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 blues slide guitarist and singer, Johnny Littlejohn. Enjoy!
Johnny Littlejohn - Bloody Tears
"The moon comes up and the sun goes down
This old world keeps spinning around
Just as sure as the day turns into the night
What you do in the dark will turn up in the light"
-- Ry Cooder
News and Opinion
CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison
Over 60 inmates at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.
According to a New York Times report, they allege that the prison staff interrogated them by beating them, placing them in solitary confinement, and in at least one inmate’s case, throwing a bag over his head and threatening to waterboard him.
Hearing about the domestic use of tactics so similar to those used by the CIA on suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, the Reverend Ron Stief, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, made the obvious connection.
“Faith and human rights leaders who worked to stop the CIA’s torture program have long feared its corroding influence on our civilian authorities,” he said in a statement. “These events prove that we must fight the torture of Americans here at home just as we have fought the use of torture abroad.”
Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police
Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse. ...
The software can identify 16,000 points on a person’s face — to determine the distance between the eyes or the shape of the lips, for instance — and compare them with thousands of similar points in police booking or other photos at a rate of more than one million faces a second.
The technology is so new that experts say they are unaware of major legal challenges. In some cities, though, a backlash is stirring.
In Northern California, the Oakland City Council, under pressure from residents and civil liberties advocates, scaled back plans this year for a federally financed center that would have linked surveillance equipment around the city, including closed-circuit cameras, gunshot microphones and license plate readers. It also formed a committee to limit the use of this equipment and to develop privacy standards, like how long data may be kept and who will have access to it. ...
Yet the F.B.I. is pushing ahead with its $1 billion Next Generation Identification program, in which the agency will gather data like fingerprints, iris scans and photographs, as well as information collected through facial recognition software. That software is capable of analyzing driver’s license photos and images from the tens of thousands of surveillance cameras around the country. The F.B.I. system will eventually be made accessible to more than 18,000 local, state, federal and international law enforcement agencies.
But people who are not criminal suspects are included in the database, and the error rate for the software is as high as 20 percent — meaning the authorities could misidentify millions of people.
Pentagon blocking Guantánamo deals to return Shaker Aamer and other cleared detainees
Pentagon chief and top officials playing ‘foot-dragging games’ despite 2013 agreement with UK diplomats and Obama’s promise to close facility
The Pentagon is blocking the return of UK permanent resident Shaker Aamer and two other longtime Guantánamo Bay detainees for whom the US Department of State has completed diplomatic deals to transfer home, the Guardian has learned.
American and UK diplomats reached an agreement in late 2013 for the return of Aamer, who has spent more than 13 years at the infamous detention facility without charge, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the understanding.
But even as the White House pledged to make his case a priority after a personal plea from David Cameron, Barack Obama’s defense secretaries have played what one official called “foot-dragging and process games” to let the deals languish.
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter, backed by powerful US military officers, have withheld support for sending Aamer back to the UK. The ongoing obstruction has left current and former US officials who consider the detainees a minimal threat seething, as they see it undermining relations with Britain and other foreign partners while subverting from the inside Obama’s long-stifled goal of closing the infamous detention facility.
Some consider the White House indecisive on Guantánamo issues, effectively enabling Pentagon intransigence ahead of the release of a long-awaited strategy for closing the facility before Obama’s presidency ends.
No Thanks, Obama and McCain. Continuing Indefinite Detention Isn’t Closing Guantánamo.
President Obama has renewed his commitment to closing Guantánamo before he leaves office, and McCain (R-Ariz.) said he might be able to support closure. However, there has always been a right way and a wrong way to close Guantánamo. The restrictions the Senate has passed, along with the latest proposal floated by the White House to move some detainees to the United States for indefinite detention without charge or trial, is the wrong way.
Guantánamo has never been just about the prison. Instead, Guantánamo has been about our government violating the rule of law and ducking American values. From torture and abuse during the Bush administration to indefinite detention and defective military commissions extending through the Bush and Obama administrations, Guantánamo has been a place where our government behaves like a human rights pariah instead of a human rights beacon.
