Going easy on polluting companies. The Bush Administration is shifting the cost of cleaning up heavily polluted sites from corporations to taxpayers.
posted by Paul Murray at 2:54 PM | permanent link

The stupidity will continue. Don't look to the Bush Administration to improve relations with Cuba. Key posts that deal with Latin American countries have been filled with Cuban-Americans, who insist upon maintaining the same hard-line stance that has not worked for more than 40 decades.

Why is our policy on Cuba is different from our policy on China? Both are communist countries with questionable records on human rights (just accept that for purposes of this argument). Yet we have approved and encouraged one's trade while doing everything we can to block the other. Why? What's the difference? As far as I can see, the answer is that one has 1.27 billion potential customers living there, while the other has only 11 million.

The "constructive engagement" argument that applied to China should apply to Cuba as well. We should be positioning ourselves for the inevitable day when Fidel Castro drops dead. (Don't hold your breath; members of his family tend to live quite long.)

Dubya didn't create our Cuba policy, but he's not about to change it. Not with that razor-thin vote margin in Florida, where he needed the voted of every Cuban exile he can get -- and so will his brother, Governor Jeb. The only way this will change is if more people is the country speak out.
posted by Paul Murray at 12:43 PM | permanent link