Tag Archives: obama

Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

by Bob Dole Posted on April 5, 2016

Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

By on 4 Apr 2016commentsShare

A major section of the original Keystone pipeline is out of commission after an oil spill near the pipeline was detected in South Dakota on April 2.

The spill, estimated at 187 gallons of crude oil, serves as a reminder of the risks that pipelines pose — and that with the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, we’ve likely avoided the potential for an even bigger, more disastrous spill.

Part of the original argument against Keystone XL was that eventually, the proposed pipeline was bound to spill. A 2013 Forbes article (which claimed that it was “crazy” to think Keystone XL wouldn’t leak) pointed out that as pipelines age, they are often not properly maintained, leading to a greater possibility of a leak occurring.

The recent oil spill was discovered, of course, by TransCanada’s state-of-the-art spill detection technology — oh, what’s that? My state-of-the-art Tweet detecting system’s “Bill McKibben” sensor just went off:

Apparently, a South Dakota landowner first noticed signs of a spill and informed TransCanada of the leak. As a result, TransCanada shut down the section of the pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla. (The section of Keystone that runs from Cushing to Texas is still in operation.)

Transcanada says that “no significant impact to the environment has been observed” from the April 2 spill. We hope it stays that way — and in the meantime, we’re glad that there’s one less huge pipeline out there to worry about. Spilled milk might not be worth crying over, but unspilled pipelines are definitely worth celebrating.

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Keystone leaks and reminds us why we’re glad there isn’t an XL pipeline out there

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Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

by JarredMessina Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stanley Kurtz is yet again in a lather about a HUD program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, the centerpiece of President Obama’s plan to fight housing discrimination:

Federal Tyranny Gags GOP in Hillary’s Backyard

The Obama administration’s AFFH policy has morphed from “mere” massive regulatory overreach into a bald attempt to quash the freedom of speech of its political opponents. The new federal effort to muzzle Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino’s attacks on the Obama administration’s housing policy is very arguably designed to silence public opposition to AFFH, and to remove a potential political time-bomb from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York is ground zero in the national controversy over AFFH….And now it just so happens that the “Federal Monitor” appointed to oversee the settlement of a court case compelling Westchester to “affirmatively further fair housing” has asked a court to muzzle Astorino.

But here’s a funny thing: Westchester’s problems were caused by a private lawsuit filed in 2006, which it lost in February 2009. It hardly seems likely that Obama had much to do with that. And it seems doubly unlikely that AFFH, which was announced a mere nine months ago, could possibly be “ground zero” for a fight that’s been ongoing for over a decade.

Still, I suppose those are nits. Regardless of when it all started, it’s certainly outrageous for the feds to try to gag an opponent of their policies. This is the kind of thing that—

What’s that? Maybe I should take a look at the federal monitor’s actual court filing? How tiresome. But we’re professionals around here. Let’s see now…ah, here it is on page 55: “Recommended Remedies.” This is what the monitor wants:

a Court declaration reemphasizing the essential terms of the Settlement and issuing findings making clear that none of the terms have been changed and the County’s statements analyzed in Section II of this report are false;
distribution by the County, voluntarily or by order, of the declaration and findings described above to the leadership of all of the eligible communities;
posting the declaration and findings described above prominently on the County website and the removal of press releases inconsistent with the declaration and findings;
unsealing the videotapes of the depositions of, at the least, the County Executive, the Commissioner of Planning, and the Director of Communications, inasmuch as each made or reviewed unsupported public statements that were inconsistent with both the terms of the Settlement and their own sworn testimony; and
hiring, within 30 days of the issuance of this report, a public communications consultant that will craft a message and implement a strategy sufficiently robust to provide information broadly to the public that describes the benefits of integration, as required by Paragraph 33(c)….

Basically, Westchester is under court order to do certain things. They haven’t done them. In fact, county leaders have been loudly and habitually lying about both the consent decree and HUD’s affordable housing requirements for years. So now the monitor wants (a) the actual terms of the settlement to be widely distributed, (b) depositions to be unsealed so everyone can see what county leaders have been saying under oath, and (c) a third-party consultant to craft the court-ordered PR plan, since the county plainly has no intention of obeying the consent decree on its own.

But nobody is being muzzled. As near as I can tell, Astorino can continue saying anything he wants. However, the county, in its official capacity as an arm of the government, is required to carry out the consent decree. In the face of repeated intransigence, the federal monitor is asking the court to force it to do just that.

