So far, two students have been killed and some three dozen injured in nationwide protests against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' closure of opposition cable TV stations.

Some 3,000 protesters came into the streets of Caracas in a relatively peaceful march to denounce what might be the temporary closure of cable network RCTV.

In 2007, the popular network had its broadcast license lifted by Chavez. Though it was known primarily for very commercial soap operas and game shows, RCTV was politically aligned with Chavez' opposition. After laying off half its employees, the network shifted all of its operations to pay-for-cable.

Chavez, however, came up with a new law which demanded that even private, pay channels on cable carry his usual five hour Sunday blabfest called "Alo, Presidente!"  When RCTV refused to comply it was shuttered today along with five other cable channels, including TV Chile. This comes in the wake of Chavez shutting down some 150 other radio stations throughout the country.

CNN

Last week at UCSD, I was able to spend the day with a group of visiting journalists from Latin America. Among them was an editor of Tal Cual, a center-left opposition paper in Venezuela. He told me that even Chavez supporters have grown weary of a president who sticks his mug on all available channels all day every Sunday to rant, curse, sing, recite poetry, and tell bawdy jokes while promising a Red Socialist Dawn.  Imagine forking out $35 bucks a month for cable and still having to watch him!

Only the most retarded among us would deny that Chavez is well on his way to constructing a "legal" dictatorship. His censorious ways deserve no apology or justification (though I am sure we will hear them anyway).

Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch, accused the president of cracking down on independent media that don't share his socialist views.

"Chavez has sought to intimidate and punish broadcasters who criticize his government," Vivanco said in a statement. "Now he's also going after those who refuse to promote his own political agenda."

Quite a nice spectacle being staged by Chavez supporters who have physically blockaded some universities which are seen as incubators of protest (Why not invade the campuses and burn their books as well?).

Today's protests come against the backdrop of a more generalized crisis for Chavez. He just devalued the currency and his VP has mysteriously resigned. Oh yeah, there's also been growing electrical blackouts, and some big time corruption scandals. In September there are new elections for the Congress which is now 100% pro-Chavez as the opposition was too stupid to run a slate last time around. This time around it is going to be very different, I assure you. There's even some speculation that Chavez might lose control of the legislative body which has been a shameless rubber stamp.

P.S. Then again, this whole anti-Chavez protest thing might just be a U.S.-engineered show. After all, Chavez-controlled media last week claimed that the Haiti earthquake was caused by U.S. weapons programs.

Here's one difference between the Clinton and Obama administrations.  The former capitulated to the idea of downsizing government immediately after the catastrophic defeat in the mid-term elections.  The latter now seems inclined toward making the capitulation nine months earlier in order to insure a mid-term catastrophe.

I was never very good in math but I am waiting for someone who is to explain the following to me: How can Obama simultaneously promise to increase aid to the middle-class while vowing to impose an across the board three year spending freeze (and not piss off his own base as a topper?).

Excuse me if I don't buy into the conventional wisdom but I don't believe for one moment a majority of Americans care very deeply at all about the size of the budget deficit let alone even know what it is (it certainly didn't keep them from re-electing drunker spender GW Bush in 2004).

What Americans DO care about is spending a trillion dollars on big banks and not seeing anything concrete to improve their lives.  Allow me to be a minority one and suggest that Obama should actually double the current mind-bending deficit and unload $900 billion in a public works program, immediately putting 5 million people to work with little orange vests and hard hats with his picture on it.

Everywhere we turn we should see crews of subsidized government construction crews rebuilding country and boosting the economy. Do that and only Ron Paul will be left burping about the deficit.

Come back, Bill Clinton. Might as well have you in office for the entertainment value.

*** UPDATE: Krugman calls Obama's spending freeze self-liquidation.

Evidently there is and never was any Plan B.

A week after the Mass. earthquake, the Democrats are still dazed and stumbling around in the rubble, looking skyward for a parachute drop of CARE packages.

Or better said, health care packages.

I'm no political genius, I assure you, but even I knew a full 3 weeks or so before last week's by-election that the Republicans could win Kennedy's seat. Didn't anyone make anti-filibuster contingency plan?

