Highlights

This piece is written by Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Kat of Kat's Korner, Betty of Thomas Friedman is a Great Man, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz, Ruth of Ruth's Report, Marcia of SICKOFITRADLZ, Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends, Ann of Ann's Mega Dub, Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts and Wally of The Daily Jot. Unless otherwise noted, we picked all highlights.


"Like the trained monkeys they are, they sell the l..." -- most requested highlight of the week by readers of this site.

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "When Hypocrite Met Hypocrite" -- Isaiah zooms in on two leaders who spy on their own countries.

 "Iraq snapshot," "Shut up, Senator Barbara Mikulski," "Mikulski loves the sound of her own voice (Wally)" and "Senator Susan Collins Eats The Young" -- C.I., Ava, Wally and Kat cover Congressional hearings.

"Baked Onion Dip" -- Trina offers a classic recipe.

"Super Bomb: Man of Steel is awful," and  "Movies and movie formats" and  "Oz" -- Betty and Stan go to the movies.

"TV Guide does not know Sci-Fi" and "revenge's big season ending f--k up" -- Marcia and Rebecca cover TV.

"Idiot of the Week" and "Idiot of the week (non-government pick)" -- Ruth and Mike pick the idiots of the week.

"The NSA," "so few brave politicians," "About Glenn Greenwald (C.I.)," "Do the same laws for the government apply to NSA c...," "NPR tries to sway public opinion on spying," "America folds like a cheap suit?," "Spying on Americans," "you can't have almost privacy," "Poor cheap Nancy Pelosi," "A great column," "Spying and The Exes," "Barack's spying and his apologists," "The uni-polar menace," "The trashing of Ed Snowden," "The trashed image," "Damn!," "the sucky in these times magazine,""Barack's spying," "He used to be so popular" and "THIS JUST IN! MORE BAD NEWS FOR BARRY!" -- some of the community coverage of Barack spying on Americans.

"Boo on Microsoft" -- Ann calls out the sexism of Microsfot.

"Joni Mitchell talks music" and  "Joni Mitchell (and other non-poster gals)" -- Kat and Elaine cover Joni Mitchell.

"New Benghazi questions" -- Ruth continues her Benghazi coverage.

"Cher, Jody Watley and my return" -- Ann returns.

"Is the IRS non-partisan or partisan? Cummings politicizes scandal" -- Mike corrects Cummings.

"Hedges rushes to do the work he should have done earlier" and "Hedges whines (unaware of what he's whining about)" -- Ruth and Elaine call out Hedges.

"Soledad O'Brien takes her lack of appeal to HBO" and "THIS JUST IN! SHE'S READY TO TANK HBO!" -- Cedric and Wally on ratings destroyer O'Brien.

Truest statement of the week

The United States should not be accumulating phone records on tens of millions of innocent Americans. That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about. Congress must address this issue and protect the constitutional rights of the American people.


-- Senator Bernie Sanders on last week's revelations that Barack Obama was spying on millions of Americans.

Truest statement of the week II

I am barred by Senate rules from commenting on some of the details at this time.  However, I believe that when law-abiding Americans call their friends, who they call, when they call, and where they call from is private information.  Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.  
The administration has an obligation to give a substantive and timely response to the American people and I hope this story will force a real debate about the government’s domestic surveillance authorities. The American people have a right to know whether their government thinks that the sweeping, dragnet surveillance that has been alleged in this story is allowed under the law and whether it is actually being conducted.  Furthermore, they have a right to know whether the program that has been described is actually of value in preventing attacks.  Based on several years of oversight, I believe that its value and effectiveness remain unclear.


-- Senator Ron Wyden after last week's revelations of Barack Obama's mass spying on the American people emerged.

