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I went to a Catholic grade school when I was a kid, and our principal was a half-crazy old nun who watered the plastic plants every morning and once tried to dye her hair grey but it came out purple and all the kids made fun of her behind her back. Still, she was mean and powerful enough to be imposing. So we’d sit up straight while she lectured us on the evils of heavy metal or masturbation or the Enlightenment or whatever. But the spitwads would fly as soon as she left the room.

Anyway, I was thinking about Sister Margaret when I read about Condoleezza Rice lecturing the OAS this week. She had an Important Message to deliver about democracy. Move over waterboarding, she said. Forget extraordinary rendition and phone taps and compromising covert operatives. That Watergate-era shit only used to be illegal and un-American and treasonous. These days, we now know, the real threat to Our Way of Life is not allowing big media corporations to overthrow governments or something.

Since Rice is a super-humungo proponent of open and balanced discussion, it must have killed her to have to unceremoniously storm out the door three nanoseconds after her big speech ended, unable to benefit from the precious “other side” of the discussion she cherishes so deeply.

And just like a little fifth-grade me, those precocious little Latins started going all insubordinate behind her back, refusing to pretend that the RCTV flap was a free speech issue or boot Venezuela from the human rights commission per Condi’s demands.

Blasphemously, all this took place in Panama, where just 25 years ago the country’s rebellious lefty President was excommunicated, permanent-like, from life with the help of the CIA. The kids today Just. Won’t. Learn.

Editor’s Note: I should get out of town more often. Judging from recent traffic stats, readers seem to like the BoRev fill-in posts better than mine. Sorry kids, I’m back.

A huge and thankful shout-out to our potty-mouthed guest bloggers, who kept things hopping with vulgar aplomb. They are always welcome to pop in once in a while. You know, to keep the ratings up.

>>> In Miami, the inmates aren’t just running the asylum anymore, they’re consulting.

>>> Florida journalists dig deep to link Caracas to JFK terror plot because some guy had a layover there or something.

>>> Least popular Latin American president ever is not down with the BoRev.

>>> Brazil’s ruling party releases statement on RCTV: the station “was openly involved in a failed coup d'etat against Chávez' government, which in any other country of the world would be enough reason to question the public license for a TV network.”

>>> Oh, and the station didn’t ever really shut down.

See, we can be wholesome. Send yer BoRev pix to BoRevNet at Gmail dot com.

Guardian columnist Richard Gott has the balls to say what others haven’t on the RCTV flap: this is a class, race and power controversy more than anything else. Money Quote:

RCTV was not just a politically reactionary organisation which supported the 2002 coup attempt against a democratically elected government - it was also a white supremacist channel.

When the mission of your newspaper is to “to fulfill the Will of God, who seeks to establish America in His Providence,” you can usually get away with ignoring mortal journalistic constructs like “fact-checking.” These things tend to sort themselves out according to His plan.

Still, even the Washington Times needs to tread carefully when running Sunday guest columns from ding-dongs who recount their sectarian infighting in their public bios. Our Heavenly Father only has so much time with the red pen.

Anyway today the Times runs a bizarre-o opinion piece linking Hugo Chavez with Salvadoran street gangs and Islamic terror groups or something. I’m still trying to figure it out. Here’s a sample:

It shouldn't take another September 11-type attack for relationships between MS-13 and South American drug and terrorist organizations such as FARC and ELN and Islamist terror groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda and Hugo Chavez's relationships with South American socialist leaders and Iran's Mr. Ahmadinejad to sound alarms in every Western intelligence and law enforcement agency around the world.

>>> Paraguay’s steadfastly centrist president is actually a socialist;

>>> The South American narcotics trade is apparently run by every country in the region except Colombia; and

>>> The Tri-Border area between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina also shares a border with Venezuela and Bolivia.

God should really pay more attention to what these yahoos write. Now He’s going to have to re-align the entire continent to not make His messengers look like holy jackasses.

>>> Totally repressive anti-free-speech V-gov ask student protestors address the nation; of course they have a hissy fit and walk out.

>>> AP got an exclusive interview with Chavez! Turns out that poor people like him.

>>> Totally repressive anti-free-speech V-gov won’t make RCTV shut up.

>>> Sports columnist wants to appoint loudmouth Venezuelan White Soxer Ozzie Guillen ambassador.

>>> 2.3 “tonnes” translates to 2.5 ‘merican tons, which is one metric fuckload of cocaine.

Viva Milka! Send your BoRev photos to double you double you double you dot BoRev dot net.

For those of you still scratching your head over what actually happened to Tony Soprano last night, here’s one theory: Alvaro Uribe is back in town. Just sayin’.

