Soundoff on Impeachment!

If you're reading this (and I think this means you, Matt, as you're the only one who reads this regularly), you should sound off on The PI's editorial on impeachment. It's little less than a straw poll, but better than nothing:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/archives/126803.asp

Free Rice (for the world, not you!)

Though I have my doubts about the effectiveness of such a website, at least it makes me feel good and smart:

http://freerice.com

What's that? Cuba's in the news again!?!

Today's daily rant is about NPR's story on Cuban dissident Oscar Biscet who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush. NPR claims that his views are "closely aligned with those of the president" but that's not a criteria for the award. Kind of like saying Halliburton's multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts are just "coincidence".

I consider myself an amateur Cuba-phile, have lived on the island, and barely heard of Biscet, so touting him as "Cuba's most high-profile dissident" doesn't mean much inside the country. Like Bush, though, he's at great odds with the rest of his own country. As an anti-abortion activist in a country that uses abortion as a primary means of birth control, a Christian in a country where few people wield that label (and fewer still who don't also infuse their Christian beliefs with a little Santeria) and a proponent of the Embargo.

Holy shit! This guy's in favor of the embargo? He's gotta be the only person inside Cuba who thinks the embargo is a good thing and working well. No wonder he's in prison.

I'm not an apologist for the Cuban government – they commit crimes just like any other government- but I do understand their line of thinking, which is "the US is waging a low-scale war against us, and we must respond in kind." The evidence of this war is hardly circumstantial, from the obvious (Bay of Pigs invasion, the bombing of a Cubana flight 455, and the 1999 hotel bombing in Havana); propaganda (Radio Martí,) antagonistic (Brothers to the Rescue fly-bys in the late 1990s); to instances that verge on paranoia if not for the hostility (a plague of insects that the Cuban government attributes to CIA clandestine warfare). Not to mention the unrelenting rhetoric from ten US presidents and counting calling for the downfall of Castro.

Any and all modern nations engaged in a war have clamped down on civil rights of their own population, for right or wrong, and the Cuban government is no difference. They think the US is at war with them, and we give them ample evidence to make such a conclusion.

Awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to one of the most extreme, a pro-Bush dissidents in one of the biggest anti-Bush countries in the whole anti-Bush world is just one of GW's many ways of saying "fuck you" to the rest of us.