Commentators here have experienced serious problems since about 12 days ago.

Before that, there was hardly spam comments (viagra ads and the like) on this blog and comments were running relatively smooth.

Then Typepad, the company that runs the basic system of this and many other blogs, introduced a new feature. Like usually, they didn’t bother to inform their customers about this.

Since the new feature was introduced, any comment with more than a few words of plain text is somewhat considered as spam and a CAPTCHA number input is required. Often comments are outright rejected as spam.

There is no way for me to shut off this feature. It is not specific to this blog, but other blogs running on Typepad have the same problem and are also complaining.

As part of the new feature anything falsly identified as spam is now placed in a special folder I can review. I can also manually release comments caught in this scheme from the folder.

But to have real time comments, as it should be, this would require me to sit in front of the screen all day and do nothing else.

This morning there were 48 entries in the spam-folder, 46 of those were legitimate comments (many redundant as people have tried several times.) Two were indeed spam. When 96% of "spam" is legitimate commenting, the spam detection is obviously misconfigurated.

Since December 6, I have complained several times and asked the Typepad help-staff a list of quite specific question. I have received no real answer to my questions on who, what, why, what to do. Instead, they sent me links to some superficial knowledgebase pieces which do not answer any questions and to marketing texts that laud the new feature. Today they asked me if I have any specific questions. Huh?

For now I’ll manually release the comments falsly caught as spam. If your comment is caught as such, please do not try to enter it again. I will try to release such comments as often as I find time, which should be several times a day.

When I release such comments, they have the timemark of when they were posted by you. Therefore, as the comment threads are chronological, you suddenly may find "new" comments upthread.

Between the coming holidays I should finally find some time to move the blog away from Typepad. The company has several times shown behaviour like this, i.e. interfered with the blogs the customers pay them to run and being completely unresponsive when they screw up.

It delivers a bad service that does not deserve customers at all.

Typepad sucks.

We welcome your comments, news and views …

The WaPo staff writers Eggen and Pincus report on a fight between the FBI and the CIA.

The CIA claims torture helped to get information from one Abu Zubaida in Pakistan. The FBI says the torturing didn’t give any useful infromation and Abu Zubaida is just a deranged man anyway.

In describing what happened, Eggen and Pincus slip in this sentence:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III eventually ordered the FBI team to withdraw from the interrogation, largely because bureau procedures prohibit agents from being involved in such techniques, according to several officials familiar with the episode.

"Bureau procedures prohibit …"?

There was a time when laws prohibited the FBI to take part in torture.

Now there are mere "bureau procedures"?

This hot from the wire:

Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) decided to postpone by six months a referendum on the future of the city of Kirkuk, Agence France-Presse reported Dec. 17, citing KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution stipulated that the referendum be held by the end of 2007, but Barzani said it was delayed for "technical reasons."

Let me explain Barzani’s technical reasons involved here.

Back in October the U.S. administration offered the Turks to bomb the Kurdish PKK guerrilla in north Iraq:

While the use of US soldiers on the ground to root out the PKK would be the last resort, the US would be willing to launch air strikes on PKK targets, the official said, and has discussed the use of cruise missiles.

The U.S. offer was politely refused and yesterday the Turks sent 50+ of their own planes:

Cont. reading: Barzani ‘Got the Message’

In Vanity Fair economist Joseph Stiglitz writes about The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush. He has some sobering numbers:

The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting.

…
Inequality is now widening in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century. A young male in his 30s today has an income, adjusted for inflation, that is 12 percent less than what his father was making 30 years ago.
…
As many as 1.7 million Americans are expected to lose their homes in the months ahead. For many, this will mean the beginning of a downward spiral into poverty. Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent.

…
Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix—and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever.

Stieglitz has some prescriptions I can agree with. Especially a hefty rise of taxes on the rich and a general move from taxes on "the good things" like labor towards taxes on "the bad things" like pollution.

But who can be the candidate measuring up with FDR to implement this stuff?

