Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

August 10, 2008 By Fausta

“WWBCD?”, Olympic version

Blue Star Chronicles is keeping an Olympic eye on things, and sent this:
Pres. Bush declines to slap Misty May-Treanor’s bikinied butt

Today, as the busy crowd over at our Olympics blog notes, after an hour’s brisk bit of mountain-biking himself, Bush paid another visit to the American athletes, watching the women warm up for softball, regretting the disappearance of that sport from the next Olympics (“It’s good for the world to have girls playing softball and these women are going to show young girls how to win”) and trying his hand, so to speak, at volleyball.

Bush knuckled off a couple of lobs, but defending gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh gave the chief executive some pointers. Then after a good play, in the tradition of female volleyballers, May-Treanor turned, bent over slightly and offered her bikinied rear-end for the 43rd president to slap.

“Mr. President,” she said, “want to?”

Want to has nothing to do with it in public life.

As the son of a president, a husband of nearly 37 years, the father of two daughters, the subject of some attempted tabloid exposes and a seasoned political veteran, who is not a female athlete but knows that every camera for a half-mile is trained on him, Bush wisely chose instead to brush his hand across the small of May-Treanor’s back. (See photo.)

Darn!

Reuters had to redo their captions.

Now ask yourselves, “What would Bill Clinton do?”

Fortunately for everybody, George W Bush is not Bill Clinton.

And Laura Bush is not Hillary.

————————————————————————-

In the Olympic spirit, today’s books and shoes:

First, the books:
The WSJ’s Five Best Books on the Olympics, selected by ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap:

And now the shoes,
Puma Espera, in silver/white/blue.

My experience with the Puma brand is that they run slightly small, so order a 1/2 size larger.

Digg!

Share on Facebook

Share

Filed Under: books, Fausta's blog, George W. Bush, Olympics, politics, shoes Tagged With: Fausta's blog

August 9, 2008 By Fausta

Something good to say about George Bush

Via Darleen,

“President Bush talks with Andrea Duran and head coach Mike Candrea as he visits the practice of the U.S. women’s softball team at the 2008 Summer Olympic games in Beijing, China Saturday, Aug. 9, 2008. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)”

The Anchoress was saying,


You remember Bush, right?
The guy who goes to Asia and tells China to free her people, while the press jeers, the guy who, while in Asia also meets with Democracy Activists in Burma and gets ignored for it, the guy who drew enormous and supportive crowds in Korea, while the American press yawned?

Sure, you remember Bush!
He’s the guy whose life was threatened along with Barack Obama’s but only the threat to Obama was newsworthy for a very long time at CNN. Bush? You mean the creepy moron who will be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity as soon as congress can figure out how to do that without exposing itself or having to put some of its own members under oath?

Yeah, that guy! The guy who does more than just talk about freedom and progress. The guy who has brought real hope and change to people all over the world, and yes, here in America. But you don’t want to hear it. It’s the wrong and inconvenient narrative, the embargoed one.

I couldn’t have put it better, so I’m glad she did.

UPDATE
Also via The Anchoress, What Bush Got Right.

Digg!

Share on Facebook

Share

Filed Under: Fausta's blog, George W. Bush, Olympics, politics, Republicans Tagged With: Fausta's blog

August 6, 2008 By Fausta

So … Should Colombia Give the Hostages Back to the Terrorists?

Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center attack, asks, So … Should Colombia Give the Hostages Back to the Terrorists?

The International Committee of the Red Cross is in a snit over Colombia’s use of its emblem during the brilliant rescue operation that freed Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages from the FARC terrorist group.
…
The ICRC doesn’t have much to say when, for example, Palestinian terrorists use its resources as cover to transport terrorists and explosives (see this 2004 WND report from Michelle Malkin). Why squawk about this one?

Taranto makes exactly the right point:

Maybe we’re dense, but it seems to us that rescuing civilian hostages from a terrorist group is a higher humanitarian priority than preventing unauthorized use of a trademark. The way the Red Cross interprets them, the Geneva Conventions seem almost quaint.

