By Steve Clemons

While I’m not with Hillary Clinton when it comes to her US-Cuba policy (and actually not with any of the candidates on all of their views. . .

First of all, this is excellent news. Second of all, it will be interesting to learn the back story. There are three other Iranian-Americans still being detained, so there is still room for very bad things to happen in the relationship.

James Fallows and I are both still in utter disbelief about what appeared in the New York Times yesterday regarding Bush’s comments to biographer Robert Draper that he really didn’t know much about why his policy on keeping the Iraqi military intact was reversed. From the Times report: Mr.

(photo credit: Dan Rosen) George W. Bush may be in Baghdad today, but that won’t change the realities on the ground in Iraq.

This is off topic, but I enjoyed watching this YouTube video of 1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines mimic Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings — Heinrich Heine (1821) I hadn’t paid much attention to the growing "banned books" problem in American schools and libraries, but I saw an ad on a Chicago train yesterday and dug in a bit.

US-Cuba relations are not high on the roster of priorities for many Americans, and yet small moves in the terms of that relationship could have enormous political consequences. Recently, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did battle over what their policies would be towards Cuba if elected President.

President Bush still does not know who actually controverted his policy on keeping Saddam’s military intact and instead disbanded it.  That’s an incredible admission — unbelievable!  This from a revealing New York Times piece today on Bush biographer Robert Draper’s interviews with Bush (and in his forthcoming book Dead Certain:  The Presidency of George W….

Larry Craig won’t be Idaho’s Senator after September 30th.  He made his resignation announcement today. There has been a lot of ridicule of Craig in the last several days — much of which was deserved given his well-preened anti-gay persona, but now he’s out. He’s terminated one of the big contradictions in his life.

The other day, I posted a tidbit on the endorsement of Senator Chris Dodd by the International Association of Fire Fighters. I’m a big fan of Chris Dodd. I think he’s an adult when it comes to thinking through what a serious foreign policy for America’s future would look like.