So after a year of dithering, deal making, capitulations, sell-outs and chaotic backsliding in Congress -- enough to sicken the American people and turn a majority of them against reform-- we now have a week of post-election stupor marked by Dems saying "huh? I dunno."  Keep this up and support for HCR will be driven down into single digits.

Perhaps, this official fecklessness and listlessness will be galvanized and turned around in this week's state of the union address. Or maybe not.  But with every passing day we see the gross incapacity of the Democrats to lead and govern.

That makes TWO completely dysfunctional major parties. Lucky us.

P.S. I love this piece.  A nice little report on how the congressional dysfunction seeps right down into the, um, progressive "think tanks."  At least they got the tank part right.

The Supreme Court has lifted all limits on corporate expenditures in political campaigns gutting the 2002 McCain-Feingold laws.

This would include spending by foreign corporations as well. Absolutely no limit or regulation.

This is what conservative "change" looks like -- giveaways to the wealthiest.

And, of course, thank heavens we don't have an activist bench that legislates.

I'm going on a three day work retreat tomorrow. Hope there's something left when I get back.

I'm not going to waste your time speculating on what is or is not going to happen in the wake of Scott Brown's election. As I suggested in my previous post, I suspect it will be not very much at all... that we may be condemned to another decade of political stasis and continuing dysfunction and decline.

I do want to comment, however, on one aspect of this spectacle. Driving through the rain Wednesday night and listening to C-SPAN radio, I heard a press conference of House Republicans whose names I did not not bother to commit to memory and it was like listening to a transmission from Mars.  Instead of rightfully limiting their boasting to having staged a stunning upset in a very Blue state, they were instead sounding off like they had just won some sort of landslide national election and were now wielding power.  It was all about how Obama now had to "listen to the people;" how the Democrats now had to negotiate their legislative agenda with what sounded like a GOP majority (the same GOP who locked the Dems out when they controlled Congress).

I'm sorry, but this is nothing short of delusional.

The Republican victory Tuesday is significant. It is an ominous warning to the White House and the Democrats.

But it was not a national victory let alone some sort of national landslide.

Indeed, it's the Democrats and Barack Obama who overwhelmingly trounced the Republicans last year. And it is the Democrats who still command a huge legislative majority -- if not the 60 Senate votes to overcome the undemocratic, archaic and purely obstructionist Republican series of filibusters.

The Republicans have no majority and they have no mandate and the Democrats have NO obligation to cede them an inch of territory. No obligation because the Republicans have NO program for health care, NO program for jobs, NO program for economic recovery, NO program for tighter regulatory control of banks, NO program for combating climate change. NO program whatsoever except to meet the demands of the lobbyists and elite special interests that underwrite their transparent charades as "populists."

The Democrats have totally fucked up this first year of Obama. But the Republicans who interpret yesterday's vote as a sea change in their favor are destined to face even greater catastrophes than the Democrats.

The one truth uttered by the nattering talking heads I heard tonight was, in fact, that Obama should listen to the message being sent by the American people. That message is that they wanted change and didn't get any.

It's Obama's move now. He either enables that change in a serious way or he wallows.  Let the Republicans celebrate this victory as vigorously as possible as I seriously doubt the American people are ready in any significant way to turn back the clock and bring back to power a party of zombies.

In the end, Scott Brown's victory will be noted by historians as the event that cut off the road to universal health care for Americans.

Quite a legacy. Quite an honor.  What did you do in the war, Daddy?

So there goes Mass of all places and, with it, perhaps health care. And maybe the Obama presidency. Or maybe not.

Here are a quick few conclusions I draw from this spectacle:

-- We knew all along that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 owed in great part to rejection of George W. Bush and a bankrupt Republican Party more than it did to a pro-active love for Democrats.

-- The election of Barack Obama did not heal the racial divide in America. He merely and temporarily bridged it because he was, indeed, an inspiring alternative to the crumb-bum Bushies (and that includes a dottering McCain and a wacky Palin).  But as soon as elected and the shine was off, the racial divide widened up again led by those strange creatures known as "independents" ( i.e. basically conservative white folks who look upon politics the way hotel guests view room service).

-- Once in power, the Democrats garishly demonstrated their inability not only to enact meaningful, swift and profound reform but also revealed a basic inability to provide leadership on any major issue.

