BACHMANN: Why would you normalize trading with a country that sponsors terror? There’s reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is potentially looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you’re 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish.

Watch it:

There is absolutely no evidence to support her claim, which seems to be based on spurious reports in an Italian publication that did not even mention missiles.

Bachmann doesn’t appear to be too pleased that the United States has made significant strides toward normalizing relations with Cuba in the past few years.

Is the White House ready for a Cuban deep water drilling disaster?

The good news? Cuban energy officials are taking the lessons of the BP oil spill disaster very seriously, according to a group of oil drilling and environmental experts just back from Cuba, including the co-chairman of the Bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (also former EPA administrator), the head of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, a former senior executive for Royal Dutch Shell, and a longtime Cuba expert with the Environmental Defense Fund.

The bad news? Less than three months before deep water drilling begins in Cuban waters in the Gulf of Mexico, neither Congress nor the Obama administration has taken the necessary steps to help prevent or respond to a similar disaster that could impact even more US coastline. Granted, it seems a bit far-fetched to imagine the present Congress sending any legislation to the president these days, so the burden of preparedness essentially rests with the administration.

That’s got CNN’s Fareed Zakaria wondering, “What in the World?”

“What happens if there’s another oil spill? Will it be easy and quick to clean up? No. You see, the nearest and best experts on safety procedures and dealing with oil spills are all American, but we are forbidden by our laws from being involved in any way with Cuba. Our trade embargo on Cuba not only prevents us from doing business with our neighbor but it also bars us from sending equipment and expertise to help even in a crisis. So, if there is an explosion, we will watch while the waters of the Gulf Coast get polluted.”

Just days before the BP disaster struck last year, Jorge Piñón, the foremost expert on oil drilling in Cuba and where US policy intersects it, and I urged the US to talk to Cuba about oil spill prevention and response. At that time, deepwater exploration in Cuban waters was slated for late 2010. Unfortunately, the BP disaster made our call for prevention and planning with Cuba all the more salient.

Now, after several delays, with a Chinese-built Italian oil rig, the Scarabeo 9, on its way to Cuba, drilling of the first of five exploratory wells in Cuban deep water is set to commence this December.

A spill from this first, easternmost exploratory well to be drilled by the Repsol consortium could be particularly damaging due to its location where the Gulf Stream exits the Gulf of Mexico for the Atlantic. Whereas the BP disaster was somewhat “contained” in the northern Gulf, Piñón tells me to “imagine a fan-shaped spill with the well as the axis.” If something were to go wrong on Scarabeo 9, we could see and feel the effects of a major oil spill in Cuban deep water not just in Florida, but far up the Atlantic coast.

Failure is Not an Option in Climate Change Talks

The B4E Climate Summit, which took place in London last week, closed with a determined statement of intent – and a warning. Ambassador NJ Mxakato-Diseko, the South African ambassador at large to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNCCC) talks in Durban later this year, will announce at Durban that failure is not an option.

Diseko, who spoke on the closing day of the London summit, emphasised the necessity of making progress at the UNCCC talks to avoid a “collapse of the system”. In doing so, he highlighted the vital importance of the talks in tackling the serious threats posed by climate change.

It probably comes as no surprise that here at WWF we agree with the ambassador. But the message coming out of the B4E Summit, organised by Global Initiatives in partnership with WWF and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), might surprise people who assume that the standard view in the business world is that there is no compelling case for urgent action, that the costs of tackling climate change are too high, and that we can carry on with business as usual.

Issa Sought Clean Energy Aid

Republican Representative Darrell Issa, who said government subsidies to specific companies can encourage corruption, sought U.S. help in the past for clean- energy projects in his home state of California.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote Energy Secretary Steven Chu to support an Energy Department loan for Aptera Motors Inc., a Carlsbad, California, electric-car maker, according to a letter received by the department Jan. 14, 2010.

“Awarding this opportunity to Aptera Motors will greatly assist a leading developer of electric vehicles in my district,” Issa wrote in letters obtained yesterday.

Issa’s committee has been investigating regulations proposed by the Obama administration and now is examining the system of federal support, including loan guarantees for companies such as Fremont, California-based Solyndra LLC. The solar-panel manufacturer filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 after receiving $535 million in U.S. loan guarantees since 2009.

