TGIF - Thoughts at Random

I never thought I'd live to see the day when the United States would engage in torture, much less when political candidates would be running on their pro-torture stands. (Not the Democrats, mind you, or John McCain, for that matter.) I grew up when the Soviets had their brutal police state and their Gulag Archipelago and the Americans were the good guys. Now, under the Bush administration, the United States has morphed into the Soviet Union. And it's not just the torture, of course, but also the illegal domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, the extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo Bay, the unitary executive, and so forth. These measures, we're told, are supposed to protect us from future 9/11's. What's to protect us from this fucked-up administration?

From the minute they got into office, they were so preoccupied with invading Iraq that they ignored warnings about Al Qaeda (Remember "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States"?). So they as much as invited 9/11 to happen on their watch. Afterward they went ahead and, without provocation, invaded Iraq--as planned--rather than hunt down the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks (as Bush swore he would do). And now, in the botched aftermath of invading Iraq, they've created a spawning ground for even more terrorists of the ilk that attacked us on 9/11.

Meanwhile Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is still out there and saying that we should stay in Iraq and continue to have our soldiers slaughtered--which, of course, is exactly what Bush is doing, against the best advice in this country. It continually boggles my mind--the sheer fucked-upness of this administration. We're now the gang that can't shoot straight, the Keystone Kops of the world. It would be funny if people weren't dying.
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Watched "Paula's Party" tonight. The show was all about pies and, of course, sex. (One of the guests at one point asked, "Since when has cooking become an X-rated art?") The Cuban pie, baked in a shell with ham, pork, cheeses and sofrito, topped with a mustard cream, sounded and looked scrumptious. (It was then garnished with dill pickle chips, finely sliced tomatoes and a mojo sour cream with lime juice, orange juice and oregano.) (Coincidentally, I had a hot Cuban sandwich for breakfast this morning.)
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My knee is getting better. I might call the doctor tomorrow, however. Maybe it should be x-rayed. I really don't want to get into suing the condo association over this (as some people have suggested), but the condo is ultimately responsible for it (i.e., negligent). I did absolutely nothing that would have contributed to it. I was just going about my daily routine.
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The kitchen ceiling is being redone next week. No more fluorescent tubes and translucent plastic panels (we took the panels down long ago, after they kept falling down whenever the wind was blowing a certain way). The bare ceiling is crisscrossed with pipes, wires and conduits, so the handyman is dry-walling the whole thing and installing recessed lighting and a new ceiling fan.