Truest statement of the week III

Yes, the situation right now is that the government, since December, has taken -- how do you say?  The face?  We call it an iron face.  You don't see the features, you don't see the expression on the face -- towards the protests that are taking place in the country.  Since December, a great many Sunnis in the western provinces, have risen in order to say that there is a double standard in dealing with many situations that are sectarian in the way that it is being dealt with.  And since that time, the government has taken a stance that 'I do not hear, I do not see, I do not speak.'  It is like a glancing over all of these things.  And it is staying in place.  It is not giving it serious attention that it needs to give.   And since that time, until this very time, every Friday -- because we have Friday prayers that take place at the mosques --  every Friday has been a 'terror Friday.'  We just don't know what is going to happen.  Sunni enclaves become like camps, deployment of Army, deployment of Special Forces, deployment of all military kinds.


-- Iraqi journalist Sahar Issa to Marco Werman (PRI's The World, link is audio) last Wednesday.

A note to our readers

Hey --

Another Sunday.



First up, we thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:


The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.

And what did we come up with?

• Truest statement of the week

Senator Bernie Sanders. 

• Truest statement of the week II

Senator Ron Wyden.

• Truest statement of the week III

We had to have three this week.  There was no way we couldn't note Sahar Issa.

• Editorial: When All The Slaves Are Free

The spying on the Americans and the scandals from the White House never cease.  

• TV: Characters wanted but not required

Ava and C.I. take on USA's Graceland.

• About Iraq

Since Iraq wasn't the editorial this week we wanted to be sure we did an update of some form.

• Report on Congress

Dona moderates a discussion about last week's Congressional hearings with Wally, Kat, Ava and C.I.

• Film Classics of the 20th Century

This edition's pick?  Alfred Hitchock's Family Plot.

• Tomato Ramen for sale on the DC black market

Tomato Ramen's still for sale in the US -- just on the black market.

• Don't miss radio

Two programs you won't want to miss this week.

• Combating Military Sexual Assault (MSA) Act of 201...

Repost of press releases from the offices of Senator Patty Murray and Senator Kelly Ayotte.

• Ground the Drones! (Workers World)

Repost from Workers World.

• Bradly Manning (Judith Orr, UK Socialist Worker)
  

Repost from UK Socialist Worker.

• Highlights

Mike and the gang wrote this and we thank them for it.

Peace.




-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.

Editorial: When All The Slaves Are Free

Leave it to The Globe to offer up Barack on the cover and impeachment as a topic last week.





The scandals they were covering was the IRS targeting of political groups, Benghazi and the spying on the press (secretly seizing hundreds of phone records from the Associated Press and seizing various records of Fox News report James Rosen).   Last week, things got a little hotter for Barack.

That's when Glenn Greenwald (Guardian) broke the news:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.


It was so outrageous that even the timid Center for Constitutional Rights noted, "As far as we know this order from the FISA court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S. It also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing information about the order to anyone other than their counsel."

In addition, AP reports, "Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans."

Thursday, US Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Justice Dept.  As reported in that day's "Iraq snapshot,"  Senator Mark Kirk estimated that this spying would have involved as many as 120 million phone calls and Kirk was bothered by one issue: Were members of Congress spied upon?



Senator Mark Kirk:  I want to just ask, could you assure to us that no phones inside the Capitol were monitored -- of members of Congress.  That would give a future executive branch, if they started pulling this stuff, kind of a -- would give them unique leverage over the legislature?

Attorney General Eric Holder:   Uh, with all due respect, Senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss, uhm,  that issue.  I'd be more than glad to come back in a -- in a appropriate setting to discuss, uh, the issues that you have raised but I -- in this open forum, I don't -- I do not

Senator Mark Kirk:  I would interrupt you and say that the correct answer would be:  "No, we stayed within our lane and I am assuring you that we did not spy on members of Congress."


Committee Chair Barbara Mikulski:  You know I'd like to suggest something here.  When I read the New York Times this morning, it was like, "Oh God, not one more thing."  And not one more thing where we're trying to protect America and it looks like we're spying on America.  I think the full Senate needs to get a briefing on this.


Once upon a time, you needed to own a press to have a say in the press.  Now days, you apparently have to be a member of Congress to find out if you've been spied upon.  As C.I. noted, "Kirk, Mikulski and Senator Richard Shelby all agreed it was an important question.  And it's important because it's them.  It's too bad that they don't feel it's important for non-members of Congress.  It's too bad that Mikulski's 'answer' is to call for a closed hearing.  It's too damn bad that she doesn't think the American people are owed answers.  Remember, in American now, 'democracy' translates as something that belongs only to elected members of Congress."

