You are in contact with the Talking Dog, so could you relay this message to him as I have no way of contacting him other than via his comment system which does not work for me. No need to display it though.

Talking Dog, ever since you upgraded your version of Movable Type, I have been unable to view comments on your site either with Sea Monkey, or Internet Explorer. I get a new window with a message below in the window:-
“MOVABLE TYPE
An error occurred
!Invalid Request”

This has been the case for at least a couple of months. Actually I have not recorded how long but it was when you moved to Movable Type Pro.

America is in the throes of a crime, law and order and racial fear panic and as a result has committed itself to far more law and order and to far stronger punishment than it can afford. This means that were all defendants to exercise their rights to a trial the system would grind to a halt. The US has resolved this problem with the corrupt system of plea bargaining. Authorities can simultaneously threaten trial for a an offense with a crippling sentence and offer a plea bargain for an offense or a sentence that in comparison is tolerable. This is great for criminals who have actually done something wrong but a disaster for the wrongly prosecuted innocent. The so called presumption of innocence only exists if the jurors want it to, and a defendant of the wrong race or religion such as Aafia Siddiqui for example, in front of a jury drawn from the race and crime fearing citizens from the respectable white suburbs, do not get it. This means the authorities have enormous coercive power over the wrongly prosecuted innocent. You can imagine any prosecutor saying:- “Take the plea for 15 years or rot in prison for 70. If you are so stupid as to refuse the plea we will throw all our resources, legal and illegal, into prosecuting you and demand a draconian sentence. You are and your lawyer have no chance against us especially when we hide exculpatory and fabricate incriminating evidence. Think carefully, this is a limited time offer.”

The US criminal justice system is hopelessly corrupt:-

1/ It is infected with racial and class prejudice. The reason that things that are illegal are illegal is that they are associated with despised minorities. The reason sentences are so draconian is that it is imagined that only members of despised minorities will receive them.
See this alternet article on racial animosity as a motive for US legal punitiveness;

2/ Prosecutorial misconduct is standard operating procedure and even when discovered is rarely prosecuted. One of the few cases where a prosecutor has been penalized is that of Mike Nifong of the Duke Lacrosse rape case. He was caught suppressing exculpatory evidence in a case against rich white boys just as he would have if prosecuting poor blacks. The defendants had a powerful legal team who discovered the misconduct and MF lost his law license, but this kind of thing is the exception. The worst that happens to most discovered to have engaged in prosecutorial misconduct is criticism in little read appeal court opinions;

3/ The allowed plea bargain discount from credibly threatened sentence for the trial charge to that for the sentence for the plea charge is too high. This puts innocent defendants in an impossible dilemma. Really there needs to be a limit on that discount, to no more than 20%, say from 70 years down to 56 years, not from 70 to 15;

4/ Use of snitches is widespread. Pressure on snitches to give evidence regardless of the truth of that evidence is enormous. There is no guarantee for example that Junaid Barbar is not telling a lie to save himself.

Even assuming that Sayhed Fahad Hashimi did knowingly store ponchos, socks and boots for use by Al Qaeda, the idea that this is a crime justifying 15 years is absurd.

My suspicion is that US authorities decided to silence Sayhed Hashimi because they did not like his criticism and have fabricated a case to do this. I do not think that they believe they are doing anything wrong here. As far as America’s righteous are concerned, all Arabs and Muslims are collectively guilty of the September 11 atrocity because at the very least they agree with the aims of those that carried it out. Therefore fabricating evidence or torturing confessions out of the innocent is OK because the innocent are not really innocent.

I’m not so sure Obama has dropped Bush’s “unitary executive theory” for a reliance on Congressional approval. I’m in touch with some academics who are out to prove that Obama is just doing a better job hiding it.

What a depressing thought — although, of course, I shouldn’t expect much (if anything) from an administration that responds to the lawlessness of “extraordinary rendition,” torture and secret prisons by deciding that drone assassinations are far less complicated.

“Obama has created a modified version of the simply-commit-crimes approach by arguing that he can silently rely on previous signing statements by himself or Bush without repeating anything in a new signing statement. This means that the series of events runs as follows: Congress passes a law; the president undoes it with a signing statement; Congress passes the same law again; the president silently considers the law meaningless; Congress erroneously assumes the new law is law.

“But, what happens if Congress passes a law and no previous signing statement or other decree has dealt with it. What can a president do (other than veto the bill or sign and obey it)? Obama has chosen to ask the OLC to write memos. Remember, this is the same office that claimed the power to legalize aggressive wars and torture in secret memos that were (are) treated as law. President Obama has publicly forbidden the prosecution of these crimes, and has kept the Justice Department’s own report on the matter secret for another year.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson01112010.html

Note that in most cases, OLC decisions are not publicly published. Note that the silent obesiance to previous signing statements, and the use of OLC memos is something that was made policy in a memo from the administration, so I’m told. I don’t know if I can get a copy of it, but I’ll try.