enlarge

Happy Saturday night, folks! It's Blue Gal from The Professional Left Podcast, bringing you this week's podcast round up. Be aware that these podcasts are also available on i-Tunes, and may not be safe for work.

New Yorker/The Political Scene - 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Decode DC - The Future Was Now

Bob and Chez - Griftopia

[video] John Fugelsang interviews Alan Grayson

Open thread below....

Whenever anyone says the words "slow news day," I think of this song. Whatcha listening to this evening?

Dead Man's Party

Video streaming by Ustream

Occupy Wall Street delivered a petition to Rupert Murdoch's New York Post demanding a retraction and apology for falsely linking OWS with terrorism. (For background story, see my previous report here.)

There are hundreds of federal flood control systems at risk of failing across 37 states in the U.S., leaving millions of people and property endangered.

Via:

When Hurricane Katrina passed over New Orleans in 2005, more than 50 deficient levees were breaches, killing 1,464 people who were in close proximity to the flood control systems. Another natural disaster could subject hundreds, thousands or even millions more Americans to the same fate if the government doesn’t address the issue.

Inspectors discovered 326 deficient levees across the US, whose likely failures could leave millions of people dead. A breach could demolish homes and cost local governments millions of dollars. By failing to repair the defective structures, the US is choosing to risk the lives of its citizens who are walking on eggshells with their proximity to the flood zones. In its first ever inventory of the nation’s flood control systems, inspectors raised the overdue alarm that hundreds of levees may be unable to regulate water levels and prove useless in face of heavy rains. Such populated cities as Washington DC, Sacramento, Dallas, Cleveland and many others might be flooded at any moment.

The US Army Corps of Engineers has only issued ratings for 58 percent of the 2,487 flood control systems, which means inspectors could still discover hundreds more deficient levees. Many of the earthen levees are crumbling under the effect of trees, shrubs and animal holes. Decaying pipes and pumping stations could also cause the flood control systems downfall, while some of the levees are dangerously close to houses or even have houses built on top of them.

Although the Army Corps has no estimates as to how many people are endangered by the defective systems, the 2,487 federally regulated flood control systems protect about 10 million people. The failures of several hundred levees could therefore impact millions of US residents.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (264)

PLAYS: (2801)

Embed

In his New Rules segment this Friday, Bill Maher took a shot at all of the "gun nuts" out there who are so worried about their 2nd Amendment rights being stripped away, but who, along with a lot of liberals, haven't said anything about the National Defense Authorization Act quietly being passed by Congress, which actually is a threat to our civil liberties in this country.

Maher's right that this is a bi-partisan political problem, but I think the bigger problem with the complacency is that we've got a corporate media out there which for the most part is completely ignoring the problem. It's a shame we'll see it discussed on a comedy show like his but ignored on the "news."

DOWNLOADS: (206)

PLAYS: (2218)

Embed

Stephen Colbert had a bit of fun with some of President Obama's detractors for his attempt to do something about the gun violence in America during this Thursday evenings edition of The Colbert Report: Colbert Mocks Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy's Obama Gun Law Criticism:

Unlike his Comedy Central cohort Jon Stewart, who has devoted much of this week to harshly criticizing the NRA and gun control opponents, Stephen Colbert joined Rush Limbaugh and Steve Doocy of "Fox & Friends" in lamenting "King Gun-Snatcher the Magnificent." On Tuesday's show, he mocked Limbaugh for Limbaugh's own mockery of President Obama's decision to bring children onstage when announcing his gun reform proposals.

Limbaugh barked on his radio show about how sickening he found Obama's display. "He brings these kids, supposedly who wrote letters to the White House after Newtown ... to paint a picture of support [mocking voice] among the children!" Limbaugh said. He continued in a falsely sympathetic tone, "They don't want to die. How can you not listen to them?" [...]

He also had some fun at the expense of Steve Doocy, who questioned why those same kids don't question Obama's tax plan and its implications for younger generations, because of course he did.

Colbert followed up with his Word segment, where he asked if the Second Amendment is truly meant to defend against government force, how can citizens ever be safe until they can have their own aircraft carriers?

A new study shows hundreds of women in the United States have been arrested, forced to undergo unwanted medical procedures, and locked up in jails or psychiatric institutions -- because they were pregnant.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women found 413 cases when pregnant women were deprived of their physical liberty between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005. At least 250 more interventions have taken place since then. In one case, a court ordered a critically ill woman in Washington, D.C., to undergo a C-section against her will. Neither she nor the baby survived. In another case, a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her from having an abortion.

Democracy Now! is joined by Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "We’ve had cases where lawyers have been appointed for a fetus before the woman herself, who’s been locked up, ever gets a lawyer," Paltrow says. "We've had cases where they’ve ordered a procedure over women’s religious objections. And one court said pregnant women of course have a right to religious freedom — unless it interferes with what we believe is best for the fetus or embryo."

The new study comes on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision on the right to abortion — a right that has been under siege ever since.

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

A day after President Obama called for broad new gun laws, the White House published on its YouTube channel videos of four children reading their own letters about guns.

