Writing in Anonymous Fearmongering About the Patriot Act from the White House and NYT Glenn Greenwald says:

Several of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous.

So, what fantasitical claims are the anonymous White House sources making?

“What you’re doing, essentially, is you’re playing national security Russian roulette,” one senior administration official said of allowing the powers to lapse. That prospect appears increasingly likely with the measure, the USA Freedom Act, stalled and lawmakers in their home states and districts during a congressional recess.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” another senior member of the administration said at a briefing organized by the White House, where three officials spoke with reporters about the consequences of inaction by Congress. “We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities, and it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk.

I have to wonder if perhaps, privately, Julie Hirschfeld Davis finds her writing more than a little ridiculous?

*BOSS: the Bush-Obama Security Scheme.

Republicans like: Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum… Is there any Republican presidential candidate who hasn’t been sucking up to Josh Duggar?

Did television change politics or simply maKe what had always been the case easier and so plain that we could no longer see the forest for the trees? Writing in The Book That Changed Campaigns Forever for Politico Scott Porch writes:

Before Richard Ben Cramer and What It Takes, before John Heilemann and Mark Halperin and Game Change, before Joe McGinnis and The Selling of the President 1968 and even before Hunter S. Thompson and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, there was Teddy White and The Making of the President 1960. This one seminal book launched a hundred imitators and reshaped American politics, transforming the modern narrative of our campaigns from simple day-to-day stories filed by newspaper reporters and wire-service hacks to grand, sweeping historical dramas filled with heroes and villains, failures and foibles, triumphs and defeats. It won the Pulitzer Prize—a rarity for any book on electoral politics—and has sold an incredible 4 million-plus copies.

So, what did the Teddy White, the author of this one seminal book think about his own reporting? White had this to say in a letter to Theo Bennahum:

The scenery of politics is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Yet I must report all this as serious. This is the strain on me. That I must be serious, and I must exhaust myself trying to find out what is true and what is fraud and yet, even after I know, I must take them both seriously and write of them both as if I did not know the true distinctions between them.

Why did White feel that he had to report as serious that which he found ridiculous? I don’t know. If asked to guess, however, I’d point to money. Can we trust anyone bought and paid for by billionaires?

Some years ago I wrote,

By 1965 the wealth produced by Cleveland’s period of greatness had become institutionalized, not only its 500-acre University Circle, housing its museums, concert halls, college, but in hundreds of foundations and trust fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars and its impressive array of social agencies. The wealthy had long ago abandoned Cleveland as a place to live but they left behind a sophisticated network of institutions to do their bidding to protect their place of business and their rich cultural and social infrastructure.

Yet this immense left-behind wealth—created in good part by ordinary people’s contribution to industry not just the rich—now pushes regressive taxes almost exclusively.

As I’ve written before, they want an easy way out. Already $170 million in cigarette taxes have been paid since 2005 in arts and sport taxes solely on Continue Reading »

C Robert Gibson and Taylor Channing writing in Here’s how much corporations paid US senators to fast-track the TPP bill had this to say about our own junior Senator Rob Portman and the Trans Pacific Partnership:

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who is the former US trade representative, has been one of the loudest proponents of the TPP. He received $119,700 from 14 different corporations between January and March, most of which comes from donations from Goldman Sachs ($70,600), Pfizer ($15,700), and Procter & Gamble ($12,900). Portman is expected to run against former Ohio governor Ted Strickland in 2016 in one of the most politically competitive states in the country.

Twenty years ago the North American Free Trade Agreement cost Ohio:

323,308 manufacturing jobs (or 32.7 percent) during the NAFTA-WTO period (1994-2014), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.* This figure is for total manufacturing employment, so it takes into account both jobs created by exports and jobs displaced by imports, among other causes of net job change. The percentage of all private sector jobs that are manufacturing jobs in Ohio declined from 23.4 percent to 14.9 percent during the NAFTA-WTO period.

