Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features blues harmonica player George 'Wild Child' Butler. Enjoy!
Wild Child Butler - Gravy Child (Lickin' Gravy)
"The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."
-- James Madison
News and Opinion
Barack Obama (D - General Dynamics) is worried that the sequestration process that he created will cut the profits of his cronies compromise his power to brutally murder brown people.
President warns of 'draconian' military cuts
President Obama warned Congress about the possible effects of sequestration during a rare visit to the Pentagon on Wednesday, saying lawmakers needed to make sure the military has "the equipment and the technology that's necessary for them to be able to succeed at their mission."
"We have done some enormous work, and I want to thank everybody sitting around this table to continue to make our forces leaner, meaner, more effective, more tailored to the particular challenges that we’re going to face in the 21st century," Obama said following a meeting with Pentagon leadership.
"But we also have to make sure that Congress is working with us to avoid, for example, some of the draconian cuts that are called for in sequestration."
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has warned that if sequestration cuts are implemented in the next fiscal year, development on crucial military projects could stall. ...
Hagel has said the Army would shed 20,000 active-duty soldiers if sequestration cuts take effect, a step that would endanger its ability to fight two major conflicts at the same time. The National Guard would also lose 40,000 soldiers, while the Army Reserve would draw down 20,000 soldiers, Hagel said.
Obama: Congress Must Stop ‘Draconian Cuts’ to Military Spending
Speaking today after a meeting at the Pentagon, President Obama pushed the idea that Congress needs to completely do away with even the pretense of sequestration with respect to military spending, saying they have to prevent the “draconian cuts” mandated.
Sequestration, agreed to because of a rising deficit, was supposed to slow the rate of growth for military spending. The reality is that Congress has ignored the sequestration rules in military budget deals anyhow, though even this higher rate of growth was too slow for the Pentagon’s tastes, and they complained of “cuts,” which are only cuts compared to a hypothetical even less affordable budget. ...
[T]he funding for the actual war is coming out of an entirely separate budget, the Overseas Contingencies budget, which is itself already immune to sequestration and is seemingly once again on the rise.
Obama Claims ISIS ‘Progress,’ But Nothing to Back it Up
As US warplanes continue to launch attacks in Iraq and Syria, President Obama is loudly proclaiming “progress” has been made in the conflict against ISIS. Exactly what he means by progress, however, is uncertain.
Yet as ever, the coalition is largely of nations which haven’t committed to do anything at all in the war, and all indications are that the airstrikes are having little impact on the ground, with ISIS continuing to gain ground, particularly in Syria.
U.S. Faces "Massive Military Failure" as ISIS Advances on Syrian Border Town of Kobani
Hat tip to divineorder:
Obama says we're bombing ISIS to protect civilians. Bullshit
The people of Kobane, Syria, must be wondering if President Obama has a short memory. The Obama administration consistently used humanitarian justifications for its decision to go to war against the terrorist group ISIS, but now that the war is underway, those humanitarian arguments seem to have been forgotten. As of this week, ISIS appears poised to capture Kobane, a small city on the Syria-Turkey border. It may commit horrible atrocities there, as it has after seizing other territories. But the US is neither committing the military resources necessary to save the town (it has stepped up airstrikes, but that is unlikely to be enough to keep ISIS out) nor funding protection efforts for the massive numbers of civilians who have fled across the border into Turkey.
Obama has relied heavily on humanitarian arguments to justify the war against ISIS. In his August 7th speech, he spoke of the need to avert ISIS's "potential genocide" of Yazidi civilians. On September 10th, he decried the group's atrocities, including rape, enslavement, murder, and threatened genocide, in a speech announcing that air strikes would be expanded to Syria. And in his September 24 address to the UN General Assembly, he asked the international community to join with the US to "dismantle [ISIS's] network of death," because "mothers, sisters and daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death."
In practice, though, US strategy appears to prioritize a long-run objective of destroying ISIS over protecting civilians in the short term. And there is a very real chance that if action isn't taken to protect civilians soon, the long term will be irrelevant to them: they will be too dead to enjoy it.
