Boyacá Chicó today won the Colombian first division football title beating América de Cali 4-2 on penalty kick after the game ended 1-1. Normally, I wouldn’t post on which teams win local championships and had América won the title I would not have written about it all. Perhaps because I root for América’s arch-rival, el Deportivo Cali but really I think the significance of Boyacá Chicó winning the title is what should celebrated because it says a lot about the new Colombia.

Until the 1990s, Colombian football was one division composed of the traditional clubs from around the country. There were two teams from Bogotá, two teams from Medellín, two teams from Cali plus one each from Barranquilla, Manizales, Santa Marta, Armenia, Pereira, Bucaramanga, Ibagué, and Cúcuta. In the past 15 years, a second division has been added and the number of teams has doubled bringing professional football to smaller regional capitals as well as adding new teams in the major urban centers. Bogotá and Cali each gained one more club and the Medellín suburb of Enviagado also received its own club. But smaller cities like Pasto, Villaciencio, Cartagena, Rio Negro, Tuluá, Barrancabermeja, Giradot, Caucasia, Neiva, Valledupar and Tunja all gained teams. Some of these are really small cities — Caucasia has less than 60,000 people. In short, as Colombia’s political regimen has been decentralized, so too has Colombian football. It reflects the opening that has taken place.

Boyacá Chicó is the team from Tunja, the capital of the Boyacá department and a city of 160,000. The other differentiating factor about Boyacá Chicó is that it is only Colombian football team that is publically traded. You can buy its shares on the Bogotá stock exchange. Most other Colombian clubs are social clubs, privately held by its members. You buy a share to join the club (tickets are extra) but being a member gets you preferred seating plus access to each club’s facility which are like country clubs. You can go work out, hang out by the Olympic sized pool or take a steam at the club’s facilities and socialize with the players and coaching staff.

Boyacá Chicó becomes the second of these new clubs to win a championship. Deportivo Pasto won a title in 2006. What is even more impressive is that Boyacá Chicó was founded in 2002 originally in Bogotá but the team moved to Tunja in 2005. It also has the smallest payroll of any first division club, 4,000 million Colombian pesos or about 2.3 million USD compared to clubs with over 20,000 million Colombian pesos in annual payroll (1 USD = 1,980 Colombian Pesos). I love it when small payroll teams win.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

In the past months, I have blogged rather extensively on the food crisis and the relationship to the growth of biofuels (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). In the context of the G8 meeting, the correlation between biofuel growth, poverty and hunger / food scarcity is again at the forefront of the discussions. As Ashley Seager puts it in the Guardian,

“The G8’s push for greater biofuel use has been a significant factor in driving 760 million people into food insecurity and putting them at risk of hunger in the past two years, ActionAid says today.

Released before next week’s G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, the charity’s report, Cereal Offenders, says the 82% rise in food commodity prices since 2006 has directly pushed 260 million people into risk of hunger as a result of the rich world’s drive for biofuels.”
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I am getting the feeling that Senator Obama is in over his head. The amount of corrections or follow-ons to his misstatements is dizzying. On July 3rd, Obama granted Relevant, a Christian magazine, a brief interview (funny, he wouldn’t sit with the major Gay media but an obscure Cincinnati-based Christian rag he finds the time). In that interview which I covered in a post entitled Backtracking with Barack: Abortion, Obama shifted yet again his position on late-term abortion procedures by seeming to exclude a women’s psychological distress as a valid cause for an abortion. And so we come to another edition of backtracking with Barack. From the Baltimore Sun:

Sen. Barack Obama clarified his position today on mental-health exceptions to late-term abortions, saying he supports such exceptions and that comments he made during a recent magazine interview shouldn’t be interpreted as opposing them.

As I wrote in an earlier posting, Obama raised eyebrows with an interview in Relevant magazine in which he said he opposed “mental distress” as a reason for aborting a fetus at or after roughly 22-weeks into a pregnancy, a so-called late-term abortion.

In saying that, it appeared that Obama was placing himself at odds with Roe v Wade and subsequent Supreme Court rulings which have upheld the constitutionality of mental-health exceptions.

But in a press availabilty on his campaign plane today on the flight from Butte, Mont. to St. Louis, Obama clarified what he meant.

Here’s a transcript of the interchange as provided by the campaign.

Reporter: You said that mental distress shouldn’t be a reason for late-term abortion?

Obama: “My only point is this — historically I have been a strong believer in a women’s right to choose with her doctor, her pastor and her family. And it is ..I have consistently been saying that you have to have a health exception on many significant restrictions or bans on abortions including late-term abortions.

