There is nothing about last night’s shows I care to remember.

This week’s guests-

• Wednesday 4/15: Billy Crystal
• Thursday 4/16: Eric Greitens

The real news below.

We can only hope.

NSA and FBI fight to retain spy powers as surveillance law nears expiration

by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Wednesday 15 April 2015 07.15 EDT

Section 215 is the authority claimed by the NSA since 2006 for its ongoing daily bulk collection of US phone records revealed by the Guardian in 2013 thanks to leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden. While the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies last year supported divesting the NSA of its domestic phone metadata collection, a bill to do so failed in November.

…

Yet with Section 215’s lifespan now stretching to a matter of weeks, supporters of broad surveillance powers have yet to put forth a bill for their preservation – evidence, opponents believe, that the votes for reauthorization do not exist, particularly not in the House of Representatives.

…

More likely, according to a multiple Hill sources, is a different option under consideration: making the major NSA reform bill of the last Congress the point of departure for reauthorizing 215 in the current one.

That bill, the USA Freedom Act, passed the House in May 2014 before narrowly failing in November in the Senate. Belatedly, the White House endorsed it, after seeing it had a greater chance of passage than any pro-NSA alternative. Yet the House version lost substantial civil-libertarian support after the intelligence agencies and House leadership weakened its surveillance restrictions, including its central prohibition on the bulk collection of domestic phone records.

…

Advocates of the bill in both congressional chambers, including its original architects, have been laboring for eight weeks in marathon negotiations to revive the USA Freedom Act. The revived bill would extend the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act for a still-undetermined number of years – essentially staking out the center of the 2015-era surveillance debate for a bill that would take NSA out of the domestic bulk-collection business.

Advocates believe they are close enough to agreement that reintroduction could come as early as Thursday and would move through the judiciary committees.

But several privacy activists inside and outside Congress consider the USA Freedom Act insufficient.

The bill would not abridge NSA collection of Americans’ international communications, nor prevent the NSA or the FBI from warrantlessly searching through its troves of them for Americans’ identifying information. Nor would it restrict a constellation of surveillance efforts authorized by a Reagan-era executive order. Even a recently disclosed bulk domestic phone records collection dragnet by the Drug Enforcement Agency would be untouched.

“We should be demanding more reforms than the intelligence agencies are gladly willing to offer us,” said David Segal of the activist group Demand Progress.

…

“A lot of it is going to hinge on the freshmen. Right now, as far as I can tell, the select intelligence committee is making a real strong play to persuade the freshmen that all of these public concerns are overblown,” Massie said.

Miles Thompson

Tonight’s topic is “Creative ways to execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.”  The Panelists are Dan Soder, Keith Robinson, and Alex Wagner.

I don’t know who thought this was funny, or appropriate, days after the conviction and right before the Boston Marathon but they were wrong and should be fired.

Yeah, that includes you Larry and you too Jon if your production company approved it.

This is an Islamophobic media lynching.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the guests- two shock comics one of whom earned their stripes on the Homophobic, Racist, Opus and Anthony show and still appears as a regular, and a “Lean Forward” DLC Operative scum sucking corporatist shill correspondent on the Faux Liberal news network MSNBC.

As angry as I am at Dick Cheney and W who are self admited war criminals who deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Hitler I have never, ever advocated their execution.

Let them rot in Spandau.

Moreover there are many, many unanswered questions about the Boston Marathon Bomb Plot including but not limited to why did the FBI and DHS ignore Tamerlan after labeling him a terrorist?  Why did the FBI execute Tamerlan’s best friend during an interrogation?  Who made the bombs?  The governments story about these issues is as leaky as their case against Bruce Edwards Ivins in the anthrax attacks.

And we know the government lies about these things, just as Police testalie all the time to convict people of color.

Wake up and smell the coffee Larry!

I don’t know if I’ll even bother watching.  I’m disgusted with you Larry that you ever let this air.  You’re deluded or hypocritical, take your pick.

