Actually, just about everyone who drove past us gave us thumbs up or shouted out words of support. Also, just from polls alone one can see that support for the Iraq invasion is at an all time low. The majority of the people in this country are opposed to the war. And you few right wing extremists out there can call us crazy all you want, but more people in this country agree with us than with you. Which is probably why you're so rabid now.

Flat-earthers rejoice! There is, umm 'light
at the end of the tunnel' . . . the
insurgency is in its "last throes". . .
er- "stay the course"

Hmmm - sound familiar? (and they wonder why
the American people do not have confidence
in their nation's leaders)

Thanks for the coverage on your site, Mike,

from one who couldn't attend

Bush is a 'coward'




CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez called U.S. President George W. Bush a "coward," a "donkey" and a "drunkard" Sunday, unleashing a torrent of insults days after Bush labelled him a demagogue.

Chavez also said world opinion is turning against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and offered a public prayer that Washington cease to pose a threat to the world.

"I'm going to tell you something Mr. Danger: You are a coward, do you know that?" Chavez said, referring to Bush. "Why don't you go to Iraq to command your armed forces? It's very easy to command them from so far away."

In his national security report issued Thursday, Bush said: "In Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the region."

The 49-page report touched only briefly on Venezuela, listing the situation in the country among regional challenges that "demand the world's attention."

On Sunday, in his harshest words for Bush in months, Chavez also called the U.S. president "a donkey" - which Venezuelans use as a synonym for "idiot" - and "a drunkard."

"You are a donkey, Mr. Bush," said Chavez, speaking in English during his weekly television and radio program, Hello President.

"You're an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you're a drunkard."

Videos showing children at peace demonstrations, U.S. soldiers in combat, and footage of a recent antiwar protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Caracas were broadcast after Chavez condemned the war.

"The world is opposed to your war, Mr. Danger," said Chavez who hosted the program from Venezuela's sun-baked plains.

Relations between Caracas and Washington have been tense in recent months. U.S. officials have voiced concerns over the health of Venezuela's democracy, and Chavez has accused the United States of conspiring to topple him or invade his country to take control of its oil industry.

Pass the kool-aid. BTW do any of you have real jobs? I mean, whereby you really create or produce something for society?

Sure do! I work at the AFL-CIO. How 'bout you?

A job that encourages sickness in our society, but thanks to afl-cio organizing, the boss has to sacrifice a lot his profit unto us for our time here.

It's a pathetic existence when one feels a job is living life.

"whereby you really create or produce something for society?" Wah Wah Wah,- anonymous crybaby. Whereby did Bush destroy half a trillion dollars and kill a hundred thousand people (kill as in dead).

To the earlier author who quoted Hugo Chavez:

I don't think Hugo Chavez is someone that should be quoted and, in the process, implicitly held up as an ally of or speaker for the left.

We're talking a political leader who has a history of getting and holding power through resisting transparent democratic elections. A leader who has a dismal human rights record. A leader who puts out rhetoric of helping the poor and working class, but who then turns around attacks trade unions and labor.

He's an authoritarian military thug who decorates his regime's corruption, violence, and repression with opportunistic rants against the US.

Quoting Chavez in this context lends credibility to someone who deserves none, and it discredits the peace and social justice movement to be seen as looking toward Chavez as an ally.

Care to support these characterizations with examples?

Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela
By Juan Forero
Published: March 21, 2006
March 21, 2006
CARACAS, Venezuela — The actor Danny Glover has come. Harry Belafonte has also been here. So has the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent African-American writer Cornel West and Bolivia's new president, Evo Morales.


American tourists walk past a mural in Caracas, Venezuela.
Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
A student from an American university photographed residents of a Caracas neighborhood during a visit to Venezuela, a new leftist mecca.

But most visitors are like Cameron Durnsford, a 24-year-old student from Australia who decided to study at a new government-financed university in Caracas. Mr. Durnsford was, admittedly, put off some by the cult of celebrity around President Hugo Chávez, which he says "seems a little bit Maoist." But Venezuela's revolution, he quickly added, was not to be missed.