So, Sen. Portman’s campaign chest is $119,900 fatter. How much thinner will the incomes of Ohio’s households be as a result?

From the transcript:

JAFFER: There are presumably negotiations going on right now between some of the big players – Senator Mitch McConnell, for example, Senator Diane Feinstein, Rand Paul, Ron Wyden, Senator Leahy, and maybe something will get wrapped up in a neat bow and presented to us on Sunday when the Senate comes back. You know, I hope not.

Given the way the landscape looks now, I think the best course would be sunset. USA Freedom, in my view, would be a step in the right direction, but a very, very small step. So unless that bill is strengthened, sunset would be the better course.

GREENWALD: Describe what you mean when you say “sunset.”

JAFFER: Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was enacted in 2001, gave the government broad surveillance power, but also had language that said the law would disappear unless Congress reauthorized it periodically. And the sunset is scheduled to take place on June 1; in other words, the law—Section 215—is going to disappear. Two other provisions too, but Section 215 is the most controversial of them. That law is going to disappear on June 1 unless Congress re-authorizes it. That’s why we find ourselves in the situation we find ourselves in now.

So what is the nut of the argument? We do not need to be a nation of frightened children.

GREENWALD: The new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, sounds like she has been fear mongering for many years when she went on CBS with Nora O’Donnell and talked about how scary it would be if the Patriot Act provisions lapsed; that it would make us less safe, that it would give a blind spots to the intelligence community.

Are there any legitimate dangers to just letting these provisions lapse?

JAFFER: No. There aren’t.

There have been a number of reviews now of precisely these questions, especially with respect to Section 215. So there was the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board review of the call records program. There was another one by the President’s Review Group.

These are all executive branch appointees or entities that are doing the reviews. And they conclude that the call records program has never been pivotal in any terrorism-related investigation. That was from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. And the President’s Review Group concluded essentially the same thing. That was about the call records program specifically.

But there was a report issued earlier this week by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General which concluded essentially the same thing about Section 215 more generally. In other words, that Section 215 had never been crucial in any terrorism investigation. Not just the call records program, but any surveillance under Section 215.

So it’s very hard to see why the sky would fall if Section 215 were allowed to expire. And Section 215 is overlapping with a number of other authorities. So even if it were the case that certain targeted surveillance under Section 215 had actually been crucial, or even useful, in any terrorism investigations, there’s no reason why the government couldn’t conduct that kind of targeted surveillance under other provisions. So I just don’t see it.

In Ohio, call senators Sherrod Brown (888.896.6446) and Rob Portman (202.224.3353).

Check the whole show, above, or just watch The Cleveland Show and Felonious Munk.

There are two reasons to work smarter, not harder: you either want more time for leisure (or at least to do non-work related tasks) or you want time to do more work. The former is obvious. The latter, however, depends upon who you’re doing the work for: yourself or someone else. What stagnant wages since the ’70s have taught us is that increased productivity does not inevitably, in fact rarely, lead to increased wages.

Oliver Burkeman wants to ban the phrase outright because the strategy is counter to that most valuable of human exercises—creativity.

What if doing things more “efficiently”, in a superficial sense, results in doing them worse? There’s evidence to suggest that we need to daydream; perhaps we also need those moments of afternoon lassitude and aimless conversations by the office microwave. Creative work, especially, depends on a kind of inefficiency. Inevitably, the scandal and schadenfreude surrounding Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine has all but drowned out its fundamental insight, but it’s a good one: creative breakthroughs depend on being stumped and feeling frustrated. Make the path to them too smooth, and you get lower-quality breakthroughs.

I do suppose, however, that I can make the strong case that daydreaming, long walks and reading trashy adventure novels all are actually working smarter since they contribute to increased creativity. Now, if we could only figure out how to get paid for those.

I have to wonder how much blowback Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) faces for his grandstanding on the floor of the Senate in opposition to legislation continuing one of the worst, and most grossly misinterpreted, sections of the U.S. Patriot Unpatriotic Act. Edward Snowden had this to say about Paul’s filibuster.