TransCanada pipeline lobbyist works all the angles with former colleagues

The funding, which accounts for about half of OAS’ budget, doesn’t amount to much — just $48 million. So why did House Republicans, led by right-wing Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), vote for Rep. Connie Mack’s (R-FL) amendment eliminating it? Because, Mack said, the OAS was supporting U.S. foes. The Associated Press reported on the mark-up:

Mack insisted that the measure did not represent isolationism but rather was targeted at an organization that backs Venezuela and its U.S. foe, President Hugo Chavez.

“Let’s engage our allies and friends, but let’s not continue to support an organization that’s perpetuating some countries’ ability” to destroy democracies, Mack said.

Likewise, Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) criticized Cuba’s human rights record as the amendment was being debated.

But the OAS’ close allegiance with Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are both highly suspect — as in: not actually true.

Cuba is not even a member of the OAS, as Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) pointed out. At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin adds that in 2009 the OAS lifted its ban on Cuban membership, but the democratic threshold for membership remains in place — and so Cuba, for now, is out.

And the OAS has actually strongly criticized Chavez and Venezuela twice in the past two years. In early 2010, the OAS issued a blistering report about Venezuela’s human rights record and slipping democratic credentials. In January of this year, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza criticized a Venezuelan law passed in December as being “completely contrary” to the Inter-American Democratic Charter passed by the OAS in 2001. Insulza added that the issue would likely come before the OAS.

As Daniel Larison points out at the American Conservative, the OAS might not do a whole lot, but its work is “fairly innocuous or even constructive when it comes to election monitoring and development aid.” At such a small cost — 0.02 percent of what the U.S. will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan this year — it hardly seems worth cutting and running from OAS by the logic of completely flawed and hollow reasoning.

Instead, what is apparently the first horror movie authorized by Cuba’s film regulators is based on the idea that the Cuban government mistakes a zombie invasion for a Bay of Pigs-like invasion by Cuban-American dissidents, and while the island collapses into chaos, ordinary Cubans — ones who have lived through the Mariel boatlift and see Cuba as paradise despite the ups and downs in the business — set themselves up in the zombie-eradication business with the jaunty tagline: “Juan of the Dead — we kill your beloved ones.”

You want proof that Cuba might change pretty quickly after Castro? This looks like it.

You’ve written serious policy books, an activist’s guide to the democratic process. Why write a novel?

Anger. I was very distressed at the way in which the 9/11 issue was handled by the [Bush] administration. In my opinion there were a number of important issues for which there was an answer, but where that answer was consciously and to date largely effectively been withheld and I wanted to tell that story.

Do you think fiction gives you a better shot of reaching more people than op-eds or policy books do?

That was part of it…While I was a senior fellow at the Kennedy School, Joe Nye, who had been a director of the Kennedy School and then was an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, told me a story that when he came back to Harvard, he had wanted to write a nonfiction academic book about his experiences in the Defense Department and make a series of recommendations. As he got into the book, he realized that in order to do that he would have to use classified information which was not going to be available to him. So he shifted from writing the book that he thought [he wanted to write] to writing The Power Game, which is a novel about his experiences in the Pentagon. I’ve indicated in [Keys to the Kingdom] that the report of the Congressional inquiry into 9/11 was fairly heavily censored, particularly as it related to the role of the Saudis. So I decided I would see if I could write this. I am a member of the external advisory board to Director Leon Panetta at the CIA. We have a fairly high security clearance and anything we write that touches on the agency, we’re required to submit it for prior approval. So at three or four occasions while I was working on this book over a period of 5 years, I submitted manuscripts to the review board and it always got a clean bill. I think I was able to tell the story without being restricted by censorship.

What were your inspirations? Do you read thrillers?

I would have to say because there’s so much material as a Senator that you have to read, I would not call myself an extensive reader of novels. I’ve read airplane paperbacks of Grisham and Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and a few other people, but I wouldn’t say I had one that was my model of how to write a suspense novel.

Tony, your main character, seems to be tailor-made to appeal to a lot of different constituencies: What was your inspiration for him? Is he based on anyone real?

He’s a composite character. I have a friend who was from Guanabacoa, and he talks a lot about his former home in Cuba, so I gave Tony that same home. I talk in there about the fact that Tony’s father and grandfather were both good baseball players. I’ve known some of those Cuban former athletes. And one scene in the book was going to a game with my father and seeing a Cuban baseball team. So it was a composite character. I’m not going to start putting names on the fictional characters in my book.

