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.

Tim Corrimal - It's a Tea Party

Bob and Chez - We have questions

News Dissector - Beyond The Spying and Surveillance Story (interview with Fred Branfman)

And then there's this...

All Songs Considered - The Year in Music (so far)

Open Thread below...

Fixurlifeup

The artist currently known as Prince doing cover vocals for 3RDEYEGIRL. Happy Saturday! Whatcha listening to?

Via Bilerico. This is what I mean when I say our politics are now profoundly undemocratic:

The U.S has become a less equal society over the past 30 years, but it didn’t just happen. Inequality in the U.S. happened by design, not by chance. It is the direct result of government policy. David Cay Johnston writes that the top 1 percent had just 10 percent of all reported national income. By 1999 the top 1 percent claimed 20 percent of national income. Since 2000, they have claimed about 1 fifth of national income. During the recovery, from 2009 to 2011, 121 percent of gains in income went to the top 1 percent.

Tax cuts for the wealthy are have driven the wrist in inequality in two ways. The report cited by Johnston and Callahan says that “tax cuts may have led managerial energies to be diverted to increasing their remuneration at the expense of enterprise growth and employment.” That means CEOs are padding their portfolios at the expense of the companies they run. Tax policy not only made the “vulture capitalism” practiced and practically invented by Bain Capital possible, it incentivized and rewarded it.

What we know about tax cuts now is pretty straightforward. Tax cuts of the wealthy won’t stimulate the economy, won’t create jobs, and won’t spread prosperity, because the wealthy don’t spend their tax cuts. Instead, the wealthy save their tax windfalls, to invest when the stock market is booming.

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UPDATE:

(Reuters) - Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul overnight on Sunday, erecting barricades and starting bonfires, after riot police firing teargas and water cannon stormed a park at the center of two weeks of anti-government unrest.

Lines of police backed by armored vehicles sealed off Taksim Square in the center of the city as officers raided the adjoining Gezi Park late on Saturday, where protesters had been camped in a ramshackle settlement of tents.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had warned hours earlier that security forces would clear the square, the center of more than two weeks of fierce anti-government protests that spread to cities across the country, unless the demonstrators withdrew before a ruling party rally in Istanbul on Sunday.

"We have our Istanbul rally tomorrow. I say it clearly: Taksim Square must be evacuated, otherwise this country's security forces know how to evacuate it," he told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters at a rally in Ankara.

Protesters took to the streets in several neighborhoods across Istanbul following the raid on Gezi Park, ripping up metal fences, paving stones and advertising hoardings to build barricades and lighting bonfires of trash in the streets.

Some chanted, "Tayyip, resign."

Local television footage showed groups of demonstrators blocking a main highway to Ataturk airport on the western edge of the city, while to the east, several hundred walked towards a main bridge crossing the Bosphorus waterway towards Taksim.

Wired reports on the latest leak on this week's PRISM story:

A newly leaked NSA document shows that Yahoo began supplying data to the spy agency’s PRISM program after failing a legal fight against a court order it considered too broad, according to a news report.

The internet giant tried to push back against the order some time in 2007 or 2008 and lost, thereby ensuring its entry into the so-called PRISM program the NSA has been using to collect data from internet companies, according to a story published by the New York Times.

PRISM is a classified NSA program, recently exposed by the Guardian and Washington Post, that allows the government to collect and manage data obtained from nine internet companies under secret orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The news sheds some light on how at least one of nine internet companies came to participate in the PRISM program.

According to news stories, each of the internet companies fell in line with the program at separate times over a number of years. It has been unclear until now what led to their inclusion in the program, but theTimes story now provides some insight into how it occurred with Yahoo.

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We've had some extreme weather so far this summer, but most of us never really get to see what hits us. Here is a very impressive video of a supercell as it forms!

The Trans-Pacific trade agreement is a truly vile agreement. I dare anyone to read it and stay an unquestioning Obama booster:

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday sent a letter to President Barack Obama's nominee to head U.S. trade negotiations, expressing concerns about the administration's lack of transparency in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal being negotiated largely in secret.

Labor unions, public health advocates and environmental groups have long decried so-called free trade policies for undermining important regulations in the pursuit of corporate profits. The letter signals that Warren's tough stance on bank regulation extends to other major consumer and public interest matters.

What the public does know about the TPP has been learned through leaked documents. According to those documents, the Obama administration is seeking to grant corporations the ability to directly challenge regulations in countries involved in the talks -- a political power that was typically reserved for sovereign nations until the 1990s. Obama opposed such policies as a presidential candidate in 2008. The leaked intellectual property chapter of the deal includes provisions that would increase the costs of life-saving medicines in poor countries.

Warren's letter does not take issue with specific terms of the negotiations, but rather the secrecy surrounding the process. Members of Congress have been allowed to see TPP negotiation texts. Some have said they were insulted by the complex administrative procedures the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, or USTR, imposed to actually access the texts -- barriers not imposed on unelected corporate advisers.

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Conservative actor John Ratzenberger, who is best known as the character “Cliff” from the television sitcom Cheers, on Friday called for former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to take "something from his gene pool" and "put it everywhere across this great country."

Ratzenberger was introducing West at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference. He also called West a “real American.”

"We should really take something from his gene pool and put it everywhere across this great country," Ratzenberger said. "A real American hero, my friend, Allen West."

It was not immediately clear if Ratzenberger intended for West to personally distribute his DNA or had some other method in mind for sharing the "gene pool."

The average American on food stamps gets just more than $30 a week to shop, but Congress is looking at cutting that budget by 20 percent. Congressman Peter DeFazio is working to prevent those cuts by showing what shopping on food stamps is like.

To protest nutrition assistance cuts this week, twenty-six members of Congress will live off of a food stamp budget this week to draw attention to House Republicans cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Eligibility requirements for the program already leave out 50 million food insecure households, but another 2 million Americans would lose access to food stamps in the proposed changes for the Farm Bill. Currently 47 million Americans receive an average monthly benefit of $133 from the program.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) detailed her grocery plans in a Wednesday blog post:

"This morning, I went shopping for the week on the SNAP budget. Getting your budget down to $4.50 a day is complicated. You need to try to make sure you have enough protein, limit your sodium, and find good vegetables. If you have special dietary needs, like diabetes or an allergy, there's even more to think about."
...
"What I'm thinking about most during this trip is that I'm shopping only for myself."

"When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn't be where I am today. I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind. I could go without breakfast; my sons couldn't. I went through the grocery store today thinking about what I wanted, not what my sons would eat, but that wasn't always the case. I would have bought ground beef and white bread for them, not yams, and certainly not tuna."

Unfortunately, while many Americans are still suffering the effects of the economic downturn, a top priority for Republicans is spending less money on food for poor people.

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Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) told a conservative conference on Friday that comprehensive immigration reform could be turn around a trend of lower birth rates in the U.S. because "immigrants are more fertile."

"Demography is destiny," Bush explained to the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference. "We're going to have fewer workers taking care of a larger number of people that the country has a social contract with to be able to allow them to retire with dignity and purpose. We cannot do that with the fertility rates that we have in our country. We're below break-even today."

"The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system to allow for people to come, to learn English, to play by our rules, to embrace our values and to pursue their dreams in our country with a vengeance, to create more opportunities for all of us," he continued. "This is a conservative idea."

"Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile. And they love families and they have more intact families and they bring a younger population."

Bush said that a comprehensive plan should include securing the border, narrowing the ability of immigrants to petition for extended family members to come to the U.S. and expanding the number of guest workers. He also called a "path to legal status" for the undocumented immigrants who were already in the country, but the former governor did not mention a path to citizenship.