John Kerry makes clear that what is important in the War of Terror is securing control of resources and land - the millions of brown people are completely expendable. So let us not hear any more humanitarian hoo-hah from the R2P bombing apologists about how wonderfully well our charitable bombs are working for the oppressed (expendable) civilians.
Isis in Kobani: John Kerry says preventing the fall of the town is 'not a strategic objective'
The civil war in Syria rocked Turkey – a Nato member state – when riots broke out in a number of cities, opening age-old wounds between Turks and Kurds.
As officials in Ankara continued to debate whether to take an active role in the fight against Isis, rival factions stirred old enmities. The country was rocked by explosive clashes in more than 20 cities as Kurds protested against the government’s perceived inaction over the plight of those living in the Kurdish city of Kobani, just a few miles inside Syrian territory. ...
Speaking tonight, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, suggested that preventing the fall of Kobani was not a strategic US objective. “As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani, you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” he said.
“Notwithstanding the crisis in Kobani, the original targets of our efforts have been the command and control centres, the infrastructure.”
"Kill the Messenger" Resurrects Gary Webb, Journalist Maligned for Exposing CIA Ties to Crack Trade
CIA didn't know it had Senate 'torture' report
It's a report that's been the talk of Washington's intelligence community for months, yet lawyers for the nation's premier intelligence agency — the CIA — improbably maintained it didn't have a copy.
That claim evaporated Tuesday as a Justice Department lawyer said the government was wrong when it told a federal judge that the Central Intelligence Agency did not have a copy of the unabridged version of a Senate committee report on treatment of detainees. In fact, the CIA does have a copy of the 6,300-page report, DOJ attorney Vesper Mei said.
"There was a miscommunication over at the agency as to what we were looking for," Mei told U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg at a court session Tuesday. "They didn't realize that they had it." ...
Last month, DOJ lawyers asked to extend deadlines in the FOIA cases until Oct. 29 to allow for continuing discussions between Feinstein's committee and the White House about the declassification process. ... "We can't predict exactly when the declassification process will be complete," Mei told the judge, while adding that she does not expect to seek a further extension.
A lawyer for a journalist suing for access to the report and related records told Boasberg the cases shouldn't be put off indefinitely because the Senate and the White House haven't agreed on the redactions.
"FOIA doesn't include a provision that the court needs to wait on Sen. Feinstein," said attorney Jeffrey Light, representing Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.
De Blasio Administration Continues Attacks On Press Over NYPD Spying, Channeling Bloomberg
Responding to a lawsuit alleging unlawful and unconstitutional police surveillance of Muslim communities, lawyers under New York Mayor Bill de Blasio have doubled down on the arguments of his predecessor, advancing the notion that the New York City Police Department did not engage in dictionary-defined surveillance of the plaintiffs in the suit and contending that any harm that may have been caused to them was the fault of reporters, not law enforcement. ...
The lawsuit that triggered this turn of events – Hassan v City of New York – was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Muslim Advocates, a non-profit, in June of 2012 on behalf of nearly a dozen Muslim plaintiffs from New Jersey who claim to have suffered from the NYPD’s haphazard intelligence operations. Together the plaintiffs claim to have been swept up in an illegal, unconstitutional, interstate NYPD surveillance program, solely because of their religion. Their case was dismissed in February and appealed the following month, forcing the de Blasio administration to now take a clear legal position on the issue of Muslim surveillance conducted outside New York. For the plaintiffs’ lawyers, that response was disheartening.
“It’s really disappointing,” Omar Farah, a CCR lawyer working on the suit told The Intercept. “It really is a full-throated defense by the de Blasio administration of the same practices that his predecessor put in place.”
Ka-ching! That’s the sound of Obama helping out his party
Forget the big campaign rallies, glitzy photo ops and lofty stump speeches. President Barack Obama’s strategy for winning the midterm elections next month is simple: Raise money, lots of it.
