This from Larry Johnson, ex-CIA, terrorism expert, and political progressive (check his blogroll)

As the official bubble burster let me state for the record, this is patent nonsense. State Department officers do not write memos to Hayden. Particularly mid-level Foreign Service Officers. A CIA officer under diplomatic cover sends his communications to headquarters via an encoded message. We call these messages cables, harkening back to the days of telegraphs and telegrams.

This, in my judgment, is the work–very clumsy work at that–of the Venezuelan intelligence service eager to build on the truth that the United States has sought to oust Chavez. All of this is quite convenient with Venezuelan elections on the horizon. It may be hamhanded, but for internal Venezuelan consumption, this is brilliant psyops and should help Chavez further demonize the equally clumsy Americans.

Indeed, why would CIA leave a document like that lying around and not send it encrypted? Or even write it down at all? Sounds like a battle between dumb and dumber here.

Tip: Russell King.

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The Uganda counter-insurgency effort in Mogadishu has been effective despite their ancient low-tech equipment. Why? They have the locals on their side.

Work those social networks. Add “credible” firepower to that, and it doesn’t matter if your tanks were built in 1960 and you’ve never so much as seen a drone.

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So now there’s still some time to fight it, even as the British government makes clear their policy of deporting dissidents to Uzbekistan if they don’t qualify for asylum - knowing full well they will be tortured upon their return.

The process was fast-tracked, which means evidence was ignored and defense had but a week to prepare. Was that a kangaroo I saw jumping by?

The judge’s behaviour was a disgrace, and let me be plain I do have contempt of her court, deep contempt. But she was merely indicative of the general mindset of the “Fast-track”, a disgraceful device by which the government seeks to curry favour with the tabloids by increasing deportation numbers.

Boosting New Labour with focus groups infinitely outweighs the torture to death of the odd dissident.

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Headzup creates short (25 seconds or so) zany political humor video cartoons designed to be shared via cell phone, iPod, or even (how old school is this) viewed online.

This interview with John Shay, Headzup co-founder, was done by phone and email.

I met John at Gnomedex 2005 as Headzup was just getting started. He wasn’t sure if it would have legs or not. Now it’s getting mentioned in CNN, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, is linked to from zillions of blogs, and growing fast with multiple distribution networks. Most excellent!

Q. What is headzup?

A. Headzup is the world’s first daily political cartoon for video-enabled cell phones. Seven days a week, Headzup publishes short (25 second) video clips that fans can watch over the Internet or on mobile devices. Using their cell phones, fans can share the tiny video clips with others the same as they would a picture message. Headzup represents a uniquely viral form of free speech with clips traversing the globe several times within minutes of publication.

Q. What’s your inspiration?

A. Headzup was created on the notion that an inspired combination of political satire and mobile peer-to-peer file sharing would result in the creation of a new form of free speech and entertainment. Headzup is pioneering a new form of mobile entertainment that we call “Catch & Release Comedy”. Fans interact with the content using multimedia cell phones to first catch the comedy and then release it back into the wild by forwarding it to others. There’s no limit to the number of people sharing a Headzup.

Q. How do you make the clips?

A. Headzup is produced and directed by comedian and cartoonist Matthew Filipowicz. The majority of the the animation is done using Adobe Flash software. The clips are rendered to uncompressed AVI video format and than transcoded to 3GP format for mobile distribution.

Q. Explain to non-techies how the cell phone distribution works

A. The two key elements to producing Catch & Release Comedy clips are 1) create clips that are small enough to be shared across cellular networks as picture messages, and 2) encode the clips for mobile playback.

Although the size of video clip that can be shared between cell phones can vary from network to network, the lowest common denominator for all cellular networks is 100K. With fairly intense digital compression, a 100K mobile video clips equates to approximately 25 seconds of video. Generally speaking, videos longer than 25 seconds (larger than 100K) have difficultly passing across network boundaries.

Encoding for mobile playback is fairly straight forward and is supported by most video encoding software tools. Interested readers can download multiple versions of each Headzup clip from our website to see how mobile image quality varies from Internet encoded videos. Formats available for download include Windows Media, Mpeg4, iPod ready 3GP, and mobile ready 3GP. For the bleeding edge readers, mobile versions can be download directly to a cell phone by pointing their cell phone browser at www.headzup.tv

Q. What kinds of distribution deals do you have. Do you make different clips for different partners?

Headzup is distributed through a variety of partner relationships and, of course, we’re always looking for new avenues for collaboration.

