I am beginning to wonder if Obama actually went to law school and taught Constitutional law. In fact, I wonder if he went to grade school. Back in May, Obama referenced having visited 57 states; today on Face the Nation, the very junior Senator from Illinois said this:

“the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.”

Surely he knows that two terms is eight years or is he hoping for a repeal of the Twenty-second Amendment. I wouldn’t put it pass him. Talk about great expectations. And I was under the impression that the objective of this trip, other than the glorification of the He who we have been waiting for, was a fact-finding mission. You’re not President, you’re a half-term very junior Senator from Illinois. You’re not even the nominee yet, only a presumptive (he doth presume much methinks) one.

And I must ask who is going to pick up the tab for this event. It had better the Obama campaign that pays for the police, the security, the conveniences and the clean-up. Why are Earth should the city of Berlin be saddled with the cost of an Obama campaign event? This is the theatre of the absurd with Obama as the master of deception but Europeans will see what they want to see and hear the glowing eloquence of a meaningless banter. There is no there there in Obama.

Here is ABC Jack Tapper on Obama’s latest gaffe in article entitled The Butterfly Effect:

Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in Afghanistan, told the paparazzi-pursued correspondent Lara Logan that “the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.

“And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.”

The notion that Obama will be dealing with world leaders for eight-to-ten years, possibly up through July 2018, suggests that either (a) he believes that not only will he be elected and re-elected, but the 22nd amendment will be repealed and he will be elected for a third term, OR (b) he was speaking casually and just meant two terms.

(I’m guessing b.)

There is a term in chaos theory describing the how infinitesmal variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.

Most of us are more familiar with the more common name for it: the butterfly effect.

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Siegessäule

The Obama campaign today released the final venue for Obama’s polemical and in my view inappropriate and ill-advised campaign rally to non-voting Europeans. Senator Barack Obama will speak in Berlin on Thursday in Tiergarten Park, beneath the monument topped with the statue of a golden angel known as the Siegessäule. According to the Obama campaign, the event will be free and open to the public. An American political campaign is now being politicized overseas. Shame on you Barack Obama, shame on you. You have no right to do this. This is a man in love with crowds, in love with the sound of his own voice, a man who needs to worshipped.

The Siegessäule is an imposing landmark in the Tiergarten which was originally built in 1873 to commemorate Prussia’s victory in the Prussian-Danish war. Denmark had to cede the duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg and most of the Duchy of Schleswig. The war was the second of Bismarck’s three planned wars to secure German unification. The Siegessäule was added to after other war victories, and also had extra heigh added by the Third Reich, and was later moved from its position in Königsplatz (now the Platz der Republik) to the Großer Stern crossroads in the Tiergarten. The golden statue on the top is over 8m high.

Some reaction to the venue:

As expected, several German politicians criticized the location because of the historic overtones of the militarist monument. The Victory Column “is dedicated to victories over our neighbors, who today are our European friends and allies,” said Andreas Schockenhoff, a leading member of Mrs. Merkel’s conservative party, according to the local Berliner Zeitung. “I consider it to be an unhappy symbolism.”

“I think it’s a less-than-perfect venue,” said Michael Cullen, an American building historian based in Berlin, who has written extensively about the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and other Berlin landmarks. “It doesn’t connote anything but Prussian military prowess and that’s not a great symbol.”

Forget the venue, Senator Obama is delivering a campaign speech to an audience composed of mostly foreigners in a foreign country. That’s wholly inappropriate.

Return to Main

The blog This Ain’t My First Rodeo recently linked to one of my posts on Chávez’s growing ties with Iran, a story I ran with from Mexico’s largest and most respected newspaper El Universal that reported that at least two of Mexico’s drug cartels were sending some of its personnel to Iran for training. Apparently, I am “poisoning the well” for some future US invasion of Latin America. His post is so full of misinformation that I have decided to lasso him with a rope of facts.

Here is the relevant part of his post entitled appropriately enough World War III DEA Disinformation Chatter Sending Red Flags in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela:

Just this week, my news filters started picking up what increasingly appears to be a disinformation campaign aimed at “poisoning the well” in Latin America:

* “DEA Reports Show That Mexican Cartel ‘Thugs’ Are Receiving Training From Iranian Revolutionary Guard”

* “Mexican Drug Cartels and Islamic Radicals Working Together”

* “The Caracas-Tehran Axes”

Something is up. They are cranking up the propaganda machine perhaps in preparation for a future deployment of U.S. forces in Mexico, Colombia and/or Paraguay. For now, their intention seems to be to threaten and to terrorize. Imagine that.

Mexico, in stoking up the heat on the drug cartels, has fallen into anarchy within its northern states along the U.S. border. Although the Bush Administration recently announced funding support for the Mexican military in their violent struggle against the Sinaloa Federation and Gulf Cartels, it is possible that more direct support may have been “placed on the table,” even though the cartels have devolved into interior power struggles and internecine wars for territorial control.

Bolivia and Ecuador are lining up with our OPEC “enemy,” Venezuela, who currently supplies 25% of our imported oil. Both are currently experiencing diplomatic conflagrations with the right-wing government of Colombia, which the Bush Administration supports. Issues involve Colombia’s alleged cross-border incursions into Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in pursuit of left-wing guerrillas whom Colombia claims have been given sanctuary by them. Venezuela has vehemently denied any support.

