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 soul blues singer James Peterson and blues-rock singer and harmonica player Delbert McClinton. Enjoy!
James Peterson - Don't Let the Devil Ride
"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist."
-- Charles Baudelaire
News and Opinion
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. ...
Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.
[T]hese surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.
[Oh, then in the US, there's the execrable Cass Sunstein]
Greenwald: Spy Agencies Manipulate Information, Attack Reputations of Targets Online
4 Darknesses: Internet being Manipulated, Deceived by Western Intel Trolls
Researchers on online behavior have shown that internet trolls (people who use insincere techniques to disrupt conversations) really are psychopaths, marked by narcisssism, sadism, Machiavellianism. Professors Eric Buckels, Paul Trapnell, and Delroy Paulhus administered surveys to students and found that about 6 percent of them enjoyed messing with other people’s heads on the internet, or trolling. This same group scored high on the four most vicious personality traits, known as the dark tetrad. ...
Now it turns out that Western intelligence agencies who say that they are fighting al-Qaeda are actually spending time trolling the internet, displaying all the same Dark Tetrad characteristics. Their victims include “hacktivists,” but note that they are targeting these individuals on suspicion of hacking and that the persons targeted have not been convicted of any crime. ...
When political organizations and political cults, or when corrupt politicians pull these tricks, it makes them disreputable. Nixon used this playbook, e.g. But here we have civil servants being paid to act this way.
To have such institutions, paid for by tax payers, engaging in trolling the internet is highly corrosive of the values of a democratic country. Democratic politics depends on citizens knowing each other and knowing where they stand politically. To have secret government officers manipulating the reputations of people, breaking up their friendships and associations, and entrapping them with sex set-ups creates a situation where it is impossible to trust democratic process. Whenever you hear of a powerful person being embroiled in a scandal, you have to now at least ask, was this an intelligence agency that took him or her down? Was it because they were in the way of some corrupt goal? For when there is no real civilian oversight over invisible government, the opportunity for graft and other criminal behavior is enormous.
Snowden 2.0: Is There a New Active Duty NSA Whistleblower
Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
What the paper reported, based on information provided by a "high-ranking NSA employee in Germany," was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed for spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel—responded to an order to refrain from spying directly on Merkel's phone by intensifying its monitoring of other high-level officals her government.
"We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly," the source told the newspaper. ...
What "amazes" TechDirt blogger Mike Masnick about the latest revelations regarding the NSA's ongoing surveillance program of German politicians "is the fact that it's already leaked out."
The seemingly un-authorized disclosure, writes Masnick, comes "despite all the talk of cracking down on future leaks out of the NSA, the NSA already has another leaker releasing information that is clearly politically sensitive."
[Of course, it's too early to know whether this was merely an authorized, strategic leak, to "send a message" to Germany's leadership.]
Here's a story to keep an eye on; this goes to trial in June. Discovery is happening now and the Obama administration is (typically) trying to seal the embarrassing records.
New documents prove U.S. Army actively targeted leftist protesters, group says
New records obtained by the Defending Dissent Foundation prove that the United States Army used a multi-agency spy network to gather intelligence on nonviolent, antiwar protesters and to disseminate their findings to both the FBI and local police departments.
Activists filed a lawsuit against Thomas Rudd and John Towery — Panagacos v. Towery — in 2007, alleging that the U.S. Army had directed operatives to infiltrate and collect information about the activist movement in the Washington area.
According to the newly released documents, the U.S. Army paid Towery, a Criminal Information and Systems Officer, to spy on the antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), as well as the Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. ...
Larry Hildes, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the Panagacos lawsuit in 2010, said that “[t]he latest revelations show how the Army not only engaged in illegal spying on political dissidents, it led the charge and tried to expand the counterintelligence network targeting leftists and anarchists.”
Exclusive: Inside the Army Spy Ring & Attempted Entrapment of Peace Activists, Iraq Vets, Anarchists
In Ukraine turbulence, a lad from Lviv becomes the toast of Kiev
When the history of the bloody turbulence in Ukraine is written, a 26-year-old who learned combat skills in the army cadets may be recorded as the man who made up Viktor Yanukovich's mind to cut and run.
Cars toot a welcome and passers-by press the hand of Volodymyr Parasiuk, a boyish-looking individual who finds it embarrassing to be called a hero. ...