With over 200 cartoons in circulation we’re starting to see fairly rapid growth on our YouTube director channel. Six months ago Headzup was lost in the persistent baseline video noise that is much of YouTube. Today we enjoy a rapidly growing fan base of politically savvy viewers who understand and enjoy political satire. Our breakout moment on YouTube came during the Democratic CNN-YouTube Debate this fall when the Headzup contribution to the debate was featured in a CNN promotional piece prior to the debate. Although our clip was too controversial to be selected for airing during the debate, someone at CNN thought the animation was slick enough to use it for promoting the event. The same clip also made it onto some mainstream media sites in Europe, including Der Spiegel in Germany and The Times Online in London.

In terms of political impact, perhaps our most exciting partnership is the one we have with GoLeft.tv. As your readers are probably aware, GoLeft.tv is the new progressive television site launched by Mike Papantanio and Bobby Kennedy Jr. from Air America Radio Network. The success of that partnership can readily be seen in the thousands of Internet users who have watched Headzup while browsing the GoLeft.tv site.

Headzup is also distributed by iTunes, Brave New Films, Revver, Blinkx, ShortBrain.tv, and Treemo. Each of these partnerships are designed to target a unique market segment which helps broaden our overall exposure.

In terms of content preparation, we’re still in the process of tuning our production line to funnel clips to each of these channel partners quickly and efficiently. Although we’ve pretty much figured out all of the format issues, we’re still working out pipeline automation that will encode and push clips to each partner quickly and efficiently.- what’s coming next?

Now that our fans are helping grow awareness by word-of-mouth and sharing clips between their cell phones, we starting to have time to think about what to do next. We’ve bounced around a lot of ideas on how to broaden our offerings but we keep coming back to political satire. It’s what we love and with the elections coming we’ve got plenty of political high jinks from which to draw inspiration.

Q. Is the universe inherently absurd?

A. Absolutely! Seven years of George Bush tells us so.

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Schools and local governments in Florida who routinely deposited excess money in a state run investment fund were stunned today when the state suspended withdrawals.

This is because the nimrods who ran the fund were “investing” in extremely risky SIVs. Word got out, there was a run on the fund, now the state has slammed the door shut.

It is a certainty they did this because the fund is taking huge losses and not only do they not want to liquidate at a loss, they can’t, because there are no buyers for the garbage they own. That’s right, this stuff is so toxic that no one wants it.

Bloomberg TV just had an interview with a school official in a Florida town who said, I’ve got a $850,000 payroll for 230 employees to make tomorrow and no money to do it with because the state froze the money. He sounded practically in tears.

We are talking billions of dollars here that will evaporate. And there will be many more stories like this in the coming months.

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The small, locally own oil refineries in China called “teapots” revolted when the government froze gasoline prices. Since they couldn’t make money with the new pricing because the price of crude was rising, they simply switched to producing non-regulated products.

They didn’t have to wait long to bring the mighty Chinese economy to its knees.

Shortages broke out, the government was forced to raise the oil price cap, and ramped up production hugely at their mammoth state-owned facilities and canceling maintenance.

As we in America should know by now, delaying refinery maintenance will come back to bite. Whether a 10 percent increase in retail prices will be enough to slow consumption and encourage increased production remains to be seen.

Interesting, isn’t it, that in a nominally communist county with 85% of the refinery capacity owned by the government, that the little capitalist teapots have such a profound effect?

In a few years, the Chinese will be selling themselves 10 million new cars a year.

Someday soon we in America will be facing shortages, gas lines, and rationing.

The chances are the revolt of the teapots is a harbinger of things to come.

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Red Squirrel details the enormous tension and conflict in Venezuela now, with the referendum vote on Saturday. Things are getting extremely polarized, with fighting in the streets, murder, and probable CIA intervention.

Venezuelan counterintelligence just released a document they say is a CIA memo outlining destabilization plans. Imagine the pressure-cooker atmosphere the release of the document must have created. And what it will be like if the lid blows off.

