Take a look at the following at see how many of these you agree with.

From ABC:

Support for gay marriage, legalizing illegal immigrants and decriminalizing marijuana all are at new highs. Three-quarters of Americans favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Two-thirds support establishing relations with Cuba.

But hold tight.

If some views that may be perceived as liberal are ascendant, so are some conservative ones: Opposition to gun control is also at a new high in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. There’s continued broad support for tighter border controls. And contrary to President Obama, half of Americans wouldn’t flatly rule out torturing terrorism suspects.

I agree with every single one of those views except ruling out torture. I don’t think that should be in our playbook, and I’m sure the readers of this blog know exactly why so I won’t get into it.

But everything else I’m on board with. And, yes, I oppose gun control and I want tighter border security.

The first because it’s not our guns that are making us less safe, it’s our drug laws and prison systems that breed criminality. And look at any study where you have conceal and carry. Crime goes down. Sorry folks, but when more people have guns, society gets more polite.

Turning to illegal immigration, in this new, post 9/11 world, it only makes sense to have much tighter border control. And if we want to begin legalizing illegal immigrants, we’re going to have to lock the border up tight. There’s no other way. You can’t have one without the other, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you snake oil.

What this tells me is that we’re definitely a moderate nation, and probably leaning a little bit more towards being center left. And after 30 years of being center right, that’s to be expected.

So, how do you compare?

Republican Dick Lugar proposed normalizing relations a few days ago, and now we’re seeing some movement. And even though Obama has said that he’s opposed to normalization, I can’t help but think this is a first step towards that.

Let’s hope.

From Wash Post:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to lift longstanding U.S. restrictions on Cuba, a senior administration official said, allowing Cuban-Americans to visit families there as often as they like and to send them unlimited funds.

The gesture, which could herald more openness with the Castro regime, will fulfill a campaign promise and follows more modest action in Congress this year to loosen travel rules.

The president has authority to loosen the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba on his own. The new rules will affect an estimated 1.5 million Americans who have family members in Cuba. Other Americans are allowed to travel to Cuba but only if they qualify through certain cultural, educational and other programs.

So why lift the embargo?

Well, for one, we have trade relationships with countries who have done things far more questionable than Cuba. Also, the embargo has simply worn out any usefulness that it once had.

Still, it’s always been a political hot button issue, so people have stayed away from it. My guess is that Obama will too for the time being, but if he gets reelected in 2012, he’ll probably feel emboldened to lift the ban. And with Republicans like Lugar behind him, it makes doing that a lot easier.

Could it come sooner rather than later?

More as it develops…

This comes as a bit of a surprise, but it’s certainly long overdue. And now that Raul Castro is starting to shake things up, it could actually be politically realistic.

From Wash Post:

The nearly 50-year-old economic embargo against Cuba, Lugar (R-Ind.) said in a March 30 letter to Obama, puts the United States at odds with the views of the rest of Latin America, the European Union and the United Nations, and “undermines our broader security and political interests in the Western Hemisphere.”

The April 17-19 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago would present a “unique opportunity for you to build a more hospitable climate to advance U.S. interests in the region through a change in our posture regarding Cuba policy,” Lugar wrote.

Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is in the forefront of a broad movement advocating a new policy that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, a number of state governments and human rights groups. A bipartisan majority of Congress has repeatedly voted to ease restrictions on travel and other contact with Cuba, although the measures died after threatened presidential vetoes during the Bush administration.

Still, I wonder if House Republicans will reject this idea now that Obama is in office. Seems like an easy thing to hit him with politically since Cuba is an easy boogeyman. If I were Obama, I wouldn’t spend ANY political capital on this right now.

But that’s where having a friend like Lugar comes in handy. Especially since it has a definite tie to the nuclear non-proliferation agreement that the US and Russia seem to be drawing up in the coming year.

More as it develops…

Reason TV digs in…

I’ve always been a bit baffled by Americans’ obsession with Che. Honestly, I just think his iconic image looks cool and so Americans think he’s cool.

Yes, it’s as shallow as that.

In the end, I wish more would see videos like this so they knew exactly who this guy was and what he did. Because a revolutionary hero he was not.

My name is Bradley A. Porter, one of the founders of The Crossed Pond. Many thanks to Justin for inviting me to blog here.