Continuity

Not African Enough For You?

The Daily Show Needs An African American Woman Host

This week’s guests-

• Tuesday 4/14: Fareed Zakaria
• Wednesday 4/15: Billy Crystal
• Thursday 4/16: Eric Greitens

One can only hope Jon is really, really funny tonight because Fareed Zakaria is another corporatist warhawk who only seems good by comparison with the other buckets of slime that ooze from cable news.

Adam Horovitz’s web exclusive extended video and the real news below.

Bernie Sanders Announcement!

Tonight we will be be discussing a far less exciting announcement, that of Hillary Clinton.  The panel will be Debi Mazar, Nia-Malika Henderson, and Ricky Velez.

Continuity

Asaad Minaj (with a cameo by Sam Bee)

This week’s guests-

• Monday 4/13: Adam Horovitz
• Tuesday 4/14: Fareed Zakaria
• Wednesday 4/15: Billy Crystal
• Thursday 4/16: Eric Greitens

Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock, is one of the original Beastie Boys and unless we’re going to discuss his recent feud with Vin Diesel over whether Diesel was ever a dancer for the Beastie Boys.

Elizabeth Warren’s 2 part web exclusive extended video and the real news below.

So it’s race number 3 and it’s time to see if Mercedes has stopped being McLaren stupid (c’mon guys, leaving Hamilton out there on Hards was a bonehead play).  Mediums and Softs, pit lane delta 23 seconds, 1 or 2 seconds a lap on the Softs.  Not a lot of other headline news.

As far as the teams go Ferrari has eclipsed Red Bull but that’s really only gratifying to Sebastian Vettel’s ego.  Alonso is not fast which I charitably attribute to the sack of crap that is Honda power because I would hate to think that his practice accident has taken someone who used to be able to make a brick look racy and ruined them.  Williams is the best of the rest which excites the Brits who commentate except that they are also Ferrari whores.

The good news is that this piece of garbage needs to be wrtten at all.

Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Matters

By ROGER C. ALTMAN and RICHARD N. HAASS

APRIL 3, 2015

But the congressional outlook for this approach – called Trade Promotion Authority, or fast-track negotiating authority, because it does not allow amendments or filibustering – has dimmed. Without it, the agreement would collapse, the victim of endless amendments. The coming vote, therefore, is the equivalent to a vote on the TPP itself. Should it die, the adverse impact on American national security would be great.

The trade debate coincides with growing challenges to America’s allies. In the Western Hemisphere, the governments of Canada and Chile, which are parties to the trade negotiations, believe the accord (despite domestic critics) will stimulate growth. In Asia and the Pacific, parties to the deal – not only our allies Japan and Australia, but also Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia – see the trade accord as a way of counterbalancing China’s economic might. This is why trade is central to our foreign policy; without this deal, the so-called pivot to Asia will be hollow.

…

Free trade leads to greater overall prosperity. The gains from free trade need to be widely shared, but defeating the TPP would not solve America’s problems with inequality. Instead, it would further rattle our allies. “Further” is the key word here, as there already are rising doubts about American reliability – the result of the debt-ceiling crises, government shutdowns, the failure to follow through on threats in Syria and, most recently, the letter addressed to Iran from 47 senators. If the TPP fails, countries that, rightly or wrongly, see Washington as ineffective will pay America less heed.

It’s reasonable to debate the merits of this major trade agreement. But the critics have exaggerated and distorted the economic costs of the accord, while all but ignoring its benefits – and the strategic costs of a rejection. The real choice is between supporting a trade accord that would help most Americans and serve the country’s strategic aims, and defeating it, which would leave the country poorer and the world less stable.

So, basically, ignore your lying eyes and follow us blindly because we’re very serious people and if you say that the Emperor has no clothes you’ll ruin our credibility and we will haz a sad.

(h/t Lambert at Naked Capitalism)

No, not that Right, your other Rite.

