Dissent, Demonstrations and Protests in socialist Venezuela are now considered Crimes Punishable by 12 to 24 Years of Jail Time......

Who can doubt for an instant that Venezuela (Hugo Chavez) isn't the number one enemy of freedom, democracy and of the United States and its allies in Latin America.

In Venezuela now, judicial authorities have announced that legal proceeding will be held against any and all citizens who for “whatever reason” march or demonstrate because these only want to disestablish the constitutionally elected government. “We want those persons who are hostile to our elected government to know the consequences of their actions.”

"It is the governments position that this type of conduct fits perfectly into the category of civil rebellion,” that Venezuelan law punishes with from 12 to 24 years of incarceration.

The stated objective of this law will be to typify anti government demonstration marches as civil rebellion

During this past month of July, governmental authorities also proposed laws against the “crimes of speech” to punish radio and TV outlets that put forth anti government programs and information that “incites hatred” and “confusion” in the general public.

The first “rebels,” according to government criteria, are already behind bars. These employees of an opposition party were detained on August 22nd for marching in protest of the recent government plan There crime was to protest the governments initiative to create a “new socialist consciousness” in the schools and universities of the country. These citizen demonstrators were accused of “obstructing traffic on public streets”, “instigating delinquency”, and “lesions against police officers.”

According to government authorities, this protest, in which thousands of Venezuelans participated, was organized by opposition parties and civil organizations to create a “climate of violence” and create similar conditions as those of the 11th and 12th of April, 2002, when a coup was put into effect that led to the removal of the de facto dictator, Hugo Chavez, for 48 hours.

These latest declarations by the Chavez government are one more step toward criminalizing all opposition to the socialist regime. Since 2007, at least 300 students have been detained because of their participation in demonstration protesting the closure of private radio and TV stations (Radio Caracas Television), and also for marching against constitutional reforms that would permit Hugo Chavez to establish his reelections indefinitely. 256 of these students were ordered to the court to report periodically to authorities, and they have been prohibited from leaving the country.

Hugo Chavez and his government lackeys have also criticized news organizations and reporters who have protested against the threats against freedom of speech in Venezuela. Two weeks ago, twelve reporters were beaten with clubs and rocks by a group of Chavistas (Hugo Chavez supporters) when they passed out leaflets in downtown Caracas critical of the new education laws and the treat of immediate closure of the communication media who would generate “terror” in children.

Chavez justified the beating of the twelve reporters because according to him, their protest was “provocative” against the people of Venezuela, and that the reporters by their own actions had become politicians. Of those responsible for the assault, only one worker for a government TV station was taken into custody but was released within the week.

It’s curious that those individuals, countries, and organizations who so vocally protest the ouster of the Honduran ALBA socialist, Manuel Zelaya, are keeping mum when human rights, freedom of speech and abuse of authority are so blatantly documented in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan socialist dictatorship.

Yes, I’m referring to leftist oriented organizations like the now OAS and UN, and those hypocritical lefist individuals such as the Castro brothers, Barack Obama, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, and Hugo Chavez himself, Etc. From these wild eyed so-called defenders of human rights we hear NOTHING, NOT A WORD about these human rights abuses in Venezuela.

These quasi democratic ALBA socialists have no credibility but unto themselves and their own kind; the head of the snake is clearly the "chafarrote" Hugo Chavez. What's scary here in the U.S. is that Obama at a recent town hall gathering called dissenters "terrorists." We are clearly on a slippery slope...

On the Job Random Urine Testing - Urine, you're out...

Like most folks in this country, I have a job; I work and my employer pays me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem). What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.

So, here is my question:

Shouldn't people asking for public assistance also have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check the same way I have to pass one to earn the money for them?

I certainly don’t have a problem with helping people get back on their feet and become productive citizens. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their ass - doing drugs, while I work and pay my taxes.

Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

It’s not that these so-called “welfare queens” are a failure in life, but rather most of them started at the bottom and apparently love it there. I'm not talking here about punishment, but rather consequences; the act of taking responsibility for oneself.

What people deem to be "their fair share" isn't in my pockets!

Gringo Crosses Illegally into Mexico for a Change...

Dear Mr. President, Senate and House of Representatives:

I'm planning to move my family and extended family (18-20 mouths) into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me.

We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. into Mexico , and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements.We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws.

I'm sure Mexican authorities can handle those things the same way you do here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, President Calderon, that I'm on my way over?

