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 Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis. Enjoy!
Furry Lewis - Good Morning Jury / John Henry / Furry's Blues
“You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”
-- Michelle Obama
News and Opinion
Glenn Greenwald: As Bulk NSA Spying Expires, Scare Tactics Can’t Stop "Sea Change" on Surveillance
I don't know if I'd assume that simply because the Obama administration has no legitimate legal authority to "hoover up" your records that they would actually stop doing it. Hell, those fellas make war without legitimate legal authority, what's going to stop them from spying on your phone calls?
For the First Time Since 9/11, Congress Checks the Security State
Sunday night marked the first time that Congress has limited the executive branch’s surveillance authority since the terror attacks in 2001 set off a dystopian explosion in the government’s ability to spy on people inside and outside its borders.
But it was not so much a glorious moment of constitutional rebalancing for the legislative branch as it was parliamentary farce as usual. Faced with the long-planned expiration at midnight of three contentious provisions of the Patriot Act, the Republican-controlled Senate was simply unable to get it together and vote to renew the surveillance powers.
That failure to act was consequential. One of the three provisions had been used — improperly, it turns out — as legal justification for a National Security Agency program that collected phone records on millions of Americans without a warrant or any probable cause, along with other business records.
So as of today, for the first time in 14 years, you can make phone calls without the NSA hoovering up the records of who you called and for how long.
McConnell finally caved to reality with just hours to go, dropping his opposition to the USA Freedom Act, and allowing a vote on whether to proceed with it. That vote was 77-17.
By that point, however, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was on a tear, his opposition to Fourth Amendment violations supercharged by a need to call attention to his flagging presidential campaign.
Paul prevented the Freedom Act from passing before the midnight deadline — but with the cloture vote a done deal, a final vote is expected mid-week.
A huge victory on mass surveillance for Snowden – and it’s not over yet
The last time US intelligence agencies suffered a comparable setback was in the 1970s, when the late senator Frank Church led reform in the wake of revelations of spying on civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, trade unionists, journalists and others. In the four decades since, the intelligence services have been accumulating powers on a scale that even Church could not have envisaged. Changes in technology have made this possible, but so has a lack of transparency and political and legal oversight, with the intelligence agencies left to grow in secret. US reaction to the 9/11 attacks accelerated the process.
The bulk collection of phone data began after 9/11 in secret and was later authorised under section 215 of the US Patriot Act. The process was conducted by a secret court. And it all remained secret until Snowden revealed it in June 2013.
The Snowden disclosures united both liberals in the Democratic party and members of the libertarian wing of the Republican party, such as the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who led the opposition in the Senate to the extension of NSA powers. Older, establishment hawks in the Republican party – such as Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader, and senator John McCain – arguing in favour of extension, found themselves squeezed and out of touch.
The importance of the loss of bulk phone collection is not just its demise. The key point is that the intelligence services, after decades left to their own devices, have been exposed to publicity. The idea that their activities can be left free from at least some degree of transparency and oversight is no longer tenable.
Fears NSA will seek to undermine surveillance reform
Privacy advocates are wary of covert legal acrobatics from the NSA similar to those deployed post-9/11 to circumvent congressional authority
Privacy advocates fear the National Security Agency will attempt to weaken new restrictions on the bulk collection of Americans’ phone and email records with a barrage of creative legal wrangles, as the first major reform of US surveillance powers in a generation looked likely to be a foregone conclusion on Monday. ...
Attorneys for the intelligence agencies react scornfully to the suggestion that they will stretch their authorities to the breaking point. Yet reformers remember that such legal tactics during the George W Bush administration allowed the NSA to shoehorn bulk phone records collection into the Patriot Act.
Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and Republican presidential candidate who was key to allowing sweeping US surveillance powers to lapse on Sunday night, warned that NSA lawyers would now make mincemeat of the USA Freedom Act’s prohibitions on bulk phone records collection by taking an expansive view of the bill’s definitions, thanks to a pliant, secret surveillance court.
“My fear, though, is that the people who interpret this work at a place known as the rubber stamp factory, the Fisa [Court],” Paul said on the Senate floor on Sunday.
Paul’s Democratic ally, Senator Ron Wyden, warned the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration against attempting to unravel NSA reform.
“My time on the intelligence committee has taught me to always be vigilant for secret interpretations of the law and new surveillance techniques that Congress doesn’t know about,” Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, told the Guardian.