Ah, screw it.  Just make three lefts and while you wait for oncoming traffic I’ll passive aggressively stew here with my shotgun and whistle tunelessly.

Do I stress you out?

Oh, you don’t even know.

Le Sacre du printemps

Allow me to review the 3 Rules of Opera-

The 3 rules of Opera.

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

I’m not afraid if the Terpsichorean Muse though I do like a nice bit of cheese-

I was a DJ after all and I know what (shudder) drags them out on the dance floor and it ain’t this-

You see, people only dance to the thoroughly familiar and cliched.

Those are ones I actually like.

Anyway the story of the Ballet goes something like this, the celebration of spring begins in the hills and a Crone enters to foretell the future which isn’t really even as interesting as a cold reading because this is a simpler, more primitive time and every Groundhog Day is pretty much exactly the same.

What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

That about sums it up for me.

Except that today is different.  Today we go and kidnap us some virgins.  I dunno, I kind of agree with that part about the railroad tracks.

And then we celebrate Festivus with the airing of grievances until the Sage comes and tells us to stop it and get on to the orgy.

End of Act I.  Time to hit the lobby and get blasted because things are only going to get worse.

Act II

Evidently the ballerinas were out in the lobby too as they straggle on stage and wander around in circles for no particular reason.  It’s just like a Sigma Alpha Epsilon party at UVA only with more roofies.  One particularly befuddled co-ed is selected for sacrifice, sent off to perform goodness knows what kind of unspeakable acts with a bunch of dirty old men and then dances herself to death much to the amusement of the other performers and outrage of the audience.

Curtain

Yeah, dance your way out of that Stravinsky.

As you might imagine this tale of pedophilic murder created quite a stir, even in Paris a city not noted for Puritanism.  At the debut there was a riot between the wealthy patrons of art and the bohemian hip crowd that liked it for it’s novelty.  From all accounts Nijinsky’s choreography sucked, but I think the whole concept was a bad idea from the git.

Despite my opinion it’s one of the most frequently recorded and performed ballets.

Oh wait, that’s Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.  This is Le Sacre.

Don’t agree with my assessment?  Well, that’s the Politics of Dancing-

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Stingray spying: FBI’s secret deal with police hides phone dragnet from courts

by Jessica Glenza and Nicky Woolf, The Guardian

Friday 10 April 2015 10.49 EDT

Multiple non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) revealed in Florida, New York and Maryland this week show federal authorities effectively binding local law enforcement from disclosing any information – even to judges – about the cellphone dragnet technology, its collection capabilities or its existence.

In an arrangement that shocked privacy advocates and local defense attorneys, the secret pact also mandates that police notify the FBI to push for the dismissal of cases if technical specifications of the devices are in danger of being revealed in court.

The agreement also contains a clause forcing law enforcement to notify the FBI if freedom of information requests are filed by members of the public or the media for such information, “in order to allow sufficient time for the FBI to seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels”.

The strikingly similar NDAs, taken together with documents connecting police to the technology’s manufacturer and federal approval guidelines obtained by the Guardian, suggest a state-by-state chain of secrecy surrounding widespread use of the sophisticated cellphone spying devices known best by the brand of one such device: the Stingray.

…

The Florida agreement – obtained from the Hillsborough County sheriff’s office by the Guardian after a series of Stingray-related Freedom of Information Act requests sent over the past seven months – reads in part:

“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement will, at the request of the FBI, seek dismissal of the case in lieu of providing, or allowing others to use or provide, any information concerning the Harris Corporation wireless collection equipment/technology, its associated software, operating manuals, and any related documentation.”

…

The provision for pushing cases for dismissal rather than reveal information about Stingray capabilities and scope, he said, represented “the FBI’s consistent policy of making local police maintain extraordinary and extreme secrecy”.

…

This kind of sweeping secrecy has led to tense exchanges in courtrooms, and the crumbling of prosecution’s cases, as they attempt to maintain secrecy. City councils may even be unaware that the police departments they oversee are using the devices if the local force has signed similar agreements with the FBI.

