Free Republic

Chesa Boudin will serve as San Francisco's next district attorney, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. Boudin, the most progressive candidate on the ballot, won a tight race against interim district attorney Suzy Loftus. Boudin held 85,950 votes as of Saturday afternoon, with about 1,200 ballots left to count, the Chronicle said. Loftus had 83,511 votes. The 39-year-old won the seat following four days of ballot counting in the city's first open election for district attorney in over a century following sitting District Attorney George Gascon's departure to run for district attorney in Los Angeles. "We are all feeling the...

The Fusion GPS news-for-hire scandal has not only led to the public identification of the source of the “Trump Dossier”—a for-profit company that provides opposition research to whoever could write big checks, which is staffed by four former Wall Street Journal reporters led by Glenn Simpson. The scandal has also lifted the lid off a sewer of corporate information warfare and opposition research that the flailing institutions of the mainstream press now regularly re-package as news, without ever saying where it came from—or who paid for it. While the idea that the products of paid opposition research are being main-lined...

The late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the mid-2000s attempted to coordinate with Colombian guerrillas to flood the United States with cocaine, according to federal prosecutors' documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal. According to the documents, former Venezuelan Supreme Court Magistrate Eladio Aponte took part in a meeting where Chávez in 2005 convened his closest advisers to draw up plans to ship cocaine to the United States with the help of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). SNIP “During the meeting, Chávez urged the group, in substance and in part, to promote his policy objectives, including to combat...

Asdrubal Chavez, chief executive of Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corp, boarded the Venezuelan-owned firm's corporate jet in Caracas on Jan. 30, after meeting with top officials of the embattled administration of socialist President Nicolas Maduro about the latest U.S. oil sanctions. Upon landing in the Bahamas - where Chavez has worked for about a year after being denied a U.S. visa - he had received word from Houston that it would be his last trip on a company plane and that his Citgo email account had been shut off. Day-to-day control of the company had passed to Citgo's top U.S. executive,...

Ocasio-Cortez: Latinos Can’t Be Illegals Because They’re ‘Descendants of Native People’ BY: Cameron Cawthorne Follow @@Cam_Cawthorne February 7, 2019 4:31 pm Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) on Thursday criticized U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and argued in support of undocumented Latinos in the United States, saying the latter cannot be "criminalized" on "Native" U.S. land because they are "descendants of Native people." The self-described Democratic socialist spoke on Thursday alongside several liberal groups, including MoveOn and United We Dream, a pro-immigration group that calls for ICE to be abolished. She repeatedly slammed ICE, claiming it "repeatedly and systematically violates human...

Every American should get behind the Trump administration’s efforts to free Venezuela and its 30 million people. Venezuelans have waited too long to be liberated from Nicolás Maduro – an illegitimate despot who has bankrupted and corrupted the nation. Venezuela was once an oil-rich nation that could have lifted its people out of poverty and become a shining example of progress and development in Latin America. It was a vibrant democracy that had everything going for it. I know because several decades ago I worked with two of Venezuela’s presidents, helping them understand the aspirations of their people through polls....

Russian President Vladimir Putin spent years building up an alliance with Venezuela's late populist leader Hugo Chavez and his successor Maduro, often playing host to the two in Moscow. As pressure has built on Maduro from self-proclaimed acting president Juan Guaido and his Western allies, Russia has stood firm behind its man in Caracas. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday vowed Moscow would "do everything" to protect its ally. Behind this support, analysts say, is an understanding that if it loses Venezuela, Moscow will have few allies to speak of in Latin America. "Venezuela is practically the last thing that...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks at an event in Claremont, N.H., January 18, 2019. (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she’s proposing asset forfeiture.History is very short, if you look at it the right way. The American Revolution seems like it was a very long time ago, but looked at with the right kind of eyes, it was the day before yesterday: The revolution of Washington and Jefferson inspired the French Revolution, which unhappily perverted the classical-liberal principles of the American Founders and created instead an ersatz religion purporting to be a cult of pure reason —...

In the age of A.O.C., the lesson must be learned again. Conspicuous by its absence in much of the mainstream news coverage of Venezuela’s political crisis is the word “socialism.” Yes, every sensible observer agrees that Latin America’s once-richest country, sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, is an economic basket case, a humanitarian disaster, and a dictatorship whose demise cannot come soon enough. But … socialist? Perish the thought. ... the Venezuelan regime’s admirers used to speak of “21st century socialism,” as it was dubbed by Hugo Chávez. The late Venezuelan president, said Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, “showed us...

Is Venezuela paying the price for adopting gun control? The shocking nature of Venezuela’s economic collapse has been covered ad nauseam. However, one aspect of the Venezuelan crisis that does not receive much coverage is the country’s gun control regime. Fox News recently published an excellent article highlighting Venezuelan citizens’ regret over the gun control policies the Venezuelan government has implemented since 2012. Naturally, this regret is warranted. The Venezuelan government is among the most tyrannical in the world, with a proven track record of violating basic civil liberties such as free speech, debasing its national currency, confiscating private property,...