The unpopular president has largely ditched the campaign trail for the money trail, serving as his party’s fundraiser-in-chief by bringing in millions of dollars to help vulnerable Democratic candidates in November.
Four weeks before the election, he is sticking to tony locales – Miami, Martha’s Vineyard and Greenwich, Conn., an affluent suburb of New York City, where he still boasts the ability to raise money for Democrats.
Obama has headlined more than 400 fundraisers since he took office, 89 of them this election cycle, as he fights to keep his agenda and legacy intact by maintaining Democratic control of at least one chamber of Congress.
On Tuesday, he added three more fundraisers when he flew to New York for the Democratic National Committee and then onto Greenwich for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
New wrinkle in Hong Kong: Leader was paid millions by Australian firm
The loyalties of Hong Kong’s besieged chief executive are coming under question again after it was disclosed Wednesday he’d received $6.4 million from an Australian engineering and development firm with interests in Hong Kong and Chinese real estate.
An Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, reported Wednesday that Leung Chun-ying, also known as C.Y. Leung, had received the payments in exchange for providing contacts and other information to the Australian company, UGL, which had acquired the Hong Kong company for which Leung worked, DTZ Holdings.
The payments were made after Leung became Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2012, but weren’t disclosed; The Sydney Morning Herald reported that UGL and Leung’s office said they weren’t required to report the payments, which were triggered by Leung’s departure from DTZ to take up his current post.
Nonetheless, the disclosures amped up calls in Hong Kong for Leung to step down, a key demand of the protesters who’ve occupied three locations in the city for nearly two weeks.
Concentration of Wealth in China Keeps Wages Low
St Louis police officer shoots, kills black teenager while off duty
Police claim the 18-year-old man was armed and fired at least three shots, but relatives say he only had a sandwich in his hand
A white off-duty police officer in the US city of St Louis has shot and killed a black teenager who fired on him, police said, triggering protests just miles from the flashpoint suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
The St Louis metropolitan police chief, Sam Dotson, said the officer was on patrol for a private security company late Wednesday when he engaged three men in a chase. ...
According to Dotson, ballistics evidence recovered from the scene suggested the teenager fired three shorts. The officer returned fire with 17 rounds. Dotson was unable to say why the officer fired so many shots. ...
After the latest incident, some who identified themselves as relatives of the man who was shot told the St Louis Post Dispatch newspaper that he was not armed.
One woman said the victim was her cousin, Vonderrit Myers Jr.
“He was unarmed,” Teyonna Myers told the newspaper. “He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again.”
Andrew Cuomo unloads on the “extreme left” in new memoir
While his father Mario Cuomo’s 1984 address at the Democratic National Convention served as a liberal rallying cry, Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly found himself starkly at odds with the liberal wing of the party. Although the governor signed marriage equality and gun safety legislation into law and has staked out a robustly pro-choice position, he has also slashed corporate taxes, capped property taxes, maneuvered to keep his own party from controlling the New York State Senate, lent conditional support to fracking, and earned plaudits from the right-wing National Review for his conservative economic agenda. There’s also the federal probe into Cuomo’s disbanding of his much-heralded anti-corruption commission, which Cuomo had touted as evidence of his commitment to good government. ...
Given his center-right track record, it’s hardly unsurprising that Cuomo is no fonder of the left than the left is of him. According to the Times – which got its hands on a copy of his new memoir, All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life – Cuomo rips the “extreme left” in the book, particularly for what he depicts as its hostility to the rich. Leftists, Cuomo writes, “speak of punitively raising taxes on the rich and transferring the money to the poor” and seek to “demonize those who are very wealthy.”
Philadelphia’s school reform debacle: Despised governor crosses the line
Gov. Tom Corbett has slashed funds and closed schools. But his latest move is the unpopular governor's most brazen
The Philadelphia school district has become the prime example of the problems with a corporate-style school “reform” agenda. Parents, teachers and students have resisted full privatization, New Orleans-style, and have found themselves punished for resistance as Gov. Tom Corbett, who controls the schools after a 2001 takeover by the state, slashes school budgets, wipes out thousands of jobs, and shutters dozens of schools.
