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 piano player and composer of blues and later gospel, "Georgia Tom" a.k.a. Thomas A. Dorsey. Enjoy!
Georgia Tom Dorsey (Thomas A. Dorsey) - Levee Bound Blues
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
-- W. Somerset Maugham
News and Opinion
Chaos in Iraq
Extended Interview: Andrew Bacevich
[I missed this last week; tomorrow I'll run Moyers' interview with Charles Lewis - The Lies That Lead to War. - js]
Isis announces Islamic caliphate in area straddling Iraq and Syria
Islamist militants have declared an Islamic "caliphate" in an area straddling Iraq and Syria, trumpeting the declaration in several videos. ...
"This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," a jihadist from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) warned in the video called End of Sykes-Picot, a reference to the agreement between France and Britain that divided up the Ottoman empire territories after the first world war.
Later the fighter pledges that jihadists will free Palestine. "We are not here to replace an Arab cahoot with a western cahoot. Rather our jihad is more lofty and higher. We are fighting to make the word of Allah the highest," the spokesman said. ...
The video features about a dozen men in a cell said to be captured troops and border police. A building, said to be a police station, is shown being blown up, as well as US-made Humvees captured from the border police. "Look how much America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets," the spokesman taunted. ...
An analyst said the declaration of a caliphate by the Islamic State posed a huge challenge to al-Qaida.
"Put simply, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has declared war on al-Qaida," said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre. "While it is now inevitable that members and prominent supporters of al-Qaida and its affiliates will rapidly move to denounce Baghdadi and this announcement, it is the long-term implications that may prove more significant.
Russian Warplanes, Experts Arrive in Iraq
The first actual combat planes the Iraqi Air Force has managed to get its hands on, the Maliki government today took delivery of 12 second-hand Su-25 warplanes from Russia.
Su-25s represent some of the finest technology the late 1970's Soviet Union had to offer, and while not as powerful as the F-16s Iraq ordered from the US back in 2011, they have the advantage of actually having been delivered.
On the downside, the US is rushing Hellfire Missiles to Iraq, which are totally incompatible with the Su-25s. Making matters worse, ISIS looted large amounts of US-made Stinger missiles from Iraqi forces in Mosul, and those missiles were designed to shoot down Soviet aircraft like the Su-25.
'No place to hide': Iraq's Christians face ISIS slaughter as country disintegrates
Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater
WASHINGTON - Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor's operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater's top manager there issued a threat: 'that he could kill' the government's chief investigator and 'no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,' according to department reports.
American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy's relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.
After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created 'an environment full of liability and negligence.'
'The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves,' the investigator, Jean C. Richter, wrote in an Aug. 31, 2007, memo to State Department officials. 'Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law,' he said, adding that the 'hands off' management resulted in a situation in which 'the contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control.'
His memo and other newly disclosed State Department documents make clear that the department was alerted to serious problems involving Blackwater and its government overseers before the Nisour Square shooting, which outraged Iraqis and deepened resentment over the United States' presence in the country.
End to Violence Unlikely as Ceasefire Extended in Ukraine
This is an interesting take on one of the current talking points regarding Ukraine, the 1994 Budapest agreement. It's worth reading McGovern's argument in full, there's far more than can be condensed in an excerpt.
Ray McGovern: Who Violated Ukraine's Sovereignty?
Did Russia's annexation of Crimea on March violate the 1994 Budapest agreement among Ukraine, Russia, Great Britain and the U.S.? Specifically, in Paragraph One, Ukraine agreed to remove all nuclear weapons from its territory in return for a commitment by Russia, Britain and the US 'to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine?'
I'm no lawyer, but I can read the words. And, taken literally, the answer seems to be Yes 'despite a host of extenuating circumstances that can be adduced to explain why Crimea rejoined Russia, including the alarm among Crimean leaders over the unconstitutional ouster of Ukraine's elected president and the Russian government's fear about the possible berthing of NATO's nuclear-missile warships at the naval base at Sebastopol.
But there's also the item in Paragraph Three in which Russia, the UK, and the US also commit 'to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty.'
