Free Republic

So, instead of writing about substantial things like the fraud constituent assembly deciding it will be in office for the next two years, taking as its first "measure" the removal from office of the general prosecutor Luisa Ortega and announcing that next week they will set up the inquisition truth commission I have to discuss what was either a failed coup or a stunt show........ What happened this morning in Venezuela was suspicious from the start..... It is 1PM+, 5 hours later and it smells fishier, too convenient for the regime......

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan authorities have suppressed a military rebellion near the central city of Valencia, a ruling official said on Sunday, days after President Nicolas Maduro formed a legislative superbody internationally condemned as a power grab. Socialist Party deputy Diosdado Cabello made the announcement shortly after the release of a video showing a group of men in military uniform announcing a rebellion and calling for a broad uprising against President Nicolas Maduro. One witness in the area of a military base in the town of Naguanagua reported hearing gunshots before dawn, but Cabello said the situation had been brought...

The threat of confrontation mounted in Venezuela as the president, Nicolás Maduro, installed a controversial new assembly despite overwhelming international condemnation and a planned opposition protest to block it. The 545-member constituent assembly was inaugurated on Friday, five days after it was elected in a vote that has been dogged by allegations of fraud and vote-rigging. The new body is made up entirely of pro-government loyalists after the opposition boycotted the vote as unconstitutional. In its opening session, the assembly elected Venezuela’s former foreign minister Delcy Rodríguez as its president, and the country’s former vice-president Aristobulo Isturiz as its first...

Investment banker Russ Dallen at Caracas Capital Markets points out a painfully obvious truth about Venezuela: it's no longer a sovereign state.  It's actually a Russian puppet state. In a market note via email, he writes: While the usual Venezuela cast of rogue acolytes – Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua – came out in support of the Maduro Regime after the fraudulent Constituent Assembly vote, from a geopolitical and economic point-of-view, there were only going to be two nations whose support really mattered: Russia and China.  And even after the revelation by Venezuela's voting machine software and hardware provider Smartmatic that Venezuela had...

undits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test of her...

Above and beyond of the tens of thousands of incriminating emails already discovered last year, a new batch of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails reveal a more extensive abuse of classified information – along with more evidence that she gave donors favors for their generous contributions to the Clinton Foundation. The government watchdog group Judicial Watch’s lawsuit has released a new batch of Clinton’s emails – communications that reveal more proof that Clinton Foundation donors consistently received special favors from her staff, and that her top aide, Huma Abedin, routinely sent information that was classified through a non-secure...

Editor’s note: The following comes from Domingo Caro, a contributor well versed in politics and the Church in South America.Colombia has been terrorized and turned into a drug-dealing country by communist subversion for decades. The worst force in this regard has a name: the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia” (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC. After President Uribe (2002-2010) struck them hard, they decided to change their strategy and secure power through elections, as Hugo Chávez himself did in neighboring Venezuela.Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos has played an active role in this strategy. Last year, he signed a “peace”...

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.”

enezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can't be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism. People are now literally starving — about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year — in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution. The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo...

Venezuela is on a fast track to the apocalypse — with the regime’s efforts to lock in its control only making it worse. Thanks to the socialist misrule of the late Hugo Chavez, the country was already the murder and kidnapping capital of the world when Nicolás Maduro took over as president. Now it’s No. 1 in inflation, too. Food is scarce; medicine scarcer still. Regime thugs answer protests with deadly force. Maduro has used corrupt courts to sideline the opposition-run parliament, and is in the process of setting up a phony “constituent assembly” of loyalists to replace it. In...

The Venezuelan Episcopal Conference (CEV) has publicly invoked the intercession of the Virgin Mary to free the nation “from the claws of communism,” in a clear reference to the regime of President Nicolás Maduro. “Blessed Virgin, Mother of Coromoto, heavenly Patron of Venezuela, free our country from the claws of communism and socialism,” the CEV posted on Twitter this Sunday, complete with an image of Santa Maria and a Venezuelan flag.

DISCLAIMER: “The Rabbit Hole Report” is a recurring feature of MOTUS A.D.. In certain circles it may be considered fake news but I prefer to think of it as extra-creative investigative journalism. Premised on the conceit that Donald J. Trump actually lost the 2016 election to Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is hoped that this alternate reality will provide temporary succor and comfort to #Democrats, #Progressives, #BernieBros, #RINOs and #NeverTrumpers. As for the rest of us who just want to #MAGA let it serve as a reminder that the fight is, was and always will be worth it because no...

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can’t be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism. People are now literally starving — about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year — in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution. The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo...

The Trump administration announced the U.S. will impose financial sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The move comes after Venezuela held a weekend election that will give Maduro's ruling party virtually unlimited power in the South American country. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the sanctions against Maduro in a brief statement on Monday. As a result of the sanctions, the statement read, "all assets of Maduro are now subject to U.S. jurisdiction are frozen and all U.S. persons are prohibited from dealing with him." "Yesterday's illegitimate elections confirm that Maduro is a dictator who disregards the...

The Trump Administration released a statement tonight condemning the illegitimate elections. The US promised “strong and swift” action against the architects of the authoritarianism.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelans appeared to be abstaining in massive numbers on Sunday in a show of silent protest against a vote to select a constitutional assembly giving the government virtually unlimited powers. Associated Press journalists toured more than two dozen polling places in neighborhoods across the capital, including many traditional strongholds of the ruling socialist party in southern and western Caracas. Virtually all the polling places saw hours-long lines of thousands of people in past elections over the last two decades of socialist government.

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...

Washington (AFP) - The US State Department on Thursday ordered the family members of its embassy staff in Caracas to leave Venezuela and authorized the voluntary departure of its employees as a political crisis appeared headed for a dangerous showdown. Its advisory also warned citizens against traveling to the South American country "due to social unrest, violent crime, and pervasive food and medicine shortages." The move came as the embattled government of President Nicolas Maduro was on a deadly collision course with the opposition, which defied a government ban to hold a nationwide strike ahead of a controversial weekend vote.

<p>CARACAS (Reuters) – The U.S. government ordered family members of employees at its embassy in Venezuela to leave on Thursday as a political crisis deepened ahead of a controversial vote critics contend will end democracy in the oil-rich country.</p> <p>Violence continued to rage on the street, with another seven people killed during the latest opposition-led strike against President Nicolas Maduro’s planned election for a powerful new Constituent Assembly on Sunday.</p>

. . .Thor Halvorssen, head of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in written testimony that Washington-based political intelligence firm Fusion GPS operated a campaign against journalists who threatened to expose a multibillion-dollar fraud involving faulty South American electric power plants, the laundering of its proceeds in U.S. banks and a kickback scheme to pay off Venezuelan officials. . .Wednesday’s hearing, initially scheduled to also feature testimony from Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort before they agreed to private interviews, was cut short when Democrats invoked a rule to stop committees...