Archive for the ‘Hugo Chavez’ Category
Friday, December 9th, 2011
The president sounds more like a Corleone than a Roosevelt.
- Most press accounts of Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Tuesday described it as delivered by the “president of the United States.” And indeed the person delivering it analogized himself to Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. In fact, the Osawatomie speech was not given by the President of the United States. It was given by the leader of the Democratic Party.
Most of the time, this distinction isn’t a problem in the United States because historically people have tended to think that the office of the presidency represents “all the people.” This doesn’t mean everyone expects to benefit from a president’s policies. What it means is that in some informal way no one has to worry that the presidential motorcade, so to speak, will drive off the road so that it can plow into you. That is no longer the case in the U.S.
Dan Henninger says that the president sounds more like a Corleone than a Roosevelt.
The Osawatomie speech sounded like what you’d expect to hear in Caracas or Buenos Aires. As in: “The free market has never been a license to take whatever you can from whomever you can.” (Applause.) And: “Their philosophy is simple. We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”
Some will say hearing crude Chavista populism in the Obama speech is an overreaction. That once it’s understood the Kansas speech was the work of the party leader, not the president of the United States, it becomes easier to think about it without overreacting to its intense and vivid rhetoric: “Millions of working families in this country . . . are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal.” (more…)
Posted in Big Government, Democrats, Dictators, Election 2012, GOP, Hugo Chavez, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Politics, Populism, Progressive Movement, Redistribution of Wealth, Social Justice, Socialism, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
The 99%: Official list of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters, sponsors and sympathizers
Posted By Zombie On October 31, 2011
The Occupy Wall Street movement has received so much media coverage in recent weeks that it’s nearly impossible to keep abreast of all the developments. So many endorsements and criticisms coming from all directions enter the news cycle in such rapid succession that even the most dedicated news junkies may have missed out on many of the pronouncements. Supporters and detractors of OWS both might find it useful to have a handy all-inclusive list of who has endorsed or embraced the protest.
To satisfy that demand, we hereby present a list of groups, organizations, individuals and entities that have expressed their support for, sponsorship of, or sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Note: All entries on this list are real and verified. Below each entry you will find a series of source links documenting the support for OWS. We have striven in almost all cases to reference either first-hand statements by the groups or individuals themselves, hosted on their own Web sites; or videos of the people in question voicing their support for OWS at various Occupations; or news reports from reliable mainstream networks; or articles by publications or organizations sympathetic to the Occupy movement; or indisputable evidence, whatever the source. As a result, it cannot be claimed that these statements of support were made up or distorted by detractors of the Occupy movement. (more…)
Posted in Community Organizers, Democrats, Dictators, Economy, Environmental Issues, Financial Meltdown, Free Speech, Hugo Chavez, Liberalism, Marxism, Media, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, One World Government, Populism, Progressive Movement, Protestors, Radical Left, Redistribution of Wealth, Social Justice, Socialism, Sovereignty, Transparency, Unions, Violent Protestors, Wall Street | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
FROM TEHRAN TO TIJUANA
Time to notice Iran’s decades-old infiltration of Latin America.
- EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: policy analysts, military officials and even a few columnists have been warning for years about Iran’s infiltration of Latin America. The story begins with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, an example of the way Tehran uses proxies such as Hezbollah to carry out its aims while giving it plausible deniability. Iran later got a boost when Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela and began seeding the top ranks of his government with Iranian sympathizers. In October 2006, a group called Hezbollah América Latina took responsibility for an attempted bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, Iran has increased the number of its embassies in Latin America to 11 from six.
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Regarding the alleged attempt by Iranian agents to enlist a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, there are two significant parts to the story. But only one of them is getting much attention.
That’s the part about how Iranian officials apparently felt little compunction ordering up a terrorist attack on American soil. Some commentators have noted that the plot does little credit to the supposedly expert tradecraft of Iran’s terrorist Qods Force, suggesting that unspecified rogue agents may have played a role. Others have argued that Tehran’s readiness to conduct the attack suggests how little they think they have to fear from the Obama administration.
The real shocker, however, is how shocked the administration seems to be by the plot. “The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?” marvelled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Information about the plot was initially met within the government with a level of incredulity more appropriate for an invasion by, say, alien midgets.
Yet policy analysts, military officials and even a few columnists have been warning for years about Iran’s infiltration of Latin America. The story begins with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, an example of the way Tehran uses proxies such as Hezbollah to carry out its aims while giving it plausible deniability. Iran later got a boost when Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela and began seeding the top ranks of his government with Iranian sympathizers. In October 2006, a group called Hezbollah América Latina took responsibility for an attempted bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, Iran has increased the number of its embassies in Latin America to 11 from six.
