March 25, 2014 archive

March Madness 2014: Women’s Round of 32 Day 2

Yesterday’s Results

Seed School Record Seed School Record Score Region
2 * Stanford (32 – 3) 10 Florida State (21 – 12) (63 – 44) West
2 Duke (28 – 7) 7 * DePaul (29 – 6) (65 – 74) MidWest
1 * Notre Dame (34 – 0) 9 Arizona State (23 – 10) (84 – 67) East
3 * Kentucky (26 – 8) 6 Syracuse (23 – 10) (64 – 59) East
2 * Baylor (31 – 4) 7 California (22 – 10) (75 – 56) East
4 Nebraska (26 – 7) 12 * BYU (28 – 6) (76 – 80) MidWest
4 Purdue (22 – 9) 5 * Oklahoma State (25 – 8) (66 – 73) East
1 * Tennessee (29 – 5) 8 St. John’s (23 – 11) (67 – 51) South

Tonight’s Games

Time Network Seed School Record Seed School Record Region
7:00 ESPN2 1 UConn (35 – 0) 9 St. Joseph’s (23 – 9) MidWest
7:00 ESPN2 3 Penn State (23 – 7) 11 Florida (20 – 12) West
7:00 ESPN2 4 Maryland (25 – 6) 5 Texas (22 – 11) South
7:00 ESPN2 4 N. Carolina (25 – 9) 5 Michigan State (23 – 9) West
9:30 ESPN2 3 Texas A&M (25 – 8) 11 James Madison (29 – 5) MidWest
9:30 ESPN2 1 S. Carolina (28 – 4) 9 Oregon State (24 – 10) West
9:30 ESPN2 3 Louisville (31 – 4) 6 Iowa (27 – 8) South
9:30 ESPN2 2 W. Virginia (30 – 4) 7 Louisianna State (20 – 12) South

Sunday’s Results below.

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos

Our regular featured content-

These featured articles-

This special feature-

Join us this evening at 6 PM EDT for this special feature-

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Wheat and Chaff

One use of the word chaff is thin strips of foil used to confuse radar.

The House’s NSA bill could allow more spying than ever. You call this reform?

Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Tuesday 25 March 2014 09.07 EDT

The House proposal, to be unveiled this morning by Reps Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, is the more worrying of the two. Rogers has been the NSA’s most ardent defender in Congress and has a long history of distorting the truth and practicing in outright fabrication, whether in touting his committee’s alleged “oversight” or by way of his attempts to impugn the motives of the once again vindicated whistleblower who started this whole reform debate, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.



His new bill seems to have the goal of trading government bulk collection for even more NSA power to search Americans’ data while it sits in the hands of the phone companies.

While the full draft of the bill isn’t yet public, the Guardian has seen a copy, and its description does not inspire confidence. Under the Rogers and Ruppersberger proposal, slyly named the “End Bulk Collection Act”, the telephone companies would hold on to phone data. But the government could search data from those companies based on “reasonable articulable suspicion” that someone is an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power”. The NSA’s current phone records program is restricted to a reasonable articulable suspicion of terrorism.

A judge would reportedly not have to approve the collection beforehand, and the language suggests the government could obtain the phone records on citizens at least two “hops” away from the suspect, meaning if you talked to someone who talked to a suspect, your records could be searched by the NSA. Coupled with the expanded “foreign power” language, this kind of law coming out of Congress could, arguably, allow the NSA to analyze more data of innocent Americans than it could before.

President Obama’s reported proposal sounds more promising, though we have even fewer details than the Intelligence Committee proposal. The administration’s plan would supposedly end the collection of phone records by the NSA, without requiring a dangerous new data retention mandate for the phone companies, while restricting analysis to the current rules around terrorism and, importantly, still requiring a judge to sign off on each phone-record search made to the phone companies – under what the New York Times described as “a new kind of court order”.

This phone plan, apparently, represents Obama coming full-circle as his self-imposed deadline on NSA reform arrives Friday, when the court order authorizing bulk collection runs out. But there’s no indication that the president’s plan would stop other types of bulk collection – such as internet or financial records – and there’s still a big question about what the NSA could do with the data they receive on innocent people two “hops” away from a suspect.