I like reading The Corner. It’s a good place to get a lot of different conservative opinions on the headlines of the day. But there are a few bylines I routinely skip because the authors are basically unhinged. Kurtz is one of them. Among other things, he was part of the crowd that went bananas about Bill Ayers during the 2008 campaign, and he’s been flogging Obama’s “war on the suburbs” for years. Today’s post is just the latest installment.

Anyway: No muzzling. No gagging. No tyranny. Just a county that refuses to obey a court order and a federal monitor who wants a judge to push harder on them. It’s hard to think of anything more routine.

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Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

by BLMWaylon7619 Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug offenders on Wednesday, as part of his push to ramp up clemencies and reform sentencing laws. That brings his total commutations to 248 since taking office, more than the past six presidents combined.

More than a third of the 61 inmates were serving life sentences on charges related to possession and distribution of drugs including cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Unlike recent rounds of commutations, however, none of them were serving life sentences for marijuana-only crimes. As Mother Jones has reported in the past, scores of so-called pot lifers remain behind bars.

“Sadly none of my guys are on this list,” says Cheri Sicard, founder of the Marijuana Lifer Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to reverse the life sentences of people charged with marijuana crimes. “That will be a huge disappointment to all of them, especially 81-year-old Antonio Bascaro,” she says, referring to the longest-serving marijuana prisoner in the United States. “He does not have much time left.”

Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, wrote in a blog post that Obama will continue his relatively aggressive pace of commutations during the remainder of his presidency. But his administration is still far from the goal it announced as part of a clemency initiative in 2011, when former Attorney General Eric Holder said that some 10,000 prisoners “were potentially going to be released.”

More than 10,000 inmates have since applied for relief, but there’s mounting evidence that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA)—which is responsible for vetting and recommending clemency petitions to the White House—has been hampered by a bureaucratic culture and broken process in which the cases of qualifying applicants often go unheard or are regularly rejected against the OPA’s recommendations.

In January, former Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned from her post after less than two years on the job. Her resignation letter, obtained by USA Today under a Freedom of Information Act request, offers a rare glimpse into a department that is shrouded in secrecy. “Given that the Department has not fulfilled its commitment to provide the resources necessary for my office to make timely and thoughtful recommendations on clemency to the President, given your statement that the needed staff will not be forthcoming, and given that I have been instructed to set aside thousands of petitions for pardon and traditional commutation, I cannot fulfill my responsibilities as Pardon Attorney,” Leff wrote to Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, who is responsible for forwarding the OPA’s recommendations to the White House.

Leff criticized Yates for overruling her recommendations and said the president was often not informed of the differences in opinion. “I believe that prior to making the serious and complex decisions underlying clemency, it is important for the President to have a full set of views,” she wrote.

Leff’s letter placed the blame for much dysfunction on the OPA’s supervisors. But in the past, Samuel Morison, a former OPA staff attorney turned whistleblower, has accused the OPA itself of routinely denying petitions “without any real consideration.” Morison noted that once cases do reach the White House, the president often takes the OPA’s advice. “The number of times the president doesn’t do what the pardon attorney suggests is extremely low,” he told me last August.

Under Leff’s leadership, Obama’s clemency numbers slowly rose. Her predecessor, Ronald L. Rodgers, a former military judge and a major prosecutor of drug crimes, was removed from office in April 2014 after failing to accurately share key information with the president in a high-profile clemency case, and during his tenure Obama granted fewer clemencies than any other modern president.

America’s federal prisons hold nearly 200,000 people; some 95,000 of them are incarcerated on nonviolent drug charges. Sicard of the Marijuana Lifer Project believes the marijuana lifers offer low-hanging fruit for an administration that has vowed to reverse “unduly harsh sentences” for drug crimes. Of Wednesday’s commutations, Amy Povah, president of the CAN-DO Foundation, which advocates on behalf of individuals charged with nonviolent drug crimes, says that while she is “thrilled that President Obama has chosen to end the suffering of these deserving applicants,” she remains concerned about others whose long-standing petitions for clemency have not yet been granted. These include Michael Pelletier, who has been in a wheelchair since he was 11 years old and is serving a life sentence for marijuana charges. The way Povah sees it, “we have a long way to go before Obama leaves office.”

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

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Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

by MayDeeter575 Posted on March 28, 2016

Trump manages to surprise us with strange “climate” obsession

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

Leave it to Donald Trump to stumble onto a talking point that can still surprise us. Trump has told two newspapers in the last week that nuclear weapons are the only type of climate change that concerns him.