In the past there has been some fear on the part of people who, not only people who are anti-abortion, but people who may be in the middle, that that means that if a woman just doesn’t feel good then that is an exception. That’s never been the case.

I don’t think that is how it has been interpreted. My only point is that in an area like partial-birth abortion having a mental, having a health exception can be defined rigorously. It can be defined through physical health, It can be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases. It is not just a matter of feeling blue. I don’t think that’s how pro-choice folks have interpreted it. I don’t think that’s how the courts have interpreted it and I think that’s important to emphasize and understand.”

According to Linda Douglass, the Obama campaign’s senior spokesperson, the senator from Illinois was making a distinction in the magazine interview between medically diagnosed mental illness and the kind of mental distress that an unwanted pregnancy causes many a pregnant mother.

“Mental distress is not an illness.” Douglass said. “He absolutely believes and has always said there has to be a health exception for serious physical and mental illness.”

That makes sense and conforms to the senator’s co-sponsorship of the Freedom of Choice Act legislation which, among other things, would codify a mental-health exception to late-term abortion prohibitions.

The problem for the senator was when he appeared to be making a clear demarcation between physical and mental health in his magazine interview by saying:

Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term…

He clearly needed to add one more thought to that statement. He did it today.

The problem for the Senator is that he is inexperienced. The problem for the Senator is that he has no core convictions to call his own. The problem for the Senator is that with just about every utterance he turns someone off because he tried to be all things to all people and that’s a dangerous game to play in politics because in the end you’ll be seen as just as another empty suit, which is, of course, what he is.

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If I have waited for this day for years, I can only imagine what it must feel like to be Rafael Nadal today. Nothing against Roger Federer who ranks among the greats of all time but frankly watching Roger play is usually less than thrilling. Today, however, it was a match for the ages and recalled previous epic battles on Centre Court. I only wish I had seen it live. Rafael Nadal ended Roger Federer’s five-year Wimbledon reign with a 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7 victory in a rain-delayed match that stretched for nearly five hours. Federer saves three match points and climbing back to square the match two sets apiece. And the fifth set went 16 games before Federer simply gave out sapped of strength. Nadal becomes the first Spaniard to win the Men’s Single Title at Wimbledon since Manuel Santana in 1966.

More from the New York Times and ESPN Sports.

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A video by BoyThreeOne.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Le Nouvel Observateur, this is a welcome, albeit belated, development. Switzerland will return approximately $12 million, which is only a fraction of all the money that Jean-Claude Duvalier and his family embezzled from their country, Haiti. Duvalier has been enjoying a nice retirement on the French Riviera since he went into exile in 1986 (life must be hard there, compared to the chaos he left behind).

The funds that Switzerland will return to Haiti were placed in Swiss banks before Duvalier and his entourage left the country. They have the remaining three months to contest the restitution. Haitian authorities estimate that Duvalier embezzled more than $100 million, mostly through stealing profits from state enterprises that were supposed to go to funding social programs. Instead, the money would find its way to Swiss bank accounts.

Duvalier no longer has access to the money deposited in Switzerland since 2002. Haiti started procedures to get the money back in 1986, but the request was only completed last May.

The best source on the history of violence in Haiti is the Encyclopdia of Mass Violence. Of course, the Duvalier regime (1957-1986), in particular under Jean-Claude Duvalier - “Baby Doc” - was a brutal and murderous dictatorship, following in his father’s - Francois Duvalier, “Papa Doc” - footsteps. Papa Doc is the one who created the infamous Tontons Macoutes.

Political and economic stability have not yet been established in Haiti and it would be nice if the returned funds were used for the collective good of a population that badly needs it.

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I have zero compassion for them. Anyone who supported Obama after March 2008 is clearly either a delusional Obama cultist or a head in the sand idiot. This one is on you. You had better more experienced choices say Senator Joe Biden. You had better more principled candidates who live their convictions say Representative Dennis Kucinich. You had a reform minded committed populist say former Senator John Edwards. And then you had Hillary Clinton who despite some flaws encompassed all the best qualities of the aforementioned. You dug the Democratic Party’s grave, now wallow in it for all I care.