The solution can never be to simply pack up both the detainees and bad policies at Guantánamo and ship them to some new prison here in the United States. No. The only meaningful solution is to close Guantánamo by ending indefinite detention without charge or trial, transferring the detainees who have been cleared for transfer, and trying detainees for whom there is evidence of wrongdoing in our federal criminal courts in the U.S., which regularly try terrorism suspects, including high-profile ones.
But instead of doing the hard work of closing Guantánamo the right way, the Obama White House is reportedly dusting off the same plan that Congress overwhelmingly rejected in 2010.
Tony Blair Should Be 'Dragged in Shackles to Court' Over Iraq War
The father of a soldier killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq said Wednesday that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal, as military families pledged to take legal action against the UK government if it does not publish a long-delayed investigation into the war.
"I'd like to see Tony Blair dragged in shackles off to court as a war criminal because we have to bear in mind 180 British service personnel were killed here, over 3,500 wounded, two million Iraqis fled Iraq, over 100,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed," Reg Keys, who lost his son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys, during the 2003 invasion, told the BBC.
Keys is part of a group of 29 families that on Wednesday threatened to sue the inquiry's lead investigator, Sir John Chilcot, if he does not set a date of publication for the report within two weeks.
Stalling publication of the Chilcot Inquiry is keeping grieving families of slain veterans from getting "closure," he added. The families have called the delay "morally reprehensible."
State Dept denies US, Turkey reached agreement on ‘safe zones’ in north Syria
Kurdish forces fighting Isis report being attacked with chemical weapons
German defence ministry says peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq believe they were attacked with rockets filled with chlorine
Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State in northern Iraq have reported being attacked with chemical weapons, according to the German defence ministry.
“We have indications that there was an attack with chemical weapons,” a ministry spokesman said, saying many peshmerga fighters had reportedly been left suffering from respiratory irritation.
A senior official from the peshmerga said the attack happened two days ago and wounded several dozen fighters.
“Last Tuesday afternoon, peshmerga forces in the Makhmur area 30 miles (50km) west of the city of Irbil were attacked with Katyusha rockets filled with chlorine,” the official said on condition of anonymity. ...
Last month, the Conflict Armament Research group and Sahan Research group said Isis had also targeted peshmerga with a projectile filled with an unknown chemical agent on 21 or 22 June. ...
The organisations said they had also documented two such attacks against Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units in Syria’s north-eastern Hasakeh province on 28 June.
As Turkey Bombed Anti-ISIS Fighters, It Hired Lobbying Firm Tied to 2016 Candidates
On July 24, Turkey launched a massive military campaign that included sweeping attacks against Kurdish forces as well as minor strikes on Islamic State positions south of Turkey’s border. Just five days later, the Turkish government inked a contract to hire a team of prominent lobbyists to add to its already formidable army of influence-peddlers in Washington.
The contract, revealed Wednesday in a filing with the Justice Department, shows that the law and lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs was retained on July 29 on a $32,000 a month retainer — as a subcontractor to Gephardt Government Affairs, acting for Turkey on its own 10-month, $1.7 million contract.
Squire Patton Boggs is no ordinary lobbying firm. It is among the highest grossing firms inside the Beltway, with a roster of former senior government officials and lawmakers. Individuals from the firm are now helping to fundraise for Jeb Bush and are among the top 20 donors to Hillary Clinton over the course of her political career.
As we reported last month, Turkey has quietly used its hired political muscle to influence the U.S. war on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, including a lobbying effort aimed at preventing U.S. military aide to Peshmerga forces, which have collaborated with other Kurdish militas against ISIS.
Turkey headed for more elections after coalition talks break down
Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s efforts to forge a coalition alliance with the country’s pro-secular party have failed, edging Turkey closer to another round of elections.
Davutoğlu told reporters on Thursday that the two party leaders had not reached common ground for a power-sharing deal.
His Islamic-rooted ruling party, AKP, lost its majority in June elections, forcing it to seek a coalition alliance in order to remain in power. More elections are likely to be called if no government is formed by the end of next week.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was reported to favour renewed elections later in the year, in the hope that the ruling party – which he founded – can regain parliamentary majority. Officials say the party’s grassroots are also opposed to a coalition with the pro-secular party.