Shameless self-promotion aside, enough about me…

While change comes to Washington, and pressing, almost intractable crises seem to be popping up like a bad game of Whack-a-Mole, it’s easy to overlook American policy towards Cuba as an area demanding of attention. Indeed, it’s precisely because our present policy is so outrageously dumb and ineffective that makes the Cuban situation easy to ignore–nothing ever changes. But under the veneer of the half-a-century old stalemate, conditions are bubbling that seem to indicate that now might be the best time in modern American history to enact a total reversal of one of the most emblematically stupid American policies of the 20th century.

The obvious: Fidel Castro is either dying or dead. His brother Raul began officially ruling the country in February, and while it’s clear Raul would like to as continue as his brother as seamlessly as possible, it remains unclear what his legacy or public standing will be. Barack Obama, who has precisely no inherent impetus to keep the embargo, has been elected president. Obama himself has shown an eyebrow-raising amount of flexibility towards revising our policy towards Cuba. He has called for an end to travel restrictions for Cuban exiles, an end to caps on remittances (family sending money back), noted he would be willing to personally sit down with Fidel Castro (though it was the inclusion of Ahmadinejad in that statement that got all the attention), and and has explicitly expressed a willingness to liberalize our Cuba policy.

And now, a critical third piece: Cuban Americans, for the first time ever, are in favor of lifting the embargo.

New polling in Florida shows that for the first time a majority of Cuban-Americans favor lifting the trade embargo against Cuba that the United States has had in place since 1962. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed favored discontinuing the embargo, and 65% said they were in favor of reestablishing diplomatic relations with the neighboring Communist regime.

It also goes without saying that the contrast is generational, with the younger demographics being significantly more liberal than their older counterparts. It is, however, significant that, for the first time, the majority of even Floridian Cuban-Americans support lifting the embargo.

In making that switch, Cuban Americans join the rest of the free world in their assessment. Already, 68% of Americans favor lifting travel restrictions, 62% favor allowing trade, and 60% favor an outright reversal of the “Trading with the Enemy Act” and subsequent diplomatic freezes.

Opinion is even more lopsided when you go outside the borders of the United States.

If votes in the United Nations serve as a gauge of global opinion, 98.9 percent of the world opposes the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, a measure imposed 46 years ago to isolate the communist-ruled island and bring down its leaders.

It failed on both counts. As far as international opinion is concerned, the country that is isolated is the United States, not Cuba. In the latest of 17 successive U.N. General Assembly resolutions on lifting the embargo, Washington mustered only two allies — Israel and Palau, a Pacific island nation difficult to find on a map. It has a population of 21,000.cubans

The Marshall Islands (pop. 63,000), which had voted with the United States from 2000 to 2007, unexpectedly and without public explanation broke ranks this year and abstained in the vote, a non-binding resolution taken a week before the U.S. presidential election.

The count — 185 countries in favor of lifting the embargo, three against — speaks volumes about a bankrupt policy stuck in the Cold War era.

Yes, you read that right. The United States of America couldn’t keep The Marshall Islands in its coalition. Who are we isolating again?

American businesses, sensing the opportunity, are piling on

President-elect Barack Obama should start soon to loosen five decades of trade curbs on Cuba and begin a comprehensive review of policy toward the communist-run island, business groups said on Thursday.

“We support the complete removal of all trade and travel restrictions on Cuba. We recognize that change may not come all at once, but it must start somewhere, and it must begin soon,” the groups said in a letter to Obama.

They recommended the United States start by holding talks with Cuba to discuss how to repair nearly 50 years of distrust and by allowing Americans to visit the island.

The groups included American Farm Bureau Federation, Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce, National Retail Federation and Grocery Manufacturers Association, whose collective membership comprises a broad cross-section of American industry and agriculture.

And finally, an oft-overlooked component. Much was said by Obama supporters about the potential soft-power advantages that might be gained by having a commander-in-chief who looks more like the world than Texas. That has very specific implications in Cuba, which has become a majority black country, and where racial tensions between that de facto majority and the Revolutionary government has always been bubbling just under the surface. It’s easy for Castro to demonize guys like George W. Bush. But even Castro senses that with President Barack Obama, he faces something of a PR nightmare. Read that whole article for an awful lot of insight about how the mere fact of a President Obama problematizes the domestic messaging of the Cuban government in a big, and potentially powerful, way.