Here to claim the mantle of Most Misunderstood Psychopath, Colombia’s notorious gangsta prez is up to some seriously crazy shit. Including:

>>> Bestowing Bill Clinton with some weird “Passion of the Colombia” award for—and this is a real quote from the Associated Press—“never believing the bad things” about his coke-fueled war ravaged country.

>>> Pretending he never received a letter sent by Senate Dems telling him to stop being a terrorist if he wanted to stay on the U.S. taxpayer gravy train.

>>> Convincing former Representative Bob “Anything for a Buck” Barr to publish a sycophantic puff piece published in the local Moonie rag. (To the best of my knowledge, this was Barr’s first public sighting since being caught on tape accepting a gift of human breast milk cheese from a renowned Kazakh journalist.)

>>> Wall Street firms predicted the Colombian peso will become the “the worst performer in the foreign-exchange markets” by the end of the year.

>>> An Inter-American court found Uribe’s paramilitary buddies guilty of a massacre of 12 human rights investigators; and

>>> Two members of his armed forces were arrested “for killing six unarmed civilians, including a child, during a killing spree early on Sunday morning.”

Well the snozberry revolution is going about as well as you would expect. If you’ve watched any Fox News over the last couple weeks, you’ve seen Venezuela’s Generation Lohan taking to the streets fighting for their god given rights to soap operas on demand or whatever. Sure, their issue is pretty lame, but watching the offspring of Venezuela’s pampered classes taking an active interest in something other than duty free shopping or cosmetic surgery sorta warmed the cockles of my cynical little heart for a minute.

But in the end, they are their parents’ children, so they of course fucked it up by being snotty little Verucas. Offered an opportunity to bring their concerns before a nationally televised session of the Venezuelan assembly, the kids came in, gave a five minute speech and stomped out the door. Then today, when Vice President Jorge Rodriguez offered to open up an extended dialogue with them, this was the response:

"When the universities are ready to have a meeting with the executive branch, we will have it.”

Some blogs carry the water so that the rest of us may fill our bongs.

Today, Oil Wars did the math on the long-insinuated Venezuelan arms buildup. Turns out that under Chavez, Venezuelan arms spending is lower than in previous administration. By a lot. Not only that, it’s less than half of the military spending of Chile or its crazy neighbor Colombia.

>>> Washington Times opinionater trashes Venezuela’s state TV, neglects to mention she runs Voice of America.

>>> Jesus has a General who advocates invasion of Caracas.

>>> Hugo Chavez, Nancy Pelosi conspire against Rush Limbaugh and Mormons.

>>> Colombians are becoming Venezuela’s Mexicans.

>>> Parts of Venezuela smell of sulphur too. Another Simon Romero vacationtime exclusive!

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One of the stranger outcomes of six years of Bush Administrata is that nobody even goes through the motions of pretending to believe a word these people say anymore.

Yesterday, when the State Department put together its new list of the “world’s worst offenders” in human trafficking, Reuters simply reported that the list existed, and then promptly clarified:

Friendly countries with major trafficking problems such as India were not placed in the worst category, where U.S. antagonists like Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela routinely appear.

But hey, it’s the Bush Administration. Making shit up spectacularly is just their thing.

Watch out Maria Conciha Alonso. John Pilger’s new film is sure to unsettle your silicone. It opens in the U.K. this weekend, and it’s already getting favorable reviews in The Guardian (natch) and the Financial Times (really).

Rupert Murdoch’s The Times of London hates it, so you know it’s gonna be good.

Beware of Op-Eds published in Houston by Texans named Austin. They tend to be a little …extreme.

This Austin Bay person celebrates the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War by warning that Hugo Chavez might try to invade the British territory himself some time. You know, because he’s “outlandish.”

Whatever, dude.

It must be Take Your Child To Work Day over at Diario Las Americas. Check out today’s… editorial(?) on Alvaro Uribe. It’s like when you were ten and had to write an essay on your hero and some kid wrote one that went “My Hero Is My Dad Because He’s Nice and Funny and Takes Me To The Zoo and Smells Good.”

Hey, it’s five o’clock on Friday. Seriously, hold off on clicking the link until you buy a 40 of malt liquor and then read it out loud to the one you love.

I know we’re supposed to hate Al Jazeera what with their “two sides to every story” approach to journalism and all, but this piece on the RCTV case just seems better than others I’ve seen. Don’t report me, pls.

And they’re pretty good sports too, when they’re not totally undermining the Global War on Terror, that is. In case you missed it, here’s Samantha Bee giving their DC studios a makeover last December.

