• the initial protests were peaceful and yet the crackdown was violent, much more than necessary. Erdogan has never really apologized for this.
• he has widened the crackdown further than what is reasonable:

 taking aim not just at the demonstrators themselves, but also at the medics who treat their injuries, the business owners who shelter them and the foreign news media flocking here to cover a growing political crisis threatening to paralyze the government of Prıme Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

• his language has been eerily similar to that of Assad in Syria:

Mr. Erdogan then singled out BBC, CNN and Reuters, saying, “for days, you fabricated news.”

“You portrayed Turkey differently to the world,” he continued. “You are left alone with your lies. This nation is not the one that you misrepresented to the world.”

…

Mr. Erdogan said Sunday that even the owners of luxury hotels near Taksim Square who had provided refuge to protesters fleeing the chaos of the police raid were linked to terrorism.

“We know very well the ones that sheltered in their hotels those who cooperated with terror,” he said at the rally. “Will they not be held accountable? If we do not hold them accountable, then the nation will hold us accountable.”

…

By Sunday, Mr. Erdogan sought to thoroughly delegitimize any opposition to his governance, linking the effort to save the park to a recent terrorist attack in Reyhanli, in southern Turkey, which was connected to the Syrian civil war and killed dozens.

“I wonder what these foreigners who came to Taksim Square from all corners of the world were doing,” he said. “We have seen the same plots in Reyhanli.”

His opponents are foreigners and terrorists. This is dangerous language aimed at dehumanizing the opposition and could easily lead to more violence.

Ok, I don’t know how this connects to Father’s Day, but it’s a nice picture. Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there.

Joseph P. Marchese Jr. wrote a letter to the BRA last month — one day after the Globe reported that the Sox were seeking a permanent extension of their current concession rights — saying he would pay $3 million for a 10-year contract. His offer is roughly double the annual rate paid by the Sox since the franchise began leasing the public street during the 2003 baseball season.

Marchese shared the letter with the Globe after the BRA failed to acknowledge his bid within four weeks, and said he is considering suing the agency on the grounds that he is being denied “the opportunity to be competitive and make a living.”

This is not so funny:

Cunha’s predecessor, Gregory W. Sullivan, wrote in a December letter that the BRA’s claim to rightfully control the street is dubious because it is based on a determination that the thriving area around Fenway Park is a slum in need of redevelopment. If the city grants another license after the Red Sox contract expires at the end of this season, it should conduct open bidding, he added.

…

The original arrangement was not subject to the state’s open bid law because the BRA — technically independent of the city government — took control of the street by eminent domain and labeled the Red Sox deal a demonstration project meant “to protect against urban blight.”

To sign another no-bid contract with the Sox, the BRA would have to exercise its eminent domain power again, maintaining that the strip of Yawkey Way is a blighted area.

The only reason Yawkey Way has had problems in the past is that the Red Sox have been such bad neighbors, not controlling their fans. I also find it interesting that the BRA is going to continue to call the area a blighted area. The whole idea behind this designation is to improve the area, if the area is still blighted then this ‘solution’ hasn’t worked and should be dropped–10 years is long enough to decide if something works isn’t it?

Of course, that isn’t the point. It’s really a gift to the Red Sox, as Marchese points out:

Marchese, who runs a law practice in Revere, contends that such a designation is “ridiculous and a means to circumvent the open bid law.”

“My take is if it’s a public way and we’re all taxpayers, we should have the same right to bid as the Red Sox,” said Marchese, a former alderman in Everett.

Hours before the State Duma passed the Kremlin-backed law in a 436-0 vote with one abstention, more than two dozen protesters were attacked by hundreds of antigay activists and then detained by police.

The bill banning the ‘‘propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations’’ still needs to be passed by the appointed upper house and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, but neither step is in doubt.

The measure is part of an effort to promote traditional Russian values instead of Western liberalism, which the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church see as corrupting Russian youth and contributing to the protests against Putin’s rule.

A widespread hostility to homosexuality is shared by much of Russia’s political and religious elite.  Lawmakers have accused gays of decreasing Russia’s already low birth rates and said they should be barred from government jobs, undergo forced medical treatment, or be exiled.

The State Duma passed another bill on Tuesday that makes offending religious feelings a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

and:

Pope Francis lamented that a ‘‘gay lobby’’ was at work at the Vatican in private remarks to the leadership of a key Latin American church group — a stunning acknowledgment that appears to confirm earlier reports about corruption and dysfunction in the Holy See.

It makes me really want to join a religion … they’re so loving and inclusive. The bit about the demonstrators has a nice touch–they get beaten up, then arrested (I wonder what the charge was, beating themselves up?).

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is still working on his explanation for why he told Senator Ron Wyden in March that the NSA does not wittingly “collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” As we now know, the NSA does precisely that — metadata (but not content) from pretty much every phone call made in America is collected and stored.

On Thursday, Clapper claimed, “What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens’ e-mails. I stand by that.” Of course, that’s not what he said, and everyone knows it, because video. So now Clapper says that he simply has a different definition of collect than most humans, and this defniition allowed him to answer in the “least untruthful manner.” He admits that this explanation is probably “too cute by half.”

So, the person we’re supposed to trust lied to Congress. And:

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq’s illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ”unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq.

”I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse,” General Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

I’m sorry, but I don’t trust him.

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of US phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon’s land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too. Another secret program revealed Thursday scours the Internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine US-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.

In his first comments since the programs were publicly revealed this week, Obama said safeguards are in place.

Government secrecy is anathema to a democracy and this isn’t good enough:

Obama said he came into office with a ‘‘healthy skepticism’’ of the program and increased some of the ‘‘safeguards’’ on the programs. He said Congress and federal judges have oversight on the program, and a judge would have to approve monitoring of the content of a call and it’s not a ‘‘program run amok.’’

Notice the sleight of hand here:

Senior administration officials defended the programs as critical tools and said the intelligence they yield is among the most valuable data the US collects. Clapper said the Internet program, known as PRISM, can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S, and that  data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum.

Let’s see:

Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade, Md., key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by The Post instruct new analysts to make quarterly reports of any accidental collection of U.S. content, but add that “it’s nothing to worry about.”

Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. The same math explains the aphorism, from the John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from any other person.

In other words, every search collects data about Americans and it’s not a big deal.

The government, like every other organization in existence, responds to pressure and because of that, they will never voluntarily give up added security powers. This is because of the way the public reacts to security issues–if there are civil rights infringements the public doesn’t respond that loudly, but it responds very loudly indeed to security break-downs (such as the bombing in Boston). This means that the default will be to add surveillance to a person that is suspected of a crime even if there’s no real reason for this suspicion.

Think of this example: I call the number of someone who is an actual high-level criminal. The response very well might be to put me on security lists which will mean that I will start to have very real difficulties, for example if I want to fly anywhere. If I called the number by mistake (maybe I know someone who has a number similar to it), then I’m going to be very upset by all this added scrutiny (especially because it’s almost impossible to get off such lists  since they and the whole program will be secret, so I can’t prove I’m on one) but most people will assume I must have done something wrong and ignore me. On the other hand, if I really am a terrorist and end up committing some atrocity there will be a huge outcry if I wasn’t put on such a list. So, on the list I go … unless there is also a large outcry when innocents are put on the list.

I think I’m going to have to start calling numbers like 672-968-7825 and 672-382-5633.