Filtering custom taxonomies

This is a cross post from the WordPress forums, which I apologize for, but it has been almost a week and not getting any response there so hoping someone here can help. If I do get a reply in either place I will update the post with a link to it.

I am attempting to extend functionality to my client’s custom theme, and I am having issues trying to get query_posts() to pull a list of custom taxonomies filtered by category. The creation of the custom post type in functions.php is this:

//Custom Post Types
add_action('init', 'create_myportfoliotype');
function create_myportfoliotype() {
    $myportfoliotype_args = array(
        'label' => __('Portfolio'),
        'singular_label' => __('Portfolio'),
        'public' => true,
        'show_ui' => true,
        'menu_position' => 5,
        'capability_type' => 'post',
        'hierarchical' => false,
        'publicly_queryable' => true,
        'query_var' => true,
        'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'portfolio', 'with_front' => false ),
        'can_export' => true,
        'supports' => array(
            'title', 
            'editor', 
            'post-thumbnails',
            'custom-fields',
            'page-attributes',
            'author',
            'thumbnail'
          )
       );
  register_post_type('myportfoliotype',$myportfoliotype_args);
}


//Taxonomias
register_taxonomy("categories", array("myportfoliotype"), array("hierarchical" => true, "label" => "Category", "singular_label" => "Category", "rewrite" => true));
register_taxonomy( 'tags', array("homepage"), array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Tags', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
register_taxonomy( 'specifics', array("myportfoliotype"), array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Specifics', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );

Currently the site has a page that pulls in all of the posts, then filters out what is visible via jquery. The query that pulls in the posts is this:

query_posts( array( 'post_type' => 'myportfoliotype', 'paged' => $paged, 'posts_per_page' => 80))

This works, but as I said pulls in everything. What they want now is 2 custom templates that pulls in only 2 specific categories each. I can’t do the filtering via jquery since it doesn’t work visually to do that in this case. I am attempting to pull in just the 2 categories, but for some reason no variation of the following code seems to work:

query_posts( array( 'post_type' => 'myportfoliotype', 'paged' => $paged, 'posts_per_page' => 80, 'tag_id' => '9' ))

Everything I have tried either still pulls in all posts, or pulls in none of them.

ps. Does anyone know of a function to dump the raw query that query_posts generates? If I could see what the actual query was doing with each variation I tried and compared that to the info in wp_postmeta it might help in figuring out where the issue lies.