Briefly

Fidel
It's the end of another era.  One of my adolescent heroes, Fidel Castro, managed to yank the chain of US presidents for over fifty years.  I still chuckle over the Mariel boatlift.  Adios, Fidel.  You pretty much won.

Betsy DeVos
While most of the Left is caught up in bemoaning the appointment of Stephen Bannon, I'm a lot more upset by the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education.  DeVos has been trying to "reform" public education in much the same way the Islamist State has tried to "reform" the Yazidis: extermination.  An advocate of public funding (vouchers) for the "Christian academies" that proliferated in response to desegregation, she also supports charter schools as a path towards the complete privatization of education.

The State Department
Romney? Giuliani?  It's hard to imagine Tr*mp settling on either of those.  Maybe he's setting us up for a "compromise" — like John Bolton, perhaps: just as rabid as Giuliani, but with more of Romney's "look of a statesman."  He wasn't terribly statesmanlike when he was W's ambassador to the UN, but I guess you could call his raucous stint there "experience."

Conflict of Interest
There is no way the Tr*mp family can effectively detach itself from its financial entanglements in foreign countries, but can it resist self-dealing?  I am reminded of Aesop's fable about the scorpion and the frog: "It's my nature," the scorpion replied.

Saving the Iran Nuclear Agreement
Trump Tower Teheran?

On Cuba

After 55 years of the Cuban embargo, not many of us remember what was on the island before the Castro takeover.  Listening to the right-wing Cubans on tonight's news, you might think the revolution overthrew some sort of democracy.  As I recall, Fulgencio Batista was a militaristic kleptocrat who strode along arm in arm with the Mafia, catering to America's sleazier tastes with gambling, drugs, and prostitution.

The "freedom loving" Cubans who fled to the United States after the revolution never seemed to mind living under Batista: they were among those who shared in the regime's ill-gotten gains.  What pissed them off was losing their ill-gotten riches.  Well, they needn't have worried.  Unlike immigrants from Mexico or, even, Communist Eastern Europe, they got very special treatment.  Their new businesses and enterprises in South Florida were largely financed by US government agencies, including the CIA.  No wonder they like Republicans.

The poor, in Batista's Cuba, were no better off than the poor in Haiti.  After Castro, they got free schooling, free medical care, and other benefits of a socialist state.  Castro's communist ideology was unlikely to endear him to the USofA, of course.  If he'd set himself up as just another Latin American military dictator, he could have been attending White House dinners ever since.

Instead, he got fifty-five years of attempts to destabilize his government, from poisoning his cigars to the recent idiotic plots by USAID (which has very often been just another branch of the CIA.)   Now it's time to end the embargo.  We've normalized relations with China and Vietnam, and we're even working on Cambodia.  Cuba doesn't have to be a democracy to be a trading partner, and the Cuban people deserve some more investment in their economy.

The Cartagena "Scandal"

I don't understand why soldiers patronizing prostitutes is so scandalous. Haven't soldiers always patronized prostitutes? Back in what many Republicans seem to regard as the "good old days" of the 19th century, prostitutes ("camp followers") followed armies around, presumably with the tacit or not so tacit approval of those armies' officers. I think the whole affair is even less scandalous because prostitution is both legal and acceptable in Cartagena. What's the big deal?

As for the Secret Service agents, let's face it — really they're nothing but paramilitaries in pinstripes, no matter how nobly they've been portrayed in the movies. Unless their escapades were being financed by the GAO, I don't see a real problem — assuming they got the job of preparing for the President's visit to the Summit of the Americas done before they began exploring the local culture.

As for the likes of Congressional "investigators" like Peter King and Darryl Issa, it's totally clear that their main goal is to make the "scandal" somehow rub off on the president. The real scandal at the Summit was the unsuccessful attempt by the United States to formally exclude Cuba from future meetings. We're ready to talk to the Taliban, but not to the Castros? (insert Bronx cheer)