Borev scoops the world.....

....by noting that you gringos really will buy anything.

On the menu today is the book Hugo Chávez presented to The Hawaiian in Trinidad and Tobago. According to da boorev it stood at 54,295th on the Amazon sales list before Hugo gifted the gift. Guess where it is now?

Go have a look at the Borev post linked here to find out.


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The Summit of the Americas

So the big hoopla SotA is up and running and Obama-centric with a large side order of Cuba, spicy sauce by Chávez and etc etc snark.

Go find comments somewhere else. I'm not doing any coverage on it and there are a thousand blogs wringing their collective cyberhands over it all. Most are crap, but check out boz cos he does a pretty good job on this kind of thing normally and even if he hasn't updated has one of those interactive realtime bloglists on the RHS so you can see what the self-justifying academic pseudointellectuals that seem to hang around boz think.

The only real thing I have to say about the SotA is this.

UPDATE: Boz just left this comment in the bit below this post that you can't see on the main page. Worthy of pasting here to see what he says about Admiral Stavridis. My only thought about Boz's view on Stavridis is that it's sad that the Southcom commander is a noteworthy exception and not the rule.

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Boz: Thanks. I like that quote, by the way. The person who is really good at acknowledging that thought is Southcom's commander, Admiral Stavridis. He goes out of his way to use the term "America" properly, warns people in the US government against ever using the term "backyard," and I've heard him give a number of speeches that he ends with "God bless the Americas." It's actually fairly impressive the effort he makes.


At some point next week I hope to cover the non-Obama, non-Cuba news that comes out of the Summit. There's plenty of interesting other bilateral and multilateral topics going on at the Summit that have nothing to do with the US or the other high-profile debates. I just need to search deep in the regional media coverage to find it. God forbid the media try to cover more than one or two topics at once.

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The Summit of the Americas: A primer

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Oscar Wilde

Thanks to The Economist, IKN no longer feels obliged to writing a long preview of next week's Summit of the Americas that happens in Trinidad and Tobago on April 17th to 19th. Here's the link to the Economist article, recommended as a nice'n'concise way to get the issues clear before the bunfest starts (top of agenda will be Cuba, Cuba, Cuba and sadassed Miami residents' rabid reaction to Cuba) and also gives a neat background to the fiasco (The Economist's word, not mine) of the last SotA in Argentina, 2005.

Finally, while checking out the script make sure you note something about the illustration that accompanies. As well as the attention to detail (Lula's missing finger) the Canadian dude is so unknown outside his borders that the cartoonist feels obliged to slap a red&white maple leaf on his tie. Sad, innit?

In one simple phrase...

The face of agendas past or future? YOU BE THE JUDGE!

.....Peter Hakim, economist* and president of Washington's Inter-American Dialogue explains to the world exactly why the Bush regime was so hated by Latin America. The subject is next month's Summit of the Americas (you'll be hearing a lot about this little gathering for sure, and the word association with Cuba will become intensely boring). Hakim dixit:

"He (Obama) shouldn't simply say what the United States is going to do, he should say what he expects Latin America to do."

No further comment necessary.

*aka dumbass in a suit