Black Sunday

International media is reporting that Both Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin have used a mask of democracy to grab personal power - in both cases, probably for life. The Putin election was a done deal even before it started. The Chavez one most likely was as well. Despite polls showing that the Venezuelan people did not want Chavez's "reforms", Chavez utterly controls the mechanisms of voting. But that result may still be up in the air according to late-breaking news.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Three cabinet ministers on Sunday said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won a referendum on whether he can run indefinitely for reelection.

The ministers, who asked not to be named, cited preliminary polling and electoral data.

And:

MOSCOW - Vladimir Putin's party won a crushing victory in parliamentary elections Sunday, paving the way for the authoritarian leader to remain in control even after he steps down as president.

The vote followed a tense Kremlin campaign that relied on a combination of persuasion and intimidation to ensure victory for the United Russia party and for Putin, who has used a flood of oil revenues to move his country onto a more assertive position on the global stage.

"The vote affirmed the main idea: that Vladimir Putin is the national leader, that the people support his course, and this course will continue," party leader and parliament speaker Boris Gryzlov said after exit polls were announced.

Venezuela News and Views, however, says that something is going on that doesn't look right at all. Chavez scheduled a press conference - then abruptly canceled it.

1) Serious source tells me Chavez canceled his press conference.

2)Jorge Rodriguez on TV, with bags under eyes dropping to his knees, calling to all to keep the piece and recognizing that the election is close!!!!

The Devil's Excrement reports some Chavista shenanigans:

5:20 PM Two friends at polling booths report in the East of Caracas lower abstention, higher anti-Chavez votes

5:31 PM Globovision report Chavista group detained in Zulia trying to vote twice

I'm not sure this one is over yet. The lights may not have gone out for Venezuela yet. Cross your fingers, say a prayer, think good thoughts, worry. Whatever. Just hope for them.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit is also following this closely and says that his report of a Chavez victory may not be correct at this point. He is looking at the same Venezuelan blogs that I am. This is still very much up in the air.

Donner And Blitzen In The Big Apple

Two reindeer from the North Pole will be making an appearance on The Martha Stewart Show. No, really.

"We're all pretty excited," said Oswego resident Doug Waterbury, owner of The North Pole, just north of Lake Placid. "We're kind of well known in the Christmas industry, if you will, and we really get a lot of joy out of it."

Monday morning, Donner and Blitzen will board the company's stock trailer for a very roomy ride down to the Big Apple. The trailer can hold all eight of Santa's reindeer and his sleigh, Waterbury said.

The four-legged stars will be accompanied by The North Pole's two full-time reindeer trainers, Matt Stanley and John Peck, said Waterbury, who also owns half of Sylvan Beach amusement park in Oneida County and recently purchased the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Cayuga County.

"(The reindeer) work in teams. Blitzen has a large antler rack, which we thought people would like to see, and Donner is his buddy, so they were a natural pair," he said.

The trailer will head to a downstate farm about an hour from Manhattan that Waterbury uses, he said. Early Tuesday morning, they'll head into midtown's television studios.

The show's staff hasn't told the owners of the reindeer exactly what the animals are wanted for. We'd just like to point out that the show website doesn't mention what the cooking segment of the show will be. We're just saying.

A Tale Of Two Retractions

In the left corner, The New Republic. Fourteen pages of attempting to obfuscate, dissemble, lay blame, cast aspersions and one little paragraph at the end sort of retracting.

In the right corner, National Review Online and Kathryn Lopez:

Long story short: Questions have been raised about some reporting in NRO's "The Tank," which W. Thomas Smith Jr. addresses here.

Bottom line: NRO strives to bring you reliable analysis and reporting — whether in presenting articles, essays, or blog posts. Smith did commendable work in Lebanon earlier this year, as he does from S.C. where he is based, as he has done from Iraq, where he has been twice. But rereading some of the posts (see "The Tank" for more detail) and after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts, I've come to the conclusion that NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall. And so I apologize to you, our readers.

I thank Smith for his good, brave work. He's a smart, reliable reporter with a great patriotic spirit and sense of service. We owe him and our readers better — we should have gotten you more context and information before a post or two went live. It's understandable how it happened — the nature of blogging being what it is — but given what an underreported tinderbox we're talking about, especially, we owed you more.  We weren't blogging about Dancing with the Stars there. 

So I'm grateful to the reporter who contacted Smith with questions. He brought them to my attention. We did due diligence. We've reported this back to him. And now we're reporting back to you.

