“Cannot Fail”

That is how (T)Hugo Chavez described the referendum on his plan to seize all power in Venezuela via a mask of democracy.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Rallies for and against constitutional changes proposed by President Hugo Chavez surged Tuesday as the Venezuelan leader declared that a weekend referendum on the proposed charter "cannot fail."

Such gatherings have increased tensions ahead of Sunday's referendum on reforms that would allow Chavez indefinite re-election, increase presidential terms from six to seven years and help the Venezuelan leader establish socialism in Venezuela.

While Chavez appeared before supporters to urge Venezuelans to approve the referendum and "open the path to a new nation," opponents held at least two protests and one of his ex-wives even held a press conference to urge voters to reject the slate of changes.

In Caracas, about 300 placard-waving students gathered outside the Catholic University Andres Bello, occupying a highway for four hours and causing rush-hour traffic jams, to urge Venezuelans to vote "no" on Sunday. The students contend the new constitution would give Chavez authoritarian powers.

"We students will keep coming out onto the street to demand freedom and democracy," said Roberto Diaz, a 21-year old law student at the university. Dozens of police and national guard monitored the demonstration that ended Tuesday evening without incident.

Gateway Pundit has more pictures and links to the violence today - and there was violence. Most of it appears to have been directed at anti-Chavez demonstrators, but neither side is blameless, according to the pictures. The use of the particular rhetoric that Chavez used here will arouse suspicions if the referendum passes his power grab, of course.

"On Saturday, the final attack begins, and Sunday … it's written: the people will vote and will say 'yes' to the call we're giving to open the path to a new nation," Chavez said, alluding to the referendum that aims to modify 69 of the 530 articles in the constitution.

"We can't go backward, we cannot fail! We're obliged to win, to continue triumphing. This is a battle of world proportions," Chavez said.

That sounds an awful lot like he's saying that the fix is in and the actual voting does not matter whatsoever.

The Price Of Greatness

Robert Gates delivered a long address yesterday as part of the Landon Lecture Series on Public Issues at Kansas State University. It is a rather longish speech but well worth taking the time to read. Gates details the history of America's response to the threats of the Cold War, the short-sighted dismantling of many of our capabilities after the fall of the Soviet Union and his vision of what America will need going forward. It really is a brilliant speech. He speaks of the need for more civilian expertise to assist the military in stabilizing problem spots. The exercise of so-called soft power as a vital component of American policy.

For example, in Afghanistan the military has recently brought in professional anthropologists as advisors. The New York Times reported on the work of one of them, who said, "I'm frequently accused of militarizing anthropology. But we're really anthropologizing the military."

And it is having a very real impact. The same story told of a village that had just been cleared of the Taliban. The anthropologist pointed out to the military officers that there were more widows than usual, and that the sons would feel compelled to take care of them - possibly by joining the insurgency, where many of the fighters are paid. So American officers began a job training program for the widows.

Similarly, our land-grant universities have provided valuable expertise on agricultural and other issues. Texas A&M has had faculty on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003. And Kansas State is lending its expertise to help revitalize universities in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, and working to improve the agricultural sector and veterinary care across Afghanistan. These efforts do not go unnoticed by either Afghan citizens or our men and women in uniform.

I have been heartened by the works of individuals and groups like these. But I am concerned that we need even more civilians involved in the effort and that our efforts must be better integrated.

And I remain concerned that we have yet to create any permanent capability or institutions to rapidly create and deploy these kinds of skills in the future. The examples I mentioned have, by and large, been created ad hoc - on the fly in a climate of crisis. As a nation, we need to figure out how to institutionalize programs and relationships such as these. And we need to find more untapped resources - places where it's not necessarily how much you spend, but how you spend it.

But one passage really caught my eye. This explains - perfectly - why people like Ned Lamont and the far left are completely wrong in their new-old "realism" and neo-isolationism.

A last point. Repeatedly over the last century Americans averted their eyes in the belief that remote events elsewhere in the world need not engage this country. How could an assassination of an Austrian archduke in unknown Bosnia-Herzegovina effect us? Or the annexation of a little patch of ground called Sudetenland? Or a French defeat at a place called Dien Bien Phu? Or the return of an obscure cleric to Tehran? Or the radicalization of an Arab construction tycoon's son?

What seems to work best in world affairs, historian Donald Kagan wrote in his book On the Origins of War, "Is the possession by those states who wish to preserve the peace of the preponderant power and of the will to accept the burdens and responsibilities required to achieve that purpose."

In an address at Harvard in 1943, Winston Churchill said, "The price of greatness is responsibility . . . The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility." And, in a speech at Princeton in 1947, Secretary of State and retired Army general George Marshall told the students: "The development of a sense of responsibility for world order and security, the development of a sense of overwhelming importance of this country's acts, and failures to act, in relation to world order and security - these, in my opinion, are great musts for your generation."