Might the EU's take-it-or-leave-it proposal last fall offering Ukraine 'associate' status in return for draconian economic austerity imposed on the Ukrainian people come under the rubric of the 'economic coercion' prohibited at Budapest? An arguable Yes, it seems to me.
Ceasefire expires: Ukrainians head down into Soviet bunkers
France says Russia, Ukraine agree to work on ceasefire
The leaders of Russia and Ukraine have agreed to work on a ceasefire between separatists and the Ukrainian authorities and on quickly setting up effective border controls, the French president's office said on Monday.
The statement followed a telephone conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko and French President Francois Hollande, the second such call in as many days.
After what Hollande's office said was a long conversation, Putin and Poroshenko also agreed to work on the liberation of more hostages and prisoners and the organisation of "substantial tripartite negotiations", according to the statement.
Poroshenko had urged Putin on Sunday to strengthen Russian control over its borders to prevent militants and arms entering Ukraine after violence led to breaches of a truce there. ...
Putin again urged that the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine be extended and a control mechanism to monitor the truce set up, with the participation of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Kremlin said in a separate statement after the talks. "The leaders spoke in favor of convening a third round of consultations between Kiev and south-eastern regions as soon as possible," it added.
Snowden Asylum in Germany? Support Grows for NSA Whistleblower After Merkel Cancels Verizon Contract
New NSA chief says 'sky not falling down' after Snowden revelations
The new director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, has played down the damage caused by Edward Snowden's revelations in contrast to claims by his predecessor and British counterparts that it was one of the worst breaches in intelligence history.
Rogers said in an interview with the New York Times that some terrorists had made changes in the way they communicate as a result of the revelations focusing on the US spying communications agency, but overall he had concluded the sky was not falling down.
His predecessor, General Keith Alexander, described the leak of tens of thousands of documents from the NSA and British counterpart GCHQ as well as the surveillance agencies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada as "the greatest damage to our combined nations' intelligence systems that we have ever suffered". British intelligence has spoken of areas of the world having "gone dark" and of disruption caused to intelligence-gathering.
The outgoing head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, giving evidence to a parliamentary committee, said Britain's enemies were rubbing their hands with glee and "al-Qaida is lapping it up".
Rogers said the agency had overheard terrorist groups "specifically referencing data detailed" by Snowden's revelations. "I have seen groups not only talk about making changes, I have seen them make changes," he said. But he added: "You have not heard me as the director say, 'Oh, my God, the sky is falling.' I am trying to be very specific and very measured in my characterisations."
'Illegal spying below': activists launch airship in protest at NSA surveillance
At about 6am local time on Friday, in a field about a mile from Bluffdale, Utah, two activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched a 135ft airship and drifted the dirigible over the NSA's massive data center there.
With some cars below entering the center's office park, the lighter-than-air vessel hung a banner reading 'NSA illegal spying below' and a web address for a new EFF site grading members of Congress on their surveillance positions. ...
The flight came right before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a long-awaited annual transparency report on the NSA's use of surveillance authorities. One single surveillance order in 2013 for communications data pursuant to a 2008 law encompassed information from over 89,000 "targets affected," the report disclosed.
It further revealed that the NSA was interested in the phone records data of 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013 during which it collected the phone records of practically every American.
Opposition to NSA Surveillance Unites Conservatives, Solid Liberals
Trevor Timm sees Roberts' opinion in Riley as perhaps a tipping point in the judicial branch dealings with warrantless spying, it's worth reading his whole commentary:
Is this the start of the end of the age of warrantless government spying?
The US supreme court's unanimous 9-0 opinion this week requiring police to get a warrant before searching your cellphone is arguably the most important legal privacy decision of the digital age. Its immediate impact will be felt by the more than 12m people who are arrested in America each year (many for minor, innocuous crimes), but the surprisingly tech-savvy opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts may also lead to far more protection than that.
Roberts's analysis of the current state of the digital world in his Riley v Wurie opinion is was so thorough, and so sweeping, that I'd be willing to bet you won't find many privacy and technology cases going forward that don't cite this one. ...
