What’s the difference between Obama and a Latin American Caudillo?

Ruling by presidential decree is a characteristic of the typical Latin American “Republic.”

Does anyone care what the Brazilian or Venezuelan congresses do? What the Mexican Senate and Chamber or Deputies decide? Populated by powerless eunuchs, many of el Presidente’s own party, they don’t matter except as a façade.

So what’s the difference between the way Americans are ruled today and the way the heirs of Peron and Chavez rule their country? Is there that much difference between Obama and the rule of the president of Mexico whose term is often labeled the "six-year monarchy" because of the seemingly unchecked power that historically has resided in the office? 

Less and less.

And while the term “imperial presidency” has been bandied about for many years in this country, it has never been more blatantly practiced than by the current occupant of the White House. No other American president has ever had the brass to tell the American people that he will rule them with a phone and a pen.  And the Democrats in congress and the press cheered him on.

Debate in the Federalist Society, an organization that tries to advance the notion that the constitution should be the basic law of the land, pointed out that over many years Congress has ceded its power to the President.

“If Congress wants to restrain the discretion of the president, they are supposed to do what the separation of powers encourages them to do: Write the statute tightly so that it will be actually administered the way you want it administered," Baker said. "The reality is many members of Congress don’t care how it is administered until somebody squawks about it. They don’t read the statutes, so how do they know how it is going to be administered.”

Members of the Republican party, at least those who are actually opposed the Imperial Presidency (instead of paying lip service to it) are hoping the courts will bail them out. That's what they thought would happen the last time the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of ObamaCare.   How did that work out?

“I do not think the executive is subordinate to the judiciary, and if the executive is not subordinate to the judiciary and has the power to independently interpret the Constitution, it can’t be exercised only at the veto point when a prior president may have signed the bill,” ... “The president who inherits the bill has to have the opportunity to interpret it himself and not be bound by the prior administration. The idea that the prior administration can tie the hands of a subsequent administration doesn’t make sense to me.”

So in 2008 with Democrats in control of both houses of congress and with the election of Obama, the nation was set on a new course. Barack and Michelle promised to “fundamentally transform” America, and with the assistance of the Democrats in the senate and house, they are well on their way. But because of the resistance by a majority of the American people and a minority of conservatives in congress, they have done so less by legislation and more by executive fiat.

Is there a constitutional remedy?  Yes, theoretically.  Impeachment is a remedy for a president who commits "high crimes and misdemeanors."  Those would include taking actions which he lacks the authority to take.  Charles Krauthammer calls amnesty via an executive order an impeachable offense.   But the Republicans are afraid of trying to remove Obama from office, even if they had the votes to convict, which they do not.

Obama has been applauded by the press because they support the direction he is taking the country. They approve of socialized medicine and government control in general … in fact there is very little about socialism they don’t support. But with the support of the goals, they have turned a blind eye to the means. They like the Caudillo when he’s ruling in their favor, believing – perhaps incorrectly – that the next Caudillo will continue the trend. That’s to be seen, but in the meantime the constitution is kicked to the curb and the rule of law is replaced by the rule of the strongman.

In the Banana Republics, the rulers often change when the military stages a coup. The problem with the Caudillo system is that it invites extremism.  Riots in the streets in reaction strong-man rule often leads to ambitious military officers restoring calm and occupying the centers of power.  Often the military has the greatest legitimacy among the competing power centers.  The current ruler of Egypt is the most recent example.  

In the US, the Gallup Poll shows that the military is the institution in which Americans have the greatest confidence with 74% approving "a great deal or quite a lot."   The presidency comes in 7th at 29% and congress is dead last, even lower than TV news.  

 Don't say we were not warned.

Tyranny, even the worst tyranny,  doesn't come all at once.  It is eaten away like a mouse nibbling on a piece of cheese, until suddenly it's all gone.  And you are in someone else's power.

Welcome to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a country with the fifth largest oil reserves in the world and absolutely broke. It’s a remarkable achievement for Chavismo. A just-wow moment. Socialism is useless at everything except for smashing things in record time. There it excels. It’s hard to imagine that as late as the 1980s Venezuela had the highest standard of living in Latin America. But then in 1960 Detroit was the richest city in the world in per capita income. Now it’s well … Detroit.

