June 19, 2013 archive

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On This Day In History June 19

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge.

June 19 is the 170th day of the year (171st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 195 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate.

Passage in the Senate

(President Lyndon B.) Johnson, who wanted the bill passed as soon as possible, ensured that the bill would be quickly considered by the Senate. Normally, the bill would have been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator James O. Eastland , Democrat from Mississippi. Given Eastland’s firm opposition, it seemed impossible that the bill would reach the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield took a novel approach to prevent the bill from being relegated to Judiciary Committee limbo. Having initially waived a second reading of the bill, which would have led to it being immediately referred to Judiciary, Mansfield gave the bill a second reading on February 26, 1964, and then proposed, in the absence of precedent for instances when a second reading did not immediately follow the first, that the bill bypass the Judiciary Committee and immediately be sent to the Senate floor for debate. Although this parliamentary move led to a filibuster, the senators eventually let it pass, preferring to concentrate their resistance on passage of the bill itself.

The bill came before the full Senate for debate on March 30, 1964 and the “Southern Bloc” of 18 southern Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator led by Richard Russell (D-GA) launched a filibuster to prevent its passage. Said Russell: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states.”

The most fervent opposition to the bill came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): “This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress.”

After 54 days of filibuster, Senators Everett Dirksen (R-IL), Thomas Kuchel (R-CA), Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), and Mike Mansfield (D-MT) introduced a substitute bill that they hoped would attract enough Republican swing votes to end the filibuster. The compromise bill was weaker than the House version in regard to government power to regulate the conduct of private business, but it was not so weak as to cause the House to reconsider the legislation.

On the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) completed a filibustering address that he had begun 14 hours and 13 minutes earlier opposing the legislation. Until then, the measure had occupied the Senate for 57 working days, including six Saturdays. A day earlier, Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the bill’s manager, concluded he had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate and end the filibuster. With six wavering senators providing a four-vote victory margin, the final tally stood at 71 to 29. Never in history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill. And only once in the 37 years since 1927 had it agreed to cloture for any measure.

On June 19, the substitute (compromise) bill passed the Senate by a vote of 71-29, and quickly passed through the House-Senate conference committee, which adopted the Senate version of the bill. The conference bill was passed by both houses of Congress, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning


Jewelry 4

Thomas Edison vs. the Supremes

Chief Justice Roberts: You want to patent light, Mr. Edison?  Just because you’re dead and may be speaking to God, it doesn’t give you any right to ask for reconsideration of the Patent Office turning down your patent on the light bulb.  You are now speaking to a much higher authority that works in the dark mostly.

Edison: I don’t want to patent light.  I just want to finally patent my successful invention for creating light and turning night into day.

Chief Justice Roberts:  I know you only had 3 months of schooling and can’t hear well beyond your autism so I will leave the questioning to Justice Scalia.  He speaks loud enough and simple enough to wake the dead.

Justice Scalia:  Though you are a dirty, smelly, mean, hippy recluse, like that Steve Jobs who was fired by the company he founded, I won’t ask you about how you had two wives and numerous children.  It’s too late to protect women from you but I want to know about you going around electrocuting elephants.  

Edison:  I only electrocuted one used elephant to demonstrate one of the problems with Tesla’s AC current.  I fired Tesla and he went bankrupt with his business, you know, but America is still stuck his lethal AC.

Justice Thomas breaks his silence and shouts at Edison:  We are all educated, God-fearing men here and we know Natural Law better than some uneducated inventor.  I should add there are some women here too but we don’t listen to them.  We just look.  Go away.  We have spoken.

Best,  Terry

Cartnoon

Late Night Karaoke

“Tell Me What You Do”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

To quote a phrase from a well known blogger at a formerly liberal, progressive web site:

Don’t tell me what you believe, show me what you do and I will tell you what you believe.

I give you President Barack Obama defending the Bush Administrations surveillance state.

Obama Defends Authorization of Surveillance Programs

by Peter Baker, The New York Times

“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney,’ ” Mr. Obama told Charlie Rose on his PBS interview show. “Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yeah, you know, he took it all lock, stock and barrel.’ My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?” [..]

Yet like Mr. Cheney, who appeared on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend, Mr. Obama defended the effectiveness of surveillance programs in heading off threats to the United States. “The one thing people should understand about all these programs, though, is they have disrupted plots, not just here in the United States but overseas as well,” he said. He added that while other factors were at work, “we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs.”

Partial transcript:

Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe, is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case…. And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.” To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

Charlie Rose: But there is a balance here.

Barack Obama: But there is a balance, so I’m going to get to your – get to your question. The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life, which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is “Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.” Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the intelligence gathering business for a very long time –

Charlie Rose: Bigger and better than everybody else.

Barack Obama: Bigger and better than everybody else, and we should take pride in that because they’re extraordinary professionals; they are dedicated to keeping the American people safe. What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they – and usually it wouldn’t be “they,” it’d be the FBI – go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause….

