The Whole Delivery

Photo from AFP While the focus on this last day of January 2011 is either turned towards Egypt or Florida joining Virginia in declaring The Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, Haiti once again never takes a backseat to the importance of its headlines. And today, it received some rather surprising and rarely awesome news. Another former exiled President maybe allowed back into the country, and it is the good exiled former Pres instead of the awful one. Haiti's government said Monday it was ready to issue a new passport to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which would allow him to return after almost seven years in exile in South Africa. "The government will give assurances that as soon as it receives such a request, it will be swiftly granted," the information ministry said in a statement. Aristide, who fled the Caribbean country in 2004, formally requested earlier that Haitian authorities issue him a diplomatic passport, and provide guarantees for his saf...

Photo from EPA While in Haiti, the 42nd President highlighted the biggest criticism labeled at him on his Haiti policy : They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton - now U.N. special envoy to Haiti - who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else." Oh the pains of free-trade right there and then for you all to see. It is a mistake that no one in the media outside of the great people at Democracy Now have brought up, but at least some kudoos to Clinton for saying th...