But after opposition leaders had signed an EU-brokered deal with President Yanukovich to end the conflict, it was Parasiuk who commandeered the microphone on Friday night to turn the crowd against it.
With former boxing champion and opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko looking on stony-faced, Parasiuk, from the western city of Lviv, made an electrifying impromptu speech denouncing the opposition for "shaking hands with this killer".
No-one was going to wait for an election later in the year, he said. Yanukovich had to get out of town by the following morning or face the consequences.
To the dismay of opposition leaders, Parasiuk's emotional address - he broke down on several occasions as he remembered dead comrades - touched a chord deep within the thousands on Independence Square who roared their approval. ...
"Emotions were overflowing because we had lost a great number of people. Suddenly these politicians come and say 'Yanukovich will stay as president and there will be elections.' I have a clear position. Yanukovich is a terrorist, Terrorist Number One, for Ukraine," Parasiuk said.
Ukrainian MPs vote to send Yanukovych to The Hague to face trial
The Ukrainian parliament has voted to send the fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych to The Hague to be tried over the violence that led to at least 82 deaths in Kiev last week.
Yanukovych is on the run and believed to be in Crimea. The interim government is trying to hunt him down and capture him.
The parliament voted that the former interior minister Vitali Zakharchenko and the prosecutor general, Viktor Pshonka, should also be sent to the international criminal court. The pair have also fled Kiev, along with a number of other key Yanukovych aides. ...
In The Hague, a spokesman for the ICC told Reuters it had not yet received a request from the new Ukrainian government to investigate events in Kiev.
"A government can make a declaration accepting the court's jurisdiction for past events," said Fadi El Abdallah. He said the court's own prosecutor would then decide whether to proceed.
Ukraine: Sevastopol installs pro-Russian mayor as separatism fears grow
Authorities in the southern Ukrainian city of Sevastopol have installed a pro-Russian mayor as fears grow that the Kremlin may be stoking separatist sentiment in the region.
Sevastopol's city council handed power to Aleksei Chaliy, a Russian citizen, during an extraordinary session on Monday evening while more than a thousand protesters gathered around city hall chanting "Russia, Russia, Russia," and "A Russian mayor for a Russian city."
Fears are spreading that separatists in Sevastopol, and the Crimean region of which it is a part, could use the power vacuum in Ukraine to seize greater autonomy and deepen ties with Russia.
It was not immediately clear whether local security forces would back Chaliy, but earlier in the day Sevastopol police chief Alexander Goncharov said that his officers would refuse to carry out "criminal orders" issued by Kiev.
At least four checkpoints manned by armed police were in place on major roads into the city to stop the arrival of extremists, according to local media reports.
Ukraine's interim president, Olexander Turchynov, warned on Tuesday that the country faced a "serious threat" from separatism.
EU No Instant Saviour for Ukraine
Ukrainians are facing years of pain and upheaval if the country moves towards closer EU integration – or the prospect of the country being left to “rot” if they do not, experts say following the weekend’s revolution.
European leaders have pledged support for the East European state following the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime while the interim government has suggested it will push for closer ties with Europe.
Although this will please many who took part in the protests over the last three months – as well as enrage many in the generally pro-Russian eastern and southern parts of the country – some analysts have warned there should be no illusions about what Ukraine will gain, and lose, if it starts on the long path to EU integration.
“The people who will gain from European integration expect some ‘pain’ as reforms are undertaken, such as unemployment and economic problems,” Lilia Shevstova, senior associate at the Moscow Carnegie Centre, told IPS.
“But they do not know entirely what kind of pain they will have to endure and that they will have to make their way through a valley of tears. And if they fail or stumble, Ukraine will rot and collapse.” ...
European integration could have severe consequences for much of Ukraine’s heavy industry as relations with Russia become strained and trade links with its Eastern neighbour are lost. Russia is one of Ukraine’s most important economic partners and the export destination for goods from much of the country’s industrial-military complex. ...
Vera Kovalenko, a sales assistant from Kiev, told IPS: “Of the people that protested, few had read the Association Agreement. Most thought that immediately after it was signed they would be able to travel to Europe without a visa and that there would be an end to corruption in Ukraine and life would be like it is in Europe. That wasn’t going to be the case.”
