Blogging the democratic revolution
Blogging live from Los Angeles – on a too tight schedule and deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Here’s what is going on on this Day Without An Immigrant: 1. Highways very quiet, no blockages, but traffic rushing through as if everyone expects some and wants to get to work first. The Santa Monica freeway (10) is especially this way, the San Diego freeway (the 405) is less so. 2. At work, none of the cleaning crew have shown up. Even the ones who told me (en espanol) that they would be here … are not. Must be 30 people missing. 3. Cardinal…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez this week threatened to blow up all of Venezuela’s oil wells, should the perfidious yanquis be so insolent as to attack. He does this partly to whip up paranoia in the shantytowns, but generally, even his own supporters are not fooled. The other reason he does it is to whip up fear in the international oil markets and thus drive up the price for his ever-diminishing oil production. He’s on record as saying he wants oil at $100 a barrel. The oil markets are a bit slower to catch on to Chavez’s B-S than the shantytown…
But not exactly in the way you might think. The Venezuelan dictator vowed to recall Venezuela’s ambassador to Peru if Peru’s voters DARED cast their ballot for Alan Garcia instead of his favored Ollanta Humala in next month’s second-round presidential debate. It’s so insane, so guaranteed to backfire, so likely to rally the Garcia vote, so likely to hurt Humala that it makes me think Chavez is on cocaine. Peruvians don’t particularly care one way or another about diplomatic relations with Venezuela. What they do care about is some foreign dictator trying to dictate how they will vote through various…
Chavista mismanagement (and thieving) has left Venezuela with a $2 billion oil shortfall on its contracts. The country literally DOES NOT HAVE ENOUGH OIL to supply all the nations it’s signed contracts with to supply. Therefore, it’s buying $2 billion in oil from Russia to avoid penalties, not the least of which is its claim to be an important oil superpower. It’s nothing to be surprised about, given that socialism ALWAYS produces shortages. That’s been a lesson to the world for about 80 years. The example this travesty parallels most closely is from 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union,…
As oil prices hit $75 a barrel, the U.S. is right now caught up in an idiotic debate over supposed price-gouging at the pump. Congress wants to investigate oil companies over it. What they should be doing is asking why the U.S. is dependent for its oil on anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. We are dependent on him, he knows it, and he abuses us for it. It’s him who, along with his pals the ayatollahs, is deliberately trying to drive oil prices up to $100 a barrel, not the oil companies. That’s not all. Chavez harasses U.S. oil companies…
Yesterday, while we were having lunch or dinner or driving to work or whatever our peaceful pursuits may be, Fidel Castro’s barbarians assaulted Martha Beatriz Roque, the leading Cuban freedom fighter in an ‘act of repudiation.’ This is nothing more than to say a gang assault sanctioned by the state. Radio Mambi in Miami said she was on the phone with them yesterday when it happened, and the Cuban American Foundation has the transcript of what happened, as Martha Beatriz told it here. She said (sorry no time to translate but will later): “…me han dado tantos golpes, me han…
We always knew there was something wrong with Prime Minister Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and today that missing link got just a little bit more primal. Turns out his idea of democratic revolution is equal rights for apes under the law. That’s right, Zapatero’s gone ape for ape rights, and given that he’s lost the confidence of his human supporters one can probably surmise that he wants to empower a newer and far more loyal core constituency that sees things as he does. Here are the monkeyshines: The Great Ape Project is founded upon the genetic similarity between great apes –…
…of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico. It’s a thing of beauty. The latest poll shows that the right-leaning free-market PAN party candidate’s lead is now E-X-T-E-N-D-I-N-G well ahead of AMLO’s. This is the third straight poll showing this awesome trend ahead of the July 2 presidential election. Here’s what’s cool about it: Tonight is the first Mexican presidential debate. Calderon can cream PRI dinosaur candidate Roberto Madrazo easily. AMLO, meanwhile, thinking his two-year-long lead was permanent, opted to sit this debate out. Now, the heavy TV exposure for Calderon against Madrazo is likely to extend his lead even further.…
Panama’s president has come forth with the long-awaited plans for the expansion of the Panama Canal. The $5.5 billion expansion would widen the canal so that bigger ships with more cargo and traffic can go through. Right now, a full five percent of all world trade goes through this canal and there can be a four-day waiting period for ships trying to go through (when there are boat-traffic jams). Panama makes about $1.2 billion a year on crossing fees, but to its great credit, its economy does not stop at those boat fees, but multiplies away into vast financial services,…
Peru’s detested spy chief, Vladimir Montesinos, who committed numerous human rights violations in the 1990s, is a man who belongs in jail. He’s there all right, but his networks of operatives are not. Instead, the unemployed spies and torturers have found a new sponsorship in the candidacy of Ollanta Humala. That tells us a lot about the kind of regime Humala is likely to institute, given that he intends to rewrite the constitution to consolidate power. Alek Boyd has the ominous report here.
