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 jazz, blues and boogie pianist Oscar Peterson. Enjoy!
Oscar Peterson - Boogie Blues Etude
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
-- Martin Luther King Jr
News and Opinion
"Negro Spring": Ferguson Residents, Friends of Michael Brown Speak Out for Human Rights
'They Just Killed Him': New Video Betrays Police Depiction of Fatal Shooting
New video footage from a cell phone camera at the scene of a deadly shooting by two St. Louis Metropolitan police officers two days ago strongly betrays the depiction of the killing given by the department in the aftermath of the incident.
Kajieme Powell, a 25-year-old black man was shot and killed by police on Tuesday just miles from where ongoing street protests in response to the August 9th killing of a black unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, have garnered international attention. Following the death of Powell on Tuesday, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson claimed the shooting was justified because the man was brandishing a knife—"with an overhand grip" and making swiping motions—as he approached the two officers on the scene.
However, the new footage taken by a civilian bystander but released by the department late Wednesday shows that although Powell appeared agitated, his hands were at his sides and does not appear to be as close as stated when the officers opened fire with lethal force.
The National Guard protects Ferguson's police, not its people
On August 16, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon called National Guard troops into Ferguson to “ensure the safety and welfare of the citizens.” ... Rarely deployed to deal with civilian unrest, in most instances National Guard troops lay sandbags and hand out bottles of water. But as troops turned up in Ferguson on Monday clad in military fatigues and equipped with rifles, they aroused memories of America’s past.
In Ferguson these civilian soldiers were clearly not there to just hand out water. As Monday night’s images of excessive force showed, the National Guard was called in to protect the police, not the people. Through wafts of tear gas, with guns ready, these troops provided military backup to an already militarized police force. For many, this is like rubbing salt in a community’s wounds. And as a closer look at the history of National Guard deployments makes clear — from Kent State to the Los Angeles riots — its presence often serves to justify police violence.
Holocaust survivor arrested in Ferguson: 'African-Americans live like under Nazi regime'
Ferguson: Eric Holder says justice will be upheld in Michael Brown case
The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has visited Ferguson to assure residents that justice will prevail in the police shooting of an unarmed teenager – but a local prosecutor has warned it will probably be two months before a decision is taken on whether to charge the officer involved.
Holder on Wednesday met the family of Michael Brown, whose death on 9 August triggered protests and riots in the St Louis suburb, and stressed the Obama administration’s commitment to civil rights in this and other cases. ...
On his visit to Missouri, Holder, the country’s first African American attorney general, walked a fine line between showing federal engagement with the case, which has prompted a renewed debate about race in the US, and not politicising it.
In addition to private meetings with officials and Brown’s family he told students at a Ferguson community college about his own personal experiences with racism. “I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man.”
He recalled police pulling him over while driving on the New Jersey turnpike and while walking to a cinema in Georgetown. “I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”
The US could and would change, Holder said, highlighting the justice department’s increased scrutiny of police forces across the US. “We have a very active civil rights division. I am proud of what these men and women have done. As they write about the legacy of the Obama administration, a lot of it is going to be about what the civil rights division has done.”
The FBI announced last week that it was carrying out an investigation into the shooting of Brown to determine whether it amounted to a civil rights violation. It may be widened to examine police practices in Ferguson, where the community is two-thirds black but 50 out of 53 police officers are white.
The federal probe will run parallel to McCulloch’s state investigation.
Ferguson Police Raid Church, Continue Arrests
Protests in Ferguson, Missouri continued throughout Tuesday night, marking the 11th continuous day of demonstrations for justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson on August 9th.
According to reports on Twitter, police on Wednesday afternoon raided the local St. Marks Church, which had become a refuge and medical aid station for protesters who had been injured by tear gas.
White supremacy is the real culprit in Ferguson. The excuses just prove it
“There is never an excuse for violence against police,” President Obama said. Yet there are endless excuses for state violence against black people. For mass incarceration, there’s the “war on drugs”. For poverty and unemployment, there’s “a culture of laziness” and “government dependence”. For the educational gap, there’s the burden of “acting white”. For Eric Garner: “loosies”. And for Michael Brown, there are stolen cigarillos, jaywalking or anything the police can say to shift the narrative from their white supremacist practices to black “ghetto” culture.
It is to say that black lives do not matter, that our babies deserve death and despair, that our communities don’t deserve protection and justice.
Obama needs post-racialism like Bush needed the “war on terror”: to camouflage our contradictions, to exercise global dominance vis-à-vis a (neo)liberal-democratic narrative, to lie to the world. But with the numbers of black bodies unemployed, incarcerated and extrajudicially executed, what are to we to do?
No one person knows.