Tony seems to have a tough time with women. He’s a risky guy to date…

Of the women in the book, [Carol, Tony's girlfriend] was the one I thought was the most affecting. And [Laura Billington, the daughter of the character who stands in for Graham] also is a composite character. Without mentioning it, there’s probably one person to whom she is quite similar.

Well, with the financial problems she seems a little like Annie Leibovitz…

No comment.

The character who most resembles you gets killed off fairly early in the book. Was that to avoid putting yourself too much in the novel?

[Sen. Billington] is not a perfect person but he tries his best. Actually, my wife has had some difficulty with the novel precisely for that reason. It makes her sad when she reads of my passing and then the funeral and those things. But that’s life.

How intentional is the juxtaposition between career civil servants and political appointees? The novel really establishes a trust in those who have spent their careers in civil service.

Well, my experience is that, unfortunately, that’s not an infrequent situation where you have a political appointee who has a particular agenda and frequently is under the close supervision of a political superior.

Since you wrote the book, Osama bin Laden’s been killed, in a way that makes Keys to the Kingdom look prescient: the country may be different, but he was kind of hiding out in plain sight, and there’s a real sense that he betrayed his children. How did you come up with the scenario for bin Laden’s post-September 11 life?

There’s one section in the book where Tony has gotten this assignment of trying to find these bombs. He goes to the Air Force counter-proliferation center in Maxwell Air Force base in Alabama, which is a real place. In fact, I had a briefing from one of the people at that center while I was writing the book. She didn’t know that she was briefing me, but she was. And I think that chapter is the best reflection of the best intelligence of what Al Qaeda would do if it came into possession of a nuclear weapon.

In terms of the scenario of bin Laden hanging out at the Saudi Court, was that based on conversations you had?

I don’t have any empirical evidence that bin Laden ever had an experience like the one that I described where he goes into the back room with the king and cuts a deal.

Since bin Laden’s capture, we’ve reevaluated our relationship with the Pakistani government. Do we need to reevaluate our relationships with the Saudi government as well?

Yes, and I think that such a reassessment may be under way now. It’s hard for me to believe that Saudi Arabia, let’s just say 25 years from now, in light of what is going on in North Africa and the Middle East today, is going to be the same kind of authoritarian regime that we’ve known for most of the 20th century.

As we’re reassessing our relationship with Pakistan, what needs to change about how we see the region as a whole?

I chaired the weapons of mass destruction commission, which issued a report called World at Risk and one of the things we commented on is the fact that the types of relationships which developed during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, such as the red phone where presidents could pick up the phone and talk directly to each other, none of that exists between Pakistan and India. The chance of an accidental nuclear war where someone misinterprets what the other side is doing, as I suggest in this novel where the Indians assumed that that nuclear attack on Mumbai on Sept. 19 was the result of the Pakistani government and actually they had no role, it was a bin Laden event, and yet they almost went to nuclear war over that.

How realistic are the scenarios? Do you want your readers to walk away feeling that they’ve read a concrete warning?

I hope they walk away feeling they’ve been entertained, but I also hope they feel they’ve been educated. As Billington says in that opening op-ed in the New York Times, is it realistic to think that Saudi [Saudi Arabia] would have some aspirations to become a nuclear power? I think the answer is that it is realistic. They have two principal adversaries, one of which is Israel, which according to a recent column in the Washington Post is now estimated to have 200 nuclear devices. And Iran is their other enemy, and it hasn’t been successful but it is aspiring to become a nuclear power. With the amount of financial resources that the Saudis have, and it has been escalating in recent years, the idea that they’d want to go nuclear and they could do so fairly quickly, associating themselves with some entity, in this case, a private firm with heavy connections to the government of the United States, is not an irrational set of possibilities.

Now, the two papers have released their first article about the cables. In “The PetroCaribe Files,” Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives review an ordeal discovered within the cables involving an oil and development deal Haiti was negotiating with Venezuela and Cuba between 2006-2007.

As a part of the deal struck that year, Haiti would join the Venezuelan-led oil alliance known as PetroCaribe and it would purchase oil “only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest” — a remarkably good deal for the Western hemisphere’s poorest country.