For months, countless voices of reason have pointed out time and again, Obama is an empty suit (the above cartoon is from March 2007 so don’t act surprise that Obama is devoid of substance). Obama is a fraud. He lacks experience. He has no relevant qualifications. He has no conviction other than his own political welfare. His past behaviour is troublesome. He threw Alice Palmer and four others off the ballot in his first run for office by engaging lawyers to challenge their petition signatures on the last day of review. His rise through the labyrinth of Chicago politics took him down some worrisome alleys and he of his own volition forged alliances with a cast of characters include Louis Farahkan, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Reverend James Meeks, Antonin Rezko, Rashid Khalidi, William Ayers, and Bernadette Dohrn. Now he pals around with Donnie McClurkin, Father Michael Pfleger, and Jodie Evans. For months, committed liberals like Paul Krugman in column after column demonstrated how his proposals weren’t that progressive or even centrist. I’ve grown hoarse pointing out Obama’s lobbyist connections and his ties to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries. At every opportunity I get I bring up the fact Senator Obama voted for the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy. The Washington Post called it “a piñata of perks for energy industries.” John McCain did not vote with his party. Hillary Clinton did not cross the aisle. But you would not listen. You were mired in a speech that he gave in 2002. I hope that speech keeps you warm the next four years because that’s is the extent of his progressive record, a speech. His real record is more well centrist (that reach out across the aisle and ream someone kind of record) or perhaps corporatist is a better choice of words. Six billion dollars in subsidies to the oil & gas industry and $12 billion in subsidies to nuclear power industry. One has to wonder if he photocopied his energy plan from Dick Cheney and Charles Grassley. His health care plan is a misnomer, it’s an insurance plan. The beneficiary is the insurance industry. His votes in the Senate were more pro-Bush than Hillary’s, than Biden’s, than Dodd’s, than Edwards’. Progressive Punch ranked Obama the 25th most progressive member of the Senate in 2007. There are 49 Democrats and one Socialist and one “Independent” in the Democratic Caucus. Twenty-fifth out of 51, middle of the pack. Funny how that is. Laughing yet?

Now, you are upset that he is backtracking. News flash: he says what he thinks will please his audience at the moment and then he does whatever he thinks will advance his career the most. And what a career it is. Zero legislative accomplishments. Zip. Name one. He has missed 42% of the votes in the Senate this year. Over the comparable period, Hillary missed 30%. That’s over a quarter more votes missed. Not trivial and by design. He and his handlers don’t want him to have a record to run on.

You think his vote on FISA was shocking. Really? He is the candidate of corporate interests, the candidate of the anti-Clinton Democratic establishment. You’re voting for Obama but getting Tom Dashcle. There’s a winner for you. You’re voting for Obama and getting Jesse Jackson, Jr. Another soulless Chicago politician and as a bonus tack on Dick Durbin. But wait there’s more. Act now and we’ll throw in out of touch effete liberals– John Kerry and a gasbag to boot — Bill Richardson. But wait, there’s more you also get master advertising guru David Alexrod. Think of it as the DNC’s special gift to to you.

Obama is the designated one, the anointed one but you satisfied yourselves with silly speeches and satiated yourselves with empty platitudes galore. You went for the hip and the flash, a no-hit wonder without a batting average who hasn’t even come up to bat yet. He has yet to even hold a leadership position. He runs the Subcommittee for European Affairs of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and despite having oversight for NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, he has yet to hold a single hearing. News flash: there more US deaths in Afghanistan last month than in Iraq. Obama’s career has been moving from one on-deck circle to another never fully entering the game. Instead you left the ace of the Democratic Party in the dugout as if she were some minor leaguer. You fools. Stop your crying and either attempt to salvage the situation or prepare yourselves for a McCain Presidency which from my point of view is preferable to an Obama one. Better the devil that I know than the devil that I don’t. I know what to expect from McCain. But how can I trust than that shiftless soulless hypocrite who with each passing day changes yet another of his positions? It’s backtracking with Barack. So far he’s trampled on the Fourth Amendment, a women’s right to choose, the health care of all Americans and now the cornerstone of what brung him to the dance in the first place, that magical speech in 2002 that had to be re-recorded so it could be replayed again and again and use your opposition to a fruitless war as his springboard to power.

So it is with incredulity that I read this silliest of wanking posts by Ian Welsh on Firedoglake entitled “Turning Obama Into A Punchline: How Democrats Can Lose.” He was mockable from the start and his supporters perhaps even more. I still can’t forget that kid in Ohio who thinks Obama infallible. Papa Obama the First. News flash — Obama is a joke. He isn’t just a punchline, he is one of those clown punch bags. He may come back up but he just gets walloped down again. The funnier part is that it is largely self-inflicted so far. The GOP has yet to get its licks in.

His post and selected comments below the fold. (more…)