Zombie Patriot Act Will Keep U.S. Spying—Even if the Original Dies
Not only does the U.S. government have all sorts of other ways to collect the same kind of intelligence outlined in the Patriot Act, but there’s also a little-noticed back door in the act that allows U.S. spy agencies to gather information in pretty much the same ways they did before.
In other words, there’s a zombie Patriot Act—one that lives on, though the existing version is dead. ...
For starters, there will be what’s left of the Patriot Act itself. One former U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that Section 214 of the law, which allows “pen register/trap & trace,” could be used to collect phone and even email records. That would not only cover the gap from the expiring NSA program that collects the phone records of Americans’ landline calls, but potentially expand the government’s collection. (No wonder the NSA largely views the bill that would reform the Patriot Act as a major win.)
That former official and another both noted that there are other tools, including under different laws than the Patriot Act, for obtaining “roving wiretaps,” which allow the government to monitor one person’s multiple communications devices.
Following the Senate vote to proceed on to the Freedom Act, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told The Daily Beast that the intelligence agencies did have a means to continue surveillance of terrorists and spies.
“I think there are other tools that can be used, but I’m not going to elaborate on them,” Inhofe said. ...
Then there’s another powerful tool that the FBI and intelligence agencies have long had in their arsenal and still will—national-security letters. They make it relatively easy for investigators to gather up all kinds of communications records. This authority can be used to collect phone, Internet, and financial records.
Appeals Court Refuses to Block Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos
Sixteen media organizations, including The Intercept’s publisher First Look Media, are seeking footage of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was repeatedly restrained and force fed while on hunger strike. ...
The government has argued that releasing the videos would harm national security by, among other things, inflaming “Muslim sensitivities overseas.” Last October, District Judge Gladys Kessler rejected their arguments and ordered the videos made public, with redactions to protect the identity of Guantánamo guards. The government then appealed.
Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Washington, D.C., called the government’s appeal “premature,” and declined to weigh in on the merits of releasing the videos.
Kessler’s order required further negotiations over redactions, the appeals judges wrote in their opinion, and “it is possible that appropriate redactions will limit the scope of, or perhaps eliminate altogether, the government’s concerns over release of the videotapes.”
Court Allows Germany's Key Role in Deadly US Drone Program to Continue
German Court Turns Down Drone Lawsuit but Leaves Door Open to Others
Amid the grim accounts of civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes, the attack that killed Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s relatives has stood out. ...
Earlier this week, the drone killings were the focal point of a historic lawsuit that was heard in a German courtroom. Though a panel of German judges dismissed the case on Wednesday, and the current security crisis in Yemen prevented Faisal from attending the proceedings, he and his attorneys consider their effort a victory, marking the first time Germany’s role in U.S. drone strikes has been acknowledged in court.
“One of the good things to come out of the decision that was taken by the judges is that an appeal is immediately available to us,” Faisal said in a phone interview. “So the path remains clear for us to continue challenging this case in the German courts.” ...
“Some people, perhaps some German people, may think that the story was really about who presses the button and perhaps Germany isn’t responsible for that,” Faisal said. “But actually, the infrastructure and what goes on behind the scenes to allow all of this to take place is crucial to the story. And the other side of the story is that innocent people are dying and suffering on a daily basis as a result of the drone program. And that’s what this case is aimed at — to help the German people understand that Ramstein plays a fundamental role in this process.” ...
The court also affirmed that the plaintiffs had standing to file their complaint even though they are not German citizens and live outside Germany — thus rejecting a key argument put forward by government attorneys. Potentially paving the way for future litigation, Craig called the court’s position a “huge step forward.”
Faisal and his fellow plaintiffs have a month to file an appeal, and according to Craig, “absolutely” intend to do so.
ISIS Routs Rivals, Seizing Key Towns Along Syria-Turkey Border
In fighting over the weekend, ISIS forcesseized the town of Soran Azaz and some nearby villages from a rival rebel faction, putting them on the outskirts of the important city of Azaz and the accompanying border crossing into Turkey. ...
Turkey has long been the go-to smuggling route for rebels, with Turkish spy agencies not only looking the other way, but even providingsome arms of their ownto Islamist rebels factions, a scandal that has been the subject of growing concern among Turkish prosecutors.
Russia Scales Back Aid to Syrian Govt, Withdraws Key Personnel
In Latakia, the reports are that some 100 Russian specialists were withdrawn from the country and not replaced. There was no official explanation given, though the recent al-Qaeda moves against the Latakia Province may well have convinced Russia it was no longer a safe place for their personnel.