All the while, the Bush Administration has recommissioned the 4th Fleet and sent it to the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. The Navy has already launched acts of provocation, in the form of “accidental” flyovers of Venezuelan island territories in the Caribbean, drawing protests from Chavez. At the same time, Ecuador demanded that the United States close its airbase in that country, which we did, moving it to Colombia.

Last week, it was revealed that George W. Bush’s man in Bogota, President Álvaro Uribe [right], just happens to be one of the former captains of Colombia’s infamous Madeline cocaine cartel, led by Pablo Escobar [left], who was “reportedly” killed in a joint operation of DEA and Colombian government forces in the 90s. What appears to have occurred is that CIA and Mossad handlers lost control over both Escobar and Daniel Noriega of Panama after Vice President George H. W. Bush, Oliver North and John P. Walters, who is not surprisingly the current “Drug Czar” under George W. Bush-43, spent so much “persuasive” effort in bringing them into the CIA Colombian “plaza” in order to benefit the Contra counter-revolution against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

This should be fun. Where to begin. Let’s start with the assertion that the United States imports 25% of its oil from Venezuela. It’s actually more like 9%. According to the Energy Information Agency, the United States imported 1,166,000 barrels of oil from Venezuela in May 2008 out of a total import of 12,742,000 barrels. Doing the math, that’s 9.15%. The United States imports more from Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico than it does from Venezuela. Furthermore, not all hydrocarbons are created equal. The ideal is light sweet crude and that comes largely from the Middle East. Venezuela’s oil is a heavy gook which requires special refineries for processing. Those refineries are largely in the United States and the Virgin Islands so Venezuela’s oil of necessity has but few markets. Not to say that if Venezuela were cut its supplies to the US that wouldn’t hurt the US, it would, but it would also cripple Venezuela, a country that cannot even feed itself. Venezuela is, for now, more dependant on the US than the US is on Venezuela.

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Quienes les brindan a las FARC cualquiera ayuda son enemigos del pueblo colombiano. Nadie pero nadie, sea en Managua, Quito o Caracas o aún en Paris o Berna nos va decir como nosotros los colombianos debemos tratar con las FARC. Colombia ya no se deja de nadie porque los colombianos están cansados de una guerra sin sentido y de vivir el dolor de los secuestros. El problema es nuestro y la solución va ser nítidamente colombiana. El pueblo colombiano hoy habla con una sola voz:

¡No más mentiras! ¡No más secuestros! ¡No más FARC!

Este 20 de julio quiero recordar a Jorge Garcés, Eduardo Garcés y Benjamin Barney. Amigos míos y victimas de las FARC. Colombia no se olvida. (more…)

The interview of Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki in Der Spiegel is bound to cause a sensation because in it, the Iraqi Prime Minister seems to signal that he prefers Obama’s 16 month timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq to other arrangements.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, the war and its consequences have cost more than 100,000 lives and caused great suffering in your country. Saddam Hussein and his regime are now part of the past. Was all of this worth the price?

Maliki: The casualties have been and continue to be enormous. But anyone who was familiar with the dictator’s nature and his intentions knows what could have been in store for us instead of this war. Saddam waged wars against Iran and Kuwait, and against Iraqis in the north and south of his own country, wars in which hundreds of thousands died. And he was capable of instigating even more wars. Yes, the casualties are great, but I see our struggle as an enormous effort to avoid other such wars in the future.

SPIEGEL: Germany was opposed to the war. German Economics Minister Michael Glos was in Baghdad the week before last, Daimler AG plans to build trucks in Iraq, and you will travel to Berlin this week. Has everything been smoothed out between Germany and Iraq?

Maliki: We want closer relations, and it is my impression that the Germans — the government, the people and German companies — want the same thing. Our task is to rebuild a country, and the Germans are famous for effective and efficient work. We have great confidence in them and want to involve them in the development of our country.

SPIEGEL: And there is truly no resentment against a country that opposed the war in 2003?

Maliki: We do not judge our partners on the basis of whether or not they were militarily involved in toppling Saddam. The decisions back then corresponded to the national will of the countries, and we respect that.

SPIEGEL: What exactly do you expect from the Germans and from German companies?

Maliki: We want to get to know them, and we want to know what they want — and the things they fear when thinking about Iraq. We have to start over again in many areas, including oil production, the development of the power grid and all industries. There is much to be done.

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Colombianos, la hora ya llegado de recuperar nuestro país, nuestra tierra querida y poner fin a la terrible pesadilla impuesta sobre nosotros por la terquedad de sicaros. ¡No más mentiras! ¡No más secuestros! ¡No más FARC! Que este 20 de julio sea el último que un colombiano la pase secuestrado. Que mañana nos traiga la paz que anhelamos.

Colombia, yo no puedo vivir sin ella.

Ahora los invito a compartir y recordar la belleza de nuestra música que ha cogido al mundo por su ritmos.

Soy Colombiano

La Pollera Colora

Ay Hombe

Guabina Chiquinquireña

Presidente Uribe, con firmeza y tienes el agradecimiento del pueblo colombiano por los logros de su gobierno.

Carlos Lemos
San Francisco, California

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