Suzanne Nossel (PEN) points out:

In 1890, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and attorney Samuel D. Warren wrote a seminal article defining a right to privacy. They pointed out that the law already recognized a "right to be let alone" and asserted that the common law "secures to each individual the right of determining, ordinarily, to what extent his thoughts, sentiments, and emotions shall be communicated to others." That zone of individual control, they argued, is essential to enable intellectual and creative freedom. The process of drafting and redrafting an article, story, poem, love letter, or advocacy petition would be radically transformed if the writer focused on the fact that every single version could be sucked into a government server somewhere. Brandeis and Warren rejected the idea that voluntary surrender of privacy in one setting or to one group of people (Facebook friends, for example) forfeited the right to privacy in relation to others. They attributed to the individual the right to "fix the limits" of such disclosure. The freedom to create requires the freedom to control who sees your creation. While its parameters would evolve, the right to privacy became enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the world's most influential international human rights instruments.

Brandeis and Warren ground their right to privacy in the principle of an "inviolate personality," arguing that infringements on the individual's ability to decide who sees their thoughts and writings interfere with basic attributes of personhood and human dignity. This intangible but long-recognized form of harm correlates loosely but unmistakably with the discomfort and disgust most people feel at the thought of a national security bureaucrat, human or mechanical, rifling through our emails even if only to dismiss them unread as dull and useless. Although Brandeis and Warren's arguments were set forth in the context of publishing and public disclosure, the prospect of personal information being involuntarily and secretly disclosed to the government is no less troubling, and probably more so.

While some were silent and hoping the whole thing would blow over without hurting Precious of the United State Barack's polling,  Senator Rand Paul was getting active as his office noted in a statement Thursday:

"The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the Executive's expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party," Sen. Paul said. "When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act late last year, I insisted on a vote on my amendment (SA 3436) to require stronger protections on business records and prohibiting the kind of data-mining this case has revealed. Just last month, I introduced S.1037, the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which would provide exactly the kind of protections that, if enacted, could have prevented these abuses and stopped these increasingly frequent violations of every American's constitutional rights.

"The bill restores our Constitutional rights and declares that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause."

 Click HERE to view the text of this legislation, which will be introduced when the Senate returns to session on Friday, June 7.


While the always ridiculous MoveOn remained silent and Ben & Jerry's US Action remained inactive, PEN e-mailed the following alert:


Back in 2002, John Poindexter proposed a "Total Information
Awareness" program to spy on everybody, including all American
citizens, complete with a creepy totalitarian logo. The American
people were repulsed, Congress defunded the idea in 2003, and they
dropped it, or so we thought.

Instead they just went ahead and did everything they planned on doing
anyway, except in total secrecy. There was another protest during the
Bush administration when it came to light that wiretaps capable of
capturing the totality of U.S. phone communications had been placed
in telecom switching centers. It did not even slow them down,
probably because most Republicans were too partisan to complain.

Now we learn that under the cheerleading of President Obama, these
eavedropping functions have been extended to virtually all the
biggest internet hubs.

Don't Spy On US Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1118.php

The New York Times published a scathing editorial last night.

The New Yorker magazine made the critical point that capturing
so-called metadata is at least as bad as, and may be worse than,
listening to individual phone calls or reading individual emails. If
anything, metadata is a more efficient way to track every movement
and association of every American citizen without exception. Indeed,
the same datataps in place can listen to all the content as well, all
in total secrecy, and who's to stop them?

We are. If only you will speak out now. Demand that our government
stop its rampant abuse of government secrecy to perpetrate the most
pervasive eavesdropping outrage in American history.

Don't Spy On US Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1118.php

And after you submit the action page above, we invite you to request
the beautiful, new "Don't Spy on US" bumper sticker we rush designed
overnight, and will get printed and shipped as fast as we can. As
with all our policy message stickers you can have one for no charge,
not even shipping, just by submitting the form.