Some Western officials are speculating the recent Russian shift reflects their efforts to placate the West and get some sanctions removed, though it could just as easily reflect a Russian effort to reduce its exposure to the war-torn nation, at a time when even their embassy staff is down to essential personnel only for security reasons. ...
Russia has long been Syria’s biggest ally, centering on their desire to maintain access to their only Mediterranean base, in the Syrian city of Tartus. With Assad’s forces increasingly losing to both ISIS and al-Qaeda, it may be that Russia believes Syria is a lost cause.
ISIS boasts US-made Humvee war spoils, Iraq loses 2,300 vehicles in Mosul alone
Iraq lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles in Mosul: PM
Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles when the Islamic State jihadist group overran the northern city of Mosul, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday.
“In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi said in an interview with Iraqiya state TV. “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.”
While the exact price of the vehicles varies depending on how they are armoured and equipped, it is clearly a hugely expensive loss that has boosted ISIS’ capabilities.
Last year, the State Department approved a possible sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees with increased armour, machineguns, grenade launchers, other gear and support that was estimated to cost $579 million.
Hat tip dharmasyd:
ISIS fighter was trained by State Department
An ISIS fighter who calls for jihad in a new online video was trained in counterterrorism tactics on American soil, in a program run by the United States, officials tell CNN.
The video features a former police commander from Tajikistan named Col. Gulmurod Khalimov. He appears in black ISIS garb with a sniper rifle and a bandolier of ammunition. He says in the video that he participated in programs on U.S. soil three times, at least one of which was in Louisiana.
The State Department has confirmed this claim.
"From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State's Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program," said spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.
The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.
Western Officials Alarmed as ISIS Expands Territory in Libya
The branch of the Islamic State that controls Surt has expanded its territory and pushed back the militia from the neighboring city of Misurata, militia leaders acknowledged Sunday. ...
The continued expansion inside Libya of the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has alarmed Western officials because of its proximity to Europe, across the Mediterranean.
Four years after the removal of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the near collapse of the Libyan government has left no central authority to check the group’s advance or even partner with Western military efforts against it.
Two armed factions, each with its own paper government, are fighting for control, and each has focused more on internal quarrels than on defeating the Islamic State.
From Ferguson to Baltimore and Beyond - The Left Forum
Paul Jay moderates a panel in New York on critical issues facing the movement reignited by resistance against police violence. With Alicia Garza, Glen Ford, Kshama Sawant, Makayla Gilliam-Price, and Thenjiwe McHarris.
Black Americans killed by police twice as likely to be unarmed as white people
Guardian analysis finds 102 people killed by police so far this year were unarmed, and that agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by US government
An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.
The findings emerged from a database filled by a five-month study of police fatalities in the US, which calculated that local and state police and federal law enforcement agencies are killing people at twice the rate calculated by the US government’s official public record of police homicides. The database names five people whose names have not been publicly released.
The Guardian’s statistics include deaths after the police use of a Taser, deaths caused by police vehicles and deaths following altercations in police custody, as well as those killed when officers open fire. They reveal that 29% of those killed by police, or 135 people, were black. Sixty-seven, or 14%, were Hispanic/Latino, and 234, or 50%, were white. In total, 102 people who died during encounters with law enforcement in 2015 have been unarmed.
The figures illustrate how disproportionately black Americans, who make up just 13% of the country’s total population according to census data, are killed by police. Of the 464 people counted by the Guardian, an overwhelming majority – 95% – were male, with just 5% female.
Steven Hawkins, the executive director Amnesty International USA, described the racial imbalance as “startling”. Hawkins said: “The disparity speaks to something that needs to be examined, to get to the bottom of why you’re twice as likely to be shot if you’re an unarmed black male.”
Former marine dies after being shot with stun gun by New York police
A man in north-west New York state died on Sunday after being shot with a stun gun by police who said he rushed at officers with a clenched fist during a confrontation, Rochester police said. ...
“An officer on scene decided to use a less than lethal option and he used his Taser to stop the suspect,” police chief Michael Ciminelli said.
The man was briefly handcuffed afterward, but released so firefighters could provide medical attention. The man was transported to an area hospital where he was later pronounced dead.
The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, citing family members, identified the man as Richard Gregory Davis, a 50-year-old black man, who was a father of six and a former marine.
