Fausta's Blog

John Paul Rathbone looks at the pink tide and concludes that

As Chávez’s death focuses attention on the economic failings of radicals, pragmatists are proving more successful

Comparing the Latin American countries,

Today, about half of the region’s 20 republics are centrist or centre-right. Not that this has diminished the importance of social progress everywhere. Caracas rightly boasts that it has halved poverty levels in Venezuela. Yet this performance has been repeated elsewhere, in Chile and Peru for example, without ransacking the economy as Chávez did.

The Chavista model is a busted flush but no leader in the region will publicly admit it. Nonetheless, tributes have flowed in all week. Dignitaries and world leaders, from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad to the Prince of Asturias, have flown to Caracas to pay their respects. In Havana, the Castro government declared three days of mourning.

Much of the radical left’s grief is real, but so too is the self-interest. Because Chávez’s demise confronts it with a bind. The populist left is dominated by outsize personalities. With its most extravagant character gone, others are jostling for supremacy. That is as true inside Venezuela, where chavismo is riddled with factions, as outside.

“The space and rhetoric won’t change,” says Franklin Ramírez, a sociologist at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Quito. But the “map has been changing”. The main contenders for influence are two economic blocs: Brazil and its partners in the southern Mercosur trade pact, and its regional counterweight, the free-trading Pacific economies of Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile.

The second and bigger problem is that the radical economic model is unsustainable. Even with the largest oil reserves in the world, Venezuela has turned to China for $40bn of loans to keep itself going.

Read the whole article here (registration required). H/t M.

talking about Chavez and Venezuela.

Listen live, or, at your convenience, to the archived podcast.

Live on C-SPAN2, Rand Paul filibustering the Brennan nomination. He started at 11:45AM and is on a roll.

As Emily Zanotti Skyles put it,

There’s nothing better than a straight-up for-reals filibuster. I can’t wait until Rand Paul gets to the Betty Crocker cookbook.

He has a ways to go. Right now he’s talking about privacy rights, and there’s plenty to say on that topic.

UPDATE:
Ted Cruz joins in,

The UK’s Daily Mail reports,
How Senator Bob Menendez tried to pass a law that would have helped donor whose jet he repeatedly used for trips to the Dominican Republic

he disclosure of the legislation that Menendez wanted to push through- that had incentives for natural gas vehicle conversions- is the latest intersection between the New Jersey Democrat who is the subject of an ethics inquiry on Capitol Hill and the Florida doctor involved in a federal criminal investigation.

Dr. Salomon Melgen invested in Gaseous Fuel Systems Corp. of Weston, Florida, and joined its board of directors in early 2010, according to the company’s chief executive and a former company consultant.

GFS designs, manufactures and sells products to convert diesel-fuel fleets to natural gas. The amount of Melgen’s investment is confidential under rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a 2009 document filed with the SEC showed the company required a minimum individual investment at that time of $51,500.

At the same time, Menendez emerged as a principal supporter of a natural gas bill that would boost tax credits and grants to truck and heavy vehicle fleets that converted to alternative fuels.
The bill stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, and after it was revived in 2012, the NAT GAS Act failed to win the needed 60 votes to pass.

While the bill was under consideration between 2009 and 2011, the former consultant for GFS spent $220,000 lobbying Menendez’s staff and other congressional and federal officials on the act’s provisions as well as other regulatory issues, according to interviews and Senate records.
…
Melgen has been a staunch supporter, giving more than $14,000 directly to Menendez since the late 1990s and, through his eye clinic, donating $700,000 last year to a ‘super’ political committee that supported Democratic Senate candidates. The committee, in turn, spent $582,000 to back Menendez’ campaign.

More:
Web of Influence
Ties between Menendez and controversial donor more extensive than previously thought

Dr. Krauthammer‘s on the case, on TV:

and here: Hail Armageddon

The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

Because of this year’s payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their belts by precisely 2 percent. They found a way. Washington, spending $3.8 trillion, cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’ fees.

Obama was counting on the sequester, make no mistake.

Ace:

Woodward’s sin was exposing “big whoppers” the Administration told on the sequester.

There are several lies Woodward has exposed:

1. Obama, despite the media blitz to blame the GOP, actually conceived of and proposed the sequester.

2. Obama, despite now claiming that tax increases must be part of the deal to avoid the sequester, agreed last year that only spending cuts would constitute the plan to avoid the sequester. Thus, he’s “moved goalposts” yet again.

3. Obama does not in fact have to release illegal aliens or cancel ship deployments due to the sequester — he’s doing these things by choice, for political purposes.

Welcome to The Obamaian Universe,

He doesn’t want to cut spending. He wants more of it. Forever. Public spending is beyond ideology for Barack Obama. It’s the oxygen in his universe.
…
Maybe it’s time to come to grips with the fact that he sees the public economy of federal spending as the life force of the nation as no president ever has, not even Franklin Roosevelt.

Indeed!

As you all know by now, Bob Woodward, the guy who brought down Nixon, has made the White House unhappy by (correctly) asserting that sequestration was Obama’s idea in the first place. So unhappy that, after being yelled at for an hour, Woodward received an email from Gene Sperling, economic adviser to the president, promising(?)

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

The charm oozes from the email later on, when Gene apologizes for yelling at Bob, but Bob isn’t the only one getting the yeller (h/t Instapundit): Ron Fournier writes,

As editor-in-chief of National Journal, I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Woodward called a veiled threat. “You will regret staking out that claim,” The Washington Post reporter was told.