But we must act collectively and courageously. Alongside the immediate arrest of Darren Wilson, we must demand the demilitarization of law enforcement as well as the decriminalization of the black body. In addition to the withdrawal of the curfew and National Guard, we must demand the withdrawal of apartheid police forces and local governments where a black majority is ruled by a white minority. We cannot depend on the same police force that killed Brown to liberate us. ... Also, we must recognize that naming Wilson as the killer without naming white supremacy as the culprit fails to address the root of racialized police violence. We must recognize, as Malcolm X did, that police brutality is a human rights issue that will not be solved simply by the passing of legislation. Our rallies must spark revolutionary action. Our marching must evolve into a sustainable movement.
California highway patrol officer could face charges for beating woman
A California highway patrol officer who was videotaped repeatedly striking a woman on the side of a Los Angeles freeway could face serious charges, the agency said Wednesday after forwarding its investigation to the district attorney.
Officer Daniel Andrew, who was put on a desk assignment after the incident, was removed from duty and put on paid administrative leave, the CHP said.
The agency didn’t reveal if it made a recommendation to prosecutors but said in a news release that its report outlined potentially serious charges he could face. It didn’t specify possible charges.
The 1 July incident sparked outrage as video showed Andrew hitting Marlene Pinnock, 51, several times on the side of Interstate 10.
[Warning - the video is an unpleasant display of police violence - may not be suitable for all viewers, certainly depicts police behavior unsuitable for a free and decent people. -js]
Hamas leaders die in wave of Israeli strikes on Gaza
Three of Hamas’s most senior military commanders have been killed in pre-dawn air strikes on Rafa in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas announced the deaths of Mohammed Abu Shamalah, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum on Thursday morning. The loss of the military commanders is a serious blow to the organisation.
There was still no definitive word on the fate of Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s top military figure, whose wife and eight-month-old son were killed on Tuesday evening when five one-tonne bombs struck a house in Gaza City. ...
At a press conference on Wednesday night Netanyahu said the Gaza war launched on 8 July “will be a continued campaign” aimed at restoring “calm and safety” to Israeli citizens.
He said the latest bout of Israeli military action in Gaza was “the harshest blow Hamas has taken since its foundation” and warned that if Hamas rocket fire continued Israel would hit back “sevenfold”. “This is a continuous campaign. The struggle against terror lasts for years,” he said.
A War on Gaza’s Future? Israeli Assault Leaves 500 Kids Dead, 3,000 Injured, 373,000 Traumatized
The Double Identity of an "Anti-Semitic" Commenter - Smearing a Progressive Website to Support Israel
Like many other news websites, Common Dreams has been plagued by inflammatory anti-Semitic comments following its stories. But on Common Dreams these posts have been so frequent and intense they have driven away donors from a nonprofit dependent on reader generosity.
A Common Dreams investigation has discovered that more than a thousand of these damaging comments over the past two years were written with a deceptive purpose by a Jewish Harvard graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website's discussion of issues involving Israel.
His intricate campaign, which he has admitted to Common Dreams, included posting comments by a screen name, "JewishProgressive," whose purpose was to draw attention to and denounce the anti-Semitic comments that he had written under many other screen names.
The deception was many-layered. At one point he had one of his characters charge that the anti-Semitic comments and the criticism of the anti-Semitic comments must be written by "internet trolls who have been known to impersonate anti-Semites in order to then double-back and accuse others of supporting anti-Semitism"--exactly what he was doing. (Trolls are posters who foment discord.)
The impersonation, this character wrote, must be part of an "elaborate Hasbara setup," referring to an Israeli international public-relations campaign. When Common Dreams finally confronted the man behind the deceptive posting, he denied that he himself was involved with Hasbara.
His posting on Common Dreams illustrates the susceptibility of website comment threads to massive manipulation.
The Neocons’ Grim ‘Victory’ in Iraq
Neocons do like to declare victory, especially regarding the Iraq War. So it came as no surprise that Paul Wolfowitz, apparently unimpressed by Iraq’s mounting crisis, regaled a recent panel discussion at the U.S.-Africa Summit with the blunt proclamation, “We have won it — in 2009.” Unsurprisingly, that’s when Team Bush left the White House — and approximately 150,000 troops behind in Iraq. ...
The simple fact is that the Iraq War was a smashing success – at least for the neocons – because it smashed the keystone in the arch of the region’s stability. By removing Saddam Hussein, his government and the Republican Guard, neocons removed a bulwark against the very jihadism that has policymakers and pundits forever wringing their hands raw, military contractors ringing their cash registers, and the denizens of the national security state resting assured under a blanket of secrecy.
Considering the persistent ubiquity of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, their growing presence around the Horn of Africa and extension into Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolfowitz’s declaration of victory may not be ironic or delusional; it may have some measure of truth – at least from his perspective – but for a reason most would not consider victorious. That “victory” achieved something the neocons could only dream of during a fitful slumber brought on by counting the media’s sheep, i.e. a permanent war in the Middle East.
