The Tibetan-American community in New England has been preparing for the Dalai Lama’s arrival and have been taking part in a labor of love of sorts:

In the basement and driveway of a humble Malden house, the carpenters are building a throne.

Across town, in Medford, a lab technician spends his nights sewing embroidered silk for the drapery.

Three Tibetan-American men, two of them former monks, have devoted much of the last month to constructing the 9-foot high chair on which a cross-legged Dalai Lama will sit for a pair of lectures at Gillette Stadium next month.

The resulting throne is the most visible manifestation of the efforts by Boston’s small Tibetan community to prepare for the Dalai Lama’s four-day visit to the region, which begins April 29. But the throne also sheds light on the unusual backstories of local Tibetans, many of whom escaped difficult lives in Tibet or lived in exile in India before arriving in the United States.

The needleworker, Kunga Namgyal, leads the ordinary life of a research scientist at Shire, a biopharmaceutical company. But Namgyal is also the son and grandson of famed Tibetan tailors – his father was a tailor for the Dalai Lama – and now, at night, when he can steal time from playing with his son and dining with his wife, he sits on the floor by a china cabinet filled with Buddha statues and tries to remember what his own dad taught him about sewing.

One gem: While conventional sewing often involves pointing a needle away from the artisan, Tibetan Buddhists sew with the needle pointing toward themselves, to symbolize compassion for others who won’t get poked.

Hopefully, when the Dalai Lama returns to the United States in October (according to media reports), the US government will show him the respect and honor he deserves by granting him an official state visit with the President and the Secretary of State, although the Obama administration seems a bit too worried China might get “angry.”

The State Department said Chavez had approached Clinton during summit sessions Saturday, and the two discussed returning ambassadors to their posts in Caracas and Washington.

“This is a positive development that will help advance U.S. interests, and the State Department will now work to further this shared goal,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said.

Is Chavez a nutter? Probably a bit. But he has oil and he holds sway in Latin America and simply ignoring him is not a foreign policy strategy, it’s a cop-out. By interacting with Chavez, the US is not capitulating to socialism nor is it displaying weakness. Rather, it is recognizing the reality of the politics of Latin America.

Apparently Secretary Clinton had several informal interactions with President Chavez which culminated in Chavez offering to re-install a Venezuelan Ambassador to Washington.

Hillary Clinton was largely panned as having no style during her days in the White House (although these days she seems much more fashion-conscious and quite successfully so) and Laura Bush was not seen as a fashion-plate either and was often described as looking frumpy or just boring. Now enter Michelle Obama, a woman in her 40’s who has attracted attention for her tall, slender, toned body and seeming interest in fashion- up to a point. One day the fashion Nazis are falling all over each other giving Michelle props for this or that outfit while the next day they are slamming her. Such is the life of the First Lady of the United States. I personally don’t give a rat’s ass what any of ‘em wear.

One thing which is sort of interesting in all of this is how many big name designers are getting peeved that Michelle Obama isn’t turning to the to make her latest dress or gown. Instead, she is using lesser known designers and in the process, making them quite successful. Meanwhile, the big names in fashion are crawling out of the woodwork to let everyone know that her G20 fashion statement was not well-received and they seem to be saying that if she had stuck to Ralph Lauren, De La Renta, Vera Wang etc., such would not be the case.

Whatever.

Secretary Clinton was in the Hague where she signaled a willingness to work with Iran on shared interests in the Afghanistan region and while there was no formal meeting with the representative of Iran, special envoy Richard Holbrooke did greet Iran’s delegation and they exchanged some pleasantries. Hey, it’s a start.

In addition, Clinton voiced support for Afghanistan’s attempts to reign in more moderate elements within the Taliban, if that is indeed possible.

During her travels yesterday, Secretary Clinton responded to a question from a reporter and she remarked that the poorly-defined and legally vague term “war on terror” seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. Good riddance.

Here is just one example that is again back in the news:

Thousands of buildings at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have such poorly installed wiring that American troops face life-threatening risks, a top inspector for the Army says.
“It was horrible — some of the worst electrical work I’ve ever seen,” said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that “with the buildings the way they are, we’re playing Russian roulette.”

[snip]

He said problems are “everywhere” in Iraq, where 18 U.S. troops have died by electrocution since 2003. All deaths occurred in different circumstances and different locations, but many happened on U.S. bases being managed by various military contractors.

Most have heard some of the stories about the war profiteers who suddenly appeared to take their place at the public pig-trough of multi-million (and billion) dollar defense contracts at the beginning of the Iraq War- for example, the case of the young American arms dealer who was being paid tens of millions of dollars to provide the military with old, crappy, dangerous, illegally obtained munitions from China only to have them either not work or worse, malfunction when it mattered most. Luckily, the feds caught up with him.

The stories of fraud, abuse and outright theft on the part of some of the contractors are just to numerous to mention here but I think all of us can agree that during a time of economic crisis such as we have now, the last thing the government needs is to be paying out billions of funds to corporations which never should have received contracts to begin with.

It goes without saying that not all defense contractors provide shoddy services but what has become problematic is how the government seems totally unable to ensure any sort of accountability for quality of services and products, not to mention cost.

UPDATE: I came across an interesting article about changing the US approach to mid-east peace out of necessity. This will admittedly be difficult as people have strong opinions about this issue and many have become mired in a rigid view of the parties involved and they tend to see any perceived shift in policy as threatening. That said, it is a good sign that the dialogue is opening up and there seems to be more tolerance for differing opinions and strategies for moving forward.

NYT columnist Roger Cohen wrote a commentary which has generated quite a bit of buzz in the blogosphere.

Talking Points Memo summarizes what is notable about the Cohen piece:

But Cohen is in the Times and he reports on an amazing shift among some of the biggest foreign policy thinkers (and doers) in the United States on the subject of Hamas. He writes about a letter organized by the US/Middle East project in which Brent Scowcroft, Thomas Pickering, Chuck Hagel, Paul Volcker, Lee Hamilton, James Wolfensohn, Carla Hills, Nancy Kassebaum, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Ted Sorensen urge that we recognize reality and start dealing, in some form, with Hamas. Henry Siegman from the US/Mideast Project and long time Jewish community leader quarterbacked the effort.

As Andrew Sullivan writes today, the “realist” school is gaining strength. How long can Israel survive through war with Palestinians, threatening war with Iran and, today’s latest, bombing Sudan (during the January war to intercept weapons supposedly headed to Gaza).

As Cohen puts it, it is time to “stop being hung up on prior Hamas recognition of Israel and watch what it does rather than what it says. If Hamas is part of, and remains part of, a Palestinian unity government that makes a peace deal with Israel, that’s workable…”

What I am interested in is whether other mainstream media outlets are going to be as open to this new dialogue over the coming weeks. Props to the NYT for veering a bit off their usual hawkish take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- hopefully others will follow suit.