Rep James Sensenbrenner’s bill, the USA Freedom Act, would make a much stronger and more comprehensive bill than either new proposal – at least for those interested in real NSA reform. Sensenbrenner, who originally wrote the Patriot Act provision that the NSA re-interpreted in secret, called the House Intelligence proposal “a convoluted bill that accepts the administration’s deliberate misinterpretations of the law”. Although, even his bill could be strengthened to ensure bulk collection of Americans’ records is no longer an option for the NSA, or any other government agency.

Obama to set out proposal to end NSA’s mass collection of phone data

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 26 March 2014 08.47 EDT

Under plans to be put forward by the Obama administration in the next few days, the National Security Agency would end the bulk collection of telephone records, and instead would need to seek a court order to search records held by the telephone companies.

A separate proposal, to be published on Tuesday by the leaders of the House intelligence committee, would not necessarily require a judge’s prior approval to access phone or email data.

Neither the White House nor the House intelligence committee proposal would require telecommunications firms to keep such records any longer than the current 18-month maximum, a significant shift away from the five years during which they are currently held by NSA.



The bill, titled the End Bulk Collection Act of 2014 and currently circulating on Capitol Hill, would prevent the government from acquiring “records of any electronic communication without the use of specific identifiers or selection terms.”



But the bill would allow the government to collect electronic communications records based on “reasonable articulable suspicion”, rather than probable cause or relevance to a terrorism investigation, from someone deemed to be an agent of a foreign power, associated with an agent of a foreign power, or “in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power.”

A draft of the bill acquired by the Guardian proposes the acquisition of such phone or email data for up to a year and would not necessarily require prior approval by a judge. Authorisation of the collection would come jointly from the US attorney general and director of national intelligence.



The House intelligence committee proposal represents competition to a different bill introduced last fall by privacy advocates in the Senate and House judiciary committees known as the USA Freedom Act. That bill, which has 163 co-sponsors in both chambers, does not lower the legal standard for data collection on US persons, and would prohibit the NSA from searching for Americans’ identifying information in its foreign-oriented communications content databases, something the House intelligence bill would not.



But in a sign of the continuing contentiousness on Capitol Hill over changes to NSA surveillance, James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and co-author of the USA Freedom Act, preemptively rejected the House intelligence committee proposal, calling it “a convoluted bill that accepts the administration’s deliberate misinterpretations of the law.

“It limits, but does not end, bulk collection. Provisions included in the draft fall well short of the safeguards in the USA Freedom Act and do not strike the proper balance between privacy and security,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement late on Monday.



According to a New York Times report late on Monday, Obama will propose ending bulk phone data collection and replacing it with individualised orders for telecom firms to provide phone records up to two “hops” – or degrees of separation – from a phone number suspected of wrongdoing. The effort goes further towards the position favoured by privacy advocates than Obama proposed in January. Obama will request the Fisa court approve the current bulk collection program for a final 90-day renewal as he attempts to implement the new plan.



“Until Congress passes new authorizing legislation, the president has directed his administration to renew the current program, as modified substantially by the president in his January speech.”

Obama is cancelling the NSA dragnet. So why did all three branches sign off?

Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union, The Guardian

Tuesday 25 March 2014 10.09 EDT

To anyone who criticized the National Security Agency’s phone-records dragnet over the last nine months or so, the American intelligence community had this stock response: all three branches of government signed off on it.

The intelligence community was right, at least in a sense, but what it presented as a defense of the surveillance program was actually an indictment of our oversight system. What it presented as a defense of the program was actually a scandal.



(I)f the administration is right that the dragnet was unnecessary, we should ask how all three branches of government got it so wrong.

The answer, in a word, is secrecy. When intelligence officials proposed the dragnet, there was no one on the other side to explain that the government’s goals could be achieved with less-intrusive means. There was no one there to mention that the law the government was invoking couldn’t lawfully be used to collect call-records. There was no one there to mention that the bulk collection of call records was unconstitutional.

