Austalia's "The Age" (The Age, June 9, 2008)  published an article this morning which reports that Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, has called on Colombia's FARC, a guerilla group which has fought the official Colombian government for 40 years, to release its more than 750 hostages and disband.

Sunday, he bluntly said what will no doubt leave many of his opponents stunned, calling into question the FARC's existence: "This far along in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of step, and that has to be said to the FARC."
And Chavez slammed the rebels, saying their insurgency was giving the United States the excuse to make of  terrorism in Latin America.

As a former Kucinich, then Edwards supporter, I'm disheartened at having lost the strongest progressive voices in the Democratic Party from the nomination process.

In considering whether to support Clinton or Obama, I remembered the Clintons' battle to stop the election of Governor Howard Dean to the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Since his election, Dean has worked tirelessly to broaden and deepen the party, providing resources and training for new rank and file leaders and candidates throughout the country. A Clinton election threatens the progress he and his staff have made.  

Riverbend, the young woman who has written the true history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in her blog, "Baghdad Burning" has published a new diary at:

http://tinyurl.com/...

She and her family made it safely into Syria in late July or early August, one of only two countries that will accept the Iraqi refugees without proper visas.
Undoubtedly, the United States requires that all such refugees obtain the necessary approvals before leaving Iraq.

But how, one might ask, can an Iraqi obtain a visa to the United States when our embassies there, new and old, are fortresses designed to keep most Iraqis out.

The success of the "Surge" can perhaps best be counted by the number of refugees who have surged to the borders, desperate to leave the violence and corruptions we have brought to Iraq.

The refugees have given up all hope of being able to survive in Iraq and are voting with their feet on the success of Bush's "democracy" in Iraq.

As the Bush-Cheney spinmeisters put the finishing touches on General Petraeus' "Report On the Great Success of the Surge", I went back to check on the reality in Baghdad from the perspective of an Iraqi resident who, since March of 2003, blogged under the name "Riverbend" at "Baghdad Burning".

She reports as of February, 2007:

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost.

You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets.

I had occasion today to edit  a company memo being sent from the Venezuelan branch of a U.S. company to the company headquarters in the United States.  

Apparently, the Venezuelan branch had been targeted by the Venezuelan Labor Department for violation of the country's labor laws and enforcement proceedings were in progress.

The memo informed headquarters that the company would have to start paying vacation pay to its workers, hire and train apprentices and hire disabled workers.

The memo recited that:

As a result of my critical articles on Carville last week ("Carville is the Tucker Carlson of the Democratic Party", Wed Aug 22, 2007 at 11:53:47 PM) I received the following invitation from Mr.Carville's office:

From the Office of James Carville  
Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza
to:

Justina,

Read your blog post with great interest. James is working on a book project, and we'd like to invite you to make a contribution.

Our offer is this:

Write whatever you like about Carville to be included in the book. We won't edit it, but we will submit it to intense fact-checking.

Let me know if you're up for it. The office number is 703-739-7777, and my cell is ....

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Rebecca

I wrote Rebecca back saying that I am not interested in contributing to anything that would make James Carville any more money than he already has.

I just received the a fund raising e-mail from James Carville, who is asking for  donations to the re-election campaign of Lousiana’s Democratic Senator, Mary Landrieu.  It reads in part:

I'm a Louisianian through-and-through. My hometown, Carville, population 1108, was named for my granddaddy. So when I write to you about our senior Senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, I'm writing from my heart and soul.

What a surprise, I didn't think James Carville had a soul; I know he doesn't have his heart in Democratic politics.

Carville, who modestly claims on his web site to be "The man who has devised the most dramatic political victories of our generation" holds no official position in the Democratic Party but who is continually put forward by the "main stream" media as "a leading Democratic political analyst", has been one of the most destructive voices in the Democratic Party since his vicious attacks on Howard Dean and the Democratic National Committee after their success in the 2006 election.

Prior to moving here to Merida, Venezuela to live, I had long been active in the Democratic Party in the United States.

It had frequently confounded me how we could call ourselves a democratic country when it took millions of dollars, raised privately, to win all our major elections.

Until the advent of internet fund raising, so successful with the Howard Dean Democratic Party presidential nomination campaign in 2004, candidates seeking major offices were required to tailor their views to the dictates of their big contributors.

Undoubtedly many candidates felt that taking the big money and appearing to agree with the views of the big campaign donors was necessary to get elected but, once elected, or so the naive thought, they would "vote their conscience".  Except, upon getting elected, they had to think about being re-elected, to think about the views of those deep pockets, and so went the idealistic "vote my conscience" notions.  Clearly, the only solution was publicly funded elections. Venezuela will soon have them.

This past Thursday night, President Chavez announced his proposed revisions to the Venezuelan Constitution.  These proposals must be approved by a vote of the National Assembly and by a referendum of all Venezuelan voters before becoming official.

I watched President Chavez speaking on national TV in my room here in Merida.  His proposals received repeated, standing ovations from the members of the National Assembly and the hundreds of other gathered there for the speech.

Long before he finished explaining the proposals, a news article from the Associated Press flashed on my computer screen, claiming that Chavez's Constitutional revisions would undermine democracy.  True to form, the article did not recite any specific facts about the new provisions.

One "fact" of the constitutional reform proposals would be greeted with near ecstasy by the many people I know at home in Maui, Hawaii, who are working two and three full time jobs just to pay the rent: a constitutionally mandated six hour work day

While I was a public defender attorney in Hawaii, I worked in the Family Court representing juvenile offenders.  It was heart-breaking to see kids, many of whom had learning disabilities and thus trouble in school, coming repeatedly back into court for shop lifting, auto theft, burglaries, assaults and the like.  