It represents a sea change from a few years ago, when intrusive new surveillance laws were passed without any kind of meaningful opposition or debate. Whatever you think about Rand Paul or his politics, it’s important to remember that when he took the floor to say “No” to any length of reauthorization of the Patriot Act, he was speaking for the majority of Americans—more than 60% of whom want to see this kind of mass surveillance reformed or ended.

I have to wonder, however, if this is a sea change or simply an ebbing tide.

Edward Snowden has hailed landmark shifts in Congress and the US courts on NSA surveillance but cautioned that much more needs to be done to restore the balance in favour of privacy.

He also warned this was only the beginning of reform of the NSA, saying there are still many bulk collection programmes which are “even more intrusive”, but expressed hope that the Senate would act to curb the NSA, saying retention of the status quo is untenable.

In an hour-long interview with the Guardian in Moscow, the NSA whistleblower said the moves by the federal court and the House of Representatives marked the first time since the 1970s there had been a reduction rather than expansion in the powers of the surveillance agencies.

“In our modern era, that is without precedent,” he said.

“The idea that they can lock us out and there will be no change is no longer tenable. Everyone accepts these programmes were not effective, did not keep us safe and, even if they did, represent an unacceptable degradation of our rights.”

I certainly hope that on his wish list for presidential pardons he will sign on his final day in office, President Barack Hussein Obama has Edward Snowden on the head of the list.

Yeah, right, as if…

For the better part of twenty years, I was a regular coffeehouse denizen in and around Cleveland Heights’ various caffeine shoting galleries. When I would find a table at Arabica, Caribou, Phoenix, Stone Oven or Brews Brothers and get to work I was often amazed at the conversations—both in person and over cell phones—that I easily eavesdropped on. (Eavesdropping in public spaces was actually a skill taught and cultivated in one of my journalism courses at Ohio University.) At one point I thought I might give people a clue by printing out the self-promotional laptop sign above. A few people took notice and asked what I meant, but most remained oblivious or uncaring as they discussed political deals, infidelities and garden-variety doucheries.

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s courageous revelations concerning government surveillance and routine gathering of the most mundane of conversations, people are occasionally more conscious of their exposure, but a group in New York has taken my laptop sign to a higher level by ostensibly placing mini-recorders in public spaces to record, and publish not-so-private conversations.

Eavesdropping on the population has revealed many saying “I’m not doing anything wrong so who cares if the NSA tracks what I say and do?”

Citizens don’t seem to mind this monitoring, so we’re hiding recorders in public places in hopes of gathering information to help win the war on terror. We’ve started with NYC as a pilot program, but hope to roll the initiative out all across The Homeland.

For greater transparency we’re declassifying excerpts from the recordings and highlighting where some devices are located. If you have any questions, ask them somewhere in public and eventually we’ll hear you, or email us for a quicker response.

Congress should let Section 215 (at least) of the Patriot Act die. (The whole fucking program should be trashed, but we have to start somewhere curb and bring down the Bush-Obama Security Scheme.)

In an action of such inconceivable chutzpah that I swear would have made Richard Nixon think twice, Saudi Arabia, already a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council (how the fuck did that ever happen) seeks the presidency of that body.

In a move that will definitely drill the “final nail in the coffin for credibility” for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, Saudi Arabia is set to make a bid to head the HRC.

The news surfaced after the United Nations Watch that overlooks the HRC pushed the United States to prevent the nation that recently advertised for eight new executioners to not be awarded the title.

“We urge US Ambassador Samantha Power and EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini to denounce this despicable act of cynicism by a regime that beheads people in the town square, systematically oppresses women, Christians, and gays, and jails innocent bloggers like Raif Badawi for the crime of challenging the rulers’ radical brand of Wahabbist Islam,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, reported The Independent.

I hope that the other members of the council fell to the floor, incapacitated by laughter, at the suggestion.