The state takeover in 2001 came in the wake of a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by then-Philadelphia Superintendent David Hornbeck, claiming that state funding favored affluent white suburbs over the children of color who attend Philly public schools. Pennsylvania state politics often pit the city, portrayed as a hotbed of crime and poverty, against the white suburbs and center of the state, and this was no exception: the state government reacted furiously, Daniel Denvir reported at The Nation, taking over the district and eliminating the teachers’ union’s right to strike. (It’s worth noting that the laws enabling the state to take over Philly schools only apply to Philly schools, not to any other district in the state.)
The timing of the move has also led the teachers and their allies to suspect that the move may have more to do with Corbett’s falling poll numbers—a Quinnipiac poll out just today shows the governor a full 17 points behind his Democratic opponent (also backed by the Working Families Party) Tom Wolf. ... Corbett, Kati Sipp of the Pennsylvania Working Families Party noted, has not been able to succeed in the kinds of attacks on public sector workers that other Republican governors, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin or Rick Snyder in Michigan, have pushed through. A secret poll made public last year by Denvir at the Philadelphia CityPaper, paid for by education reform group PennCAN, suggested that “Corbett, a governor who has long suffered from low public-approval ratings, condition state aid to Philadelphia schools on major union concessions and kickstart his hobbled reelection campaign with a high-profile fight against the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.”
Philly Students Walkout As City Cancels Teachers' Contract
Students Walk Out After Attack on 'Union that Defends Public Education'
Students from at least two Philadelphia public high schools refused to go to classes Wednesday morning to protest the recent and abrupt cancellation of the city’s contract with the Philadelphia teachers' union. ...
State law prevents the PFT from striking; those who do strike risk losing their teaching licenses. It is the only union in Pennsylvania without that option.
So students stepped in for their teachers. Using the hashtag #StudentsForTeachers, Philadelphia high schoolers took to the streets and social media in support of local educators. "We're striking because every single teacher in the district's benefits are at risk and being played with through politics," student organizers said on Facebook.
Outside the Philadelphia High School for Creative & Performing Arts, a high school junior identified as 'Cy' told CBS Philly: "They say it’s for us. They say, 'oh we’re doing it for the students. We’re taking the teachers' money and we’re giving it back to the schools so the students can get books and pencils and paper.' And it’s like, we don’t want those things if we don’t have good teachers. You know, the good teachers, they can go to other schools and get their jobs and we don’t want that to happen."
SCOTUS allows North Carolina voting restrictions
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed North Carolina's new voting restrictions, considered among the nation's most stringent, to go into effect.
The court, with two of the nine justices dissenting, granted a last-minute request by state officials seeking to block an appeals court ruling that suspended parts of a new state voting law.
The state objected to the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' conclusion that same-day registration should be restored and provisional voting reinstated for voters casting ballots outside their normal precincts.
The high court's action means the appeals court's decision will not go into effect and the two provisions will not be available to voters in the Nov. 4 elections.
Restoring an America That Has Lost Its Way
The Evening Greens
New York Court to Decide if Chimps Are People Too
A US court has never been asked to consider the question "Who is a person?" in the same way that a New York appeals court will have to answer it in a case that started today.
This case is the first of its kind and raises the issue of whether high-order animals — non-human primates, dolphins, elephants, and orcas — are people and entitled to certain rights as people.
Tommy the chimpanzee, 26, is at the center of the case. He is owned by a human and spends his days watching television in upstate New York, where disagreements have arisen about his living conditions.
Tommy's owner, Patrick Lavery, claims the chimp lives in a state-of-the-art $150,000 enclosure with cable TV and a stereo. If that's true, Tommy has a nicer place than many humans.