So point number one, if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule. There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden, allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place, and they caused all the ruckus. Program number one, called the 2015 Program, what that does is it gets data from the service providers like a Verizon in bulk, and basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there. Now, if the NSA through some other sources, maybe through the FBI, maybe through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD. Get a number that where there’s a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might involve foreign terrorist activity related to Al-Qaeda and some other international terrorist actors. Then, what the NSA can do is it can query that database to see did any of the – did this number pop up? Did they make any other calls? And if they did, those calls will be spit out. A report will be produced. It will be turned over to the FBI. At no point is any content revealed because there’s no content that –

Charlie Rose: So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.

Barack Obama: Well, let me – let me finish, because I don’t. So, what happens is that the FBI – if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone – it’s got to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant.

Charlie Rose: But has FISA court turned down any request?

Barack Obama: The – because – the – first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small… number one. Number two, folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion.

Charlie Rose: Should this be transparent in some way?

Barack Obama: It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court…. The whole point of my concern, before I was president – because some people say, “Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.” Dick Cheney sometimes says, “Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel.” My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you’ve got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee – but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works.

Now, one last point I want to make, because what you’ll hear is people say, “Okay, we have no evidence that it has been abused so far.” And they say, “Let’s even grant that Obama’s not abusing it, that all these processes – DOJ is examining it. It’s being renewed periodically, et cetera – the very fact that there is all this data in bulk, it has the enormous potential for abuse,” because they’ll say, you know, “You can – when you start looking at metadata, even if you don’t know the names, you can match it up, if there’s a call to an oncologist, and there’s a call to a lawyer, and – you can pair that up and figure out maybe this person’s dying, and they’re writing their will, and you can yield all this information.” All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that.

Charlie Rose: So, what are you going to change? Are you going to issue any kind of instructions to the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper, and say, “I want you to change it at least in this way”?

Barack Obama: Here’s what we need to do. But before I say that – and I know that we’re running out of time, but I want to make sure I get very clear on this. Because there has been a lot of mis-information out there. There is a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity. It can only be narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks, and a select number of identifiers – phone numbers, emails, et cetera. Those – and the process has all been approved by the courts – you can send to providers – the Yahoos or the Googles, what have you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant. And what will happen then is that you there can obtain content. But again, that does not apply to U.S. persons. And it’s only in these very narrow bands. So, you asked, what should we do? …What I’ve said is – is that what is a legitimate concern – a legitimate critique – is that because these are classified programs – even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it – despite all that, the public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right? Because they say, “Well, Obama says it’s okay – or Congress says it’s okay. I don’t know who this judge is. I’m nervous about it.” What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I’m describing to you today, people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.

Number two. I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board, made up of independent citizens including some fierce civil libertarians. I’ll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities.

Charlie Rose: Let me just ask you this. If someone leaks all this information about NSA surveillance, as Mr. Snowden did…. Did it cause national security damage to the United States, and therefore, should he be prosecuted?

Barack Obama: I’m not going to comment on prosecution…. The case has been referred to the DOJ for criminal investigation… and possible extradition. I will leave it up to them to answer those questions.

Keep in mind that this president employs and supports two known liars, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander, both of whom have continuously lied to Congress about the surveillance programs. This president has approved unchecked wiretapping something he said he would end when campaigning for office.

Mr. Obama has said he does not believe he has violated the privacy of any American but this is what he does.

So what does he believe? Certainly not the Constitution and our right to protection from illegal searches.

Arming Syria Is Not a Good Idea

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

CNN host of GPS and editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zacharia made this video before Pres. Barack Obama decided to send arms directly to the Al Qaeda backed rebels in Syria.

Oh Thank God–Finally, War With Syria

by Russ Baker,

Now, the Obama administration is preparing for war, in an astonishing echo of the George W. Bush administration’s misleading justifications for invading Iraq. [..]

No one is likely to demand good hard evidence for the use of chemical weapons. After all, the Bush administration and its lies for war was so…very long ago. [..]

None of these military adventures were ever about anything remotely honorable. So, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you just have to get over it. You may feel better believing the system of which you are part has noble intentions, or that the party you prefer is somehow more principled.

The truth is actually pretty simple: no matter which party is running things,  globally dominant governments do not make decisions based on humane do-goodism.  In the halls of power, decisions are based on a consensus of hard-headed “realists,” whose concerns do not extend to human rights, the safety of women and children and other civilians, or the “self-determination” of non-Americans. “Spreading democracy around world”? Um, no.

This entry into a new Middle East conflict isn’t going over very well with the American public. Only 20 percent support this action, while 70 percent oppose it. Opposing to arming the rebel is strong across party lines, as Jon Walker at FDL Action shows with this graph from Pew:

Americans Opposed to US Syrian Intervention photo 3_zpse6482096.png

Click on image to enlarge

At FDL News Desk, DSWRight makes some very salient points that this is not Rwanda and not how you get people to the table:

This is not Darfur or as Bill Clinton may infer Rwanda. This is a sectarian civil war where the Sunni majority is taking on a Shiite aligned government as part of a larger factional struggle in the region. [..]

In what world is that a way to launch peace talks? America is not neutral (and to be fair never has been) but starting off negotiations by claiming one of the parties at the talks must leave power is not going to advance the ball very far.