Pity the dude at the Topeka Capitol-Journal that has to go through the Letters to the Editor this week. The town where families still fight over Darwin, desegregation and mullets printed an Op-Ed by an academic. From New York City. On Venezuela.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, the link might help: here.

Whew. I was concerned there for a sec that after Wolfowitz and his high-priced “companion” left the World Bank we’d be left without a corrupt, evil foil at the world’s largest predatory lender. But this is the Bush administration, so I don’t know what I was worried about. Call me a pessimist.

Anyway, it’s going to be Robert Zoellick, the former Wall Street mogul/State Department Operative/New American Centurion dickwad who “regards free trade philosophy and free trade agreements as instruments of U.S. national interests.” We can work with this!

Zoellick’s already off to an awesome start. He hasn’t even started the job yet and he’s already giving speeches on Venezuela, saying that even if the Bolivarian Republic wants to get out from under the Bank’s influence, there’s “no shortage” of dumbass poverty stricken nations they can screw over. And Venezuela will come crawling back, he says with a maniacal laugh. They always do.

Kos’ earnestness can seriously drive me up the wall. But he’s usually right:

Many Democrats, especially its pathetic consultant class, still believe that the way Democrats show "strength" is by huffing and puffing and threatening to bomb the "f" out of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, or whatever the latest boogeyman of the moment might be.

Honestly, the Latin American elite will bitch about anything. You may have read that Venezuela is offering free cataract surgery to poor people who don’t have access to health care. Here’s the reaction from the industry:

At the Pan American Congress of Ophthalmologists in Cancun last month, doctors complained that Venezuela was "invading" their nations to poach eye patients.

That's the photographer's reflection in the screen. Send your BoRev shots to www dot BoRev dot net.

God Bless the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. While other fishwrappers mask their quirks under a veil of Ivy League respectability, the Journal lets their uber-rightist freak flag fly with daily doses of unbridled McCarthyism. And lord knows America could use more of that these days.

Of course, the Journal’s unrivaled queen of Latin policy is the irrepressible Mary Anastasia O’Grady. She’s really steeped in Latin culture, and loves to prove it through the generous sprinkling of words like “fiesta” and “piñata” in her columns. I know what you Latins out there are thinking: it’s like she really gets you.

If I may be so bold--and I know I’m a cheap imitation--her writing is like a “taco”…No, no…a “margarita,” blending together Ayn Rand fantasies with Ollie North paranoia and, um…Ipecac instead of Triple Sec! Whew. This is harder than it looks.

Anyway, today this spicy “señorita” has mashed together various unsourced rumors and innuendo between Nicaragua and Venezuela and Iran and the USSR and Terrorists and Cuba into a veritable “guacamole” of esoteric cold war weirdness, and yet the WSJ editors publish it. Because they are “loco.”

Speaking of WSJ editors, they have done a bit of a “hat dance” around the free flow of information, and won’t let you read the article without a subscription. So we’ve posted the text for you after the jump. Ole!

Yes, that’s the World Bank’s new overlord standing next to Brazil’s fuzzy president. Adolescence must have been particularly difficult for him, which makes him a very dangerous man. Let’s all please keep an eye on him, hmm?

PS: A reader just sent me this photo with the subject line “Kraftwerk,” which is pretty awesome.

The Miami Herald is trying out a new approach! Today, they’ve brought in a smartypants academic to analyze Venezuela’s financial strategies. She’s sympathetic to the poor people, of course. She totally understands their attraction to social safety nets. But they need to learn that in the long run only a U.S.-style model is really going to bring them out of poverty. It’s really for their own good. If only they’d listen.

Her premise is founded on the notion that Venezuelans are morons only neoliberal economic policies can provide access to small business loans and credit lines they need to rise out of poverty.

Naturally, her piece was published just four days after the New York Times ran this article, all about how access to small business loans and lines of credit has never been easier in Venezuela. Poor women are using the loans to start their own businesses and bring their families out of poverty and, of course, rich women are getting boob jobs.

Always the boob jobs.

Colombia! Colombia! This is YOU!

Forget the cute puppies riding a dustmop. No precocious rugrats, either. This is Colombia, muthafuckas. This week, an entire nation gets comically kicked in the nads when it turns out that America’s favorite foreigner has been lying all along about his death squad connections!

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As you know, for the past forever hundreds of millions of your tax dollars have gone into funding a government radio/TV project aimed at teaching Cubans that radio and TV projects should not be run by governments. The poetically futile Radio Martí rarely reaches actual Cubans, of course, since their government jams the signals in and around most metropolitan areas. Still, it’s a fun little cold war that keeps out-of-work Miami Cubans off the streets, which is always a good thing.