[Update at 1000 on 21 May: So, Paul spoke for 630 minutes and only managed to waste a day of the senate’s time.

Two years after rising to national prominence with a 13-hour talking filibuster against drones, Rand Paul has made another marathon speech on the floor of the US Senate – only this time in a bid to halt the federal government’s mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records and to derail an extension of the Patriot Act.

Paul spent a total of 10 hours and 30 minutes on Wednesday calling for an end to the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance tactics, eating up one of just three legislative days remaining before lawmakers go on recess till 1 June – the same day that key provisions of the Patriot Act are due to expire.

But by stepping aside just before the clock struck midnight, Paul, at least for now, did not meaningfully affect the Senate schedule or block the Patriot Act from moving forward. Emphasis mine, JH

Why would anyone expect any better from a Republican?]

Senator Rand Paul launched and completed an 11-hour filibuster today. At the finish of his filibuster, Paul sent out the following email under the subject line: Filibuster, it’s on.

Fellow Conservative:

This is it.

As you read this, I will be on the Senate floor to launch my filibuster to stop ANY extension or reauthorization of the “PATRIOT Act’s” unconstitutional and illegal domestic spying programs.

I will not rest. I will not back down. I will not yield one inch in this fight so long as my legs can stand.

But I need you. I need you to please take just one minute to show you “Stand With Rand”.

Fellow Conservative, liberty cannot long last without privacy from government intrusion.

Yet, it seems many of my colleagues here in the Senate care more about getting out of town for the Memorial Day break than protecting the Constitution so many American patriots have fought and died for.

I have news for them. They are going NOWHERE.

I will not simply stand down and allow them to ram through another “last-minute” deal to shred our Constitution — all while they think the American people aren’t looking.

Our Founders would have rolled over in their graves to learn our American government was collecting and storing billions of personal records on its citizens every day.

Billions of phone calls, texts, emails, Internet searches, social media posts and all the rest.

The NSA tells us we must give up all of our privacy for “security.”

Just like President Obama promised us better healthcare with ObamaCare.

Just like gun control activists say gun control would make us all safer.

As Benjamin Franklin stated, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We can abide by the Constitution, defend against terrorism and keep our freedoms.

It’s that belief in liberty that lies at the heart of the American ideal.

We can’t lose that belief.

What’s to become of our great nation if we simply throw up our hands, admit defeat and decide freedom no longer works?

Fellow Conservative, we can’t simply stand by and watch while Big Government spy state apologists try to gut our freedoms.

I’m not going to back down.

Here I stand, so help me.

If you stand with me, I need to know right now.

Please don’t ignore this email.

Please agree to chip in your most generous gift right away to help me turn up the heat on my colleagues in the Senate.

Thank you.

In liberty,

Rand Paul

Paid for by Rand Paul for President

So, is this just a fund raising stunt from the floor of the Senate for Paul, or Does this mean that he now sees Edward Snowden for the hero (and patriot) that he is?

If you read the sketchy New York Times article on the Delta Force raid into Syria a few days ago—how an ISIS leader was killed when he “tried to engage” American commandos while his fighters used women and children as shields, and an 18-year-old slave was freed with no civilian casualties thanks to “very precise fire” — you can be forgiven for thinking, “Haven’t I seen this movie before?”

You probably have, and it was called Zero Dark Thirty, the film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal and backed with gusto by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA provided Bigelow and Boal with privileged access to officials and operators behind the hunt for Osama bin Laden—and not coincidentally, their movie portrayed the CIA’s torture program as essential to the effort to find and kill the leader of al Qaeda. It grossed more than $132 million worldwide.

Zero Dark Thirty was criticized by a number of writers (including me) when it came out in 2012, and now it is being treated as a political farce in a new Frontline documentary scheduled to be broadcast by PBS on Tuesday, May 19. Titled Secrets, Politics and Torture, the show explores the CIA’s effort to persuade Congress, the White House and the American public that its “enhanced interrogation methods” were responsible for extracting from unwilling prisoners the clues that led to bin Laden and other enemy targets.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer whose work on CIA torture has been exemplary, explains that the team behind Zero Dark Thirty was conned by the CIA.

