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 guitarist and harmonica player Studebaker John. Enjoy!
Studebaker John & The Hawks
“The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
News and Opinion
This is well worth reading in full, an excerpt really can't convey the contents of this excellent piece.
The empire strikes back: How Brandeis foreshadowed Snowden and Greenwald
In the famous wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote one of the most influential dissenting opinions in the history of American jurisprudence. Those who are currently engaged in what might be called the Establishment counterattack against Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, including the eminent liberal journalists Michael Kinsley and George Packer, might benefit from giving it a close reading and a good, long think.
Brandeis’ understanding of the problems posed by a government that could spy on its own citizens without any practical limits was so far-sighted as to seem uncanny. ... Government and its officers, Brandeis argued, must be held to the same rules and laws that command individual citizens. Once you start making special rules for the rulers and their police – for instance, the near-total impunity and thick scrim of secrecy behind which government espionage has operated for more than 60 years – you undermine the rule of law and the principles of democracy.
“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Brandeis concluded. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.” ...
In that case, the court found by a 5-4 vote that federal agents could record private telephone conversations without a warrant, and that the defendant’s constitutional rights had not been violated. ...
While the court’s majority took the Scalia-type position that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments covered only physical actions like torture or breaking and entering, Brandeis urged a broader view. “Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the Government,” he wrote. “Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.” You can say that again. In fact, the more you read of Brandeis’ opinion, the more he seems like a time traveler from the future, shipped backward from the secret X-Men lair of Greenwald and Laura Poitras in a failed effort to divert us from disaster.
This thoughtful must-read piece by Marcy Wheeler discusses the
Eben Moglen piece (familiar to folks here from his lecture series) that I posted yesterday and the article that I posted directly above this today. So here we'll join the article in progress after Marcy introduced the two articles:
What If the Democratic Response to Snowden Is to Expand Surveillance?
... I raise them in tandem here because both address the threat of spying to something called democracy. And the second piece raises it amid the context of American Empire (he compares the US to the Roman decline into slavery).
I raise them here for two reasons.
First, because neither directly notes that Snowden claimed he leaked the documents to give us a choice, the “chance to determine if it should change itself.” ...
Snowden, at least, claims to have contemplated the possibility that, given a choice, we won’t change how we’re governed.
And neither O’Hehir nor Moglen contemplates the state we’re currently in, in which what we call democracy is choosing to expand surveillance in response to Snowden’s disclosures.
Admittedly, the response to Snowden is not limited to HR 3361. I have long thought a more effective response might (or might not!) be found in courts — that if, if the legal process does not get pre-empted by legislation. I have long thought the pressure on Internet companies would be one of the most powerful engines of change, not our failed democratic process.
But as far as Congress is concerned, our stunted legislative process has started down the road of expanding surveillance in response to Edward Snowden.
And that’s where I find Moglen useful but also problematic.
He notes that the surveillance before us is not just part of domestic control (indeed, he actually pays less attention to the victims of domestic surveillance than I might have, but his is ultimately a technical argument), but also of Empire.
While I don’t think it’s the primary reason driving the democratic response to Snowden to increase surveillance (I think that also stems from the Deep State’s power and the influence of money on Congress, though many of the surveillance supporters in Congress are also supporting a certain model of US power), I think far too many people act on surveillance out of either explicit or implicit beliefs about the role of US hegemony.
Edward Snowden says he was trained 'as a spy'
Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, said in a U.S. TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for U.S. government agencies.
In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with "NBC Nightly News" that aired on Tuesday, Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst. ...
"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas - pretending to work in a job that I'm not - and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
Describing himself as a "technical expert," Snowden said: "I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from - from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top."
LulzSec hacker 'Sabu' released after 'extraordinary' FBI cooperation
Hector Xavier Monsegur, who by the US government’s calculations participated in computer hacker attacks on more than 250 public and private entities at a cost of up to $50m in damages, was released from a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday after the judge saluted his “extraordinary cooperation” with the FBI.
Monsegur, or “Sabu” as the celebrated hacker was known, was sentenced to time served – equivalent to the seven months he spent in prison last year – plus a year’s supervised release, in reward for having spent much of the past three years working as a federal informant. He had been facing a maximum sentence according to official guidelines of more than 26 years.
His lenient sentence seals his reputation as one of the hacker world’s most hated figures, a skilled technician who turned from having been a leading figure of the Anonymous and LulzSec collectives into what was in effect an undercover FBI agent. ... A spokesperson for Anonymous told the Guardian that “Monsegur is, first and foremost, a criminal; the FBI’s cyber crime task force are his co-conspirators. ... “The FBI continues to use captured informants, who commit egregious crimes in pursuit of reduced sentences, for the sole purpose of creating ‘examples’ to frighten the public. They do this with the hope of pacifying online dissent and snuffing out journalistic investigations into the US government’s misconduct.”