Paul Krugman thinks Edwards is the best available choice. Today he writes against Obama’s Big Table Fantasies:

Over the last few days Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have been conducting a long-range argument over health care that gets right to this issue. And I have to say that Mr. Obama comes off looking, well, naïve.

…
[In the debate] Mr. Edwards replied, “Some people argue that we’re going to sit at a table with these people and they’re going to voluntarily give their power away. I think it is a complete fantasy; it will never happen.”

This was pretty clearly a swipe at Mr. Obama, who has repeatedly said that health reform should be negotiated at a “big table” that would include insurance companies and drug companies.

…
As health care goes, so goes the rest of the progressive agenda. Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world.

I have read a bit about Obama and certainly do not like his neocon illusions. But I don’t know much about Edwards.

Who is financing his campaign? Who is on his staff? What is his likely foreign policy?

The LA Times has a preview of the post-surge plans for the U.S. military in Iraq:

In a change of plans, American commanders in Iraq have decided to keep their forces concentrated in Baghdad when the buildup strategy ends next year, removing troops instead from outlying areas of the country.

The original plans were to ‘thin out’ the troops, but to keep some posture in every part of Iraq.

The Iraqi puppet government is protesting against the plans, especially because control of Anbar will now go to the U.S. paid ‘awakening’ tribes.

But the occupiers don’t care what the pesky Iraqi government thinks. Their plans include its likely removal:

Cont. reading: The New Iraq Strategy – Waiting For Regime Change

The new Lichtenblau, Risen, Shane piece on domestic spying deserves notice as it dispels with some myths.

Myth 1: "It’s about terrorism"

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, …

Myth 2: "It began after 9/11"

In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.

Cont. reading: Myths about N.S.A. Domestic Spying

The Bali Action Plan will not matter much as it does not include binding commitments. But the conference showed an interesting change in attitude towards U.S. neocon stubbornness.

Earlier Enviro-Bamboozler James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, proclaimed:

We will lead. The U.S. will lead, but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.

The arrogance of demanding ‘leadership’ in doing nothing was not appreciated by those ‘others’:

The head of the U.S. delegation, Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, announced the United States was rejecting the plan. Her comments were met by booing from other delegations.

[…]

Cont. reading: Bali Fallout

This is the State of the Union:

The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.
[…]
Earlier reports, based on tax returns, showed that in 2005 the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and fractions of the top 1 percent enjoyed their greatest share of income since 1928 and 1929.

[…]
On average, incomes for the top 1 percent of households rose by $465,700 each, or 42.6 percent after adjusting for inflation. The incomes of the poorest fifth rose by $200, or 1.3 percent, and the middle fifth increased by $2,400 or 4.3 percent.

The consequences:

The 1920s "boom" enriched only a fraction of the American people. Earnings for farmers and industrial workers stagnated or fell. While this represented lower production costs for companies, it also precluded growth in consumer demand.  Thus, by the mid 1920s the ability of most Americans to purchase new automobiles, new houses and other durable goods was beginning to weaken.
…

Cont. reading: Income Disparity Depression

Cloned Poster points to an interesting BBC Newsnight story about an influential UK thinktank and its faked research.

As the Guardian sums up:

A rightwing thinktank which claimed to have uncovered extremist literature on sale at dozens of British mosques was last night accused of basing a report on fabricated evidence.

The report by Policy Exchange alleged that books condoning violent jihad and encouraging hatred of Christians, Jews and gays were being sold in a quarter of the 100 mosques visited.

But BBC2’s Newsnight said examination of receipts provided by the researchers to verify their purchases showed some had been written by the same person – even though they purported to come from different mosques.

Several receipts also misspelled the names or addresses of the mosques where the books were supposedly sold.
[…]
Policy Exchange’s research director, Dean Godson, insisted it stood by the report "100%". He said the thinktank had checked its evidence thoroughly and the allegations did not challenge the substance of the study – that such extremist literature was being widely sold.

The Policy Exchange report was published on the evening of the Saudi king’s state visit to the U.K. It was certainly intended to somewhat influence it.