There’s less than 3% of the votes to be counted and unless something really unusual happens, Alan Garcia will be the second candidate in the runoff for president of Peru, by a narrow margin. Lourdes Flores is in third place, trailing Garcia by 84,832 votes. I hate Garcia’s guts. But not nearly as much as Ollanta Humala’s. The prime difference between the two men is that Garcia, leftist and irresponsible as he is, is nevertheless a democrat. When his term was up in 1990, and he’d made his big mess of the economy, he nevertheless left office. He didn’t entertain…
In the struggle to name a new election board that won’t be as discredited for its pro-Hugo Chavez biases as the last one, a supposedly transparent and fair process is being put into place and supposedly neutral observers are being chosen. This of course is not happening. The candidates are being asked whether they voted or not – a highly loaded question since only 18% of the voters voted in December and the rest of the electorate boycotted the election. If saying they stayed home on election day means they aren’t patriotic (read: Chavista) then the only people who will…
Source: Daniel’s Venezuela News & Views What do 70,000 unsolved murders look like? That’s what Venezuelans tried to show today in a unique and passionate protest in Caracas. The most visible legacy of Hugo Chavez’s regime is murder. As the entire governmental infrastructure becomes politicized, one hard hit section is the police. Bad cops, so long as they are Chavistically loyal, are the ones hired, while the ethical cops get thrown out. Not only that, the government is focusing its resources on prosecuting political, not criminal, cases. That leaves the cops who could make a difference out of luck. Lastly,…
The spectacular decline in the visual appearance of Caracas, Venezuela, once one of South America’s smartest cities, continues to be noted. Caracas under the Hugo Chavez dictatorship is getting that telltale ‘Havana‘ look, as a result of the same types of policies that made Havana the heap of rubble it now is. We’ve recently noted this slideshow from The Real Cuba, and now Daniel at Venezuela News & Views, fresh from an eye-opening trip to Caracas, notes the decline and rubbishification of Caracas – as well as its new signs of massive Stalinist propaganda – in an informative and interesting…
For the 45,873th time, communism has failed. Forced confiscations of once-productive farms have left Zimbabwe a hollowed out shell of itself, its people hungry and starving, its government without revenue, and its infrastructure a smoking ruin. How many times do people need to learn this? Is there ever such a thing as learning from others or the past? Does everyone on earth need to learn everything the hard way individually? How anyone could support communism after this is beyond stupid. It can only be evil. Hugo Chavez of course has yet to learn. Anyway, Zimbabwe’s government has “invited” farmers of…
Boli-Nica has a tremendously important piece about the role of the Internet is having on burning down Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s lead in Mexico’s presidential election to be held on July 2. Well, we here certainly don’t like the guy! But more importantly, Boli points out how Mexico’s bloggers are warning, criticizing, exposing and ridiculing the supposedly untouchable AMLO, whittling down the leftist demogogue’s once-powerful presidential lead, which is now down to 3 or 4 points at most and still falling – with a good long three months for it to fall farther. Mexicans can’t stand this kind of nonsense,…
Cuba’s state-controlled press has just reported that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is proposing a new federation of “autonomous” nations in one big Bolivarian union. It’s a massive show of self-aggrandisement (for who would rule such an entity but Chavez himself?), but also an incredible call to regess to the failed past. Chavez has dressed it up in the aggrieved language of preserving indigenous identity, something that makes sense from his point of view because he is most likely to entice into this the supporters of leaders like Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ollanta Humala of Peru, who have no knowledge…
Boz has his weekly polls roundup from around the Americas, and first, the best part: Spanish voters rank Chavez and Castro as rock bottom from among the region’s leaders. Chavez’s trips to Spain, where he made an incredible fool of himself, obnoxious all the way, must have had something to do with this. Castro, meanwhile, speaks for himself. He’s also got updates from Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, all well worth seeing here.
