Found this today in The State.com a South Carolina paper.

Is it just me or does this seem like a really, really bad idea. . .

WASHINGTON — A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism.

The Bush administration considers the UAE an important ally in the fight against terrorism since the suicide hijackings and is not objecting to Dubai Ports World’s purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. The $6.8 billion sale is expected to be approved Monday.

The British company is the fourth largest ports company in the world, and its sale would affect commercial U.S. port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

Critics of the proposed purchase said a port operator complicit in smuggling or terrorism could manipulate manifests and other records to frustrate Homeland Security’s already limited scrutiny of shipping containers and slip contraband past U.S. Customs inspectors.

Shipping experts noted that many of the world’s largest port companies are not based in the United States, and they pointed to DP World’s strong economic interest in operating ports securely and efficiently.

DP World said it won approval from a secretive U.S. government panel that considers security risks of foreign companies buying or investing in American industry.

The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which could have recommended that President Bush block the purchase, includes representatives from the departments of Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce, State and Homeland Security.

The State Department describes the UAE as a vital partner in the fight against terrorism. But the UAE, a loose federation of seven emirates on the Saudi peninsula, was an important operational and financial base for the hijackers who carried out the attacks against New York and Washington, the FBI concluded.

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Robert Kennedy at the Oxnard CA airport in June 1968

My mom did a bit of digging in the attic and she found a photo that a friend had taken of Robert Kennedy a few days before he was killed.

I wonder how different the world would look if he hadn’t been shot. Better, worse. . .

I dunno.

But I like the photo so I wanted to share.

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Stephanie often writes things for the Reno News & Review and they had her do a Valentines Day story on how to have a good time on V Day without a sweetie.

I hate V Day. Never had a good one even when I was dating someone. Stuart doesn’t believe in it and it is actually a huge relief.

I prefer his surprises that he often gives me. A couple of weeks ago at work he walked in with a box of green tea, handed it to me and said as he walked away, “Thought you needed some tea.” On top of the tea was a jewelry box. Inside that was a silver chain with a single pink pearl and baguette diamonds charm.

Today my e-mail contained a message that he had bought me a year subscription for the New York TimesSelect.

Yeah. I think I’ll keep him.

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In my effort to be healthier, I’ve started making smoothies for my breakfast. It’s a really easy way to consume three, four pieces fruit and you’re done. Plus they’re tasty.

I despair at ever being able to cut up a mango without slaughtering it. I am remarkably untalented at figuring out where the pit is and I end up eating most of the mango before I put it in the blender.

Today was a pineapple, mango, banana and plum smoothie.

I tried to make Stuart drink a little of it. As you can imagine, that went well.

“Drink a little.”

“Aggh. No! There’s bits in it.”

“Not at the top. Drink a little.”

He screwed up his face so that he had more wrinkles than a Shar-pei, dipped the front of his lip into the glass and groaned, “It smells like an old hoof. And there are bits.”

“That’s just plum skin.”

“Aggghhhhhhhhh.”

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Here’s hoping red state people are starting to say no to the Koolaid.
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The Trust Gap

We can’t think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can’t think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush’s presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn’t the slightest intention of changing it.

According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn’t work that way. It’s not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales’s own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as “hypothetical” a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel.

THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do.

On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world.

According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings.

And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president’s whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists.

THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush’s biggest “trust me” moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies.

But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war.

When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before.

•
Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

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Making dinner for Stuart and Preston.

One of my all time favorite cookbooks of the many I own is Rick Bayless’ Mexico: One Plate at A Time. One of my favorite dishes in it is Pollo Adobado Con Papas or in English– Red Chile-Marinated Chicken Roasted with Potatoes. It is really flavorful, a little spicy, slightly unusual because you roast the chicken butterflied. . . I always get compliments when I make it.

I hit a snag today when looking for dried ancho chiles. You can walk into any supermarket in LA, hell you can walk into a 7-11 and find dried ancho chilies. I wasn’t in the mood to search high and low so I went into one of the Caribbean shops nearby and bought a bag of wicked looking little chilies that are impossible to deseed.

I made the adobo and when I tasted it I shrieked. Seriously. Even the air in the kitchen is spicy from the marinade.

