November 06, 2005
A Little Dab Will Do Ya
Dense with fruit and nuts, this makes an elegant finger sandwich with a layer of cream cheese and is dense enough to get your blood sugar back up during a long afternoon at the office.
PUMPKIN BREAD
Makes 2 loaves.
•3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
•2 tsp. baking soda
•1 1/2 tsp. salt
•2 tsp. cinnamon
•2 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. allspice
•3 cups sugar
•4 eggs, beaten
•2 cups of fresh pumpkin --> 16 ounces if using canned pumpkin
•2/3 cup water --> if pumpkin is canned
•1/2 cup water --> if pumpkin is fresh or frozen
•1 cup vegetable oil •1 cup chopped walnuts
* I cup raisins
Preheat oven to 350 F. Combine flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar in large mixing bowl. Add eggs, water, oil, raisins and pumpkin. Stir until blended. Add nuts. Mix well. Pour into two 9x5" loaf pans. Bake 1 hour. Cool slightly and take out of pans to let cool on a rack. This tastes best if you wrap, refrigerate and wait a day to eat it. It keeps well in the refrigerator and can be frozen. It will smell so good that keeping your mitts off of it will be nearly impossible.
Slice it thinly to make finger sandwiches, no more than a quarter inch thick (the bread is moist and will hold up to this kind of treatment.) For finger sandwhiches, take two slices and spread one thinly with devon cream or cream cheese. Slice the bread into four fingers on a high tea tower along with all the goodies you've prepared for your high tea, like cucumber and watercress finger sandwiches.
The combination of these elements together, along with an egg salad tea sandwich on a sturdier baguette (sliced VERY thin), gives you all the fixings for an elegant high tea, which is a very fun way to throw an afternoon party that you don't really want to rage into the evening. A sip of sherry wouldn't be out of line, but everyone goes home before dinner. High tea is usually at around 4. Make sure you have a flowing pot of good black tea, I'm partial to Assam teas at that hour of the day.
Finger sandwiches and high teas are an art which should be more widely distributed. This is good food, served at the low point of the afternoon blood sugar and I like it a lot. It is also a social habit which re-distributes the colleagues at near the end of the day to share what they learned that day. That is precious social capital.
If I were going to design a big capitalist organization (actually, I'm doing that right now and it might become real in the next couple of weeks) I'd build high tea into the organization. It works for the Brits for a very good reason, and happy hour and the Russian temptation to the bottle hit at about the same hour. I go with tea, better blood sugar and finger sandwiches. And they are good, too. I'm thinking about your workplace and your kitchen. You can stash these in the fridge in plastic bags. And be enormously popular with our colleagues.
Thought for Food
As I've said before, I came to the love of seafood relatively late in life, the product of an upper Midwest 1950's childhood which didn't have the advantage of fresh, iced seafood flown in to Byerly's Markets every morning. I think we had canned salmon as our major exposure to seafood, along with tinned cocktail shrimp at the odd grown-up party a couple of time per year.
These days, I enthusiastically consume the raw stuff as sushi, sashimi and ceviche. This recipe, however is one of my favorite and it is cooked here to this day. I didn't learn about scallops until I was an adult and starting my first experiments in cooking as a young ('way too young) wife. It's easy and elegant. If, due to the season, all you can find are Gulf scallops, halve them. This recipe assumes the smaller (and better, to this pallette, Bay scallops.)
COQUILLES ST. JACQUES
1/2 c. French bread crumbs
5 tbsp. butter
1 chopped garlic clove
1/12 c. Gruyere cheese (6 oz.)
1 c. mayonnaise
1/4 c. dry white wine
2 tbs. sherry
1 tbsp. chopped parsley
1 lb. scallops
1/2 lb. mushrooms, sliced
1/2 c. chopped onion
Toss bread crumbs with 1 tablespoon butter. Set aside. Stir together next 5 ingredients. Set aside.
In medium skillet, cook scallops in 2 tablespoons butter until opaque. Remove from heat. Drain well. Cook mushrooms and onions in 2 tablespoons butter 3 minutes or until tender. Add to cheese mixture with scallops. Spoon into 6 individual dishes. Sprinkle with crumbs. broil 2-4 minutes until brown.
This serves six as a first course, four as a main course. It is easy elegance. As a main course, you can make this in a skillet and then plate it with steamed asparagus with lemon butter and plain steamed rice with parsley. The classic presentation is to serve the scallops and sauce on a scallop shell on the plate and you can buy these cheaply at cooking stores. An alternative presentation is to brown the finished scallops and gruyere in a phyllo pastry shell, which you can find in the freezer case at your grocery. They'll only need a minute to brown under the broiler.
If you are serving this as one course of a multi-course meal, you can do everything before the broiling in advance, but don't use phyllo, it will get soggy. The scallops have to be broiled just before you bring them to the table, so make sure your guests have their salads or soup to finish while you are completing the cooking. Serve with a hearty bread to mop up the sauce if you aren't using phyllo shells. An excellent side is orzo with browned butter sauce (clarify the butter and then scatter the skillet with seasoned bread crumbs and saute for about a minute) and broiled tomatoes covered with freshly snipped herbs, salt and pepper. We haven't had a killing freeze here, yet, and my basil would nearly do for a christmas tree. I'd snip it onto the broiled tomatoes (were I making this tonight) along with a little rosemary and oregano. Salt and pepper to taste.
This doesn't even take 20 minutes. Elegance on the cheap, timewise.
Creative Thinking
A Hospital Plan for Pandemics
Don't Close Walter Reed and Other 'Obsolete' Facilities
By Phillip Longman
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page B07
Got your Tamiflu yet? How about a home respirator and a live-in nurse? If expert predictions of a coming flu pandemic prove right, there's little chance you'll be able to find a hospital bed in which to recover.Here in Washington, for example, after a long series of hospital closures, there are only 4,346 hospital beds left -- a number that will soon go lower with the closing of Walter Reed Army Medical Center's main facilities. Yet projections show that even a moderately severe strain of a pandemic flu virus would require some 5,000 people to be hospitalized in the District alone. Even if we discharged every patient in Washington's hospitals -- including all the mental patients in St. Elizabeths, all the frail elderly in Hadley Memorial's long-term acute care facility and all the veterans in Veterans Affairs Medical Center -- there still would not be enough hospital beds available to care for, or even to quarantine, highly infectious flu patients.
The same is true nationally. Since 1980 the number of hospital beds available per U.S. resident has declined by roughly 40 percent. Today the United States has only about 965,000 staffed hospital beds. Yet Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit group committed to promoting public health, estimates that the emergence of a pandemic flu virus like the one of 1918 would require hospitalization of 2.3 million people in this country.There are many sound reasons why the number of hospital beds has been declining. New technology allows for much greater use of outpatient facilities. Galloping medical inflation demands more cost-effective care. But the result is a health care system that is perpetually running at or above 100 percent capacity, and that will be overwhelmed by a pandemic, major terrorism attack or natural disaster.
Fortunately, there is a way to help solve this problem and many others that plague our health care system.
Let's start with the example of Walter Reed. Located just 5 1/2 miles from the White House, 6 1/2 miles from the Capitol and six miles from the Washington Convention Center, its facilities, including a hospital built in 1972, are an integral component of the District's emergency preparedness plan. In the event of a mass casualty terrorist attack or other public health emergency, the plan calls for Walter Reed to discharge its noncritical patients and begin treating civilian victims within as little as three hours. Walter Reed is particularly well equipped and well situated to treat not only victims of a flu pandemic but also those wounded by a nuclear or biological attack in downtown Washington. But maintaining this capacity is expensive, and right now Congress is poised to accept the recommendation of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission that the main hospital and most other buildings on the 113-acre campus be razed.
It may well be appropriate for the military to reorganize and rationalize the way it delivers care in the Washington area and many other parts of the country, just as it is for the private sector. Across the Northeast and Midwest, for example, many VA hospitals have lost their patient base because so many aging veterans have retired elsewhere. The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced that it is closing hospitals in Pittsburgh and in Brecksville, Ohio, and it is threatening to close facilities in Brooklyn and Manhattan. But rather than abandon these and other "obsolete" hospitals -- including many shuttered public hospitals such as D.C. General -- we should turn at least some of them into facilities that will stand ready to serve the public in the event of disasters and that between disasters will serve the uninsured and those on Medicaid.
Private health care providers are under such enormous pressures to contain costs that they cannot begin to afford to keep wards open that aren't filled nearly every day. This makes it the proper role of government to ensure we have surge capacity that the private sector cannot deliver. Literally every American, including those with gold-plated health insurance plans, stands to benefit from a health care system built to handle such increasing risks as a flu pandemic, another Katrina, a major earthquake or a terrorist attack.
There is no one, perfect solution, but this sure would help for "surge capacity."
Blabbermouth
Rove's Security Clearance Widely Questioned
# Federal workers under suspicion of smaller lapses have had access to classified data yanked.
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — An intelligence analyst temporarily lost his top-secret security clearance because he faxed his resume using a commercial machine.An employee of the Defense Department had her clearance suspended for months because a jilted boyfriend called to say she might not be reliable.
An Army officer who spoke publicly about intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks had his clearance revoked over questions about $67 in personal charges to a military cellphone.
But in the White House, where Karl Rove is under federal investigation for his role in the exposure of a covert CIA officer, the longtime advisor to President Bush continues to enjoy full access to government secrets.
That is drawing the attention of intelligence experts and prominent conservatives as a debate brews over whether Rove should retain his top-secret clearance and remain in his post as White House deputy chief of staff — even as Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald mulls over whether to charge him with a crime in connection with the operative's exposure.
"The agencies can move without hesitating when they even suspect a breach of the rules has occurred, much less an actual breach of information," said Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney who has represented more than three dozen intelligence officers in security clearance cases, including those cited above.
If Rove's access to classified information were taken away, it would prevent him from doing much of his job. His wide portfolio includes domestic policy and national security issues, and he is at the president's side often during the day.
Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) joined Democrats last week in questioning whether the advisor should retain his policymaking post.
This is a no-brainer. His clearance should be yanked now.
Avian Influenza and Media
Via Crawford Killian:
Pandemic planning advocates fear blowback from tsunami of recent coverage
Helen Branswell
Canadian Press
Sunday, November 06, 2005
TORONTO (CP) - When freelance journalist Steve Burgess starts talking about pandemic influenza - especially the recent tsunami of media coverage of pandemic influenza - the anger starts to mount in his voice."It is a crying wolf situation," Burgess will tell you with a vehemence that rises as he warms to his topic, echoing a view he voiced in a recent column on the Vancouver-aimed Westender.com website.
The annoyance Dr. Allison McGeer hears is of the softer, under-the-breath sort, with colleagues who specialize in chronic ailments grumbling the pandemic spotlight is crowding out the diseases that are killing Canadians to favour one that will take an undefinable number of lives at some unknowable point in the future.
McGeer and others who've been leading the long and, until recently, lonely charge for pandemic preparedness are nervously taking note of both the sotto and not-so-sotto voce criticisms these days.
They are worried the way the threat of a pandemic exploded onto TV newscasts and across the front pages of newspapers in the last month or so is giving rise to a backlash. And that, they fear, could erode public and political willingness to fund preparations for an inevitable - but impossible to time - pandemic.
"I think we might be in some trouble already. I'm not sure it (the coverage) is having the impact that I'd like in terms of pressuring people to keep planning. I think it might have gone over the top," says McGeer, one of Canada's leading infectious disease experts and a long-time proponent of pandemic preparedness.
"It is, I think, inducing a split between the communicable disease people and the non-communicable disease people," she adds, referring to medical and public health professionals.
