Zorro
Zorro's JournalIt was once the richest country in Latin America. Now it’s falling apart
In Venezuela the food lines are only the most visible evidence of a nation in free fall. Known as las colas, the lines form before dawn and last until nightfall, several bodies thick and zigzagging for miles in leafy middle-class neighborhoods and ragged slums alike. In a country that sits atop the world’s largest known petroleum reserves, hungry citizens wait on their assigned day for whatever the stores might stock: with luck, corn flour to make arepas, and on a really good day, shampoo.
“I never dreamed it would come to this,” says Yajaira Gutierrez, a 41-year-old accountant, waiting her turn in downtown Caracas. “That in Venezuela, with all our petroleum, we would be struggling to get corn cakes.”
In the capital’s Dr. José María Vargas hospital, a doctor watched a 73-year-old woman die of kidney failure because the hospital lacked the medicine to perform a routine dialysis. In a Caracas police station, more than 150 prisoners crowded into a cell made for 36, standing shirtless (there was no room to sit) in the stench of sweat and feces. In arid Lara state, an elementary-school teacher told of children fainting in class from hunger. The economy contracted by almost 6% last year, and is expected to shrink by as much as 10% this year.
Venezuela was once Latin America’s exemplar: home to Simón Bolívar, who freed much of the continent from Spanish rule. Now, after years of political mismanagement and months in economic free fall, it is the region’s cautionary tale. The bolivar, the currency named for the Liberator himself, is now carried in backpacks instead of wallets; one unit is worth less than a penny. While production plummets, crime soars. Fights frequently break out in food lines. The number of murders last year ranged between 17,000 and 28,000. No one knows the exact tally, but regardless it would put the nation’s murder rate—driven by a lethal mix of street gangs, drug cartels, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries jostling for power—among the world’s highest. Even animals are dying: some 50 zoo animals have starved to death over the past six months because there’s not enough food.
http://time.com/venezuela-brink/
Just another example of the media making something out of nothing.
Cuba subdued ahead of Fidel Castro's 90th birthday
Fidel Castro greeted his 80th birthday from his sickbed, gripping a newspaper to show he was alive two weeks after stepping down as president.
For the next 10 years the leader of the Cuban revolution watched from home as his brother Raul granted Cubans new economic freedoms and declared detente with the United States after a half-century of hostility.
When Fidel Castro turns 90 on Saturday, the man who nationalized the Cuban economy and controlled virtually every aspect of life on the island will celebrate his birthday in a far different country than the one he ruled.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans are running private businesses, buying and selling their homes and cars, and checking the internet on imported cellphones. Castro's greatest ally, Venezuela, is in economic free-fall, cutting the flow of subsidized oil that Cuba has depended on. Tens of thousands of Cubans are emigrating to the United States, hollowing out the ranks of highly educated professionals.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cuba-subdued-ahead-fidel-castros-040533118.html
1966 could be rock 'n' roll's most revolutionary year, thanks to the Beatles, Dylan and Beach Boys
What’s the most innovative year ever for rock ’n’ roll? Fans, critics and academics have any number of watershed years they can point to in the more than six decades of post-World War II popular music broadly defined as rock.
There’s 1954, the year Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” signaled the flashpoint of rock ’n’ roll, and Elvis Presley first stepped up to a microphone at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio in Memphis, Tenn.
Or 1964, the year Beatlemania exploded around the world and the launch of the British Invasion.
Don’t discredit 1967, with the Summer of Love, the blossoming of flower power and psychedelic music.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-1966-rock-explosive-year-20160803-snap-htmlstory.html
TRUMP BLASTS MEDIA FOR REPORTING THINGS HE SAYS
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, tore into the media on Thursday for what he called its “extremely unfair practice” of reporting the things he says.
“I’ll say something at a rally and I look out and see all these TV cameras taking every word down,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “No one in politics has ever been subjected to this kind of treatment.”
“It’s unbelievable and, frankly, very unethical,” he added.
At a rally in Florida, the candidate lashed out at a TV cameraman whom he caught in the act of recording his words for broadcasting purposes. “Look at him over there, picking up everything I’m saying, folks,” Trump shouted. “Get him out of here.”
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-blasts-media-for-reporting-things-he-says
Fox News Latino poll: Clinton holds 46-point lead over Trump among Hispanics
Source: Fox News Latino
With less than four months to go before Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton holds a commanding 46 point lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump among Hispanic voters, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday by Fox News Latino.
The poll found that 66 percent of registered Latino voters would head to the ballot box to vote for Clinton and her running-mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, compared to only 20 percent who would pick the ticket of Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike on Election Day.
The gap between the two candidates widened 7 percent since May, when Clinton held a 39-point edge among Hispanics.
“The results are not that surprising given the reaction of Latinos to some of Trump’s proposals,” Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, told Fox News Latino.
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/08/11/fox-news-latino-poll-clinton-holds-46-point-lead-over-trump-among-hispanics/
Only a 46 point lead?
Venezuelans flood Brazil border in 36-hour grocery run
Government employee Jose Lara this month used some vacation days to take a long scenic bus ride through the verdant plateaus and sweeping savannas of southern Venezuela, but the trip was anything but a holiday.
It was a 36-hour grocery run.
Lara took an overnight bus and then a pick-up truck to get across the border to neighboring Brazil to buy food staples that have gone scarce in Venezuela's crisis-stricken economy.