However, Steven Wise, an attorney with the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) who is representing Tommy's personhood, says that the chimp resides in a "dank, dark shed." The NhRP claims Tommy's living quarters are in a used trailer lot. ...
If the appellate court rules in favor of Tommy, it would mean that he is capable of having legal rights and it likely would open the door for further cases concerning other high-order animals.
Because Monsanto? The US GMO label fail
Egypt's Expansion of the Suez Canal Could Ruin the Mediterranean Sea
The Egyptian government's plan to massively enlarge and deepen the Suez Canal has been met with widespread support domestically — but it has raised the ire and concern of scientists, who say the $8.5 billion project could have devastating ecological consequences in the Mediterranean Sea. ...
"There are more than 100 years of scientific studies of the invasions of the Mediterranean by species from the Red Sea — it's not a recent phenomenon," Bella S. Galil, senior scientist at Israel's National Institute of Oceanography and one of the paper's authors, told VICE News.
Galil and her colleagues estimate that about half of the almost 700 hundred non-native species living in the Mediterranean today have entered the Sea through the Suez Canal. The passage, wrote the scientists, "is one of the most potent mechanisms and corridors for invasions by marine species known in the world."
The impact of invasive species has been acutely felt in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly off the coasts of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, where nearly all non-native species arrived via the canal. ... Poisonous puffer fish have been found as far from the Suez as Italy. Venomous swarms of jellyfish known as Rhopilema nomadica have spread from Tunisia to the Levant, where they've stung beachgoers, mucked up fishing nets, and, in 2011, even clogged an Israeli power plant's seawater cooling system.
In the Red Sea, the jellyfish cause few problems because they have natural predators to keep their populations in check. In the Mediterranean, where they prey on native fish and crustacean larvae — wreaking havoc on the food chain from the bottom up —little or nothing stands in the way of their proliferation. "It's a Zero-Sum game," Galil said.
Gas Drilling: The Media’s New Climate Denial Showcase
Over 300,000 people filled the streets of New York City in September as part of the worldwide People’s Climate March, a stirring call for action on global warming.
But if you watched TV news that day, you may not have known it happened at all.
The Sunday chat shows totally skipped this historic climate march. Instead, one program on the supposedly liberal MSNBC produced a sad segment about how voters are loyal to either Starbucks or Chick-fil-A. ... Sensible people know there’s no more arguing about climate change: The planet is warming due to human activity. The only important question now is whether we plan to do anything about it. It will require, among other things, a massive shift away from burning oil, gas, and coal, as Naomi Klein argues in her brilliant new book, This Changes Everything.
But it’s hard to build that kind of political momentum when the most important platform for discussing politics — the mass media — doesn’t think the future of the planet is a big story. ...
“One of the economy’s good-news stories is the oil boom,” Robert J. Samuelson wrote recently in a Washington Post column endorsing a massive expansion of the U.S. oil industry. He never mentioned climate change, even though he writes for a newspaper whose editorial board has dedicated a new series to taking the climate crisis seriously.
It’s pretty simple: We can’t tackle climate change while fracking and burning more oil and gas. Big media outlets that refuse to make this simple connection are the new climate denialists.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
The Solution Is the Soil: How Organic Farming Can Feed the World and Save the Planet
Naomi Klein webchat
Hey, Paul Krugman: Here’s the real argument about climate change and economic growth
Non-Denial Denials: The Most Ludicrous and the Most Heinous
What Default Phone Encryption Really Means For Law Enforcement
Conchita Wurst at the EU Parliament yesterday
Ebola: UN Ban Ki-moon calls for 20X Action
A Little Night Music
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Anyone Can Say They Love You
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Maryanne
George 'Wild Child' Butler Spoonful
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Open Up Baby
George 'Wild Child' Butler - None of nothing
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Jelly jam
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Weak in the knees
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Hippie Playground
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Stranger
George Wild Child Butler - Can You Use A Man Like Me
George 'Wild Child' Butler - Down In the Chile', Aching All Over
George "Wild Child" Butler - Put It All In There
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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