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) - Ex-Argentina president Cristina Kirchner was charged with corruption as a judge asked that her parliamentary immunity be lifted so she can be detained, reports said Monday. She is accused of having accepted tens of millions of dollars in bribes in the notorious "corruption notebooks" scandal that has rocked Argentina's political and business elites. As a senator, Kirchner is protected by parliamentary immunity from imprisonment, although not from prosecution. Unless that immunity is lifted, she cannot be jailed, even if found guilty. However, last month the Senate did vote to partially lift her immunity so that investigators...

You've heard of skunks at the garden party? Such as still-ruling Nicaraguan socialist strongman, Daniel Ortega, who got his famous nickname from none other than the great Ronald Reagan? Well, now we have pigs at the garden party of democracy, the Organization of American States' Summit of the Americas, and this time, quite literally. At the globally watched summit, locals released a bunch of pigs through the streets of the Peruvian capital of Lima, around the Plaza San Martin, which is one of its main public spaces, spray-painted with the names of Venezuela's dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and Cuba's dictator, Raul...

Cindy Sheehan says President Trump's allegedly insensitive remarks to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger aren't surprising to her, and that former President George W. Bush had a similarly difficult time with her family after her son Casey's 2004 death in Iraq. Bush's treatment of grieving military family members, including Sheehan, who camped outside his Texas ranch to protest the Iraq War, is upheld frequently as an example for Trump to follow. But Sheehan said Bush's attempt to comfort her family and others was rife with awkwardness and upsetting moments, and said she's "not shocked" to read that...

The images, anecdotes, and videos coming out of Venezuela in the past year have been heartbreaking. Shortages of medicines and basic household supplies, people rummaging through garbage for food, violent clashes, a seemingly hopeless future. The data if anything understate the scale of the catastrophe. Entirely avoidable, the combination of policies and circumstances leading to it have been in place for years. Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard-based Venezuelan economist deemed persona non grata by the government for his fierce criticisms, appeared on Alphachat recently to discuss the sequence of events preceding this cataclysmic economic situation. He also talked listeners through the...

The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains For the last decade in American politics, Hugo Chavez became a potent political weapon - within a few years of his ascent, he was transformed from just a leader of a neighboring nation into a boogeyman synonymous with extremism. Regularly invoked in over-the-top political rhetoric, Chavez's name became a decontextualized epithet to try to attach to a political opponent so as to make that opponent look like a radical. Because of this, America barely flinched upon hearing the news that the Bush...

“From the Soviet Union to Cuba, Venezuela, wherever socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish, devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems…”– President Donald Trump, Sept. 19.A big takeaway from my prior years in ministry is that things aren’t always as they seem. Sometimes people hide dark secrets behind nice smiles and happy faces. Here in the U.S., gobs of sorely misinformed people fantasize about the pie-in-the-sky idea of socialism, having no idea all it does is...

On one level, the saga of Madame Giselle is a story about, in no particular order, allegations by two neighbors who say they were swindled in an elaborate scheme to sell T-shirts to the Venezuelan army, a cash-stuffed envelope slipped under a doorway, a legendary bygone scandal involving the Colombian military and a glamorous woman known as “The Blonde,” an ongoing multimillion-dollar Colombian fraud case, and a supposed helicopter ride into Syria. But on another level, as illustrated in interviews and in hundreds of text messages obtained by The Washington Post, it’s a story about friendship and trust, about what...

Leftists like British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have long had warm words for Venezuela's chavistas. But as famine has racked the country and President Nicholás Maduro has turned dictatorial, those words are coming back to bite them. PAMPLONA, SPAIN—An inspiration, a hero: these are the words leftists in Europe lavished on the late Hugo Chavez for his “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. For British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing parties like Syriza and Podemos in southern Europe, Chavez’s ascendance was long the clearest challenge to inequality in Latin America, neoliberalism in Washington, and austerity at home. Today, it's a decidedly...

Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, has blamed the turmoil in Venezuela on Hugo Chávez’s unwillingness to execute “oligarchs” after he came to power. ... “One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela,” Livingstone told Talk Radio. “He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro.”

US Ambassador Nikki Haley has called for international action to address the crisis in Venezuela, after a US-backed proposal for regional mediation failed to win support at the Organization of American States. (The US-backed proposal failed to overcome opposition from the 14 similar national jurisdictions that benefit from turmoil and discounted Venezuelan oil.) "The tragic situation in Venezuela calls out for action. The Venezuelan people are starving while their government tramples their democracy". //Snipp// The Judiciary has sold out and military command is wavering as the country, pummeled by the plunge in oil prices and the Hugo Chávez, legacy of...