"Workers can't even enjoy vacation anymore. Look where I am! Buying food for my children," said Lara, 40, who was preparing to load 30-kilo (66-pound) packages of rice and flour onto a bus to complete a journey that takes close to 36 hours.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuelans-flood-brazil-border-36-hour-grocery-run-145711427.html
Damn anti-revolutionary grocery hoarders.
15 OAS states urge Venezuela to act on recall 'without delay'
Source: AFP
A group of 15 countries called on Venezuela Thursday to act "without delay" to clear the way for an election on whether to recall President Nicolas Maduro from office as a way out of a worsening crisis.
The countries, all members of the Organization of American States, issued the joint statement after the head of Venezuela's election authority laid out a schedule this week that appears likely to push any recall election into 2017.
The timeline is crucial because if the unpopular Maduro is voted out in a recall election after January 10 he would simply yield power to his handpicked vice president.
If the recall is held this year, and Maduro loses, the constitution calls for new elections in the leftist-ruled South American country.
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/15-oas-states-urge-venezuela-act-recall-without-183148082.html
US court rules for Chevron in Ecuador rainforest-damage case
Ecuadorean plaintiffs cannot collect a $9 billion judgment in the U.S. against Chevron for rainforest damage, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, upholding a judge's finding that the judgment was obtained through bribery, coercion and fraud.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had the authority after a trial to rule in March 2014 as he did. It noted, however, that Kaplan's decision doesn't invalidate the Ecuadorian judgment and doesn't stop the enforcement of the judgment outside the U.S.
In a decision written by Circuit Judge Amalya Kearse, a three-judge panel rejected the argument by the Ecuadorean plaintiffs that they were not aware of wrongdoing by lawyers in the case and should not be held responsible.
"There is no authority suggesting that a party ignorant of its attorney's fraudulent actions may enforce a fraudulently procured judgment," the panel said. "Even innocent clients may not benefit from the fraud of their attorney."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-court-rules-chevron-ecuador-161658312.html
I’m a Republican and I don't like Hillary Clinton — but I’m voting for her
If Donald Trump had flamed out of the primaries as almost everyone expected, I would have proudly voted for Marco Rubio, John Kasich or Jeb Bush, and would have supported Scott Walker or Chris Christie. But compared with these candidates, Donald Trump lives on another planet. Simply put, he is not a Republican nor a conservative as we have understood those terms for decades.
Instead, I will vote for Hillary Clinton in November. I will do this knowing full well that she has more baggage than United Airlines and that she would nominate Supreme Court justices that would do violence to the 1st, 2nd and 5th Amendments to the Constitution. She flat-out lied about her home-brew server and the classified information on it, thereby imperiling national security. I recognize that she is owned in fee-simple by one of the most reactionary groups in the United States, the public employee unions. Further, I assume that the SVR, the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, will cause to be released documents showing a very unsavory connection between Clinton’s actions as secretary of State and the Clinton Foundation.
Despite these serious flaws, Clinton believes in America and its values. Trump — who would establish religious tests for immigration and ethnic tests for judges — does not. She is open to the world; Trump is not.
Trump believes in only himself. As Khizr Kahn, the Muslim father of a slain U.S. Army captain noted at the Democratic Convention: Trump has “sacrificed nothing.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shulman-republican-clinton-voter-20160808-snap-story.html
Even a few RWNJs are coming around to the Clinton camp.
Mike Pence Should Get Donald Trump to Withdraw
For the past year, every effort by Republican leaders to topple Donald J. Trump has met with embarrassing failure. Yet, according to published reports, jittery insiders have been considering still other ways of detaching the Trump brand from the party of Lincoln. The best option is one that can avoid an ugly, and likely futile, confrontation and help both Mr. Trump and his party save face. All eyes must now turn to his running mate, Mike Pence, to do what must be done.
I say this not as a member of the so-called Never Trump faction of my party. Though Mr. Trump was not my first choice for the nomination, I found his attack on the established order appealing at times, even entertaining, and respected the wishes of a clear plurality of Republican primary voters. Americans long have been entranced with the idea of the political outsider who puts self-interest aside to battle Washington’s wrongdoers and set things right. But in recent weeks — indeed, months — the pitfalls of political outsiderdom have become plain.
Seasoned politicians learn what fights to pick, what half-victories to savor, how to make coherent points and how to increase their electoral base. By contrast Mr. Trump, an accomplished businessman unaccustomed to answering to anyone, appears constitutionally incapable of letting any slight go unchallenged. He has proved unwilling or unable to discipline himself to a consistent message or to restrain his worst impulses. He lacks an ability to form, or more important expand, a general election coalition. Whenever his poll numbers climb, as they may very well again in this unpredictable election, he is oddly more determined to test their durability.
Even if he were to win the presidency — a job that requires negotiation, diplomacy, discipline, finesse and some semblance of intellectual curiosity — it is not clear Mr. Trump will be able to master or enjoy the position. His self-destructive behavior demonstrates that on some level he knows this. Indeed, he’s marveled many times that he’s made it as far as he has. Now he needs someone to guide him to a graceful exit. Mike Pence is that person.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/campaign-stops/mike-pence-should-get-trump-to-withdraw.html
The stench of Republican desperation is getting stronger every day.
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