FCC Responds to Net Neutrality Ruling
Uneasy calm returns after battle as divided east Ukraine city awaits fate
Uneasy calm returned to the streets of Donetsk on Wednesday after the biggest battle of a pro-Russian separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine, a conflict transformed by the landslide election of a pro-European leader who has vowed to crush the revolt.
Government forces killed dozens of rebel fighters on Monday and Tuesday in an assault to retake the airport, which the rebels had seized the morning after Ukrainians overwhelmingly elected Petro Poroshenko as president.
Pro-Moscow gunmen have declared the city of a million people capital of an independent Donetsk People's Republic.
After the government assault - the first time Kiev has unleashed its full military force against the fighters after weeks of restraint - morgues were filled with bodies of rebel gunmen. Some were missing limbs in a sign of the massive firepower used against them.
In Donetsk, some shops were closed and streets were quieter than usual, but calm had returned. Around 1,000 miners bussed in from around the eastern Donbass coalfield staged a demonstration in support of the separatists in Donetsk on Wednesday.
"Kiev does not rule us any more, we will no longer accept that," Denis Pushilin, leader of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic which held a referendum on independence on May 11, told the miners. A Ukrainian fighter jet roared overhead, and some gunfire could be heard in the distance, apparently from rebels shooting at the aircraft.
'Civil war metastasizing in Ukraine, US silent on civilian casualties'
Ukraine says hundreds of armed militants have crossed border from Russia
Donetsk was tense Tuesday, and most residents heeded Lukyanchenko’s warning to stay indoors. Many residents expected further clashes, particularly if the military decides to attack the Donetsk regional administration building, which the Donetsk People’s Republic now occupies and uses as its headquarters.
“We have posed another ultimatum to them, and if they do not surrender, we will strike them with special weapons,” Vladislav Seleznev, a government spokesman, told reporters in Kiev. He didn’t say whether the army had acquired precision-guided munitions or some other weapons system.
Equally ominous was the possibility that more armed volunteers will head to this city of 1 million for the showdown. Just hours after a Monday appeal for help to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Dennis Pushlin, the self-appointed chairman of the “Supreme Soviet” of the Donetsk People’s Republic, armed Russian volunteers were reported to have crossed into Ukraine.
In the Luhansk region, whose People’s Republic is linked to the Donetsk People’s Republic through a union called Novorossiya, Ukrainian border guards intercepted several carloads of militants who attempted to cross illegally from Russia with a stash of assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and explosives. One gunmen was captured but several escaped, the state border service said.
At another location, an enormous number of armed militants appear to have crossed in early Tuesday. The Ukraine Foreign Ministry said it was protesting Russia’s failure to take action against 40 truckloads of militants who entered near Astakhovo, also in the Luhansk region.
Armed men attack, torch Ukraine hockey stadium
Armed men, believed to be pro-Russian rebels, stormed and set fire to a major ice hockey stadium in the eastern city of Donetsk Tuesday and border guards reported battles with insurgent trying to bring weapons into Ukraine from Russia.
The Druzhba arena, home to the Donbass club, had been earmarked to host several games during the 2015 world championships.
The attacks were the latest in an upsurge in fighting as Ukrainian anti-terrorist troops mount a major campaign against rebels in the wake of the weekend election of a new Ukrainian president, candy magnate Petro Poroshenko, who has vowed to negotiate a peaceful end to the crisis.
[Of course the chocolate guy has also vowed to destroy eastern Ukrainian citizens whom he refers to as "terrorists." That sounds peaceful. /s - js]
Obama Vision of "Ending" Afghan War Includes 10,000 Troops
Despite repeated calls to end the war completely, president lays out plan for continued US presence well beyond 2014
In comments made Tuesday afternoon at the White House, President Obama laid out his plan to draw down the number of occupying forces in Afghanistan, indicating that his vision of succcess in terms of U.S. foreign policy is that in 2015, nearly ten thousand U.S. troops would remain "in harms way" overseas.
According to President Obama, the number of troops will be cut from its current level of 32,000 to 9,800 by 2015.
"This is how war ends in the 21st century," the president said, adding that after the protracted war, "Afghanistan will not be a perfect place." ...
Obama's plan is contingent on the Afghan government signing the Bilateral Security Agreement, which current president Hamid Karzai has refused to sign. On June 14, Afghans will vote in the second round of presidential elections, and U.S. officials say they are "confident" that Karzai's successor will sign the agreement. The two front runners, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, have both vowed to sign the BSA if elected.