The videos are part of what the White House promises will be an all-out effort by Mr. Obama’s administration to pass his gun proposals, drawing on the emotional reactions to the school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

Of course the videos have generated criticism from conservatives -- yet it's our children who are dying at younger ages than their counterparts in 16 other nations according to a recent study from the National Academy of Sciences -- and one of the most glaring reasons for this is children in the US are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun.

The children in these videos are worried enough about the gun violence that they have written letters to Obama, they wanted to be heard, and they damn well deserve to be heard. So let's hear more:

In “A letter from Hinna,” Hinna Zeejah, 8, reads aloud what she wrote to Mr. Obama in the wake of the shootings.

“Mr. President, can we do something which will stop all of these terrible problems,” she says. “Can we stop using guns? I think if they are no guns on the street, no one could get hurt. Bullets don’t have eyes. It can hurt anyone.”

In another video, titled, “A letter from Julia,” Julia Stokes, 11, tells Mr. Obama that guns should be “very hard for people to buy.”

“The only thing they do is harm or kill,” Julia said. “I know that laws have to be passed by Congress, but I beg you to try very hard to make guns not allowed.”

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica, Jan. 18, 2013

When Reddit co-founder and internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide last Friday, he was facing up to 13 felony counts, 50 years in prison, and millions of dollars in fines. His alleged crime? Pulling millions of academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR.

Prosecutors allege that Swartz downloaded the articles because he intended to distribute them for free online, though Swartz was arrested before any articles were made public. He had often spoken publicly about the importance of making academic research freely available.

Other online activists have increasingly turned to computer networks and other technology as a means of political protest, deploying a range of tactics — from temporarily shutting down servers to disclosing personal and corporate information.

Most of these acts, including Swartz's downloads, are criminalized under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), an act was designed to prosecute hackers. But as Swartz's and other "hacktivist" cases demonstrate, you don't necessarily have to be a hacker to be viewed as one under federal law. Are activists like Swartz committing civil disobedience, or online crimes? We break down a few strategies of "hacktivism" to see what is considered criminal under the CFAA.

Publishing Documents

Accessing and downloading documents from private servers or behind paywalls with the intent of making them publicly available.

Swartz gained access to JSTOR through MIT's network and downloaded millions of files, in violation of JSTOR's terms of service (though JSTOR declined to prosecute the case). Swartz had not released any of the downloaded files at the time his legal troubles began. 

The most famous case of publishing private documents online may be the ongoing trial of Bradley Manning. While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning passed thousands of classified intelligence reports and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, to be posted on their website.

"I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public," Manning wrote in an online chat with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who eventually turned Manning in to the Department of Defense.

Both Swartz and Manning were charged under a section of the CFAA that covers anyone who "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer…"

The charges hinge on an interpretation of this section that says anyone in violation of a website's terms of service is an unauthorized user. Because they're unauthorized, all of their activity on that website could therefore be considered illegal. Both were charged with felonies under the CFAA, on top of other allegations.

The Ninth and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that such an interpretation of the CFAA casts too wide a net. With the circuit courts divided over whether a broad definition of "unauthorized" is constitutional, it may fall on the Supreme Court to ultimately decide.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann of Massachusetts was the lead prosecutor in Swartz's case. (He was known for winning a 2010 case that landed hacker Albert Gonzalez 20 years in prison.) Heymann offered Swartz a plea bargain of six months in prison but Swartz's defense team rejected the deal, saying a felony and any time behind bars was too harsh a sentence. Swartz's family blamed his death in part on "intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

As a result of Swartz's suicide, some lawmakers are now calling for a review of the CFAA. On Tuesday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) proposed a piece of legislation called "Aaron's Law," which would amend the law to explicitly state that merely violating a site's terms of service cannot fall under the federal CFAA.

Distributed Denial of Service

A Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attack, floods a web site's server with traffic from a network of sometimes thousands of individual computers, making it incapable of serving legitimate traffic.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (239)

PLAYS: (3635)

Embed

By now everyone has seen this propaganda piece put out by the NRA claiming that the Obama girls have armed guards at their school. There's only one problem: That claim isn't true. Shame, shame, NRA, for living in such a deep silo you actually relied on a Breitbart.com report without any fact checking.

Buzzfeed:

"[The] school Obama's daughters attend has 11 armed guards," the longer ad's narrator says, citing an article from Breitbart.com.

But a fact-check by the Washington Post found that not to be the case. The Postcalled the school, Sidwell Friends, where Obama's daughters attend and asked if the school had armed guards. The school responded that none of their 11 security members carry any firearms.

But where did the myth of armed guards at Obama's school come from?

A quick search found that the first post about it came from the Weekly Standard's blog. A post by Daniel Halper said that the school — attended by both Obama's and David Gregory's children — had 11 armed guards on staff, citing the 11 members of the security team. The error by the site presuming the security at the Quaker school was armed led to the NRA's two incorrect ads.

Well, yes, it led to them. But the NRA cited an article at Breitbart.com in their longer propaganda piece. Here's the screenshot:

Continue reading »