So, with all that in favor of reversing America’s policy towards Cuba, it should be a no-brainer, right?

Not so fast.

While Obama has shown a huge degree of openness towards liberalizing our Cuban policy, it’s easy to overstate the case and paint the situation as America opening up Cuba being a done deal. But as is true of a lot of things, while both his critics and supporters read idealism and boldness into Obama’s position, the truth of it is that he maintains a cautious “flexibility” that could go either way.

For one, just as Obama has no real political reason not to normalize, he also has no real political reason to normalize (save that it’s unquestioningly the right thing to do). His purported disproportionate problems with the Hispanic vote (even in Florida) never materialized (in fact, he ran much stronger among them, against an immigration reform crusader and generally favorably-viewed figure among the Hispanic community in McCain, than Kerry did against Bush), but at the same time he probably wants badly to hang on to Florida for 2012 and courting controversy on this, particularly as it’s unclear what demographic would be won over the gesture, might give him pause. The problem with Cuban policy is that while most everyone broadly thinks reversal is a good idea, there’s nobody for whom this is a make-or-break issue except the pro-embargo Cuban community mostly centered in Florida. In other words Obama can lift the embargo, or do nothing at all, and still count on the majority of Hispanics to support him—and being the Democrat, it doesn’t seem very likely his future opponent for reelection is going to flank him on the left with this one. All Obama has to do to gain maximum political advantage here is take the Price is Right Strategy. If your opponent buzzes in with $1000, go with $999. With nobody but the critics tying their votes to Obama’s policy, why court controversy? Never underestimate the draw of the path of least resistance for any politician, even one with Obama’s Changiness.

Secondly, while Obama has indeed made a lot of remarks indicating he was open to the possibility of reforming our Cuban policy, he’s consistently couched that in language that could just as easily be used to support a status quo position. Michael C. Moynihan at Reason does the best job I’ve seen of deconstructing Obama’s Cuban stance (or non-stance, as it were). The gist is that while Obama has indeed made specific promises that amount to rolling back some Bushian restrictions with the stroke of a pen, he has very conspicuously fallen short of going farther. When asked directly on more major changes to Cuban policy—or when making policy speeches to Cuban audiences—Obama, like every major Presidential candidate since 1962, has made sure to conditionalize everything on Cuba democratizing. What exactly they would need to do to merit a reversal of course remains ambiguous, as it always has, but the crux is that Obama’s stated positions on Cuban policy are no different than any other President. He is willing to lift the embargo provided Cuba “opens itself up to democratization”, a policy which, at least in letter, is identical to even the most fervent hardliner’s stance.

And finally, while Obama can make good on his Cuban campaign promises relatively easily (by reversing the present administration’s in-practice additions to our law), to make any kind of significant revisions would require Congressional approval, which is to say, a bill would have to reach his desk for him to sign. There is little reason to believe that Obama himself will ask for one, and while most people are confident that Obama would sign one if given the opportunity, whether or not he’ll be given that opportunity remains the same open question we’ve had for years. There is some reason for optimism here, of course. With major Democratic majorities, of course, chances are more likely, and also with Dodd taking on increasing leadership and visibility in the majority caucus, and with Richardson at Commerce, it seems very likely that the issue will at least reach Obama’s ear. However, again, whether this becomes a centerpiece agenda item for anybody remains unclear.

And that last point is the stickler. Obama will, I would guess, make some revisions to American Cuban policy. And I am also a believer that eventually we will normalize with Cuban, and that our Cold War policy will suffer a death of a thousand cuts. But the very nature of lifting the embargo on Cuban means that, for us to gain leverage with it, we would have to do so in a dramatic, very public way. Merely letting it atrophy won’t cut it, in other words: it needs to be part of a gesture to provide a PR hit to the island for us to gain good advantage from it. There is a way to have the embargo aid in efforts to democratize Cuba: by lifting it, publicly and loudly. It would be better to have a slow death of the embargo than no death at all, but letting it phase out quietly robs us of our biggest potential soft power weapon.

Right now, at this point in history, we have the best chance we’ve ever had towards making a real change in regards to Cuba. The stars, as it were, are well aligned. But those assuming this is going to get done ought to be prepared for a fight. If it’s ever to be done, now is the right time to do it. My point is not to knock Obama his pragmatic flexibility, but rather to say that like anything in inertia-based Washington, change may come, but it’s not going to spontaneously generate itself. It has to come because we demand it, not because we expect it.