Henry Siegman, Leading U.S. Jewish Voice for Peace: "Give Up on Netanyahu, Go to the United Nations"
Israeli Troops Furious at New West Bank Rules of Engagement
Troops Can't Shoot Fleeing Palestinians in the Back Anymore
Israelisoldiers are acting with outrage tonight after news that the military has temporarily revised the rules of engagement for combat soldiers in the occupied West Bank, centering on efforts to prevent gunfire except in genuine cases of threats to the lives of soldiers.
The ban, for instance, explicitly forbids shooting fleeing rock-throwers in the back, and likewise warns that if a car runs through a checkpoint without trying to run people over, the military isn’t to just fire willy-nilly into the sides of it. ... Israeli soldiers termed the new rules “bizarre,” saying they are all in “total shock” at the sudden efforts to tamp down shooting at Palestinians.
Jason Leopold has FOIA'd the CIA again and obtained a pretty interesting bunch of documents that provide insight to the ongoing feud between the CIA (led by its chief liar John Brennan) and the Senate committee whose job it is to oversee CIA. One major point of contention was the Panetta review of the CIA's torture program, which, since it came to conclusions at odds with the CIA's propaganda for public consumption, CIA considers out of bounds for congressional overseers to review. Among other things the article reveals that the CIA's contractor screwed up the installation of a search tool. That screwup allowed Senate staffers access to the Panetta review and many other documents that CIA wanted off-limits to its overseers and led to the CIA (probably illegaly) spying on Senate staffers.
Here's a snippet to whet the appetite:
The Google Search That Made the CIA Spy on the US Senate
Daniel Jones, the principal author of the Senate's torture report, is the Senate staffer who in November 2010 discovered the Panetta Review. Using the Google search tool on his computer, Jones conducted a keyword search. When he did, documents he hadn't before seen appeared.
No one can identify the exact search term or terms that led to the discovery of the Panetta Review. But a US official told VICE News that it could have been any number of search strings, such as Abu Zubaydah and waterboarding, referring to the CIA captive who was the guinea pig for the program. Such search terms, when typed into the Google search tool, would have resulted in all documents mentioning Zubaydah and the drowning technique to which he was subjected being made available on the Senate's side of the computer network. This would have included CIA cables, emails — and the Panetta Review.
Weaver, the researcher with the International Computer Science Institute, said the Google search tool used by the Senate and CIA on RDINet is what's known as "Google In a Box," an "appliance that Google makes that indexes and searches private data (in this case, on a disconnected network) but presents the familiar Google interface through a web page."
According to US officials knowledgeable about Jones's access to the Panetta Review, he was unaware he was not supposed to see the documents. The Senate staffers assumed the CIA and Centra contractors cleared the material and placed it into the Senate's folder on the Senate's side of RDINet for review. Although the CIA maintains the Panetta Review was off limits to the Senate Intelligence Committee because it was marked "deliberative draft," the agency had already provided the committee with thousands of other documents from the torture program that had identical markings, US officials said.
Jones made copies of the documents and shared them with four other congressional staffers who accessed them on their computers at the CIA facility. A copy of the Panetta Review was also printed and placed in the committee's safe at the Hart Office Building, where it remains. Senate staffers said they did this without alerting the CIA because they feared the CIA would destroy the documents or revoke access to them, as the agency had with other documents in separate incidents. VICE News filed a FOIA lawsuit to obtain the document, but a judge denied the request, claiming that it was a "draft" document exempt from disclosure.
'2 allegations dropped, but US won't rest trying to prosecute Assange'
Julian Assange condemns Swedish handling of sexual assault claims
Julian Assange has criticised what he described as the incompetence of Sweden’s prosecutor after she dropped her investigation into some of the allegations of sexual assault against him due to the expiration of a five-year time limit for bringing charges.
Prosecutors will continue to pursue an interview with the WikiLeaks founder over an outstanding rape allegation.
“I am extremely disappointed. There was no need for any of this,” Assange said in a statement.