Dean Godson, the Policy Exchange’s research director, is such an extremist neocon that even the editorial page of the rightwing ToryTelegraph fired him. As the Telegraph editor explained:

Cont. reading: Spoilt Brats

Still no cats in my home, so no Friday cat blogging, and also no new barfly artwork to present. Instead, I’ll deliver some porn.

Here is a brand new crane that fascinates me since it was announced in April this year.

This is a GTK 1100, a crane specifically build for erecting wind energy mills, at its very first job. (bigger pic)

It is a product of Grove, a U.S. company belonging to the Manitowoc group. But it was engineered and manufactured in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, by a former part of the Krupp group. The idea for this thing came from the junior chief of a German crane operating company, Wiesbauer, which now owns its very first instantiation.

The top high of the crane is 140 meters, 460 feet. Top load is some 100 metric tons, 110 U.S. tons.

The new idea in it is the self-erecting telescopic tower and its bracing. The tower carries a slightly modified top part of a typical telescopic road crane.

So far lattice boom cranes have been used to erect big wind mills. (Here in some recent work on a 5 megawatt tower).

The new GTK 1100 needs only 4-5 truck loads to be transported and it is set up in about six hours. Lattice boom cranes need 15+ truckloads and take days to be erected. Sure, they do have a higher top capacity, but that isn’t needed for these energy mills.

A nice computer animation of the GTK concept shows some details. And last week saw the GTK’s very first erection and job in the field. Good pictures are available in a German crane forum here and here. (Also at the Wiesbauer site: 1, 2, 3, 4.) There isn’t much of technical descriptions out yet, but an unofficial version of a brochure is this pdf from a (slow) Polish site.

Cont. reading: Friday Crane Porn: GTK 1100

On the front page of the Washington Post, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart W. Bowen Jr, is assassinated by Robin Wright. Bowen has been lauded for reveiling several corruption scandals of U.S. personal and contractors in Iraq.

The long piece is based on anonymous accounts of "officials" and "current and former employees". The main accusations:

Current and former employees have complained about overtime policies that allowed 10 staff members to earn more than $250,000 each last year. They have questioned the oversight of a $3.5 million book project about Iraq’s reconstruction modeled after the 9/11 Commission report. And they have alleged that Bowen and his deputy have improperly snooped into their staff’s e-mail messages.

Working in Iraq, the Inspector General’s people get 70% in hazard overpay. They also work much longer than they would do in DC – there isn’t much else they can do in Iraq – and that certainly makes the pay seem less scandalous.

The piece doesn’t go much into the oversight issues, though it quotes a minority(!) staff director of the House Oversight committee to say that there is an ongoing investigation of the inspectors office. But the inspector general says that investigation was closed. Couldn’t Robin Wright find the truth? Why wasn’t the majority leader asked?

And like any other bosses, the inspector general had announced a policy of reviewing emails his coworkers send in their official capacity. Email from official accounts isn’t private.

While going into small details of the above and the IG’s work, the hit piece forgets to mention how in 2006 Republicans in Congress tried to shut down the Inspector Generals office:

[T]ucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.
[…]
The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.

That decision was later reversed. But why wasn’t this included in the piece at all? Would it have shed light on the sources of the accusations?

The best guess is that Halliburton and Blackwater promissed some additional advertising in the Post. If only that pesky Inspector General could be taken off their back …

I haven’t written much about the War on Iraq recently. The very reason is that there isn’t much happening to write about. Of course the killing goes on – without making headlines. Resistance bombs blowing up in this or that part of Iraq, dead people turning up every day. Sunni on Shia violence, Sunni on Sunni, Shia on Shia, the U.S. on everyone …

But there is no process. Peter Beinart has been lambasted for asserting that Iraq will not matter in the 2008 election. If everything stays the way that it is now, he is right. Today Iraq still matters in the polls, but eleven month from now?

One cannot follow the daily barrage of death and carnage with analysis. There are some subtle movements of this or that tribal coalition and Badger thankfully tries to follow those. But do they really matter?