-- The person of Barack Obama remains one of great integrity and intelligence but he has clearly erred in too closely following a Clintonista strategy embodied in such dubious characters as Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.

-- Obama conceded way too much power to a feckless and literally corrupt Congress. He pandered to such dolts as Baucus and Lieberman instead of going to the Hill early on and sternly warning his delegation that he was elected on a mandate of real change and real change is what he wanted and wanted NOW.

-- The principal cause of the Democratic defeat tonight and in previous by-elections has nothing to do, whatsoever, with Obama trying to do too much, moving the party too far to the left (as the mindless pundits argue) nor in any specific policy decision per se. It owes primarily to a 10% unemployment rate ( really a 17% rate) and tremendous economic insecurity and fear. The economic recovery program was, in fact, a necessary evil for which Obama gets too little credit.  But it was insufficient and has done little to nothing to touch the lives of ordinary Americans.

-- The wallowing around of congressional Democrats and the lack of clear strategic leadership on the part of the White House opened the door to the absurdity of a zombie-fied and discredited Republican Party being able to pose as the challengers to the economic elites. Rather fantastic. But not wholly baffling. After all, when you cut the sort of deals that the Dems have with Wall Street and Big Pharma like those we have seen the past year, it makes it all too easy for the Republicans to look like pitchfork populists.

-- He might be a font of conventional wisdom but this time around Howard Fineman hit it out of the park when he said: "Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus." Amen.

-- This isn't the end of the world as we know it, but it's a 7.0 political earthquake.  Please don't mistake me for someone who gives two s...s about the Democrats. I gave up on them 'round about 1965. But I do deeply resent that they make me and everyone else around here live in a country that can't meet its great potential and that must suffer the further indignity of spending most our time living under Republican rule.

-- My best guess is that the Democrats will now fold on health care. The House might pass the Senate bill as is, which would be better than nothing, but I doubt there is enough political courage to go forward. After the euphoria of last year's election it might be hard to believe that exactly one year after Obama's inauguration the Democrats will give up the ship. Yet, that is exactly where the smart money should be tonight.

-- The only succor I get from this debacle is that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the DNC have perfectly met my dismal expectations. It's an unfortunate way to be right. But better it is to be validated than to be heart-broken.

-- Josh Marshall, bless his soul, has offered up in quick and dirty form, a proposed way forward for Barack Obama.  It's a nice idea:

The central problem the president is laboring under is the fact that the economy remains in a shambles. And unemployment remains at a toxic 10%. Beyond that though the Democrats are suffering because they have shown voters an image of fecklessness and inability to deliver results at a moment of great public anxiety and suffering. Big changes provoke great anxiety, especially in such a divided society. But Democrats are not just having dealing with the ideological divisions in the country -- which is what the Tea Party movement is about. They're also losing a big swathe of the population that is losing faith that the Democrats can govern, that they can even deliver on the reforms and policies they say are necessary for the national good. As I wrote earlier, this is about meta-politics. If the Democrats, either from the left or the right, walk away from reform, they will get slaughtered in November. They'll get it from the people who want reform, from the people who never wanted reform and from sensible people all over who just think they can't get anything done.

What the Democrats -- and a lot of this is on the White House -- have done is get so deep into the inside game of legislative maneuvering, this and that 'gang' of senators and a lot of other nonsense that they've let themselves out of sync with the public mood and the people's needs.

The president needs to find way to say, we've heard you. We've gotten so focused on working the Washington channels to get this thing done that we've lost a sense of the public's mood and urgency. Well, we've heard you. We're going to stop playing around and get this thing done. And then we're going to work on getting Americans back to work. We know the urgency of the moment and we know you expect results.

I've written this quickly. I would not consider it a polished version of anything the president should say. But I think the gist is right. This is the biggest testing time the president has yet faced. It could be a key turning point in his presidency. Over the next forty-eight hours the president is going to come under withering pressure to walk away from reform. It'll come from the left and the right, and in various different flavors. It will come from shocking directions. The president is going to have to find a way to say, No. We're doing this. He'll need to stand down a lot of cowardly and foolish people in his own party. He'll have to stand down the vast and formless force of establishment punditry and just say, No. We're going to do this. And he's going to have to make the case to the public, not necessarily convince all those who have doubts about health care reform but make clear that he thinks this is the right direction for the country and that he's going to make it happen.