Pretty fucking evil.

Public health experts involved in the response to the Ebola crisis have condemned what they described as a ludicrous, insulting and opportunistic attempt to exploit the disease for corporate gain by the world’s largest privately-held coal company.

As part of a PR offensive to rebrand coal as a “21st-century fuel” that can help solve global poverty, it has emerged that at the height of Ebola’s impact in Africa, Peabody Energy promoted its product as an answer to Africa’s devastating public health crisis.

Greg Boyce, the chief executive of Peabody, a US-based multinational with mining interests around the world, included a slide on Ebola and energy in a presentation to a coal industry conference in September last year. The slide suggested that more energy would have spurred the distribution of a hypothetical Ebola vaccine—citing as supporting evidence a University of Pennsylvania infectious disease expert.

The World Health Organisation believes nearly 27,000 people contracted Ebola in an outbreak of the virus in West Africa last year, and more than 11,000 died – although the international agency believes that is probably an underestimate.

Public health experts who were involved in fighting the spread of Ebola were outraged at Peabody’s suggestion that expanding energy access with coal generation could have hindered the spread of Ebola and helped with the distribution of a vaccine—especially as there is no approved vaccine against the disease.

Meanwhile, the medical expert cited by Peabody to support its claims told the Guardian he had never heard of the company – and that it had got his name wrong.

“There is no apparent merit or evidence to support such a thesis,” said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Centre for Disaster Preparedness, and an advisor to the White House on the US response to Ebola. “Peabody has very specific and explicit corporate goals. I think this is a pretty far fetched leap from a global crisis to try to justify the existence of a company that is interested in producing and selling coal.”

Those of us who grew up along the Ohio River have a very long history with Peabody.

Over the years, in addition to practicing meditation, I have taught a number of courses on meditation. My starting point has always been a discussion of monkey mind, that incessant cacophony of thoughts that fill our heads when we are not intensely focused on what we are doing in the moment. I have used analogies about being in the zone or losing track of time, but this morning I came across an even better example from Jon Kabat-Zinn.

[N]ow that you have decided to cultivate greater mindfulness in your life, your mind is at risk for filling up with a host of new ideas and opinions—about meditation, about mindfulness, about how well you’re doing or not doing, about whether you are doing it right—in addition to all the other ideas and opinions swirling around in the mind. It is a bit like television sports commentary. There is what is actually going on in the game, and then there is the endless commentary. When you begin a formal meditation practice, it is almost inevitable that you will now be subject to meditation commentary to one degree or another. It can fill the space of the mind. Yet it is not the meditation any more than the play-by-play is the game itself.

Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way—a first-order, first-person experience—rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on.

Commentary (or annotation in books) has always bothered me except in those instances when I’m deliberately analyzing a repeated experience. This is the primary reason why people who talk during movies irritate me. (Because I can hit a pause button while watching a DVD or reading a book, I’m less irritated by such interruptions, but the distraction from the immersion into the experience remains—like being yanked to the surface while snorkeling to report what you see down there.)

Oliver Burkeman directed me to Kabat-Zinn’s piece from his own thoughts on procrastination and how to adjust your defaults.

This notion of adjusting your defaults turns out to be a surprisingly useful way to think about other kinds of habit change. It becomes easier to resist the siren call of the web and social media, for example, if you come to see “not being online” as the default state, and “being online” as the active, chosen one – something you sporadically choose to do, then stop doing. It’s also the spirit behind the idea the productivity blogger Thanh Pham calls clearing to neutral: the habit, after any activity, of clearing up the equipment involved—dirty pans, work files – so they’re ready for next time. Gradually, tidiness becomes the default, mess the anomaly, and the good habit happens without thinking or effort

A brood of Blue Birds fledged two or three days ago. Today the hawk has a new perch.