Heard Around the Hillary-Sphere: Lazy Sunday Edition

Secretary Clinton leaves for Latin America today and will stop in Chile as planned despite the devastating earthquake.

More on her trip from Reuters India:

These are the key points of Clinton’s itinerary:
URUGUAY – Clinton begins in Uruguay, where she will attend the March 1 inauguration of incoming President Jose Mujica.

While Mujica was a member of a leftist urban guerrilla group in the 1960s and early 1970s, his victory in last year’s polls was seen as a successful referendum on the economic successes of Uruguay’s center-left coalition as well as a testament to its stable politics.

Uruguay has good relations with Washington — former President George W. Bush visited in 2007 — and Mujica’s predecessor expressed interest in a free trade pact with the United States.

CHILE - Clinton is then due to fly to Chile’s capital Santiago, although U.S. officials said they were assessing the situation after Saturday’s huge earthquake — a hint the stop could be postponed if Chilean officials are too busy with disaster relief efforts.

Clinton’s schedule features March 2 meetings with both outgoing President Michelle Bachelet and President-elect Sebastian Pinera, a conservative billionaire whose election closed 20 years of center-left rule since the end of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

BRAZIL – Clinton’s March 3 visit to Brazil marks the centerpoint of the trip, and carries the most diplomatic heft.
A fast-emerging regional power with global aspirations, Brazil represents the first real counterweight to Washington in the Western Hemisphere and relations between the two have not always been smooth.

Brazil is currently a non-permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, and Clinton is expected to press President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to support new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, which Brazil has been reluctant to do.

The two countries also found themselves at odds over the response to the coup in Honduras, and are engaged in a dispute at the World Trade Organization over U.S. cotton subsidies.

Brazil also wants the Obama administration to end the 48-year old U.S. economic embargo on Cuba — a call Clinton is likely to hear on other stops on her trip.

Despite this, political analysts see the United States and Brazil as natural partners in the hemisphere, as was demonstrated by their coordinated response to last month’s Haitian earthquake disaster.
Lula, one of the first heads of state to visit Washington after Obama’s inauguration last year, developed an easy rapport with the U.S. president that may help to promote deeper diplomatic cooperation.

COSTA RICA – Clinton will continue to Costa Rica, where on March 4 she will be the keynote speaker at a meeting of “Pathways to Prosperity” — a U.S.-backed initiative billed as a way for regional trade partners to consolidate economic gains and spread economic benefit.

Clinton will also meet retiring President Oscar Arias, a Nobel Prize-winning peacemaker who played a central role in negotiations following the June 28 coup in Honduras, as well as incoming President Laura Chinchilla, an Arias protege who stands to become the country’s first woman leader.

GUATEMALA – Clinton will conclude her trip with a stop in Guatemala on March 5, where U.S. officials say she hopes to meet both President Alvaro Colom as well as leaders of other regional countries to discuss issues including Haiti.

Last week I put up a blog post about the events in DC which Secretary Clinton will be attending to mark International Women’s Day- (you can see the post here) and here is information from the State Department on Secretary Clinton leading the U.S. Delegation to the UN Commission on the Status of Women:

U.S. Delegation to the 54th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women

The Department of State is pleased to announce the U.S. Delegation attending the 54th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to be held from March 1 through March 12, 2010 at UN Headquarters in New York.

· Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State, Head of Delegation.

· Ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, Alternate Head of Delegation.

· Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Department of State, Alternate Head of Delegation.

· Ambassador Rick Barton, U.S. Representative on the UN Economic and Social Council, Deputy Head of Delegation.

· Meryl Frank, Deputy Head of Delegation with the personal rank of Ambassador.

They will be accompanied by five Public Delegates.

· Beth Brooke, Global Vice Chair of Public Policy, Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement at Ernst & Young.
· Ellen Chesler, distinguished lecturer and director of the Eleanor Roosevelt initiative on Women and Public Life at Roosevelt House, Hunter College.
· Connie Evans, President and CEO of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity.
· Geeta Rao Gupta, President of the International Center for Research on Women.
· Asifa Quraishi, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin, and founding member of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and the California group American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism.