“I am an innocent man. I haven’t even been charged. From the beginning I offered simple solutions. Come to the [Ecuadorian] embassy to take my statement or promise not to send me to the United States. This Swedish official refused both.” ...
Helena Kennedy QC, a member of Assange’s legal team, said he had spent more time in the embassy than he could ever spend in a Swedish prison, and the remaining allegation against him was “just as unlikely to lead to conviction”.
“The question remains whether we are dealing with incompetence or bad faith or an agenda set by other considerations. I remain unconvinced that this prosecution has been about securing justice for women.”
Chelsea Manning may face solitary confinement for having magazine in cell
Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier serving a 35-year military prison sentence for leaking official secrets, has been threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for having an expired tube of toothpaste in her cell and being found in possession of the Caitlyn Jenner Vanity Fair issue, according to her lawyers and supporters.
Manning, a Guardian columnist who writes about global affairs, intelligence issues and transgender rights from prison in the brig of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has allegedly been charged with four violations of custody rules that her lawyers have denounced as absurd and a form of harassment. The army private is reportedly accused of having showed “disrespect”; of having displayed “disorderly conduct” by sweeping food onto the floor during dinner chow; of having kept “prohibited property” – that is books and magazines – in her cell; and of having committing “medicine misuse”, referring to the tube of toothpaste, according to Manning’s supporters.
The maximum punishment for such offences is an indeterminate amount of time in a solitary confinement cell.
The fourth charge, “medicine misuse”, follows an inspection of Manning’s cell on 9 July during which a tube of anti-cavity toothpaste was found. The prison authorities noted that Manning was entitled to have the toothpaste in her cell, but is penalizing her because it was “past its expiration date of 9 April 2015”.
The Pentagon’s Half-Billion-Dollar Drone Boondoggle
Rivalry between the Army and Air Force over Predator drones may have cost the Pentagon over $500 million in wasteful spending, according to a report released under the Freedom of Information Act. ...
The report blasts both the Army and the Air Force for spending $115 million in 2008 and 2009 on research efforts that were supposed to help combine their Predator programs, in other words, to buy the same drone. Those efforts were “ineffective,” the report said, depriving the Pentagon of an estimated $400 million in savings that would have resulted. ...
In May 2008, Pentagon officials ordered the two services to unify their efforts to save money, since they were effectively buying the same type of drone from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. The services never did that; the Air Force responded by ending its purchase of the Predator altogether and buying a new, larger variant of the Predator called Reaper. ...
The real question may be whether both the Air Force and Army really needed to operate their own Predator drones.
Military analyst William Arkin argued the Army didn’t have a good justification for buying its own Predators, it just wanted them. “The Army in the end just wanted to be more like the Air Force, more capable of targeted killing,” Arkin told The Intercept.
CIA Whistleblower to Civil Rights Groups: Where are You?
In the letter published at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, specifically calls out the NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Congressional Black Caucus, writing "I saw you when other black faces were either killed or mistreated." But, to these civil rights groups, he writes, he is "invisible."
In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.
As torture whistleblower John Kiriakou previously explained, Sterling "didn’t sell secrets to the Russians. He didn’t trade intelligence for personal gain." He continues:
He reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had botched an operation to feed false information about nuclear technology to Iran — and may have actually helped Iran’s enrichment program instead.
Largely based on this, the government accused Sterling of leaking details about the program to journalist James Risen, who wrote about it in his book State of War.
Even worse, the feds claimed that Sterling, who is black, did it out of resentment over a failed racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency — in effect using Sterling’s willingness to stand up for his rights against him.
"Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency?" Sterling asks in his letter.
"Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security?" ...
"I am now in prison for a crime I did not commit," he writes. "Where are you?"
Ferguson protester faces four years' jail over charges of kicking SUV
A protest leader in Ferguson, Missouri, could face up to four years in prison after being charged with a felony for allegedly kicking a vehicle as it ploughed through a line of peaceful demonstrators who were blocking a highway.
Brittany Ferrell was accused of causing damage worth more than $5,000 to the SUV as its driver forced her way through the group, which had gathered on Interstate 70 near Ferguson during events to mark the anniversary of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a police officer.
