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All I've seen from Abbott so far is punditry.
Glad to see, maybe Abbott will turn out a better gov than Goodhair.
All I've seen from Abbott so far is punditry.
iow, you're full of
Abbott + Patrick are worse than JimmyRicky
Obama to make history with Cuba visit
In the not-too-distant past, the very idea of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba seemed fanciful. The suggestion that a sitting American president would step foot on Cuban soil as part of a diplomatic trip was almost impossible to imagine.
And yet, here we are.
Barack Obama will become the first sitting American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years, in what would be a crucial turning point between the Cold War rivals that recently shed their decades-old hostilities.
Obama will visit the communist island nation in March, he said in a tweet. A senior administration official told NBC News that the details would be announced Thursday as part of a larger tour by Obama of Latin America.
The announcement comes roughly a year after President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro normalized relations between the two countries, and about six months after the two governments agreed to open embassies in each other’s capitals.
Cuba has also been removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that even the fiercest Cuban critics found difficult to justify.
For the White House, next month’s visit will be the culmination of one of the president’s most impressive foreign policy accomplishments, overhauling a failed policy that administrations from both parties were content to leave in place indefinitely. As we discussed in July, U.S. presidents just stuck to an ineffectual policy that didn’t advance anyone’s interests, out of inertia and political fear.
Obama, to his credit, overhauled a failed policy into a victory, making this one of his most notable foreign policy accomplishments.
There is, of course, a very real possibility that a Republican president and Republican Congress will undo the progress next year – a scenario Cuba is well aware of – rolling back the clock and doing lasting damage to U.S. credibility throughout much of the region.
But at least for now, it’s a triumph. To reiterate a point from April, it’s worth emphasizing that the dramatic shift in the U.S. position enjoys support from a majority of Americans, a majority of Cuban Americans, and a majority of Cubans themselves.
What’s more, American allies are delighted to see the new U.S. policy towards Cuba, as is much of Latin America, which routinely criticized the old, failed approach.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...d=sm_fb_maddow
The right’s misplaced apoplexy over Cuba image
they’re apparently apoplectic about a photograph they disapprove of.
The conservative blogosphere had a collective melt down after President Barack Obama took a picture in front of a mural of Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara on Monday in Havana’s Revolution Plaza.
Conservative websites jumped on the opportunity to criticize the President for posing in front of the infamous image of Guevara, which is based off a picture taken in 1960. Townhall.com called it a “gem of a picture,” while The Washington Examiner wrote that the picture created a “fresh wave of fury.”
You can read the TPM piece to fully appreciate the unbridled outrage conservatives are apparently feeling about the image, but before your crazy uncle who watches Fox all day sends you an all-caps email, it’s worth taking a deep breath.
The truth is, when presidents travel abroad, sometimes they’re photographed with politically controversial images in the background.
Ronald Reagan was seen in 1988 delivering comments below a Vladimir Lenin bust and the USSR’s flag. It did not mean Reagan was a communist sympathizer; it was not a signal intended to crush the spirit of anti-communist forces around the globe; and the image drew no meaningful criticisms from Democrats.
George H.W. Bush was pictured – more than once – in front of a Mao portrait in China. It wasn’t a big deal, either.
Stories like these come up from time to time, which is a shame. When President Obama was photographed wearing casual attire in the Oval Office, his Republican critics pounced, but the story disappeared once similar pictures of other presidents came to light.
When President Obama was seen bowing to the emperor of Japan, it became fodder for Republicans for years, though interest faded once the public saw other images of other presidents bowing to a variety of heads of state were also readily available.
When President Obama was seen making an awkward salute, conservatives were in high dudgeon, right up
until they saw images of George W. Bush trying to salute while holding his dog.
I’m all for holding presidents to a high standard, but let’s not hold this president to some entirely new standard, never before applied to his predecessors. If some Che image in Cuba is the new national scandal for the right, I’ll take their complaints seriously just as soon as they blast Reagan for speaking under the hammer-and-sickle flag in 1988.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-s...d=sm_fb_maddow
you rightwingnuts have the seriousness, the maturity of frat rats, a real Animal House of adolescent bags
Limp-wristed displomacy, lol
JFK is rolling in his grave right now.
Thread would have been proud of the two piece that put him there.
Darrin's adolescent ankle-biting is eternal. He did manage to squeeze out 3 words.
He would have never made any kind of concessions or visits to communist Cuba or Castro. He was a staunch opponent of communist Cuba.
Fidel outlasting det going on 53 years
Only because one of Castro's die-hard supporters killed him.
Impressive when Kennedy's supporters couldn't get the job done on Castro a couple years before tbh.
He probably would be fine with it now. It's not like there is a Soviet Union anymore.
It's not 60 years ago anymore
Yeah, it's about time western culture rapes that virgin island tbh
A friend who has been said Cuban es will anyone that takes them out. Made it sound like West Berlin 1945 when you could plow the master race for a bar of soap and some cigarettes.
Yeah, it's about time western culture rapes that virgin island tbh
Of course, obviously as beautiful as Cuba is - must be living there and they don't want to risk the raft trip. A lot of guys will be snatching up those cuban girls desperate to go whenever it's possible.
Cuba is really high on the the tourists over scale though, since you can't legally change your dollars for theirs. So my friends who have been said it was pretty expensive.
No experience with Cuba really, besides knowing a few of them who made their way to Cali. I'm sure they'd fix that up if the tourism opens up more, that's a lot of cash to boost their economy.
No. I'm a McVeigh man.
"as beautiful as Cuba is - must be living there"
really? because it isn't America? 12M in Cuba. There's more people in abject poverty in USA than in Cuba.