We'll see. Meantime, I would be buying some health insurance corporate stock.

Good News for CNN!

After days of abject non-cooperation, some of the poorest, most desperate. most God-foresaken people on earth start fighting over candles right in front of the cameras. Can you imagine such barbaric lawlessness.

"Robbers...Looters!"

Whoopee!

But have no worry. Anderson Cooper comes to the rescue!

Not only does he save an "American businessman" who clearly wanted the candles so he could sell them (instead of the looters selling them), AC also saves a bloodied little boy.

Actually, AC really didn't do very much. He did what any decent human would do. I give him credit for that much. But then, cameras rolling, he tells the bleeding, battered little boy he is now "OK" and then, according to his blog, hands him over to a stranger and "hopes he's OK." No time to stop the show and make the sure kid gets any significant help.

This is what we mean by "disaster porn."

P.S. What we really need to do is airlift a joint AIG/Goldman-Sachs team into Haiti so they can show those primitive, violent young men much more sophisticated manners of mass looting. Wielding sticks and throwing bricks is just SOOOO Third World.

P.P.S.  Here are some questions that occur to me that it would be nice to have answered by some of these hero journalists:

-- Five days after this catastrophe just exactly WHO has boxes of candles still for sale rather than having given them away?

-- What sort of business is "Tony" the American businessman in?

-- Where did he get the AK-47's?

-- What's the deal with foreign shop owners privately arming the Haitian police?

-- Are the comments underneath AC's blog for real? Who are these folks that write such treacle?

Through the bedazzling technology of my new iPhone app -- FuggedFuture-- I am able to advance you an exclusive photo of what the U.S. Senate will look like 24 hours from now. Astounding, no?

The betting line on tomorrow's by-election Senatorial race in Massachusetts is now hovering at 3 to 1 in favor of the GOP.  None other than liberal odds-maker Nate Silver rates Republican conservative Scott Brown as a 74% favorite.  Says Silver of the chances of Democratic nominee and current fill-in for Dead Teddy Martha Coakley:

Overall, while I would probably take Coakley's side of a 3:1 wager, her situation looks to be increasingly difficult. She is basically relying upon getting solid turnout from a "silent majority" of voters who have done little to make themselves seen and heard. We know that there are a huge number of potential such voters in Massachusetts, which remains a very blue state and which until the past three weeks had not behaved unusually in any obvious way. But the pollsters are no longer seeing and hearing from them.

Silver also explains why there is a slim chance she might pull it out. But 3 to 1 sounds like a yummy bet to me.

The probable outcome is somewhat less appetizing.  But a Republican victory tomorrow would, indeed, be the mass roosting of all those frenzied chickens.  I never have a problem blaming the electorate for some dumb choices. That's a given, however, in politics. And if and when the Democrats lose their 60th seat tomorrow, they will have absolutely no one to blame but themselves.

Granted, this comes from a fairly conservative source, but the crux of this report on Coakley's recent fundraiser with a pack of corporate lobbyists is pretty damning.

Of course, the Coakley debacle runs much deeper than your usual K-Street fund raiser. Bob Kuttner lays it on pretty thick on the more generalized failure of the Democrats over the past year, failures that now seem destined to crest in tomorrow's voting.

Losing that Senate seat ain't gonna be no joke. It will be the end to what was already the tenuous 60 vote Democratic majority in the Senate. It will mean, at best, that we will get the worst health care possible (the one already passed by the Senate which the House will have to adopt word for word). Just as likely it will mean the demise of any such bill as Blue Dog Dems (and others in the House), spooked by Coakley's loss, head for the hills.

I suppose this will be good news for Dennis Kucinich and Jane Hamsher as they will now have their chance to "start over again." And they will have plenty of time to do it.  Maybe like 15 or 20 years, if we are lucky.

I am not going waste my breath here detailing just what a pathetic pack of fools the Democrats are. I believe that will all be self-evident 5 minutes after the polls close tomorrow night.

For the first time since 1958. the Chilean right-wing  won a presidential election Sunday. Conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera edged out a 52-48% win over the candidate of the ruling center-left coalition Eduardo Frei.