"You've got a nation and a leader trying to prove an alternative to neo-liberalism and the policies that have ravaged Latin America for 20 years," he said. "That's why people are coming here. There's a sense that it's a moment in history."

Mr. Chávez is decidedly unpopular with the Bush administration, which he has branded a terrorist regime out to get him. That antagonism, coupled with Mr. Chávez's huge oil-generated outlays for social spending, is drawing a following from all over and turning Caracas into the new leftist mecca.

Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana 20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers and 1970's-era hippies — a new generation of Sandalistas, as some call them.

Some, including many Americans, have come to stay. But others come for a new brand of revolutionary tourism organized by the government or by private groups.

Venezuela welcomes them all, but rolls out the red carpet for high-profile visitors like Mr. Belafonte, the 79-year-old singer and activist.

In January, he led an American delegation that included Mr. Glover, Mr. West and Dolores Huerta, the farm workers' advocate. They met with Mr. Chávez, toured a neighborhood and visited government-run programs promoted as a way to shift the country's oil wealth to the poor.

"We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your revolution," Mr. Belafonte told Mr. Chávez during the president's weekly television program. He called President Bush, a constant target of Mr. Chávez's barbs, "the greatest terrorist in the world." Then he shouted, "Viva la revolución!"

Other recent visitors have included the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Ollanta Humala, a leading candidate in the election for president in Peru on April 9; the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and the Argentine Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

For less well-known Americans, the new vacation trail no longer goes through the famed beaches of Margarita Island. Rather, groups like Global Exchange, based in San Francisco, take visitors who pay $1,300 on a two-week jaunt through the tumbledown barrios where support for Mr. Chávez is strongest.

The tours include visits to literacy classes, cooperatives and government-financed media outlets. Visitors chat with government ministers, see "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a documentary favorable to Mr. Chávez, and meet with state oil company officials, who explain how petrodollars are funneled to social programs.

Among the speakers who have met with visitors is Eva Golinger, a New York lawyer who is dedicated to unearthing what she claims is evidence of Washington's support for Venezuelan opposition groups, something the Bush administration has denied.

Americans like Pat Morris, 62, from Chestnut Hill, Mass., who never had a good impression of the Bush administration, are usually left speechless. "I thought that our current government was lying and greedy, but I had no idea of the long-term investment in destabilizing the country," she said, tears in her eyes after hearing Ms. Golinger speak.

Reva Batterman, 27, a graduate student, said she had wanted to come to Venezuela to show its people that "we're not all just Bush supporters or imperialists."

"I wish the people in the U.S. would try to understand Hugo Chávez," she said.

Not everyone is as enamored. Julio Borges, an opposition politician, said that while Mr. Chávez certainly had showered aid on the poor, he was also a strongman out to crush dissent.

Instead of lionizing him, Mr. Borges said, visitors should be aware of government ineptitude and growing abuses, like attacks on the press, charges the government denies.

"We always tell people who come with this romantic idea of Venezuela that despite the changes here, the people who carry out the transformation are the armed forces, that Venezuelan democracy is basically a militarized one," he said. "You have to have a profound concern about that. We want to take off the democratic veil the government uses."

Referring to American visitors, an American diplomat in Caracas, who could not speak on the record because of embassy rules, echoed the concerns, saying, "Come down here and get your consciousness raised, absolutely." He added, "My only request of them is that they try to get the other side of the story."



A "reality tour" stops by a Caracas radio station covered with murals of Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar.
Emily Kurland, a 26-year-old social worker originally from Chicago, said that was exactly what she and the others here were getting.

"They're frustrated with Bush, frustrated with not being listened to, frustrated with Iraq," said Ms. Kurland, speaking in the Caracas house she shares with several foreigners. "They don't trust Fox News. They don't trust the mainstream news. They want to see with their own eyes what's happening here."

She came to Venezuela thinking she would stay just long enough to get a taste for Mr. Chávez's grandly titled "Bolivarian revolution." A year later, she said, she has no plans to leave anytime soon.