Turkish opposition calls for Erdogan to be investigated for corruption
Embattled prime minister claims voice recordings of him ordering his son to dispose of large sums of cash are fabricated
A Turkish opposition party leader has called on prosecutors to launch a corruption investigation into the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, following the disclosure of alleged voice recordings in which he orders his son to dispose of vast amounts of cash.
Erdogan has met Turkey's intelligence chief after the audio of two men discussing how to get rid of money from a home circulated on the internet on Monday.
Erdogan's office claims the tapes were fabricated. They have vowed to take legal action against the perpetrators.
Devlet Bahceli, leader of Turkey's far-right Nationalist Action party, called the recordings "mind-blowing" and urged prosecutors and other judicial bodies to intervene.
He said Erdogan should "not even think about" escaping blame by claiming the tapes were edited.
The Victim of a Police Assault Should Not be Prosecuted
The prosecution of occupy activist Cecily McMillan highlights the worst hallmarks of how police and prosecutors in New York responded to the occupy protests. These include abusive targeting of people who are not protesting or who are even obeying police orders, overuse of force and mass arrests in response to assemblies, failure to prosecute abusive police but instead prosecuting victims of police abuse and police falsely testifying in ways that are inconsistent with video tape and photographs of the incident. ...
Let’s review the incident involving Cecily McMillan. On the six month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street Cecily McMillan arrived at Zuccotti Park to meet some friends and go out to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Instead, at the end of the night, she found herself in a hospital waking up from being unconscious having suffered seizures and badly bruised; and under arrest.
McMillan arrived in Zuccotti Park around midnight looking for friends she was supposed to meet. She was not there to protest. She arrived as the police began to violently break up the crowd. One officer told her to leave the park and she was doing so when she felt someone violently grab her right breast. She involuntarily swung her elbow around and hit the offender in the face. It turned out to be police officer Grantley Bovell. She was then aggressively arrested by a group of police officers, knocked to the ground unconscious and she began suffering seizures while she was handcuffed. It took 15 to 20 minutes before an ambulance arrived. Photos of McMillan document bruises on her right breast showing finger marks where she was grabbed, a swollen eye and other bruises. ...
The abusive actions of the NYPD in their response to occupy have been well documented. What has been less well documented is the complicity of the New York District Attorney’s Office. Under the leadership of Cy Vance, police have not been prosecuted, obviously false testimony has been put on the stand by prosecutors and victims of police abuse have had to file lawsuits to protect their rights. Prosecutor Vance’s actions have done nothing to curtail police violence against people exercising their constitutional rights.
This is no recovery, this is a bubble – and it will burst
According to the stock market, the UK economy is in a boom. Not just any old boom, but a historic one. On 28 October 2013, the FTSE 100 index hit 6,734, breaching the level achieved at the height of the economic boom before the 2008 global financial crisis (that was 6,730, recorded in October 2007). ... The current levels of share prices are extraordinary considering the UK economy has not yet recovered the ground lost since the 2008 crash; per capita income in the UK today is still lower than it was in 2007. ...
The situation is even more worrying in the US. In March 2013, the Standard & Poor 500 stock market index reached the highest ever level, surpassing the 2007 peak (which was higher than the peak during the dotcom boom), despite the fact that the country's per capita income had not yet recovered to its 2007 level. Since then, the index has risen about 20%, although the US per capita income has not increased even by 2% during the same period. This is definitely the biggest stock market bubble in modern history. ...
During the dotcom bubble, the predominant view was that the new information technology was about to completely revolutionise our economies for good. Given this, it was argued, stock markets would keep rising (possibly forever) and reach unprecedented levels. ... Similarly, in the runup to the 2008 crisis, inflated asset prices were justified in terms of the supposed progresses in financial innovation and in the techniques of economic policy. ... This time around, no one is offering a new narrative justifying the new bubbles because, well, there isn't any plausible story.
[S]hare prices are high mainly because of the huge amount of money sloshing around thanks to quantitative easing (QE), not because of the strength of the underlying real economy. ... The result, unfortunately, is that stock market bubbles of historic proportion are developing in the US and the UK, the two most important stock markets in the world, threatening to create yet another financial crash.