Ferrell, 26, was charged with first-degree property damage, which is a class D felony in Missouri. She was also charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace, according to Bob McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St Louis County, who oversaw the grand jury inquiry into Brown’s death. Ferrell was released on a $10,000 bond on Wednesday. ...
The charges prompted a furious reaction among the wider Black Lives Matter protest movement. Brittany Packnett, an activist who sat on Barack Obama’s White House taskforce on police reform, said several demonstrators were struck by the vehicle.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature from the Chicago Day Book: "A raw, red record of terror and death-that of the private army. ABOLISH IT!"
Tune in at 2pm!
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SEC Admits It’s Not Monitoring Stock Buybacks to Prevent Market Manipulation
The Securities and Exchange Commission has admitted that it has no ability to enforce the main rule intended to prevent market manipulation when companies buy back their own stock, and has no intention to do so.
SEC Chair Mary Jo White made the acknowledgement in a response to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., who queried the agency about stock buybacks. Baldwin is one of a growing number of politicians — including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — who are citing buybacks as an example of deliberate financial engineering that bolsters concentration of wealth and keeps working-class wages stagnant.
Stock buybacks are an increasingly common practice in which corporations take profits, and instead of investing in facilities, research and development, or boosting worker wages, buy shares of their own stock on the open market, thereby boosting demand and driving up its price. Companies bought back over half a trillion dollars’ worth of their own shares last year.
The practice creates short-term rewards for executives who are paid in stock and stock options, and benefit from an increased price. They also make corporate earnings look better by reducing outstanding shares and increasing the commonly reported ratio of earnings-per-share.
Joe Biden election decision nears as supporters see surge in momentum
US vice-president Joe Biden is nearing an imminent decision on whether to challenge Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination as supporters report a surge in interest from potential backers.
“We have seen a huge spike in momentum not only in the last day or two, but over the past few weeks,” said William Pierce, director of Draft Biden, a political action committee formed in March to prepare the ground for a possible campaign.
“We’re seeing people signing up on the website, the phone ringing off the hook, people donating, people emailing in and writing Biden letters,” he said.
Though officially unconnected to Biden, the Super Pac has had 195,000 people register their support for him running and sufficient donations to employ eight staff in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, together with a similar number at its headquarters in Chicago.
Pierce declined to speculate on the cause of the recent surge but it coincides with setbacks for Clinton, who fell behind Sanders for the first time in a recent New Hampshire opinion poll and has been beset by continued questions over her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state.
The Clinton campaign could use a public disruption from Black Lives Matter
The Black Lives Matter movement has had two major run-ins with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, both of which left him flustered. ... But the confrontations worked; Sanders’s immediate reaction was to draft a policy plan for racial justice that has been praised by important members of the Black Lives Matter movement. The plan calls for ending employment discrimination based on criminal history and steering people with drug problems into treatment rather than jail cells, among other progressive changes. ...
As the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton should be pushed and challenged publicly too, especially since her views may not align with the rights agenda Black Lives Matter is pushing. The enemies of Black Lives Matter are racism, sexism, homo/transphobia and capitalist exploitation. Clinton opposed gay marriage until 2013. Among the Black Lives matter list of demands are an end to mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, which both grew exponentially under her husband’s administration. Clinton also has a record of racially divisive rhetoric. She turned to race baiting in 2008, claiming she was the candidate with the best chance of winning the general election because she could attract more working-class white voters than Obama, presumably based solely off of her whiteness. She was subsequently admonished by the black political organization ColorofChange. Black Lives Matter also is devoted to progress for the poor, while Ms. Clinton is a favorite of big banks on Wall Street. ...
Clinton’s record, unlike Sanders, says she can never be completely trusted, but must chased and forced into dialogue. The Black Lives Matter movement cannot simply accept carefully worded responses and classic Clinton political platitudes in private meetings. She must be forced to answer for the shortcomings of her political career, many of which are tied to race and class, and to do so publicly. She should have to come face to face with a generation of black youth who lost their fathers and mothers to her husband’s failed drug policies. Occasionally, she should not be permitted to speak at all. Thus far, that strategy has yielded better results than backdoor meetings.
