This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Foreign Policy

  • More stuff that’s our fault

    Photo by Tom Charron/Miami Herald

    Miami-Dade fire-rescue personnel assist Cuban migrants

    who landed Friday on Adams Key.

    While news services are fixated on Pakistan, and while everyone floats new conspiracy theories about the murders there, a new surge is happening on our own southern border – 50 refugees from Castro’s Cuba have landed on Florida beaches this last week. And of course, it’s the US “wet foot, dry foot” policy to blame according to the Cuban government (Miami Herald link);

    As the Cuban government blamed U.S. policy Friday for an uptick in the number of Cubans leaving the island and disputed the number of dead in recent drownings off its coast, the top U.S. Coast Guard official in Miami called on exiles to denounce the illegal voyages.

    Rear Admiral David W. Kunkel said the Coast Guard has patrol boats and cutters looking for migrants constantly. “We have federal, state and local help. But there’s a link missing.”

    That link, he said, is the local community.

    ”They are not working with us. I know that’s rather blunt, but the fact remains that these smugglers are being financed by desperate families,” he said. “The only safe way is if we all work together.”

    I guess it’s too much to ask that we expect the Cuban government to treat their people with a measure of decency, ya know, things like stop throwing them in prison for having opinions and for writing the truth about Cuba. Then maybe folks won’t want to leave. Of course the Cubans claim to be helping and protecting their people, but those danged Cuban exiles in Miami keep sending money to the poor folks in Cuba and tempting them to make the dangerous voyage here.

    Granma, the Communist Party daily, the Cuban government blamed Miami news outlets, including The Miami Herald, for publishing reports of 25 suspected dead in an attempted escape Dec. 22.

    The Cuban government said the boat was in distress and Cuban Border Guard troops detained a Cuban on land who said he was part of a group that included women and children who were in trouble at sea.

    ”As a result of the ground patrol, 26 persons were detained [19 men and seven women], accompanied by two minors, both 9 years old,” the report in Granma noted.

    The Cuban government insisted that the sea search was a rescue operation that turned up two dead, identified as Yosvani Vera Alvarez, 29, and Zuleica Rodríguez Pérez, 43.

    The Cuban government denies having chased the boat — as Florida family members of some of the Cubans said earlier this week.

    The government blamed the United States’ ”wet foot/dry foot” policy that allows Cubans who reach U.S. shores to remain in America.

    Marc Masferrer writes at Uncommon Sense about the 25 assumed dead despite what the Cuban government says.
    Beats me why Cubans are leaving that workers’ paradise – especially since we know it’s a wonderland of literacy and health care. What else could those Cubans want, for Pete’s sake?

    Robert M at Babalu Blog outlines the problem;

    Would increasing the number of annual visas for Cubans help? Sure, only if Cuba cooperated, which we know isn’t possible.

    Encourage neighboring countries to help the U.S. deal with the number of Cubans who want to leave? Sure, but they’re more interested in maintaining relations with the castros than help Cubans attain freedom.

    Rear Admiral Kunkel wants us to “work together”. A noble suggestion and idea, but one that comes with more than its share of issues and complexities that can’t just be pinned on one group of people (such as Cuban exiles).

    A much easier solution is for the Cuban government to throw open their prisons and have real democratic elections and elect a government that works for the people instead of a few lucky enough to be born into the communist aristocracy. It’s inevitable, it’s happened everywhere in the world – the communists are just prolonging the agony.

  • Ghoulish candidates wave Bhutto’s bloody blouse

    Bezir Bhutto’s body hadn’t reached room temperature yesterday before Clinton and Obama seized on her death for political opportunism (Washington Post link);

    For [Obama’s] chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Bhutto’s death helped underscore the line she has been driving home for months — about who is best suited to lead the nation at a time of international peril. In her comments Thursday, Clinton described Bhutto in terms Obama (D-Ill.) could not: as a fellow mother, a pioneering woman following in a man’s footsteps, and a longtime peer on the world stage.

    The differing reactions of Clinton and Obama to the assassination crystallized the debate between the two just a week before Iowans will decide the first contest in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    While aides said Clinton was anxious not to appear to be politicizing Bhutto’s death, they nonetheless saw it as a potential turning point in the race with Obama and former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.).

    Everything seems to be a potential campaign issue these days, but it’s completely tasteless to prop up a dead body, Bernie-like, and campaign from behind it. And I’m stupefied that Clinton thinks the murder of one woman politician gives her any kind of moral authority or proves her ability to be President. Clinton came close to  announcing that Bhutto would be her running mate;

    “I have known Benazir Bhutto for more than 12 years; she’s someone whom I was honored to visit as first lady when she was prime minister,” Clinton said at a campaign event in a firehouse in western Iowa. “Certainly on a personal level, for those of us who knew her, who were impressed by her commitment, her dedication, her willingness to pick up the mantle of her father, who was also assassinated, it is a terrible, terrible tragedy,” she said.

    Sweetness and Light chronicles Clinton’s lies about her relationship with Bhutto. And Obama blamed Bhutto’s death on Clinton;

    Three hours after news of Bhutto’s slaying broke, Obama delivered a withering rebuke of Clinton’s experience, depicting her lengthy political resume` as a hindrance to solving big problems, including crises abroad. In an especially charged moment, senior Obama adviser David Axelrod would later tie the killing to the Iraq war — and Clinton’s vote to approve it, which he argued diverted U.S resources from fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both al-Qaeda hotbeds.

    “You can’t at once argue that you’re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it,” Obama said. “You can’t fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America.”

    The Wall Street Journal reports that somehow Clinton and Richardson think their time milling around the White House gives them experience;

    Sen. Clinton, who had planned to talk about housing and the economy at a rally in Lawton, Iowa, shifted to condemn the assassination, to recall Ms. Bhutto as someone she had known personally since the late 1980s, and to stress the need for “picking a president who is ready on day one, who is ready to deal with the myriad of problems.”