If McGeer is right, Dr. David Boyd is on the other side of the divide.
"I think a certain amount of that is self-serving scaremongering," Boyd, a specialist in internal medicine in London, Ont., says of the warnings the world may be watching the unfolding of the first flu pandemic in 37 years.
"It makes it sound when you listen to the news like it's imminent and everybody better get their mask fitted," Boyd says. "There's an awful lot of hype about it. So far, there isn't a pandemic."
Therein lies the problem for pandemic planners and society as a whole, though many people may not have grasped it yet.
The only time governments, hospitals, municipalities and companies can plan for a pandemic - whether by laying in drugs, signing vaccine contracts, stockpiling syringes and medical masks or preparing business contingency plans - is before such an event starts.
Once the tidal wave of disease is launched, it'll be all about getting through with what's available, not making sure that what's needed is at hand.
Experts readily acknowledge they can't say whether the H5N1 avian flu virus causing so much trouble in Southeast Asia will become a pandemic strain. But they believe the world's not ready for a pandemic of any stripe, let alone one that might be as worrisome as H5N1 has been so far.
"The problem we have today is that everything we see in Asia with H5N1 screams 'Perfect Storm.' And in that regard we are in the public health community across the board issuing some very dire predictions," admits Dr. Michael Osterholm, the U.S. infectious disease expert who has taken a lead role globally in pushing for pandemic planning.
Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention at the University of Minnesota, says the inability to predict the timing or the strain of the next pandemic shouldn't deter governments, communities and companies from urgently improving their state of readiness.
"No matter how much lead time we have, we'll never be prepared enough."
This article echoes concerns I've heard out of the epidemiology community with which I'm in touch: that the media will move on to the next disaster and fear fatigue will overtake the public if this pandemic doesn't happen on a short term schedule. In reality, the conditions are now such that it could take place in a couple of week or it might be years down the road. Some of the doctors with whom I'm in touch were not concerned that it took so long for the media to begin paying attention, prefering that the story break on the cable channels closer to the arrival of the illness. Well, we work with what we've got.
Hypocrisy
Bush administration's moral compass is lost
November 4, 2005
BY CATHLEEN FALSANI RELIGION WRITER
The morning after George W. Bush won his second term in office and many of his Republican colleagues also claimed victory last year, I received an e-mail from one of my dearest friends, Amanda.It's a note that has haunted me since, a niggling at the back of my mind like an overdue library book or an insult hurled in anger that can't ever be taken back properly.
Amanda is one of the most moral, ethical, intelligent and kind people I know. She also happens to be a Jewish atheist, more or less.
We've known each other since we were teenagers, and the subject of faith -- the peculiarity of my born-again-ness and the absence of her faith in any religious way -- had been a perennial topic of discussion. I respect her deeply and care about what she thinks, particularly about spiritual matters.
"Help!" was the title of Amanda's e-mail. "I'm sad and angry today," she began. "Given your profession and your personal belief system, I am genuinely hoping you have something to say on this: How can people who claim to be voting on religious and moral values vote for a man who . . ."
Then she listed what she believed were President Bush's offenses:
# He supports the death penalty. He claims to be humble and ask for God's guidance, yet seemingly refuses to admit his fallibility or take advice from those who might have helped him avoid dragging us into an unjust war.
# He reversed the civilized world's abhorrence of preemptive war. He sold Americans a war based on lies. He willingly started an unnecessary war that has resulted in the deaths of (now more than 2,000) American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
# He, at least tacitly, condones torture. (Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. And, we learned earlier this week, perhaps a number of secret CIA-run locations in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.) He ignores the human race's responsibility for preserving the Earth and its creatures.
# He is against stem cell research. He accuses dissenters of degrading the U.S. troops but does not push to fully fund Veterans Administration hospitals or health insurance for veterans. And he allowed the automatic assault weapons ban to lapse.
"How are these things reflective of a man with strong 'morals?' " Amanda asked. "How does 'morals' get to be defined as the things the right wants it to be? . . . Why isn't being anti-death penalty a moral issue? Why isn't being anti-war a moral issue? Why isn't being supportive of civil unions so that gay couples can, for example, obtain health insurance for each other and their children a moral issue?
"Please help me understand!" she pleaded.
For a year, I've not been able to bring myself to respond in any substantive way.
I'm reluctant to appear unduly partisan, at least not in print.
I don't want to paint one political ideology or another with a broad brush, and I am reticent always to judge the quality of anyone's faith (or heart), that of a president or anyone else.
But there comes a time when silence is immoral. Now, I believe, is that time.
Lost voice
While surely it is not solely Bush's doing, the moral morass facing (and, arguably, created by) his administration is as profound as any in our history.
Mired in political corruption of one variety or another, hamstrung (economically and spiritually) by an unjust war, and publicly shamed by the most despicable display of institutionalized racism since the slave era, as demonstrated in the unforgivably inept early response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has lost whatever moral voice it might have had.
And this week, as Republican leaders try to force a monstrous $50 billion budget cut designed allegedly to offset the mounting costs (currently in excess of $62 billion) of hurricane-related aid through Congress, it is clear that its moral compass also has been lost.
The proposed budget cuts, part of the so-called "budget reconciliation," would have devastating effects on the poorest, most vulnerable Americans, while allowing tax relief for the rich.
'Moral values'
The massive budget reductions would include billions of dollars from pension protection and student loan programs, Medicaid and child support enforcement, as well as millions from the food stamp program, Supplemental Security Income (read: senior citizens and the disabled) and foster care. Also attached to the "reconciliation" proposal is a plan that would allow oil drilling in Alaska's pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Nice.
Maybe Republican leaders should consider proposing an open season on the homeless or the resurrection of debtors' prisons while they're at it?
Is this the kind of leadership the majority of voters who, according to pollsters at the time, cast their ballots in 2004 based on "moral values," had in mind?
Is this what faith-based "compassionate conservatism" looks like? Is our nation more moral, more secure or spiritually healthier than it was a year ago?
And, to address my fellow Christian voters specifically, has the Good News been advanced in any way?
No. Absolutely not.
Next
I tend to listen to a man who knows something about indictments:
A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse? Reading Between the Lines of the Libby Indictment By JOHN W. DEAN ---- Friday, Nov. 04, 2005In my last column, I tried to deflate expectations a bit about the likely consequences of the work of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; to bring them down to the realistic level at which he was likely to proceed. I warned, for instance, that there might not be any indictments, and Fitzgerald might close up shop as the last days of the grand jury's term elapsed. And I was certain he would only indict if he had a patently clear case.
Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one.
Click here to find out more!Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.
This believable. It's impossible to think that Libby did something that a control freak like Cheney didn't know about. Bring it on, Fitz.
What Democracy?
The FBI's Secret Scrutiny
In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page A01
The FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender "all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person" who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities -- still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit -- by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
How about those ethics briefings?
In the Streets
Via Juan Cole:
Darkening mood overtakes Baghdad bookstore
By HAMZA HENDAWI
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Through war, sanctions, invasion and insurgency, the two men who own the Iqra'a bookstore in Baghdad's old quarter have clung to an optimism that was often surprising and refreshing.But lately that optimism has begun to show cracks.
Mohammed Hanash Abbas and Attallah Zeidan have spoken to The Associated Press of their dreams and confidence in the future in a dozen interviews since May 2003.
This time, however, they grumbled, spoke in unusually harsh language, and indeed seemed embarrassed when reminded of the positive glow they had radiated previously.
"People are worried sick," Zeidan said. "Death now comes on very, very short notice."
Neither has given up on Iraq. They remain excited by the political empowerment of their long-oppressed Shiite community following Saddam Hussein's overthrow in 2003. They believe fears of a Shiite-Sunni civil war are groundless, that Iraq will remain one nation and will ultimately see better days.
But there are many Iraqis who rejoiced at Saddam's overthrow only to descend quickly into despair as electricity failed, crime soared and the Sunni-led insurgency became a daily slaughter of fellow Iraqis. And the mood of Abbas and Zeidan has darkened too.
They complain that business is worse than they had expected. They say Baghdadis prefer to shop in their neighborhoods rather than make a dangerous trip to their bookstore. In recent months, getting there has become harder because of gridlock and the closure of the northern end of their street for security reasons.
"I want to collect all the terrorists in one place and kill them like insects," Abbas said in a rare flash of downright anger.
Yet the two men's store, whose name is the Arabic imperative for "read," is still a sanctuary of sorts - a tiny establishment in a dusty mall on a street strewn with trash, where college students, lecturers and regular readers can get a break from the mayhem.
For one thing, there are more books, with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and Hemingway taking pride of place. Under the U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, most of Iqra'a's books came from Iraqi families selling them off to make ends meet.
Now textbooks for teaching English come from Iran while novels left by U.S. soldiers at their bases are collected by cleaners and find their way to shops.
Students too poor to buy textbooks can borrow them for 20 cents each.
Sitting in their store, fingering identical strings of black worry beads, Zeidan and Abbas would muse about politics, ethnic relationships, business plans, personal dreams and everyday problems. The background noise might be gunfire and explosions, the BBC news in Arabic, the sputter of their electricity generator or Quranic verses blaring from a mosque's loudspeakers.
In the most recent interviews, Abbas, 41, and Zeidan, 40, for the first time appeared weighed down by worries. They looked weary, their hair flecked with gray.
Each grumbled that politics had split along sectarian lines, and that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Shiite-led government had failed to improve security or services. Before the Oct. 15 referendum on adopting Iraq's new constitution, Abbas had enthused that "I will vote yes a thousand times." But now that the votes were counted and the Shiite majority had given the constitution its resounding approval, he sounded less excited about it.
Still, the two men were keeping faith with democracy. They had voted for al-Jaafari in the Jan. 30 election, and would vote again in the Dec. 15 parliament election, though perhaps not for al-Jaafari's Shiite alliance.
Abbas had become something that never existed in the days of Saddam-vs.-nobody elections - a swing voter. "I have not made up my mind yet on who I will vote for," he said.
"We still need time to mature politically. It will take time," said Zeidan, a philosophy graduate.
"The electoral blocs contesting the next election are formed along sectarian lines: Shiites, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and secularists with communists," he complained.
Yet the two men suggest Sunni-Shiite tensions are more political than sectarian.
"All the talk about civil war is meaningless. We live in a homogenous society despite everything that's being said and done," said Zeidan. "When I take a seat in the service taxi that brings me here from home every morning, do I turn to the guy seated next to me and ask him, 'are you Sunni or Shiite?' I never asked my wife before I married her whether she was Sunni or Shiite."
Hendawi is one of the best US reporters in Baghdad. This is a "slice of life" story that can't be reported by non-Arabic speakers.
The Great Flu
Bumper Sal sent me this. I read The Toronto Star most days, but she got me to this a lot earlier than I would have on my own. Thanks.
Remembering the epidemic of 1918
LOUISA TAYLOR
By the time the Spanish flu had come and gone in the fall of 1918, more than half of the city of Toronto had been ill, and more than 2,000 died. But there is no photographic record of the crisis — the death toll on the battlefields of World War I looms far larger in the city's collective history. Last week, the Sunday Star chronicled the flu's journey of destruction through the city, and asked readers to send in their stories of the period. This week, a sampling of the responses.When I was a child, my grandmother, Clara Brooks, often told me of the time her mother fell gravely ill with the Spanish influenza. In the fall of 1918, Clara was a young woman and lived with her mother in a small apartment near the Danforth and Jones Ave. When her mother became sick, the doctor was summoned.
"It's the flu," he said after a brief examination. "She's in God's hands."