The U.S. embassy at the time noted that Haiti would save a hundred million U.S. dollars a year under the terms of the PetroCaribe deal; the saved dollars would then be earmarked for development in schools, health care, and infrastructure. Yet, under the charge of ambassador Janet Sanderson, the embassy immediately set out to sabotage the deal.

In a classified cable, Sanderson noted that the embassy started to “pressure” Haitian leader Rene Preval from joining PetroCaribe, saying that it would “cause problems with [the United States.]” Major oil companies — such as ExxonMobil and Chevron — began threatening to cut off ties with Haiti, and Sanderson repeatedly met with the energy firms to assure them that she would pressure Haiti at the “highest levels of government.” The U.S. embassy also continually warned Preval against traveling to Venezuela and collaborate with other left-wing governments in the region.

Despite this intimidation campaign, Haiti successfully completed its deal with PetroCaribe, rebuking both its superpower neighbor and the combined threats of the world’s most powerful oil corporations. Yet the story of the PetroCaribe deal outlined in the cables is a powerful tale of how multinational corporations have exerted pressure on the U.S. government to undercut development in the emerging world economies.

On Wednesday, The Nation and Haiti Liberte will publish articles detailing a campaign by the United States that pressured the country against bringing its minimum wage to $5 dollar a day. This campaign was allegedly waged under the Obama administration, where Sanderson currently works as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

“We have arrived at the conclusion that it is advisable to limit the fundamental political and state offices to a maximum period of two consecutive periods of five years,” Mr. Castro said in a speech opening the Sixth Communist Party Congress, the first such gathering since 1997. He said his generation had failed to prepare a new crop of younger leaders, and called for a “systematic rejuvenation of the whole chain of party and administrative posts.” [...]

[Castro] praised the expanded opportunities already extended to entrepreneurs; the government has granted 180,000 licenses for small businesses like coffee vendors, fast-food stands and house rentals, with tens of thousands more expected to be issued in the coming months. Yet he appeared to reject as “contrary to socialism” the loosening of rules on buying and selling homes, a change some analysts had speculated was coming.

This sounds like an effort on both the political and economic front to move in a more Chinese direction, away from personal dictatorship and toward greater economic freedom. Should be good news for the Cuban people.

The main thing that really powerful political lobbies have in common is the absence of any kind of coherent opposition. But Ben Smith gives us a glimpse at what happens when an unexpected clash emerges:

Israeli leaders reacted warmly to an unexpected defense of Jews and Israel, and criticism of Iran, from Cuban leader Fidel Castro in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Castro’s “deep understanding” and President Shimon Peres wrote in a warm letter to Castro that the comments were “a surprising bridge between the hard reality and a new horizon.” Israeli officials, I’m told, saw the moment as an opportunity to widen a fissure in the hostility of the global left for Israel.

But Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — a key player because of her position on Foreign Affairs, and a longtime supporter of Israel — was less pleased by the opening. A Cuban exile and fierce Castro foe, she made her displeasure known to the Israelis — and even received an apologetic call from Netanyahu, which appears effectively to have squelched the unlikely dialogue with Cuba.

Jeffrey Goldberg snarks, “Could you remind again which lobby is so powerful?”

The answer, of course, is that they’re both powerful! But what’s extraordinary here is how much quicker Netanyahu is to react to a Cuba-related brushback from Ros-Lehtinen than he is to pushes from the President of the United States. The difference is credibility. When a Cuban exile representing a South Florida district complains that someone is being soft on Castro, she’s very credibly going to stick to her guns. And suddenly the patron-client dynamic between the mightiest empire the world has ever known and a small Mediterranean country snaps into place.

Ian Vasquez observes that this is the fiftieth anniversary of America’s ridiculous embargo of Cuba:

It is time to lift the embargo. Doing so will not save communism from its inherent flaws; that system collapsed spectacularly elsewhere around the world in places where the West maintained or established trade. Keeping the sanctions will only further allow the dictatorship and its sympathizers to explain away the regime’s own failings. It would be better for Cubans and the world to see the unraveling of Cuban communism without U.S. intervention. When a free Cuba is eventually born, it will more easily flourish if enemies of the open society cannot rely on a false narrative about how the colossus of the North finally killed off the island’s socialist experiment.