Oh, and please let him know that I will be expecting the following:


1. Free medical care for my entire family.

2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might need, whether I use them or not.

3. All Mexico government forms need to also be printed in English.

4. I want my kids to be taught Spanish by English-speaking (bi-lingual) teachers.

5. Schools need to include classes on American culture and history.

6. I want my kids to see the American flag on one of the flag poles at their school.

7. Please plan to feed my kids at school for both breakfast and lunch.

8. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easyaccess to government services.

9. I do plan to get a car and drive in Mexico, but, I don't planto purchase car insurance, and I probably won't make any special effort to learn local traffic laws.

10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memofrom their president to leave me alone, please be sure that every patrol car has at least one English-speaking officer.

11. I plan to fly the U.S. flag from my house top, put U.S. flag decals on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any complaints or negative comments from the locals.

12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes,or have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start.

13. Please have the president tell all the Mexican people to beextremely nice and never say critical things about me or my family, or about the strain might we place on their economy.

I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for all his people who come to the U.S. From Mexico. I am sure that President Calderon won't mind returning the favor if you ask him nicely.

Thank you for your kind help.

Joe Six Pack...

P.S. I voted for you.

U.S. Escalates Build-Up against ALBA Socialist Revolutions in Latin America...

The US State Department and the interim regime in Honduras have publicly stated what many of us already knew: the June 28 military coup was not just directed against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, but also Venezuela and the unfolding socialist ALBA Latin American revolution.

On July 20, US state department spokesperson Phillip Crowley said he hoped Zelaya now understood that in “choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow”, the US believes “the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model”.

“If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.”

The same day, vice foreign minister of the Honduran coup regime, Marta Alvarado, said: “Honduras is playing a very important role in the sense that the continuity or otherwise of the avalanche of the ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our Americas] countries depends on Honduras, and whether the people who are under the pressure of the ALBA countries wake up.”

ALBA, an initiative of the revolutionary Venezuelan and Cuban governments, unites nine Latin American and Caribbean countries into an anti-imperialist bloc that combines solidarity-based trade agreements with a coordinated political intervention into regional politics.

In response to the global economic crisis, the ALBA bloc has denounced the capitalist system. It has proposed radical measures that place the burden for the crisis on the capitalist elites who created it — not the workers and poor.

This revolutionary challenge is a dangerous threat to an empire in decline.

The June 28 coup in Honduras shows that, as the crisis deepens, Washington is increasingly turning to military solutions to “solve” this problem.

With two failed coup attempts so far this century (Venezuela in 2002 and Bolivia in 2008) and one successful one (Haiti in 2004), this strategy is not new. But extending this strategy is becoming more likely — and more dangerous, as military incidents threaten to spill over the borders and become a regional conflict.

Pro-imperialist governments in Latin America are aiding the US in this task.

Colombia, which in March 2008 bombed Ecuadorian territory, has just opened the door to five new US military bases on its territory. This occurred just days after the US began to move out of its base in Ecuador, from which the government of President Rafael Correa expelled it.

This move has been combined with a heightened propaganda campaign against Venezuela, not unlike the one that preceded the Iraq invasion.

Venezuela has been accused by Washington and the Honduran coup regime of “interference” in Honduras. The US Congress Foreign Relations Commission decided that Venezuela is a “narco-state” that protects guerrilla and criminal organisations.

A tampered video has been released purporting to show a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) admit they funded the election campaign of Ecuador’s Correa, whose government has joined ALBA.

Israel joined in, claiming a Hezbollah cell is now operating in Venezuela near the border with Colombia.

These are just the latest shots fired against ALBA and specifically Venezuela.

Venezuela has initiated a review of its diplomatic relations with Colombia in response to the new US bases.

Bolivia has called for ALBA to increase military integration and denounced governments that allow US bases as “traitors to the homeland”.

It is essential that there is a clear rejection of the US war drive from those within the belly of the beast. This includes Australia, whose government continues to be one of the few globally to not condemn the Honduran coup.

An important task for anti-war and anti-imperialist activists is to build a movement that can hold back US imperialism in Latin America. Immediately, this means opposing the US bases in Colombia, the disinformation campaign against Hugo Chavez the de facto socialist dictator of Venezuela and solidarity with the pro socialist groups of Honduran people.

Obama names renown socialist, Arturo Velenzuela, as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs...