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The vanguard Marxist ideologues of SWP continue doing a stellar job of destroying of what was once a solid and promising left party.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

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Two out of three middle class American families on shaky financial groundMore than half of middle-class families have no net financial assets whatsoever.

Only 13 percent of middle-class families are secure in their asset levels- meaning that they have enough to cover most of their living expenses for nine months should their regular income cease; 79 percent are “at risk” in this category, meaning they could not cover the majority of their expenses for even three months.

This is the middle class they’re talking about. Thus, things are even more dire for those with less income. How did things get so desperate?

And it’s about to get much worse (see next post)

Tip: C&L

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Are we headed for an epic bear market?The credit bubble is just starting to unwind, a credit-derivative insider says. And while U.S. borrowers are being blamed for the mess, they were really just pawns in a global game.

When asked if we were in the third inning on this, insider Satyajit Das, author of a 4,200 page book on credit derivatives, just laughed, saying we’re still listening to the national anthem, the game hasn’t even started yet.

The real problem is the credit crisis, and a bear market will make credit even harder to get. This will affect people as well as businesses as the economy slows down, factories close, and banks blow up.

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The resolution, which passed unanimously requests

that law enforcement officers in the city not “exert effort on behalf of federal agents to unearth undocumented residents” who live in Hartford.

From the resolution itself

RESOLVED, That the Mayor assist the Chief of the Hartford Police Department in developing policies that do not hinder the police from properly carrying out their duties in identifying criminal elements and assuring the public safety but to avoid becoming involved in immigration issues or asking the immigration status of individuals detained for other reasons.

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Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, plans to invest first tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D for renewable energy that will be cheaper than coal. They want to create breakthrough technology.

“We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers,” said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. “We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal.”

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal.  We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.” (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.)

Wow. There’s lots more too, read the press release. Let’s hope lots more foundations, businesses, and governments do the same. And hey, maybe even do it in an open source manner with everyone sharing information. After all, we all live on the same planet.

Tip: Ecogeek

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The credit bubble is just starting to unwind, a credit-derivative insider says. And while U.S. borrowers are being blamed for the mess, they were really just pawns in a global game.

When asked if  we were in the third inning on this, insider Satyajit Das, author of a 4,200 page book on credit derivatives, just laughed, saying we’re still listening to the national anthem, the game hasn’t even started yet.

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Watching Bloomberg TV these past few weeks has been almost comical.  There’s been a deluge of bad news lately, especially for the financials. Write downs in the tens of billions.  “Investments” that are now selling for pennies on the dollar. Yet every time such bombshell news hits, Bloomberg newscasters invariably ask whoever they are interviewing, so now all the bad news must out of the stock so it has to a good time to buy, right?

Uh no. The subslime debacle has turned into a worldwide credit crisis and this won’t be resolved any time soon, no matter how much Bloomberg cheerleaders want it to be.

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Under socialism, the workers’ state can impose mandatory emissions controls and implement emissions reduction technology in a coordinated fashion. The worst case scenario of global warming can be averted.

Such mandatory controls would need to be worldwide, not just nationwide. The question, as always, is how could such a global government be implemented - especially since we don’t have decades for this to happen. Action is needed now.

We need some kind of worldwide controlling body that has the power to mandate climate control changes because it’s highly doubtful that private enterprise will do it en masse on their own because of the cost. Such a controlling body would also have to be composed of highly competent (and non-corruptible) people. It would have to be able to build consensus and implement the changes in a way that made the players want to participate. Again, we don’t have time for conflict and violent disagreements, as the climate change clock continues to tick.

Also, solutions won’t scale worldwide. What works in the US won’t work in, say, Bangladesh. There are probably hundreds of millions of people who burn animal dung and chop down trees for fuel. While this is ecologically disastrous when done on a large scale, a governing body can’t tell them to stop doing so without providing alternative, clean fuel - not unless they want protests and uprisings. Here in the States, forcing coal plants to close would be politically impossible unless new sources of energy have already been created.

Somehow, we need worldwide consensus on climate change, then mandating the changes becomes relatively much simpler.

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Britain has denied political asylum to Uzbek dissident Jahongir Sidikov. If he’s sent back, he will be tortured. Immersion of limbs in boiling water is a favored technique. His hearing is tomorrow.

Uzbekistan has been used by the US and Britain for extraordinary rendition. Political prisoners are sent there to be tortured, as documented in former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray in his book, Murder in Samarkand.

