This evening's music features Texas blues and boogie-woogie piano player Dave Alexander aka Omar Sharriff.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an “orderly transition” of the NSA’s domestic dragnet. Carlin did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May.

But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection.

“This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute.”

US Strikes ISIS Fighters to Protect al-Qaeda Town in NW Syria

Up until the past few days, US airstrikes in Syria have come in two forms, the ones aimed at directly aiding Kurdish factions against ISIS, and the kind meant to just cause damage to ISIS without an eye toward aiding anyone. Monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is now reporting the first US strikes in aid of a “non-Kurdish” faction in Syria.

The strikes, which began on Friday, were meant to blunt an ISIS offensive against the city of Azaz, which is held by a coalition of Islamist rebels that is dominated by al-Qaeda. Eight were killed in the airstrikes, and 20 wounded.

That was just the tip of the iceberg, however, as the Islamists reported they were “tipped off” about ISIS positions in advance, and captured a large number of them over the subsequent days, publicly beheading a number of captive ISIS fighters.

Too wimpy for the Navy:

I propose the following "get back to basics" ad campaign:

Navy Drops Humanitarian Ad Campaign, Looks for Something More Appropriate

Six months after abandoning its humanitarian but underperforming slogan, “America’s Navy. A global force for good,” the U.S. Navy is making an $84 million bet on a new, presumably more muscular advertising agency.

The Pentagon recently announced that Young and Rubicam, a slick Manhattan marketing firm, has won the Navy’s advertising contract for its recruitment effort for one year. Y&R rival Lowe Campbell Ewald had been exclusively retained by the Navy for 15 years until it was ousted.

Dan Flint, a marketing professor at the University of Tennessee told The Intercept that the feel-good message “did not motivate young men and women to act — and worse it demotivated those who served.”

Why? “The campaign was too soft for a war fighting force,” he said. “It might have played well to some outside audiences, namely some of our allies, but not recruits, service members or even our enemies.” But it’s “not quite the campaign that evokes confidence, power or fear,” he said.

“It does not tap into pride enough,” he added. “And worse, it and the humanitarian aide aspects of their missions made some service members feel confused as to why they were there and if they were losing their war fighting capabilities.”

Another approach to correcting a dysfunctional government:

Protests In Mexico Force Officials To Cancel An Election

In Rare Move, Community Seeks Murder Charges for Cops Who Killed Tamir Rice

Forced by a sluggish and dysfunctional justice system to take matters into their own hands, a group of community leaders, clergy, and civil rights activists in Cleveland will ask a judge on Tuesday to order the arrest of the officers who killed Tamir Rice, the black 12-year-old shot dead in November while carrying a toy gun in a park.

The community group will make its announcement at a 11 am press conference Tuesday morning. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the group plans to file several affidavits under a rarely used state law asking a Cleveland Municipal Court judge to issue arrest warrants for Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback in connection with the November 22 shooting. That law, passed in 1960, allows any person with knowledge of the facts of a case to file sworn affidavits asking a judge to find probable cause to sign off an arrest warrant.

The group is seeking charges including aggravated murder and manslaughter.

"We are still waiting for the criminal justice system to enact justice in the name of Tamir Rice," said Rev. Dr. Jawanza Colvin, pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, in a press release. "It has been more than six months since his tragic death and, yet, the people still have no answers and no one has been held accountable. Today, citizens are taking matters into their own hands utilizing the tools of democracy as an instrument of justice." ...

Should the community group succeed, the case would still eventually be sent to a grand jury. Ohio's constitution guarantees a person charged with a felony the right to have their evidence heard by a grand jury, which could hand up an indictment charging the officers, or decline to indict them. However, if the group's affidavits are approved, the officers' arrest would be followed by a public hearing, which community members said would be preferable to allowing prosecutors to operate in secret.

Tea Party Oddsmaker Has Best Campaign Finance Reform Idea Yet (Really)

Yes, the presidential race next year may cost $5 billion. But rather than gasping at that, remember that the U.S. annual gross domestic product is $17 trillion, so $5 billion is about 0.03 percent of our economy. The U.S. is expected to spend $190 billion in 2016 on advertising alone, so $5 billion is only 2.6 percent of that — and there’s only a presidential race every four years, so a better comparison is to say the presidential election will cost perhaps 0.6 percent of total U.S. advertising in 2016-19.

So the problem isn’t that we’re spending too much on politics. Instead, it’s two problems: we’re spending way too little, and what money there is is coming from far too few people.

That’s why it’s good news to see “The Tea Party Case Against Mega-Donors” by John Pudner, in which Pudner advocates “giving average citizens a $200 tax credit for their small campaign contribution to the candidate of their choice.” ... To understand the potential scale of this proposal, you have to multiply the number of adult American citizens (about 230 million) by $200, to get $46 billion. With that kind of money flowing into politics, it wouldn’t be necessary to try to keep out money from the Koch Brothers (or George Soros); it would simply be swamped by much larger amounts coming from regular people.

It’s not hard to see why genuine grassroots conservatives might find this concept appealing. It’s simple, straightforward and wouldn’t create a big bureaucracy, it’s clearly constitutional and it doesn’t require the government to make decisions about what constitutes acceptable political speech. Liberals would be wise to start exploring whether this is potential ground for a right-left alliance to drain the stinking swamp of U.S. politics.

Also of interest:

By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years

Why repealing Citizens United won’t save American democracy