To repair relations with this country’s pro Castro/Chavez ALBA Latin American neighbors, President Obama has turned to a leading socialist academic who was born and raised in South America and has studied the region his entire adult life. Arturo Valenzuela is a specialist on Chile, the origins and consolidation of democracy in Latin America, Latin American politics, and U.S.-Latin American relations. Even before his confirmation, Valenzuela became embroiled in a policy dispute over Latin American policy. In his Senate testimony, Valenzuela condemned the June 2009 so-called military coup against the elected turned socialist President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, as an “unconstitutional removal of power.” Apparently taking offense, ultra-conservative Republican Senator Jim DeMint postponed the Committee vote on Valenzuela as a way of protesting the Obama administration’s stand against the coup. Valenzuela has also been criticized by fellow anti socialist, Democratic-leaning Latin America experts.

Arturo Valenzuela was born in Concepción, Chile, in 1943, to parents who were religious missionaries. He spent his childhood in Concepción, with the exception of a year in the United States as an exchange student. Valenzuela then relocated to the United States for his higher education. He earned a B.A. in Political Science and Religion from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, in 1965, and a Doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University in 1971, where his studies focused on Latin American politics.

Among his academic positions, the two most prominent were as Professor of Political Science and Director of the Council of Latin American Studies at Duke University, which he left to become Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He continued at Georgetown through 2009. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, the University of Sussex, the University of Florence and the Catholic University of Chile.

Valenzuela debuted in politics in 1987 when, at the request of future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, he began to advise Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. In 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed Valenzuela Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs in the State Department, where his primary responsibility was policy toward Mexico. In Clinton’s second term, Valenzuela served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House. During the 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Valenzuela served as a foreign policy advisor to Hillary Clinton.

He has also been an advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has served as a consultant to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. He has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Sub-Committee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Sub-Committee on Commerce State and Justice of the House Appropriations Committee. He has been an advisor on political, electoral and constitutional reform in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia.

Valenzuela has also served on the board of directors of Drew University, the National Democratic Institue for International Affairs, the National Council of La Raza and the advisory boards of America's Watch and the Intitut des Ameriques in Paris. He is the co-author or co-editor of nine books, including Political Brokers in Chile: Local Government in Centralized Policy Teh Failure of Presidential Democracy; and A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet.

A Democrat, Valenzuela donated $16,250 to Democratic candidates and causes between 1994 and 2008, including $3,500 to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama and $2,300 to his adversary, Hillary Clinton. He is married and has two children from his first marriage.

Obama campaigned on "change" but failed to mention that his vision of change was socialism; which is a great idea 'til you run out of other people's money.

U.S. gets Third World's Bells and Whistles...

Alarming as it is, Developing World's Parasites and Diseases hit U.S... Researchers Say Infections are being Spread by Bug Bites, Larvae that Are Flourishing Along our Border and in Other Pockets of Poverty!

Parasitic infections and other diseases usually associated with the developing world are cropping up with alarming frequency among U.S. poor, especially in states along the U.S.-Mexico border, the rural South and in Appalachia, according to researchers.

Government and private researchers are just beginning to assess the toll of the infections, which are a significant cause of heart disease, seizures and congenital birth defects among black and Hispanic populations.

One obstacle is that the diseases, long thought to be an overseas problem, are only briefly discussed in most U.S. medical school classes and textbooks, so many physicians don't recognize them.

Some of the infections are transmitted by bug bites and some by animal feces contaminated with parasite larvae; still others are viral. All spread in conditions of overcrowding, malnutrition, poor sanitation and close contact with animals receiving little veterinary care.

"These are diseases that we know are ten-fold more important than swine flu," said Peter Hotez, a microbiologist at George Washington University and leading researcher in this field. "They're on no one's radar."

The insect-borne diseases -- among them, Chagas and dengue fever -- thrive in shanty towns along the Mexican border, where many homes have no window screens and where poor drainage allows standing puddles for bugs to breed. Outbreaks of a bacterial infection transmitted in rat urine have cropped up among the urban poor in Baltimore and Detroit.

Such parasites as toxocara -- shed in animal feces -- thrive in the soil and sandpits where poor children often play. There are an estimated 10,000 toxocara infections a year in the U.S. Symptoms include wheezing, fever and retinal scarring severe enough to blind.

