i have yet ANOTHER idea; let's have BROWNIE run the ports deal

it COULDN'T get any worse. sweep those objections under the table. DON'T record them. pretend there WERE no warnings (i.e. pretend there WERE NO breeches in the levees)

can you in fact IMAGINE what would happen if anyone other than THIS republican administration even SUGGESTED this deal? c'mon think what would happen
WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP

Pentagon, Homeland Dept. objected to UAE port deal

At least three security agencies raised objections to a takeover by a United Arab Emirates state-owned company of the operations of six major U.S. ports.

Congressional sources said the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department and Coast Guard expressed objections during the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of the state-owned Dubai Ports World, which bought the British-owned Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. P&O has managed port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans.

"All of the rules were bent on this one," a congressional source said. "We had a major security review managed by political appointees."

But most of the objections were not recorded in the proceedings of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the sources said. They said the objections remained off the record for "technical reasons." Later, the heads of some of the agencies denied that their representatives raised concerns..........

and a very good analytical article from russ baker at tom paine

Appointees Guarding The Henhouse
Russ Baker
March 06, 2006
Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker is a longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is also the founder of the Real News Project, a new not-for-profit investigative journalism outlet. He can be reached at russ@russbaker.com .
Even the most over-reported Bush Administration scandal can lead the curious to more fertile ground. Let’s take the approval of the $6.8 billion sale of a British company that manages ports in the United States to Dubai Ports World, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. The debate has centered on whether this poses a security risk.
But there’s another matter of equal—and probably greater—import: how the approval of the ports deal fits a pattern in which federal agencies have been handed over to the inappropriate, the unqualified, the inane—and, in many cases, to the very companies the agencies are supposed to regulate.
With the ports scandal, the outlines of the decision-making process are emerging only slowly. But we do know that two key administration figures have direct ties to Dubai Ports World.
Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose department headed the panel that approved the Dubai Ports deal, came to the Bush administration from the chairmanship of CSX, a rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World the year after Snow joined the administration. The new head of the Maritime Administration, David Sanborn, worked for both CSX and Dubai Ports.
The incest boggles the mind. In February, 2003, the same month Bush appointed Snow, Snow’s company sold its container shipping division, CSX Lines, to the Carlyle Group. CSX Lines does substantial business with the U.S. military; Carlyle’s big shareholders include Bush’s father and family consigliere James Baker III, former British PM John Major and members of the bin Laden family............

and as joe conason says in his new york observer article

.......'If none of that makes sense to you, then you’re obviously a racist, bigoted, xenophobic protectionist. Remember that for most if not all critics of the Dubai Ports World takeover, the most troubling issue is the Bush administration’s casual approach to vetting the deal. The more we learn about this process, the less confidence we have in it. To doubt the competence of this government is neither xenophobic nor racist.'........

Who Dares to Question The Dubai Port Deal?
How fortunate that the opinion pages of our mightiest newspapers are open to diverse viewpoints. We would otherwise miss the opportunity to learn from liberal, conservative and centrist pundits alike that opponents of the Dubai ports deal—which now include about 70 percent of the American public—must be crazed, racist and xenophobic.

One original thinker after another insists that there can be no honest criticism of the Dubai deal. They tell us that every critic, no matter how measured, is a protectionist bigot; and that every argument, no matter how rational, is a calumny against Arabs and Muslims. There is a strange whiff of demagogy in these screeds.

In The New York Times, David Brooks laments America’s sudden inundation by “a xenophobic tsunami.” That newspaper’s Thomas L. Friedman warns us against “global ethnic profiling.” And Nicholas Kristof huffily declares in its pages that “this fuss about ports is really about Arabs.” Mr. Brooks proclaims that any concern about potential security problems is “completely bogus,” while Mr. Friedman describes such concerns as not only “bogus” but “borderline racist.” Mr. Kristof refers slyly to “the arguments of those who believe we should discriminate against Arabs.”

The same ugly insinuations can also be found in The Washington Post, parroted under the bylines of Richard Cohen and David Ignatius. Mr. Ignatius regards dissent from the Dubai deal as simply “racist,” while Mr. Cohen prefers to squawk “xenophobic.”

Such is the conventional mainstream wisdom, which blesses all trade as “free trade” and venerates corporate globalization as the one truth faith. To question those assumptions, even in the name of national security, is considered a sign of benighted partisanship, economic ignorance or worse..............