Welcome to South America where things are getting worse ... fast.

“Brazil is becoming Argentina, Argentina is becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is becoming Zimbabwe.” The question that always puzzles historians about the fall of great and rich countries is: ‘why didn’t they say it coming?’ How did they let disaster sneak up on them?

Bolivian villagers bury suspected killer alive

When the judicial system is discredited, justice will be done somehow.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Villagers in Bolivia's southern highlands buried a man alive in the grave of the woman he is suspected of having raped and murdered, an official said Thursday.

Police had identified 17-year-old Santos Ramos as the possible culprit in the attack on 35-year-old Leandra Arias Janco Sunday in a Quechua community near the municipality of Colquechaca, said Jose Luis Barrios, the chief prosecutor in Potosi province where the community is located.

Enraged, more than 200 community members seized Ramos and buried him alive alongside his alleged victim Wednesday night, according to Barrios. He said residents on Thursday blocked the road to the community, preventing police and prosecutors from reaching it.

A local reporter for an indigenous radio station, who would only speak on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, told The AP that Ramos was tied up at the woman's funeral. Mourners threw him into the open grave, placed the woman's coffin in it and filled the grave with earth.

Colquechaca is a town of 5,000 inhabitants located 207 miles (333 kilometers) southeast of Bolivia's capital, La Paz.

Also in Potosi, residents of the Quechua indigenous community of Tres Cruces on Wednesday stoned to death a suspected thief and burned his accomplice alive, Barrios said. The official said the two had earlier robbed a car and killed its driver.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his legacy of plunder

Miami Herald editorial

Hugo Chávez’s folksy charm and forceful personality made him an extraordinary politician. His enviable ability to win a mass following allowed him to build a powerful political machine that kept him in office from February of 1999 until his death on Tuesday. But as a national leader, he was an abject failure who plunged Venezuela into a political and economic abyss.

Dead at 58, Hugo Chávez leaves behind a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos.

A former paratrooper, Mr. Chávez had a radical vision for “21st Century Socialism,” which was never fully explained. His skillful rhetoric, which filled supporters with utopian dreams, was used to justify the methodical destruction of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and the free market.

Shortly after coming to office, he rewrote the constitution to his liking and aggressively set out to rig elections and stifle adversaries in the legislative branch and the courts. Unable to brook criticism, he turned his fire on the independent news media, eventually silencing most voices of opposition by bully tactics and economic intimidation.

His Bolivarian regime rewarded supporters and punished opponents, giving rise to enormous corruption and the creation of a new class of greedy oligarchs with political connections. Unfortunately for Venezuela and for all his political skills, the president was both an incompetent executive and a worse economist.

In an energy-rich country that once knew no blackouts, electrical shortages are frequent, the result of Mr. Chávez’s plundering of the country’s public oil company. In a country that once enjoyed a thriving free market, prices are controlled and food items often scarce.

In recent weeks, while Mr. Chávez was hospitalized, Venezuela was once again forced to devalue its currency, this time by one-third. This was the inevitable outcome of a series of disastrous economic decisions that included nationalizing the telephone company and other utilities, which scared off foreign investors and spurred capital flight.

For Venezuelans, the worst aspect of the Chávez years was the soaring crime rate. Venezuela has become one of the most violent countries in the world, with nearly 20,000 murders recorded in 2011 and a homicide rate that some experts say is four times greater than in the last year before Mr. Chávez took power.

On the international front, Mr. Chávez eagerly accepted Fidel Castro as his mentor, providing Cuba with cut-rate oil and making common cause with Iran and other rogue regimes. His departure leaves the anti-American front leaderless on a hemispheric level and could eventually threaten the subsidy that Cuba relies on to keep its economy barely functioning.

As a result of all this, Venezuela today is a polarized society divided between the intolerant supporters of Mr. Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution and a democratic opposition that, against all odds, has waged a courageous fight for a democratic alternative.

The president’s death means a new election must be called soon. Under Hugo Chávez, the electoral machinery was stacked against the opposition and that will doubtless be the case again, but the United States and democracies throughout the hemisphere should insist on a fair and transparent electoral process to select the new president.

The Organization of American States, which was once seen as a defender of political and civil liberties in the hemisphere but has made itself largely irrelevant in recent years, could regain some of its stature by taking a prominent role in ensuring that the people of Venezuela can make the most of this opportunity to restore their democracy.