Once I moved back to daily reporting this year, the badgering intensified. I wrote Saturday night, asking the official to stop e-mailing me. The official wrote, challenging Woodward and my tweet. “Get off your high horse and assess the facts, Ron,” the official wrote.

Lanny Davis (audio starts immediately) told Washington, D.C.’s WMAL this morning that the Obama White House had threatened the Washington Times over his column.

Woodward says sequestration is “a kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time.”

So, is Woodward overreacting, or has he created a perfect storm of a timely controversy about the media and individual reporters?

Mind you, not just any individual reporter, but the reporter who brought down a POTUS, and had Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson (as Jack Foreman) play him in movies a generation ago.

Or is this just a generational thing that young voters will brush aside?

RELATED:
The presidency as theater:

And thus the facade continues: promising peace and delivering expanded war, with new frontiers broken for drone killings of children and other innocents, legal justifications crafted for killing Americans, and near-limitless executive power over nearly every aspect of our lives. Reciting the Progressive line while delivering impoverishment, decreased access and less-affordable healthcare, clearly it matters only what he says, not what is. His hoped-for next act: new goals of gun control that would make the most vulnerable more so, an increased minimum wage that would further exacerbate the inability of those with no work experience to get an entry-level job in which to hone the skills that will put them on the economic ladder, and “green” measures, based, like the Life of Pi, on computer-generated fantasy so much more appealing than dry real-world data.

If You Don’t Buy This Budget, We’ll Kill This Seal

(Click on link for full size)

Ted Cruz is in the unique position of being a Senator who’ll most likely never run for POTUS since he was born in Canada. His professional background is second to no one’s (particularly the current POTUS’s),

Before being elected, Ted received national acclaim as the Solicitor General of Texas, the State’s chief lawyer before the U.S. Supreme Court.  Serving under Attorney General Greg Abbott, Ted was the nation’s youngest Solicitor General, the longest serving Solicitor General in Texas, and the first Hispanic Solicitor General of Texas.

In private practice in Houston, Ted spent five years as a partner at one of the nation’s largest law firms, where he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national Appellate Litigation practice.

Ted has authored more than 80 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and argued 43 oral arguments, including nine before the U.S. Supreme Court.  During Ted’s service as Solicitor General, Texas achieved an unprecedented series of landmark national victories, including successfully defending:

• U.S. sovereignty against the UN and the World Court in Medellin v. Texas;
• The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms;
• The constitutionality of the Texas Ten Commandments monument;
• The constitutionality of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance;
• The constitutionality of the Texas Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment law; and
• The Texas congressional redistricting plan.

The National Law Journal has called Ted “a key voice” to whom “the [U.S. Supreme Court] Justices listen.”  Ted has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America, by the National Law Journal as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America, and by Texas Lawyer as one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.

From 2004-09, he taught U.S. Supreme Court Litigation as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law.

Prior to becoming Solicitor General, he served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as Domestic Policy Advisor on the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign.

Ted graduated with honors from Princeton University and with high honors from Harvard Law School.  He served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the U.S. Supreme Court.  He was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for the Chief Justice of the United States.

Cruz has jumped into the fray:

So far he is the only senator who has dared challenge the many blatant falsehoods President Obama and many congressional Democrats have been pushing regarding guns, in particular the bogus claim that 40 percent of gun sales are done without background checks.

To add to the Dems’ outrage, Cruz is demanding that Chuck Hagel disclose the source of funds Hagel receive for speeches (particularly $200,000),

Lanny Davis is among the few democrats who agree that Hagel should make full disclosure.

Behold, the birth of Ted Cruz Derangement syndrome: IS SENATOR TED CRUZ OUR NEW MCCARTHY?

A guy who was at Harvard Law at the same time as TC had this to say,

@ryanlizza I was there then. Cruz is basically correct: there were more Marxists than Republicans. Mayer should have talked to more people.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 22, 2013

This is only the beginning, folks.

Give ‘em hell, Ted!

UPDATE:
Linked by Extrano’s Alley. Thank you!

Government by Freakout
Obama’s scare tactics aren’t much of a long-term strategy.

In a way it’s all brilliant showbiz: Scare people into supporting your position. But we’ve been though it before, and you wonder, again, why a triumphant president and a battered Republican House majority can’t reach a responsible agreement.

And then you remind yourself why. Because Mr. Obama thrives in chaos. He flourishes in unsettled circumstances and grooves on his own calm. He spins an air of calamity, points fingers and garners support. His only opponent is a hapless, hydra-headed House. America has a weakness for winners, and Republicans just now do not look like winners. They have many voices but no real voice, and no one saying anything that makes you stop and think. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is a singular character who tells you in measured tones that we must have measured answers. Half the country finds his politics to be too much to one side, but his temperament is not extreme and he often looks reasonable. With this gift he ties his foes in knots to get what he wants, which is higher taxes. He wants the rich to pay more and those he judges to be in need to receive more. End of story. Debt and deficits don’t interest him, except to the extent he must give them lip service.

And so far this seems to be working fine for him. A USA Today/Pew Research Center poll out this week reported half the respondents said it will be the Republicans’ fault if the sequester goes through. Only a third said they’d blame the president.

The question is, is Obama overplaying his hand?