“I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons,” he told The Washington Post Editorial Board when asked about his concern for human-made warming. Trump then told The New York Times in an interview about his foreign policy, completely unprompted, “When people talk global warming, I say the global warming that we have to be careful of is the nuclear global warming.”

Trump’s nuclear-as-climate-change concern hasn’t yet reached the same level of infamy of lines like, “I’m not a scientist,” but he’s been tweeting on it since at least 2014:

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Apparently, it’s a reference to the Cold War-era debate over the threat of a nuclear winter if the United States and Soviet Union were to go to war, but now he means it in the context of North Korea and Iran. Conservatives might not normally compare nuclear weapons directly to climate change, though they do like to complain that President Obama overstates the risks of climate change compared to terrorism and foreign threats (see Mike Huckabee’s favorite quip, “I assure you that a beheading is much worse than a sunburn”).

In the same Post interview, Trump insisted he isn’t a “big believer in man-made climate change.” But he hasn’t mentioned his other two favorite theories in a while about how climate change is a hoax: Cold weather in New York debunks global warming, and the whole thing is a con “created by and for the Chinese.”

Trump could be following national Republican trends where politicians change the subject instead of jumping into science denial. Maybe that counts as something like progress? Or Trump is just giving us another flavor of climate denial.

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How caucuses disenfranchise voters

by mariawilkerson67 Posted on March 25, 2016

How caucuses disenfranchise voters

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

If you live in a caucus state, like I do, you’ve heard party officials talk about how the caucus system is more democratic, more small-government, more conducive to building party unity than holding a big primary. Here’s Washington Democratic Party spokesman Jamal Raad, touting the system to me over the phone: “We’re not trying to be representative of the Washington State electorate. We’re trying to be representative of Washington State Democrats. And we actually make it very easy. You just have to show up and affirm that you’re a Democrat to participate. … It’s like a block party.”

But it’s a block party that not everyone can attend. And that’s a problem, especially for the environment, because the people left out tend to be those who care more about it.

The caucus system was once more common in our national elections, but Washington, where Democrats vote on Saturday, is one of only 12 states and a handful of territories that hold onto it. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both appeared here in recent weeks, seeking votes. But many potential Democratic voters will find it tough to cast ballots for either candidate. Instead of simply walking to your local polling place and then going on with your day, caucusing is an event. And if you don’t have the time or ability to participate, you’re just plain out of luck.

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Scholars like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Thomas Patterson suggest that the caucus system  disproportionately disenfranchises minorities, low-income earners, and young people, who are much less likely to show up than older, whiter, wealthier voters. And those who don’t show up — young voters, voters of color — tend to be more progressive on issues like climate change, the environment, and infrastructure spending. For example, voters under 30 tend to be slightly more concerned about climate change, at 54 percent vs. 51 percent for all age groups per a 2015 New York Times/CBS poll. And both black and Latino voters are more likely than white ones to say climate change is manmade, according to Pew.

Here’s how the caucus works in Washington: It starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, generally taking place at community centers, libraries, town halls, school gyms, or — in my precinct — a dance studio. Once all the participants are gathered together, precinct captains will be selected, votes will be cast, tallied, and the results announced. Like the Iowa Democratic caucus, caucus-goers can attempt to sway undecided voters if there is no clear majority, and then a second tally is taken. The second tally is what determines how many delegates each candidate receives at the national convention in July.

This is not a quick process. It’s projected to take two hours, minimum. So to have your say, you must make time for at least two hours on a Saturday, right around the time you’d normally be taking the kids to soccer, setting out for brunch with your gals, or sleeping through your hangover. And we wonder why voter participation is low. Even people who want to take part in the caucus often can’t — me, for instance. I’ll be 3,000 miles away, stepping off a plane right around the time the first tally is taken.

Clinton herself called this a problem when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008: “You have a limited period of time on one day to have your voices heard. That is troubling to me. You know in a situation of a caucus, people who work during that time — they’re disenfranchised. People who can’t be in the state or who are in the military, like the son of the woman who was here who is serving in the Air Force, they cannot be present.”

In Washington, you can participate if you’re in the Air Force, or any other branch of the military. The party provides exceptions for people who are unable to attend due to military service, work, religious obligation, disability, or illness. Those who qualify can submit a surrogate affidavit form to the state party rather than attend the caucus on Saturday — although they’ve got to do it a week in advance.