AFP/Getty Images Buenos Aires in March 1992, shortly after the bombing of the Israeli embassy.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Border Security, Dictators, Drug Smuggling, Foreign Policy, History, Hugo Chavez, Illegal Immigration, Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Marxism, Mexico, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, Radical Left, South America, Terrorism | No Comments »
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
- SEPTEMBER 28, 2011, 7:45 A.M. ET
What American ‘Political Prisoners’?
An American hiker channels Noam Chomsky after two years in Iranian jail.
Imagine you are Shane Bauer, one of two American hikers released from Iranian captivity last week.
On July 31, 2009, you’re traversing a mountain trail in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. You’re with one of your best friends and your girlfriend. Suddenly a group of Iranian border guards capture you, and the next thing you know you’re in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison accused of “illegal entry” and “espionage.”
Your girlfriend is kept in solitary confinement and you can see her only for an hour each day. The Iranian government prevents you from contacting your family for almost a year, at which point they decide to let your mother visit you for two days at a Tehran hotel.
While your captors treat you humanely and provide three square meals a day, your Iranian co-prisoners aren’t so lucky. Every night you hear their screams. Evin is the world’s most notorious torture dungeon, where political dissidents (men and women) are routinely raped, beaten and subjected to all manner of physical and psychological abuse.
Ahmad Batebi, a student activist who spent 17 months in solitary confinement there, reports that guards kicked him in the teeth, dunked his head into a toilet “stopped up with feces,” and whipped his back and testicles with a cable. When he tried to sleep, they slashed his arms with a knife and rubbed salt in the wounds.
Posted in American History, Dictators, Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Iran, Liberalism, Middle East, Protestors, Radical Islam, Radical Left | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
THE JERUSALEM POST
Photo by: REUTERS
‘Die Welt’: Iran building rocket bases in Venezuela
05/17/2011 01:41
German paper says Iranians paid cash to build mid-range missile launch pads on Paraguana Peninsula; Iranian engineers visited site in Feb.
BERLIN – The Iranian government is
moving forward with the construction of rocket launch bases in
Venezuela, the German daily Die Welt wrote in its Friday edition.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is Teheran’s most important South American ally.
RELATED:
Arab spring, Persian winter
UN: Iran, North Korea trading missile technology
Iran is building intermediate- range missile launch pads on the Paraguaná Peninsula, and engineers from a construction firm – Khatam al-Anbia – owned by the Revolutionary Guards visited Paraguaná in February. Amir al-Hadschisadeh, the head of the Guard’s Air Force, participated in the visit, according to the report. Die Welt cited information from “Western security insiders.”
The rocket bases are to include measures to prevent air attacks on Venezuela as well as commando and control stations. (more…)
Posted in Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, International Affairs, Iran, Missle Defense, National Defense, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Radical Islam, South America | No Comments »
Monday, March 21st, 2011
Why Obama Went to Brazil
There’s a chance to build a new foreign policy alliance that disdains dictators like Hugo Chávez.
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By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY
President Obama’s trip to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador this week, while war rages in Libya, has been sharply criticized as proof of dangerous detachment from a world that badly needs U.S. leadership.
Yet there is a case to be made for going—to Brazil anyway. Arguably Santiago and San Salvador could have been postponed. Chile is already a stable ally and the stop in El Salvador, to mouth platitudes about hemispheric security while Central America is going up in narco-trafficking flames, only highlights the futility of the U.S. war on drugs.
Going to Brasilia to meet with Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff on Saturday, on the other hand, was important.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama discredited his trip even before it began by peddling it as a trade mission to create jobs and boost the U.S. economy. With those goals in mind, he would have been better off staying home and lobbying Congress to drop the 54 cents per gallon tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol, and to end all U.S. subsidies on cotton, which have been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization in a case brought by Brazil. Or he could have sent the Colombia and Panama free trade agreements to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where they would be easily ratified.
Let’s face it: Mr. Obama’s reputation as a protectionist precedes him. If he believes otherwise, our silver-tongued president has a tin ear.
Presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia, March 19.