You can go read Smith's defense of himself. But the fact is that NRO has stepped up and pointed out the problems practically as soon as they were informed of them. They did not stonewall for five months or more then do a spineless ejection of ink in an effort to escape further damage. (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I have never read any of Smith's posts.) Bottom line: advantage NRO and TNR is still in the cellar.

Bits Blog and Sister Toldjah have good takes on it. See also: Right Wing Nut House, Flopping Aces, A Blog For All, Gina Cobb, Michelle Malkin, Captain's Quarters,  

As The Royal Navy Sinks Quietly In The West…..

The Telegraph has an article describing a leaked British Ministry of Defense report that indicates just how weak the Royal Navy has become. The report was commissioned by Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, supposedly to defuse criticism. This backfired, didn't it? The report appears to be a stunning condemnation of the state of the Royal Navy.

The Royal Navy can no longer fight a major war because of years of under­funding and cutbacks, a leaked Whitehall report has revealed.

With an "under-resourced" fleet composed of "ageing and operationally defective ships", the Navy would struggle even to repeat its role in the Iraq war and is now "far more vulnerable to unexpected shocks", the top-level Ministry of Defence document says.

The report was ordered by Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, who had intended to use it to "counter criticism" on the state of the Navy in the media and from opposition parties.

But in a damning conclusion, the report states: "The current material state of the fleet is not good; the Royal Navy would be challenged to mount a medium-scale operation in accordance with current policy against a technologically capable adversary." A medium-scale operation is similar to the naval involvement in the Iraq War.

The document adds that the Navy is too "thinly stretched", its fighting capability is being "eroded" and the fleet's ability to influence events at the strategic level is "under threat".

The document's findings come at a time of mounting pressure on the Prime Minister, who has been heavily criticised over claims that as Chancellor he failed to fund the military ­adequately.

None of this will be a surprise to regular readers. I have posted about the dire straits the Royal Navy finds itself in several times. Here, here and here, to name just a few.  There are more. The fleet has lost strength at an alarming rate, though. The once proud Royal Navy has become a mere shadow of the shell it had already become a decade ago. The Telegraph has a dismal graphic that shows just how feeble the navy is today compared to 20 years ago.

Ed Morrisey also noticed this article today and warns that the US is also weakening its fleet, although not at a similar rate.

That doesn't let the US off the hook, though. For approximately the same period, the US has allowed our navy to shrink, a situation that only recently caused alarm in Washington with the apparent arms buildup of China. We have relied on two vast oceans to serve as our buffer against military attack, buttressed by an overwhelming surface and subsurface naval armada. We have begun to drift in the same direction as the UK, allowing our ability to project power and protect our trade routes dwindle slowly. We have not seen the same level of degradation that the British see in their naval power, but we're on the same road.

Not a good situation. Britain and the United States have kept the sea lanes open for centuries - for the benefit of all lawful seafarers. It is no coincidence that the reductions in the navies of these two nations coincides with the huge upswing in piracy globally. This is not likely to get better in the short term.

Department Of Irony

I pointed out the amusing cancellation of skiing in Colorado due to snow. This is even more amusing. USA Today points out that one of the very first events to be canceled due to the cold weather was - wait for it - an annual "Polar Bear Plunge."

OMAHA (AP) — Weather forecasters predict Nebraska will receive a treacherous mix of sleet, freezing rain and snow this weekend, so it's understandable that events may get canceled.

But one of the first cancellations announced Friday afternoon came from an unexpected source: organizers of the Polar Bear Plunge.

The chilling swim in Omaha's Zorinsky Lake raises money for the Special Olympics, but organizers decided to postpone the event because of the weather.

Oh, I know it was because of worries over road conditions. But it's still funny.

And In Today’s Narcissistic Cretin News

A college student, a drama student at University of Montana has been charged with assault. His offense: he thought it would be "funny" to push a pie into the face of a shopping mall Santa Claus and film it for a movie project.

Clint Westwood, 22, said he "lightly smooshed" the pie into the man's face Wednesday and shouted, "What do you think of that, Santa?"

Westwood, a drama student at the University of Montana, was charged Friday. He said he videotaped the encounter and plans to include the clip in an upcoming film.

He said that after the pie ruckus, he expected to approach Santa for a signature on a film-release form, but police arrived first.

"It's a good thing he didn't wait around, because I think Santa would have laid him out," said Sgt. Travis Welsh of the Missoula Police Department.

Westwood said he and companions had waited for a girl about 15 years old to finish sitting on Santa's lap before the pie hit his face, "but then we just decided it would be funnier if she was still sitting there."

That is assault, of course. It also shows a complete lack of respect for others. Westwood better hope he never tries that on someone else who doesn't think the rules of common decency apply. The result might be educational for him. After he wakes up.