I am using less on the chicken than I normally would and I usually marinate it overnight but I figured a half hour is good enough. The directions tell you to pour the reserved marinade over the chicken and the potatoes for the last ten minutes, but I think I will skip that step.

I think it will be okay. I hope it is okay. Can you be arrested for assaulting someone with overly spicy food?

Update:

Thank God. It was not only edible, it tasted good. Next time I’m using ancho chiles.

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February 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Smoking Dutch Cleanser

By MAUREEN DOWD
Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he’s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic.

President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage.

The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn’t. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned.

The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, “he’s smoking Dutch Cleanser.”

The president doesn’t know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids.

The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn’t, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme.

At the Bush White House, the mere evocation of the word “terror” justifies breaking any law, contravening any convention, despoiling any ideal, electing any Republican and brushing off any failure to govern.

Asked yesterday by Senator Susan Collins why the administration had reacted in slo-mo on Katrina, with “people dying, people waiting to be rescued,” Michael Brown replied that if FEMA had declared that a terrorist had blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, “then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could.”

Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations.

It used to take an Israeli incursion to inflame the Arab world. Now all it takes is a cartoon in Denmark.

W. and Vice have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground, leaving the 9/11 villains at large, and letting cronies and losers botch the job of homeland security.

Brownie, one of the biggest boneheads in U.S. history, considered the homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, so useless that he deliberately didn’t call him right away about the suffering in New Orleans.

“The culture was such that I didn’t think that would have been effective and would have exacerbated the problem, quite frankly,” Brownie told the Republican senator Bob Bennett, who called the statement “staggering.” A telephone call to his boss, Brownie said, “would have wasted my time.”

The doofus who frittered away lives e-mailing colleagues about being a “fashion god” and wondering how he looked on television may have just been engaged in self-protective spin. Or has the Homeland Security Department simply created another set of paralyzing turf battles?

The most dysfunctional man in government is calling the government dysfunctional.

W.’s sophomoric “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” line makes even Brownie cringe. “Unfortunately,” the former FEMA chief complained, “he called me ‘Brownie’ at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir.”

In the new Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, who was a senior C.I.A. official overseeing Middle East intelligence assessments until October, says the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the intelligence on Iraq was that war was unnecessary. He says the White House “went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

He calls the relationship between the intelligence community and the policy makers — you guessed it — politicized, damaged by bureaucratic rivalries and dysfunctional.

A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay.

Perfect.

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Thought the man was brill for years. On a whim I ran his name in one of the search engines and his Princeton Web site had this at the start:

“If someone reading this site wants to get in touch with me for radio, TV, karaoke, whatever, I run such things through. . .” and then it listed his agents. . .

I think I want to invite Paul Krugman to karaoke.

No, not really. –

Well, I do, but I have no balls to invite him to a night of karaoke in London where I am the only one in the band that could speak to the Fuckedupitness of American economics, fools gold verisimilitude of the Bushies and the general sad state of affairs in the old U S of A. Plus I’m not smart enough to hang.

So, since I can’t ask Paulie to sing ” Pour Some Sugar On Me”, I will post his last NY Times you need to be paying the big bucks -isn’t that BS? for Times Sellect column.

Thanks to J. Zeccola for forwarding it.
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February 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

The Vanishing Future

By PAUL KRUGMAN

At this point we’ve had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush’s special mix of blatant dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the 2000 presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration’s denials and deceptions.

Consider the case of the vanishing future.

The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first tax cut through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted that its tax-cut plans wouldn’t endanger the budget surplus bequeathed to Mr. Bush by Bill Clinton. But even some Republican senators were skeptical. So the Senate demanded a cap on the tax cut: it should not reduce revenue over the period from 2001 to 2011 by more than $1.35 trillion.

The administration met this requirement, but not by scaling back its tax-cutting ambitions. Instead, it created fictitious savings by “sunsetting” the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of 2010.

This was obviously silly. For example, under the law as written there will be no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010. But the estate tax will return in 2011 with a maximum rate of 55 percent, creating some interesting incentives.

I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw Momma From the Train Act.

