Thanks to an earlier post by Crypto-Comrade The Fish Who... I am going to be getting a check in the mail. Someday. Maybe.
New Krugman [NYT reg req'd]. Excerpt:
Last Thursday a House subcommittee met to finalize next year's homeland security appropriation. The ranking Democrat announced that he would introduce an amendment adding roughly $1 billion for areas like port security and border security that, according to just about every expert, have been severely neglected since Sept. 11. He proposed to pay for the additions by slightly scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $1 million per year.And, finally, I started looking into the business dealings of one Albert Yeung Sau Sing today after reading a rant posted to a message board at AICN. I'm a little concerned at what I'm finding. As many of you know, I've always been a huge Jackie Chan fan, what I'm reading as I comb the online archive of Australian newspapers and the english versions of some HK news sites is making me feel a little concerned. I'm well aware of Jackie's marital issues and have never paid them much attention; he's been a vocal opponent of triad intrusion in the HK movie business and done quite a bit for a charity, which I felt balanced out some of his personal problems. I'm starting to think there may be much more darkness and complicity in some pretty awful crap lurking around in his business dealings. More to come...
The subcommittee's chairman promptly closed the meeting to the public, citing national security — though no classified material was under discussion. And the bill that emerged from the closed meeting did not contain the extra funding.
It was a perfect symbol of the reality of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Behind the rhetoric — and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny — lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn't fit the administration's agenda.