Getting in the middle of a regional conflict like Syria may even be dumber than Iraq, which is really saying something. And what if the rebels win? Then Al-Qaeda and friends come to power. After they are done massacring the losers and sectarian minorities they can help launch attacks against America. The Syrian intervention is all kinds of stupid.

This is not going to go well. Should anyone be surprised that Pres Obama’s approval rating is dropping?

Life Insurance Crooks

Insurers Inflating Books, New York Regulator Says

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH, The New York Times

June 11, 2013, 8:50 pm

Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York’s superintendent of financial services, said that life insurers based in New York had alone burnished their books by $48 billion, using what he called “shadow insurance,” according to an investigation conducted by his department. He issued a report about the investigation late Tuesday.



Insurance is regulated by the states, and Mr. Lawsky said his investigators found that life insurers in New York were seeking out states with looser regulations and setting up shell companies there for the deals. They then used those states’ tight secrecy laws to avoid scrutiny by the New York State regulators.

Insurance regulation is based squarely on the concept of solvency – the idea that future claims can be predicted fairly accurately and that each insurer should track them and keep enough reserves on hand to pay all of them. The states have detailed rules for what types of assets reserves can be invested in. Companies are also expected to keep a little more than they really expect to need – called their surplus – as a buffer against unexpected events. State regulators monitor the reserves and surpluses of companies and make sure none fall short.



The transactions at issue are modeled after reinsurance, a business in which an insurance company pays another company, a reinsurer, to take over some of its obligations to pay claims. Reinsurance is widely used and is considered beneficial because it allows insurers to spread their risks and remain stable as they grow. Conventional reinsurance deals are negotiated at arm’s length by independent companies; both sides understand the risk and can agree on a fair price for covering it. The obligations drop off the original insurer’s books because the reinsurer has picked them up.

Mr. Lawsky’s investigators found, though, that life insurance groups, including some of the best known, were creating their own shell companies in other states or countries – outside the regulators’ view – and saying that these so-called captives were selling them reinsurance. The value of policies reinsured through all affiliates, including captives, rose to $5.46 trillion in 2012, from $2.82 trillion in 2007.

The chief problem with captive reinsurance, Mr. Lawsky said, is that the risk is not being transferred to an independent reinsurer. Also, the deal is not at arm’s length. And confidentiality rules make it difficult to see what secures the obligations.

The New York State investigators subpoenaed this information and discovered that some states were approving deals backed by assets that would not be allowed in New York; Mr. Lawsky referred to “hollow assets,” “naked parental guarantees” and “conditional letters of credit.”



Insurers, unlike banks, have no prepaid fund like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to make customers whole in the event of a collapse. That’s why Mr. Lawsky said he feared that taxpayers might have to be called to the rescue again.

The Next Crash And The Next Bailout Now

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

at 11:15AM Jun 13, 2013

Give them a suit with rubber pockets and they’d steal soup.

Learning from the sweet — and largely unprosecuted — techniques of their pals in the financial-services industry, it appears that the moguls, poobahs, and panjandrums in the insurance industry are finding their own special ways to game the entire system into the poorhouse.



You think any of these guys looked at what happened in 2008 and thought, “Boy, those guys really were crooks and bought the country a helluva catastrophe. We should learn from them and not do that ourselves.” Nope, I guarantee you the first thoughts among the people who thought up this scam for the insurance companies was, “Holy crap, look at the dough those guys made!” And I guarantee you those same people all got raises. The upper levels of American capitalism is so rotten with amorality, so utterly devoid of any conventional sense of ethics, let alone social responsibility, that it hardly seems worth pointing it out any more. Congratulations to America’s graduate schools of business. You have bred three generations of vampires to feed on the rest of us. It’s as though every medical school in the country adopted the basic approach to thoracic surgery of Sweeney Todd and married it to the economic philosophy of Bialystock And Bloom.

Chronic Tonic- I Wish I Didn’t Mind

Originally published at Voices On The Square

So, last night I had trouble getting to sleep because I had been arguing on the internet! Stupid, I know, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. There’s a lot going on in my life and people would think that I have enough on my plate, why in the world would I stress myself out over anything more; why take on anything additional. Well…because things bother me.

I have tried to go the mindless route, it just does not work for me. I don’t want to be one of those people they stop on the street for a candid video who cannot tell you who the attorney general is or not know what’s going on in the world or what my government is doing. So, when somebody on the internet tries to tell me that I shouldn’t mind that my government is collecting information they have no right to be collecting because Google or Target is collecting information or that I shouldn’t worry because it’s the same government that has my Medicare info, what’s the big deal, oh, that bothers me a lot.

I usually keep this post non-political, but this week I just can’t do that. There is much in my life that I need to compartmentalize, much that I need to live day by day, some hour by hour just to get through.  But here’s the thing, why; why am I fighting so hard to do that? For some dystopian future? No, fuck that noise.

So, yes, I take care of what I need to at home:  My kids, my mom, my own achy ass, I play a few games, I do love me some hidden object games, I watch some teevee, but I don’t need both hands to count my “must see’ shows.   And in my spare time? Oh, some shit bugs the shit out of me. Sometimes it keeps me up at night. I really wish I didn’t mind, but I do. I mind terribly.