Theoretically, this should take care of some concerns about disenfranchisement. But of course, that presumes that you’ve actually heard of the surrogate affidavit form, which most people haven’t. And regardless, this workaround doesn’t cover voters who don’t have the excuse of military, work, religion, disability, or illness. It leaves out caretakers, for instance, who may be unable to bring along the elderly person or young children in their care. And it leaves out people like me, who don’t have a valid excuse at all. Simply not going to be in town this Saturday? Sorry, no voting for you.

When I asked Raad, the Democratic spokesman, about these concerns, he said the party is aware of them. That’s  why party officials added “work” to the list of acceptable reasons to use a surrogate affidavit form for the first time this year. He also said they are reaching out to Asian-American and Spanish-language newspapers to spread the word about the caucus, although he wasn’t aware of any efforts being made to specifically reach other communities.

In 2008, according to Harvard’s Patterson, the national average voter turnout in caucus states was just 6.8 percent, four times less than participation in primary states. In Washington state, it was even lower: Only 0.9 percent of eligible voters actually caucused. And the tiny percentage that shows up tends to have different views than the general public. “Even after accounting for many other factors, caucus attenders were more ideologically extreme than primary voters,” wrote Brigham Young University political scientists Christopher Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope in a 2014 Washington Post editorial. “In terms of their willingness to take consistently conservative or liberal positions on the issues, caucus attendees look a lot more like members of Congress than they do average Republicans or Democrats.” The Washington Democratic Party is hopeful that with a heavily contested race, this year’s caucus turnout will be record-setting. But that will still mean just a tiny percentage of the state’s voters helped choose the nominee for president.

This “block party,” it seems, isn’t about the people: It’s about the Party.

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How caucuses disenfranchise voters

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Obama Dances the Tango During a State Dinner in Argentina

by ChandaThibeault Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Obama danced the tango during a state dinner in Argentina on Wednesday, after receiving a friendly invitation from a professional to join her on the dance floor. The president, who initially tried to decline the dance, nailed the impromptu performance, which was both wonderfully awkward and a delight to watch for everyone else.

Well, almost everyone. By morning light, political pundits jumped at the opportunity to chastise the president. That buzzkill brought to you by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

However, the advance person who let him do the tango, that person ought to be looking for work on somebody’s—in somebody’s campaign very far away. That was a tremendous mistake. It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work, but you’ve got to be careful of these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tango, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day.

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Obama Dances the Tango During a State Dinner in Argentina

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following the terrorist attacks at a subway station and airport in Brussels on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz renewed their calls for Syrian refugees and other immigrants to be banned from entering the United States.

“We need to immediately halt the president’s ill-advised plan to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees,” Cruz said during a Tuesday press conference in Washington, DC. “Our vetting programs are woefully insufficient.”

“I would close up our borders,” Trump said on Fox News. “Look at Brussels, look at Paris.”

This time, they may have some backing in Congress. After the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, more than 30 states mounted efforts to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their communities—issuing executive orders, proposing state-level legislation, and even filing lawsuits. These efforts failed because the Constitution mandates that immigration policy be set by the federal government. Now Congress is considering a bill that would tweak federal law to make this sort of refugee obstructionism a whole lot easier.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved the Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act, paving the way for a vote on the House floor. The bill, co-authored by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), would give state and local governments the opportunity to reject the resettlement of refugees in their communities—as was proposed by more than half of states after Paris—and it would shift the responsibility from the president to Congress of setting an annual ceiling on the number of refugees. The ceiling is currently at 85,000 refugees, after a September 2015 order from President Barack Obama, but Congress could set it as low as 60,000 refugees and block the president from raising it without congressional approval. In September 2015, Obama pledged that the United States would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016.

The measure would also allow “recurrent background security checks” of US refugees, a provision that critics say amounts to “continual surveillance” of refugees. It would also delay how soon refugees can obtain their permanent green cards—changing it from one year after their arrival to three years. The bill also requires that the Department of Homeland Security prioritize claims from refugees who fear persecution based on their religion, as opposed to those who face persecution due to other circumstances, like their race, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. Religious persecution would be an unlikely claim for most Syrian refugees coming to the United States: the vast majority of them are Muslim, and Sunni Muslims are Syria’s religious majority. This is one way the bill “clearly discriminates against Muslims as the intended target,” said the Rev. John McCullough, president of the Church World Service, on a press call with reporters last week.