Our country has now for many decades taken upon itself great burdens and great responsibilities - all in an effort to defeat despotism in its many forms or to preserve the peace so that other nations, and other peoples, could pursue their dreams. For many decades, the tender shoots of freedom all around the world have been nourished with American blood. Today, across the globe, there are more people than ever seeking economic and political freedom - seeking hope even as oppressive regimes and mass murderers sow chaos in their midst - seeking always to shake free from the bonds of tyranny.

The price of greatness is responsibility… Those words should be engraved in the heart of every American. Every time the United States has attempted to avert our collective eyes, the cost has been greater when we were finally forced to look. Every time.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

UPDATE: DefenseLink also has the speech up.

Gone Fishing?

Dick Morris predicts that the Clinton campaign will go negative soon against her primary rivals. He predicts that she will use a tried and true method that the Clintons have used for years: send in the private detectives to fish for some dirt, then leak whatever they find to a friendly reporter.

Their favored method of getting out negative material about their foes is to hire private investigators to dig up dirt, which they then release through feeds to friendly journalists.

Consider the Lewinsky scandal. When Linda Tripp got to be a danger, the Clinton people released her Pentagon personnel file to Jane Mayer (then a reporter for The New Yorker). A federal judge later reprimanded two Clinton operatives for this violation, and the government had to pay Tripp more than $600,000 - but the damage was still done.

Meanwhile, Clinton staffer (and Hil- lary favorite) Sidney Blumenthal peddled the line that Monica was a stalker to journalist Christopher Hitchens. And White House operatives told ABC News' Linda Douglas of incoming House Speaker Bob Livingstone's infidelity scandal before it was made public.

In the '92 presidential campaign, the Clintons openly disclosed their use of private detectives to dig up ammunition on women who had accused the presidential candidate of having affairs with them, disclosing that they paid detective Richard Palladino over $100,000 in campaign funds. But, of late, they avoid such embarrassing disclosures by hiding their detective bills in their legal expenses.

Charming MO, isn't it? The problem this time may be that any negative attacks like this could actually increase her rival's stature. Morris points out that things like that have never deterred the Clintons before. He doesn't think it will this time either. But if Hillary starts looking like she needs to attack, she also risks losing the air of inevitability. This could be interesting. Somehow, there would be a sort of cosmic justice to see the negative tactics of the Clintons actually bring Hillary down.

French Deploy 1,000 Police Officers

In an effort to tamp down the rioting in the northern suburbs of Paris, the French are deploying 1,000 police to the strife torn areas. Unfortunately, it may be a case of too little too late as the violence appears to have spread to Toulouse in the southern part of the country.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon visited the restive suburb of Villiers le Bel, where the death of two teenagers Sunday touched off two nights of violence that have left at least 120 police injured.

Nine people were detained in Villiers ahead of Fillon's visit, police told AFP.

Earlier, a court jailed eight youths over the clashes with police Sunday and Monday. Four were handed prison sentences ranging from three to 10 months, while four others were detained pending judgement.

There was also Tuesday signs that the violence had spread outside the Paris region when about a dozen cars were set on fire in the southern city of Toulouse.

For two nights running, young men have hurled petrol bombs and bricks at police, torching cars and buildings in Villiers le Bel, where two youths were killed in a motorbike collision with a police car.

Faced with the worst eruption of urban violence since the riots of 2005, Fillon vowed a beefed-up security presence Tuesday evening and to "do everything" to stop the violence from spreading across the Paris area.

"Those who shoot at policemen, those who beat a police officer almost to death are criminals and must be treated as such," he told parliament earlier. "We will do everything tonight to ensure maximum security."

Hopefully, they can get this under control. This is the most up to date article from AFP, so I have no better information about any developments over there.

More High Resolution Magic

This time it is a high resolution satellite map of Antarctica, fully zoomable and with a resolution of about 1 pixel to 90 meters. It can be browsed online or the images can be downloaded.

In support of the International Polar Year (IPY 2007-2008), LIMA brings the coldest continent on Earth alive in greater detail than ever before through this virtually cloudless, seamless, and high resolution satellite view of Antarctica.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), created LIMA from more than 1,000 Landsat ETM+ scenes.

The website appears to be running a bit slow, probably because of load.

France Afire

Riots have erupted in suburban areas of Paris and are escalating. Rioters (quaintly identified as "youths") have begun shooting at police with shotguns. So far some 82 police officers have been injured, four with serious wounds caused by buckshot.

VILLIERS LE BEL (AFP) - A second night of riots by youths in a Paris suburb left more than 80 police injured, buildings gutted and France on Tuesday facing heightened tensions in towns north of the capital.