None of Mr. Chávez’s would-be successors, including Nicolás Maduro, his vice president and designated political heir, possesses the fallen leader’s forceful personality or political skill, though his popularity may extend beyond death to give the regime’s official candidate an edge in the next election.

But without discarding “Bolivarian” principles and restoring the country’s democratic institutions, no one will be able to stop the downward spiral of Venezuela that began the day Hugo Chávez was elected president.

When you create the machinery of control and corruption, there will always be someone who wants to get rich and powerful who is willing to grab the reins and using age-old demagoguery, is willing to grind the faces of the poor ... all in the name of the poor.

Hugo Chavez Dead

Listening to NPR mourn Chavez’ death this morning I was struck by a comment made by a reporter for the New Yorker who once interviewed Chavez and asked him why he came to Socialism so late. Since socialism and its sibling, Communism, has led to so much poverty, misery and death throughout the world the question why anyone would come to Socialism - late or early - is baffling to me. But the question itself reveals something about the questioner. It would not have occurred to the reporter to ask a Fascist dictator why they had come to Fascism “so late.” The question would have been phrased to ask why he was a Fascist, that discredited political movement, at all. But asking a Socialist thug about a political philosophy that was destroying his country seemed to this reporter to be as normal as asking him why he became a Presbyterian so late in life.

One of the aspects of the lives of Left wing dictators like Chavez and Castro that the NPR crowd averts its eyes from is that the rulers of these “people’s republics” manage to become ultra-wealthy.

Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion.”

“The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” said Brewer in an analysis published in their website.

Beyond the criminal mismanagement and corruption that's a feature of all Socialist states, that's two billion dollars that was not used to alleviate the misery of Venezuela's poor and crime ridden people.  The life of Socialist Leader is the royal road to riches.

 

The New York Times, a reliable cheerleader for Socialism of all stamps tells us that ...

Mr. Chávez, 58, changed Venezuela in fundamental ways, empowering and energizing millions of poor people who had felt marginalized and excluded.

 

Exactly how he "empowered and energized millions of poor people" is not explored.  Exactly what does that mean?  "Empowered" how?  "Energized" how?  In the same way that a large group of people in the US believe that Obama "cares about them" while unemployment, wage losses and poverty among these same supporters increase?   Possibly.  The Times goes on to explain what these empowered and energized people are experiencing in oil-rich Venezuela. 

At the same time, the country struggled with an out-of-balance economy, troubled by soaring prices and escalating shortages of basic goods.

 

Scenes like this must bring back memories to people who are old enough to remember the 1930s.  To others, like the readers of the NY Times, it will seem entirely normal

 

Mr. Chávez’s new six-year term began on Jan. 10, with the president incommunicado in Havana. In his absence, the government held a huge rally in the center of Caracas, where thousands of his followers raised their hands to pledge an oath of “absolute loyalty” to their commander and his revolution. Officials promised that Mr. Chávez would have his inauguration later, when he had recovered.

Argentine government wins control of newsprint

Argentina's senate, which is controlled by Fernandez's allies, voted 41-26 to control newsprint's manufacture, sale and distribution to media friends and foes alike.

It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Hugo Chavez Spearheads Raids as Food Prices Skyrocket

Mountains of rotting food found at a government warehouse, soaring prices and soldiers raiding wholesalers accused of hoarding: Food supply is the latest battle in President Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution.

When socialism comes to America, its proponents will vehemently deny that they are socialist, ridiculing those who say they are. They will say it’s being done to help the disadvantaged and create a necessary oversight of an out-of-control Capitalist system. In fact it’s what they are saying now. When there are no more capitalists to blame, they will be invented; history always repeats.

Che Guevara at the Bay of Pigs

"Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands!" snarls Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his diaries. "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!"


Alas, the "acrid odor of gunpowder and blood" very rarely reached Guevara's nostrils from actual combat. It always came from the close-range murder of bound, gagged, and blindfolded men and boys. "He went into convulsions for a while and was finally still," gloats Che Guevara in his diaries, describing the death agonies of a bound Cuban peasant he had just shot in the temple with his pistol. "Now his belongings were mine." (Unwittingly, here Che Guevara gives us communism in a nutshell: cowardly murder and theft.)