Coughing and shaking from fever and chills, her mother grew weaker with every passing hour. Nothing Clara did seemed to help. Worried and frightened, she kept glancing out the bedroom window of their second-floor apartment, watching the endless line of hearses and carts that wheeled up the puddles and ruts of Danforth, then a dirt road. As far as you could see, nothing but mourners and their sad processions.
It had been days and days of families bringing their dead to the cemeteries on the outskirts of Toronto. It seemed to Clara that the flu was killing everyone it touched. As she sat there worrying and listening to her mother's raspy breaths, she noticed a big barrel of oranges in front of the corner grocery across the street. She didn't know whether it would help or not, but she just had to get some oranges.
Pocketing a few coins, Clara threaded her way through the endless line of mourners jamming the street, and marched up to the grocer's store.
She had enough money for nearly a dozen oranges, and she spent every cent. One by one, the grocer dropped them into a paper bag.
Clara raced back across the street and up the stairs to her mother. She sliced open each orange, and squeezed all the juice into a cup. Teaspoon by teaspoon, she held them to her mother's lips. It took hours to finish all the juice.
By morning, her mother's fever had all but disappeared, and in a few days, was gone. And the Spanish flu that only days before had been taking the lives of young and old seemed to just fade away. Fewer and fewer mourners trudged along the Danforth. Soon enough, they stopped.
Sometimes, when I visit my grandmother's old neighbourhood, I think back to when the Danforth was just a dirt road with mud and messy cart ruts. I think about that endless line of hearses and carts and wagons. And I think about little groceries and oranges, and the love of a daughter that was strong enough to pull back her mother from the grip of the Spanish flu.
Ruth Walker, Whitby
My grandmother, Bedina Chianelli, is now 91 years old. She was 4 years old when the epidemic swept Toronto. She lived in the east end with her parents, Sebastiano (Sam) and Josephine Leo, who owned a fruit and vegetable store. Her mother gave birth to her younger brother, then died four days later from the flu.
Sam was left with three small children, but relatives were unable to help, as they were busy nursing others with the flu. Sam remarried very soon after. The woman he married was the great-grandma I fondly remember as a child.
My grandmother remembers being sick, and then everything changing drastically.
Cathy Lawn, London, Ont. The Spanish flu of 1918 was referred to often during my youth. All of us kids knew that our mother, Isabella Linton, was a flu survivor.
Born in 1897, Isabella was the oldest child of George and Christina Brown. In 1918 she was single, working in an office, and living at home with her family on Harbord St.
After work she devoted many hours to volunteering, as did other young women of her generation. They often visited servicemen at Chorley Park Hospital. The patients had been wounded in World War I.
When she became sick in 1918, Isabella had three brothers also living at home, but no one else in the family got the flu. I never heard that she was hospitalized, so I assume that she was cared for by her mother at home. Grandma Brown had no formal nursing training.
George Brown worked as a typesetter at The Toronto Daily Star until his retirement in the 1940s. The Browns were not wealthy people, but when Bella was recuperating in 1919, her mother took her north for the summer months, at considerable expense, to vacation at a lodge in Muskoka. There she received excellent meals, rest, fresh air and sunshine. It turned out to be the correct prescription. Isabella married, had five children and lived to 99.
Eileen Wood, London, Ont.
I have often heard stories from my mother, Grace Jones, about this horrible pandemic.
She is 97 years old and living in a retirement home. In 1918, she was living with her parents and eight siblings on Thornton Ave., between St. Clair and Eglinton, very close to Prospect Cemetery.
She was 10 years old, no longer in school. She vividly remembers a large truck driving around the neighbourhood, going from house to house picking up bodies.
She and her friends used to play in Prospect Cemetery, much of which was an open field back then. They watched as men dug huge pits, which they were told were for mass graves. Coffins were not used as they could not build them fast enough. They knew of entire families wiped out by the flu, but luckily, not one person in her family fell ill.
Bonnie Lund, Kingston
My father, the late Sam Levine, and his sister Laura were orphaned by the Spanish flu. My father was 3 years old, his sister aged 2. Their parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants Morris and Annie Levine, were young entrepreneurs who owned a dress factory in Toronto.
To the rescue came a spinster aunt, Dora Nepom, who was Annie's sister. Dora became foster mother to the two orphans.
Auntie Dora's example was one of great courage, love and duty to family. She never married and always put the children's interests ahead of her own.
Her foster children always treated her as their true mother and cared for her in return.
My father graduated from Harbord Collegiate and the Royal Conservatory of Music. He became a professional musician, played the double bass in the Toronto Symphony, and is a past president of the Toronto Musicians' Association. He was a great raconteur who often told us humorous stories of things that happened in his childhood, but if you scratched a little deeper you could see that he always regretted not knowing his real parents except through photographs. He made an extra effort to be an exceptional father to my brother, Mike Levine, and me.
Anita Levine Dahlin, Brechin
In 1918 my grandfather Dr. Charles W. L. Clark was a doctor in Toronto. He was one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this city but during the flu epidemic everybody with any kind of medical background was pressed into service.
He was seeing patients day and night in their homes. He often spoke of how terrible it was to answer those house calls only to find that his patients had died.
He described one particularly tragic incident when he arrived at a patient's home late in the evening, his last call of the day.
No one answered the front door, but it was open, so he went in. He found two children dead in the living room, then went upstairs and found the mother dead in the bedroom with her baby dead in the bassinette beside her.
That was the worst story that he told, and it stayed with him, that feeling of not being able to save anybody.
Christine A. Featherstone,
Toronto
The Toronto Star is soliciting stories about the 1918 flu. If you have one: contact them at Remembering the epidemic of 1918
LOUISA TAYLOR
By the time the Spanish flu had come and gone in the fall of 1918, more than half of the city of Toronto had been ill, and more than 2,000 died. But there is no photographic record of the crisis — the death toll on the battlefields of World War I looms far larger in the city's collective history. Last week, the Sunday Star chronicled the flu's journey of destruction through the city, and asked readers to send in their stories of the period. This week, a sampling of the responses.
When I was a child, my grandmother, Clara Brooks, often told me of the time her mother fell gravely ill with the Spanish influenza. In the fall of 1918, Clara was a young woman and lived with her mother in a small apartment near the Danforth and Jones Ave. When her mother became sick, the doctor was summoned.
"It's the flu," he said after a brief examination. "She's in God's hands."
Coughing and shaking from fever and chills, her mother grew weaker with every passing hour. Nothing Clara did seemed to help. Worried and frightened, she kept glancing out the bedroom window of their second-floor apartment, watching the endless line of hearses and carts that wheeled up the puddles and ruts of Danforth, then a dirt road. As far as you could see, nothing but mourners and their sad processions.
It had been days and days of families bringing their dead to the cemeteries on the outskirts of Toronto. It seemed to Clara that the flu was killing everyone it touched. As she sat there worrying and listening to her mother's raspy breaths, she noticed a big barrel of oranges in front of the corner grocery across the street. She didn't know whether it would help or not, but she just had to get some oranges.
Pocketing a few coins, Clara threaded her way through the endless line of mourners jamming the street, and marched up to the grocer's store.
She had enough money for nearly a dozen oranges, and she spent every cent. One by one, the grocer dropped them into a paper bag.
Clara raced back across the street and up the stairs to her mother. She sliced open each orange, and squeezed all the juice into a cup. Teaspoon by teaspoon, she held them to her mother's lips. It took hours to finish all the juice.
By morning, her mother's fever had all but disappeared, and in a few days, was gone. And the Spanish flu that only days before had been taking the lives of young and old seemed to just fade away. Fewer and fewer mourners trudged along the Danforth. Soon enough, they stopped.
Sometimes, when I visit my grandmother's old neighbourhood, I think back to when the Danforth was just a dirt road with mud and messy cart ruts. I think about that endless line of hearses and carts and wagons. And I think about little groceries and oranges, and the love of a daughter that was strong enough to pull back her mother from the grip of the Spanish flu.
Ruth Walker, Whitby
My grandmother, Bedina Chianelli, is now 91 years old. She was 4 years old when the epidemic swept Toronto. She lived in the east end with her parents, Sebastiano (Sam) and Josephine Leo, who owned a fruit and vegetable store. Her mother gave birth to her younger brother, then died four days later from the flu.
Sam was left with three small children, but relatives were unable to help, as they were busy nursing others with the flu. Sam remarried very soon after. The woman he married was the great-grandma I fondly remember as a child.
My grandmother remembers being sick, and then everything changing drastically.
Cathy Lawn, London, Ont. The Spanish flu of 1918 was referred to often during my youth. All of us kids knew that our mother, Isabella Linton, was a flu survivor.
Born in 1897, Isabella was the oldest child of George and Christina Brown. In 1918 she was single, working in an office, and living at home with her family on Harbord St.
After work she devoted many hours to volunteering, as did other young women of her generation. They often visited servicemen at Chorley Park Hospital. The patients had been wounded in World War I.
When she became sick in 1918, Isabella had three brothers also living at home, but no one else in the family got the flu. I never heard that she was hospitalized, so I assume that she was cared for by her mother at home. Grandma Brown had no formal nursing training.
George Brown worked as a typesetter at The Toronto Daily Star until his retirement in the 1940s. The Browns were not wealthy people, but when Bella was recuperating in 1919, her mother took her north for the summer months, at considerable expense, to vacation at a lodge in Muskoka. There she received excellent meals, rest, fresh air and sunshine. It turned out to be the correct prescription. Isabella married, had five children and lived to 99.
Eileen Wood, London, Ont.
I have often heard stories from my mother, Grace Jones, about this horrible pandemic.
She is 97 years old and living in a retirement home. In 1918, she was living with her parents and eight siblings on Thornton Ave., between St. Clair and Eglinton, very close to Prospect Cemetery.
She was 10 years old, no longer in school. She vividly remembers a large truck driving around the neighbourhood, going from house to house picking up bodies.
She and her friends used to play in Prospect Cemetery, much of which was an open field back then. They watched as men dug huge pits, which they were told were for mass graves. Coffins were not used as they could not build them fast enough. They knew of entire families wiped out by the flu, but luckily, not one person in her family fell ill.
Bonnie Lund, Kingston
My father, the late Sam Levine, and his sister Laura were orphaned by the Spanish flu. My father was 3 years old, his sister aged 2. Their parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants Morris and Annie Levine, were young entrepreneurs who owned a dress factory in Toronto.
To the rescue came a spinster aunt, Dora Nepom, who was Annie's sister. Dora became foster mother to the two orphans.
Auntie Dora's example was one of great courage, love and duty to family. She never married and always put the children's interests ahead of her own.
Her foster children always treated her as their true mother and cared for her in return.
My father graduated from Harbord Collegiate and the Royal Conservatory of Music. He became a professional musician, played the double bass in the Toronto Symphony, and is a past president of the Toronto Musicians' Association. He was a great raconteur who often told us humorous stories of things that happened in his childhood, but if you scratched a little deeper you could see that he always regretted not knowing his real parents except through photographs. He made an extra effort to be an exceptional father to my brother, Mike Levine, and me.
Anita Levine Dahlin, Brechin
In 1918 my grandfather Dr. Charles W. L. Clark was a doctor in Toronto. He was one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this city but during the flu epidemic everybody with any kind of medical background was pressed into service.
He was seeing patients day and night in their homes. He often spoke of how terrible it was to answer those house calls only to find that his patients had died.
He described one particularly tragic incident when he arrived at a patient's home late in the evening, his last call of the day.
No one answered the front door, but it was open, so he went in. He found two children dead in the living room, then went upstairs and found the mother dead in the bedroom with her baby dead in the bassinette beside her.