Police won't face indictment over death of suspect who warned: 'I can't breathe'
A grand jury in Louisiana has declined to indict police officers who held a man down, with officers on top of him, and did not get up despite him telling them: “I can’t breathe.”
Robert Minjarez Jr, 30, died five days after his arrest by Carencro and Scott police and sheriff’s deputies outside a gas station in Lafayette Parish, the Advertiser reported. ...
The coroner’s report said video from the store and from police car dashcams showed at least three or four officers remained wholly or partly on top of Minjarez after his hands and legs were cuffed. His upper body was on the street, and his hips and legs were on the sidewalk, the report said.
For about five minutes, the report said, Minjarez is heard on dashcam audio screaming: “Help! Help! Help me! Get off! You’re going to kill me!” The report also quotes him as saying “You’re going to suffocate ...” and “I can’t breathe” three times. He cried and screamed, his voice becoming “increasingly muffled, hoarse and strained” while repeating “I can’t breathe”, the report added.
About five minutes after he was restrained, the report said, Minjarez groaned and gurgled, and an officer said: “You got 265 pounds on your back, you’re not going anywhere.” The suspect groaned “and no more sounds are heard from him”, the report said.
The grand jury issued its decision on Wednesday. The officers’ names have not been released.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature the International Socialist Review reports on Big Bill Haywood's appearance before the Commission on Industrial Relations.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Keiser Report: We Are All Greeks Now
Chris Hedges: Karl Marx Was Right
The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.
But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.
Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.
Marx warned that in the later stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” he wrote. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPP and CAFTA to further weaken the nation-state’s ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end these corporate monopolies would obliterate free market competition.
A May 22 editorial in The New York Times gives us a window into what Marx said would characterize the late stages of capitalism:
As of this week, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are felons, having pleaded guilty on Wednesday to criminal charges of conspiring to rig the value of the world’s currencies. According to the Justice Department, the lengthy and lucrative conspiracy enabled the banks to pad their profits without regard to fairness, the law or the public good.
... “The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.
What comes next is up to us.
The inspiring rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can leave black people feeling left out.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the lifelong crusader for economic justice now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has serious civil rights movement cred: he attended the historic 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a quarter million people changed the country’s course when it came to race. It would be wrong and unfair to accuse him of indifference to issues of racial equality.
But in the wake of his picture-postcard campaign launch, from the shores of Vermont’s lovely Lake Champlain, Sanders has faced questions about whether his approach to race has kept up with the times. Writing in Vox, Dara Lind suggested that Sanders’ passion for economic justice issues has left him less attentive to the rising movement for racial justice, which holds that racial disadvantage won’t be eradicated only by efforts at economic equality. Covering the Sanders launch appreciatively on MSNBC, Chris Hayes likewise noted the lack of attention to issues of police violence and mass incarceration in the Vermont senator’s stirring kick-off speech.
These are the same questions I raised last month after watching Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio hail the new progressive movement to combat income inequality at two Washington D.C. events. Both pointed to rising popular movements to demand economic justice, most notably the “Fight for $15” campaign. Neither mentioned the most vital and arguably most important movement of all, the “Black Lives Matter” crusade. (Which is odd, since “Fight for $15″ leaders have explicitly endorsed their sister movement.) And the agendas they endorsed that day made only minimal mention, if they mentioned it at all, of the role that mass incarceration and police abuse plays in worsening the plight of the African American poor. ...
Ironically, our first black president has exhausted the patience of many African Americans with promises that a rising economic justice tide will lift their boats. President Obama himself has rejected race-specific solutions to the problems of black poverty, arguing that policies like universal preschool, a higher minimum wage, stronger family supports and infrastructure investment, along with the Affordable Care Act, all disproportionately help black people, since black people are disproportionately poor.
At the Progressive Agenda event last month, I heard activists complain that they’d been told the same thing: the agenda will disproportionately benefit black people, because they’re disproportionately disadvantaged, even if it didn’t specifically address the core issue of criminal justice reform. (De Blasio later promised the agenda would include that issue.) But six years of hearing that from a black president has exhausted people’s patience, and white progressives aren’t going to be able to get away with it anymore.
The Evening Greens
Rapid Arctic ice loss linked to extreme weather changes in Europe and US
Arctic warming appears to be the prime reason behind fluctuations in the polar jet stream that is causing unusual weather, study says
The string of massive snowstorms and bone-chilling cold on the US east coast, as well as flooding in Britain and record temperatures in Europe, are linked to rapid ice loss in the Arctic, new research appears to confirm.