One group of six or so kids burglarized a string of homes in a two block area.  The cops knew that the same kids had done all five burglaries because items stolen from house 1 were found in houses 2 and 3, items from house 2 were found in houses 4 and 5.  

Apparently, they carried radios and CD players stolen from one house on to the next, if they found a better radio or CD player in the next house, they left the previously stolen goods and picked up their new treasures, carrying those to house 3, etc. After the police arrested the kids, the community had to hold a "swap meet" to recover all their own things.

Although I've longed worked as a lawyer in the U.S., for the last five years I haven't had any medical insurance.  Why?

I couldn't manage to pay for it and make a hefty mortgage payment and put a child through college, even a state college.  Something had to go, so I gave up the insurance with a prayer that I wouldn't get sick.  I was lucky, I didn't get sick.  Many people in the same situation aren't so fortunate.

In February of this year, I retired from law to begin a new, less stressful career, that of teaching English as a foreign language.  I choose to come to Venezuela to teach because I wanted to see at first hand what the "Bolivarian Revolution" was all about.

The British BBC reported yesterday that President Chavez of Venezuela is creating a "single, separate party", suggesting thereby that he is creating a single party state.  This is untrue, and yet another example of the pervasive misinformation the western media is distributing about the reality of Chavez and his government.

The media, particularly in the U.S. and Britain, has been enthusiastically supporting the U.S. State Department's anti-Chavez  policies which are designed to depose socialist Chavez from office so he can be replaced by those acceptable to the ne-conservative administration. Venezuela likely has greater oil reserves than those in the Middle East and the U.S. wants to control them.  

To accomplish the removal of Chavez and his Venezuelan government,the U.S. has been contributing millions of dollars to a coalition of opposition parties hoping they will oust him. (See Eva Golinger, "Code Chavez" [El Codigo Chavez](2005] and "Bush v. Chavez"(2006) for documentation of these efforts.)  

Impeaching Bush and Cheney at this point does the Republican Party a favor by clearing the field of the "old" crooks so they can attempt to replace them with shiny "new" crooks before the 2008 election.  Censuring, repeatedly, after through investigations, might be more effective.

Parliamentary systems frequently have "shadow governments". Something like that is needed now here.

What I think is needed, and Representative Waxman is the perfect candidate to lead this operation, is to create a virtual "shadow" government of investigative committees, each with a full staff of competent investigators and expert cross-examiners. We could call them Sunlight Squads.

Viewing the tapes of the Democratic National Committee's Winter Meeting (http://www.democrats.org)where many of the potential 2008 Democratic candidates took the stage, I was once again impressed with the fact that Governor Howard Dean has been a truly great leader. When he ran for president in 2004, he told us we had the power to take our country back. He has led that effort, not as U.S. President, but as President of the Democratic National Committee. He has done wonders.

We have Dean's DNC -- and his fifty state strategy -- to thank for regaining control of Congress. The DNC has been wonderfully re-energized and, amusingly, even Hillary Clinton is now repeating the Dean mantra "We are going to take our country back"!

General Wes Clark was the one candidate with the graciousness to thank Dean and the DNC for their great work in transforming the composition of Congress. Clark's campaign work for Democratic candidates over the past 3 years has made him into an authentic Democrat and he'd make a very acceptable president.

Will Bush start the Iran War in two weeks?

Robert Parry's article "Iran Clock Ticking" (available at truthout.com) reports that his Pentagon sources tell him that Bush has already decided to attack Iran and that it will happen in mid-February. Bush is only awaiting the arrival of the second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf to proceed.

Clearly, the Bush-Cheney administration intends to ignore the will of Congress and the November, 2006 vote of the American people.

If the attack is begun, what can Congress do then?  They could vote to stop it's funding, but Bush may have has all the money he needs to bomb Iran.  [As Bush switched approved funding for the Afghanistan War to unapproved use in his attack on Iraq, there is no reason to suppose that he would not use approved Iraq funds for an unapproved attack on Iran.]

Eric Altermann, writing at HuffingtonPost today is concerned that, now that Rumsfeld has been fired, the pundits are trying to place all the blame for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq on Rumsfeld, not on "the Decider":

The Los Angeles Times' neocon pundit, Max Boot, makes only glancing reference to the president in this attack on Rumsfeld's leadership in Iraq. Ditto Newsweek's John Barry and Michael Hirsh, who wrote an entire column which referenced President Bush as if he were a Rumsfeld aide who assisted with war plans, but was rarely close enough to the action to affect the situation in a meaningful way. "Historians will probably argue for decades," they wrote, "over who gets most of the blame for the mistakes made in Iraq.

But goodness, we can't blame George for the nasty war, just ask his mother.

This was the speech that was used by the national media to smear Governor Howard Dean after his defeat in the Iowa Presidential Caucus  in 2004:

Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York ... And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Byaaah!!!

The Republicans laughed at Dean in 2004.

Today's Talkleft (www.talkleft.com) points out why Obama is no where near ready for a presidential run.  Their critique of Obama's naive and/or misguided "non-partisan", heavily religious, direction is absolutely accurate.

We are in an extremely dangerous point in America's political history when a relatively small group of utterly anti-democratic and viciously partisan actors have taken control of all our political institutions. They were able to seize this control because Democratic leaders failed to stand up to them and fight their undemocratic actions in the early stages of their push to absolute power.

Begining with the Democrats' inept response to the Florida vote manipulation, they continued to try to pacify the beasts by supporting the passage of the Patriot Act, by capitulating to the even then clearly baseless Iraq war plans, and, perhaps most damaging, supporting the appointments of Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court.