The tireless advocates for Tibet over at the Tibet Truth blog are asking the United Nations to not ignore China’s atrocities committed against women, particularly with respect to forced sterilization in pursuit of their population policy.

Daniel Drezner over at Foreign Policy just finished reading the self-serving tome ‘Game Change’ and reached a conclusion most of us reached without having read it- that the anonymous sources the authors used may have their own agendas and the authors were naive to trust them. Duh. An interesting tidbit about ‘Game Change’ is that it seems to spend a lot of time trashing Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Edwards but doesn’t seem to be quite so tough on the boys. Granted, John Edwards apparently doesn’t come off smelling like a rose but then given what happened…

Iraq’s democracy is tenuous and many of the gains that have been made may be undone with upcoming elections.

China’s being a pain in the ass again. As if. They have announced no new emissions caps despite being one of the planet’s largest polluters. They also have banned the movie ‘Avatar’ and replaced it with a film about Confucius. I’ll go ahead and say what I’ve been saying pretty much every week on this blog- a country that is really economically and politically powerful doesn’t act this way. Many of China’s actions are motivated by one thing- fear. Fear is not strength.

Robert Dreyfuss over at The Nation takes Anne Applebaum to task over her silly commentary in last week about how Obama should prepare for war with Iran. And he’s not the only one. Over at ‘The Stopped Clock’ they respectfully suggested Ms. Applebaum get a map and familiarize herself with the portion of the globe known as The Middle East. Heh. For the record, Applebaum has been beating this drum since at least 2007.

Russia is peeved that it had to learn about US plans to deploy missile interceptors in Romania from the media. Whoops!

Secretary Clinton had two days of meetings/testimony/appearances on the Hill last week and let loose on Alan Greenspan and of course, she was right on all counts:

…Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday said “outrageous” advice from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan helped create record U.S. budget deficits that put national security at risk.
Appearing before congressional panels to defend the State Department’s $52.8 billion budget request for 2011, Clinton said the massive U.S. foreign debt had sapped U.S. strength around the world….

Marty Peretz over at The New Republic is trying to essentially claim that the elder statesman and Special Envoy with the thankless task of brokering some sort of Mideast peace, George Mitchell, is anti-Israel and is hoping the rumors that he wants to quit are true. He then goes on to make the preposterous claim that, well, the whole State Department and Hillary Clinton are really anti-Israel too. Yeah, whatever Marty:

…That would make one less “special envoy” in the president’s service, which couldn’t be bad.
According to Jack Khoury in Ha’aretz, the information came from “an Arab political source,” unidentified but published in Hadith a-Nass, a Nazareth-based daily (responsible, I’m told).

Mitchell’s reason for wanting to quit are said to be two. One is that he believes “that certain elements within the State Department hold biased favor toward Israel.” Historically, this would be a brand-new departure in attitude for a bureaucracy that has always been more than a bit churlish towards the Jewish state. It once was thought that Hillary Clinton, with a relatively friendly attitude towards Israel and a firm understanding of the perils it faces, might put her stamp on the department. But, as it happens, she has turned…

Parroting every false issue that comes her way, she leaps to the front of the diplomatic line to reproach Bibi Netanyahu and his government which, pressed by its hard right, has tried (valiantly, I would say) to accommodate the Palestinians. It is the Obama administration which invented the demand that Israel cease all settlement building, including in Jerusalem. Are they mad? Anyway, Hillary went along, as did groggy old George…[emphasis added]

Anyone who claims that Hillary, or the State Dept., is anti-Israel just doesn’t have a clue. Eric Alterman over at ‘The Nation’ tries to school Peretz in the dangers of his constantly tossing out the charge of antisemitism at critics in order to try to stifle debate about the Middle East.

For those of you not familiar with Peretz’ constant heckling over at TNR, I’ll sum up his views this way: “anyone who disagrees with me is an anti-semite and anti-Israel…” The irony, of course, is that just as is the case with all those who scream “racism” or “sexism” at the drop of a hat in order to evade accountability, it ends up diminishing REAL antisemitism, racism, sexism etc.