Che made Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. His models were Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin. The Cheka came to Cuba with Guevara.


But in actual combat, his imbecilities defy belief. Compared to Che "The Lionhearted" Guevara's defense of Cuba, Rufus T. Firefly's defense of Freedonia in Duck Soup comes across like Anthony McAuliffe's of Bastogne.


The Bay of Pigs, we're led to believe by Castro and his dutiful media/academic minions, was Fidel and Che's crowning glory. "Imperialism's First Defeat!" as the Castroite press crows to high heavens. Yet in their recent movie, so closely mentored by Castro's propaganda ministry, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro somehow "overlooked" Che's glorious role in the epic victory. Hummmm...?


Odd, perhaps -- until you realize that a historically accurate depiction of Che Guevara's military exploits would be impossible to direct and cast without the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus. To wit: The Bay of Pigs invasion plan included a CIA squad dispatching three rowboats off the coast of western Cuba (350 miles from the true invasion site) loaded with time-release Roman candles, bottle rockets, mirrors, and a tape recording of battle.


The wily Comandante Che immediately deciphered the Yankee-Imperialist scheme! That little feint three hundred miles away at the Bay of Pigs was a transparent ruse! The real invasion was coming here in Pinar Del Rio! Che stormed over with several thousand troops, dug in, locked, loaded, and waited for the "Yankee/mercenary" attack. They braced themselves as the sparklers, smoke bombs, and mirrors did their stuff just offshore.


Three days later, the (literal) smoke-and-mirror show expended itself, so Che and his troops marched back eastward, where Che could taunt the (safely captured and disarmed) freedom-fighters. Freedom-fighter Manel Menendez parachuted into the inferno of Soviet firepower known as the Bay of Pigs and ripped into the Communists to his very last bullet, like his entire band of freedom-fighting brothers who inflicted casualties of 20-1 against their Soviet-led and -armed enemies.


Castro rules today primarily for one reason: The Knights of Camelot cut off the bullet supply to Manel and his freedom-fighting Band of Brothers. During dinner with your humble servant here many years later, Manel described Che's visit. "We'd all run out of ammo and been captured and herded into an enclosure," he recalls. "And so here comes Che, strutting and sneering as usual. He strutted up and looked around with that famous sneer of his. Then he started snickering. Many of us were wounded, but one of our guys faced him down and said, "Well I guess you'll send us all to the paredón (firing squad) now, right, Che?"


"No," Che snapped. "No paredón. We're gonna hang all of you, slowly! The firing squad's too good for you."

"I was standing close to Che at the time," recalls Señor Menendez, "and got a close-up of his face when he was talking. It was plain from the way his eyes lit up that the man was sick, mentally ill, a bona-fide sadist. Sure, most military commanders or wartime leaders -- Patton, Chesty Puller, Winston Churchill, whatever -- bad-mouth and taunt enemy soldiers. But that's during combat, to get the troops fired up for the kill, etc. Here, the combat was over. We were uniformed adversaries, but completely disarmed. So look, don't even ask me what I think when I see him on a T-shirt, or when I see him presented as some kinda military genius!"


Not surprisingly, in his heated battle with a tape recorder and roman candles, the masterful Comandante had managed to wound himself. The bullet pierced Che's chin and excited above his temple, just missing his brain. The scar is visible in all post-April '61 pictures of the gallant Che (the picture we see on posters and T-shirts was shot a year earlier).


Che's hagiographers and their Castro regime mentors are mostly mum on the details leading to this wound. But we can read between the lines and speculate. Apparently, the sight of the bottle rocket's red glare and the sound of tape-recorded bombs bursting in air roused Che to a Pattonesque fury. He drew his pistol and prepared to lead the charge against the Yankee juggernaut. "¡Arriba muchachos!" he bellowed, as his men sprung from their trenches with bayonets gleaming, and charged a tape recorder. With the amplified soundtrack from The Sands of Iwo Jima blaring in the background, Che stood atop a tank turret and turned to his men. "Let's wipe 'em out!" he yelled, while waving his pistol overhead in the manner of Clevon Little in Blazing Saddles.


Then he managed to shoot himself through the chin.

If the Leftists in the media have their way, THIS is coming to the place where you live.