The Iraq War made it functionally impossible for the United States to ever fully walk away from Iraq, the Persian Gulf or anywhere Muslims and oil mix. And for Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and William Kristol, it’s a dream come true. Regime change in Iraq created a power vacuum that was and is too strong to resist. ...
The bait-and-switch of 9/11 for Saddam, of Colin Powell’s show-stopping vial of fake anthrax for actual evidence of chemical weapons, of aluminum tubes as proof for non-existent nuclear centrifuges — it all set a trap that, in the final analysis, America cannot really free itself from, no matter how rabidly Uncle Sam gnaws at the exposed bone of his blood-soaked leg.
Ukraine border guards begin checks on Russian aid trucks
Ukrainian border guards began on Thursday to inspect a Russian truck convoy carrying aid earmarked for humanitarian relief in eastern Ukraine that has been stranded at the frontier between the two former Soviet republics for nearly a week.
Kiev believes the convoy of some 260 trucks, carrying water, food and medicines, could prove a Trojan horse for Russia to get weapons to pro-Russian separatists battling Ukrainian forces in the region - a notion that Moscow has dismissed as absurd.
"I can confirm that at 2:15 p.m. (1115 GMT/7.15 a.m. EDT) the Ukrainian side began border-customs formalities relating to the Russian humanitarian cargo," border guard spokesman Andriy Demchenko told Reuters. ...
The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has sent 35 staff to help smooth the way for the Russian convoy and intends to accompany the Russian drivers and trucks with its own vehicles.
"We are ready to roll with this convoy, there has been a last-minute delay. We are hopeful that it will be resolved shortly," ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told Reuters.
"Last-minute decisions from the Ukrainian side have delayed the process," he said, declining to elaborate.
Russia closes McDonald's restaurants for 'sanitary violations'
Russia has shut down four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow for alleged sanitary violations in a move critics said was the latest blow in its tit-for-tat sanctions tussle with the west.
The federal monitoring service for consumer rights and wellbeing announced on Wednesday that the offending outlets included the famous restaurant on Pushkin Square that opened just before the fall of the Soviet Union. The body said the eateries were being shut down for "sanitary violations" discovered during inspections this week.
The agency has a history of banning food from countries out of favour with Moscow, and the move will almost certainly be taken as a political statement in the sanctions war. ... In a statement, McDonald's said it was studying the watchdog's complaints to "determine the actions necessary to open our restaurants to customers as soon as possible".
The consumer watchdog said inspections would continue in other McDonald's restaurants. The chain has 430 restaurants in 70 Russian cities and employs more than 35,000 people there.
U.S. Military Bans The Intercept
The U.S. military is banning and blocking employees from visiting The Intercept in an apparent effort to censor news reports that contain leaked government secrets.
According to multiple military sources, a notice has been circulated to units within the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps warning staff that they are prohibited from reading stories published by The Intercept on the grounds that they may contain classified information. The ban appears to apply to all employees—including those with top-secret security clearance—and is aimed at preventing classified information from being viewed on unclassified computer networks, even if it is freely available on the internet. Similar military-wide bans have been directed against news outlets in the past after leaks of classified information.
Keiser Report: Economy Crapification
Bank of America reaches record $17bn settlement over questionable mortgages
Bank of America has reached a record settlement of nearly $17bn (£10.2bn) to resolve an investigation into its role in the sale of mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis, officials directly familiar with the matter have said.
One official, who spoke with AP on condition of anonymity because the announcement was not scheduled until Thursday at the earliest, said the bank will pay $9.65bn in cash and provide consumer relief valued at $7bn.
The deal is the largest settlement arising from the economic meltdown in which millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. It follows agreements in the past year with Citigroup for $7bn and with JPMorgan Chase & Co for $13bn.
Like the Bank of America deal, those settlements were a mixture of hard cash and "credits" for various forms of consumer aid that the banks have promised to provide in coming years.
The Bank of America settlement was negotiated through a joint federal and state working group established by the US president, Barack Obama, two years ago with the justice department and other federal and state authorities. Individual states are expected to share in the settlement.
Argentina moves to cut out US hedge funds
Argentina has risked deepening its isolation among international lenders with a proposal to cut out a group of US hedge funds from sovereign bond payments.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced on Tuesday that the government was replacing its New York intermediary bank with the state-run Banco de la Nación.
This would allow it to circumvent a New York judge's ruling that blocked bond payments to all creditors, after the country refused to reimburse a group of hedge funds which are demanding payment of their bonds in full.