Frei had served previously as President slightly more than a decade ago.

Pinera's victory came as no surprise to anyone as Frei scored a miserable 30% of the vote in a three-way first round of voting last month. The non-conservative vote was split in two as independent and youthful candidate Marco Enriquez Oninami took 20% of the votes in that round after breaking with the official government coalition (and a a second breakaway candidate took another 7%).

There are few politicians as dour and uninspiring as Frei who wound up serving as a powerful magnet for significant voter fatigue with the Christian Democrat/Socialist "concertacion" alliance which has governed Chile since the transition to civilian rule in 1991.  Outgoing president and Socialist Party member Michele Bachelet has racked up an astounding 80% popularity rating but none of that charm could be transferred to the threadbare candidacy of Frei.

As one-time translator to Chilean President Salvador Allende who was overthrown and killed himself in General Pinochet's 1973's coup, you might expect me to be hysterical over Pinera's victory.

I'm not.

If ever a political coalition deserved defeat it was the "concertacion."  While it should be credited with stewarding the democratic political transition after Pinochet lost his own plebiscite twenty years ago, from the outset it showed excessive cowardice in moving Chile far enough and fast enough away from the legacy of the dictatorship. It virtually punted on all human rights issues. It never thoroughly "de-nazified" the Armed Forces and police. It more or less maintained in place Pinochet's savage free-market economic policies (though in these past few years Bachelet finally moved toward some visible social reform). And it, quite obviously, failed to inspire a significant governing majority to keep itself in power. So, adios.

Pinera is rather a stereotypical Chilean "momio" --or mummy-- as the conservative right is called. Of pure European blood (take a look at the pic), the owner of the Chilean national airlines, some important media and other huge business interests, he quite literally shuttles around and over the slums and marginal neighborhoods of Santiago in hes personal helicopter.  Nice.

While he claims to have against retaining Pinochet in power in the plebiscite of 1988, he is, nevertheless, deeply entwined in the roots of the Chilean right-wing and had been a key ally of the dictator.  Pinera now claims to be part of the "New Right" which has boldly pushed forward a populist economic program, filling the void left wide open by the tepid reformists who have been in power for the last two decades. Indeed, while Pinera and the Chilean Right have total dominion over the cushiest elite neighborhoods, they also register pockets of strength in some of the poorest barrios of Santiago.

I suspect that very, very little will change due to Pinera's election. In the end, his policies are little different than those who govern now. He will also face a Senate controlled by what will become his opposition. And he has no clear majority in the lower chamber of the Chilean congress. Rather ironically, just at the moment that the Right returns to the presidency for the first time in 52 years, so does the Chilean Communist Party return to elected seats in Congress after a long absence. Good luck to Pinera on that score.

While I am not terrified or even upset by Pinera's victory I can hardly be pleased. Mostly I am curious to see how this re-ordering of Chilean politics will shake out.  Pinera will have quite an internecine fight on his hands as more extreme elements of the Chilean right will clamor for a piece of the pie -- something he might be reluctant to dish out (just like in American elections it's now the so-called moderate independents who hold the electoral key in Chile). Likewise, Frei's defeat tonight marks the formal death of the ruling concertacion - an ungodly mix that should have perished a long time ago.

For the average Chilean virtually nothing will change because of the election. But the entire political establishment will be shaken to its foundations. The frankly fascist elements among the Chilean right (of which there is no shortage) are due for a big let-down when and if they find their aspirations blunted by the more pragmatic Pinera. And, likewise, what has laughingly called itself the Chilean Left, primarily the Socialist Party, will now have to completely re-assess its posture and position after this historic defeat. As to the "centrist" (read center-right) Christian Democrats, the best we can hope for is that they follow the example of their Italian cousins and disappear from the map. The Christian Dems played a dastardly role in egging on and inititally supporting the 1973 coup only to soon find themselves outlawed like everyone else. Then Christian Democratic leader Eduardo Frei, father of the current defeated candidate by the same name and himself a former president, wound up getting poisoned to death in 1981 by the same dictatorship he helped enable.

Strange world we live in.

From USC Annenberg. There's still time to join in today.

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