A good way to start would be by lifting the travel portion of the embargo. That measure would expose ordinary Cubans to hundreds of thousands of American citizens, thus inevitably expanding Cuba’s informal economy and establishing innumerable relationships that would make Cuban citizens more independent of the state. The regime may try to reap the benefits of increased revenues, but it will have unleashed a social dynamic that will be difficult to control.

To add a few other points, Cuba aside it’s simply preposterous for the government of a democracy to be restricting which countries its own citizens are allowed to visit. What’s more, it’s worth emphasizing that insofar as a relaxed embargo would present new economic opportunities to the Cuban regime the way for them to maximize those opportunities is to walk further down the China/Vietnam path and relax their grip on the economy. Consequently, the impact of relaxing the embargo on Cuban freedom is necessarily going to lie somewhere in the positive range.

According to an anonymous Republican aide, LeMieux is delaying Shannon’s confirmation over the role he played in initiating talks with Cuba on migration and direct mail service when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the Obama administration. Yet while many suggest that LeMieux is trying to “burnish his Cuba credentials to help Crist,” he may not realize that Shannon’s actions were largely motivated by an effort to “bridge the gap” between Cuban Americans and their relatives in Cuba. The Obama administration has allowed Cuban Americans to visit their family members and lifted limits on money transfers to Cuban relatives, all while keeping in place long-standing trade restrictions. While still in office, Martinez chose to describe the developments as “good news for Cuban families separated by the lack of freedom in Cuba.”

Curiously, a new report recently revealed that wealthy supporters of the U.S. embargo against Cuba have contributed almost $11 million to members of Congress since 2004 and have been largely successful in blocking efforts to weaken sanctions against Castro’s government. In the meantime, long-time Republican Cuban Americans “drift[ed] to Obama” during the 2008 elections.

LeMieux was nominated and confirmed as Assistant Secretary by a Republican president and Republican-dominated Congress in 2005. Up until Obama’s inauguration, Shannon was working under an administration that approached Cuba with a heavy iron fist and often referred to Castro’s government as part of the infamous “axis of evil.”

Holding up Shannon’s nomination means the U.S. has limited diplomatic relations with the largest and most economically robust country in Latin America. Brazil also ranks fifth among the world’s most populated countries.

Back during the campaign, Barack Obama’s “naive and irresponsible” pledge to engage in constructive diplomacy with “bad guy” nations was primarily debated in terms of Iran. So far, however, it seems to be having its greatest impact in Latin America. I’ve written previously about the infamous handshake with Hugo Chavez and earlier this week the US and Cuba agreed to resume talks on migration and postal issues. Now it seems that the Organization of American States is getting ready to reinvite Cuba to join the organization, another important step toward moving beyond the Cold War in Latin America.

Obviously, a lot of substantive issues remain, including the main elements of the US-backed embargo of Cuba and the continuing Castro-run dictatorship on the island. But we seem to have gotten to a point where both sides are trying to improve the relationship, rather than looking for pretexts over which to fight. And that’s a good thing.

Obama administration announced some steps today to begin moving our Cuba policy in a more sensible direction:

– Lift all restrictions on transactions related to the travel of family members to Cuba.

– Remove restrictions on remittances to family members in Cuba.

– Authorize U.S. telecommunications network providers to enter into agreements to establish fiber-optic cable and satellite telecommunications facilities linking the United States and Cuba.

– License U.S. telecommunications service providers to enter into roaming service agreements with Cuba’s telecommunications service providers.

– License U.S. satellite radio and satellite television service providers to engage in transactions necessary to provide services to customers in Cuba.

– License persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to activate and pay U.S. and third-country service providers for telecommunications, satellite radio and satellite television services provided to individuals in Cuba.

– Authorize the donation of certain consumer telecommunication devices without a license.

– Add certain humanitarian items to the list of items eligible for export through licensing exceptions.

What they’ve done here, pretty clearly, is tightly target those measures where a clear case can be made that relaxing restrictions does much more to weaken the regime than anything else. That’s clever politics and probably a smart start. But the plain fact of the matter is that the whole embargo is based on faulty logic. Making the Cuban population as poor as possible isn’t going to bring democracy to the island, and the idea that a more prosperous Cuba could somehow become so prosperous as to pose a security threat to the United States is ridiculous. A Communist economy running without subsidies from the USSR is bound to be pretty poor no matter what, but there’s no reason for us to contribute to the situation.