That was the worst story that he told, and it stayed with him, that feeling of not being able to save anybody.
Christine A. Featherstone,
Toronto
Yes, *Of Course* Bush Lied
There are several big stories this morning. One of them, as Melanie has noted, further documents what the Administration knew to be the dodgy nature of the intel that supposedly supported their claims of a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
While it's good to have more of the details on this, I'm not sure it matters that much. Saddam was a secularist who didn't trust religious nuts, and was a control freak. The idea that he'd risk turning over dangerous weapons to fanatics he couldn't control, as anything other than a desperation measure when cornered, could only be believed, even in the run-up to war, by people who either (a) really wanted to believe it, come hell or high water, (b) were decent Americans who couldn't believe Bush would lie to us about something this important, or (c) were just plain ignorant.
Which brings me to recent pieces by Jonathan Chait and Marshall Wittman.
Chait, who should know better, says that Bush didn't deliberately mislead us into war; his administration made "honest mistakes" about the intel. Wittman, of the Bull Moose blog, is even more dismissive of the idea that the Bushies deliberately lied to us on this score; he derides that belief as "Michael Moore territory." Wittman points out that if Bush did lie us into war, we should be pushing for impeachment. I completely agree with him there; it drives me a bit nuts that no significant Democrat is advocating impeachment.
It's really simple, guys:
1) The case for war was that Saddam had WMDs that he might give to terrorists who would use them against us.
Sure, there were other reasons given here and there. But that's the nub of what the Bush Administration sold the Congress, the UN, and the American people as the justification for war. If you don't believe me, check out the Congressional resolution authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq, or UN Resolution 1441, or Bush's speech to the American people on the eve of war.
2) The Saddam-terrorist connection was a bunch of bullcrap, and the Bush Administration knew it.
See above.
3) The WMD case can be broken down into: (a) the nukes, and (b) everything else.
There's a big gap between biological and chemical weapons, with which one might be able to kill hundreds or thousands of people (but more likely ones or tens of them) and nuclear weapons, which can easily kill hundreds of thousands of people. You don't go to war on an off-chance that your enemy will some day kill hundreds of your citizens. So the case for nukes was important, in generating public support for the war.
4) The case for Saddam's nuclear program was also a bunch of bullcrap, and the Bush Administration knew it.
This was obvious even before the war. But Bart Gellman's piece last Sunday reviews much of the bidding.
5) So we're down to the biological and chemical weapons. These can be divided into (a) those that the Bush Administration regarded as a threat - those that when we invaded, we'd have to do our utmost to secure, to make sure they weren't stolen by people who would sell or give them to the terrorists, and (b) those that the Bush Administration didn't regard as worth worrying about in that manner.
But as Bart Gellman reported two and a half years ago, the Iraqi WMDs all fell into that second category.
When our advancing troops, during the initial invasion, came across prospective WMD sites, did they secure them? No - they headed on towards Baghdad. As soon as they did so, the locals would loot the sites to the ground.
In other words, the Bush administration got us into this war on the basis of the WMD threat, but conducted the war as if no such threat existed.
And what's more, knowing that the prospective WMD sites were looted to the ground before our troops had a chance to ascertain whether the sites had actually contained WMDs, was the Bush administration concerned? If so, they have never once shown it.
If the Bush administration believed that Iraq really had WMDs that would represent a threat to us if terrorists obtained them, wouldn't this be, how you say, a "hair on fire" moment? Apparently not. The WMDs were only the excuse, the justification.
Either Bush knowingly lied, or he was Cheney's sock puppet, and Cheney was the witting liar. Either one's reason to remove him, and Cheney, from office. There's no way out of this particular corner.
Falling Apart
The great unravelling of the Bushlies begins now.
Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: November 6, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.
Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’
The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence.
An administration official declined to comment on the D.I.A. report on Mr. Libi. But Senate Republicans, put on the defensive when Democrats forced a closed session of the Senate this week to discuss the issue, have been arguing that Republicans were not alone in making prewar assertions about Iraq, illicit weapons and terrorism that have since been discredited.
Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the C.I.A., a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission.
Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.
The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi’s claims.
But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.
It was his DIA, if W chose not to listen to them, that was his decision. What Jehl doesn't tell you:
Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy
No U.S. Troop Withdrawal Date Is Set
By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 16, 2005; Page A01
President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath."We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."
With the Iraq elections two weeks away and no signs of the deadly insurgency abating, Bush set no timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops and twice declined to endorse Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's recent statement that the number of Americans serving in Iraq could be reduced by year's end. Bush said he will not ask Congress to expand the size of the National Guard or regular Army, as some lawmakers and military experts have proposed.
Politics with a Texan Twang
DeLay Asked Lobbyist to Raise Money Through Charity
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: November 4, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - Representative Tom DeLay asked the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to raise money for him through a private charity controlled by Mr. Abramoff, an unusual request that led the lobbyist to try to gather at least $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations, according to newly disclosed e-mail from the lobbyist's files.
The electronic messages from 2002, which refer to "Tom" and "Tom's requests," appear to be the clearest evidence to date of an effort by Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, to pressure Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners to raise money for him. The e-mail messages do not specify why Mr. DeLay wanted the money, how it was to be used or why he would want money raised through the auspices of a private charity.
"Did you get the message from the guys that Tom wants us to raise some bucks from Capital Athletic Foundation?" Mr. Abramoff asked a colleague in a message on June 6, 2002, referring to the charity. "I have six clients in for $25K. I recommend we hit everyone who cares about Tom's requests. I have another few to hit still."
The e-mail was addressed to Tony Rudy, who had been Mr. DeLay's chief of staff in the House before joining Mr. Abramoff's lobbying firm. Mr. Abramoff said it would be good "if we can do $200K" for Mr. DeLay.
The e-mail traffic was released this week by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which has conducted a yearlong investigation into whether Mr. Abramoff and a business partner, Michael Scanlon, Mr. DeLay's former House press secretary, defrauded Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations out of tens of millions of dollars. There was no immediate comment on the e-mail from spokesmen for Mr. Abramoff or Mr. DeLay, who has stepped down as House majority leader because of an unrelated criminal indictment in his home state.
A Republican friend of mine recently told me "Hey, we aren't the party of Delay." I told him that was great, then force him to resign and cut off all ties with him. Since that isn't happening, I guess they are the party of Delay.
These current Republicans took the wrong message from the
DeLay Uses Campaign Tactics to Fight Charges
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 6, 2005; Page A07
With his future tied to the outcome of a criminal indictment in Texas, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is using an extraordinary array of campaign tactics to try to win his court battle and save his political career.
Other politicians caught in a legal bind have tried to make a similar case that they were victims of prosecutorial excess or partisan attack. But few have done it to the degree of DeLay and his allies, who have launched an aggressive campaign to portray the former House majority leader as both a victim of a vendetta and an irreplaceable champion of conservatism.
By so doing, DeLay's team hopes to accomplish three critical goals: undermine the stature of his Democratic prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, in the minds of potential Texas jurors; win over DeLay's suburban Houston constituents before a potentially difficult reelection campaign; and retain his political base in Washington before a planned return to power.
The effort includes television advertisement that portrays Earle as a snarling Rottweiler, a staff of well-connected communications aides and skillful lawyers, e-mail blitzes, talking points for friendly radio hosts, speeches and a bulging legal defense fund.
"There's a parallel campaign going on, with his audiences, his constituency in Texas and the [Republican] conference here in Washington," Kevin Madden, a DeLay spokesman, said. "It's important that his constituents and his colleagues understand the egregious nature of the charges he faces."
Because telling the truth isn't part of his "Christian" beliefs. Tommy, here's a hint. It's going to take more than Checkers 3.0 and dust devils to get you out of this one.
November 05, 2005
Saturday Night Open Thread
Let me state it right up front: I'm not a big fan of pork. I don't each much meat, but when I do, it's in the beef and chicken families. Processed ham? Don't bore me. I eat organic beef and poultry and most commercial hams taste like the chemicals they are injected with.
That said, my brother the chef guided me through a bone-in ham (butt end) a couple of years ago that I still dream about. I offer it to you as we approach the family feast season if you are looking for alternatives from the poultry box. He invented this and I think he deserves a MacArthur for it.
Find the best bone in butt ham you can find (the shoulder works, too, but the technique is a little more difficult.) Disrobe it from it from its plastic wrap and go to work on the cut end with a boning knife. Work the knife down around the bone on all sides as deeply as you can get it into the ham, as close to the foot end as possible. When you've made some space between the bone and the meat all the way around, stuff the new cavity with fresh rosemary, leave it on the stem, but stuff as much in all around as you can. Use lots.
Remove the most egregious loose fat from the outside of the ham, the stuff that peels off easily. Score the outside of the ham with the traditional diamond scoring (add cloves if you want, but they are extraneous with this recipe) and then disolve three tablespoons of your favorite mustard into a half cup of honey. Add some allspice (also unnecessary) if that's traditional and mix well before coating the outside of the ham with the glaze. A pastry brush works well for this if you have qualms about using a paper towel and your fingers. You will need a shower while the thing is roasting if you opt for the latter method. Roast the ham in your traditional manner (help
I'm no fan of ham (particularly not the "country" stuff we get in this part of Virginia,) but I lined up for thirds on this recipe. The rosemary on the bone makes for a flavor that is otherworldly. The leftovers as sandwiches were heavenly, and Leigh eventually made ham and pea soup out of it that got shared with the employees of their store. The All Things Country crowd works very hard, but Leigh makes sure they are well fed during the Christmas season, which makes or breaks any retail enterprise. I took a bag of sandwich makings home with me, but I can only imagine how Leigh dressed them up for the sandwich spread at the store. I'm a good home cook, but Leigh is a chef and I learn from him everytime I cook with him. And I'll be cooking with him soon, I just got a request to bring dinner rolls for Turkey Day and I want to see if I can do something new. I've never made ciabatta, and that looks like a direction to pursue...
My brother is a chef so that you don't have to be. Just follow the recipes here and the basic directions in the Betty Crocker cook book and you'll be one hell of a cook. He's also a motorcyclist, a non-profit founder and home-renovator. If I can find the picture of him turning that Bobcat on its back, I'll post them and he'll hate me for them. His wife, who watched, horrified, told the story with great glee and we laughed until our sides ached. Home renovators have a learning curve, which is why I hire professionals rather than do it myself. After you've made that fifth trip to Home Depot to repair the toilet, you might begin to ask yourself, "What is my time worth?" and then the correct tool for the job is a checkbook.
Fuck Cavinistic self-sufficiancy. There comes a time in every job to hire a pro. Knowing when to do so, and who, is part of the wisdom of the second half of life.
Leigh and Anne have a lovely home and a relationship with a contractor. Those two things are not unrelated. Knowing when your macho has hit the wall: priceless. My condo is dealing with cheap help from the previous owners: the wallpaper is peeling, the ceramic floor in the kitchen is floating off the subfloor and cracking and all the repairs they left undone in the master bedroom are unsettling. This was crappy work. Do yourself a favor: pay for the good stuff the first time so that you don't have to pay for it to be done again. Or visit it on subsequent owners. Love your property enough to treat it with some class.
I have to replace all the toilets, the dishwasher and most of the sink and electical system. What looked cheap 10 years ago doesn't look so hot right now. Buy a home inspection (I had one, but I had little choice, my ex shed me and the courts set the schedule) and buy in the spring when you have the most choices and best inspectors. Learn from "lessons learned."
This is an open thread. I've given you plenty of targets.