Now, defense attorneys appear to be catching on to the practice. In Tallahassee, Florida, the ACLU has amassed a list of more than 300 cases where they believe Stingrays have been used to locate clients, and at least one Florida case recently came undone when defense attorneys began to dig into the involvement of Stingrays.

Oh yeah, tweets.  So yesterday was Monday, last week (between time change, Basketball, appointments, and visitors I’m getting very, very confused).  By Tuesday the real blowback had started centered around 8 admittedly unfunny tweets Trevor Noah made-

• Daily Show’s Trevor Noah under fire for Twitter jokes about Jews and women, by Lauren Gambino, Salon

Frankly I don’t understand insult or physical comedy at all.  The Three Stooges leave me cold and if you’re going to insult someone better it should be like Groucho Marx and not Don Rickles.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

And yet intellectually I understand there is an audience for Jackass and Andrew Dice Clay.

On Tuesday (last week) damage control started-

• Comedy Central stands by new Daily Show host Trevor Noah, by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian

• Put down the Trevor Noah pitchforks: His offensive, unfunny tweets shouldn’t cost him “The Daily Show” just yet, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

• Trevor Noah is more than his worst joke: Yes, it’s possible to talk about those tweets without losing perspective, by Katie McDonough, Salon

• Trevor Noah fires back: Controversial tweets are “not a true reflection of my character”, by Anna Silman, Salon

Some more measured and thoughtful criticism-

• “Daily Show” co-creator sounds off on Trevor Noah: “When you tweet it, make sure you can back it up”, by Colin Gorenstein, Salon

• “Daily Show” correspondent defends Trevor Noah: “If it wasn’t his tweets, I think they would dig up something”, by Anna Silman, Salon

The latest is that he stole jokes-

• Comedian claims Trevor Noah stole jokes: “He’s a thief”, by Colin Gorenstein, Salon

• ‘Daily Show’ Successor Trevor Noah Finds Himself Catching Criticism, Not Dealing It Out, The New York Times

Milton Berle stole every joke he ever told.

Sigh.  I must admit I really want to like Trevor, just like I want to like Larry.  Larry’s show has gotten much, much better now that he’s had a chance to work out the kinks in the format (monologue, bit, panel (now only 3), Keeping it 100) and I expect the same will happen with Trevor.

And it isn’t fair for us to expect that he will be the same as Jon-

• Trevor Noah and “The Daily Show” problem: Why do we insist on holding a TV host to a politician’s standards?, by Sonia Saraiya, Salon

• Is Trevor Noah really proof of US comedy’s soft power, by Brian Logan, The Guardian

(note- Original, unedited video.  You may not want to watch it, but you probably should.)

Civil Rights Attorney Says Cops Have Been Shooting Unarmed People in the Back for Years

The War on Black America

by GLEN FORD, Counter Punch

April 09, 2015

The United States produced a bumper crop of what Billie Holiday would call “Strange Fruit,” in March: at least 111 bodies, the majority of them unarmed men of color, shot down by police in the blood-fertilized streets of American cities. If one just counts the unarmed victims, that’s a rate of about two extrajudicial executions per day, roughly twice the “one every 28 hours” cited by the Malcolm X Grassroots Network’s 2012 report, Operation Ghetto Storm.

Yet, in the same month, President Obama declared Venezuela a threat to the national security of the United States, based largely on the death of 14 “dissidents” during a period of anti-government disturbances back in 2014. Many of the dead were pro-government activists killed by “dissidents.” By contrast, Philadelphia police have been shooting an average of one person a week for the last eight years, the overwhelming majority of them Black and brown, according to a new U.S. Justice Department report. As Frederick Douglass said, “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

All across the country, the granting of impunity for the perpetrators of summary execution of Black men, women and children is “everyday practice” – now certified as “best practice” by Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims court precedents preclude prosecution of killer cops except under the most extreme conditions.

Chill dudes.  Obama got this.