Well worth reading the whole thing:
Four Reasons You Should Consider Washington's Deficit As Your Surplus
Public sector deficits are private sector surpluses. I try to be very careful about making proclamations of “truth.” Science done properly assumes that every proposition is falsifiable and that we must remain skeptical, especially of the views we have adopted ourselves. But this is about as close as you get to fact: when the public sector spends in deficit, it is by definition a surplus for the private sector. If the government spends $500 more than it taxes, then it must be true that the private sector earned $500 more than it was taxed. Period. This is an inescapable accounting identity.
A logical extension of this is that public sector deficit reduction = private sector income reduction.
How TPP Would Harm You At the Drug Store and On The Internet
A law affecting content on the Internet that was rejected by Congress shows up in a trade agreement designed to bypass and override Congress. Small, innovative companies that manufacture low-cost, generic drugs find their products blocked. ...
A company with a drug patent is granted a monopoly to sell the drug at any price they choose with no competition. Currently a drug might be patented for a limited number of years in different countries. When the patent runs out other companies are able to manufacture the drug and the competition means the drug will sell at a lower cost.
Leaked documents appear to show that TPP will extend patent terms for drugs. Countries signing the agreement will scrap their own IP rules and instead follow those in TPP. So giant drug companies will have the same patent in all countries, for a longer period, and the patent will prevent competition that lowers drug prices.
Currently smaller, innovative companies can produce “generic” drugs after patents run out. Because of competition these drugs can be very inexpensive. Walmart, for example, sells a month’s supply of many generic drugs for $4, while drugs still under patent protection can cost hundreds or even thousands. This is of particular concern to poor countries that will be under TPP rules. ...
Another area where the IP section of TPP could give corporations tremendous power is in deciding what regular people can see, do or say on the Internet. TPP will override our own rules, even imposing laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) that Congress have specifically rejected.
U.S. lags behind the world in temp worker protections despite heightened risks
For nearly six years, Limber Herrera has toiled as a temp worker doing the same work for the same company in Mira Loma, Calif. About 40 hours a week, he unloads shipping containers for NFI, one of the largest freight distribution firms in America, moving goods that will eventually stock the shelves of Walmart and Sam’s Club.
Herrera, 30, has been a temp so long that he’s outlasted the agency that hired him. But that mattered little. One day in late 2012 he was called into the break room to fill out some paperwork. Then he went back to work, only now employed by the temp agency that took over the contract.
If Herrera worked in South Korea, his temporary assignment would be limited to two years, after which the company would have to hire him as a regular employee. If he worked in Germany, he would be guaranteed the same wages and working conditions as employees hired directly by the company. And if he worked in Chile, his temp agency could be shut down if it failed to pay him his wages or put him in harm’s way.
But Herrera works in the United States, which has some of the weakest labor protections for temp workers in the developed world, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which produces research on behalf of 34 of the world’s industrialized nations.
Chris Christie attempts to balance NJ books by stealing from old people
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will call for a new round of public pension reform when he presents his fifth state budget on Tuesday, according to remarks released in advance.
Christie, a Republican, worked with the Democrat-led legislature in 2011 to make changes to retirement systems for public employees. But the changes did not go far enough to stem the tide of rising costs for pension and health care benefits, Christie said in the remarks. New Jersey must make a $2.25 billion payment into its pension system in fiscal 2015, which begins July 1. ...
Under the previous reforms, the state's pension contributions have been rising by a set amount each year, to culminate at $4.8 billion in fiscal 2018 in an effort to make up for years of underfunding.
Pressure from rising fixed costs, including pensions, comes as New Jersey's economic recovery lags the rest of the nation, with revenues that could fall $400 million short of projections by the end of the fiscal year.
Charges of insanity as Clowns from the states grace the Beltway Bigtop stage on the White House lawn
WASHINGTON — A genteel weekend of governors’ meetings suddenly became a partisan showdown at the White House on Monday, as Republicans and Democrats accused each other of being insensitive and, in one case, criticizing a colleague’s remarks as insane. ...
After the meeting, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, wasn’t pleased as he spoke in a driveway outside the West Wing.
He said Obama “seems to be waving a white flag of surrender” and charged, “The Obama economy is now the minimum-wage economy.”
The president had continued to push his effort to increase the minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour, to $10.10. Most Republicans weren’t buying it.
Democrats quickly fired back.
“I don’t know what the heck he was referring to, a white flag?” said Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat. He added that Jindal’s comment was “the most insane statement I’ve ever heard.”
[Now that's entertainment!]
