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 r&b singer and songwriter Jimmy "T-99" Nelson. Enjoy!
Jimmy Nelson & Sean Carney Band - Piney Brown Blues
"The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity."
-- Naomi Klein
News and Opinion
The Obama administration is still protecting the criminals of the Bush administration. One is left to wonder what Bush, Cheney and their similarly evil minions will give Obama as a thank-you gift.
Justice Department: Appeals Court Wrong to Revive Lawsuit Brought by Immigrants Abused After 9/11
The Justice Department has requested a federal appeals court revisit and reverse its decision to revive a lawsuit against former Justice Department officials, who allegedly violated the rights of Arab or Muslim immigrants when they were detained in the immediate months after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Attorneys for the Justice Department argue, regardless of whether immigrants had their rights violated, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and former Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) James W. Ziglar adopted reasonable policies “in an effort to protect the nation during a turbulent time.” The former officials should not be liable for rights violations.
More than a decade later, in January 2013, a federal court dismissed the complaints and concluded there was no evidence the officials had any “intent to punish” the plaintiffs.
However, in June, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Justice Department officials were not entitled to “qualified immunity.” The appeals court also determined the confinement conditions imposed on immigrants, who were rounded up, were established with “punitive intent.”
Justice Department attorneys now assert in a filing submitted to the court on August 14 [PDF] the appeals court was out of line to decide the former officials could be sued for violations of due process or equal protection rights.
As Chelsea Manning Speaks Out on Trans and Prison Issues, Authorities Threaten Her with Solitary
The real reason Chelsea Manning could face solitary: It’s about power
Chelsea Manning has, in her recent past, faced the most serious charges that can be brought against a person in this country. At one point, the whistleblower faced an “aiding the enemy” charge, which can carry capital punishment. This week, by contrast, Manning will defend herselfagainst disciplinary charges including acts as ostensibly innocuous as possessing unapproved reading material and storing expired toothpaste. The potential punishment is outrageously harsh: Indefinite solitary confinement (a form of torture, according to the United Nations).
We should not be surprised by the pettiness of the charges and the extremity of the punishment. Prisoners in the U.S. are regularly isolated for far less — failure to return food trays, for example. The punishment within prisons for the tiniest violations represent what philosopher Michel Foucault called “micropénalité,” or the microphysics of power — the production of docile bodies through the monitoring and control of everyday life. Disciplinary ferocity aims to further turn people into prisoners. It is effective by virtue of punishing the petty; no aspect of life can be outside the authority of the prison.
That Manning is facing such punishment is especially unsurprising, but certainly enraging. Since her arrest in 2010 for leaking classified documents, the U.S. military and government have made every effort to reduce the whistleblower to nothing.
Most recently, she reported that she has been denied access to the military prison’s law library at scheduled times, even though she will be representing herself at Tuesday’s hearing. ... Were Manning’s hearing simply an issue of upholding brig discipline, then the inmate would be not be denied access to the materials which could help her defend her case to the fullest extent. But this is about punishment, and the reminder of the military’s control over the woman who has done more to rightfully threaten their moral legitimacy than perhaps any other American in recent history. This is about power, and ensuring Manning has none.
Declaring Chelsea Manning’s Voice Against Torture Contraband
Along with [a] list of seemingly trivial items, Leavenworth officials also confiscated an item that goes to the core of the whistleblowing that landed Manning in prison in the first place: the Senate Torture Report.
Chelsea Manning faces the threat of solitary confinement, which most countries and many psychologists consider torture, because she was reading the Senate Torture Report.
Recall that among the events that led Manning to provide information to WikiLeaks was when she was ordered to “assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki” – people who Manning discovered were actually criticizing Maliki’s corruption. Manning realized that by helping the Baghdad Police, US forces would be helping put them “in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police [where they would be] very likely tortured.” In an effort to thwart US complicity in torture, Manning leaked classified materials to WikiLeaks, including information on Iraq’s Wolf Brigade, a unit that conducted torture the official US policy on which was to ignore.
Manning hasn’t ceased her efforts to hold the US accountable for its involvement in torture. Among the seven columns she has written for the Guardian since being in prison, one focused on US torture. “According to numerous public reports, including the Senate Torture Report, these programs were authorized at the highest levels of government,” Manning wrote, relying on the Torture Report that has since been confiscated. “This clearly shows a premeditated and intentional conspiracy to knowingly violate US law, and to avoid any oversight and criminal liability.”