Today, the Venezuelan government arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, president of Globovision Television, the only remaining television on public airwaves critical of Hugo Chavez. According to the government, Zuloaga made offensive comments about Chavez (which is against the law in Venezuela) while speaking at a conference of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) in Aruba, where media representatives criticized the Venezuelan regime’s crackdown on freedom of speech.

Steve Forbes asks: STEVE FORBES: Could a Chavez-Style Media Crackdown Be Coming Our Way?

Many of Chavez’s most ardent supporters here in the U.S. come out of the “media reform” movement, which believes that our corporate media has been thoroughly co-opted by capitalists bent on destroying the benevolent leadership of the likes of Chavez. They think that our capitalist-plagued media world is in dire need of reform.

The chief proponent of this thinking – which amounts to an unprecedented government intrusion into our own country’s media -- is Professor Robert McChesney, founder of the Orwellian-named Free Press, one of the most influential organizations in the growing “media reform” movement on the far-left.

Free Press’ curious stance on media reform can best be summed up by McChesney who suggests that, “Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself."

Is this a fringe group? Well, no.

All of this could be ignored as the comical rantings of a loony leftist professor safely ensconced in the tenured halls of academia, were it not for Free Press’ astonishing -- and growing -- influence on policymaking within the current administration and Congress.

As hard as it may be to believe, McChesney and his indefatigable band of media revolutionaries are being taken seriously by some policymakers in Washington. They are granted regular audiences with those overseeing our nation’s media policy at the FCC and FTC, and meeting regularly with members of Congress.

Their latest plan to defacto nationalize the media calls for the federal government to bail out newspapers with $60 billion in new government subsidies. As anyone familiar with Washington knows, money does not come free: Such subsidies will virtually invite the government into the fourth estate as overseers. Richard Nixon must be rubbing his eyes in disbelief. But Free Press tells us not to worry. Such media reform will have safeguards in place to protect the freedom of the press from government influence.

Read the whole thing. The Virginian Pilot has already fallen into line.

Betting the ranch

The problems you eventually face when you rely too much on one thing have become apparent in Venezuela. Being dependent on one dam to supply your country with over half its electricity is a good example of non-diversification that comes back to bite you. that's true in finance as well as a country's infrastructure.

Hugo Chávez may be wondering, as Venezuela's taps run dry and its cities fall into darkness, whether God is on the side of the Yankees.

The El Niño weather phenomenon appears to be taking sides as it parches leftist-ruled parts of South America and brings bounty to US farmers and corporations. One of the severest droughts in decades has given Venezuela's socialist president a political nightmare as hydro-electrical power dribbles to a standstill, unleashing blackouts, rationing and protests. The waters behind the Guri dam, which supplies more than half the nation's power, have touched perilously low levels. Chávez has declared an "electricity emergency", urging people to spend no more than three minutes in the shower. The president has even dispatched Cuban pilots to seed clouds for rain.

Iran Demands Nurses In Bolivia Wear Hijabs

Coming to a hospital near you:

On Wednesday, November 24, Iranian demands that female nurses don the hijab in response to Iran’s providing $1.2 million for funding of the new El Alto city hospital in Bolivia sparked a national outcry among women’s rights advocates within Bolivia. In an international teleconference in La Paz held between Bolivian President, Evo Morales, and Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to celebrate the hospital’s opening, nurses were shown wearing hijabs as part of their new uniform regulations.

This imposition of political Islamic pseudo-religious attire from another country is causing a rift within Bolivian political ranks. Even though the Morales administration is the profoundly socialist MAS party, the Iranian demand is still seen as an affront on Bolivian cultural integrity especially in a country with a Roman Catholic majority.

Lourdes Millares, the Deputy for the Democratic and Social Power Party called the Iranian hijab demand, “…an assault on the dignity of women…” and excoriated Morales for, “…submission to the rules of another government.”

Millares went on to state, “We must make clear to the Iranian government that that hospital is Bolivian territory. They have made their money is one thing but this is Bolivian territory.”

Although Millares finds it hard to believe that the hospital would willingly impose the hijab, the government run newspaper, Cambio, states that the hijab reflects, “…health, cleanliness and respect for the culture of Iran.” However, Health Minister, Ramiro Tapia, also called the new hijab regulation an, “…assault on women.” His office is under heavy demand by outraged Bolivians for an explanation of the veil, which is not an Islamic religious requirement, but a visible manifestation of aggressive Islamic political conquest much like secular clothing and colors represent gang territorial boundaries.