Instead, there was an entirely one-sided system in which government attorneys presented the supposed interests of the intelligence community in the most expansive way possible, and the judges of a poorly resourced court tried unsuccessfully, and sometimes halfheartedly, to imagine what ordinary citizens might say in response. Over time, and perhaps without entirely meaning to, the court developed a wholly new body of law, a body of law animated not by democratic principles but by the values of the intelligence community – collect, analyze, conceal.

The intelligence committees that were meant to serve as a further check on unwarranted government surveillance failed just as profoundly.



One can confidently predict that the administration’s proposal to end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records will not go far enough. According to the Times report, the administration’s proposal will still have the NSA collecting records about people who are two steps removed from terrorism suspects, not just records about the terrorism suspects themselves. The administration doesn’t seem to be contemplating new limits on the agency’s authority to retain, analyze or disseminate the records it collects. And it isn’t proposing to end bulk collection of all records – just the bulk collection of phone records. And of course Congress must approve the proposal.

But, as David Cole has observed, this much can be said about the administration’s proposal already: the president is acknowledging that a surveillance program endorsed by all three branches of government, and in place for more than a decade, has not been able to survive public scrutiny. It’s an acknowledgement that the intelligence agencies, the surveillance court and the intelligence committees struck a balance behind closed doors that could not be defended in public.

Bill Maher’s New Rules: Noah’s Ark, God and Religion

Adapted from The Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Bill Maher – New Rules: Noah’s Ark, God and Religion

“What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he’s mad at? I mean, besides Chris Christie.”

“Hey, God, you know you’re kind of a dick when you’re in a movie with Russell Crowe and you’re the one with anger issues.”

“You know conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality, well maybe it’s because you worship a guy who drowns babies.”

“If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away.”

“I’m reminded as we’ve just started Lent, that conservatives are always complaining about too much restraining regulation and how they love freedom, but they’re the religious ones who voluntarily invent restrictions for themselves. On a hot summer day, Orthodox Jews wear black wool, on a cold winter night Mormons can’t drink a hot chocolate… isn’t life hard enough without making shit up out of thin air to fuck with yourself?”

Cartnoon

The Buying of American Elections

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Who’s Buying our Midterm Elections?

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to issue another big decision on campaign finance, one that could further open the floodgates to unfettered and anonymous contributions, just as the Citizens United case did four years ago. [..]

Already, three times as much money has been raised for this year’s elections as four years ago, when the Citizens United decision was announced. “This is the era of the empowered ‘one percenter’. They’re taking action and they’re becoming the new, headline players in this political system,” Kroll tells Moyers. Kim Barker adds, “People want influence. It’s a question of whether we’re going to allow it to happen, especially if we’re going to allow it to happen and nobody even knows who the influencers are.”



Transcript can be read here

Time for a New Church Committee

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI), the chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on Meet the Press, making once again the nonsense that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was in cahoots with Russian intelligence and a puppet of Vladimir Putin. As Kevin Gosztola, Rogers has been spewing this discredited propaganda to cover up his lack of any oversight of the intelligence community by his committee:

The propaganda Rogers pushes is the product of a vendetta Rogers has against Snowden. The whistleblower has forced him to address the issue of oversight of the NSA-a concept in government which appears to be personally outrageous to him. He has had to think about questioning the very secret surveillance programs and policies he is committed to fiercely defending. And so, the focus must be put on Snowden to avoid doing the job he should be doing as an overseer in government.

This is not about Edward Snowden. What Rogers and the other NSA/CIA apologists don’t want you to notice is that these agencies are out of control and there is no oversight by congress. The CIA and NSA are so out of control, it created a constitutional crisis.