But you can imagine the fun that Miami Herald reporter Pablo Bachelet must have had when he intercepted a “sensitive but unclassified” report that demonstrates exactly what happens when government agencies evaluate their own success. According to the report:

>>> Radio and TV Marti reporters are getting better every year in terms of pretending to be real journalists, except for the times that they “breach” journalistic standards by editorializing when they are supposed to be reporting, and when they broadcast all those “insufficiently sourced” rumors.

>>>Anecdotal evidence, (in the form of a no-doubt unbiased survey of Cuban refugees during their immigration hearings or something) shows that seventeen percent of new Cuban immigrants claim to have heard of the station, which is apparently up from “negligible” in years past. Although unlike past reports, this one doesn’t estimate actual numbers of viewers.

>>> Station President Pedro Roig is called “assertive” and “inspiring” and “the most effective in recent history,” except that he’s also set up a patronage system and only promotes a “chosen few” from his inner circle.

The Bush Administration is banking that the popular antics of “MC Rove" and “Our Dumbass President Dancing Awkwardly to African Beats” will help middle America forget that we lost an entire black city on its watch.

This week, Operation Funky Honky expands to Latin America with the appointment of some guy named “P. Duddy” to the ambassadorship of Venezuela. White House insiders assure that while his name may sound relatively “street” by WASP-y Republican standards, we'll still see the same sort of crappy foreign policy we’ve come to expect from this administration. They further caution that in no way does this appointment signal a willingness to allow poor black Americans to vote.

Attention all fake journalists from the greater Miami area: you are one step closer to employable! Connie Mack just slipped an amendment into the 2008 Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would expand Voice of America and beam it over to Venezuela in order to convince them to stop voting for people we don’t like.

Mack’s press release doesn’t specify exactly what its going to cost us taxpayers, but our programming to Cuba has run up a $250 million dollar tab over the past decade, and um, Venezuela is quite a bit larger than Cuba and sort of on another continent, so you can imagine.

This is a really important move, Mack tells us, because in Venezuela, “the only thing the people can see or hear are the things that Hugo Chavez lets his media print and broadcast.” If true, then Chavez has some seriously diverse tastes, and a lot of freaking time on his hands to monitor it all.

Here’s a listing of what’s playing on Venezuelan cable TV tonight. Apparently Chavez has personally approved news coverage by opposition station Globovision, as well as international carriers like CNN, Fox News and the BBC. He’s also given the thumbs up to “Los Dukes de Hazzard,” “La Famila Ingalls,” and, awesomely, “Los Angeles de Charlie.” That, along with the full programming schedules of about 200 other domestic and international stations. Seriously, it’s a wonder he has any time left over to hate our way of life--although if he actually sat through that all-day marathon of Talladega Nights on channel 414, I sort of don't blame him.

I just hope Mack has slipped in an enormous advertising budget for VOA.Ve. If it gets lost in all those TV options, people might start to think it’s a big ol' waste of our tax dollars.

Hey kooky conspiracy theorists: you were right this time too.

The CIA’s role in botched assassinations, drug experiments on U.S. citizens, surveilling reporters, infiltrating antiwar groups, and placing thousands of bogus stories against inconvenient democracies in the mainstream papers will all be admitted next week.

Of course, this info-dump will only cover the 1950’s through the 70’s. We have to wait another generation to find out that today’s crackpots are actually the only halfway intelligent citizenry we’ve got.

>>> Waco Tribune Exclusive: Analyst Ted Nugent totally slams Hillary, Chavez, Paul McCartney. Rawk!

>>> Busted underwater cable cuts off internet access in Central America, Colombia, Venezuela. Cable company blames Latin American leftist politics.

>>> Media world turned on its head: Fox News “spread demonstrably false information” in Venezuela coverage. Really!

>>> U.S. company confirms Venezuela’s heavy crude reserves are among world’s largest; War now inevitable.

>>> Venezuelan unemployment at lowest levels in a decade, but whatever.

Jawohl! Send your BoRev pictures to dubya dubya dubya dot BoRev dot net.

Yikes, what’s gotten into The Nation? The normally analytical lefty mag this month ran a deeply creepy piece by former Salvadoran guerilla cum free marketeer Joaquin Villalobos. Fair enough, but Villalobos’ argument is that the Bolivarian Revolution isn’t revolutionary enough because it’s…peaceful. Money quote:

Venezuela might be experiencing a period of extreme polarization and social conflict, but that is not a revolution. In revolutionary times, violence becomes prevalent, first in the form of rebellion and later in the form of counterrevolution. So far in Venezuela, political violence has been more verbal than material.