As I mentioned in this afternoon’s podcast, the hostage rescue mission was indeed carried peacefully and its purpose, which was met, was the rescue of prisoners which were held by an organization that had tortured those prisoners for years. It was indeed a humanitarian mission, and not a shot was fired. If the Colombian military wanted to kill the FARC members they could have.

As you can see in the newly-released videos of the hostage rescue, the Red Cross insignia was one of many used in order to make the helicopter look like the helicopters used by any of the many NGOs that routinely deal with the FARC.

Think about it: NGOs dealing with the FARC, a criminal and terrorist organization, use the Red Cross emblem. Why doesn’t the ICRC complain about that, too?

Digg!

Share on Facebook

Share

Filed Under: Colombia, FARC, Fausta's blog, Ingrid Betancourt, Red Cross, terrorism Tagged With: Fausta's blog

July 24, 2008 By Fausta

Feed me!

Special thanks to No Runny Eggs for keeping track of what you would think I would, namely the new feed: http://faustasblog.com/?feed=rss2

Share

Filed Under: blogs, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Fausta's blog

July 4, 2008 By Fausta

“Hostage Rescue Is Happy Coincidence for McCain in Colombia”…

(While Fausta’s blog is moving from Blogger to its new home, I’ll be cross-posting everything at both places. This was yesterday‘s main post)


… says Elizabeth Bumiller of the NYT. The title of that article implies that McCain’s visit had been planned to coincide with the hostage rescue.

Like any other conspiracy theory, that one is easily rebuked. Commenter Pat Patterson, at my Pajamas Media article, deftly and with a good measure of sarcasm points out the obvious:

That’s right the Colombian government spent months arranging the infiltration of its agents, getting the intel on the location of the fifteen hostages and then sat around twiddling their thumbs until Sen. McCain showed up for a photo op. But since there are no pictures of Ingrid Bettancourt or the Americans holding flowers and shaking hands with the senator from Arizona then the whole plot seems like a terrible waste of energy. Maybe it was a conspiracy by FTD and not the CIA?

Moe Lane expands,

If you’re wondering why a big counter-terrorism strike just happened to take place during Senator John McCain’s visit to the region*, stop wondering: it was a no doubt deliberate decision on Colombia’s part. Note that while they briefed the American delegation prior to the event, the actual operation took place while McCain was en route to Mexico. President Uribe wants good relations between Colombia and the USA, but he also wants to establish a certain separation. Bringing off a major counter-terrorism operation during, but independently of, a working visit by three US Senators should fit the bill.

Aside from the silly title, Bumiller’s article makes a good point:

The timing of the rescue, which occurred while Mr. McCain was in Colombia, was in many ways a fortuitous turn of events for a presidential candidate who is using a three-day trip to South America and Mexico to try to show that he is a more agile foreign policy hand than his Democratic competitor, Senator Barack Obama. Although the timing of the rescue was a coincidence and Mr. McCain’s trip to Colombia had nothing to do with it, the event nonetheless put him in the middle of classified talks about covert operations with the head of another government.

What is no coincidence is that McCain’s foreign policy experience outshines that of his rival. McCain’s statement on the rescue highlights the importance of the operation while still reminding us of the hundreds of remaining hostages:

McCain, who was in Colombia Tuesday and Wednesday, said that President Alvaro Uribe and the Colombian defense minister had told him of the rescue plans.

“I’m pleased with the success of this very high-risk operation,” McCain said in a release. “Sometimes in the past, the FARC has killed the hostages rather than let them be rescued. So I congratulate President Uribe, the military and the nation of Colombia. It is great news. Now we must renew our efforts to free all of the other innocent people held hostage. With regard to the three Americans and Ingrid Betancourt — they had been held many years, as many as six years.”

Additionally, McCain supports the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat congress has been blocking.

The clear winners in this operation are Alvaro Uribe, all the hostages released, and the people of Colombia. The very big loser? Hugo Chavez. This hostage rescue has infinite repercussions in international politics.

Der Spiegel:

Indeed, it is Chavez who has been the big loser as a result of the positive developments in his neighboring country. With the fall of FARC, he has lost an important ally. His dream of a cross-border Bolivian revolution has failed, and at home he is fighting for his political survival.