Late into the night, around 100 young men again hurled petrol bombs and bricks at police in the town of Villiers le Bel, where on Sunday two teenagers were killed in a motorbike collision with a police car.

Faced with the worst eruption of urban violence since the riots of 2005, President Nicolas Sarkozy was to chair a special meeting on the unrest on Wednesday, after returning from a state visit to China.

The president was also to meet the families of the victims, aged 15 and 16, at the Elysee palace Wednesday morning.

Monday night's violence left several buildings damaged by fire in Villiers, just north of Paris, including a tax office, a supermarket, a library and a nursery school, as well as 63 vehicles. Six people were arrested during the troubles, which lasted about six hours, police said.

A report from Le Monde newspaper described boys as young as 13 taking orders from their elders to torch buildings and forming battle ranks against the police, vowing to "do in" a "pig" — a police officer.

A some point 'riot' becomes 'insurrection'. The French may have one on their hands at the moment. Gateway Pundit has a large roundup of links, photos and video of the night's festivities.

Labor’s Hands Caught In The Cookie Jar

A growing scandal over illegal campaign contributions appears to be swamping the British Labor party. The British media is going bonkers on this one, it is the lead story all over the place. The funds were illegally funneled into Labor coffers in what certainly looks like a quid pro quo to get approval for a construction project a developer wanted.

Gordon Brown today vowed to return nearly £600,000 of "illegal" donations as the Labour sleaze scandal intensified.

In a desperate bid to restore the party's dwindling credibility, the Prime Minister branded the cash gifts as "completely unacceptable" and unlawful.

He also revealed the property tycoon at the centre of the affair had tried to donate to his own leadership bid through intermediaries.

But the PM's campaign team had turned it down as they were only accepting gifts from known supporters.

As an underfire Mr Brown adopted a hard-hitting approach to tackle the mounting crisis, it also emerged the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been called in to investigate.

The CPS, whose job is to decide when prosecutions are brought for suspected breaches of the law, has held talks with the Electoral Commission, which is the official watchdog on party funding issues.

Speaking at his monthly press briefing this morning, even Mr Brown acknowledged that the donations had broken the law.

But it is unclear if anyone will face prosecution.

At least one head has rolled, politically speaking over the scandal but there appear to be others lined up for sacrifice. This is a huge hit on Labor and the polls are showing it. The Daily Mail reports that the Tories have the biggest lead since Margaret Thatcher was in office.

New Mexico’s Illegal Alien Problem

These are not aliens coming across the borders, either. They are coming from outer space. Well, sort of. There is a flap in New Mexico over a new television ad campaign promoting tourism in New Mexico. Some tourism officials are very, very displeased with the ads.

Instead of highlighting New Mexico's picturesque desert landscapes, art galleries or centuries-old culture, the ads feature drooling, grotesque office workers from outer space chatting about their personal lives.

To some, the 30-second TV spots — which lead in roundabout fashion to the tag line that New Mexico may be "the best place in the Universe" — are provocative, funny and bold.

But to increasingly vocal critics, the ad campaign is a possible threat to the well-being of the state's $5.1 billion tourism industry. In other words, while the ads may yield a chuckle or two, the joke is on New Mexico.

Critics say the less-than-cuddly, reptilian spacemen may be more apt to baffle or frighten away a tourist than reel one in.

"New Mexico has a lot to offer — we don't need to bring our standards down," said Ken Mompellier, head of the convention and visitors bureau in Las Cruces, the state's fast-growing second-largest city, which has refused to use the alien ads to bolster local tourism pitches, as it normally would.

"My first question would be: What does this campaign show of the things that we are known for?" Mompellier asked. "I look at this campaign and I don't see the fit. And the things I'm hearing from people, some of it is very negative."

The concern is that the ads tend to not target the people with actual time and money to spend visiting New Mexico: Baby Boomers. The ads may be "provocative, funny and bold" to some people, but they would appear to be rather silly if the goal is to bring in people with actual dollars to spend. Judge for yourself, I frankly don't see these as particularly funny or effective.

A New Old Shibboleth

shib·bo·leth: 3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.

When even the assistant editor of The New Republic isn't buying the "new" model for foreign policy that many in the Democratic party are leaning toward, you know that something is out of whack. James Kirchick points out that the "new" model is just an old model - without even a fresh coat of paint. His target: none other than Ned Lamont.

While faulting Lieberman for historical ignorance in his recent claim that the Democratic Party has abandoned its “muscular tradition” of “Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and the Clinton-Gore administration,” the commentary by Lamont in last Tuesday’s Politico underscores his own lack of political knowledge.

Praising the first Bush administration and “our bipartisan foreign policy tradition,” Lamont neglects to mention that the vast majority of Democrats in Congress opposed the first Gulf War; Gore and Lieberman were two of just 10 Democratic senators to vote in favor of authorizing the use of American force.