Inevitably, everyone's going to wonder what this week's cellphone decision means for the future of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. At first blush, it doesn't, at least not directly. Roberts adeptly sidestepped any questions about collecting pure phone records, either individually or en masse.
But if you read carefully, Roberts did throw a wrench into the NSA's main defense for what it does: self-policing. The NSA's argument has always been essentially this: we don't need court oversight over our massive surveillance machine because our internal privacy controls are so good.
Roberts, however, ridicules this theory in his Riley opinion: the government promised the court it would create "government agency protocols" and make sure not to abuse its power if allowed to continue searching cellphones without a warrant. "Probably a good idea," Roberts wrote after going into detail about the historical origins of the Constitutional right to privacy, "but the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols."
Benghazi attack suspect 'compliant but not cooperative' in federal custody
A day after Ahmed Abu Khattala pleaded not guilty to charges regarding the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi in which four Americans died, Republican criticism of the decision to try the Libyan militia leader in civilian court mounted.
Mike Rogers, the chair of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, told CNN Khattala had been 'compliant but not cooperative' through 10 days of interrogation on a navy ship before being transferred to Washington for a civilian trial. Rogers said Khattala should be classified as an enemy combatant and held at Guantanamo Bay. ...
Khattala was captured earlier this month and then held and questioned aboard the USS New York in the Mediterranean for 10 days, before being read his Miranda rights as a criminal suspect and being transferred to Washington. ...
On Saturday, Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond, told the Guardian it was not certain whether information gained from Khattala on the ship would be admissable in a civilian court.
'This is difficult to know because it is unclear what was asked in what circumstances,' said Tobias. 'Some have reported that he was not given Miranda warnings and if he were not, it may be difficult to use his statements.'
There is a 'public safety' exception which the US reportedly may invoke. [But] the supreme court also requires that international captures be brought before a US magistrate judge without unnecessary delay and delay for purposes of interrogation violates this idea.
Al Jazeera News Director: Prison Terms for Journalists in Egypt are Chilling Start to Sisi Era
Corporate Rights Trump Women's Health in Hobby Lobby Ruling
Defenders of women's health and reproductive freedom are reacting with anger to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Monday which ruled that an employer with religious objection can opt out of providing contraception coverage to their employees under the Affordable Care Act.
Writing for the majority side of the 5-4 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the "the HHS mandate demands that they engage in conduct that seriously violates their religious beliefs."
"Today's decision from five male justices is a direct attack on women and our fundamental rights. This ruling goes out of its way to declare that discrimination against women isn't discrimination," said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
"Allowing bosses this much control over the health-care decisions of their employees is a slippery slope with no end," Hogue continued. "Every American could potentially be affected by this far-reaching and shocking decision that allows bosses to reach beyond the boardroom and into their employees' bedrooms." ...
Following the ruling, the secular advocacy group Center for Inquiry released a statement saying: "Today the Court made clear it does not view Americans' access to medically necessary health care as a compelling government interest, and announced loud and clear that the religious preferences of employers take preference over the health needs of workers."
Why is Washington still protecting the secret political power of corporations?
[Despite the failure of the Disclose Act to mitigate the corrupting effects of Citizens United], there is another way to achieve the disclosure of corporate political donations that doesn't require Congress at all: the administration could simply propose new regulations under its existing authority. Unfortunately, despite having a Democratic chair - Mary Jo White - the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could mandate such disclosures, is either too intimidated (or too captured) to act. ...After adding a political disclosure rule to its 2013 agenda, the agency quietly dropped the rule for this year. ...
Last May, Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee warned White not to pursue the political disclosure rule. During the hearing, Rep Scott Garrett (R-NJ) went so far as to ask her to formally commit to removing the political disclosure rule from their regulatory agenda.
It would appear White, despite claims she is "apolitical," heard him loud and clear. No proposed rule materialized, and seven months after Rep Scott Garrett requested it, the rule was removed from the agency's 2014 agenda. ...
