Evil friends

I got a present in the mail the other day.

A gift certificate, and catalog for a store.

Penzeys (don't blame me because they don't use an apostrophe).

For those who don't know Penzeys sells spices.

Powdered (useful, if fresh).

Mixes (for those times you don't want to go to the trouble/expense of blending your own crawdad boil, or vindaloo curry).

Extracts (these can be good, or wretched, when good they make lots of things easier... cinnamon oil doesn't settle to the bottom of a custard the way powder might. When bad, well they can ruin something worse than the settling of a powder might).

Whole. This, if one can justify the space, and the money, is the way to go. Whole Nutmegs don't go stale (well, they do, but it takes years, perhaps decades. I have had stale pepper, but the container was at least 20 years old. It wasn't completely unusable, it just made pepper which was barely better than the powdered stuff at tableside in a diner).

I have avoided looking them up online for the very reason I said this was an evil present (anyone who want's to contribute to food porn may feel free to ask me for my address) There is a lot of stuff here I want.

Whole Mace (nutmeg is an interesting spice, because it is the seed of a fruit, and the seed has a wrapper, which is also a spice). Usually I avoid mace because it can't be found whole, and it goes stale fast. I'd have to be baking for an army to go through a small jar before I decided it was past it. Whole mace has a longer shelf life.

Allspice. I can find this, but Penzeys has a reputation of having good spices, and I don't have any in the house right now.

Green peppercorns. Hard to find. A bit more pungent than white, a bit brigter than black.

Rogan Josh. One of my my favorite curries. Absolutely the best curry for lamb.

Turkish Bay. I like bay, and Turkey has some very nice bay (so does Greece, but I don't know a supplier for that). I've had little luck getting it to grow for me.

Vanilla Beans, Madagascar, and Mexican. What more need be said. Flavor sugar with them, make custards, ice creams, cookies with the exotic crunch of the seeds of an orchid.

Double strenth vanilla extract (half again the price, twice the flavor, saves space, and money, since vanilla extract improves with age, this looks like something to buy a fair bit of, and store it up. The price won't drop, and the quality will improve. Takes less space than vintage wines)

Juniper Berries. Just the thing for game meats, and sauerbraten, and duck, and...

All sorts of peppercorns, Tellichery, Sarawak, Muntok, Malabar

Three kinds of Saffron.

Sumac.

Poppy Seeds (ah, the things which can be done with poppy seeds, cookies, pastries, rugala, buns, rolled cakes, side notes in saurbraten, stews, eaten out of hand... if one ever has an urge to just bite something, poppy seeds are great. I used to keep a jar in my car for fighting traffic).

Charnuska. Pleasant on the outside of sharp breads, like rye, as well as sweeter breads, like pumpernickel. Used in garam masala.

That's the list I'm choosing from. I want to buy more stuff, I want to get some of the various cinnamons (they have both cinnamon, and cassia, and more than one type of each).

I want to send myself a gift box, so I can get the nutmegs, the cinnamon and the bay they use as packing material.

I want to go to the store itself (they just opened one in Torrance, so it's not that out of the way) and just walk around with my nose leading the way.

It's going to be an interesting time for people coming to my table next month.

Forget the surface

I've been mentioning, of late, the Gonzales and Yoo memos, about presidential power in time of war.

Bruce Schneier sums it up pretty damned well here (it was also an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but he goes into more detail on his blog, if I read it right).

My complaint with the Bush administration's views is that they argue the president has unlimited powers during wartime. This is the idea which led Bush to say his telling the NSA to spy on people was legal, and to allow torture, hold citizens as, "enemy combatants" and all the other things people (at this point on both sides of the aisle, from Bob Barr [of all people] to the ACLU).

But on to what Bruce had to say on it.

Here's the opening paragraph of the Yoo memo. Remember, think of this power in the hands of your least favorite politician when you read it:

You have asked for our opinion as to the scope of the President's authority to take military action in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. We conclude that the President has broad constitutional power to use military force. Congress has acknowledged this inherent executive power in both the War Powers Resolution, Pub. L. No. 93-148, 87 Stat. 555 (1973), codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1541-1548 (the "WPR"), and in the Joint Resolution passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). Further, the President has the constitutional power not only to retaliate against any person, organization, or State suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on the United States, but also against foreign States suspected of harboring or supporting such organizations. Finally, the President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.

There's a similar reasoning in the Braybee memo, which was written in 2002 about torture:

In a series of opinions examining various legal questions arising after September 11, we have examined the scope of the President's Commander-in-Chief power. . . . Foremost among the objectives committed by the Constitution to [the President's] trust. As Hamilton explained in arguing for the Constitution's adoption, ‘because the circumstances which may affect the public safety’ are ‘not reducible within certain limits, it must be admitted, as a necessary consequence, that there can be no limitation of that authority, which is to provide for the defense and safety of the community, in any manner essential to its efficacy.’ . . . [The Constitution’s] sweeping grant vests in the President an unenumerated Executive power . . . The Commander in Chief power and the President’s obligation to protect the Nation imply the ancillary powers necessary to their successful exercise.

The crucial point, is here, "Yoo starts by arguing that the Constitution gives the president total power during wartime. He also notes that Congress has recently been quiescent when the president takes some military action on his own, citing President Clinton's 1998 strike against Sudan and Afghanistan.

Yoo then says: "The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001, were surely far graver a threat to the national security of the United States than the 1998 attacks. ... The President's power to respond militarily to the later attacks must be correspondingly broader."

This is novel reasoning. It's as if the police would have greater powers when investigating a murder than a burglary.

More to the point, the congressional resolution of Sept. 14, 2001, specifically refused the White House's initial attempt to seek authority to preempt any future acts of terrorism, and narrowly gave Bush permission to go after those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Yoo's memo ignored this. Written 11 days after Congress refused to grant the president wide-ranging powers, it admitted that "the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President's constitutional authority," but argued "the President's broad constitutional power to use military force ... would allow the President to ... [take] whatever actions he deems appropriate ... to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters."

Even if Congress specifically says no.

And that's what scares me. This president believes he is the final arbiter of what is legal.

When I look at the GAO saying the Ohio vote was suspect, and probably corrupt, the President's supporters arguing that it's more important to investigate those who leaked that spying of questionable legality was going on (never mind that those to whom they leaked sat on it for a year; that's another issue altogether, one which ties into whom the Press is serving, and how much it can be trusted in these days) rather than to ponder the idea that the president has been, for the past four years, engaging in wiretaps without warrants. When I see real harm to our intelligence efforts being done, and those same supporters saying that's just business as usual, "nothing to see here, move along." When I see the Courts being used to avoid review (for which the 4th Circuit just slapped the administration upside the head; with statements that the credibilty was in jeopardy, because questions of similar nature would come up again, and this makes it hard to think them acting in good faith), when I see the president saying he can declare anyone, anywhere, an enemy combatant; at which point they lose all civil rights, when I see him ignoring the findings of the tribunals he constitutes, and holding those deemed innocent by them...

When I see things like that, I begin to think him a threat to the republic, as great a threat as we have ever faced.

I begin to see an American Caesar.