Snowden’s disclosures, backed up by documents, served effectively as the gravest of grave, but also very obvious warnings that no good can come from empowering a “Deep State Top Secret America” to secretly and illegally spy on its own citizens. Unsurprisingly, Congress and other government officials now find themselves in this moment of “constitutional crisis” where not only is freedom of the press threatened, and ordinary citizens are not allowed to know about or democratically control the Deep State “Security” Surveillance but we’ve reached the point where, for instance, the CIA’s secretive and illegal attempts to thwart the Senate Intelligence Committee’s lengthy and exhaustive investigation of CIA torture as part of its oversight responsibilities, has now led to a real constitutional crisis.

This level of dangerous blowback is exactly the harm Snowden blew the whistle on! But isn’t it also what Senator Obama campaigned he would change, if elected to the presidency, before further damage could occur to our Constitutional rule of law? And isn’t the current perilous situation on all fours with the similar constitutional crisis involving the FBI’s COINTELPRO, CIA’s CHAOS and NSA’s MINARET programs that occurred in the final years of the Vietnam War, which led to Watergate and a president’s resignation? The spying and intimidation of Senator Feinstein’s Committee is very similar to the spying on Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, and main NYT and Washington Post newspaper editors and columnists along with thousands of other innocent Americans who found themselves targeted by these secret spy programs during the last six years of the Vietnam War. These “national security” programs claimed authority not only to listen but to “disrupt” Americans domestically. Wasn’t this the important history lesson that Obama actually based his campaign for “Change” on?! Senators Church and Baker have passed on but surviving Church Committee members and staffers have quickly realized that history is repeating which is why they’re so urgently calling for a new Church Committee-type investigation.

Theses agencies are manipulating the actors in this drama pitting the executive and legislative branches against each other while they pull the strings. Meanwhile, the one person who could end it all, has allowed it to continue. Why? Could it be because he is not in control of these executive agencies either?

Where is the president in all this? Mostly limp and unpersuasive so far in very restrained responses. He didn’t fire the CIA director nor the NSA director though both have lied to Congress and the public, and are obvious candidates for blame. The president did not launch a seriously independent inquiry nor does he seem to understand that, whether or not it’s fair, the blame falls at his feet. Why didn’t  he get angry?

Because he knows the secrets, he is therefore vulnerable to reprisal.

The spies may not have tapped the White House phones but they do know what he knows and can always make use of it. This is the very core of the card game played by the intelligence agencies and it didn’t start with Barack Obama. When any new president comes to town, he is told the secrets first thing and continuously. The briefings can be chilling but also thrilling.

Ultimately, it can also be slyly coopting to learn what the government knows only at the very highest level. As the agencies take the White House deeper and deeper into the black box, it becomes harder for a president to dissent. It also makes it riskier to do so. The CIA or NSA know what he heard and know what he said when he learned the secrets. If the president decides to condemn their dirty work, the spooks and spies can leak to the press how in the privacy of the Oval Office the commander-in-chief gave the green light.

The former chief investigator for the Church Committee, Ben Wides says that the Senate and House intelligence committees are now too entwined with the intelligence agencies to be effective and has called for an independent committee. The other reason for this committee is President Obama’s refusal to investigate the actions taken during the Bush/Cheney administration’s ‘war on terror.’



Transcript can be read here

It is now time for a new Church Committee. Along with Firedoglake Action, we urge you to call you representatives and ask them to convene a special congressional investigation into the surveillance activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

This is not about Edward Snowden. This is about keeping the Republic.  

On This Day In History March 25

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.

March 25 is the 84th day of the year (85th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 281 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in history, two tragic fires occurred in New York City. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed 146 lives and 79 years later, in 1990, the Happy Land fire killed 87 people, the most deadly fire in the city since 1911.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent immigrant Jewish women aged sixteen to twenty-three. Many of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits. People jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

The factory was located in the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place, now known as the Brown Building, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

Fire

The Triangle Waist Company factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building on the northwest corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just to the east of Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women’s blouses, known as “shirtwaists.” The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours on Saturdays.