(more…)
Posted in American History, Big Business, Big Government, Cuba, Democrats, Economy, Energy, Environmental Issues, Foreign Policy, Globalization, Hugo Chavez, Marxism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Progressive Movement, South America | No Comments »
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
NEWS & OBSERVER
Venezuela congress grants Chavez
decree powers
CARACAS, Venezuela Venezuelan lawmakers granted President Hugo Chavez broad powers Friday to enact laws by decree, undermining the clout of a new congress that takes office next month with a bigger opposition bloc.
Chavez opponents condemned the move as a power grab, saying the law gives him a blank check to rule without consulting lawmakers. The National Assembly approved the special powers for 18 months.
A new congress goes into session Jan. 5 with an opposition contingent large enough to hinder approval of some types of major laws.
Chavez has argued he needs decree powers to fast-track funds to help the victims of recent floods and landslides, and also to hasten Venezuela’s transition to a socialist state.
He taunted his opponents in a televised speech Friday night, saying now that he has decree powers they won’t be able to block his laws. (more…)
Posted in Dictators, Election, Hugo Chavez, Human Rights, South America | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010
FIRST NEWSPAPER TO CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT
KUHNER: President’s socialist takeover
must be stopped
President Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be done: Mr. Obama should be impeached. He is slowly – piece by painful piece – erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. (more…)
Posted in Big Government, Conservatism, Constitution, Democrats, Economy, Hugo Chavez, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Progressive Movement, Socialism | No Comments »
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010
RABEN: Love affair with leftists
Chavez proves the path from populist to oppressor can be short
By Robert Raben The Washington Times
September 13, 2010
And as someone who grew up in Miami right after the Castro-led nightmare, I am particularly familiar with how populist rhetoric can pave the way to a totalitarian state trapped in a cycle of fear and poverty – for, of course, the good of the people.
For years I have watched Hugo Chavez follow an all-too familiar course: From the bright upstart who in 1998 promised to improve the welfare of his fellow Venezuelans, safeguard their rights with a revamped constitution and clamp down on corruption, he has become the demagogue who has abolished term limits to ensure his grip on power, packed the country’s supreme court and clamped down on the media.
Power can corrupt, to be sure, and sadly, we don’t have to look as far as Venezuela for examples. But it is not Mr. Chavez‘s principles that shock and dismay me (sicken, perhaps, but not shock). It is the leftist elite outside Venezuela, including in our own country, who continue to support a man increasingly open in his scorn for the cornerstones of a civil, liberal society: rule of law, separation of powers, a democratic electoral system, human rights and freedom of speech.
This is to you, Hollywood: Supporting a politician, in this country or abroad, merely because he opposes the right is a terrible basis for endorsement. Tactics matter, and never so much as when they undermine the very principles they are espoused to support. (more…)
Posted in Afghanistan, Dictators, Europe, Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Political Corruption, Religion, Representative Paul Ryan (R), Small Business, South America | No Comments »
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
The Weekly Standard
Hugo Chávez, Tomb Raider
From the Scrapbook
August 9, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 44
The Scrapbook confesses that it takes a certain unhealthy interest in recent accounts of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez’s exhumation of the corpse of Simón Bolivar. No disrespect to the Liberator is intended here, of course; but the details could hardly be invented.
Chávez seems to believe that he is the (literal) reincarnation of Bolivar, and is also convinced that Bolivar did not die of tuberculosis in 1830, as is generally understood, but was murdered—probably, in Chávez’s imagination, by Colombia or the United States.
To be sure, the fact that Chávez is so attached to the man who won Venezuela’s independence from Spain—he keeps an empty chair at cabinet meetings in case the Liberator should stop by—is a puzzlement in itself. Hugo Chávez seems to have a kind of obsessive hatred for the United States of America and its system of government; Simón Bolivar was not just a friend and admirer of the U.S. presidents of his day, but regarded himself as a Jeffersonian democrat, and carried a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into battle against the Spanish.
But The Scrapbook expects neither logic nor rationality from the man who has appropriated the name and image of South America’s great democratic leader in his quest to transform Venezuela into a socialist dictatorship. Nor does it expect what we might call appropriate mortuary behavior. When Bolivar’s remains were removed from their coffin and teeth and bone fragments were excised for “testing,” Chávez gazed intently at the Liberator’s skeleton, and declared, “Yes, it is me.” Then he inquired of the bones, “Father, is that you, or who are you?” To which Bolivar responded, according to Chávez: “It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.” (Thor Halvorssen, a distant relation of Bolivar’s,
tells the story well in the July 25
Washington Post.)
(more…)
Posted in Dictators, Foreign Policy, History, Hugo Chavez, Marxism, Socialism, South America | No Comments »