Afghan Fury Follows Revelations of NSA Spying
The Afghan government denounced on Sunday the revelations that the NSA is monitoring nearly all the phone calls in Afghanistan, saying it violates the nation's sovereignty and the human rights of its people.
The Intercept reported last week on new revelations of vast surveillance conducted by the United States in a series of countries but withheld the name of one of those target countries citing a "specific, credible concern that doing so could lead to violence." That country was subsequently revealed by WikiLeaks to be Afghanistan.
"These activities are an obvious violation of agreements based on technical use of these [telephone] stations," Agence France-Presse reports an Afghan government statement as saying. "Most importantly, it is a violation of the national sovereignty of Afghanistan, and a violation of the human rights guaranteed to all Afghans."
"These [telephone] stations are installed in Afghanistan by U.S. and Britain forces for the purpose of combating drug smuggling," the statement continues. "The National Security Adviser has been directed to raise these illegal activities and the anger of Afghan government with the U.S. and seriously investigate the issue."
Egyptians slow to vote despite efforts to boost turnout
Many Egyptians failed to vote in a presidential election on Wednesday despite official efforts to boost turnout with an extra day of polling, raising doubts about the level of support for the man still forecast to win, former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
A low turnout would sound a warning to Sisi that he had failed to achieve the resounding mandate he sought after toppling Egypt's first freely elected president, Islamist Mohamed Mursi, following street protests last year.
A tour of Cairo polling stations on Wednesday suggested authorities would again struggle to get more people to cast their ballots. The same pattern emerged in Egypt's second city, Alexandria, Reuters reporters said.
In a country polarized since a popular uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the low turnout was linked to political apathy, opposition to another military man becoming president, discontent at suppression of freedoms among liberal youth, and calls for a boycott by Islamists.
After months of adulation by the media encouraged by his supporters in government, the security services and business, many Egyptians were shocked when the election failed to produce mass support for Sisi, who had called for a turnout of 40 million, or 80 percent of the electorate.
The two-day vote was originally due to conclude on Tuesday but was extended until 9 p.m. (1800 GMT) Wednesday to allow the "greatest number possible" to vote, state media reported.
Japan PM says will take time to provide patrol ships to Vietnam
Japan said on Wednesday it was unable to immediately provide decommissioned patrol ships to Vietnam amid heightened tensions in the South China Sea as its own coastguard was stretched by surveillance activities.
As tensions mount between China and other claimants to the South China Sea, countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines are rushing to bolster their maritime patrols.
Japan, itself locked in a bitter territorial spat with China, in March agreed to dispatch a research team to Vietnam as a step toward providing it with patrol ships.
Asked about the possibility of providing used patrol ships to Vietnam to expedite the process, Prime Minister Shinto Abe told parliament: "Surveillance duties are getting heavier for the Japan Coast Guard."
"Regrettably, our country is not in a situation where we can retire all the vessels that have reached such age."
Voters Reject Traditional Left Parties In EU Parliament Elections
Waves of immigrant minors present crisis for Obama, Congress
Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma.
An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.
The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.
The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters. ...
The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.
Clearing Detroit's blight will cost city almost $2bn, taskforce report finds
There are 84,641 blighted structures and vacant lots in Detroit and almost half should be demolished, at a cost of almost $2bn, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force’s much-anticipated study gives the most definitive picture to date of the scale of the bankrupt city’s woes.
The taskforce, established by President Obama in 2013, found the city would need as much as $850m just to tackle its crumbling and burnt-out residential structures in the next few years. Addressing abandoned industrial sites across the city would cost another $500m to $1bn more, because of their scale and the greater environmental issues posed by disposing of such properties including the larger presence of asbestos, lead and other dangerous materials.
Detroit’s spectacular collapse has sparked a small cottage industry in “ruin porn”, with tourists visiting the charred remains of once proud symbols of the city’s historic past like Michigan Central Station, an abandoned colossus on the edge of the gentrifying Corktown district. ...
“Other cities contending with high levels of blight have never addressed more than 7,000 structures a year. At that pace, it would take Detroit more than 11 years to address the 84,641 blighted structures and vacant lots. Even then, merely addressing the existing blight understates the problem because blight creates more blight. Without swift remedies, blight will continue to spread and expand,” the report says.
Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86
Maya Angelou, the memoirist and poet whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — which describes in lyrical, unsparing prose her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday in her home. She was 86 and lived in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Her death was confirmed by her longtime literary agent, Helen Brann. No immediate cause of death had been determined, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been in frail health for some time and had had heart problems. ...
Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.
“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,” Ms. Angelou wrote in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou’s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her — be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived — with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.
The Evening Greens
“All of the Above” or “Action now?”: Obama’s Natural Gas Contradiction
At a talk in Vermont last week, the nation's top energy official offered up his thoughts on a problem the White House has said calls for “urgent action”: climate change.
“We need to mitigate the effects of climate change and need to adapt at the same time,” said Dr. Ernest Moniz, Secretary of Energy, as he described the findings of a White House report issued earlier this month outlining the dangers of global warming and the impacts already felt nationwide.
But Moniz's talk also highlighted a fundamental flaw in the approach that President Obama has taken to energy and the environment.
The president has begun sounding alarm bells about the hazards and costs of worsening climate disruption. At the same time, he has aggressively promoted the nation's ongoing shale gas rush. And yet, experts warn this drilling frenzy may have wiped out most of the gains made by slashing carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal.
It's a paradox that the Washington Post labeled “a jarring juxtapostion” and “the contradiction at the heart of President Obama's climate change policy.”
During his talk, the Energy Secretary extolled the nation's progress in cutting emissions of a key greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. “We are roughly halfway to the president’s 17 percent (greenhouse gas emissions) reduction goal by 2020,” he said, “and half of that has been gas substituted by coal.” ...
The problem for the Obama administration is that carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas that could have stunning impacts on the world's climate. Natural gas is made up of methane, a greenhouse gas that the U.N.'s leading climate experts warn is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide during the first two decades after it leaks out into the atmosphere. And a growing number of studies have shown that much more methane is leaking from natural gas operations than previously believed — enough to make using natural gas even worse than coal for the climate.
The Obama administration is tripping over its own intellectual shoelaces. The “all-of-the-above” rhetoric isn't just dishonest, it's dangerous. It gives the impression that the administration is backing renewable energy, while still continuing enormous subsidies for oil, gas and coal.
U.S. industry gears up to fight Obama's climate rules
This summer is likely to see a series of attacks by industry opponents of a U.S. plan to curb carbon emissions from power plants in a bid to stir voter anger ahead of elections in November, when voters in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia may determine whether Democrats keep control of the Senate.
On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose new rules to crack down on power plant emissions, part of President Barack Obama's efforts to combat global climate change. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will release a report Wednesday analyzing the effect the yet-to-be-announced regulations will have on the economy.
Coal industry lobbyists say the new rules will probably raise household electricity costs, prompt power brown-outs during heat waves and cold snaps, and destroy jobs at coal mines and manufacturing plants.
"We fully expect that whatever comes out will be overly stringent, and will be something that is not good for American consumers or businesses," said Laura Sheehan, spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.
In March, Sheehan’s group, which represents coal mining companies as well as owners of coal-fired plants like American Electric Power and Southern Co, released a report warning that the EPA plan might cause retail electricity prices to rise in 29 states and kill more than 2.85 million jobs.
Obama will let states decide how to cut greenhouse gas emissions
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is about to unveil the centerpiece of his agenda to fight climate change, a much anticipated rule to slash the emissions of planet-warming gases from power plants.
The president will call for major reductions, according to sources familiar with the planning, with each state given its own greenhouse gas emissions reduction target and the power to decide how to meet it. The Environmental Protection Agency is putting the plan together, and Obama will announce it Monday.
The plan could push states to require more renewable energy use and to lower demand by investing in efficiency programs for homes and businesses. States also could use so-called “cap-and-trade” systems, in which emissions are limited and polluters buy and sell rights to release greenhouse gases, according to indications the Obama administration has given to environmental groups and others.
California already has such a cap-and-trade system, as does a coalition of Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states including New York, Massachusetts and Maryland.
The new rule could prompt other states to join in similar regional cap-and-trade ventures, or to take other measures to cut down on coal burning.
As Louisiana's coast shrinks, a political fight grows
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
A Little Night Music
Studebaker John & The Hawks - Your HooDoo Man
Studebaker John & The Hawks - Howl With The Wolf
Studebaker John And Hawks - Nothin' But Fun
Studebaker John & The Hawks - Ride With Me Baby
Studebaker John - Two Time Boogie
Studebaker John & The Hawks - This Road
Studebaker John & The Hawks W/Pinetop Perkins
Studebaker John & The Hawks - Where Are You
Studebaker John's Maxwell Street Kings - She's All Right
Studebaker John - Bad Gasoline
Studebaker John's Maxwell Street Kings - When They Played The Real Blues
Studebaker John - Boogie Twist
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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