So how is it that Republicans' statements are so much more effective in influencing Mary Jo White's SEC? Some of her critics theorize that it's because she agrees with them. Prior to her role as Chair, she spent 10 years representing corporate clients like Bank of America and Morgan Stanley at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. And last October, White gave a speech before Fordham Law school that included a critique of the usefulness of company disclosures to investors, even criticizing Congress for requiring companies, like those that manufacture electronics, to disclose if they use conflict minerals (a rule long opposed by Republicans and the future of which is uncertain due to recent court rulings).
After Losing Vote, U.S.-EU Threaten to Undermine Treaty To Stop Corporate Human Rights Abuses
The United States and the 28-member European Union (EU) have assiduously promoted and vigourously preached one of the basic tenets of Western multi-party democracy: majority rules.
But at the United Nations, the 29 member states have frequently abandoned that principle when it insists on 'consensus' on crucial decisions relating to the U.N. budget, or when it is clearly outvoted in the 193-member General Assembly or its committee rooms.
That's exactly what happened Thursday at the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva which adopted, by majority vote, a proposal to negotiate a legally-binding treaty to prevent human rights abuses by transnational corporations (TNCs) and the world's business conglomerates. ...
Anne van Schaik, accountable finance campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, told IPS the voting list 'makes clear we are up against powerful forces'.
'Who will not back away from using old bullying techniques?' she asked.
She said the EU has clearly stated it will not cooperate in implementing the proposal.
And after the vote, the United States said this legally binding instrument will not be binding for those who vote against it.
'So we can expect some fierce opposition,' Schaik said, even as the IGWG plans to hold its first meeting sometime next year.
'But we are cheerful because it is not every day public interest wins over corporate interests which are backed by the EU and the U.S.,' she added.
Why the War Party Loves Corporate Welfare from the Export-Import Bank
The Ex-Im Bank's alleged mission is to promote foreign trade: it does so primarily by loaning money directly to foreign governments (or foreign-owned companies) to enable them to buy American products, and by insuring and guaranteeing loans. Established by Franklin Roosevelt's executive order in 1934 specifically to subsidize trade with the Soviet Union, and later Cuba, in both cases the administration sought to use financial leverage to advance its foreign policy goals: lending support to the Soviet Union and the Cuban dictatorship of Juan Batista.
Over the years the agency expanded, like all government programs and eventually became what amounts to a massive slush fund for the politically connected corporate elite. Among its biggest "customers" are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Halliburton - all, not coincidentally, charter members of what Dwight Eisenhower deemed the "military-industrial complex."
I point out this confluence because until recently the Ex-Im Bank was a major fulcrum for arms deals involving US allies unable to afford the expensive arms purchases involved in fulfilling their duties as instruments of US foreign policy. ... In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of "free market" thinking, defense analyst Tom Donnelly, formerly chief of strategic communications at Lockheed and a big honcho over at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century starts out his pitch for keeping Ex-Im with a telling phrase: "Corporate welfare in the defense of liberty is no vice." ...
The War Party would dearly love to deploy Ex-Im in their campaign to extend the frontiers of the Empire, and its expiration would be a major blow to their expansive ambitions. Under Donnelly's proposal, which would eliminate the prohibition on financing arms sales, essentially bankrupt countries like Ukraine, a front-line state in Washington's new cold war against Russia, would be able to garner much more than the mere $1 billion in "foreign aid" they've so far finagled. US arms merchants could apply for financing from Ex-Im, and American taxpayers would be on the hook for many billions more. This beats going to a private bank and asking for a loan: Ukraine is hardly a good risk, and whatever terms Lockheed or whomever could get from them entail high interest rates. Uncle Sam, on the other hand, is bound to be much more generous.
Keiser Report: Russell Brand talks revolution with Max & Stacy
Russell Brand's speech to 50,000 people at the anti austity protest in London
The Evening Greens
Emperor penguins at risk of extinction, scientists warn
The entire population of Antarctica's famous emperor penguins could fall by a third by the end of the century because of disappearing sea ice, putting them at risk of extinction, researchers said on Sunday.
The finding justified protecting emperor penguins under the endangered species act - as America already does for polar bear - the researchers writing in the journal Nature Climate Change said.
They also called for marine reserves to buffer the fish stocks penguin need to survive.