Skiing Canceled Due To Snow

One expects lack of snow to ruin skiing, of course, but there is just something hysterically funny about canceling skiing due to too much snow. That is exactly what happened yesterday in Colorado, however. The massive storm that swept across the US - currently heading for the northeast - caused all kinds of problems.

Madison had expected three inches of snow and wind gusts of up to 30 mph Saturday. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department postponed its annual Solstice Party, which was set for Saturday, until February.

"This is the most treacherous kind of weather that the weather can deliver," said department chairman Jonathan Martin.

The storm also complicated plans for some presidential hopefuls drumming up support for the Jan. 3 caucuses that kick off the nomination process.

Republican Mitt Romney canceled three campaign stops planned Saturday in southern Iowa, and former President Clinton canceled a rally for his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, scheduled Saturday afternoon outside Des Moines.

In the mountains of western Colorado, the storm dumped up to two feet of snow, bringing moisture to a region that had been thirsting for it. A half foot of snow in Beaver Creek forced organizers to postpone a men's World Cup super-G skiing event from Saturday to Monday.

Eastbound Interstate 70 was closed for about three hours Saturday night leading up to Vail Pass in the mountains due to accidents on icy, snowpacked roads.

Heavy ice accumulations on power lines blacked out more than 14,000 customers scattered around Iowa, according to Alliant Energy and MidAmerican Energy. Thousands more were without power near Galesburg, Ill., Ameren spokesman Leigh Morris said.

Unfortunately, there were also tragic accidents as a result of the weather:

In Indiana, a van carrying Purdue University's ice hockey team rolled over on an ice-slickened highway about 20 miles southwest of West Lafayette, killing one team member and injuring seven others, school officials said.

As a veteran of a lot of winter driving, I always dread the first storm of the season. Too many people forget how to drive in the snow and ice from one year to the next. The key is to always slow down. Always. It takes some people the first three or four storms to remember that. Do yourself a favor - don't have to relearn it every year.

Rise Of The Limousine Liberals

Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel pen an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today that points out that the "liberal" of today has little, if any, resemblance to the liberal of old. Nor do they care about the lower or middle classes. The authors call them "Gentry Liberals."

Well, it isn't your father's liberalism, the ideology that defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes. The old liberalism had its flaws, but it also inspired increased social and economic mobility, strong protections for unions, the funding of a national highway system and a network of public parks, and the development of viable public schools. It also invented Social Security and favored a strong foreign policy.

Today's ascendant liberalism has a much different agenda. Call it "gentry liberalism." It's not driven by the lunch-pail concerns of those workers struggling to make it in an increasingly high-tech, information-based, outsourcing U.S. economy — though it does pay lip service to them.

Rather, gentry liberalism reflects the interests and values of the affluent winners in the era of globalization and the beneficiaries of the "financialization" of the economy. Its strongholds are the tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and West Los Angeles.

Just as the number of industrial workers and traditional middle-class households has declined, the ranks of the affluent class have grown. From 2000 to 2005, the number of millionaires in the U.S. rose 26%. Meanwhile, households with incomes of more than $100,000 a year were the most rapidly growing income category, according to Ogilvy & Mather demographer Peter Francese. From 1994 to 2004, the number of six-figure-income households jumped 54%.

Although many of the newly affluent are — as is traditional — politically conservative, a rising number of them are turning left. Surveys done by the Pew Research Center indicate that an increasing number of households with annual incomes greater than $135,000 — the nation's top 10% — are moving toward the Democrats. In 1995, there were nearly twice as many Republicans (46%) as Democrats (25%) in this category. Today, there are as many Democrats (31%) as Republicans (32%).

The political upshot is that Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts, according to Michael Franc of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Kotkin and Siegel point out that this is elitism - the presumptuous assumption that the gentry are wiser and more capable of ruling and deciding what is best. I'd recommend reading it all. Because, in fact, the gentry liberals are increasingly out of touch with the interests of the working people.

But gentry liberalism's increasingly "green tint" distances it the furthest from the values and interests of the middle and working classes. Leading gentry liberals, whether on Wall Street, in Hollywood or in Silicon Valley, are among the greatest scolds on global warming. They justifiably excoriate the Bush administration for its overall environmental record, but some of them — movie stars, investment bankers, dot-com billionaires — are quick to insulate themselves from charges that their private jets or 20,000-square-foot vacation homes in Nantucket spew prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide. Repentance typically includes the purchase of carbon "offsets," parcels of rain forests, hybrid vehicles or solar panels.