Flu News
Sentries in U.S. Seek Early Signs of the Avian Flu
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: November 6, 2005
DAVIS, Calif. - Bang! Inside an improvised duck blind - her parked car - Grace Y. Lee presses a switch and her net gun, powered by a blank rifle bullet, blasts a square of light volleyball netting over the dirt road she is watching.One of the two magpies she has baited into range with cornbread, cheese-flavored rice snacks and dog food is snagged, flopping furiously around.
"We mostly catch the young ones," Ms. Lee said. "These birds are too smart to be caught again. We get them once, and they don't shop here anymore."
With the country waiting nervously for avian flu to arrive, catching wild birds is no hobby. It has become part of a national early detection effort, and Ms. Lee, a researcher at the University of California here, is a sentry on the country's epidemiological ramparts.
She is one of hundreds of ornithologists, veterinarians, amateur bird-watchers, park rangers and others being recruited by the National Wildlife Health Center to join a surveillance effort along the major American migratory flyways. They will test wild birds caught in nets; birds shot by hunters on public lands, who must check in with game wardens; and corpses from large bird die-offs in public parks or on beaches.
The plan also calls for sampling bodies of water for the influenza virus, which is shed in bird feces. And it is designating some ducks and geese - like those in backyard flocks or living year-round in park ponds - as "sentinels" to be captured, tested, released and periodically retested.
Surveillance of poultry is already in place. Long-standing federal and state laws require farmers to report deaths of birds from any flu strain. The surveillance system was worked out this summer by the Agriculture Department, which oversees poultry, and the wildlife health center in Madison, Wis., part of the Interior Department, which oversees wildlife - including migratory birds, which are thought to be the most likely entry route for the flu virus.
Dr. Christopher J. Brand, the center's research chief, estimated the cost at $10 million. [On Nov. 1, President Bush announced a $7.1 billion plan to guard against a flu pandemic; Dr. Brand said he hoped money for the surveillance system would come from that.] The sampling plan had a small test run this fall in Alaska, which Dr. Brand said was the obvious choice because of the flu's surprise appearance in Siberia in July. Birds from there mingle in the summer Arctic nesting grounds with birds that migrate down the North American coast.
Now the flu's recent crossing of Europe "has opened up more eyes," Dr. Brand said. It is unlikely that infected birds will cross the Atlantic, because most migrate north-south and the birds detected in Eastern Europe were from species that migrate to Africa. Still, Dr. Brand said, there is now talk of setting up a surveillance network for Greenland, eastern Canada and the East Coast.
The threat of avian flu has also sped a transformation that was begun by the fear of bioterrorism and fueled by the fight against West Nile virus: veterinarians and doctors, as well as the agencies overseeing them, are joining forces.
Previously, said Dr. William B. Karesh, head of the field veterinary program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, the two fields almost never worked in tandem.
"Human medicine and veterinary medicine have advanced beautifully in the last 30 years, but they were not linked," Dr. Karesh said. That has always frustrated him, he said, because "diseases don't care which way they flow - there is a whole world of bacteria, viruses and fungi that move between wild animals, domestic animals and humans."
Dr. Karesh described once trying to get a research grant for surveillance of animal diseases that infect humans, known as zoonoses. The National Institutes of Health told him to apply to the Department of Agriculture, he said, and officials there sent him to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which told him it had no mandate to study disease.
"Then we went to Homeland Security, and they understood what we were talking about," Dr. Karesh said. "But they said: 'You're an orphan. No one does this.' And in their rankings, we're lower than people trying to blow up the subway in New York."
Now, instead of sharing information haphazardly and getting into jurisdictional disputes - problems that cropped up during the 2003 monkeypox outbreak and in surveillance for mad cow disease - health officials are writing plans that emphasize teamwork.
The United States still does far better at animal surveillance than most other countries because its medical and veterinary systems are each excellent and because outbreaks cannot be hushed up - as, for example, the SARS outbreak was in China.
As you all know, I'm highly critical of the Bush admin's pandemic influenza preparation (and lack thereof) but this is actually good news. In this country, surveillance of zoonoses has improved dramatically, but the efforts are primarily volunteer, rather than anything the USG is responsible for. There is very little chance that this effort is going to detect bird flu--the virus is mostly likely to hit these shores in a human host, rather than a bird. Remember, the virus still has to go through two significant changes before this becomes efficiently human to human transmissible, and those are two important changes. Will it happen? We don't know, but, as a gambler I don't like the odds that it won't. Don't panic, prepare. Read The Flu WIki.
Just a heads-up, Bumpers. For only the second time since Bump went live on November 15, 2003, I'm going to be out of town for a few days. There is a big flu conference in the Bay area of Northern California next week and I'll be leaving Wednesday morning and returning on Sunday night. It is, of course, quite an honor to be asked to participate in this event. I got the participant list last night and it is pretty intimidating. Lots of famous names and lots of scientists with an alphabet soup after their names. I'm just a lowly writer, blogger and theologian. I'll be back in time for our second blogiversary on the 15th and have some special things planned for that day. The guest posters will be in to help me out while I'm in California--the schedule is daunting as the group will meet (with meals) from first light until 9:30 every night. This will be both hard work and a chance to meet with others who are (as the organizer put it) "the flu obssessed."
My wiki partner, DemfromCT, will be one of the participants and he and I (who have virtually known each other since we were both guest posters at Dkos two years ago) will be meeting in person for the first time. I'm looking forward to that as much as I'm looking forward to all that I will learn at the conference. I met one of the Reveres at a think tank panel in DC earlier this year and, of course, I met pogge at some training I was taking in Toronto last year for that job that didn't work out so well. We have big plans for the Wiki, which has sort of "taken off" as one of the "go to" sites for pandemic flu information and we are dealing with a lot of growing pains right now and looking to create an organization around the Wiki. The next month is going to be complicated, to say the least, but I think we'll have something new to show for it: a website which creates an organization, rather than the other way around. Imagine that, an organization called into being over the Web by popular demand.
If any of you can put me in touch with a lawyer who does pro bono work in the area of creating 501(c)3 filings, I'd be greatful. Dem, the reveres and I are going to make us a non-profit to fund the wiki. We need to grow and we need to grow now. And we need visionary philanthropists who can see that right now.
I'll be spending most of Sunday working on budgets and grant proposals, so I hope the guests can chime in. And thank them. Bump is an all-volunteer effort and I plan to keep it that way.
Public Housing
Changing Course (Perhaps) on Housing
Published: November 5, 2005
Public outrage over President Bush's mishandling of the Katrina disaster has forced the administration to back away - if only temporarily - from a deeply wrongheaded policy on low-income housing. In New Orleans this week, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced with great fanfare that the government would tear down some of the most unlivable high-density public housing in the country and replace it with model lower-density housing, which will probably serve mixed-income residents.That sounds a lot like Hope VI, a valuable public housing program, created in the 1990's, that the Bush administration has attacked relentlessly. It has tried to eliminate the program's budget for three straight years. If the recent announcement represents a policy shift and not just a public relations tactic, the change would be welcome.
Hope VI has furnished desperately needed money for communities that have seen their housing blighted by the disastrous high-rise public projects that the nation mistakenly embraced in the 1940's and 50's. By concentrating poverty - often in places without jobs or decent schools - these developments eventually killed entire neighborhoods and socially isolated the families who lived in them.
Congress has thus far prevented the Bush administration from killing Hope VI, but the program has been preserved at a reduced financing level that falls far short of the national need. Perhaps Mr. Bush will now realize that there is a good deal more work to be done - all over the country - before the program runs its course. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, community leaders will need to make sure that some portion of the planned new housing is actually affordable for the poor people who will be displaced. Those who won't be allowed to move back should get vouchers for decent housing elsewhere.
The NYT doesn't get it. Bush has public disdain for the poor and middle class. He couldn't care less and his far right buddies in Congress don't care either.
Impeach Him Now
Torture: It's the new American way
ROSA BROOKS
'WE WILL bury you," Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. diplomats in 1956. The conventional wisdom is that Khrushchev got it wrong: The repressive Soviet state collapsed under the weight of its own cruelties and lies while democratic America went from strength to strength, buoyed by its national commitment to liberty and justice for all.But with this week's blockbuster report of secret CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe, cynics may be pardoned for wondering who really won the Cold War.
According to Dana Priest, the Washington Post investigative reporter who broke the story Wednesday, it all started on Sept. 17, 2001, when President Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the CIA to kill, capture or detain Al Qaeda operatives.
There was only one problem: The CIA didn't know where to put the people it detained. Those detainees thought to be of "high value" needed to be kept somewhere … special. Somewhere impregnable, like Alcatraz. And somewhere secret, far from the prying eyes of reporters or Red Cross officials. Because these high-value prisoners — so-called ghost detainees — were going to be subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."
That's Orwell-speak for what's known in English as torture. The list of enhanced techniques is classified but reportedly includes such old favorites as "waterboarding" (feigned drowning) and feigned suffocation. Authorized techniques also may have included the "Palestinian hanging," a "stress position" in which a detainee is suspended from the ceiling or wall by his wrists, which are handcuffed behind his back.
It was this enhancement that preceded the death of Manadel Jamadi, an Iraqi who died in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, according to government investigative reports. When Jamadi was lowered to the ground, blood gushed from his mouth as if "a faucet had turned on," said Tony Diaz, an MP who witnessed his torture. Later, other guards posed with Jamadi's battered corpse, and the leaked photos shocked the world.
That's not the kind of publicity a freedom-loving democracy needs, so the CIA reportedly opted for secret "black sites." It's not as easy as you might think to find a spot where you can torture people in peace. Abu Ghraib is full of camera-clicking reservists, and the Marquis de Sade's castle lies in ruins. The Tower of London's dungeons still boast an excellent range of enhanced interrogation equipment, but they attract too many giggling children.
CIA operatives apparently considered uninhabited islands near Zambia's Lake Kariba, but interrogators didn't much like the idea of catching one of those nasty local diseases so prevalent in Central Africa. Marburg hemorrhagic fever? No thanks.
Thailand worked for a while, but the Thai government got cold feet when press reports outed the existence of a local CIA site. And Guantanamo's CIA interrogation facility had to be closed when the Supreme Court pointed out that Guantanamo is not a law-free zone.
Remember the flap last spring when Amnesty International called Guantanamo an American "gulag"? Maybe that's what gave the CIA the idea of locating some black sites in Eastern Europe. ("Hmm, gulag, gulag … that reminds me of something…. Hey! Maybe there are some leftover Soviet-era detention facilities we can use for our enhanced interrogations!")
And we re-elected the bastard. Unbelievable.
Ousting the Oligarchs
Spending Inquiry for Top Official on Broadcasting
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: November 5, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 - Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees, officials involved in that examination said on Friday.Mr. Tomlinson was ousted from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on Thursday after its inspector general concluded an investigation that was critical of him. That examination looked at his efforts as chairman of the corporation to seek more conservative programs on public radio and television.
But Mr. Tomlinson remains an important official as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The board, whose members include the secretary of state, plays a central role in public diplomacy. It supervises the government's foreign broadcasting operations, including Radio Martí, Radio Sawa and al-Hurra; transmits programs in 61 languages; and says it has more than 100 million listeners each week.
The board has been troubled lately over deep internal divisions and criticism of its Middle East broadcasts. Members of the Arab news media have said its broadcasts are American propaganda.
People involved in the inquiry said that investigators had already interviewed a significant number of officials at the agency and that, if the accusations were substantiated, they could involve criminal violations.
Last July, the inspector general at the State Department opened an inquiry into Mr. Tomlinson's work at the board of governors after Representative Howard L. Berman, Democrat of California, and Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, forwarded accusations of misuse of money.