These diseases share a common thread. "People who live in the suburbs are at very low risk," Dr. Hotez said. But for the 37 million people in the U.S. who live below the poverty line, he said, "There is real suffering."

Consider cysticercosis, caused by ingestion of tapeworm larvae. Medical journals estimate 3,500 new cases a year in the U.S., mostly among Latin American immigrants. The larvae spread through the bloodstream and can damage the heart, lungs and brain.

Several times a year, pregnant women complaining of seizures come into Jeanne Sheffield's obstetrics practice at Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas, which serves a mostly poor, Hispanic population. Dr. Sheffield orders MRIs and often finds lesions in the brain, a telltale sign of this parasitic infection.

The unpaved streets of Las Lomas in Starr County, Texas, few of its residents have full health or dental insurance. In recent years, as the immigrant population has spread, Dr. Sheffield said, cysticercosis has cropped up in states that have never had to deal with it before, including Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and Oregon. Treatment is available but complex; patients must remain on anti-seizure medicine for years.

Chagas disease, another troubling infection, begins with the innocent-sounding "kissing bug," an insect endemic in parts of Latin America and also found in across the American South, especially Texas. the top three countries contributing illegal aliens and migrants to the U.S. are: Mexico, Cuba, and El Salvador.

The bugs are often infected with a tiny protozoan parasite, which they excrete after snacking on human or animal blood. When a bite victim scratches, he may accidentally rub the parasite into his open wound -- and an infection takes hold. Chagas spreads more easily in poor rural communities where homes without window screens get infested.

Many of those ill with Chagas are immigrants or travelers who became infected elsewhere; as many as half develop complications such as cardiac inflammation that can cause heart failure.

Most blood banks in the U.S. began screening for Chagas in the past two years, as concern about the disease mounted. Hundreds of cases have been detected, with especially high rates among Hispanics in Florida and California.

Nationally, one in 30,000 potential blood donors tests positive -- yet many don't seek treatment even after they are told they have Chagas, said Susan Stramer, executive scientific officer of the American Red Cross. Many are immigrants who don't want to draw attention: "They're afraid of the consequences of finding out they're infected in the U.S," she said.

One of the few Chagas clinics in the nation is run by Sheba Meymandi, a physician at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Dr. Meymandi hits the road one weekend a month with a car full of PVC piping and lengths of cloth, which she uses to transform church sanctuaries into makeshift clinics with curtained exam rooms. At each stop, she tries to persuade Latinos to be tested.

It is a hard sell. Those who feel fine see no need to be tested for what sounds like an exotic disease. And those who have heard about Chagas have also heard that the treatment is exceptionally grueling -- three daily doses of a drug that can cause insomnia, nausea, memory loss and a possible lack of sensation in the limbs. The cure rate is about 70%.

Dr. Meymandi presses on, spurred by the reports that regularly cross her desk, such as the recent case of a 38-year-old gardener who dropped dead, his heart ruined by the parasite. "This is no longer an exotic disease," Dr. Meymandi. "It's prevalent."

Public-health experts say the first step in fighting the infections is to learn more about them. "We understand the basic biology," said Mark Eberhard, who directs the parasitic-diseases division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But we don't understand that much about the burden of these diseases."

Hoping to raise awareness -- and money for research -- the CDC is teaming with private foundations to organize a national summit this fall for doctors, nurses, community activists and politicians.

Health-care legislation pending in the House calls for a full report to Congress about the threat from this cluster of diseases, termed "neglected infections of poverty," as their consequences threaten to increase U.S. health-care costs.

Sweet'n simple... Zelaya wanted by the Law....

Honduras' Supreme Court rieterated once again that Honduran law requires ousted President Manuel Zelaya to face trial if he returns to the Central American country.

The Honduran top court is giving its opinion on a plan to solve Honduras' political crisis after Zelaya was ousted in a coup.

Zelaya's return to Honduras under a national unity government is a key provision in a plan by mediator and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. A great solution except that Honduras doesn't want the socialist SOB anywhere near the presidential palace.

Soldiers arrested Zelaya and flew him in his pajamas into exile in Costa Rica on June 28 after he ignored a Supreme Court order to cancel an illegal referendum asking Hondurans if they wanted a special assembly to rewrite the constitution which would allow Zelaya to remain in power indefinitely.

The court said Saturday that Zelaya must keep in mind the pending charges against him. It has charged him with treason and abuse of power, Etc.