'The population is declining. Unless something changes to stop that, the population will go into extinction,' said Hal Caswell, senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and one of the authors.
As a top predator in Antarctica, the main threat to emperor penguins' survival comes from climate change which is melting the sea ice.
The loss of sea ice is reducing the supply of krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that populate the Southern Ocean, and are the emperor penguins' main food source. Young krill feed off of algae living in the sea ice. When the ice goes, so do the krill.
Peru now has a 'licence to kill' environmental protesters demanded by US
Some of the recent media coverage about the fact that more than 50 people in Peru, the vast majority of them indigenous, are on trial following protests and fatal conflict in the Amazon over five years ago missed a crucial point. Yes, the hearings are finally going ahead and the charges are widely held to be trumped-up, but what about the government functionaries who apparently gave the riot police the order to attack the protestors, the police themselves, and - following Wikileaks' revelations of cables in which the US ambassador in Lima criticized the Peruvian government's 'reluctance to use force' and wrote there could be 'implications for the recently implemented Peru-US FTA' if the protests continued - the role of the US government?
The conflict broke out in northern Peru after mainly indigenous Awajúns and Wampis had been peacefully protesting a series of new laws which were supposedly emitted to comply with a trade agreement between Peru and the US and which made it easier, among other things, for extractive industries to exploit natural resources in their territories. Following a blockade of a highway near a town called Bagua – and an agreement that the protestors would break up and go home, reached the day before – early on 5 June the police moved to clear it and started shooting. In the ensuing conflict, 10 police officers, five indigenous people and five non-indigenous civilians were killed, more than 200 injured – at least 80 of whom were shot – and, elsewhere in the Bagua region, a further 11 police officers were killed after being taken hostage.
Does this desperate failure of justice not effectively constitute a “licence to kill” for the police? Maybe, maybe not, but whatever the answer Peru has now formalised that licence by emitting a law that, as the Dublin-based NGO Front Line Defenders (FLD) puts it, grants:
. . . members of the armed forces and the national police exemption from criminal responsibility if they cause injury or death, including through the use of guns or other weapons, while on duty.
Entire Unitarian Church Votes to Divest from Fossil Fuels
Marking a major victory for the climate movement, the assembly of the Unitarian Universalists, representing over 1,000 congregations, voted on Saturday to divest their $175 million endowment from fossil fuel companies.
According to a church spokesperson, the 2,000 delegates in attendance at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) meeting in Providence, RI, voted "overwhelmingly" to support a Fossil Fuel Divestment Business Resolution. ...
According to information provided to the Journal, roughly 2.9 percent of the UUA's $175-million endowment is invested in Carbon Tracker 200 companies. ...
The Resolution requires that the church reach full divestment of directly held securities and indirect holdings for companies that produce and process fossil fuels within five years, with the exception of maintaining "a few shares" to allow the church to engage in shareholder advocacy.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
If you haven't seen this already, here's a fine diary about the ongoing destruction of West Virginia by extractive energy industries.
We Are Our Mountain's Keeper: The Fight for the Soil & Soul of Appalachia
Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say
Why financial heists are getting bigger and we put less value on money
Organized workers can continue to elect sell-out, dead-end corporate politicians... Or they can create a real, politically independent grassroots movement
For American Indians, Yosemite has a ruinous and bloody history
A Little Night Music
Kansas City Kitty & Georgia Tom - Fish House Blues
Kansas City Kitty & Georgia Tom - Show Me What You've Got
Jane Lucas (Victoria Spivey) and 'Georgia Tom' Dorsey - What's That I Smell?
Tampa Red & Georgia Tom - You Can't Get That Stuff No More
Harum Scarums (Georgia Tom, Big Bill Broonzy, Mozelle Anderson) - Come On In
Sweet Papa Tadpole - Black Spider Blues
Ma Rainey w/Georgia Tom - Deep Moaning Blues
Stovepipe Johnson w/Georgia Tom - Devilish Blues
Tampa Red & Georgia Tom - No Matter How She Done It
Georgia Tom with Tampa Red - Grievin' Me Blues
Famous Hokum Boys - Saturday Night Rub
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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