The lawmakers requested the inquiry after Mr. Berman received complaints about Mr. Tomlinson from at least one employee at the board, officials said. People involved in the inquiry said it involved accusations that Mr. Tomlinson was spending federal money for personal purposes, using board money for corporation activities, using board employees to do corporation work and hiring ghost employees or improperly qualified employees.
Through an aide at the broadcasting board, Mr. Tomlinson declined to comment Friday about the State Department inquiry.
In recent weeks, State Department investigators have seized records and e-mail from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, officials said. They have shared some material with the inspector general at the corporation, including e-mail traffic between Mr. Tomlinson and White House officials including Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President Bush and a close friend of Mr. Tomlinson.
Mr. Rove and Mr. Tomlinson became friends in the 1990's when they served on the Board for International Broadcasting, the predecessor agency to the board of governors. Mr. Rove played an important role in Mr. Tomlinson's appointment as chairman of the broadcasting board.
The content of the e-mail between the two officials has not been made public but could become available when the corporation's inspector general sends his report to members of Congress this month.
That inspector general examined several contracts that were approved by Mr. Tomlinson but not disclosed to board members. The contracts provided for payments to a researcher who monitored the political content of several shows, including "Now" with Bill Moyers, and payments to two Republican lobbyists who were retained to help defeat a proposal in Congress that would have required greater representation of broadcasters on the corporation's board.
The inspector general also examined the role of a White House official, Mary C. Andrews, in Mr. Tomlinson's creation of an ombudsman's office to monitor the political balance of programs.
Mr. Tomlinson has said he took those steps to counter what he called a clear liberal tilt of public broadcasting. But broadcasting executives and critics of the corporation say the steps violated the corporation's obligations to insulate broadcasting from politics.
On Thursday Mr. Tomlinson was forced to step down from the corporation, which directs nearly $400 million in federal money to public radio and television, after the board was briefed about the conclusions by its inspector general. In that inquiry, examiners looked at accusations that Mr. Tomlinson improperly used corporation money to promote more conservative programming.
State Department officials said on Friday that al-Hurra, the Arabic language satellite television network set up by the board of governors, was also being examined by the inspector general for possibly problematic procurement practices. That audit was first disclosed on Friday by The Financial Times.
The system still sorta works.
Not Our Kind, Dear
Read the post below then read this. It would all be laughable if lives weren't at stake.
November 4, 2005
NEWS THAT the Central Intelligence Agency is running a system of secret prisons in far-off countries has shocked the nation. The clandestine jails are an affront to American values and an embarrassment in the world community. They are probably illegal, and ineffective as well.But their existence may solve one of Washington's recent minor mysteries. Members of Congress were dismayed last month when Vice President Dick Cheney, joined by CIA Director Porter Goss, lobbied them to exempt CIA employees from a bill that would bar cruel or degrading treatment of all prisoners in US custody. Their efforts were spurned in the Senate, where the provision, advanced by Senator John McCain, passed with 90 votes.
Cheney's desire to give CIA jailers and interrogators special status raises the question of whether Americans are torturing or otherwise coercing detainees at the ''black site" prisons described Wednesday in The Washington Post. According to officials quoted by the Post, some 30 prisoners suspected of being high-level Al Qaeda members are ''kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being."
In America, even those accused of the most heinous murders have a right to see a lawyer and to assert their innocence. But this emblem of democracy is being trampled before the world. And the Bush administration seems deaf to the growing complaints from our allies and our own citizens. Cheney in particular was pushing for the CIA exemption only days before felony charges were filed against his top aide, Lewis Libby. And in replacing Libby, Cheney has shown no sign of reform. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, has barred UN human rights inspectors from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, insisting that the only outside inspectors will be those from the International Red Cross, which makes no public reports. And even the Red Cross has not gone to the CIA sites.
The level of secrecy and coverup in this administration is astounding, and it has spread to Capitol Hill. With Republicans senators stalling an investigation into the misinformation that was disseminated prior to the invasion of Iraq, Democrats lit a fire this week, invoking a rarely used rule to force the Senate to go into a closed session. Ironically, it took a secret session to open up the process a bit.
And where is the president in all this? Where is George W. Bush, who campaigned in 2000 on a promise to restore integrity to Washington and to give the nation a government it could be proud of?
The Post story revealed the existence of the CIA's black sites. But in this administration, far too many remain.
Dear BoGlo,
The news may have shocked you, but I don't notice the nation up in arms. I don't see peasants in the streets with pitchforks (those would be in Argentina.) I frankly don't notice anybody caring. American exceptionalism remains in high gear and I don't see us giving a damn.
Yours,
Melanie
Power Point Bullshit
Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings
White House Counsel to Give 'Refresher' Course
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 5, 2005; A02
President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the "spirit as well as the letter" of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, "the White House counsel's office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information," according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.
The mandatory ethics primer is the first step Bush plans to take in coming weeks in response to the CIA leak probe that led to the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, and which still threatens Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff. Libby was indicted last week in connection with the two-year investigation. He resigned when the indictment was announced and on Thursday pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to federal investigators and a grand jury about his conversations with reporters.
A senior aide said Bush decided to mandate the ethics course during private meetings last weekend with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and counsel Harriet Miers. Miers's office will conduct the ethics briefings.
The meetings come as Bush faces increasing pressure from Democrats to revoke a security clearance for Rove as punishment for Rove's role in unmasking to reporters a CIA operative whose husband was critical of the White House's prewar assessment of Iraq's weapons capabilities. The five-count indictment against Libby maintains that other government officials were aware of, if not involved in, leaking the identity of Valerie Plame to the media.
Will Bush attend these? Will Rove? The tenor gets set at the top, corrupt management breeds corrupt staff.
Murderous Liars
Cut in U.S. troops in Iraq not assured
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 4, 2005
The Pentagon said yesterday that U.S. troop drawdowns from Iraq are not assured after the nation's Dec. 15 elections and that levels may even go up, if top commanders need more manpower.Army Gen. George Casey, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to make a troop level recommendation in 2006 once a permanent government takes office in Baghdad Dec. 31.
Gen. Casey initially held out the hope for "substantial" reductions. But he backed off those predictions after prominent Sunnis failed to sign on to Iraq's new constitution, dashing hopes that that minority group would quit the insurgency and join the new government. The constitution passed, nonetheless, winning large majorities of Shi'ites and Kurds.
Larry Di Rita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, held out the possibility of more troops as the Bush administration dampened expectations for a big U.S. exodus.
"I don't want you to be surprised again when for whatever reason, Gen. Casey says, 'I might want more. I'll stick where I am, in steady state,' or 'I'll ask for less,'?" Mr. Di Rita told reporters at the Pentagon. "And those are his three choices."
The Pentagon had maintained a troop level of about 138,000 until late summer, when the number bumped up to 160,000 to provide more security for the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum. It appears the level will stay there until at least after the December elections, even though local Iraqi forces now exceed 210,000.
So, what else is Casey lying about?
The Mythologists
It turns out that Feith and Wolfowitz had an opposite number in the UK.
More comment | Special report: politics and Iraq
Interview
A political war that backfired
In advance of publication of his memoirs, Britain's former ambassador to the US reveals why he supported the war in Iraq but is far from happy about the aftermath
Julian Glover and Ewen MacAskill
Saturday November 5, 2005
The Guardian
A small, hand-addressed blue box on Sir Christopher Meyer's desk provides a clue to his background. It contains a miniature stone replica of the White House and was a gift this month from Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser. It a sign that Sir Christopher is not just another former ambassador but a man close to the heart of Republican America.As British ambassador to Washington from 1997 to February 2003, he was the man who introduced a wary Tony Blair to Mr Bush. He led the way towards the unexpected mating of New Labour with the American right, a relationship that eventually took Britain to war in Iraq.
Article continues
He did not just arrange meetings between the two leaders but spoke up at them. He was a confidant of both sides, with regular private meetings with everyone in the White House from vice-president Dick Cheney and his aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now being prosecuted in Washington, to the president himself.He reinvented what it meant to be Britain's ambassador to Washington, a dominant figure in the capital's social life as well as in politics.
His posting overlapped the Clinton and Bush administrations and, with access to both the US and British sides, he was well placed to track the debate in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. He supported the war but is far from happy about the handling of the aftermath. "I don't believe the enterprise is doomed necessarily, though, God, it does not look good," he says in an interview with the Guardian marking the publication of his memoirs, DC Confidential. "A lot of people think what we are going to end up with is precisely what we didn't want."
It is not a book that will make comfortable reading for Mr Blair and those who served him. He is the first of the insiders involved in the planning of the war to publish a first-hand account. He is not flattering about the way the prime minister, his ministers and advisers went about their task. Now as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Britain's newspaper watchdog, he works from a small, shabby office just off Fleet Street, a far cry from the embassy receptions and official Rolls-Royce that once ferried him around the US capital. He looks at the breakdown of Iraq now with the detachment of an outsider - but one with a unique insight into how the war came about and what could have been done differently.
He contrasts Mr Blair's meek approach with Lady Thatcher's dealings with the White House. Mr Blair behaved very differently from what Sir Christopher calls "the Thatcher style". He saw it first-hand on many of her trips abroad.
"Thatcher had no hesitation on the phone, or surging into the Oval office to blaze away if she thought Reagan was doing something stupid. And she did on a number of occasions and sometimes it was extremely effective and certainly did not damage the relationship at all. I think Tony Blair and Downing Street were reluctant to perform in that way," he says.
And for all his rhetorical strengths, Mr Blair was surprisingly weak on detail. He faced a president who was sharper than Europeans generally assume. There were "moments of great power and strength exerted by Blair, usually in the rhetorical framing of issues. But we see, how can I put it, less attention to detail than some of these issues demanded."
Lady Thatcher took pride in knowing more detail than her officials. "That is why it was terrifying to be summoned into her presence because if you did not know your stuff, she would expose you. There was never that danger with Tony Blair."
Sir Christopher, who had access not only to all the Bush-Blair phone exchanges but position papers written by Mr Blair, was in a position to know.
....
So what, two-and-a-half years after the invasion, do the president and prime minister have to do now? "I think the US and ourselves are on the horns of an absolutely impossible dilemma," he says. He opposes an early pullout of US and British troops. Abandoning the task of rebuilding the country would leave "the relatives of at least 2,000 American servicemen and 98 British servicemen with a legitimate question about what they died for".But he accepts that the task of rebuilding may now be impossible. "There is no doubt that the presence of American and British troops to a degree motivates the insurgency. So this is agonising for Bush and I think it is agonising for Blair, all of us really." He also dismisses the prime minister's claim that the war has not exposed Britain to terrorist attacks. "There is plenty of evidence around at the moment that home-grown terrorism was partly radicalised and fuelled by what is going on in Iraq," he says. "There is no way we can credibly get up and say it has nothing to do with it. Don't tell me that being in Iraq has got nothing to do with it. Of course, it does. The issue is it is part of the price we have to pay and should be paying for the removal of Saddam Hussein and at the moment the jury is out."
He never expected to have such doubts at this stage. "I was a war supporter. I still think it was the right thing to do to bring Saddam to heel."
Writing the book, a process he began on a family holiday in France last year, as well as the worsening situation in Iraq, has led him to think hard about what should have been done differently.
In Washington, he says, ahead of the war, "there was a massive amount of wishful thinking which led to really not working through in detail and assiduously what would need to be done after Saddam was driven from power. They were being told by people that they would be greeted as heroes and liberators."
The reality, of course, turned out to be different and Sir Christopher's view is that this should have been predicted.
