Fidel Castro is back in the public eye, but he’s singing a slightly different tune now.

The Obama administration has announced that citizens traveling to the United States from 14 countries will undergo more intensive airport security screening.   Eric Lipton for NYT: Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that [...]

Christopher Hitchens is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, famously willing to piss on anyone’s grave, whether it be Mother Tereasa, Bob Hope, or Teddy Kennedy. Interestingly, this time he smacks down with one hand whilst patting on the back with the other: Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara [...]

Glenn Beck continues to impress in his ability to top himself with zaniness.  Today, he explained how “they” have all manner of plans to destroy America and make it more like Cuba.  And “they” may be getting away with it because “they” are so far ahead of us. For those who can’t view the video [...]

Remember those 17 Uighar captives at Gitmo being held in a state of limbo because nobody would take them?  Palau has come to our rescue. The tropical Pacific island nation of Palau announced Wednesday it will accept up to 17 Chinese Muslims who have languished in legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay despite a Pentagon determination [...]

In my latest for New Atlanticist, “Preconditions, Preparations, and Posturing,” I argue that Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and perhaps even Nicholas Burns are misreading the now 16-month-old debate over Barack Obama’s pledge to meet “without precondition, during the first year of [his] administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, [...]

Said an American politician, speaking to an international audience: “I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world. I come with the heartfelt wishes of my people for peace, bearing honest proposals and looking for genuine progress.” I mean can you imagine? Didn’t this politician know that he was [...]

The United States has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Iran since our embassy there was stormed and its staff taken hostage on November 4, 1979.  That may soon change, Ewen MacAskin reports for The Guardian. The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US [...]

Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms’ grave.   Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms’ foreign policy: His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of [...]

David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was testifying under subpoena yesterday to the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. He took great delight in being a complete jackass, as Dana Milbank details. Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? “I’m not going to answer a [...]

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that [...]

George Will joins the Blame America crowd on the issue of high oil prices. Responding to Chuck Schumer’s suggestion that we block arms sales to Saudi Arabia until it “increases its oil production by one million barrels per day,” which would cause the price of gasoline to fall “50 cents a gallon almost immediately,” Will [...]

John Steele Gordon makes some very slight edits to the NYT’s 2000 endorsement of Al Gore over George W. Bush: Mr. Obama has asked to be judged by something more than his positions. He offers himself as an experienced leader who would end the culture of bickering in Washington and use wisdom and resoluteness in [...]

A judge overseeing war crimes cases in Guantanamo Bay has been dismissed from trial without much in the way of explanation. A judge hearing a war crimes case at Guantanamo Bay who publicly expressed frustration with military prosecutors’ refusal to give evidence to the defense has been dismissed, tribunal officials confirmed Friday. Army Col. Peter [...]

Spanish-only speakers have an easier time getting by in Miami than English-only speakers, AP reports. In many areas of Miami, Spanish has become the predominant language, replacing English in everyday life. Anyone from Latin America could feel at home on the streets, without having to pronounce a single word in English. In stores, shopkeepers wait [...]

Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama further elaborated on his “accidental foreign policy” agenda Friday in a speech before the Cuban American National Foundation, the Cuban exile group that historically has been a bastion of hard-line anti-Castro sentiment. In his remarks, Obama called for a “new strategy” towards Cuba and other Latin American nations and contrasted his [...]

Matt Yglesias and Charles Krauthammer don’t agree about much but they are in convergence over the origin of Barack Obama’s foreign policy: a gaffe at last August’s YouTube debates wherein he avowed that, if elected president, he would indeed meet, “without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.” In [...]

Jamie Rubin, formerly Bill Clinton’s State Department spokesman, takes to the pages of the Washington Post to call out John McCain for hypocrisy in claiming that Barack Obama wants to “appease” Hamas. Riffing on John Kerry’s famous gaffe, the piece is subtitled, “McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It.” McCain is the last [...]

MG Jay Hood’s appointment as the top U.S. military officer in Pakistan has been pulled owing to Pakistani complaints about a previous stop in his career as commander at Guantánamo. When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military’s [...]

The Semper Fido Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

For those of you out there who enjoy the pleasures of a fine cigar, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve become a reviewer over at the cigar review site CigarJack.net. My first review, of the La Gloria Cubana Wavell Natural, can be found here. La Gloria Cubana is in General Cigar’s large brand [...]

The Herd Mentality Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

Fareed Zakaria argues that John McCain’s foreign policy would be bellicose whereas Barack Obama’s would be conciliatiatory but, as Dave Schuler notes, both are “confrontational” and “interventionist,” just with slightly different priorities. Zakaria points to a recent McCain speech: Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in [...]

Time for the Monday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/Aaron Favila) Winners will be announced Thursday PM

As previously noted, Admiral Mike Mullen told a gathering at the Atlantic Council that he fears the United States and its allies “will have to deal with Iran in the very near future.” That statement left a lot of room for strategic ambiguity. He removed a bit in a press briefing yesterday, Ann Scott Tyson [...]

An elementary school in McLean, Virginia (an affluent D.C. suburb) has banned tag and touch football. Robyn Hooker, principal of Kent Gardens Elementary School, has told students they may no longer play tag during recess after determining that the game of chasing, dodging and yelling “You’re it!” had gotten out of hand. Hooker explained to [...]

I have noticed that if a political figure or pundit makes the observation that one political obstacle in changing our foriegn policies regarding Israel is the influence of the American Jewish population, then you are labled a “bigot” or “anti-Semite.” However, if you make the observation that one political obstacle in changing our foreign policies [...]

It will come of little surprise that Christopher Hitchens uses the Obama-Wright controversy to take another whack at organized religion. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. . [...]