"Don't Spy on Us" bumper stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/all_bumper_stickers.php

Of course, if you can make a donation of any amount, that is what
makes it possible for us to send free stickers to anyone who cannot
make a contribution right now.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
Contributions to The People's Email Network are not tax-deductible
for federal income tax purposes.


How very disturbing that only PEN steps up -- but how very telling.  Establishing yet again that so many organizations on the left which try to bleed you for money constantly are nothing but shills for the Democratic Party.



Enter the multitudes
In Exxon blue
In radiation rose
Apathy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(Who're you gonna get)
-- "Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her Night Ride Home.

TV: Characters wanted but not required

Graceland debuted on USA Thursday night.  Within ten minutes, it felt as if it had debuted forty years ago.  In fact, series 'creator' Jeff Eastin appears to owe Stephen J. Cannell and Steven Bochco both royalties and apologies.





Graceland is the name of the beach house and agents from various law enforcement branches -- DEA, FBI, ICE --  and, in testimony to the magical powers of a chore wheel, they all cohabitate in peace.  In the real world, these people would be snarling at one another about who had jurisdiction and who was in charge of the crime scene instead of spending the day trying to teach 'newbie' Mike Warren how to surf.

Aaron Tveit plays Mike because Jeff Eastin longs for the day when most males on TV were completely non-sexual.  It's not only as though Friends never aired, it's as though NBC never got the test scores for Jonathan Silverman in season five of Gimme A Break!  Maybe it's Chris O'Donnell's success in NCIS: Los Angeles or just a general affinity for LEGOS that brings the wide and boxy Tveit to California -- where the actor who turns thirty this year but already looks thirty-five -- performs as 'newbie' Mike.

Though Mike can't stop praising FBI agent Briggs (Daniel Sunjata), we learn at the end of the first episode that Mike's actually been sent to spy on Briggs.  His sucking up to Briggs might stand out were it not for the fact that everyone's always praising Briggs.  In fact, the first hour plays like a really bad play by a self-obsessed writer recovering from a non-serious suicide attempt.  Did we mention Jeff Eastin wrote the first episode?

Sunjata was very effective earlier this year on Smash, exhibiting real chemistry with Debra Messing.  Prior to that, his big stand-out was playing Chris on 30 Rock, the cool crew member Liz was so desperate to impress in one episode.  He was in FX's Rescue Me -- a show like many of USA's which kept coming back each season for reasons unexplained.

If Sunjata had any talent for improvisation, he would have exited at least one scene shaking his head and kicking one leg out repeatedly -- to indicate a dog humping his leg because that's what his co-stars (especially Manny Montana as Johnny) came off as.  The part is a lot like the one Patrick Swayze played in Point Break -- but Kathryn Bigelow trusted the actor she hired could project cool  so there was no need to film repeated testimonials from the other characters.

The USA network likes to announce, in their commercials, "Characters welcome."  But the reality is the shows get less and less character based every season.  Graceland, for example, is 80s high concept, fish out of water, at its worst.  USA really made a name for itself with Silk Stalkings. After season two, when CBS dropped the show, USA carried new episodes exclusively through season eight (1999).  The show was USA's first real hit with a scripted drama.  They'd follow it with La Femme Nikita, Monk, Psych, and In Plain Sight -- the latter three especially being character driven.  But then the network grew ever more cartoonish -- so much so that TNT's commercial boast ("We know drama") seemed to be mocking USA.

As TNT aired The Closer, Saving Grace, Raising the Bar and Rizzoli & Isles, USA was premiering live-action Huckleberry Hound in the form of Burn Notice and cheese cake confection Covert Affairs.  Suits was a brief respite but now it's back to these awful shows that look like the cheesy TV 'action' flicks TNT used to air as part of their 90s TNT Friday Night Movie programming.