Lieberman’s prescience then would be derided as warmongering now.

As if further evidence were needed that the party is rejecting its past, Lamont’s own column embraces the worst elements of coldhearted GOP “realism,” the sort of foreign policy that Clinton and Gore derided when they ran for the White House and the antithesis of everything that progressive internationalists should stand for.

Lamont is hardly alone. So-called progressives look with great reverence to Scowcroft and Baker, erstwhile bugbears of Democratic Party talking points.

But tyrants the world over have no better friends in the American power elite than these two men.

So why are liberals warming up to them?

Amid his effusive praise for GOP realists, Lamont betrays an astounding degree of obliviousness to the fact that he epitomizes the death of the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy tradition that Lieberman bemoaned earlier this month.

Everything old is new again. One of the driving reasons for "realism" was that the nation was in the midst of a long Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a lot of unpalatable decisions acceptable to the "realists." We need to keep that in perspective.

It's funny how today's theme appears to be recycling. From sewage to LBJ to stepping right back boldly into the foreign policy past. Or maybe th theme actually is sewage. Hard to say.

Everything old is new again. One of the driving reasons for "realism" was that the nation was in the midst of a long Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a lot of unpalatable decisions acceptable to the "realists." We need to keep that in perspective.

It's funny how today's theme appears to be recycling. From sewage to LBJ to stepping right back boldly into the foreign policy past. Or maybe th theme actually is sewage. Hard to say.

Stubbornly Like Johnson?

An odd article from the New York Times today that looks at where Eliot Spitzer has gone wrong. Generally friendly in tone to the embattled Governor of New York, it has a few things that might make New Yorkers think even more negatively about him than they already do.

Nearly all of the advisers now concede that they deeply misjudged how the driver’s license proposal would fare, though few believed that it would permanently hobble Mr. Spitzer and fewer still blamed the governor himself.

Those outside the executive chamber, however, mostly echoed Mr. Cunningham. Some of Mr. Spitzer’s toughest critics questioned whether he could rehabilitate himself. More troubling than his blunders, they said, is a suspicion that he does not learn from them.

“With Spitzer, it seems like he’s walked into buzz saws of his own devising,” said Richard Norton Smith, a biographer of former Gov. Thomas E. Dewey who is now at work on a book about Nelson Rockefeller. “He spent capital, but it’s hard to say how it leads to some payoff, unless he’s been humbled and educated by his first year.”

Lessons Learned

Mr. Spitzer said he had, in fact, been hitting the books. While he has previously delved into biographies of governors like Roosevelt, Charles Hughes and Al Smith, all of whom battled the Legislature to bring about change, he said he was now pondering the lessons of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who matched brute will to a subtle mastery of the legislative process.

“There’s an art there that I would like to be more successful at,” Mr. Spitzer said. “Life is a learning process, and a little more Lyndon Johnson would not hurt.”

Somehow, I find a reliance on Lyndon Johnson as a role model disturbing. I think the fact that Spitzer does not, in fact, appear to learn from his mistakes is the real problem he is facing. The Licenses for Lawbreakers® scheme was a pretty good example of that. He pushed and pushed until ran right through the spinning blade of the buzz saw. He appeared to be enable to see the real damage he was doing - even on a national level - to Democrats. In the end he looked weak and ineffectual and cost himself a lot of support. Choosing Lyndon Johnson as a new hero is not likely to improve things for him.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire hits it right on the head: "So Eliot Spitzer hopes to bring the best of Reagan, Giuliani, and LBJ.  Go, libs!"

Toilet To Tap

In Orange County, California, they are about to turn on a new facility to recycle sewage into potable water. Regulations prohibit the direct reuse of the water, so it will not go directly into the drinking water system. Instead, the treated water will be injected into the ground, feeding aquifers and proving a freshwater barrier to block the infiltration of seawater into the aquifers.

But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

On that Friday, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. They and others hope it serves as a model for authorities worldwide facing persistent drought, predicted water shortages and projected growth.

The process, called by proponents “indirect potable water reuse” and “toilet to tap” by the wary, is getting a close look in several cities.

The San Diego City Council approved a pilot plan in October to bolster a drinking water reservoir with recycled sewer water. The mayor vetoed the proposal as costly and unlikely to win public acceptance, but the Council will consider overriding it in early December.

Water officials in the San Jose area announced a study of the issue in September, water managers in South Florida approved a plan in November calling for abundant use of recycled wastewater in the coming years in part to help restock drinking water supplies, and planners in Texas are giving it serious consideration.

Here's the website for the so-called "Groundwater Replenishment System."  They have animations that show how the process works. I know a lot of places down in Florida use some form of recycled water for landscaping. I don't know if this is going to catch on or not, But when you really think about it, how clean is "natural" water?