Richard Fernandez argues that the rioting by Kosovar Serbs was entirely predictable: The wider impact of the Kosovo crisis is the precedent that it sets for many of the “frozen conflicts” of the world, ranging from Azerbaijan to the Basque region. Remarkably, many Muslim countries have refused to recognize Kosovo. And their reluctance is fueled [...]

Senator John McCain declared our policy of containment towards Cuba a success and declared his support for an independent Kosovo in a conference call with bloggers this afternoon. He made some opening remarks focusing on foreign policy before taking questions and I had the opportunity to ask him to expand his thoughts. He challenged Barack [...]

Fidel Casto may have stepped down but the embargo aimed at his ouster is staying put. The Bush administration is ruling out any changes in its Cuba policy — including lifting a five-decade trade embargo — after Fidel Castro’s resignation, deriding his brother and heir apparent, Raul, as “dictator lite.” [...] “They’re the ones who [...]

Fidel Castro has finally resigned the presidency of Cuba. Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country as president or commander-in-chief, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution. Castro, 81, who has not appeared in public for almost [...]

The blogosphere is roiled up over the flag issue again. No, not that flag. This one: That’s the Cuban flag with the image of Ernesto Che Guevara superimposed on it. It’s tacked onto the wall of an office in Barack Obama’s Houston campaign headquarters. An office belonging, apparently, to a low level staffer who’s in [...]

Admiral Mike Mullen wants to close the prison facility at Guantanimo because of its propaganda value to the enemy. The chief of the U.S. military said he favors closing the prison here as soon as possible because he believes negative publicity worldwide about treatment of terrorist suspects has been “pretty damaging” to the image of [...]

Via the BBC: Castro ‘well enough for election’ The health of Cuban President Fidel Castro is good enough for him to be a candidate in next month’s parliamentary elections, his brother Raul has said. Which raises the question: apart from breathing, how healthy is “enough” to run, given that he won’t have to campaign or [...]

The New Orleans city council today defied protestors and voted unanimously to tear down the first of four remaining major housing projects in the city to make way for mixed-income housing that will accommodate some, but not all, of the pre-Katrina public housing population. Needless to say, the self-appointed community activists were displeased: The scene [...]

The continuing rise of Mike Huckabee — he’s now vaulted to the top of the polls in South Carolina [and now Florida!] to go along with his surge in Iowa, New Hampshire, and the national surveys — has created the inevitable backlash. It’s the fate of frontrunners, especially unexpected ones, to see a close examination [...]

The CIA destroyed at least two tapes of its operatives using “severe interrogation techniques” to obtain information from suspected terrorists, Mark Mazetti reports for the NYT. Both the 9/11 Commission and attorneys for Zacarias Moussaoui had specifically requested any such evidence and Agency officials had previously denied, under oath, that any such tapes ever existed. [...]

The blogosphere is abuzz over the revelation that Keith Kerr, the 74-year-old retired Army colonel and California National Guard general who stunned the candidates in last night’s YouTube debate with the announcement that he was openly gay, works for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Jonathan Martin describes the question itself as “a powerful moment.” A retired [...]

The EEOC recently ruled that requirements that employees speak English on the job violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This led to action in Congress to overturn the regulations, which in turn sparked heated exchanges among the legislators, John Fund reports: It’s been less than a week since New York’s Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. [...]

Today’s WaPo fronts the story of the most interrogators of WWII, who had a reunion yesterday at Fort Hunt. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the focus is on those who spoke out about the war in Iraq and the interrogation techniques now being used. For six decades, they held their silence. The group of World War II [...]

James’s post on Sen. Barack Obama’s announced proposal for eliminating nuclear weapons certainly raised a number of questions in my mind. Below I’ll give you a sample of some of the questions that came to mind and my answers. Please provide your own answers in the comments. Should we reduce the size of our nuclear [...]

Fred Thompson recently told a stump speech crowd, “You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn’t take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.” An unsigned author at the Washington Post has [...]

Does somebody else’s off-hand comment ever catch in your mind so that you just have to research it a little farther? That happens to me all the time, most recently with respect to this comment about Cuban exports from David Bernstein (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds): And, for the unitiated, Cuba is not actually economically isolated [...]

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is dead. Unless he’s not. Val Prieto had a flurry of updates yesterday reporting Castro’s death, with imminent announcements expected. Half the political blogosphere linked the post and his server couldn’t handle the strain. In a Communist plot, no announcement was forthcoming. Meanwhile, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton got into the act [...]

Bill Richardson sets forth his foreign policy vision in a piece called “New Realism: Crafting a US Foreign Policy for a New Century” published in the Harvard International Review. The beginning is standard boilerplate, with plenty of sops to the base thrown in: US foreign policymakers face novel challenges in the 21st century. Jihadists and [...]

The Wallawallabingbang Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

I was apparently the only political blogger who didn’t watch the YouTube debates last night. My conscience is clear, though, in that I’m exceedingly unlikely to vote in the Democratic primaries, Virginia doesn’t hold primaries for six and a half months (February 12), transcripts would be available online in short order, and I found the [...]

Duncan Hunter is warning about the threats posed by Iran and Venezuela, according to two separate UPI reports. “As a regional neighbor of the United States, Venezuela is increasingly threatening stability in the Western Hemisphere. The country’s leadership is determined to move the country away from democracy and toward socialism; maintains close relations with Cuba [...]

Dallas Mavericks honcho Mark Cuban shares way too much information about his colonoscopy. His message is well taken, though: Bottomline is that your life just might depend on getting tested for colon cancer. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Its truly easy and breezy. Do it.