December 1, 2014

GOP staffer who said Obama's daughters lack "class" to resign

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2014/12/i-guess-we-all-have-our-causes.html#comment-1720322522
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/elizabeth-lauten-gop-aide-who-criticized-obama-daughters-resign-n258931

December 1, 2014

“We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA,” Amazon said in a 2013 statement."

MONDAY, DEC 1, 2014 03:58 AM PST
Amazon’s frightening CIA partnership: Capitalism, corporations and our massive new surveillance state
Hundreds of millions flow to Amazon from the national security state. It's a kind of partnership we shouldn't allow


..............

“I consulted people I knew fairly high up in the State Department off the record, and they said that they did not have to put pressure … on Amazon for that to happen,” said Robert McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, in an appearance on “Democracy Now!.” “It was not a difficult sell.”

And it paid off. A little more than a year later, Amazon was awarded a generous $600 million contract from the CIA to build a cloud computing service that will reportedly “provide all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services.”[/b] As The Atlantic noted, and as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, these same agencies collect “billions and perhaps trillions of pieces of metadata, phone and Internet records, and other various bits of information on an annual basis.”

That is to say: On Amazon’s servers will be information on millions of people that the intelligence community has no right to possess — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper initially denied the intelligence community was collecting such data for a reason — which is used to facilitate corporate espionage and drone strikes that don’t just jeopardize innocent lives, but have demonstrably ended hundreds of them.

Instead of helping expose U.S. war crimes, then, Amazon’s cloud service could be used to facilitate them, for which it will be paid handsomely — which was, in all likelihood, the whole point of the company proving itself a good corporate citizen by disassociating itself from an organization that sought to expose its future clients in the intelligence community.



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Way More:
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/01/amazons_frightening_cia_partnership_capitalism_corporations_and_our_massive_new_surveillance_state/

December 1, 2014

Open your eyes - Open your heart - Justice is blind but we can see

OzarkHillbilly says:
December 1, 2014 at 5:46 am

.....the rioting was Monday night, the board up was Tuesday morning, a call went out and the art happened Tuesday night. My son was there and he said he had never seen so many people there on a Tuesday night before:














More STL:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/12/01/monday-morning-open-thread-heal-stl/#more-162509

December 1, 2014

Tasteless, offensive and inflammatory?

ST. LOUIS – The St. Louis Police Officers Association has released a statement condemning the St. Louis Rams football players who entered the field displaying the "hands up don't shoot" pose.

..............

"St. Louis, Missouri (November 30, 2014) – The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.


Read the rest & vomit:
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/11/30/stl-police-officers-association-condemns-rams-display/19721979/?hootPostID=56e4d621f410c5ee1ef0c0b0696f34f8
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/01/missouri-police-st-louis-gesture-nfl-michael-brown


*************

Killing an unarmed teenager is tasteless and offensive.

Murdering a child with a toy is tasteless and offensive

Protesting when this is pointed out is tasteless, offensive and inflammatory, and it is high time the police associations quit excusing murder on our streets.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/01/1348511/--Tasteless-Offensive-Inflammatory



*******




MORE HERE TOO:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/police-group-demands-punishment-for-players-over-hands-up-gesture

December 1, 2014

1883

Douglass, in his "Address to the people of the United States" (September 24, 1883), declared:

"Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resented and resisted at every step of his progress ... The color line meets him everywhere ... In spite of all your religion and laws he is a rejected man. ... and yet he is asked to forget his color, and forget that which everybody else remembers. ... He is sternly met on the color line, and his claim to consideration in some way is disputed on the ground of color."

"It is our lot to live among a people whose laws, traditions, and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free. To assume that they are free from these evils simply because they have changed their laws is to assume what is utterly unreasonable and contrary to facts. Large bodies move slowly. Individuals may be converted on the instant and change their whole course of life. Nations never. Time and events are required for the conversion of nations."

"The practical construction of American life is a convention against us. Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may. Examples are painfully abundant "

the rest:
http://asagordon.byethost10.com/fdonct.htm

December 1, 2014

James Risen: He didn't become radical, the country did

I think my real change came after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. I was covering the CIA as a beat then. And to me, it was fascinating talking to CIA people right after the invasion of Iraq and right before the invasion of Iraq, because it was kind of like privately talking to a bunch of Howard Deans. They were all radicalized against what Bush was doing.

To me it was wild to hear all of these people inside the intelligence community, especially in 2003, 2004, who were just going nuts. They couldn’t believe the radical change the United States was going through, and that nobody was opposed to it. And that led me to write my last book, State of War, because I was hearing things from within the intelligence community and the U.S. government that you weren’t hearing publicly from anybody. So that really led me to realize—and to step back and look at—the radical departure of U.S. policy that has happened since 9/11 and since the invasion of Iraq.

To me, it’s not like I’ve been radicalized, I feel like I stayed in the same place and the country changed. The country became more radicalized in a different direction.


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/25/talking-james-risen-pay-price-war-terror-press-freedoms/

December 1, 2014

Here are the 17 books Obama bought with his kids

President Obama and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, visited a well-known independent bookstore named Politics and Prose in Washington on Saturday. The visit was meant to show support for small businesses and to mark a day sometimes known as "small business Saturday," when consumers are encouraged to follow-up the big-chain purchases of black Friday by patronizing small businesses.

The visit is perhaps of most interest, though, for the books that Obama picked up with his daughters. It's hard to imagine the purchases were entirely spontaneous — the White House knows presidential reading gets a lot of scrutiny — but it's still interesting to see. The two that most stand out to me are Evan Osnos's book on life in contemporary China — China is a major and quietly successful foreign policy issue for Obama — and Heart of Darkness. I would be very curious to know who in the Obama White House has taken an interest in reading about colonial depravation and horror in 19th-century sub-Saharan Africa.

Here are the books, largely a mix of young adult fiction (Sasha and Malia are 13 and 16), kids' books (probably a gift), and contemporary non-fiction.

Nora Webster, by Colm Toibin (fiction, about a widowed young mother struggling in Ireland)




http://www.vox.com/2014/11/29/7307289/obama-books