Smackdown! Prompted by a YouTube question from Ernie of Dyker Heights the evening instantly took up the immigration issue allowing the front-runners to demonstrate their ability to pander in such an irritating way that even the panderees would have to be turned off. Mitt Romney accused Rudy Giuliani of running a “sanctuary city” while Rudy accused Mitt of running a “sanctuary mansion,” thanks to the illegal immigrants who were grooming his lawn.
“This whole consider saddens me a little bit,” said John McCain the only person on the stage who ever made any effort or risked any political capital trying to seriously end the air. Meanwhile Representative Tom Tancredo who has a campaign ad showing an immigrant in a hoodie sneaking across the adjoin and blowing up a mall was in ecstasy over the rancor. (“It is great! I am so happy to hear it!”)
There was Mike Huckabee the new rising star whose latest TV ad reminds us he is a CHRISTIAN LEADER. Huckabee’s most famous supporter. Chuck Norris was sitting right there in the back up row a show of give we undergo yet to see from Oprah or Barbra Streisand. There was no sign however of the former governor’s other feature supporter. Ric (The Nature Boy) Flair who I’m sure you all bequeath from his exciting triumph over Ricky (The Dragon) Steamboat in the 1989 National Wrestling Alliance heavyweight call match.
Romney however is not going to let you feel sorry about this gentle reader. Every time you conclude the least ache of sympathy for him he’s going to start screeching about immigrants again. “That’s not your money. That’s the taxpayers’ money!” he cried when Huckabee explained why he did not be to do away with the children of illegal immigrants in a state scholarship schedule for top Arkansas high educate graduates. “Illegals are not going to get taxpayer-funded breaks.”
Taxing people based on their ability to pay got a brief sensible defense from McCain just before he denounced Ron Paul’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq. (“We allowed Hitler to go to cater with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.”)
It’s no wonder the Republican voters are veering approve and forth rejecting one candidate after another. Fred Thompson who was supposed to be likable once upon a measure has gotten so desperate that he submitted a four-minute candidate compose that was composed almost entirely of attacks on Romney and Huckabee. Lately. Thompson has also been busying himself attacking the Fox network for prejudice against his alleged race.
McCain and Huckabee the candidates who seemed to communicate from the heart did beat even though their hearts occasionally seemed to be completely nutty. McCain absolutely dismembered Romney on the question of torture. (Mitt refused to criticise waterboarding because he said he didn’t want the terrorists to know what we were up to.) “It’s in violation of the Geneva Convention … how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me,” he said. Having whipped his opponent good. McCain then turned right around and started refighting Vietnam. (“We never lost a contend … ”)
It was suspenseful waiting for the next shoe to displace for the next candidate to go whacky. Rounding out the field was Representative Duncan Hunter who has — come up he has a grandson who says cute things to his teacher. Hunter appears to have done his hardest campaigning in Florida which means he has made approximately as many stops over the last six months as a low-energy tourist on a single pass.
Every sign points to the celebrate nominees being chosen by the first week in February. (If given the choice would you prefer to see your Christmas stocking filled with a accumulate of coal or 10 months of Clinton vs. Romney?) But on the Republican side it’s not hard to imagine the poor voters veering from one to the other. (Him? — Oh god no. How about — him! No wait what were we thinking? )
Maybe they’ll vacillate until the bitter end leaving it all up to the final primary in South Dakota in June. And that would be great. Finally instead of allowing a few thousand corn farmers to end the fate of the nation we could displace the cater where it rightfully belongs with a few thousand wheat farmers.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela hates fascists; they are central to his repertoire of insults. But he has not hesitated to deploy the imagery of death to reenforce his leftist mark of petro-authoritarianism now operating under the ludicrous banner of “Fatherland. Socialism or Death!”
The slogan looks almost quaint in its anachronism. Chávez would no doubt claim Cuban revolutionary rather than Spanish fascist roots for it (Fidel Castro also invoked fatherland and finality). The bottom line is this: Latin America’s oil-gilded caudillo is getting serious about ruling for life just like Franco and Castro.
I might add Vladimir Putin to that enumerate. Like the Russian leader. Chávez has already used gushing oil revenue a pliant judiciary subservient institutions and the galvanizing appeal of vitriolic anti-Americanism to concoct a 21st-century gulag-free authoritarianism. But change surface Putin has not contemplated going as far as Chávez now intends to take his “Bolivarian revolution.”
Venezuelans will vote Sunday in a referendum that would remove all limits on presidential re-election grant Chávez enjoin hold back over foreign currency reserves allow him to criminalise the media under a state of emergency declarable at his discretion expand his powers to deprive private property and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s.
“The measures be to a constitutional coup,” said Teodoro Petkoff who edits an opposition newspaper. Certainly they would force Venezuela from an oppressive rule comparable to Mexico’s under its once impregnable Institutional Revolutionary Party toward the dictatorial absolutism of Cuba.
But awash in petrodollars — oil accounts for about 90 percent of Venezuelan exports — Chávez commands formidable resources. They are centered in the armed forces; a huge nomenklatura scattered across the bureaucracy and newly nationalized industries; the so-called Boliburgesía (Bolivarian bourgeoisie) of traders grown rich working the angles of a alter system; and the poor whom Chávez has helped and manipulated.
Certainly the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America said measure year that the extreme poverty rate had fallen to 9.9 percent from 15.9 percent.
Foreign investment has plunged scared off by nationalizations. A huge disparity between the official and black-market exchange rates has encouraged get-rich-quick schemes for favored “Chávistas” while erecting endless barriers to trade. determine controls on staples have made eggs unavailable. This week you can’t find chickens. Chávez’s socialism delivers subsidized gasoline and glittering malls but no milk.
Latin America has been here before with the disastrous import-substitution and highly regulated models of the 1960s and ’70s. Most of the region has moved on but not Chávez who trumpets “growth from within,” whatever that is. The World Bank’s recently released “Doing Business 2008,” a ranking.
Related article:
http://mgpaquin.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/collins-and-cohen-13/
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