In the U.S. nothing is happening either. The Democrats will give Bush all the money he wants to further wage war and will not attach even one tiny string to it. In their logic, they would be weak if they don’t give in to Bush’s demands.

Something big needs to happen and will. If a trend can not go on forever, at some point, it will stop. The longer the now perceived calm continues, the bigger will be the outbrake from the trend, or rather the suprise about the divergence.

As Patrick Cockburn explains, Nothing is Resolved in Iraq

Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.

A new generation of fighters is coming to age. The girls and boys that were 13 or 14 when the U.S. invaded, are now grown ups. They don’t remember Saddam, only the GIs that broke their homes door and shamed their fathers.

The treacherous perceived quietness might last for months or blow up tomorrow. Beinart is right, if everything stays the way it is now. Given his prediction record, we can be sure that it will not do so.

by Debs is Dead
lifted from a comment

‘Newfie’ Gwynne Dyer has just written an interesting piece on the unraveling Kosovo conundrum.  I have included a link from my local fishwrap, the article will be syndicated through "liberal in name" rags around the planet.

In this article Dyer discusses the the cleft stick the EU nations
find themselves in over Kosovo and Russian opposition to independence.

The problem is that while no one likes Russia or their new
hydrocarbon pricing structure, and they certainly support some airy
fairy wish like "all Kosovars should be free" they like the notion of
forcing a sovereign state to fragment against it’s will, even less.

Who? What? Why? Could people possibly think that a culturally
distinct minority shouldn’t be allowed to up sticks and create their
own state?

Well how about Spain (the Basques), Cyprus (the Turks), and Romania
(Magyars and Roma). That’s just for a start the English wouldn’t be
happy if the Welsh or Scots rediscovered their balls and flicked away
hundreds of years of oppression, neither would France (Basque and
Catalan) or probably even Germany – Bernhard; I imagine there are still
some minorities in the East who didn’t get free when Germany was carved
up after the Nazi defeat, aren’t there?

Cont. reading: Kosovo Sovereignty

The Fed today announced to inject another thick pile of billions into the credit markets:

The Fed, the U.S. central bank, said it would launch a "temporary term auction facility" that banks can use to secure loans at its discount window.

"This facility could help promote the efficient dissemination of liquidity when the unsecured interbank markets are under stress," the Fed said in a statement.

The banks do not trust each other anymore. They refrain from lending one another on normal terms. This because no one knows how much bad debt any bank is holding. There are just too many off-balance-sheet vehicles out there holding bad debt: mortgages, car loans, credit card loans. Who owns these vehicles? What is the real value of their holdings? What happens if they have to liquify their holdings? Will their sponsor bank have to take the loss? Does it have enough capital to take the loss?

All these questions are open. Now the Fed steps in and takes on the risk other banks do not want to take. The NYT’s Floyd Norris sees Fear at the Fed:

Cont. reading: The Fed’s Credibility

The blog lives through your comments.

News & views … open thread …

Picking up from Hannah K. O’Luthon:

None of the following links are "nice", but overall they seem to
indicate that the question of CIA torture (who ordered it, who did it,
and what it wrought on both its victims and its perpetrators) is about
to be reconsidered under a more intense light than previously.

In
particular the ABC interview with John Kiriakou (transcripts here and here) will merit analysis beyond that of the 230 comments at the ABC site or the discussion at Larry Johnson’s No Quarter blog or the TPM Muckraker site . 

We seem (in my un-informed view) to be once again in the presence of a
little fish being tossed into the mediatic maw while those really
responsible remain in the shadows.

The interview with Kirakou seems to be well prepared and the man is very careful in what he does say and does not say. It certainly pushes the spotlight on those who ordered the "Verschärfte Vernehmungen" (enhanced interrogations), i.e. torture.

I am not sure why this is put out now, but together with the recent hit-piece on Pelosi, it smells like part of a CIA warning campaign to the torture enablers in the White House and Congress. "If you go after us, we know how to pay back …"

There is, by the way, a direct connection between systematic nazi-torture in German concentration camps and the torture methods used by the CIA. This was laid out and backed by documents in recent German TV documentations.

