By Steve Rhodes
1. Did that lyric just go “It only hurts when I’m sober?”
Why yes, it did.
2. Typical view from downtown; if you actually live in one of those neighborhoods it looks – and sounds – less than beautiful.
rooftop, looking westward, the unofficial fireworks in every neighborhood are what make independence day in chicago. beyond beautiful.
— David Spielfogel (@spielfogel) July 5, 2013
Spielfogel is a top advisor to Rahm.
3. This is so funny; when an old friend interviewed Usher just as his career was ascending, he tried to get the word “usher” into every answer. Like, “Well, this record is going to usher in a new era . . . ” and so on. What a drip.
4. “As the reporters James Fontanella-Khan and Joshua Chaffin pointed out in the Financial Times this week, American diplomats have for four years now waged ‘an ongoing, multi-agency effort to convince the E.U. to cooperate on a wide array of intelligence gathering, from sharing airline passenger data to watering down consumer data protection legislation,'” Steve Coll writes for the New Yorker.
“Persuading democratic governments to share information on their citizens in the name of counterterrorism or any other security priority is fraught with legal and political problems in the best of circumstances.”
That’s a polite way of putting it. If George W. Bush were still president, we’d be talking about impeachment proceedings.
The fact that Barack Obama still gets a certain benefit of the doubt just goes to show how deep the political brainwashing got.
5. “Imagine the aircraft of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on ‘suspicion’ that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale,” John Pilger writes for the Guardian.
“Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the ‘international community,’ as the governments of the west call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.
“The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane – denied airspace by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to ‘inspect’ his aircraft for the ‘fugitive’ Edward Snowden – was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.”
Also:
I’m still dazzled that a president who said he wouldn’t “scramble jets” over #Snowden scrambled nation states instead.
— John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) July 4, 2013
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German business daily @handelsblatt compares the square footage it takes to physically store NSA data vs. STASI data: http://t.co/WKGaOJIpnJ
— Wolfgang Blau (@wblau) July 5, 2013
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The WaPo called The Guardian a “small British newspaper.” Comscore itself just confirmed. Guardian: 41 million uniques worldwide. Post: 24.
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 3, 2013
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Yet won’t aid the leaker MT @wikileaks: EUParl votes 2 scrap US data-sharing deal unless it reveals spying practices http://t.co/F8GtbrrorT
— Beachwood Reporter (@BeachwoodReport) July 5, 2013
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Dear Twitter: How in the world is “The White House” similar to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch?
— Beachwood Reporter (@BeachwoodReport) July 5, 2013
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6. Human Rights Watch: Countries Should Consider Snowden’s Asylum Claim Fairly.
7. American Exceptionalism: The rules apply to everyone except America.
8. “A Cook County judge has thrown out a libel lawsuit filed by former NBC-TV news reporter Amy Jacobson, who was fired in 2007 after a rival station aired a report of her in a bathing suit at the home of a person of interest in a prominent criminal case,” the Tribune reports.
Jacobson’s lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, says she’ll appeal partly based on her argument that Jacobson wasn’t a public figure at the time, which just goes to show how weak her case is because I’m not sure there’s a court in the land that would rule that a television reporter wasn’t a public figure.
See also: Amy Jacobson’s Resumé.
And plug “Amy Jacobson” in the ol’ Beachwood search box for more of what I’ve written in the matter, because it’s too much to reproduce here.
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But how does Jacobson get fired while those involved in this NBC Chicago fiasco not only retained their jobs but got promoted?
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This is the NBC vice president who was atop the shitshow.
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This was the local handler.
9. “By exposing NSA programs like PRISM and Boundless Informant, Edward Snowden has revealed that we are not moving toward a surveillance state: we live in the heart of one,” Trevor Paglen writes in Turnkey Tyranny for Creative Time Reports.
10. The Week in Chicago Rock.
Including: King’s X, the Go-Gos, Polyphonic Spree, the B-52s, Kinda Good, Swing Out Sisters, Walk The Moon, Janis Ian, Hollywood Undead, Richey Lam.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Move in for the kill.
Posted on July 5, 2013