In advance of the House Judiciary Committee vote last week, 234 organizations—including the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—sent a letter to Congress opposing the legislation. They noted “the current vetting process for refugees is incredibly rigorous and includes screening by U.S. federal law enforcement and national security agencies.” Giving state and local governments a veto on refugee resettlement, they wrote, wouldn’t enhance security and would instead “codify discrimination against refugees.” They concluded: “It is simply un-American to treat persecuted individuals, who want nothing more than to start a new life in safe and welcoming communities, as criminals.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Labrador, a former immigration lawyer, is convinced that current vetting processes aren’t sufficient for screening refugees from Syria. “Compared to countries where US intelligence has strong footing, many current refugees are coming from failed states such as Syria, where there is very little US intelligence presence,” he said when introducing the bill before the House Judiciary Committee last week. “The simple fact is that we do not know who these people truly are.”

If the bill reaches the Senate, it will face an uphill battle. Following the Paris attacks in November 2015, the House passed another piece of legislation that would have effectively halted the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. In January, the Senate blocked the measure.

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

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President Obama Just Made a Passionate Appeal to the Cuban People to Embrace Democracy

by TyreeKruse Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just hours after terrorist attacks in Brussels left dozens dead or wounded, President Barak Obama spoke directly to the Cuban people Tuesday morning. He condemned the violence saying, “We must unite, we must be together regardless of race, nationality, or faith,” and then shifted his focus to US Cuban relations.

In the televised broadcast from the Gran Teatro in Havana, he urged the citizens of Cuba to embrace American democracy, outlining the steps he believes they should take in order to ease the path to normalization of relations between the two neighboring countries.

“I have come here to bury the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said.

Since Obama announced the historic move to restore relations in December of 2014, questions have repeatedly arisen concerning the timing of this reconciliation after more than five decades of hostilities. On Tuesday, Obama said that the approach employed by the United States since the Cold War was no longer working and that “we have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth.”

He also called on Congress to lift the embargo to help expedite the normalization process.

Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, took no time to respond to Obama’s speech, slamming the president for being in Havana at all.

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President Obama Just Made a Passionate Appeal to the Cuban People to Embrace Democracy

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Trump says nuclear weapons are the riskiest kind of climate change

by LinneaDuesbury Posted on March 22, 2016

Trump says nuclear weapons are the riskiest kind of climate change

By on 21 Mar 2016commentsShare

National embarrassment and presidential hopeful Donald Trump met with The Washington Post’s editorial board on Monday and spouted some nonsense about climate change, among many other topics. The takeaways: He’s “not a big believer” in human-caused climate change; instead, he believes “our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons.”

Here’s the full climate exchange:

FRED HIATT, WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: You think climate change is a real thing? Is there human-caused climate change?

DONALD TRUMP: I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.

STEPHEN STROMBERG, EDITORIAL WRITER: Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them?

DONALD TRUMP: Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.

FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER: Thank you for joining us.

No, thank you, Frederick Ryan Jr. and the WaPo editorial board, for reminding us to check out Mexico’s immigration policies. We hear the food’s great and there’s going to be a really big wall. Maybe that’ll keep Trump out.

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President Obama Meets With Raul Castro for a Historic Meeting in Cuba

by Bryon6591cdfuls Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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A day after making history by becoming the first sitting US president to visit Cuba in 88 years, President Barack Obama joined Cuban president Raúl Castro for a joint press conference inside the Palace of Revolution in Havana, where the two leaders candidly discussed the steps both countries would need to take to begin normalizing relations.

“This is a new day—es una nueva día—between our two countries,” Obama said.

In their addresses, both leaders acknowledged the profound differences that remained between the two countries on subjects such as human rights and democracy. Castro urged the United States to lift decades-old economic sanctions and also called for its departure from Guantanamo.

“We recognize the position President Obama is in and the position his government holds against the blockade, and that they have called on Congress to lift it,” Castro said.

Then, in the rare Q&A session that followed, Castro appeared defensive when asked about the regime’s political prisoners. “Give me a list of those political prisoners and I’ll release them,” he said. “If we have those political prisoners they will be free before nighttime.”

His frustration continued when Obama gently nudged him to answer another question, this time about human rights violations. (Castro had said he’d answer just one question.) “Human rights,” he eventually said, “should not be politicized.”

With such remarks, it’s not exactly surprising the press conference ended on this uncomfortable note:

MORE: How did the Obama administration finally break through years of deadlock on Cuba? Read our story on the crazy back-channel negotiations here.

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President Obama Meets With Raul Castro for a Historic Meeting in Cuba

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