Interesting Links For You - Updated 11/15/13

NEW on 11/15/13: "The Insurance Company Bill of Rights" - Republican pro-business skulduggery - again.  Read here.

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11/13/13:  Women's Rights Activists finally go "On Offense". The seeming collapse of public support for the Tea Party after the shutdown debacle, seems to have given liberals some semblance of backbone. They may finally be realizing that if all you ever do is resist the advances of the Right, you are still retreating.

Alan Grayson is one who has always understood this, I think. Now Barbara Boxer and others are getting with it, introducing the Women's Health Protection Act—"historic legislation that aims to end the relentless attacks on women's essential reproductive health by extremist politicians".

Sign on here - they want your support.

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11/12/13:  Very interesting article on TomGram, on the disastrous difference for the
Spy-ers, between Omniscient and Omnipotent - the Spy-ees can get them back!

"There’s never been anything quite like it. The slow-tease pulling back of the National Security Agency curtain to reveal the skeletal surveillance structure embedded in our planet (what cheekbones!) has been an epochal event. It’s minimally the political spectacle of 2013, and maybe 2014, too. It’s made a mockery of the 24/7 news cycle and the urge of the media to leave the last big deal for the next big deal as quickly as possible.
It’s visibly changed attitudes around the world toward the U.S. -- strikingly for the worse, even if this hasn’t fully sunk in here yet. Domestically, the inability to put the issue to sleep or tuck it away somewhere or even outlast it has left the Obama administration, Congress, and the intelligence community increasingly at one another’s throats. And somewhere in a system made for leaks, there are young techies inside a surveillance machine so viscerally appalling, so like the worst sci-fi scenarios they read while growing up, that -- no matter the penalties -- one of them, two of them, many of them are likely to become the next Edward Snowden(s)."

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11/9/13:  Fatally shot for being a young black woman - 

Last Saturday, Renisha McBride got stranded after a car accident in a suburban neighborhood in Detroit. Her cellphone battery was dead, so she went to the nearest house and knocked on the door, planning to ask for help. Instead, unprovoked, the owner of the house fatally shot her in the head.¹

It seems like nothing could more blatantly lead to an arrest. But here's the thing: Michigan is one of the 30 states that has a "Stand Your Ground" Law.² Like in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin in Florida, gun-owners in Michigan are allowed to "shoot first" if they feel someone poses a threat.

In this case, Renisha's killer is claiming he shot her in the face by accident, because he thought she could be a burglar. He has not been arrested.

You can read more, and sign a Petition for justice, here.

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11/6/13:  Does Lindsey Graham know better than your Doctor?

Danielle and Robb Deaver were "over the moon" about Danielle's pregnancy until her water broke at 22 weeks. They were heartbroken to learn their baby would not develop further or survive, but that heartbreak was compounded when doctors told them they couldn't end their nightmare and induce labor because their state bans abortion after 20 weeks. Doctors had to wait for Danielle to get sick or for the baby to die before they could do anything. When baby Elizabeth was finally born, she survived for only 15 minutes.¹

Senator Lindsey Graham is planning to introduce a national bill this week that criminalizes abortions after 20 weeks.² When politicians introduce these inhumane bans on abortions, they are tying the hands of doctors who want to help couples like the Deavers. Less than 2% of abortions occur after 20 weeks, and many of them are for heartbreaking reasons that no one should ever have to face.³

Texas, North Dakota, and Arkansas have all passed 20-week abortion bans this year, and so has the House in Congress.⁴ If we don't make a stand against Sen. Graham's bill in the Senate, more states will be emboldened to pass these inhumane laws. We have to make sure that conservatives everywhere know we won't stand for this.

Tell the Senate: You have no right to legislate our medical decisions. Enough with the attacks on women. Block Graham’s inhumane and extreme abortion ban bill.

Add your name to the petition.

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Hi all -

I'm turning over a new leaf - believe that if you can!

I've realized I'm spending too much time and space on this 'ere Blog, on relaying interesting contemporary stuff about issues. (Even though I absolutely love it!) So from now on, I'm going to restrict myself to things that relate to my main theme of "The War On The 60s".

However, since there are so many good things to read, which I love to share with you... I'm going to post just brief links to stuff I want to alert you to, and update it as we go along Life's Merry Way.

For instance, this seems pretty timely - Numero Uno:

How "ObamaCare Cancelled Your Plan" is really an Insurance Co Scam to Rip You Off

Numero Dos:  Former House Speaker Denied a Texas Voter ID

Numero Tres:  you remember how the Romans figured out that the way to keep the ignorant masses quiet was to give them "bread and circuses"? Well, of course the modern equivalent is the quasi-religion of mind-numbing team sports. Read how the NFL rips off Taxpayers here.

Sauce For The Goose... Senators Don't Like To Be Spied On!

This is really Funny!

BoldProgressives. org went to Sen. Lindsey Graham's office (The one Jon Stewart always refers to as a "middle-aged lesbian") with video cameras, to present him with 100,000 signatures protesting Government spying.

Here's what happened:

"On Wednesday, we delivered 100,000 petition signatures against government spying on Americans to Senate offices.