Oldest holocaust survivor dies at 110 - 'Everything we experience is a gift we should pass on'
If a 38-minute documentary, The Lady in Number 6, wins an Oscar next weekend, it will stand as a fitting memorial to its subject, Alice Herz-Sommer. The oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, who has died aged 110, preferred all her long life to speak of the joy music brought her rather than the horrors she had witnessed in Theresienstadt.
The executive producer of the film, Fredric Bohbot, told Radio 4: "She is the most incredible person I have ever met. I think she had no material desires, she was very curious about everyone and she had no hatred in her. She loved everyone in so many ways."
Interviewed for the film – in which one of her neighbours describes the bliss of sharing the block of flats in north London and hearing classical music beautifully played every morning and afternoon – Herz-Sommer described her life as full of joy. "I think I am in my last days but it doesn't really matter because I have had such a beautiful life. And life is beautiful, love is beautiful, nature and music are beautiful. Everything we experience is a gift, a present we should cherish and pass on to those we love." ...
Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, into a prosperous, cultured and musical Moravian family. Her mother had been a childhood friend of the composer Gustav Mahler, and Herz-Sommer remembered the premiere of his second symphony when she was about eight. She also vividly recalled another family friend, "Uncle Franz", the author Franz Kafka.
Her talent was recognised when she was only five, and she had lessons with Conrad Ansorge, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt ("as a pianist, extraordinary, as a teacher, not so good", she told the Guardian).
The Evening Greens
Kurt Vonnegut:
Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088
... And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?
Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.
The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:
- Reduce and stabilize your population.
- Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
- Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
- Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
- Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
- Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
- And so on. Or else.
Chesapeake's ex-CEO McClendon tries to force new drilling
Chesapeake Energy Corp ousted its former chief executive Aubrey McClendon last April after a governance scandal and a liquidity crisis. But the former boss retains financial ties to the second-largest U.S. natural gas company, and he is using them to try to change company plans.
A firm run by McClendon is attempting to force Chesapeake to drill 12 multi-million dollar wells in Louisiana's Haynesville Shale at a time when Chesapeake is trying to rein in spending and cut debt to focus on other shales, according to a lawyer for Chesapeake.
As a legacy of his tenure as a Chesapeake founder, McClendon has personal stakes of 2.5 percent in nearly all of the tens of thousands of wells the company developed. He is also entitled to a slice of new ones, and he has asked Louisiana regulators to order Chesapeake to follow his drilling plan, saying more natural gas production on the land would benefit the state and landowners. ...
Patrick Courreges, a spokesman for Louisiana's Office of Conservation said the request by McClendon may be without precedent. The agency said it is considering whether the minority owner even has the standing to make its request.
The Office of Conservation is charged with regulating the production of oil and gas, permitting wells and their spacing, and encouraging development.
Supreme Court hears states’ objections to greenhouse gas rules
The Supreme Court seemed split down the middle Monday, and occasionally lost in the fog, as the justices confronted a challenge to the Obama administration’s greenhouse gas regulations. ...
The regulations challenged Monday stem from a particular part of the Clean Air Act. The law sets 100 or 250 tons per year, depending on the source, as the pollutant emissions threshold for when “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” permits are needed. For greenhouse gas emissions, which result from many sources, the EPA changed this to a more lenient 100,000 tons per year.
Conservatives objected, even though the less onerous standard imposed a smaller burden on industry. Regulators, the critics say, shouldn’t unilaterally rewrite congressional work. ...
The frequently technical argument Monday, though, also made clear that the EPA will retain the ability to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary and mobile emission sources even if the court strikes down the regulations in question. Justices showed little interest in reversing a 2007 high court ruling that first declared the EPA had the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?
Economics Has a Surprising Mental Disorder
Victories, though rare, should be acknowledged when they occur
A Little Night Music
Delbert McClinton - Shaky Ground
James Peterson - Up For Adoption
Delbert McClinton - Every Time I Roll the Dice
Delbert McClinton, Marcia Ball, Johnny Nicholas - Spoonful
Delbert McClinton - Better off With the Blues
Delbert McClinton - B-Movie Boxcar Blues
Delbert McClinton + Kacey Jones - You're the reason our kids are ugly
Delbert McClinton & Francine Reed - I Used to Worry
Delbert and Glen - Been Around A Long Time
Delbert McClinton - Too Much Stuff
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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