Is an election fair if the results are tabulated before the voting begins?

"In Honduras, according to breaking Catalan newspaper reports (translations available, USA Today mention), authorities have seized 45 computers containing certified election results for a constitutional election that never happened. The election had been scheduled for June 28, but on that day the president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted. The 'certified' and detailed electronic records of the non-existent election show Zelaya's side having won overwhelmingly."

I wonder how much press coverage this will get in the MSM?

Buying Honduras

A rich Leftist, draft dodging asshole by the name of Allen Andersson bought the election for Zelaya. After getting a this would-be dictator elected, a man who he characterizes as a

lazy, ineffective and clownish jerk

He leaves the Hondurans to clean up his messes and decides to live in New Hampshire. If there is any justice in the world, he will find himself living in Honduras, subject to the whims of fat-cat liberals who are bored and find it amusing to destroy little countries.

News from Honduras

This site, created by Hunter Smith, is a first hand - non MSM - account of the political situation in Honduras.

Click on the link and then read and see his reports.

Venezuela's Chavez calls Obama "ignoramus"

But they told me that once Obama was elected the world would love us, the oceans would recede and the lion would lie down with the lamb.

Maybe Chavez needs a hug. Go hug him Barack.

Tell him about the Special Olympics.

Act

Richard Fernandez:

In a development highlighted by the McCain campaign, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was briefed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe before Wednesday’s rescue of 15 hostages held by terrorists, including three Americans.
...
The concept of “taking over” an enemy command and control system was reputed to have been employed by the IDF in their recent attack on Syria’s nuclear reactor. The basic idea is to hack into the control system and subvert it over a critical time window. Wired describes what happened in Syria.
...
But one other thing was on display in this instance: decisiveness. After the last preparations have been made and the final contingencies prepared for, there always remains the last bit of irreducible risk. Uribe had to spin the wheel and hope it worked out. He and GW Bush would probably have been pilloried by the press if the rescuers had walked into a trap or had a firefight ensued which resulted in the death of the hostages.

Read the whole thing.


Obama would have voted "present"

The NY Times would have written a story exposing the subterfuge.

Rush Limbaugh on the volcano in Chile

This astonishing picture shows the volcano in Chile erupting during storms in the middle of the night. The electrical storms that they were having, the volcano went up, the volcano caused even more electricity, more lightning as clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionize the air, generating an explosive electrical storm, colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from a volcano's crater, creating an image of raw terrifying energy as if the air itself were ablaze. The UK Daily Mail from May the 7th. We'll get this posted. There's two of these pictures that illustrate this effect and then there are just a bunch of them that show the amount of ash and how thick the cloud is. By the way, one other observation. For those of you buying into this silly compact fluorescent lightbulb scheme, when you look at these pictures from the UK Daily Mail, I want you to try to convince yourself that the type of lightbulb you use matters a hill of beans to anything, when you look at the raw power. And then after you do that, after you ask yourself, after you tell yourself how worthless, how irrelevant, I should say, the kind of lightbulb you use is, I then want to ask you, "Are you one of these people that's bought into this silly notion to unplug your toaster and all of your electronic appliances when you're not using them?"

You might want to do that to save electricity, that's fine. But if you're doing it to save the planet, I want you to take a look these pictures and ask yourself if unplugging your Sunbeam toaster, your Mr. Coffee, your cell phone charger, will matter a hill of beans to the climate of this planet. If you answer yes, you have a serious vanity problem, or worse: Your life is meaningless and you'll be talked into any scheme or hoax to believe in in order to make you think your life has a purpose, such as saving the planet. You're simply helping a bunch of socialists tear down the greatest capitalist system on the face of the planet if you go along with this rotgut garbage.

Poll: Chavez Loses Referendum Lead

The reason appears to be

:...Chavez has hurt his standing by shutting an opposition TV station and failing to end some food shortages.

Amanda Aguilar, 17, was in line at 5:30 a.m. waiting for a food store to open to buy her single, rationed carton of milk.

And here are pictures of food lines in Venezuela...