A main figure in the connection is Henry K. Beecher, an anesthetist at Harvard Medical School. He reviewed medical journals of experiments in Dachau for the U.S. Army and he ‘debriefed’ Dr. Walter Schreiber, who assigned and directed medical ‘research’ in German concentration camps like Dachau.

Beecher also experimented with drugs, especially mescaline, to get the ‘truth’ out of prisoners. At least one of the persons he ordered to be drugged was killed by it. Beecher took part in the CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE which, in the early 1950s, researched interrogation methods by ‘experiments’ on humans in Germany.

The results of the project were summed up in the CIA document "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" which describes interrogation techniques, including "coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources". The document was the base of the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" used by the infamous School of the Americas. The trail continues through Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture — from Latin America to Iraq.

All methods used in Dachau, long standing, cold rooms, dogs, nakedness, drugs, were also used on CIA prisoners after 9/11. That is not a coincidence.

There is a direct track from Dachau to Abu Ghraib and it passes through Langley, Virginia. That track would not exist without the tacit approval and funding by Washington.

The recent CIA revelations are, in my view, designed to remind the co-conspirators in DC of their complicity in these crimes. This just a day before the Congressional hearings about the ‘destroyed’ CIA videotapes of waterboarding and other torture.

The reporting about the presidential candidates is tiring. Journalists are diving deep into the ‘real’ issues. They explain in detail the concepts this or that candidate presents about health insurance, farm subsidies or trivialities like waging wars.

But nobody cares for this stuff. Too many reports are about the issues the candidates stand for. Voters don’t bother to read them. They’d rather want to know about the candidates legs.

We are therefore thankful to WaPo’s talented Robin Givhan deep meditation on the candidate who is Wearing the Skirt:

The mind, so easily distracted by things mauve and lemon yellow, strays from more pressing concerns to ponder the sartorial: How many skirts does Rudi Giuliani have in his closet? And does he ever wear them in the same combination more than once?
[…]

Cont. reading: WaPo on Wearing the Skirt

by Debs is Dead
lifted from a comment

Virtually every human who takes an interest in things beyond their
front gate will have noticed the announcement by News Corp that Rupert
Murdoch’s son James Murdoch has been appointed heir apparent of the despicable NewsCorp.

The Grauniad’s Sunday edition, "The Observer" provides a little more
detail on the position James has been stuffed in to, in a weekend
sycophantic puff piece called a ‘profile’.
Writer James Robinson must consider he may one day return to the
Murdoch stable, which famed for their elephantine memory of past
slights is not a mob you want to offend. He therefore describes James
as a ‘quiet family man’.

Which is interesting because as Robinson goes on to say:

. . ."a newly created post at its parent company News
Corp, where he will run the group’s European and Asian operations. He
takes responsibility for the Times, the Sun and the News of The World,
the group’s powerful stable of British newspapers, a move that makes
him the most powerful opinion-former in the country. . . ."

Those unfamiliar with NewsCorp’s english titles other than The
Times, should know that News of the World and the Sun are the two most
reviled rags in the foul swill which passes for an English media. They
specialize in black-mailer style traps of their ‘marks’ where anyone
who has had 15 minutes or more exposure especially by way of a rival
publication’s exclusive, is likely to be set up with a live boy, dead
girl, gerbil and a container load of whatever drug the rag’s
‘contractors’ can get their hands upon. The result is then video-taped
at some ‘country hotel’ away from London to ensure that the victim has
no redress, Yet another human has their world destroyed in the
interests of selling the nasty, racist and capitalist lies the papers
put between their revelations about minor pop singers, fading athletes
, and of course, "The Royals".

What a quiet family man hopes to achieve by supervising this blackmailer’s paradise is difficult to imagine.

Cont. reading: Third time is a charm?

by beq

She Lived in Dread of Rumors
by beq

(bigger) 

beq adds music by Kodo, especially song no. 9 from the Mondo Head album: Echo Bells.

Somehow the download doesn’t work for me (maybe it is geographically limited?), but there are some Mondo Head tracks available at the producers website.