It was also obvious that the administration had no intention of abiding by its concession to fiscal prudence, that it would try to eliminate the sunset clause and make the tax cuts permanent.

But it quickly became clear that the budget forecasts the administration used to justify the 2001 tax cut were wildly overoptimistic. The federal government faced a future of deficits, not surpluses, as far as the eye could see. Making the tax cut permanent would greatly worsen those future deficits. What were budget officials to do?

You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future disappear.

Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and revenues. But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years. This artificial shortsightedness greatly aided the campaign to make the 2001 tax cut permanent because it hid the costs: since budget analyses no longer covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the tax cut became invisible.

But now it’s 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period from 2007 to 2011, which means including a year in which making the Bush tax cuts permanent will cost a lot of revenue — $119.7 billion, but who’s counting? Has the administration finally run out of ways to avoid budget reality?

Not quite. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, until this year budget documents contained a standard table titled “Impact of Budget Policy,” which summarized the effects of the administration’s tax and spending proposals on future outlays and revenues. But this year, that table is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what’s really going on.

Now, the administration has proposed spending cuts that are both cruel and implausible. For example, administration computer printouts obtained by the center show that the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on veterans’ health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five years.

Yet even these cuts would fall far short of making up for the revenue losses from making the tax cuts permanent. The administration’s own estimate, which can be deduced from its budget tables, is that extending the tax cuts would cost an average of $235 billion in each year from 2012 through 2016.

In other words, the administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell, allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.)

At this point the administration’s budget strategy seems to be simply to ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can’t be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.

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Watching the opening of the Olympics. The women holding the names of each country are wearing these fantastic white ball dresses with a black pattern at the bottom. I said to Jen that I liked the dresses.

She said, “I once went to a drag ball in a dress similar to that. I went as a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be Carol Burnett.”

Later when they were talking about luge I said, “How do you get involved in that sport? It’s not as if you can go out and spend your weekend luging.”

Jen said, “I figure that you have already tried every other way to die.”

They started to play Gloria. Jen snorted, “Are they playing Gloria? Oh, that’s terrible. Do you know Eurovision? It’s filth. It’s fantastic. It’s like watching Showgirls. Have you seen Showgirls?”

“Not all the way through. We should have a Showgirls party.”

“Yes! But we need to have gay people there.”

We looked at each other in horror.

“We don’t know any gay people here!”

“How is that possible?”

“We need gay boyfriends! I haven’t not had a gay boyfriend since I was eighteen.”

I nodded. “Me too! That’s why I have been so sad. We need to go out and find gay boyfriends.”

“We’re fagless fag hags!”

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(Nicole’s mobile rings. She answers it.)

STUART: Thomas! What are you doing?

NICOLE: Sending out e-mails and calling about ads on Gumtree.

STUART: You listened to me and you’re looking at Gumtree? Ahhh. . .

NICOLE: I always listen to you. God, you make me feel like I’ve just been sitting around, taking your money and eating bon-bons.

STUART: I never said that, but now that you would mention it. And surfing the Web.

NICOLE: Surfing the Web?

STUART: You’ve just been sitting around, taking my money, eating bon-bons and surfing the Web.

NICOLE: Bite me. I’ll have you know, I already have two interviews for Monday. One is for a delicatessen in Chelsea. I called, said, I’m calling about the ad on Gumtree. They said, Would you like to come in for an interview. (laughs)

STUART: What is the other interview?

NICOLE: Oh, it’s terrible. It’s so bad I hope I get it because of the stories that I would get.

STUART: Wah?

NICOLE: You go up to people in bars, offer to give them a head massage and then they pay you what they think the massage was worth. You get to keep half your earnings.

STUART: You’re kidding.

NICOLE: No! Isn’t it terrible! It’s fantastic.

STUART: No way you’re doing that. I’ll hit the roof.

NICOLE: What about my getting a job?

STUART: I didn’t tell you to take a piss. No. You’re not doing that.

NICOLE: Okay, I won’t rub strangers heads for money.

STUART: Good.

NICOLE: There was also an ad for an artist that was looking for a nude model. I was thinking about doing that. What do you think?

STUART: Sure, that would be fine. But you aren’t doing head massages in bars. That’s just, just. . . agggh.

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