All of Manning’s columns addressed topics that the confiscated items likely helped her write, but by writing on torture she implicated the chain of command. Now Manning’s prison guards have decided the underlying document is contraband.
Once before, Defense Department officials subjected Manning to forced nudity and separation. Now, they’re threatening to do so again, in part because she was reading – and writing – of how such policies are willful and systematic.
Snowden Documents Reveal AT&T’s "Extreme Willingness to Help" NSA Domestic Spy Program
Why the Close Collaboration Between the NSA and AT&T Matters
Internal NSA documents describe a nearly unavoidable surveillance system on AT&T's Internet backbone in the United States. One document shows a technical sketch of how AT&T provides the spy agency not only with access to traffic on its own network, but also traffic from other telecoms that crosses its network.
Such cooperative arrangements, known in the industry as "peering,'' are central to the speed of the global Internet. The packets that make up emails and other messages are sent through the fastest routes possible, jumping on and off each company's network as needed. That means that any Internet user's communications, regardless of whetherthey are an AT&T customer, could end up on AT&T's network - and in the NSA's hands.
The newly disclosed documents seem to confirm the words of former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who has testified that the spy agency had access to vast amounts of data from other telecoms that was transmitted over AT&T's fiber-optic lines.
Klein's allegations are central to Jewel v. N.S.A., which alleges that the NSA's "bulk, untargeted seizure of the Internet communications of millions of innocent Americans" from AT&T's networks amounted to an unconstitutional search and seizure.
UN deciding ‘how best to respond’ after AT&T helped NSA spy on headquarters
The United Nations has said it expects member states to respect its right to privacy and is assessing how to respond to a report that telecommunications company AT&T Inc helped the US National Security Agency spy on the world body’s communications.
The company gave technical assistance to the NSA in carrying out a secret court order allowing wiretapping of all internet communications at the headquarters of the United Nations, an AT&T customer, the New York Times reported on Saturday. ...
The United Nations said in 2013 that the United States had pledged not to spy on the world body’s communications after a report that the NSA had gained access to the UN video conferencing system. ...
The 1961 Vienna Convention governing diplomatic relations protects functions of the United Nations, diplomatic missions and other international organizations.
US Military Prepares Drastic Escalation of Global Drone Program
New reporting reveals plans to expand drone program by 50 percent, including broader use of mercenaries
The U.S. Pentagon is poised to dramatically increase the deployment of surveillance drones over "global hot spots" such as Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, the South China Sea, and North Africa, as well as expand its capacity for lethal drone strikes, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Monday.
Citing exclusive interviews with senior U.S. officials, the WSJ's Gordon Lubold reports that the number of daily flights by aircraft such as MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones will surge an estimated 50 percent. Further, the expanded drone program will "draw on the Army, as well as Special Operations Command and government contractors," in addition to the U.S. Air Force, which currently carries out most of the operations for the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency.
Lobuld reports: "The Pentagon envisions a combined effort that by 2019 would have the Air Force continue flying 60 drone flights a day, the Army contributing as many as 16 and the military’s Special Forces Command pitching in with as many as four. Government contractors would be hired to fly older Predator drones on as many as 10 flights a day, none of them strike missions."
Israeli Military: Iran Deal Could Ultimately Benefit Israel
While Israel’s far-right government is angrily condemning the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, Israel’s military intelligence corps is offering its own assessment, viewing the deal as largely positive,saying the only real “risk” is that it will make Iran a legitimate country.
That would make Israel’s constant threats to attack them, a cornerstone of their foreign policy for decades, tougher to sell. By contrast, the corps sees the deal as not only preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear arms, but likely to restrain Iran’ssupport for overt terrorist attacks.
Gazans March for Dignity as UN Funds Dwindle and Schools Shutter
Alongside Palestinian children and their family members on Monday, several hundred employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip rallied against announced cuts to the agency's budget and services, especially regarding education, which have resulted in the delay of the school term for many students. ...
In June, UNRWA announced that impacts of austerity and budget constraints would force it cut 85 percent of its international staff operating in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
Subsequently, according to Al-Jazeera:
The agency announced earlier in August that it had funding only until the end of this month, when the school year was due to start in the Palestinian territories and Jordan.
The agency requires $100m to begin the 2015-2016 academic year in some 700 UN-run schools for half a million students across the Middle East.
