Venezuela on slope down ..

For those who still admire Chavez, here's a not so optimistic article on how he's running his country.

Even though it has views like this:

Well, someone is... but whose fault is it?

Actually I havent 'assumed' that since the oil crunch of the seventies... but then I dont listen to liberal propaganda either.

In fact... the article ENDS with the unstated conclusion that unless Chavez learns something about managing the oil business, even the poor are going to end up worse off than before he started micromangaging everything.

For the same reason as before. The difference is the profits he is skimming off are going largely to strengthen his grip on the country.

 

Sean Penn was on Letterman the other night blowing kisses to his man Hugo.

P-fog, you take digs at the NYT but continue to post their articles. Come on now just admit it, its a great paper! WSJ is good and its editorials witty, but it doesn't touch the variety and width of coverage of the Times.

 

The Times is good, but they've lost their sanity on the editorial board... and they have gone too far with their "anaylsis" articles on their regular pages. That's not news, that's opinion. Can't stand it, but they don't want to lose readership... but I think it makes their problems worse. Not as a great a paper as it use to be. The Washington Post has a more balanced editorial page.

Except for socialists, who don't understand that Chavez is actually impoverishing Venezuela, everybody understands Chavez is a disaster for Venezuela. If you really care about Venezuela, you can't support Chavez.

 

For those of you who didnt bother, the piece shows how Venezuela Oil is actually becoming less and less profitable for Chavez.. it's what happens when you turn an organization into a government bureaucracy, and use patronage to staff it. Think FEMA. And use its revenue as a sort of personal 'bank account'

There was a reason that Penn was cast as Spicoli in Ridgemont High... it wasnt just done from his picture folio. People best play who they identify with... or basically are, which is why Larry David's political views carry absolutely no weight.

The reason I do that is that it would do no good for me to make a point always using the NY Post or UK Telegraph. I also link the WaPo a lot... and sometimes even the Guardian.

You know how I came across that? It was a 2 sentence snark-link on a RW blog, showing how 'idiot lib the writer was'... but you see when I follow one of those, I actually READ the whole thing.
By the time I got back to LGF, the link had been updated to reflect there was value in the content.

In fact this article was indeed an analysis worthy of the WSJ, well at least NewsWeek. It had some dumb writing, like the assumption we were idiots and didnt KNOW who controlled the bulk of oil reserves but it also had good insight .. or acknowledgement, rather.. on where things go wrong when a populist gains power. We've seen it how many times before? From Castro to Mugabe.... power perverts. Absolute power perverts absolutely.

 

That's a rather shallow cut, Don... Fred Thompson is not an actor and you know it. He acts as a sideline but to call him an 'actor' as if he had no body of work!
And why do you mention HIM in that company if you arent afraid of him?

I might remind you that Reagan was not elected because of any acting {he really wasnt real good at it, but neither were a lot of those 30's/40's contract guys.} Reagan was elected for his off-screen body of work.

I already fell on my sword about Asner... wtf do you want?

Socialists? Well Marxists/Maoists use the term... but why are you splitting hairs?

Just because the 'old socialists' prefer to call themselves 'Progressives' doesnt change a thing.

 

I'm sorry, too, that Thompson seems half-hearted about his candidacy.
Thompson is no serious Pres candidate, he screwed up the chance by waiting to get into it.
But he'll end up bringing something to the table in the debates.
What he does best is elucidate the points. He is certainly no lightweight in political or applied constitutional thought, nor is he beholden to a particular power group.
But an 'actor'? Hell he actually played a 'bad guy' ONCE... obviously to test his mettle in acting, and look what happened. Naw.. like said above his character on Law and Order was pretty much verbatim what Fred Thompson would have been if he were the NYC DA.

 

I don't think you can discredit a paper based on its editorial page. The Times backpage is undeniably liberal as the Journal's is undeniably conservative. If either paper dropped or played down the positions they hold in the editorials, effectively self-censorship, for the elusive concept of neutrality they'd lose my readership.

 

Thompson Thompson

I appreciate the complement Sir Don. 8)

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On Thompson; I saw p-fog's boy on Meet the Press yesterday. It was my first exposure to him, besides half a debate and the flyby 24 hour media playing up his stump fatigue, you can count me as impressed. He was very up front, dare I say honest, about his positions and plans particularly regarding Iraq and Iran. Unlike too many others he didn't resort to rhetoric. He seems to have a wide base of genuine knowledge and is level headed. Call me gullible but I was quite taken to be honest.

 

I don't. Like I wrote, I'm critical of their "analysis" articles on the regular pages of the paper. They're slipping opinion into the paper where it doesn't belong.

 

Hillary Clinton isn't a socialist? Just because nobody uses the term doesn't mean "socialists" aren't around. Anybody clearly left-of-center in the US has socialist tendencies. I have my own social tendencies since I'm left-of-center on a number of issues. I don't think it is wrong to call people socialist.