Let’s hope enough people and organizations have made enough noise that Sidikov will not be sent back to the country which is almost certainly a model for Doonesbury’s Berzerkistan.

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That’s because the State of Connecticut is funding embryonic stem cell research.

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Google closed at precisely 666.00 today.

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Economist and financial adviser Nouriel Roubini is known to be a permabear, someone who is always pessimistic about the financial markets. However, he accurately predicted the subprime collapse months ago, long before the consensus wisdom did. He’s been consistently right about it ever since too.

His latest post is unsettling.

Liquidity and credit crunch in financial markets is back to summer peaks, only much worse and more dangerous.

Monetary [Fed] policy is impotent in dealing with the problems that a mostly unsupervised and unregulated financial system – as regulators were asleep at the wheel blinded by free market voodoo religious fundamentalism – have created.

Emphasis added. That’s strong language coming from a highly regarded economist. But then, much of this bubble as well as the preceding dot com bubble was presided over by Alan Greenspan, an early and avid follower of Ayn “Greed is good” Rand and her philosophy of extreme selfishness and unregulated markets.

We are thus now observing a severe worsening of conditions in financial markets with a generalized liquidity and credit crunch that will have serious effects on real economies.

The reference to “real economies” means the impact will hit you, me, the places we work and shop at, and more. This is not some esoteric financial episode with no relation to our everyday lives.

BTW, the recent announcement by Gov. Schwarzenegger that four California mortgage lenders will not increase adjustable mortgage rates is, alas, just air. Those mortgage companies, for the most part, no longer own the mortgages, as they’ve been sliced and diced into CDOs and SIVs and sold to whoever. Only the current owner of the mortgage can agree to freeze rates and only if the terms of the debt instruments allow it.

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So says the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Venezuelan student leader Stalin González (his real name, his parents are leftists) opposes Chavez on Marxist terms. His been shot at, gotten death threats, and is central in student opposition to the upcoming referendum in Venezuela which, if it passes, would rescind term limits for Chavez and make the central bank part of the government rather than being independent.

González believes that Chávez’s socialist rhetoric is a lie because the country has not set about to create a working class, instead surviving off its oil wealth.

“This government talks a lot, but it does very little,” González said. “Chávez isn’t a Marxist-Leninist, he’s a crazy military officer.”

While Chavezistas view an anti-referendum vote as blocking the road towards socialism, others, it is clear, see such a vote as blocking a power grab by Chavez.

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Our cats, who went outside in snow for their first time last week and were not amused, now insist upon being let out at 5:30 am so they can frolic in below freezing temperatures. It appears they have quickly adapted and are now sturdy New England kitties.

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This week, I’m guest blogging at Crooks and Liars in Mike’s Blog Roundup, once a day for seven days. Here’s my first post.

C&L is one of the main liberal / progressive blogs and gets a whopping 170,000 or so visits a day. It was started by John Amato who got the name from an email list done by Mike Finnegan (now of Mike’s Blog Roundup.) It was the first blog to my knowledge that posted video from news and TV shows, and it was this huge innovation that first got them noticed.

Since then, Amato has turned it into a group blog and it has become an influential force in the blogosphere and beyond. I’ve known John and Mike since long before blogging and it’s been inspiring watching C&L become the powerhouse that it is.

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Elizabeth Kucinich: My husband would “absolutely” consider running with Ron Paul.

So, will Kucinich be asking Paul to return the $500 donation he received from neo-Nazi Klan member Don Black? Lordy, such myopic dimbulbness coming from a supposed progressive is difficult to fathom, indeed.

Perhaps Mr. Kucinich could get Dog The Bounty Hunter to run, so he could join together with his candidacy instead.

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Here in Connecticut, many of the leaves are still on the trees. While they’ve turned color, they haven’t fallen off yet, a highly unusual occurrence. If they stay on much longer, and we get freezing rain, the leaves as well as branches will ice up, and the extra weight could bring trees down.

When I was a kid growing up here, freezing rain didn’t happen much, it snowed rather than rained in the winter. Sub-zero temperatures, while uncommon, certainly happened. Now it never gets much below 15 F. And we’re officially still in a drought! All of which shows a definite trend multi-year trend towards warmer weather.

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