The gentry liberal crusade to tighten U.S. environmental regulations to slow global warming could end up hurting middle- and working-class interests. U.S. industry needs time and incentives to develop new technologies to replace carbon-based energy. If it doesn't get them, and an overly aggressive anti-carbon regime is instituted, the shift of manufacturing, energy and shipping jobs to developing countries with weak environmental laws and regulations could accelerate.

Ignoring these potential Third World environmental costs would result only in shifting the geography of greenhouse gas emissions without slowing global warming — and at a terrible cost to jobs in the U.S.

Which is what a lot of us have been trying to point out. In the end this imposition of the limousine liberal agenda (which I prefer to the gentry term) is little more than societal suicide. They are firmly convinced that they are right and will brook no dissent, actively trying to silence anyone who disagrees. They also don't acknowledge the reality that imposing draconian carbon laws here will merely drive the factories - and all the jobs - to China.

Enablers

The Opinion Journal describes, yet again, the changes (T)Hugo Chavez is trying to make to the constitution of Venezuela. These are fundamentally undemocratic, tyrannical changes that empower autocratic rule disguised as "participatory democracy." They wonder if the west's enablers will finally open their eyes to what is happening in Venezuela.

Mr. Chávez wouldn't be close to pulling this off if he hadn't already used his nine years in power to neuter Venezuela's independent political institutions. To gain control of the Supreme Court, Mr. Chávez increased the number of justices to 32 from 20. Then he fired the National Electoral Council (CNE) and named his own version, which presided over a crooked and non-transparent August 2004 recall referendum.

Former President Jimmy Carter nonetheless blessed that fraud, and the Bush State Department went along too. For their part, Venezuelans have so little faith in an honest vote that they boycotted the 2005 legislative elections; chavista candidates won 100% of the seats.

In 2002 Mr. Chávez also purged the military after it refused to fire on protestors and briefly removed him from power. In that event, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd rushed to support Mr. Chávez while ignoring the pleas of labor unions, human rights activists and religious leaders that he was abusing his power. Another enthusiastic supporter is Joseph P. Kennedy II, who in exchange for discounts on Venezuelan oil has been promoting the president as a benefactor to America's poor.

Despite this help from abroad, Mr. Chávez's popularity at home has been dropping sharply as Venezuelans rebel against this electoral putsch. Students have been pushing back hard against limits on free speech, and even former ally General Raul Baduel has called the referendum a "coup against democracy" and joined the opposition.

Right offhand, I'd say the answer to the question posed by the Opinion Journal is no. The enablers will not make a peep of protest. They'll ignore this or make excuses. There is a chance that the people could vote this down, but it is a slim one. Chavez owns the entire electoral process and the vote is probably already over before it even begins. Hence his preemptive threats to cut off oil to the US if our government protests the results. People like Kennedy, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey and all the others are too narcissistic to give a hoot about the people of Venezuela and the nightmare that is descending on them.

The World Turned Upside Down

Legend has it that the band of Lord Cornwallis' army played that tune when they marched out to surrender to the Continental Army at Yorktown. That story may be only a myth. This one isn't. The latest polls in Iowa show Huckabee on top for the Republican field and Obama leading for the Democrats.  If it holds, just like that the race changed. Completely.

(Huckabee story) Huckabee wins the support of 29 percent of Iowans who say they definitely or probably will attend the Republican Party's caucuses on Jan. 3. That's a gain of 17 percentage points since the last Iowa Poll was taken in early October, when Huckabee trailed both Romney and Fred Thompson.

Other poll findings indicate that the former Arkansas governor is making the most of a low-budget campaign by tapping into the support of Iowa's social conservatives.

Romney, who has invested more time and money campaigning in the state than any other GOP candidate, remains in the thick of the Iowa race with the backing of 24 percent of likely caucusgoers. But that's a drop of 5 points since October for the former Massachusetts governor.

(Obama story) Despite the movement, the race for 2008's opening nominating contest remains very competitive about a month before the Jan. 3 caucuses, just over half of likely caucusgoers who favor a candidate saying they could change their minds.

Obama, an Illinois senator, leads for the first time in the Register's poll as the choice of 28 percent of likely caucusgoers, up from 22 percent in October. Clinton, a New York senator, was the preferred candidate of 25 percent, down from 29 percent in the previous poll.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who led in the Register's May poll, held steady with 23 percent, in third place, but part of the three-way battle.

If - and only if, of course - these hold all the assumptions, all the "destiny", all the "inevitability" are out the window.

The old Chinese curse applies. May you live in interesting times. (If that is any more true than the tune the band played when Cornwallis surrendered.)