With Graceland, Jeff Eastin has hit rock bottom.  He's not only aping the work of 70s TV giants, he's aping his earlier attempts to copy those giants.  Graceland is little more than Shasta McNasty -- a point that becomes obvious when Johnny starts flirting with women -- and, to really get the beach scenes in -- as well as the hero worship, Hawaii.  Both of those shows only lasted one season.  After the dismal ratings for the heavily advertised Graceland, you'd hope it would meet the same fate; however, this is USA which, more and more, seems to be a breeding ground for bad TV.

About Iraq

Through Saturday, Iraq Body Count counts 106 violent deaths in Iraq so far this month.  The United Nations found April to be the most violent month in Iraq in five years . . . until May topped that.

Last week, Anthony Cordesman offered  "Why Is Obama Ignoring Iraq?" (Real Clear World):


 For all the current attention to Syria, Iraq is the larger and more important state. Iraq is a nation of 31.9 million and Syria is a nation of 22.5 million. Iraq has the larger economy: Iraq has a GDP of $155.4 billion, and Syria had a GDP of $107.6 billion in 2011, the last year for which there are useful data. Most important, Iraq is a critical petroleum state and Syria is a cypher. Iraq has some 143 billion barrels worth of oil reserves (9 percent of world reserves) and Syria has 2.5 billion (0.2 percent). Iraq has 126.7 has trillion cubic meters of gas, and Syria has 10.1. Iraq has a major impact on the overall security of the Gulf, and some 20 percent of the world oil and LNG exports go through the Gulf.
This does not mean the conflict in Syria is not tragic or that it is not important. But from a practical strategic viewpoint, Iraq divided Iran from the Arab Gulf states. Iraqi-Iranian tensions acted as a strategic buffer between Iran and the rest of the Middle East for half a century between the 1950s and 2003. Today, Iraq has s Shi'ite government with close links to Iran and is a military vacuum. Iraq's Shi'ite leaders treat its Sunnis and Kurds more as a threat than as countrymen. Its Arab neighbors treat Iraq's regime more as a threat than an ally, and the growing Sunni-Shi'ite tension in the rest of the region make things steadily worse in Iraq and drive it towards Iran.


Iraqi journalist Sahar Issa shared on The World (PRI) last Wednesday,  "In the neighborhoods where people live, there is fear, there is tension.  At the checkpoints?  There are fake checkpoints where they ask for your name and your i.d.  To tell you the truth, the situation is really quite fearful on the streets." 


And Saturday brought a new kind of bombing -- dog bombing.


Iraq drifts further off the US radar.  So much so that for weeks, as rumors have circulated in the Iraqi press that US Vice President Joe Biden was trying to divide Iraq into three regions, the White House has said nothing.




It took Moqtada al-Sadr calling out the plan or 'plan' from The Godfather of the Division (one of the nicknames Biden's picked up in Iraq over the last weeks) and denouncing Biden as Satan for the US government to respond. And even then, it was the US Embassy in Baghdad (finally) responding.




Wednesday, Alsumaria reported that the US Embassy in Iraq denied today media reports that Biden was overseeing Iraq being split into three sections.  The embassy stated that Biden spoke to the three leaders only in attempt to help keep a political dialogue alive between the various blocs.  On his phone calls, he did not raise the issue of dividing Iraq but instead stressed the need for all participants to work together to find some resolution to the crises confronting Iraq.   Friday, All Iraq News reported on the denial:

The spokesman of the US Embassy Frank Finver said in a statement received by All Iraq News Agency (AIN) that "The remarks reported by some media outlets over the US Vice President Biden’s talks at the end of last week on Iraq, are absolutely groundless." 
 The spokesman added that "In fact, the US Vice President recently talked with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nijaifi and the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government Masoud Barzani and urged them to continue working together and stressed the importance of participation of all parties to find solutions to the points of disagreement within the framework of the Iraqi Constitution.”


All of the above combines to beg the question: Who is leading the US effort in Iraq?  And it also begs the question how are US tax dollars being spent?  Especially after Mark Thompson (Time magazine) reported last week on the $2 billion contract that the State Dept has with PAE Government Services, Inc., "That’s a million dollars a day over a five-year period, if the contract hits its ceiling. The down payment is $347,883,498 (don’t you just love such precision? It’s almost a prime number, for Pete’s sake)."