Read the rest of the article. It's revealing; Chalabi and Co. sold this war on both sides of the Atlantic.
Liars and Thieves
U.S. Should Repay Millions to Iraq, a U.N. Audit Finds
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: November 5, 2005
An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary. Skip to next paragraphThe work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.
Some of the work involved postwar fuel imports carried out by K.B.R. that previous audits had criticized as grossly overpriced. But this is the first time that an international auditing group has suggested that the United States repay some of that money to Iraq. The group, known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, compiled reports from an array of Pentagon, United States government and private auditors to carry out its analysis.
A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Cathy Mann, said the questions raised in the military audits, carried out in a Pentagon office called the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, had largely focused on issues of paperwork and documentation and alleged nothing about the quality of the work done by K.B.R. The monitoring board relied heavily on the Pentagon audits in drawing its conclusions.
"The auditors have raised questions about the support and the documentation rather than questioning the fact that we have incurred the costs," Ms. Mann said in an e-mail response to questions. "Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges.' "
The Pentagon audits themselves have not been released publicly. Ms. Mann said Kellogg, Brown & Root was engaged in negotiations over the questioned costs with its client in the work, the United States Army Corps of Engineers and Developmentas been set for resolution of these issues," Ms. Mann said. The monitoring board, created by the United Nations specifically to oversee the Development Fund - which includes Iraqi oil revenues but also some money seized from Saddam Hussein's government - said because the audits were continuing, it was too early to say how much of the $208 million should ultimately be paid back.
But the board said in a statement that once the analysis was completed, the board "recommends that amounts disbursed to contractors that cannot be supported as fair be reimbursed expeditiously."
The K.B.R. contracts that have drawn fresh scrutiny also cover services other than fuel deliveries, like building and repairing oil pipelines and installing emergency power generators in Iraq. The documents released yesterday by the monitoring board did not detail problems with specific tasks in those broad categories, but instead summarized a series of newly disclosed audits that called into question $208,491,382 of K.B.R.'s work in Iraq.
A member of the monitoring board said questions about the contracts "had been lingering for a long time." Once the audits are completed, said the board member, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to be seen as speaking for the United Nations, the results will give the Iraqi government "the right to go back to K.B.R. and say, 'Look, you've overbilled me on this, this is what you could repay me.' "
The Cheney administration gave these folks a license to loot and it will never be paid back. You and I paid for it.
Rank and Smelly Idiocy
FEMA Speeds Katrina Relief
Owners in Areas With Worst Damage To Receive $26,200
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 5, 2005; Page A01
Faced with the daunting task of inspecting hundreds of thousands of damaged homes, federal officials have decided to award the maximum relief aid possible to people in neighborhoods presumed destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.The Federal Emergency Management Agency has begun notifying 60,000 renters and property owners in nine Louisiana and Mississippi parishes and counties that they will immediately receive as much as $26,200, the most Congress has authorized for individual households battered by Katrina. The determination of who gets the money is being based on satellite imagery of the worst flooding or wind damage, broken down by Zip code, where individual inspections have not been done.
Although it may be possible that some homes in those areas escaped serious damage and their owners do not require the aid, FEMA has decided not to wait for case-by-case inspections.
"It is presumed these homes are uninhabitable, and these persons will be eligible for the maximum amount they can receive," said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews. "Basically if you lived here, . . . if you lost everything you owned, which is presumable, you'll probably receive the $26,200," though renters will receive less.
The move was not formally announced by FEMA but will complete the agency's cash obligation to a large number of victims of Katrina, which hit on Aug. 29. With the onset of cold weather, officials have estimated that as many as 600,000 families require long-term housing. The agency's multibillion-dollar plans to temporarily place people aboard cruise ships, in hotels, mobile homes or trailers have been criticized as wasteful and ill-conceived.
The aid would not be discounted by any money for hotels FEMA is paying for 200,000 residents who fled the storm. But it would be offset by any other FEMA cash aid -- including rental assistance for apartments -- those people may be receiving. The affected nine-digit Zip codes are in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Plaquemines parishes in Louisiana, and Jackson, Harrison and Hancock counties in Mississippi.
FEMA said yesterday that its estimated cost in Louisiana alone will be $41.4 billion, about five times what it spent on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York. The state's share would be $3.7 billion -- the equivalent of about half of Louisiana's state annual general fund.
So far, 2.8 million households have applied for federal aid from Katrina and from Hurricane Rita, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coast four weeks later, Andrews said. Based on past disasters, about two-thirds will qualify for help.
The $26,200 is the most money homeowners can receive. There are eligibility limits and restrictions on what the money can be spent on, but it can pay for home repairs, for temporary housing and to replace a car.
Sorry, WaPo, this is laughable. "Speeds Relief?" Katrina came ashore on August 29. Today is November 5. This isn't "speedy," this is slow and neglectful and incompetent.
Note that FEMA paid a bunch of people in Florida who weren't anywhere near hurrican Ivan last year. This is an agency in dire need of reform.
Hope in the present
The Threat of Hope in Latin America
by Naomi Klein
When Manuel Rozental got home one night last month, friends told him two strange men had been asking questions about him. In this close-knit indigenous community in southwestern Colombia ringed by soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, strangers asking questions about you is never a good thing.The Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, which leads a political movement that is autonomous from all those armed forces, held an emergency meeting. They decided that Rozental, their communications coordinator, who had been instrumental in campaigns for agrarian reform and against a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, had to get out of the country—fast.
They were certain that those strangers had been sent to kill Rozental—the only question was, by whom? The US-backed national government, which notoriously uses right-wing paramilitaries to do its dirty work? Or was it the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Latin America’s oldest Marxist guerrilla army, which does its dirty work all on its own? Oddly, both were distinct possibilities. Despite being on opposing sides of a forty-one-year civil war, the Uribe government and the FARC wholeheartedly agree that life would be infinitely simpler without Cauca’s increasingly powerful indigenous movement.
Prominent indigenous leaders in northern Cauca have been kidnapped or assassinated by the FARC, which seeks to be the exclusive voice of Colombia’s poor. And indigenous authorities had been informed that the FARC wanted Rozental dead. For months rumors had been circulated that he was the worst thing you can be in the books of a left-wing guerrilla movement: a CIA agent. But that doesn’t mean the strangers were FARC assassins, because there had been other rumors too, spread through the media by government officials. They held that Rozental was the worst thing you can be in the books of a right-wing, Bush-bankrolled politician: “an international terrorist.”
On October 27 the Indigenous Council, representing the roughly 110,000 Nasa Indians in the region, issued an angry communiqué: “Manuel is no terrorist. He is no paramilitary. He is no agent of the CIA. He is a part of our community who must not be silenced by bullets.” The Nasa leaders say they know why Rozental, now living in exile in Canada, has come under threat. It is the same reason that this past April two peaceful indigenous villages in Northern Cauca were turned into war zones after the FARC attacked police posts in the town centers, giving the government an excuse for a full-scale occupation.
All of this is happening because the indigenous movement is on a roll. In the past year the Nasa of northern Cauca have held the largest antigovernment protests in recent Colombian history and organized local referendums against free trade that had a turnout of 70 percent, higher than any official election (with a near unanimous “no” result). And in September thousands took over two large haciendas, forcing the government to make good on a long-promised land settlement. All these actions unfolded under the protection of the Nasa’s unique Indigenous Guard, who patrol their territory armed only with sticks.
In a country ruled by M-16s, AK-47s, pipe bombs and Black Hawk helicopters, this combination of militancy and nonviolence is unheard of. And that is the quiet miracle the Nasa have accomplished: They revived the hope killed when paramilitaries systematically slaughtered left-wing politicians, including dozens of elected officials and two Unión Patriótica presidential candidates. At the end of the bloody campaign in the early nineties, the FARC understandably concluded that engaging in open politics was a suicide mission. The key to the Nasa’s success, Rozental says, is that they are not trying to take over state institutions, which “have lost all legitimacy.” They are instead “building a new legitimacy based on an indigenous and popular mandate that has grown out of participatory congresses, assemblies and elections. Our process and our alternative institutions have put the official democracy to shame. That’s why the government is so angry.”
The Nasa have shattered the illusion, cherished by both sides, that Colombia’s conflict can be reduced to a binary war. Their free-trade referendums have been imitated by nonindigenous unions, students, farmers and local politicians nationwide; their land takeovers have inspired other indigenous and peasant groups to do the same. A year ago 60,000 marched demanding peace and autonomy; last month those same demands were echoed by simultaneous marches in thirty-two of Colombia’s provinces. Each action, explains Hector Mondragon, well-known Colombian economist and activist, “has had a multiplier effect.”
Across Latin America a similarly explosive multiplier effect is under way, with indigenous movements redrawing the continent’s political map, demanding not just “rights” but a reinvention of the state along deeply democratic lines. In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups have shown they have the power to topple governments. In Argentina, when mass protests ousted five presidents in 2001 and ’02, the words of Mexico’s Zapatistas were shouted on the streets of Buenos Aires. At this writing, George W. Bush is on his way to Argentina, where he will discover that the spirit of that revolt is alive and well.
Emphasis mine. Time to build our own indigenous, participatory democracy.
With Your Coffee
What's a beignet? Make one and find out.
Pronounced "ben-YAYS", these are the rectangular doughnuts (no holes) served fresh and hot around the clock at Cafe du Monde in the French Market. (Another former French Market coffeehouse, Morning Call, moved to ... Metairie. Ugh.) When you hear people talking about "goin' fo' coffee an' doughnuts", this is what they mean. Cafe du Monde is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is usually quite busy at all hours.
These aren't terribly difficult to prepare at home. Even though there's a CDM Beignet Mix (just add water, and it's as "easy as un-deux-trois-quatre", as the box says), it's not available out of New Orleans, and making this from scratch is fun. The yeast dough must be prepared in advance and refrigerated overnight. It seems that for home preparation the dough works better in the large quantity given here, enough for about 5 dozen beignets. Don't worry, though ... the dough keeps well under refrigeration for about a week. Just cut off some dough when you want to make beignets -- roll it out, cut it up, and fry for about 3 minutes per batch. Don't forget the powdered sugar, lots of it. Or, just invite enough people over to eat all 5 dozen.
Serve, of course, with piping hot cafe au lait made with Community Coffee.
* 1 package active dry yeast
* 1-1/2 cups warm water (100-115 degrees F)
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 2 large eggs
* 1 cup evaporated milk
* 7 cups flour
* 1/4 cup vegetable shortening
* oil for deep frying
* confectioner's sugar for dusting (or burying, depending on taste)
Put the warm water into a large bowl, then sprinkle in the yeast and a couple teaspoons of the sugar and stir until thoroughly dissolved. Let proof for 10 minutes. Add the rest of the sugar, salt, eggs, and evaporated milk. Gradually stir in 4 cups of the flour and beat with a wooden spoon until smooth and thoroughly blended. Beat in the shortening, then add the remaining flour, about 1/3 cup at a time, beating it in with a spoon until it becomes too stiff to stir, then working in the rest with your hands. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight in a greased bowl.
Roll the dough out onto a floured board or marble pastry surface to a thickness of 1/8 inch, then cut it into rectangles 2-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches with a sharp knife. Heat the oil in a deep fryer to 360 degrees F. Fry the beignets about 3 or 4 at a time until they are puffed out and golden brown on both sides, about 2-3 minutes per batch. Turn them over in the oil with tongs once or twice to get them evenly brown, since they rise to the surface of the oil as soon as they begin to puff out. Drain each batch, place on a platter lined with several layers of paper towels, and keep warm in a 200 degree F oven until they're all done.