With Obama in Cuba, Pro-Torture Pundits Suddenly Concerned With Human Rights
Some Cold War hold-outs in the media just weren’t having it, though, taking the occasion to feign outrage that Obama could visit a country with such a terrible human rights record. While American human-rights hypocrisy is nothing new, a string of Bush-era, pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo pundits expressing indignation at Cuba’s human rights failings was still remarkable.
Marc Thiessen. As a former Bush speechwriter, Thiessen helped shape the messaging around “enhanced interrogation” that provided the Orwellian phraseology the administration hid behind while torturing hundreds of detainees. He has since been a staunch defender not just of Guantánamo prison, but of force-feeding its prisoners and even expanding its use. The New York Times recapped his much-criticized defense of torture in 2010:
Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Today, however, in the Washington Post opinion section, Thiessen suddenly discovered his inner human rights advocate, quoting an “activist” saying of Obama’s trip:
This will prolong the life of the dictatorship, is worsening the human rights situation there, marginalizing the democratic opposition and compromising US national security.
Thiessen even had the gall to cite Amnesty International, which has roundly condemned the US’s extrajudicial prison in Cuba that Thiessen loves to champion.
National Review‘s concern about the rights of prisoners in Cuba does not extend to all prisoners in Cuba.
Rich Lowry. The National Review editor was another Bush-era torture advocate,telling the McLaughlin Group in 2002, when asked if the US should torture terrorism suspects:
If it comes to that, we should let someone else do it. We should send him to another country that will do the job…. Look, this is going to be a messy war and you have to do some underhanded things.
The National Review’s contempt for basic human rights and legal norms continues, with the non-ironic article “Guantánamo Bay Detainees: Why Not Shoot Them?” published just last month. But Lowry has considerable concern for oppressed people in Cuba who aren’t on a US military base:
Obama’s Che Moment: President Obama’s Cuba Visit Ignores Continued Human Rights Abuses
But a patina of revolutionary romance, embodied by that image of Che looking down on President Obama, still hangs over Cuba. It makes its human-rights abuses, theft and lies an afterthought, or even excusable, for the American Left.
Jonathan Alter. A putative liberal, Alter was one of the more vocal supporters of torture in the wake of 9/11, writing his now-infamous article in Newsweek, “Time to Think About Torture,” which acts as a 1000-word trial balloon for some of the more heinous aspects of detainee abuse. He even cites the Jordanian security service threatening to kill Palestinian militant Abu Nidal’s family in the 1980s as an example of torture “working.”
But during the March 9 Democratic presidential debate, Alter tweeted his outrage at Bernie Sanders not condemning Cuba:
Bernie a lefty sucker for Cuban line on health care. If he got sick there, he'd medevac out. And where's his concern for human rights there?
In almost 6,000 tweets, Jonathan Alter had not once tweeted out the words “human rights” until that moment. Per usual, “human rights” were not a categorical imperative, or a moral framework; they were merely a weapon to be wielded against America’s enemies when our establishment pundits saw fit, and to be discarded just as quickly when they didn’t.
John Bolton. Bush’s UN ambassador, Bolton has long been one of the biggest advocates for keeping Guantánamo open, writing multiple op-eds after Bush left office in defense of the notorious prison. Bolton also said he was open to the idea of torture in a 2008 interview with British television. But Monday, upon Obama’s arrival in Cuba, the famously unilateral Bolton appealed to the very international norms he had long dismissed (PJ Media, 3/21/16):
Bolton pointed out that the president said initially that he wouldn’t go to Cuba until there were improvements in the area of human rights there. “But not only has there been no improvement, things have been going in the wrong direction,” he lamented. “More people have been put in jail than have been released.”
Bill O’Reilly on Obama’s trip to Cuba: He shouldn’t have gone.
Bill O’Reilly. Leading Fox News blowhard O’Reilly hasrepeatedly defended torture, saying as late as 2014 that a President O’Reilly would have “authorized waterboarding and other severe interrogation methods,” and calling the CIA’s torture policy “morally correct.” He has played the role of Guantánamo truther, insisting in 2008 that there was “no proof” of mistreatment at the Cuban detention center. But last night, discussing Obama’s trip to Cuba, O’Reilly told Fox’s resident straw liberal Kirsten Powers that Obama shouldn’t have gone because it is a “human-rights violator.”
***
Human rights are important. Human Rights™, as arbitrary tools of Western propaganda, are dangerous. Not only because they serve to bully unfriendly nations with cheap sloganeering, but they also, in the long run, undermine the otherwise noble and well-intentioned enterprise of establishing international norms.
“The problem with living outside the law,” Truman Capote once quipped, “is that you no longer have its protection.” The same is true for every Bush-era pundit who served as ideological shock troops in one of the more shameful episodes of American history. These talking heads can criticize Cuba’s controlled economy, they can criticize its leadership, they can criticize its immigration policy—but they have no grounding, intellectually or morally, to criticize its human rights record.
http://www.alternet.org/media/obama-...d-human-rights
Fidel was the longest serving head of state in the 20th century.
The sanctions didn't work, and only made the scapegoating of the US credible. Bad governments got to blame everything on the USA bogeyman.
That goes for Iran too.
I don't think that the Cuban government is quite ready for what is about to happen. Eff 'em.
The people who think that the embargo somehow punishes the regime are wrong. Embargos tend to prop up authoritarian regimes. The best you can do is limit their military power by keeping their tech base primitive.
We have tried the "get tough on... X" approach for decades with little result. Time to change tactics, and I have been advocating something like this for a while.
Guess we will get to see what happens.
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