As the workday was ending on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, a fire flared up at approximately 4:45 PM in a scrap bin under one of the cutter’s tables at the northeast corner of the eighth floor. Both owners of the factory were in attendance and had invited their children to the factory on that afternoon. The Fire Marshal concluded that the likely cause of the fire was the disposal of an unextinguished match or cigarette butt in the scrap bin, which held two months’ worth of accumulated cuttings by the time of the fire. Although smoking was banned in the factory, cutters were known to sneak cigarettes, exhaling the smoke through their lapels to avoid detection. A New York Times article suggested that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines, while The Insurance Monitor, a leading industry journal, suggested that the epidemic of fires among shirtwaist manufacturers was “fairly saturated with moral hazard.” No one suggested arson.

A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to warn employees on the tenth floor via telephone, but there was no audible alarm and no way to contact staff on the ninth floor. According to survivor Yetta Lubitz, the first warning of the fire on the ninth floor arrived at the same time as the fire itself. Although the floor had a number of exits – two freight elevators, a fire escape, and stairways down to Greene Street and Washington Place – flames prevented workers from descending the Greene Street stairway, and the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent theft. The foreman who held the stairway door key had already escaped by another route. Dozens of employees escaped the fire by going up the Greene Street stairway to the roof. Other survivors were able to jam themselves into the elevators while they continued to operate.

Within three minutes, the Greene Street stairway became unusable in both directions. Terrified employees crowded onto the single exterior fire escape, a flimsy and poorly-anchored iron structure which may have been broken before the fire. It soon twisted and collapsed from the heat and overload, spilling victims nearly 100 feet (30 m) to their deaths on the concrete pavement below. Elevator operators Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo saved many lives by traveling three times up to the ninth floor for passengers, but Mortillalo was eventually forced to give up when the rails of his elevator buckled under the heat. Some victims pried the elevator doors open and jumped down the empty shaft. The weight of these bodies made it impossible for Zito to make another attempt.

The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. The fallen bodies and falling victims also made it difficult for the fire department to approach the building.

The Happy Land fire was an arson fire which killed 87 people trapped in an unlicensed social club called “Happy Land” (at 1959 Southern Boulevard) in the West Farms section of The Bronx, New York, on March 25, 1990. Most of the victims were ethnic Hondurans celebrating Carnival. Unemployed Cuban refugee Julio Gonzalez, whose former girlfriend was employed at the club, was arrested shortly after and ultimately convicted of arson and murder.

The Incident

Before the blaze, Happy Land was ordered closed for building code violations in November 1988. Violations included no fire exits, alarms or sprinkler system. No follow-up by the fire department was documented.

The evening of the fire, Gonzalez had argued with his former girlfriend, Lydia Feliciano, a coat check girl at the club, urging her to quit. She claimed that she had had enough of him and wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Gonzalez tried to fight back into the club but was ejected by the bouncer. He was heard to scream drunken threats in the process. Gonzalez was enraged, not just because of losing Lydia, but also because he had recently lost his job at a lamp factory, was impoverished, and had virtually no companions. Gonzalez returned to the establishment with a plastic container of gasoline which he found on the ground and had filled at a gas station. He spread the fuel on the only staircase into the club. Two matches were then used to ignite the gasoline.

The fire exits had been blocked to prevent people from entering without paying the cover charge. In the panic that ensued, a few people escaped by breaking a metal gate over one door.

Gonzalez then returned home, took off his gasoline-soaked clothes and fell asleep. He was arrested the following afternoon after authorities interviewed Lydia Feliciano and learned of the previous night’s argument. Once advised of his rights, he admitted to starting the blaze. A psychological examination found him to be not responsible due to mental illness or defect; but the jury, after deliberation, found him to be criminally responsible.

Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, Gonzalez was charged with 174 counts of murder- two for each victim he was sentence maximum of 25 years. It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.

The building that housed Happy Land club was managed in part by Jay Weiss, at the time the husband of actress Kathleen Turner. The New Yorker quoted Turner saying that “the fire was unfortunate but could have happened at a McDonald’s.” The building’s owner, Alex DiLorenzo, and leaseholders Weiss and Morris Jaffe, were found not criminally responsible, since they had tried to close the club and evict the tenant.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning


Lately things just don’t seem the same

Late Night Karaoke