Serve 3 beignets per person, sprinkling heavily with powdered sugar, and serve hot with cafe au lait.
November 04, 2005
Trip to Torino
I had this one night in Turin, and it was one of the great meals of my life, one of those things I can still taste (vodka cream sauces were unheard of in this country and were still new in Italy in 1985.) This will serve two as a main course, 4 as a first plate.) If you are lucky enough to have some truffle to grate over this, so much the better.
Fettucine with smoked salmon, vodka and dill
* 1/4 c Butter
* 1 1/2 c 35% Real Whipping Cream
* 2 tb Vodka, optional
* 8 oz Smoked salmon, diced
* 1/2 ts Salt
* 1/2 ts Pepper
* 2 tb Fresh dill, chopped
* 3/4 lb Fettuccini noodles
* 1/2 c Parmesan cheese, grated
Melt butter gently in a large deep skillet.
Add cream.
Bring to a boil.
Add vodka.
Reduce heat and cook on low 3-4 minutes until slightly thickened.
Add smoked salmon, salt, pepper and dill.
Remove from heat.
Cook fettuccine in a large pot of boiling salted water until tender.
Drain noodles well.
Reheat sauce.
Place drained noodles in the pan with the hot sauce.
Toss gently over low heat until sauce coats noodles and is thick and creamy.
Pass freshly grated fresh parmigiano-reggiano and a pepper grinder.
For a very different presentation, you can use finely sliced and thinly juilliened prosciutto and substitute sauteed mushrooms or Duxelles for the dill. In either case, top with finely chopped parsley for table presentation.
Trip to Beirut
I took a year off between college and grad school to make some money and pay off some school loans. I'd been temping, on and off, for an agency run by a woman who specialized in filling hard to fill positions and I'd had a number of really interesting and creative assignments from her. She worked really hard to match her temps and the jobs. We had a couple of turkeys I asked to be taken off from, but I got a wide variety of work and ended up being somebody that was requested by my regular assignments. One of my favorites was at Graco, a Fortune 500 company that makes fluid-delivery equipment (read: gas pumps, oil filler pumps.) I worked all over their corporate headquarters that year. I had two or three different bosses who requested me time after time so I got to know the business rather than simply doing statistical typing.
One of the reasons I loved working at Graco (in addition to the fact the bosses were good) was that it was located in Northeast Minneapolis (or as we say, "Nordeast"), the old industrial and ethnic section of Minneapolis. Going back to the early twentieth century, successive waves of immigration to the upper midwest created neighborhoods in Nordeast which were ethnic enclaves. That means ethnic restaurants, and one of my favorites was Emily's Lebanese Deli, which is still some of the best veggie eating in the city. I'd grab take out and go back to the office to eat it in the employee lunchroom with my friends. I loved the food so much I bought the coookbook and learned to make:
Mjadra
Ingredients:
8 oz of lentils (1/2 bag)
1/4 cup rice
1 large onion
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon, allspice
water, oil
Procedure:
Boil the lentils with the cinnamon and allspice. Saute the onions in the
oil with the salt and pepper until very brown or carmelized. Add the
onions and the rice to the lentils, simmer until the rice is soft (at least
fifteen minutes).
Notes:
You have to watch the lentils and continuously add water and stir so they
don't stick. All of the measurements are subject to your taste. I've used
one large onion to as little as 4 oz of lentils. Keep an eye on the onions.
Serves 4 to 6.
Most Lebanese serve fattoush on the side with this dish and stir it into their mjadra.
2 or 3 tomatoes, cubed
1 small cucumber, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and chopped
1 medium green pepper, seeded, deribbed, and diced
5 scallions, chopped
1/2 small lettuce, shredded
2 Tbs. finely chopped parsley
1 Tbs. finely chopped fresh mint or 1 tsp. dried mint
1 pita bread (or 2-3 slices of bread), toasted and cut into cubes
A dressing made from equal amounts of olive oil and lemon juice and seasoned with salt and black pepper. (Make plenty of dressing and store whatever you do not use in the fridge.)
Combine the vegetables, herbs, and bread. Make the dressing, pour it over the salad, toss well, and chill for 30-60 minutes before serving. For an authentic Arabic flavor, the dressing should be made of equal parts of oil and lemon juice. However, you may prefer to use more oil - perhaps two to three parts of oil to one of lemon juice. Chill. Serves 4 to 6.
Adjust the lemon juice--lemon juice is to Lebanese cooking what white wine vinegar is to French or Italian. I like a lot of it and my tabouleh and hummous are quite lemony. I omit the bread when I'm making fattoush to garnish mjadra, since it already has plenty of carbs.
It's easy to size this recipe for a smaller crowd, and it will keep in the fridge for three days.
By the way, one of the Lebanese dining tradtions is for "mezze," small plates rather like Spanish tapas. One of the ways to party with Lebanese food is to serve it the way the Lebanese do: lots and lots of small servings of tasty things. All of the Lebanese recipes I've given you so far are very amenable to this treatment. I've used it to take things to pot-lucks and people love loading up their plates with one of these and two of those and a dab of that. I've NEVER taken food home from a pot-luck.
Cook Lebanese for your veggie friends, they'll love you for it.
Trip to Havana
As you've probably gathered, I love ethnic food. Having been a starving musician or student for so long, it is easy to develop a preference for good, cheap food, and the DC area has has so many good ethnic places now that competition keeps the prices down.
There are lots of great Caribbean restaurants in the area, but Cuban cooking is my very favorite. My "special night out" dish is Ropa Vieja ("old clothes) which I learned about at Havana Cafe. As with any Cuban dinner meal, serve black beans and rice on the side, maybe with fried yucca or plaintains . Sangria is a great wine pairing.
This is a fair amount of work to make, but, believe me, it is worth it. It's also a great way to use up left over flank steak or London Broil. The recipe is for 8 but it is easy to cut down. It also freezes well and, frankly, this is one of those dishes which is better the second day.
Ropa Vieja
For braising beef:
3 pounds skirt or flank steak, trimmed
2 quarts water
2 carrots, chopped coarse
1 large onion, chopped coarse
2 celery ribs, chopped coarse
1 bay leaf
3 garlic cloves, crushed lightly
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
2 green bell peppers, cut into 1/4-inch strips
1 red onion, cut into 1/4-inch strips
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups braising liquid plus additional if desired (use at least one cup of dry red wine)
a 14- to 16-ounce can whole tomatoes with juice, chopped
3 tablespoons tomato paste
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
2 red bell peppers, cut into 1/4 inch strips
2 yellow bell peppers, cut into 1/4 inch strips
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
1/2 cup pimiento-stuffed Spanish olive, drained and halved
Accompaniment:
For yellow rice with toasted cumin:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons cuminseed
1/4 teaspoon crumble saffron thread
2 cups unconverted long-grain rice
4 cups water
3/4 teaspoon salt
To braise beef:
In a 5-quart kettle combine all braising ingredients and simmer, uncovered, 1 1/2 hours, or until beef is tender. Remove kettle from heat and cool meat in liquid 30 minutes. Transfer meat to a platter and cover. Strain braising liquid through a colander, pressing on solids, into a bowl. Return braising liquid to kettle and boil until reduced to 3 cups, about 30 minutes. Stew may be made up to this point 1 day ahead. Cool braising liquid completely and chill it and the beef separately, covered.
In kettle cook green bell peppers and onion in 2 tablespoons oil over moderate heat, stirring, until softened.
While vegetables are cooking, pull meat into shreds about 3 by 1/2 inches. To onion mixture add shredded meat, 2 cups braising liquid, tomatoes with juice, tomato paste, garlic, cumin, oregano, and salt and pepper to taste and simmer, uncovered, 20 minutes.
While stew is simmering, in a large skillet cook red and yellow bell peppers in remaining 2 tablespoons oil over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until softened. Stir peppers into stew with enough additional braising liquid to thin to desired consistency and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes. Stir in peas and olives and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes.
Serve ropa vieja with yellow rice.
To make the yellow rice:
In a heavy 3-quart saucepan heat oil over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking and sauté cuminseed 10 seconds, or until it turns a few shades darker and is fragrant. Stir in saffron and rice and sauté, stirring, 1 to 2 minutes, or until rice is coated well. Stir in water and salt and boil rice, uncovered and without stirring, until surface of rice is covered with steam holes and grains on top appear dry, 8 to 10 minutes more. Remove pan from heat and let rice stand, covered, 5 minutes. Fluff rice with a fork. Serves 8.
Dress up a can of black beans (the mexican brands are best, if you can find them) by rendering three tablespoons of chopped salt pork or fat back in a sauce pan, adding a small onion coarsely chopped, a chopped green pepper, a chopped chipotle pepper (carefully seeded) and a minced glove of garlic. When the garlic has begun to brown and the onions are transparent, add the beans. Stir in a handful of chopped parsely, a half teaspon of cumin and fresh oregano, finely chopped. Let the beans heat slowly to pick up the flavors. Before serving, add a handful of chopped fresh cilantro.
Alienation
Bush's Troubles Follow Him to Summit in Argentina
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and LARRY ROHTER
Published: November 4, 2005
MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina, Nov. 4 - President Bush's foreign and domestic troubles trailed him to the opening day of an international summit here as tens of thousands protested in the streets and Mr. Bush deflected questions about his chief political aide, Karl Rove, who remains under investigation in the C.I.A. leak inquiry.At a brief news conference with American reporters today at the Sheraton Mar Del Plata, Mr. Bush was asked four times about Mr. Rove, and four times refused to answer. The president did not take the opportunity to offer a public endorsement of Mr. Rove, nor did he address speculation in Washington about whether Mr. Rove would stay as his deputy chief of staff.
Asked if there were discussions at the White House about whether or not Mr. Rove would remain in his job, Mr. Bush replied that "the investigation on Karl, as you know, is not complete, and therefore I will not comment about him and/or the investigation."
Mr. Bush calmly added, "I understand the anxiety and angst by the press corps to talk about this." But he called the C.I.A. leak inquiry "a very serious investigation," and said that the White House is "cooperating to the extent that the special prosecutor wants us to cooperate."
At the same time, Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez, rallied some 25,000 protesters in this beach resort's main soccer stadium. He declared a free trade accord backed by Mr. Bush as dead and accused the Pentagon of having a secret plan to invade his oil-rich country.
"If it occurs to U.S. imperialism, in its desperation, to invade Venezuela, a 100-years' war will begin," Mr. Chávez declared to cheers.
President Bush arrived here on Thursday night after one of the worst weeks of his presidency, only to be greeted by strong anti-American sentiment and taunts from Mr. Chávez.
Today, Mr. Bush said that he and Argentina's president, Néstor Kirchner, had agreed in talks that the United States' role in the region could be constructive and positive. Mr. Bush stressed the need for wise decisions to attract investments.
Standing next to President Kirchner, he also made what appeared to be a reference to the protests.
"It's not easy to host all these countries," he said, addressing Mr. Kirchner. "It's particularly not easy to host, perhaps, me," he said, drawing laughter.
The Summit of the Americas, a two-day, 34-nation gathering, opened to officially focus on creating jobs and promoting democracy.
Mr. Chávez, who has repeatedly accused the Bush administration of trying to assassinate him and invade his oil-producing country, is using the international summit meeting here to protest the administration's free trade message and to attempt a showdown with Mr. Bush, the man the Venezuelan government calls "Mr. Danger."
He said this week that his main goal at the meeting was the "final burial" of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas accord, which is already stalled.
Bush has pissed off Canada (Canada!) and now he's working on pissing off the rest of the hemisphere.