The Evening Greens
Clinton Emails and The Privatization of Mexico's State Owned Oil and Gas Company
PERIES: Steve, what do you make of Hillary Clinton and energy and environmental policy going into this presidential election campaign year?
HORN: Well, I do think that this clearly shows -- I think it's another example of the role that her State Department that she led, the push that they have led to spread fracking technology around the world. More broadly looking at this, her State Department ran a program called the Global Shale Gas Initiative that still exists now. It's called the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program. This is part of her legacy at the State Department. It's a program that still exists, as I said.
And it sort of, I think it should be [obvious], I mean, to people watching. She's very friendly to oil and gas interest now. She has heavy funding from bundlers who are in the oil and gas industry. She's of course never, ever said anything critical about things like fracking. So she's sort of, I mean, at this point still trying to posture as somebody who cares about the climate, that sort of thing. But the track record shows complete opposite. It shouldn't be surprising people if she does become president and ends up pushing these same things she was pushing during her four years in the State Department.
Can't Touch This: To Stave Off Climate Disaster, Arctic Oil Must Stay in Ground
'There is no reasonable scenario in which Arctic oil drilling and a safe climate future co-exist,' says Oil Change International in new report
Just days after Royal Dutch Shell commenced drilling at the bottom of the Chukchi Sea, two major environmental groups released a new report confirming what many activists and scientists have already warned—to avert the looming climate crisis, U.S. Arctic offshore oil should be considered "untouchable."
"There is no reasonable scenario in which Arctic oil drilling and a safe climate future co-exist," said report author Hannah McKinnon, senior campaigner with Oil Change International (OCI), which issued the study along with Greenpeace. "Drilling in the Arctic is a climate disaster, plain and simple."
Untouchable: The Climate Case Against Drilling (pdf) reiterates the warning that, according to the best available science, at least three-quarters of existing fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground in order to limit global warming to 2° Celsius. "Projects that expand or break open new reserves and generate more greenhouse gas emissions clearly fail a test of what is safe for the global climate," the report states.
California drought will persist despite 'significant and strengthening' El Niño
Rain could come to drought-stricken California this fall, as one of the strongest El Niño weather patterns in recorded history looks set to hit the state, the National Weather Service (NWS) said on Thursday.
The NWS’s Climate Prediction Center said that current measurements were stronger than those detected ahead of the 1997 El Niño, which doubled rainfall in southern California. ...
But Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, warned that even if El Niño did bring increased rain, the effect on the drought would be limited. “One season of above normal rain and snow is very unlikely to erase four years of drought,” Halpert said.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information
Hunger-Striking Detainee Tests Obama’s Will to Close Guantánamo
This is the real Cuba: a timeline of gripping photography since the 50s
Jeremy Corbyn replies to Blair warning: I don't do personal, I don't do abuse
U.S. Jets Meet Limit as Iraqi Ground Fight Against ISIS Plods On
The Growing Danger of Israeli Teens Waging Jewish Jihad
The Atlantic, WSJ: As Hillary drops in the polls, influential SC Dems, others encouraging Biden run
For a better way than identity politics
13. Ms. Shade
A Little Night Music
John Littlejohn - Been Around The World
Johnny Little John - Kitty O
Johnny Little John - Keep On Running
John Littlejohn - Chips Flying Everwhere
John Littlejohn - What In The World You Goin' To Do
John Little John - Hoochie Koochie Man
Johnny Littlejohn - She's too much
John Littlejohn - Shake Your Moneymaker
Johnny Littlejohn - Worrried Head
Johnny Little John - I Need Lovin
John Littlejohn - 19 years old
John Littlejohn - Treat Me Wrong
John Littlejohn - Johnny's Jive
John Littlejohn - Can't Be Still
John Littlejohn - Dream
John Littlejohn - How Much More Long
Johnny Littlejohn - Can't Be Still
Johnny Littlejohn - 1975 - Pori Jazz, Kirjurinluoto, Pori, Finland