Free Republic

Redistribution: Is the Los Angeles city council hellbent on sticking it to the little guy yet again, this time by cutting the housing stock? It couldn't come up with a better blueprint for that than its new scheme to freeze rents. Wednesday, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon introduced a motion to freeze rents, solely, he claims, because he cares about "fairness." According to him, "a one-year hold on increases in rent (will) help our working families, and give the council time to consider longer-term fixes to ensure fairness in our rent control ordinance." As if they needed a year...

Latin America: An eruption of anti-U.S. bluster hasn't done Hugo Chavez much good back home. Thousands of Venezuelans rallied Saturday for his challenger, Manuel Rosales. This time they may give Chavez the boot. Rosales drew big crowds, including the poor, but Chavez's own rally the next day drew only a few thousand supporters, nearly all of them angry young men in red T-shirts. Despite an oil windfall, populist social spending and a big mouth abroad, all is not well for Chavez at home. The Sunday rally may signal a swing toward Rosales, who has quietly campaigned through the countryside and...

A Castroite state-controlled media organ reports that El Barbudo is incensed about Cuba not having enough doctors in Cuba in this news item here. Oh really? It's enough to make me wonder if he's almost as oblivious to economics as El Supremo. Of course there aren't enough Cuban doctors, Castro! You sent them off to be spies in Venezuela! Cubans have noticed this. And so have Venezuelans! Daniel researched that Misión Barrio Adentro program and found quite a bit of evidence of such shenanigans here. You've got plenty of Cuban doctors, Castro. It's just that when you send them to...

January 5, 2005 | Recently Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez gave Aljazeera TV an interview in which he openly disclosed his plans to lead a global "offensive war" against U.S. "colonialism and imperialism." The interview was one of those prepared events in which the questions are carefully designed to invite the answers. Not journalism but impudent advertisement. The presenter, Mr. Faysal Al-Quaim, starts by telling Chávez that he is so popular in the Arab world that, if he ran in an Arab presidential election he would "win by more than 90% of the votes" and hastened to add: "I mean a...