More than a $1bn has been pledged by governments by the end of 2014, and the UNRWA urged donors, many of whom have still not fulfilled their commitments, to act immediately.
Barely a year after the deadly assault by the Israeli military on Gaza known as "Operation Protective Edge"—which left an estimated 2,134 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded—international aid groups and the UN continue to warn that all Gazans remain in extreme crisis, suffering from lack of water, basic health supplies, and access to adequate shelter.
"It is revolting and unpardonable that as the United States plans to gift an additional $1.5 billion in military aid to Israel, hundreds of thousands of children are being denied the right to education," Danny Muller, a coordinator with the Middle East Children's Alliance said. "These weapons gifted by the U.S. are the same ones that Israel used to bomb schools and hospitals in Gaza. To think that we would commit $4.5 billion in military aid to Israel this year, while a fraction of that would guarantee a basic level of care for Palestinian children still living and learning in the rubble from last year's bombardment, is heartbreaking and tragic."
Osama bin Laden issued a chilling pre-warning of 9/11 attack 'plan', al-Qaeda audio tapes reveal
Osama bin Laden recorded a chilling warning about the 9/11 bombing just a few weeks before the devastating attack on the World Trade Center, according to an analysis of a vast cache of al-Qaeda cassette tapes.
The collection of more than 1,500 audio tapes recovered from an Afghan compound after the US invasion in 2001 offer an extraordinary insight into the listening habits, influences and mindset of the terrorist organisation.
Flagg Miller, an expert in Arabic culture who was tasked with assessing the tapes for the Afghan media Project at Williams College in Massachusetts, said they included early speeches by Bin Laden in the late 1980s.
"What's fascinating is how Bin Laden is speaking about the ways in which the Arabian Peninsula is threatened - but who is the enemy? It's not the United States, as we often think, or the West. It's other Muslims," Miller told the BBC.
Miller, who has written a book about his findings titled The Audacious Ascetic, said Bin Laden’s focus only shifted to “the far enemy” after he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship, under US pressure, in 1994.
Turkish PM's coalition talks collapse as deadline approaches
If no government is formed by Sunday, Ahmet Davutoğlu’s caretaker cabinet will be dissolved and a power-sharing government installed
Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, is expected to give up on his attempts to form a new government after coalition talks with opposition parties collapsed.
He is set to return his mandate to form a government to the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Tuesday evening, days before the Sunday deadline.
Under the terms of the constitution, if no government is formed by 23 August, Erdoğan must dissolve Davutoğlu’s caretaker cabinet and call on an interim power-sharing government – composed equally of all four parties in parliament – to lead Turkey to a new election in the autumn.
Davutoğlu’s AK party lost its parliamentary majority in an election in June, leaving it unable to govern alone for the first time since it came to power in 2002.
The Long Distance Revolutionary - Chris Hedges
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature A. M. Simons on the Industrial Workers of the World: "Outlook for New Union"
Tune in at 2pm!
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Workers To Face Biosurveillance From Employers
The modern work environment was already becoming more than a bit Orwellian, with employees being electronically spied on by their bosses to ensure productivity, but now the corporate push for total information awareness of workers is hitting new levels of creepiness.
According to a report in Bloomberg, companies are now using biosurveillance technologies to monitor workers. Workers at some firms now wear biosensors that let managers know an employee’s physical and mental state by monitoring vital signs such as heart rate, skin temperature, and the pace of their breathing.
The technology is reportedly being adapted from, among other places, the defense industry. Firms such as Equivitalare taking biosensor technology developed for battlefield environments and repurposing them for civilian use.
Though such comprehensive and intrusive monitoring systems were originally intended for a battlefield environment to help medics and other responders have an improved medical picture when treating someone suffering life-threatening injuries, that technology can now be used to pressure workers into meeting production goals.
Hillary Clinton Talks With BlackLivesMatter
Footage shows Black Lives Matter activists confronting Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton told Black Lives Matter activists her priority was to change laws, not hearts, after two confronted her at a campaign event with accusations that she was, in part, personally responsible for the mass incarceration of black Americans, footage released on Monday reveals.
The awkward exchange event was captured by a cellphone camera, and activists shared the video with MSNBC. Massachusetts activists had arrived at the New Hampshire event to confront the Democratic presidential frontrunner as other protesters had confronted her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, earlier this month.
“I don’t believe you change hearts, you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate,” Clinton told Julius Jones, a Worcester, Massachusetts, activist.