The new plan would allow Argentina to pay the so-called haircut bondholders who agreed to restructure their payments in 2005 and 2010 but have been unable to receive payments since the court ruling.
The bond market meanwhile reacted negatively to the proposed change in jurisdiction, which the New York court may see as an attempted evasion of its decisions.
The Evening Greens
Corporate Profits Trumped Public Safety in Lac Mégantic
The Lac Mégantic oil train derailment that killed 47 people and nearly destroyed a small town was caused by a series of government and industry failures, according to an investigation released Tuesday. This "accident waiting to happen," observers note, is another searing indictment of the "profit before public safety" directive of the fossil fuel industry and its government backers.
Citing 18 separate factors that contributed to the July 7th, 2013 disaster, the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada concluded that the now-defunct Maine, Montreal & Atlantic (MMA) Railway "was a company with a weak safety culture," which government regulators Transport Canada had repeatedly failed to audit and address. ...
The examination also found that Transport Canada "did not provide adequate regulatory oversight" and was too reliant on MMA's purported Safety Management System and thus failed to properly audit their operations to ensure that they had a functioning safety plan.
Though many have demanded that the railroad executives be held responsible for the 47 deaths, the only individuals who have been charged thus far are three MMA employees: Thomas Harding, the train conductor; Jean Demaître, manager of train operations; and Richard Labrie, traffic controller. They are being charged with criminal negligence and face a maximum sentence of life in prison.
"When this many things go wrong, it’s not a freakish coincidence," wrote the editors of the Chronicle Herald. "It’s a picture of an accident waiting to happen because a company with a weak safety culture was allowed to operate."
Tar Sands Bitumen by Rail Set to Eclipse Pipelines Like Keystone XL
“Rail can get you just about anywhere. It's like the Harry Potter stairway. You get on the stairs at one end and they move to wherever you need to go. That's the beauty of the railway. You get on at one end here, with your bitumen or dilbit, and then you can end up in different places depending on what are the best markets.”
That quote is from Pete Sametz, president of Connacher Oil and Gas, speaking to the Daily Oil Bulletin about the appeal of moving tar sands oil by rail. And Sametz isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for rail transportation options for bitumen.
At the Canadian Institute's North American Pipeline Symposium in June, Randy Meyer of Canadian National railway, told the conference how this situation appeared to him.
“It's kind of amusing when I read in the paper that there's this angst and gnashing of teeth about Keystone and I'm going, 'My goodness, we're already there.' We can go there and we are. We are shipping product there.”
The reality is that tar sands bitumen transport is so well-suited for rail over pipelines that it is now cheaper to move tar sands bitumen by rail than it is by pipeline. If you're a tar sands industry executive, this is your light-bulb moment: Who needs the Keystone XL headache when you can bypass the controversy entirely using existing rail lines?
Maryland Fracking Study Cites Toxic Air Emissions as Top Concern
A state-commissioned report found that air emissions trump water pollution and drilling-induced earthquakes as a top public health threat posed by future fracking projects in Maryland.
For nearly a year, experts at the University of Maryland's School of Public Health examined past research into the link between oil and gas activity and health. The findings, released Monday, stand in stark contrast to public concern in heavy-drilling states such as Maryland's neighbor Pennsylvania. Those concerns have tended to focus on tainted water, not air. ...
According to the Maryland study's principal investigator, Donald Milton, existing data show a clear trend: oil and gas activity can spew significant levels of toxic chemicals into the air—and that pollution consistently makes people sick.
"We think [the state] should pay a lot of attention to air pollution," said Milton, who is director of the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and a UMD professor of epidemiology, biostatistics, and medicine. Although water pollution is also a concern, Milton told InsideClimate News that there's not enough data on how likely dirty water is to sicken people, nor how strong those health effects would be.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Behind Obama’s ‘Chaotic’ Foreign Policy
‘Is This America?’: 50 Years Ago Sharecroppers Challenged Mississippi Apartheid, LBJ, and the Nation
The Revolutionary Document That Is The UK's 184-Year-Old Idea Of 'Policing By Consent'
Top U.N. Human Rights Chief: “There are many parts of the U.S. where apartheid's flourishing”
Three transpeople shot in three days in Detroit
A Little Night Music
Oscar Peterson - Cakewalk
Oscar Peterson & Count Basie - Jumpin' At The Woodside
Oscar Peterson - Eight Bar Boogie Blues
Oscar Peterson - Summertime
Ray Charles & Oscar Peterson - Blues for Scotia
Oscar Peterson Trio - A Gal In Gallico
Oscar Peterson - Take the A-train
Stuff Smith & Oscar Peterson - Things Ain't What They Used to Be
Oscar Peterson - C Jam
Oscar Peterson - Sweet Georgia Brown
Oscar Peterson - The Backyard Blues
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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