While the rapidly-thawing Arctic cannot be held responsible for specific weather events like the “snowmageddon” in 2009, Hurricane Sandy, or European heatwaves, researchers at Rutgers university said it appears to be a prime reason why the polar jet stream – a ribbon of winds that encircles the globe – gets ‘stuck’ with increasing frequency.
Western Europe and large parts of North America will experience more extreme weather because of “Arctic amplification” - the enhanced sensitivity of high latitudes to global warming, the team suggested in a paper published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
“We are seeing these extremes because the Arctic is warming faster than elsewhere. The whole lower atmosphere is heating up but the sea ice is the most observable. This is having this effect on the jet stream, making it extend further south and stay longer,” said co-author Jennifer Francis.
In Face of Rising Climate Movement, Tar Sands on Life Support: Report
With dozens of carbon-intensive tar sands projects delayed or on hold, a new report released Friday confidently declares: "The case for the tar sands is crumbling."
A new analysis by Oil Change International identifies 39 projects—representing more than 1.61 million barrels per day (bpd) of potential tar sands oil production capacity—that companies are currently unable or unwilling to invest in.
That's good news for the climate and the environment, as well as for frontline communities that bear the brunt of the toxic tar sands production.
And it's bad news for the tar sands sector, which now finds itself "struggling to justify many new projects," says Hannah McKinnon, senior campaigner on private finance at Oil Change International.
According to the report, On the Edge: 1.6 Million Barrels per Day of Proposed Tar Sands Oil on Life Support(pdf), the delayed and on-hold projects include three open pit mine projects with a combined capacity of over 450,000 bpd, and over 30 drilling projects with nearly 1.2 million bpd capacity. The total extractable tar sands oil in these projects is almost 13 billion barrels. If all of that resource was extracted and burned, around 7.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted—equivalent to 40 years of emissions from 51 average U.S. coal-fired power plants.
Furthermore, the Oil Change analysis found that an additional 550,000 bpd of production capacity is owned by companies that have filed for bankruptcy—"another clear indicator of weakness in the sector," the authors write.
From Fracking to Coal Waste, NAACP Confronts Environmental Racism in North Carolina
The organization that spurred the south's "Moral Mondays" movement announced this week it is launching a civil rights investigation into the disproportionate public health hazard that fracking and coal ash pollution pose to poor communities and people of color in one North Carolina county. ...
The initiative was revealed just days after environmental regulators issued the state's first ever contracts to launch fracking tests at select locations. One of those sites is in the majority-black community of Walnut Tree—located in Stokes County, which is more than 90 percent white.
That fact alone is raising concerns that people of color will be disproportionately impacted by the numerous hazards associated with a potential fracking sites—including dangerous pollution of drinking water.
But it doesn't stop there. Residents are worried that fracking could compromise the stability of the massive coal ash waste pond at Belews Creek Steam Station owned by Duke Energy. The company's toxic and leakingcoal ash ponds across the state have attracted international attention, but according to residents, an inadequate regulatory response. ...
"If you look at what population is most impacted from the [Belews Creek Steam Station] coal ash pond, it is a disproportionate number of people of color and low-income people surrounding that pond," Amy Adams, North Carolina campaign coordinator for advocacy organization Appalachian Voices, told Common Dreams. "This is different from the larger community."
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
St. Louis Grapples — and Fails To Grapple — With the Matter of Murdered Black Women
Supreme court throws out conviction of man who posted rap lyrics on Facebook
A year after armed standoff, Cliven Bundy still star of his own Tea Party-tinged western
Reports of the Patriot Act’s death are greatly exaggerated
This is Us!
A Little Night Music
Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones
Furry Lewis - Im Going To Brownsville
Furry Lewis - I Will Turn Your Money Green
Furry Lewis - When I lay my burden down
Furry Lewis - Billy Lyons & Stack O' Lee
Furry Lewis - Dry Land Blues
Furry Lewis - Baby You Don't Want Me
Furry Lewis - Falling Down Blues
Furry Lewis - Big Chief Blues
Furry Lewis - Mr. Furry's Blues
Furry Lewis - Everybody's Blues
Furry Lewis - Done Changed My Mind
Furry Lewis - A Chicken Ain't Nothing But a Bird