“You’re not going to change every heart, you’re not,” she continued, stepping closer and pointing with both hands at Jones. “But at the end of the day we can do a whole lot to change some hearts, and change some systems, and create more opportunities for people who deserve to have them.”
Barred from entry by staff who said the event was full, activists managed to enter after campaign staffers arranged a meeting with Clinton backstage. There the activists told Clinton that “more than most” she and her family had been responsible for policies that led to mass incarceration.
Clinton said she felt strongly about police behavior, drug laws and criminal justice reform, but offered no specifics about what she would change or even how her own ideas had changed over the years.
Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy
Clinton was no stranger to the rules of the federal government. She had to know that if she used a State Department account, her 60,000-plus e-mails would become part of the official record. She certainly knew, without any doubt, that her political opponents would delight in rummaging through her communications. Let’s be honest: Hillary and Bill Clinton do have enemies, lots of them, who show no compunction about launching unfair and vicious attacks. She must have wanted to make sure they never got the chance.
But all of that is beside the point. If you accept the job of secretary of state, you inevitably surrender some of your privacy. Any public official’s work-related e-mails are the modern equivalent of the letters, memos and diaries that fill the National Archives. They tell our nation’s history and belong to all of us. Even if your name is Clinton, you have no right to unilaterally decide what is included and what is not.
So I wish Hillary Clinton would be respectful enough to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I wish she wouldn’t insult our intelligence by claiming she only did what other secretaries of state had done. None of her predecessors, after all, went to the trouble and expense of a private e-mail server.
I wish she would explain why, after turning over to the State Department the e-mails she deemed work-related, she had the server professionally wiped clean. The explanation that she didn’t want people prying into private matters such as “planning for [daughter] Chelsea’s wedding . . . as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes” is unconvincing. Does she have some secret yoga move she doesn’t want the world to know about?
Intelligence Officials Flag 305 Hillary Clinton Emails for Possible Classified Info
US government lawyers revealed on Monday that intelligence officials have flagged 305 documents from Hillary Clinton's private emails for review.
"Out of a sample of approximately 20 percent of the Clinton emails, the… reviewers have only recommended 305 documents — approximately 5.1 percent — for referral to their agencies for consultation,'' Justice Department lawyer Robert Prince wrote in court documents, explaining the slow pace of the email disclosures.
Clinton's emails from her time as Secretary of State are being released in chunks in response to a Freedom of Information Request Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by VICE News senior investigative reporter Jason Leopold. In May, a federal judge ordered the government to release 15 percent of the 35,000 emails each month — but John Hackett, the State Department's top FOIA official, admitted that they are 1,721 pages behind schedule. ...
So far, around 70 of the emails released to the public have been redacted to shield classified information.
Get Ready for a Flood of Online Campaign Ads That Will Target and Track You
The amount of spending on digital advertising is expected to nearly double in this election cycle compared with 2012. Online spots cost a fraction of traditional TV or print ads, and political operatives are giddy over the new-and-improved ways to cheaply and creatively bombard voters with their messages. Larry Grisolano, who oversaw paid advertising efforts for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, predicts that the 2016 presidential nominees likely will devote nearly a quarter of their ad-buy budgets to digital media. Considering that each side could spend more than $2 billion to get into the White House, that's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for grabbing eyeballs.
Television ads will remain the dominant tool for winning hearts and minds, digital consultants say, but the utility of online outreach is that it can pinpoint and analyze who's seeing and clicking on what. And campaigns can microtarget potential supporters with more precision than ever before. "Everyone is spending money on Facebook," Grisolano notes. "They give you all kinds of ways to target advertisements. If, say, I want to advertise to people who show an interest in something specific, like people who are looking to buy a Volvo, I can do that."
Often, online ads are enticements to visit the website of a candidate, super-PAC, or dark-money group, where users are asked to provide their names and contact information. Tracking how you arrived at the website can give these outfits detailed background on your online behavior, interests, and motivations, which in turn can be used to solicit support or money.
Yet while political advertisers will know a lot about you, you may know very little about them. Due to paralyzed federal watchdogs and antiquated campaign finance rules that didn't anticipate the explosion of digital politicking, there is virtually no oversight of online ads. ... The Federal Election Commission's last major overhaul of political advertising rules was in 2002. And that rewrite was completed long before anyone pondered the possibility of things like YouTube, much less Snapchat (which several candidates, including Paul and Jeb Bush, have incorporated into their campaigns). Currently, the commission does not have the ability to scrutinize how a campaign or any other group spends its money online.