Senator Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) staff responded by repeatedly yelling, "We don't allow filming in the front office!" We responded, "We don't like having our phone records spied on."

Click here to watch the petition delivery, and chip in $3 to support continued bold progressive organizing on this issue.

Sen. Graham has made some of the most outrageous comments in favor of government surveillance. We made sure that he heard from the people.

Thanks for being a bold progressive.

-- Zaid Jilani, PCCC Investigative Blogger"

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Pithy Comments on Secrecy and Obama

From the very excellent Institute for Public Accuracy:

"Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian has revealed the identity of Edward Snowden, the source for a string of pieces on the NSA, and posted a video interview with him. Recent revelations include: "NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily," "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others" and "Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data."

Greenwald has noted in recent interviews that `these lessons should have been learned from the Church Committee.'"

(Remember the Church Committee?  They investigated the FBI and their stinking, illegal COINTELPRO. See my earlier post on COINTELPRO for more.)

AND: 

"Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture. 

    In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee. 

    Pyle just wrote the piece "Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage," which states: "Edward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest. ...

    "Like Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers [and who is supporting Snowden], Snowden is a man of principle. 'The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to,' he told interviewers. 'There is no public oversight.  The result is that [NSA employees] have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.' For example, he said, he could have accessed anyone’s e-mail, including the president’s.

    "This is not the first time that the American people have learned that their intelligence agencies are out of control. I revealed the military’s surveillance of the civil rights and anti-war movements in 1970. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post disclosed the Watergate burglary by White House operatives, which led Congress to create two select committees to investigate the entire intelligence community.

    "Among other things, the committees discovered that the National Security Agency had a huge watchlist of civil rights and anti-war protesters whose phone calls it was intercepting.  The FBI had bugged the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide rather than accept the Nobel Peace Prize. The CIA had tried to hire the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. President Richard M. Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to audit the taxes of his political enemies. His aides tried to destroy Daniel Ellsberg for leaking a history of the Vietnam War, both by prosecuting him and by burglarizing his psychiatrist’s office for embarrassing information. The FBI opened enormous amounts of first-class mail of law-abiding citizens in direct violation of the criminal law.

    "Since then the technology has changed. The old Hoover vacuum cleaner has been redesigned for the digital age. It is now attached to the Internet, where it secretly collects the contents of everyone’s 'audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs' from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It also siphons billions of telephone communications and Internet messages off the fiber optic cables that enter and pass through the United States. None of us has a reasonable expectation of privacy any more.

    "The Fourth Amendment used to require specific judicial authorization before the government could undertake a seizure. No longer, according to the secret FISA court. Secret seizures of 'metadata' now precede individualized searches. Starting this fall, this information will be stored in a huge warehouse at Camp William, Utah, where it can be searched by computers whenever the military decides to re-label one of us a 'person of interest,' like a reporter, a suspected leaker, or a Congressman it doesn’t like.

    "Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), claims not to be worried, but he should be. Before Watergate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had 24 file cabinet drawers full of dirt on politicians just like Graham. Hoover let each politician know that the Bureau had found the compromising information while on some other search, but promised not to reveal it. Not surprising, Hoover’s abuses of power were not challenged until he died. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who used to prosecute Wall Street swindlers, was driven from office when data miners at the U.S. Treasury Department leaked news that he had been laundering money to pay call girls. ...

     "Now that the story is out, President Barack Obama “welcomes” a 'conversation' about them. Baloney. The function of secrecy is to prevent conversation, not welcome it. The Obama administration is a great supporter of privacy, but only for itself. ...

    "The president insists that no one is listening to our phone calls, but Snowden said he could. Of course, we now know that President George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq War, and falsely denied authorized a massive program of warrantless wiretapping, then a felony under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The NSA and FBI both denied their illegal wiretapping and mail opening programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2004, the Justice Department assured the Supreme Court that our government did not torture people, just a few hours before the torture photos from Abu Ghraib were broadcast on national television. Why should we believe such people now?

    "Secret government was curbed in the 1970s. President Nixon was driven from office. The NSA’s watchlist was shut down; the FBI was returned to law enforcement. Wiretapping was brought under the supervision of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Assassinations were forbidden by executive order, and the campaign to punish leakers ended when White House aides were caught trying to suborn Ellsberg’s judge. Both Houses of Congress created intelligence committees to oversee our secret agencies.

    "Unfortunately, these efforts at oversight have largely failed. Judge Vinson’s order to Verizon proves beyond cavil that the secret FISA court is a rubber stamp for the indiscriminate seizure of all sorts of personal records. ...

    "Seventy percent of the federal government’s intelligence budget now goes to private contractors. Far from overseeing the agencies, members of Congress court them, hoping to obtain business for companies that contribute generously to their campaigns. ...

    "Americans can no longer trust the President, Congress, or the courts to protect them, or the reporters, whistleblowers, and politicians on whom our democracy relies. Our government has been massively compromised by campaign contributions and executive secrecy."

The online activist group Rootsaction.org has begun a petition supporting Snowden's actions."