Daniel Drezner has a nice list of things Passover can teach us about international relations including this key point:

Sanctions against an autocratic regime will rarely yield significant concessions. To get the Pharaoh to let the Jews go, God imposes an escalating series of sanctions against Egypt. These sanctions crippled Egyptian agriculture, health, sanitation and, er, sunlight, inflicting great suffering against the Egyptian people. Not until the first-born male children are killed, however, does Pharaoh relent for a sufficiently long time for the Egyptians to make their escape. Not coincidentally, that plague is the only one to truly hurt the autocrat personally, as his son was killed in the plague as well. Compellence strategies would seem to have a greater chance of success if they target autocratic elites.

This is part of the reason that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to slam Rep Bobby Rush for getting so lovey-dovey with Fidel Castro. The sanctions policy against Cuba is horribly misguided and has taken a terrible toll on innocent Cubans. But Castro personally is a dictator and a bad guy, and insofar as it’s possible to be hard on him personally rather than inflicting collective punishment on the entire population one should do so. I think there’s a limited amount that can be accomplished in this regard, but saying things like “It was almost like listening to an old friend” is not a promising start.

Someone was telling me about this yesterday and I didn’t quite get what I was being told, but Senator Robert Menendez is holding up two of Barack Obama’s key climate/science appointees, John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, over an unrelated Cuba policy dispute:

The delay — which could end quickly if Menendez dropped his objection or Senate leaders pushed for a floor vote that would require 60 votes to pass — has alarmed environmentalists and scientific experts who strongly back Holdren and Lubchenco.

“Climate change damages our oceans more every day we fail to act,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist for the advocacy group Oceana. “We need these two supremely qualified individuals on the job yesterday.”

Kate Sheppard notes that just last year Menendez thought climate change was “incredibly important.” But apparently not as important as defending America’s insane Cuba policy status quo.

Meanwhile, I would note that even more than the filibuster, the “hold” process in the Senate is an absurd procedural bottleneck that could and should be done away with. People sometimes wonder what the hold rule is, and nobody even really knows. When I was an intern in Chuck Schumer’s office the idea of putting a hold on someone came up, and the office had to scramble to figure out what it means. Turns out that it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just an insane convention that Senate leaders agree to uphold and that Senators as a whole conspire to put in place. But it’s ridiculous. Irrespective of the details of one’s views on Holdren or Cuba it clearly does not serve the general interest to let random appointees be held up by random Senators for no real reason. All it does, ultimately, is feed the egomania and power-lust that seems to afflict every single senator. But it’s time for some members of the body to put their substantive policy commitments ahead of their wacky perks of office and start pushing for the kind of substantial procedural reforms that will make it possible for the Senate to tackle major issues in a serious way.

Relatedly, it’s annoying to read things about how it “would require 60 votes to pass” a resolution confirming these nominees. If you look through United States history, plenty of bills and plenty of nominees have been passed with more than 49 but fewer than 60 votes. Similarly, in the pre-seventies era of the 67-person cloture vote plenty of bills passed with fewer than 67 votes. Throughout the nineteenth century it required unanimity to break a filibuster, but that didn’t mean that bills all passes unanimously. It also “requires” 60 votes to pass things if we accept the premise that the filibuster should be used routinely. That has not, however, been the historical understanding of the filibuster. The speed with which Washington has accepted the idea of a routine supermajority requirement is a little bit frightening as it was just a few years ago that this started to be put into place.

We should evaluate how to encourage the regime to allow a legitimate opening – not in terms of cell phones and hotel rooms that Cubans can’t afford, but in terms of the right to organize, the right to think and speak what they believe. However, what we are doing with this Omnibus bill, Mr. President, is far from evaluation, and the process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the Omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide.

Menendez points to a memo prepared by the staff of Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) as recommending a policy change that Menendez worries could “rescue the regime by improving its economic fortunes,” namely giving Cuba “financial credit to purchase agricultural products from the U.S.”

These picks have in fact languished for months, having been put forward by President Obama on December 20. Lubchenco’s nomination to be administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has been stalled in part by the turmoil over finding a Secretary of Commerce, whose department includes NOAA. NOAA career staff are gamely working to draft a spending plan for the $830 million in the recently passed recovery act, and energy adviser Carol Browner is managing climate policy from the White House with a skeleton staff. But the Office of Science and Technology Policy is a key White House office, and its director Holdren is meant to be the top science adviser to the president. The “wise counsel” of Holdren and Lubchenco is irreplaceable, especially given the scope of the challenges our nation faces.