The Evening Greens
Obama Gives Shell Final Approval to Drill in Arctic Despite Protests & Pledge to Cut Emissions
Shell gets final clearance to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic
The Obama administration has granted final approval for Shell’s Arctic drilling programme, clearing the way for the company to restart its stuttering search for northern oil.
Shell has been waiting since the beginning of August for the arrival of a key safety vessel, the Fennica, after it was damaged en route to the Chukchi sea. Arctic safety standards forbid drilling deep enough to hit oil without the Fennica, which carries a device designed to control a blowout.
The director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) Brian Salerno said the arrival of the safety vessel meant the company was now compliant with “the highest safety, environmental protection, and emergency response standards”. ...
Barack Obama has placed action on climate change at the centre of his presidential legacy. Earlier this month he implemented sweeping laws to curb power plant emissions and last week announced a trip to the Alaskan Arctic to visit climate affected communities.
But friends of the Earth climate campaigner Marissa Knodel said: “When president Obama visits the Arctic this month, he must face the communities he is sacrificing to Shell’s profits.”
Islamic Declaration Blasts Short-Sighted Capitalism, Demands Action on Climate
Just as scientists announced July was the hottest month in recorded history, and ahead of a major climate summit in Paris later this year, an international group of Islamic leaders on Tuesday released a public declaration calling on the religion's 1.6 billion followers to engage on the issue of global warming and take bold action to stem its worst impacts.
Released during an international symposium taking place in Istanbul, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Changeis signed by 60 Muslim scholars and leaders of the faith who acknowledge that—despite the short-term economic benefits of oil, coal, and gas—humanity's use of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming which increasingly threatens "a functioning climate, healthy air to breathe, regular seasons, and living oceans."
The declaration states there is deep irony that humanity's "unwise and short-sighted use of these resources is now resulting in the destruction of the very conditions that have made our life on earth possible." ...
The declaration by the Muslim leaders follows the widely lauded encyclical released by Pope Francis, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, earlier this summer in which he called for a drastic transformation of the world's economies and energy systems in order to stave off the worst impacts of an increasingly hotter planet. Additionally, hundreds of Jewish Rabbis also released a Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis and dozens of other denominations and churches have joined the global movement to divest their financial holdings from the fossil fuel industry.
As with the papal encyclical, the Muslim scholars take special note of how global capitalism—namely the "relentless pursuit of economic growth and consumption"—has fostered an energy paradigm that now threatens the sustainability of living systems and human society.
'No Further': Activists Storm Coal Fields, Shut Down Europe's Biggest Polluter
In a stirring act of mass civil disobedience, roughly 1000 protesters stormed the gates of RWE's coalfields in Rhineland, Germany on Saturday, successfully shutting down operations for Europe's biggest carbon polluter.
Under the banner Ende Gelände, which means "here and no further," activists descended on the mine to send a direct message to officials that such extraction will no longer be tolerated amid the encroaching climate crisis.
"This action very clearly sent the signal to governments and the fossil fuel industry around the world that people are fed up and that people want a future free of climate change and that if you're not going to solve it for us, we're going to solve it for you," said 350.org global managing director Payal Parekh.
According to reports, early Saturday morning, an estimated 1,500 faced off with police wielding batons before roughly two-thirds of the protesters broke through and managed to enter the opencast lignite, or brown coal, mine. Lignite is a particularly dirty fossil fuel due to its high moisture content.
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 Long Sad Slide From Leading Civil Rights Organization to Anti-Black Lives Matter Group
David Graeber: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank
The Case Against DuPont
The Saudi Royals — Unchained
Out of hand
A Little Night Music
Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Sweetest Little Girl
Jimmy Nelson - Little Rich Girl
Jimmy Nelson - T-99 Blues
Jimmy T99 Nelson - What Was I Supposed To Do ?
Jimmy "T99" Nelson - I Sat And Cried
Jimmy T99 Nelson - She Was So Good To Me
Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Married Men Like Sport
Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Mean Poor Girl
Jimmy "T-99" Nelson - Big-Eyed, Brown-Eyed Girl Of Mine
Jimmy Nelson - Free and Easy Mind
Jimmy Nelson - Tell me who
Jimmy Nelson - Fine Little Honeydripper
Jimmy Nelson - She Moves Me
Jimmy Nelson - Hot Tamale Man