Update: Why didn't we guess? Villalobos is currently "an advisor to Colombia’s conservative President Álvaro Uribe in his tough U.S.-backed fight against 'narco-guerrillas.'"

What goes together better than athletic achievement, our whacked out gap-toothed SecState, and, uh… Manilow? Nothing, that’s what--So! (Apologies in advance to our non-inebriated readers. Everyone else, sing along at home):

Her name was Condi
She was a buzzkill
With relaxant in her hair
Sexy boots hiked up to there
She’d propagandize
And spout the blah blah
But while she tried to play aloof
Couldn’t help herself, and poof:
“Must stop the fútbol cup
With crap that I make up”
If you travel to Venezuela
Get your Ass! Blown! Up!

The Los Angeles Times misses all the Red Scare irony in today’s exposé of Venezuelan baseball players. They aren’t just commies, see, they’re also Witch Doctors!

Update: Some people were having trouble accessing the link. Something about a "membership" w/ the LA Times. We have a healthy disrespect for intellectual property here, so we've reposted the text after the jump.

Hey District of Columbians: Wed. night you can check out the seriously cool Afro-Venezuelan women’s percussion band Eleggua at a free show at the Lincoln Theater. Details arriba.

Oh, and there’s also this: On Friday morning the National Press Club has decided to save reporters the trouble of ignoring the other side of the story by only inviting hard core opposition folk to their “Newsmakers” discussion on Venezuela. Watch an El Universal Reporter, a ex-IMF dude and two former oil execs explain the state of Freedom and Democracy in Venezuela. To Washingtonians. Who have no elected representation.

Happy Family Jewels week everyone! The CIA’s awesomely named secrets-that-everybody-already-knew info dump is all over today’s papers. Among the bungled attempts to kill off Castro and the wow-it-worked plan to assassinate the lefty Congolese prez lie the details of dozens of ridiculously far-fetched propaganda schemes published by CIA “assets” in various U.S. press outlets.

The whole point of the release was to show that while our entire foreign intelligence apparatus used to be run like a Peter Sellers movie, it’s all cleaned up now. Ha ha J/K! Actually, they’re just spreading the madcap fun throughout various agencies these days.

To celebrate, the Air Force’s own Dept. of Quackery just released a brand new psychological profile of Hugo Chavez. Its expert findings, based on watching videos or something, go like this: The Venezuelan president is clinically “pugnacious.” And “malignantly narcissistic.” And “insecure.” And will probably try to stay in office forever.

Medically speaking, of course.

It is a small world after all. Roughly eighty percent of the great nations on earth wish George W. Bush would get bent—just like you do. The latest poll results from the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that 37 of the 47 countries surveyed think that our president sucks ass. See, foreigners are just like us!

Of course, media outlets were quick to argue that Bush is not alone. The world, you see, is just sort of grumpy these days. Reuters says “Leaders like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who challenge the existing order found few admirers.” ABC News lists Chavez and Vladamir Putin among the worlds opinion “losers.” The Washington Post writes that the world has “little confidence” in Chavez.

But hilariously, the Miami Herald (the Miami Herald!) actually looked at the numbers:

Majorities in 30 countries have little confidence in Iran's Ahmadinejad, while majorities in 14 countries distrust Venezuela's Chávez.

So how did all these media outlets get it wrong in exactly the same way? Well for starters, Pew’s spokeswoman, one former U.S. Secretary of State, sort of drove the point home in a press conference yesterday, which may have something to do with it. But seriously, don’t cell phones come with calculators nowadays?

Headline from Reuters this evening: “Bush wishes Cuba's Castro would disappear”

Sort of explains the old Iraq policy. Can we have Gordon Brown come rule us now, too?

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So just how nostalgic are you for 1950’s nostalgia? Long before Peggy Sue got married and some pimply little Fonzie greased your lightning after the ironic sock hop (he called you Calvin because that was the name in your briefs!), you, my friend, were hopelessly devoted to the principles of a culture that didn’t bother chasing mice around.

Well thank god for t-x expenditures! Today, your own Voice of America gets meta-hip with the iconic sounds, feels and values of an era when we internalized our cultural heritage from Negro-phobic representations of a bygone era.

But as the 70s masters captured the innocence and fun of the age, only today’s gov-funded faux journalists can capture the attitude: Desk hunkering. One-sided. Nerd Induced. Fear.

Hugo Chavez is in Russia! And while he’s not buying any weapons, VOA asks…what if? Witness the modern day family jewels, unsullied by cubic zirconia or testicular implants. Watch the video . The voice-over is a classic.