Fausta's Blog

While the trafficking groups in Mexico are commonly called “cartels” (even Stratfor uses the term), they are not really cartels. A cartel is a combination of groups cooperating to control the supply of a commodity. The primary purpose of a cartel is to set the price of a commodity so that buyers cannot negotiate lower prices. The current conflict in Mexico over cocaine and marijuana smuggling routes shows that there are deep rifts between rival groups like the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas. There is no sign that they are cooperating with each other to set the price of cocaine or marijuana. Also, since most of the Mexican criminal groups are involved in a diverse array of criminal activities, their interests go beyond drug trafficking. They are perhaps most accurately described as “transnational criminal organizations” (TCOs), the label currently favored by the DEA.

The chimichanga? It may be the only thing Republicans have left to offer Latinos

…subsequently Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina tweets that this is “the line of the day” and the twitterverse is afire. Lots of Hispanic folks on the right side of the aisle are insulted by not just the insensitivity of the original remark, but the supporting tweet by none other the the President’s Campaign manger.

I can understand why some of us would be insulted. The remarks are definitely insensitive. But there are two things which insult me even more than these statements.

First, the abject hypocrisy of the left, with their holier than thou bullshit with regards to racial and ethnic issues, who have, whether through silence or excuses, defended Milbank and Messina.

Second, and most importantly, the silence from most of our “liberal” Latino brothers and sisters, who have almost collectively stuck their tails between their legs and hidden in a corner and ignored these blatant acts of racial discrimination. As if ignoring this will make it any less egregious or any less insulting or any less real.

Here’s my message to those liberal Latinos: Come on over to the dark side, amigos. Where you’ll be considered equals, where your success will be limited only by your determination and where you won’t be treated like chimichanga eating chattel.

Capriles — the grandson of Jews who survived the World War Two Holocaust in Poland — defines himself as a center-left “progressive” who admires Brazil’s “modern left” model of free-market economics with a strong social conscience.

The attacks against him foreshadow a tough election battle in the polarized South American OPEC member nation, where Chavez has strong support among the poor and denounces opponents as representatives of a discredited, super-rich elite.

The most furious accusations have come from state media commentator Mario Silva, who often targets Chavez’s foes on his late night TV show, “The Razorblade.”

‘The Enemy is Zionism’
Silva insulted opposition leaders and then read out a purported police document reporting Capriles was caught in a car having sex with another man in 2000.

Capriles denied the allegation and said the document was falsified. Police have not commented.

Another state radio commentator, Adal Hernandez, wrote a vitriolic profile of Capriles, highlighting his Jewish family background and titled: “The Enemy is Zionism.” Capriles, a practicing Catholic, has not responded to the profile.

One cartoon, retweeted on Wednesday by a senior Chavez aide, showed Capriles in pink shorts with a Swastika on his arm, squaring up to a much larger, muscular Chavez. He often talks emotionally of his grandparents’ escape from Nazi repression.

Factbox: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
Capriles comes from a wealthy family but pointedly spends more time in a T-shirt in shantytowns than in his office, and he is seeking to project himself as above the mud-slinging.
“I wasn’t elected to fight with anyone but to solve problems,” said Capriles, who won nearly two-thirds of the 3 million votes cast in Sunday’s primary. “The only confrontation I want is against violence, unemployment, corruption and other problems in Venezuela.”

Witness his supposed compromise on the HHS regulations on insurance companies having to supply free contraceptive and sterilization care to all women even if their employers are religious institutions with religious objections to such policies. The Obama administration is pretending that the employers won’t have to pay for these policies, just the insurance companies. This is mendacious sophistry. Someone has to pay for those policies. Insurance companies don’t offer policies for free. That someone will be have to be the religious institution. Somehow, they’ll end up paying for Obama’s free contraceptive mandate.

Yet whatever the Constitution said, the operation of the actual power meant that the effective answer is probably that government cannot really really force you to do things, but actually they can.

as problematic as their immigrants are, they have fewer of them and they are not constantly importing more.

You might argue that the biggest clown show in the world is in America. Where SWPL yuppies in a never ending battle against “the wrong sort of White people†have imported a mass of vote-mercenaries who will assuredly kill their hipster paradises of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, and Ann Arbor, dead, dead, dead! Not too many working guys from Michoacan or their descendants are big into irony, feminism, gay rights, or saving the planet. Mostly, they throw trash out the window (as Victor Davis Hanson attests) and stage pit-bull and cockfights. People from Michoacan don’t ironically drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and get designated drivers, they drive drunk without a license and run over lots of kids, elderly, and each other. The folks from Juarez don’t earnestly send money to Greenpeace to save the Gay Whales, they mostly hang headless bodies from bridges, or roll grenades into discos, or become the victims of the same.

The actor Sean Penn has weighed into the Falklands dispute, urging Britain to join UN-sponsored talks over what he called “the Malvinas Islands of Argentina”.

Penn met Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in Buenos Aires and said: “It’s necessary that these diplomatic talks happen between the United Kingdom and Argentina. I think that the world today is not going to tolerate any kind of ludicrous and archaic commitment to colonialist ideology.”

Iran has a proven record of using its official presence in a foreign city to coordinate attacks, which are then carried out by Hezbollah agents from abroad, often leveraging the local community—whether wittingly or not—as facilitators. Most notable are the 1992 and 1994 bombings of Israeli and Jewish targets in Argentina, which killed 29 and 85 people, respectively. The New York City Police Department, where I work as director of Intelligence Analysis, sent a team to Argentina to study the modus operandi of those attacks and to meet with Argentine security officials who worked the investigations. Coupled with open source information, this is what the NYPD learned:

Iranian agents were sent to Argentina years before the attacks, where they integrated into society and became Argentine nationals. Mohsen Rabbani is believed to have been in charge of coordinating the 1994 attack and is subject to an Interpol arrest warrant for his involvement. He first came to Argentina in 1983, where he subsequently became the main imam at At-Tauhid, an Iranian-funded mosque in Buenos Aires.

After traveling to Iran in August 1993 to participate in a meeting that allegedly gave the planned attack the green light, Mr. Rabbani returned to Argentina as a cultural attaché to the Iranian Embassy, conveniently providing him diplomatic immunity. Then, Hezbollah agents from abroad received logistical support from members of the local Lebanese-Shiite community and the Iranian Embassy to carry out the attack.

The Argentine attacks were by no means isolated incidents. Hezbollah has been tied to failed attacks in 2009 against Israeli and Jewish interests in Azerbaijan, Egypt and Turkey. Last month, Thai officials arrested a suspected Hezbollah militant for possibly planning attacks there or perhaps facilitating the movement of weapons through Bangkok.

Hezbollah and its supporters have a presence in New York and the surrounding area as well. In 2008, two Staten Island men pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah. Just down the road in Philadelphia, 26 people—including a former Brooklyn resident—were indicted in federal court in 2009 for conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group.

Lebanese-linked businesses in the tri-state area and elsewhere have been implicated in a massive money-laundering scheme benefiting Hezbollah. This scheme was revealed in a civil suit filed against several Lebanese financial institutions last December by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Meanwhile, at least 18 other Hezbollah-related cases have been brought in federal courts across the United States since 2000.

Mr. Fortuño says that he expects Washington to give him a carve-out for LNG tankers, but he doesn’t have it yet. He also says that a large part of the environmentalist push-back is political, suggesting to me that he ought to be more worried than he is. This kind of politics needs to preserve the status quo of the welfare state. And that implies blocking Mr. Fortuño’s development agenda no matter what it means to the poor.