There’s a second loser in this drama: Nicolas Sarkozy. The French appeared to have been just as surprised as Chavez to hear about Betancourt’s release on Wednesday. Paris had only just managed to establish fresh contact with the new FARC leader Alfonso Cano. Sarkozy had hoped that the French could score a coup by negotiating Betancourt’s release and flying her directly to Paris. Colombian government officials had spoken reproachingly about what they often deemed to be politically motivated attempts at intervention on the part of the French.

Erik Svane notices that the French didn’t take it gracefully: Frenchwoman: What Freed Ingrid Bétancourt Was Not President Uribe, But… “International Pressure” on President Uribe!, with “international pressure” meaning the French government, of course. They’d like to take credit for the release of one of their citizens, having failed at procuring the release itself.

The rescue itself was extraordinary: Counterterrorism blog calls it an Operation Right Out of Spy Thriller

This is a classic demonstration of how a country can use a mixture of law enforcement, intelligence, military, diplomatic and other mechanisms together, with a great deal of patience and tenacity, to achieve profound results against terrorism. It’s an operation that needs to be studied, understood, to see what its lessons are for handling other hostage situations and other terrorist groups.

The political map has changed for South America. Let’s hope the Dems in Congress get around to realizing that. For sure, the Dems claim that Pres. Bush has been ignoring Latin America flies in the face of this fact:

The US ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield, said there had been “close co-operation” from the Americans, including the sharing of intelligence, equipment and training advice.

This Ain’t Hell has Betancourt’s first press conference

Venezuela News and Views reacts to the press conference

Betancourt has now been reunited with her family. Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes are back home, too.

Others blogging on the rescue:
Gateway Pundit

Prairie Pundit

The New Editor

Poliblog

In Spanish ElTiempo’s report

Much more at Memeorandum

Special thanks to Larwyn and Siggy.

Digg!

Share on Facebook

Share

Filed Under: Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, Democrats, Election2008, FARC, Fausta's blog, France, Hugo Chavez, John McCain, Nicolas Sarkozy, politics, Republicans, Uncategorized

January 24, 2008 By Fausta

Coming up on Blog Talk Radio

This afternoon at 3PM Eastern I’ll be Ed Morrissey‘s guest, along with our mutual friend Val Prieto. We’ll be talking about Cuba, Venezuela and politics.

Tonight I’ll be liveblogging the debate at Heading Right.

Tomorrow at 11AM, Siggy and I will be talking about food with Happy Catholic.

Tuesday, January 29, at 11AM, Siggy and I will have a new, one-hour show.

During all my podcasts chat will be open at 10:45, and the call-in number is (646) 652-2639. Join us!

Listen to Fausta's blog on internet talk radio
Digg!

Share on Facebook

Share

Filed Under: Babalu Blog, Blog Talk Radio, Captain's Quarters, Fausta's blog, politics, Sigmund Carl and Alfred

June 27, 2007 By Fausta

Listen to Tell Me More today on NPR

Updated with the audio link

Today I am a guest in Michel Martin‘s NPR show, Tell Me More.

It came about last week when I was lying on a beach towel (who was covered with more sunblock, sand, and sea water, the towel or I? We’ll never know) when my friend Josue Sierra called and told me that he had given my name to Michel’s producer. They were looking for a Hispanic conservative.

To make a long story short, yesterday afternoon The Husband and I headed to Norfolk, Virginia, to the local PBS affiliate, WHRO. We arrived early, but luckily right before a big thunderstorm rolled in.

A nice young man led me to the studio room where he’d connect to the Washington, DC studio where the show is recorded. At 2:55PM I was comfortably seated and prepared for the connection.

And then we waited for 20 minutes.

Once the connection problems were ironed out, the show started recording. Michel’s guests were Jan Donaldson of Hot Ghetto Mess.com, who was at the studio with Michel, Ana Marie Cox of Time.com (formerly Wonkette), who was calling from her office in DC, and myself.

The first item of discussion was the upcoming Democrat debate. Michel’s going to be one of the panelists asking the candidates questions.

We had been asked beforehand to provide the question we would ask, and here is mine:
For me personally, it is very important to know,
What would you offer as incentives to entrepreneurs like myself – who hold MBAs and have sponsored foreign programmers – so we can continue to attract the best and brightest workers, and keep them?