She has taught English in government-financed classes for the poor and talks about volunteering at a state-run microcredit bank for women. She spends most of her time, though, leading tours for Americans who flock here for a look at how Mr. Chávez is changing his country.

There is a precedent, of course: Fidel Castro's revolution, which in its early years placed emphasis on "people to people" contacts that enhanced support among vocal members of the American body politic, while neutralizing opponents.

Activists, intellectuals and leftists have gravitated to other governments, from Allende's Socialist Chile in the early 1970's to Sandinista-run Nicaragua in the 1980's, which also declared ambitions to overturn the old order in their countries.

"Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Chile at one point became the mecca for many leftists around the world," said Fernando Coronil, a University of Michigan professor and the author of "The Magical State," a book about Venezuela. "That has been capitalized upon by the governments of these places, in eliciting foreign support but also as a way of focusing on certain elements of foreign policy that have wide appeal, and not focusing on internal problems."

Some of the people who have visited Venezuela or have moved here acknowledge having some doubts. Chesa Boudin, 25, a New Yorker who has worked as a volunteer here, notes that some on the left glorify Mr. Chávez simply because he has positioned himself as the anti-Bush leader in Latin America.

But Mr. Boudin, one of the authors of a book favorable to Venezuela's government, said many people who had been dismayed by the advance of globalization saw the possibility of a better world in Venezuela.

"The fact that we have a country that's trying to create an alternative model is bold and ambitious and unique, and that's why people are wondering, 'Is this possible?' " said Mr. Boudin, whose parents, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the 1970's radical group the Weathermen. "The intellectual in me is curious."

Perhaps nothing so illustrates the intertwining of Mr. Chávez's rhetoric about serving the poor and the government's policies as the three-year-old Bolivarian University, which offers free tuition to its mostly poor student body.

Jerome Le Guinio, 23, from France, came a year ago and works in the university's administration. He lives in Catia, a poor neighborhood where support for Mr. Chávez is solid. "The idea is to find an alternative," he said, "and if you don't find it in Venezuela, you won't find it anywhere else."

Under this administration's watch, Iraq has become a training ground and launching pad for international terrorism, North Korea has likely quadrupled its nuclear arsenal, bin Laden remains on the loose, terror attacks across the world are on the rise, and Katrina exposed the staggering gaps in the administration's ability to protect America

As someone asked another poster earlier: do you care to provide some sort of proof?

Quick thoughts:

1- Any terrorists operating in Iraq are targetting coalition forces within Iraq. Not exactly international terrorism.

2- Making unfounded assumtions about the RNK without evidence only makes you look like an idiot.

3- Bin Laden has been a threat for decades, one that Clinton had several opportunities to take out, but he was too damned spineless to order the shot. At least this President is trying to do something about the bastard besides bomb a drug factory and call it a "decisive action."

4- There has not been a terrorist incident within the US since 9/11. What do you attribute this to? Luck? And this President cannot protect America? Please. Terrorist incidents have been on the rise since the 70's. Get a new action line.

5- Katrina <i>did</i> expose weaknesses in government, from the local mayor to the state of LA to FEMA to the DoHS. But the weakness and basic uselessness of FEMA are not news to anyone who has dealt with them in the past. Having lived in FL (born and raised there) most of my life I rode out about a dozen hurricanes, 3 of them major. Not once did FEMA react in a timely manner. No one raised hell after Hurricane Andrew destroyed Homestead and FEMA took a week to get in there. Not once did anyone say anything about FEMA's slow response to Hurricane Opal (8 days). Not once did anyone say anything about the inept and pitiful FEMA response when Ivan wiped out the better part of the west coast and panhandle areas of FL. That's because the state had a plan and activated it as soon as the storm was gone. My point is, FEMA is there to hand out money. It is the state's job to manage the crisis until FEMA can get in and start getting things rebuilt. Read up on it.

Once again, the "hate Bush" action line is getting old. Get some evidence, quit drinking the Kool-Aid, and think before you say something stupid.