The topic is hideous but it’s getting harder to ignore: Venezuela is becoming the New Medellin, an emerging drug-trafficking capital for our hemisphere. It’s a big change. As brave President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia crushes Marxist narcotraffickers in his own country, these same narcos are finding greener pastures by moving next door, to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It represents a historic shift because Venezuela’s lawmen have always fought Colombian drug traffickers like cougars to keep them out. Today, Hugo Chavez embraces these same dopers as Marxist allies in his struggle against U.S. “imperialism.” You can imagine how dispiriting this must be…
Thomas Friedman has a terrific new piece out in Foreign Policy magazine, describing something I have discussed earlier, the creepy inverse relationship between rising oil prices and declining freedom. As oil prices have shot up, many oil producing countries and regions – Venezuela, Iran, Russia – have correspondingly lost their freedoms. Others, like Nigeria and Aceh, have seen a rise of gangs and rebels, making life hell, just as surely as a tyrant. The article is not out on the Web yet but you can buy the issue, which is loaded with several good articles of great relevance. The newly…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really starting to tumble in the Mexican presidential polls, to be held July 2. He’s still ahead, but now only by 3 or 4 points. And with three months to go before election day, his trajectory is down. Reuters has a new story here showing that for the first time in three years, he’s starting to really look shaky. AMLO is the favored candidate of the Hugo Chavez left in Mexico. But Chavez, ironically, is the main cause of AMLO’s downfall. The more Hugo Chavez talks, the more anti-U.S, rage he spews, the more insanity…
Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent newspaper editor and politician on the left, has said he will run for president against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in December’s election. It’s a fascinating decision. Petkoff is an ex-leftist guerrilla who can’t stand Chavez. He was also a good government infrastructural minister who really got things done. He’s extremely competent, and I don’t care what he claims his political orientation is. He does thing right. Petkoff posts on English-language Venezuelan blogs on occasion and the one striking thing I noticed about him from his posts was his brilliance and confidence, even if I did not totally…
You thought commissars were a thing of the past? Not at UCLA. Here in the states, a fierce debate is going on as to whether illegal immigrants should all walk out on their jobs on May 1 to make a political point, one that says the U.S. economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. It’s a takeoff on a clever movie that came out recently called ‘A Day Without A Mexican.’ The problem is, if the immigrants do this, they’ll probably be fired from their jobs, negating the point of being an illegal immigrant altogether. And being fired could leave such…
I hate to have to waste bandwidth on this but there are still people out there who think Hugo Chavez has improved the situation in Venezuela, and is only in power because he is popular. Having been there and talked to people, I strongly doubt it. But I also used my eyes. If it’s true that Chavez is popular because he’s made things so much better for the poor, how come this is the Caracas reality today? The above PowerPoint presentation, courtesy of The Real Cuba shows the deterioration of Caracas from 1998, the last year before Hugo Chavez took…
Another day, another 20,000-vote narrowing in the gap between Lulu Flores and Alan Garcia, the two candidates vying for second place in Peru’s electoral race, which will go into a second round next month. Yesterday, Flores was trailing Garcia by 93,000 votes. Today, it’s 71,000 votes. There’s still about 8% of the votes to be counted. If you ask me, I think the odds are starting to go into her favor, if these expat trends continue. She’s behind but she’s also got the momentum from voters. Can it last for eight percentage points? I am starting to cross my fingers.…