
DESVARIEUX: So, Janet, the president talked about the achievements of his administration, and he pointed to how over the past eight years the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on earth. What do you make of this claim?
REDMAN: ... I think it's important ... that we dissect it a little bit. There are three pieces that I think are critical when we're looking at the numbers that he's talking about.
One, of course, is that we've seen a lot of emissions reduced because we're moving away from coal. That's exciting. I think many of us have been saying for a long time we need to leave coal behind. There's no such thing as clean coal. And so this is exciting. But the reality is we're shifting to other fossil fuels, and in particular, as you heard Obama talk about, we're shifting to natural gas. So part of the reality of the number of us reducing emissions is that we may not be counting the whole emissions package that comes along when we do natural gas drilling. So what I think we're going to see as we talk more about the energy policy is in fact we may see a rise in emissions as we begin to measure the full greenhouse gas ramifications of natural gas drilling.
I guess there are two other pieces that I think are really important. One, while we may be reducing our emissions here in the United States, we're still consuming a lot of goods from other parts of the world. So part of the emissions package from China, from India, from other parts of the developing world are actually some of our own embedded emissions. And by embedded emissions I mean that those countries are producing cheap products that we purchase here in the United States, but they are counting the emissions from that production in their own statistics. So we're kind of missing a bunch of the emissions that are actually in our computer in the clothes that we purchase.
And then a third piece--and I think this is also important--is that of course we're seeing a downturn in our economy in the past eight years. So a piece of that reduction of emissions is actually because of slowed economic growth. So if we are actually coming out of a recession, or if we don't see a second dip in the recession, those numbers may change, those numbers will change slightly. We may not be in the same kind of trajectory or pathway as we just saw Obama talk about.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
The anti-fracking activist barred from 312.5 sq miles of Pennsylvania
Allergic to America: I Had to Move Away Because Life in the US Was Making Me Ill
Epic Treachery - Sabotage of Most Important Climate Talks in 50 Years
A Little Night Music
Sugar pie Desanto - Soulful Dress
Sugar Pie DeSanto & Etta James - In The Basement (Part 1& 2)
Sugar pie de Santo - I don't wanna fuss
Sugar Pie DeSanto - Hello San Francisco
Sugar Pie De Santo - Do The Whoo-pee
Sugar Pie Desanto - Use What You Got
Sugar Pie Desanto - Slip-In-Mules
Sugar Pie DeSanto - Git Back
Sugar Pie DeSanto - (That) Lovin' Touch
Sugar Pie DeSanto at the 2008 Pioneer Awards
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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