    Democrat Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who has boasted of his experience as President Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, had the most muscular reaction. He called on President Bush to suspend military aid to Pakistan and “press Musharraf to step aside” in favor of a new coalition government, because he has failed to hunt down terrorists and had destabilized the country by “his attempts to cling to power.” Mr. Richardson also scheduled a speech for today in Des Moines to reiterate that call.

    How does being being one member of a hundred-person debating society give Clinton any experience in dealing with terrorism? Richardson couldn’t even talk to the Pakistani government while he was laying waste to the omelet bar at the UN. I remember that Clinton and Richardson both admitted that they couldn’t make headway against the Taliban and al Qaeda because Pervez Musharraf’s government ignored them everytime the Clinton Administration tried to enlist Pakistan. 

    I guess the Democrats figure we’ve all lost our memories.

    capt_596af4d416b544e0ad485570b37221c4_parade_magazine_benazir_bhutto_prn3.jpg

    Photo lifted from Drudge Report

    I can’t imagine any of the Democrat candidates telling their Democrat supporters that “I am what the terrorists most fear”. Well, especially since the terrorists and madmen around the world have already decided to support our Democrat candidates.

  • Land reform ghosts and FARC’s hostages

    Just as the 49th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution rolls up on us, his legacy is reaching into Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela according to this report from the Miami Herald’s Casto Ocando;

    When Bienvenido Jorajuría could not get into his family’s La Quinta ranch in the fertile region of Yaracuy, in north central Venezuela, the Cuban-born rancher felt a familiar frustration.

    The land was confiscated earlier this year by President Hugo Chávez’s government after armed peasants backed by the national guard invaded it, despite the fact that it was in full production.

    For Jorajuría, it was the second time his family’s land had been expropriated. In 1960, his family’s farm in Matanzas, Cuba, was confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government.

    Funny how most of the US media is skipping right over this story. Just a few months ago, Chavez’ main ally, Islamic Republic’s Mahmoud Ahmidinejad proposed an alliance with the king of land reform – Robert Mugabe (FARS link). The subject of the story recalls the parallels between the seizure of his father’s land in Cuba and his own;

    ”They forced us to provide documents to prove that the property was private as far back as 1850,” said Adivi Ahmad, Bienvenido Jorajuría’s wife, who inherited part of the land in La Quinta, which was purchased by her father in 1947.

    ”Finding these documents was extremely difficult because of Venezuela’s public registry disorder,” Ahmad told El Nuevo Herald.

    Ahmad said it took six months and about $500 to compile and submit the documents, but later those documents ”got lost” in the office in charge of collecting them.

    The Jorajuría story is similar that of other ranch families of Cuban origin in Venezuela.

    Various parts of the story hint at Cuban government involvement in the expropriation particularly of  Cuban expatriots. Dirty pool at it’s dirtiest.

    Chavez’ opponents claim that these “land reform” measures explain much of the shortages of staples in Venezuela;

    ”When Chávez arrived in 1999, we produced 35,000 tons a year of sugar cane,” said Rodríguez, who arrived in Miami in June with his family. He said squatters used death threats to ”expel” him from his own land.

    In 2007, after a series of systematic invasions, Vladimir Rodríguez said he couldn’t harvest anything.

    ”And the ranch was totally lost, unproductive,” said Rodríguez, who is still awaiting a response from the Venezuelan government on the value of his confiscated property. He also is using his Cuban heritage to apply for permanent residency in Miami under the U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act.

    But seein’s how Chavez can’t solve his own domestic problems, he can get his commie buddies at FARC to release their hostages, apparently (AP/Yahoo link);

    President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that he hopes three hostages will be freed by Colombian rebels within hours, and that Venezuela has planes and helicopters ready to retrieve them.
    Â
    “The only thing we need is the authorization of the Colombian government,” Chavez said at a news conference in the presidential palace. “We are ready to activate the humanitarian operation.”

    Chavez said he hoped it would be completed “in the coming hours.”

    But then, Chavez’ extra-Venezuelan image is much more important to him and his allies than Venezuelans’ views. Who cares if Venezuelans can’t get milk, sugar and meat as long as Chavez can score points with the US Bush-hating Left. More on the hostage release press conference at Kate’s hogar.

  • 68% of Mexican Immigrants Illegal

    Brace yourself, there are bound to be shrieks of racism.

    In an AP story, in the IHT A report funded by the Mexican government has determined that SIXTY-EIGHT PERCENT of Mexicans who immigrate to the US do so illegally, 55% of those using smugglers to get in.
    More than two-thirds of the Mexican immigrants here are criminals. Wow.

  • Another pro-American on the world stage

    Lee Myung Bak, decidedly pro-American CEO of Hyudai, has won the South Korean presidential election, according to the LA Times; (more…)

  • Shame on you, JOE-4-OIL

    My television has been inundated with those Joe Kennedy ads announcing free Venezuelan heating oil for “poor” Americans. He just took a load from benevolent Hugo Chavez this last week (The Patriot Ledger): (more…)

  • Civil War Looms in Bolivia

     

    Men dressed in traditional clothing from Bolivia’s eastern province play music in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Friday, Dec. 14, 2007, in support of a hunger strike by people in favor of an ‘autonomy statute’ for the eastern opposition stronghold of Santa Cruz. (AP)

    (more…)

  • Meet Argentine Hillary

    Photo from Associated Press

    Cristina Fernandez (it’s funny, but until today her name was Cristina Kirschner), the new President of Argentina, spent her second day in office doing an impression of poor victimized Hillary Clinton. (AP)

    (more…)