Menendez spokesman Afshin Mohamadi declined to comment on the putatively anonymous hold. “He takes a back seat to no one on the environment,” Mohamadi discussed by telephone, saying the senator’s “record best reflects his feelings on the urgency of combatting climate change.” When asked if Sen. Menendez hopes to have climate legislation on President Obama’s desk before the end of 2009, Mohamadi explained that Sen. Menendez believes it “would be helpful to have it in place going into the December international climate change conference in Copenhagen.”

Each day that Dr. Holdren and Dr. Lubchenco have to sit on the sidelines makes that goal more unlikely.

Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) has long been a voice of reason on foreign policy issues. And now via Steve Clemons, I see an important new report titled “CHANGING CUBA POLICY — IN THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL INTEREST” (PDF) that his staff has prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on which he serves as ranking minority member. The opening:

Economic sanctions are a legitimate tool of U.S. foreign policy, and they have sometimes achieved their aims, as in the case of apartheid South Africa.

After 47 years, however, the unilateral embargo on Cuba has failed to achieve its stated purpose of “bringing democracy to the Cuban people,” while it may have been used as a foil by the regime to demand further sacrifices from Cuba’s impoverished population.

The current U.S. policy has many passionate defenders, and their criticism of the Castro regime is justified. Nevertheless, we must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.

This is not much more than common sense, but in political terms it’s extremely bold. I can only hope that Senator Kerry and the Obama administration will show some boldness of their own and work toward implementing the sort of approach Lugar is talking about.

He suggests as an alternative Flor de Caña, a Nicaraguan brand.

Substantively, the two were at odds over the Iraq war — Mrs. Clinton voted to authorize it and Mr. Obama said he would have opposed it had he been in the Senate then — and to a lesser extent over negotiations with Iran. But although Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Obama for being willing to sit down and talk to dictators, he has said he would have a lower-level envoy do preparatory work for a meeting with Iran’s leaders first. Mrs. Clinton has said she favors robust diplomacy with Iran and lower-level contacts as well.

This idea that a relatively small disagreement about diplomacy with Iran was their only disagreement during the primaries is widespread, but strikes me as something of a mutually convenient myth. The Iran thing really was an example of an issue where the disagreement seemed to generate more heat than light. But they had a related, and more clear-cut, disagreement about Cuba policy with Obama indicating a desire to soften the hard line that prevailed through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations while Clinton indicated a desire to stick with the status quo. Obama wholeheartedly embraced the Shultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn nuclear disarmament agenda while Clinton was more equivocal. Obama implicitly criticized the Clinton administration for waiting until its waning days to really buckle down on the Arab-Israeli conflict. They disagreed about whether the US should join the international treaty to ban cluster bombs.

None of it is earth-shattering stuff, but there was a consistent trajectory to these disagreements, and Obama was on the right side of them. People who supported Obama in the primary — or who voted for the Democratic candidate in November — are going to be looking for assurance that adding Clinton to his team, or having a Republican run the Pentagon, doesn’t indicate a desire to move away from the course he outlined.

I’ll admit that I’ve really slacked off in terms of reading New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz’s blog. And now that I have a chance to glance at it, I think he’s deliberately being dumb to keep me on my toes. For example, yesterday he wrote “Imagine for a moment that the United States has mounted an attack on Mexico or Cuba, truly an unimaginable act.”

Unimaginable indeed. Except the United States has invaded both Mexico and Cuba in the past, multiple times each. Indeed, at this very day the United States maintains a large military installation on Cuban soil despite the objections of the Cuban government. And that installation is the legacy of decades of colonial domination of Cuba by the United States. And when America’s preferred proxy ruler of Cuba was overthrown by a new dictator, we tried several times to overthrow his government — once sponsoring an invasion — and have subjected the country to a devastating embargo for decades in an effort to keep him out of power.

Now nothing in America’s fairly long history of shabby acts toward our “near abroad” comes close to justifying Russia’s bad actions in its near abroad. But they do provide the necessary context of fairly banal great power politics rather than terrifying and unprecedented expansionism.