Cross-posted at The Crossed Pond.

The Crossed Pond is a site devoted to crossing boundaries, ideological and geographic. Our founders include an English physicist, a debate coach in Kansas, and a freelance writer in Chicago (me)–a Tory, a Libertarian, and a Republican, respectively. All of us consider ourselves centrist, libertarian-leaning conservatives of one sort or another, though like Donklephant are pointedly non-partisan. We have since expanded our roster to include a few more Englishmen, an American expat in Japan, a 20-year veteran (and now critic) of the military’s counter-narcotics efforts in South and Central America, a student in California, a (also ex-military) civil servant in D.C., and a few others. In 2007 we were named as a finalist for Best Political Coverage at the Weblog Awards (and promptly got stomped by RealClearPolitics), and made Iain Dale’s list of Top Right-of-Centre Blogs in the “Guide to Political Blogging in the UK”. We pride ourselves on being “the best blog you’ve never heard of”.

The announcement came after North Korea handed over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear work to Chinese officials on Thursday, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process.

Bush called the declaration a positive step along a long road to get the nation to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet, he remained wary of the regime, which has lied about its nuclear work before. And North Korea’s declaration, received six months late, falls short of what the administration once sought, leaving it open to criticism from those who want the U.S. to take an even tougher stance against the regime.

“We will trust you only to the extent you fulfill your promises,” Bush said in the Rose Garden. “I’m pleased with the progress. I’m under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn’t the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process.”

My question now…why not Cuba? I mean, are we comfortable with setting the precedent that we’ll lift sanctions only if you have the potential for nuclear armaments? True, Cuba has numerous and long reaching human rights abuses, but I think it has been demonstrated throughout the years that North Korea is far more authoritarian than Cuba ever was.

And then there’s the question of Iran. What makes them different? Ties to terrorists? An unwillingness to give up the idea of using nuclear energy to power their infrastructure? Pointed sabre rattling? Because let’s not forget that North Korea has engaged in the exact same things too, except they didn’t threaten Israel. So, if we’re going to take a fair look at the differences here, Israel is really the biggest difference.

One particularly bright spot is that this decision does set up a bi-partisan framework to engage in diplomacy with our most strident foes. In other words, I’m expecting all of those on the right wing who would criticize a President Obama for a move like this to do the same thing currently to Bush. And the same goes for the left wing and praise.

So…what do the candidates have to say?

Obama has already issued a statement praising the decision

:“This is a step forward, and there will be many more steps to take in the days ahead,” he says in a statement that also voices conservative caution. “Critical questions remain unanswered. We still have not verified the accuracy of the North Korean declaration. We must confirm the full extent of North Korea’s past plutonium production. We must also confirm its uranium enrichment activities, and get answers to disturbing questions about its proliferation activities with other countries, including Syria.”

I’ll get McCain’s once it’s posted.

UPDATE:
A couple Republican lawmakers are not happy campers…

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed her “profound disappointment” over the decision, while Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, also expressed his outrage.

“Lifting sanctions and removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism flies in the face of history and rewards its brutal dictator for shallow gestures,” said Hoekstra, who has not shied away from criticizing the White House in recent years.

Good to see some transparency even though I disagree.

Welcome to the 21st century Cuba! You’ve got a long way to go yet, and let’s hope that happens sooner rather than later.

It’s been over 2 months since he officially took power, and The Seminal details some progress…

Raul Castro announced today that he is commuting all death sentences in Cuba (with the exception of 3 individuals charged with terrorism) to lesser sentences, citing humanitarian reasons. Cuba has faced pressure from human-rights activists to abolish its death penalty, which is still administered via firing squad.

The commutations are the latest in a wave of populist reforms introduced by Raul Castro since his older brother Fidel Castro retired and handed him power. Over the weekend he announced he’s raising pensions for retirees as well as salaries for some government employees, while earlier this month he lifted long-time bans on Cubans owning cell phones and staying in hotels reserved for foreigners.

Oh, and he’s also allowed Cubans to own personal computers, and that’s given rise to uncensored blogging about the country.

And yes, Raul still has a long way to go to undo the harm his brother has wrought on the country, and one can’t help but think the lion’s share of it will only happen after Fidel is dead, but these steps do amount to some progress and it should at least be recognized.