And also,
How do you propose to reduce the costs and the barriers entrepreneurs like myself face now?

I hope the question makes it to the debate.

The conversation was animated, amusing, and amicable. I had a great time, and hope to be able to do it again soon.

One side note: After living the traffic in the North East, I am amazed at how little traffic there is in the Durham, Raleigh, and Norfolk areas by comparison.

On the way back The Husband and I stopped at a nice restaurant for dinner and enjoyed a very pleasant evening by the sea.

Not a bad way to spend a vacation afternoon, not bad at all.

The show airs today. Check your local NPR station for times. Here’s the live stream for all NPR shows

Update
Here’s the audio to the segment. You can also access it from here

Digg!

Share

Filed Under: Fausta's blog, Michel Martin, National Public Radio, NPR, radio

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 145
  • 146
  • 147
Tweets by @Fausta
retirees_raise-2015_300x250

Pages

  • About
  • Email

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Previous Posts

  • Mrs. Maisel goes full Alinsky on Mrs. Schlafly
  • Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • You need to unfriend me
  • Go ahead and Kiss the Girl, if you dare
  • Ashamed

Recent Comments

  • John on Mrs. Maisel goes full Alinsky on Mrs. Schlafly
  • Today’s hot topics: Democrats’ collusion shift, tax-return rift, Venezuela drift, and more! – PoliticalWitchDoctor.com on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Today’s hot topics: Democrats’ collusion shift, tax-return rift, Venezuela drift, and more! - AmericanTruthToday on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Did Venezuela’s Minister of Defense Back Out At The Last Minute? on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?
  • Roseanne Not Back, Khan not Invited, Operaman’s back, Jobs back, Fausta’s back (but not here yet) Thoughts under the fedora – Da Tech Guy Blog on Venezuela: Did the Minister of Defense back out at the last minute?

Archives

  • 2019
    • December 2019
    • May 2019
    • January 2019
  • 2018
    • December 2018
    • October 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
  • 2017
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
  • 2016
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
  • 2015
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
  • 2014
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
  • 2013
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
    • March 2013
    • February 2013
    • January 2013
  • 2012
    • December 2012
    • November 2012
    • October 2012
    • September 2012
    • August 2012
    • July 2012
    • June 2012
    • May 2012
    • April 2012
    • March 2012
    • February 2012
    • January 2012
  • 2011
    • December 2011
    • November 2011
    • October 2011
    • September 2011
    • August 2011
    • July 2011
    • June 2011
    • May 2011
    • April 2011
    • March 2011
    • February 2011
    • January 2011
  • 2010
    • December 2010
    • November 2010
    • October 2010
    • September 2010
    • August 2010
    • July 2010
    • June 2010
    • May 2010
    • April 2010
    • March 2010
    • February 2010
    • January 2010
  • 2009
    • December 2009
    • November 2009
    • October 2009
    • September 2009
    • August 2009
    • July 2009
    • June 2009
    • May 2009
    • April 2009
    • March 2009
    • February 2009
    • January 2009
  • 2008
    • December 2008
    • November 2008
    • October 2008
    • September 2008
    • August 2008
    • July 2008
    • June 2008
    • May 2008
    • April 2008
    • March 2008
    • February 2008
    • January 2008
  • 2007
    • December 2007
    • November 2007
    • October 2007
    • September 2007
    • August 2007
    • July 2007
    • June 2007
    • May 2007
    • April 2007
    • March 2007
    • February 2007
    • January 2007
  • 2006
    • December 2006
    • November 2006
    • October 2006
    • September 2006
    • August 2006
    • July 2006
    • June 2006
    • May 2006
    • April 2006
    • March 2006
    • February 2006
    • January 2006
  • 2005
    • December 2005
    • November 2005
    • October 2005
    • September 2005
    • August 2005
    • July 2005
    • June 2005
    • May 2005
    • April 2005
    • March 2005
    • February 2005
    • January 2005
  • 2004
    • December 2004
    • November 2004
    • October 2004
    • September 2004
    • August 2004
    • July 2004
    • June 2004
    • May 2004
    • April 2004
    • March 2004
Content Copyright Fausta's Blog

Site Developed and Managed by 300m.com