More proof that Venezuela’s leftist strongman Hugo Chavez is aiding communist insurgents attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government of Colombia (from today’s Wall Street Journal):

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A cache of controversial computer files closely tying Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez to communist rebels seeking to topple Colombia’s government appear to be authentic, U.S. intelligence officials say.

The trove — found on a dead guerrilla leader’s laptops during a military raid in March — is likely to ratchet up pressure for the U.S. to impose sanctions on one of its most important oil suppliers.

The files that have been made public so far have largely confirmed Mr. Chávez’s well-known sympathy for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But a review by The Wall Street Journal of more than 100 new files from the computers suggests that Venezuela has broader and deeper ties to the FARC than previously known.

These documents indicate Venezuela appears to be making concrete offers to help arm the rebels, possibly with rocket-propelled grenades and ground-to-air missiles. The files suggest that Venezuela offered the FARC the use of one of its ports to receive arms shipments, and that Venezuela raised the prospect of drawing up a joint security plan with the FARC and sought basic training in guerrilla-warfare techniques.

“There is complete agreement in the intelligence community that these documents are what they purport to be,” a senior U.S. official said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been sharing its assessments with the White House, this official said.

Washington’s stance is likely to hurt Venezuela’s already deeply strained relationship with the U.S., its biggest trade partner. It could also add pressure for the U.S. to declare Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism, alongside Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, and impose sanctions……

Tune in this Tuesday afternoon to hear, May 6th, to CRC’s Internet radio program “Organization Watch,” which airs live from 3:05 to 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on http://www.rightalk.com/  Our guest is Brandon Millett, who will discuss his organization The G.I Film Festival. He will discuss with us his group’s upcoming Film Festival honoring America’s brave men and women in uniform being hosted at the Carnegie Institution at 1530 P Street, N.W. in Washington, DC from May 14^th- May 18^th.   in Washington, DC form May 14^th- May 18^th.  Brandon may even have a surprise guest or two joining him for today’s show. For ticketing information for the G.I Film Festival please click here.

After our live radio program ends at 4:00 p.m., it will be repeated at 5 minutes past the hour for the following 23 hours. Or download it from the http://www.capitalresearch.org/podcast/ section on our website.

As Capital Research Center’s GreenWatch project director, I was quoted in a New York Post article May 4 by Isabel Vincent, about the Rainforest Foundation, singer Sting’s extravagant, wasteful charity.

To clarify a bit I was discussing the groups extremely low fair market valuation of the concert tickets, raises suspitions upon the group, not the donors to the group, as the article implies. Donors do not have control or responsiblity of assessing and creating this “fair market valuation,” the charity however does.

Is this Hawaii’s future?

A real-life secessionist movement seizes a historic American landmark and major media outlets treat the uprising as a curiosity of mere passing interest. Meanwhile, that same media gives a thumbs-up to a seditious, balkanizing plan for Aloha State apartheid.

AP’s Mark Niesse reported yesterday, “Native Hawaiian sovereignty advocates” who are members of the group known as the Hawaiian Kingdom Government occupied the grounds of the palace of Hawaii’s final monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani. “Hawaiian activists have long used the palace as the site for protests of what they call the United States’ occupation of the islands, but never before had they physically taken control,” wrote Niesse.

Pacific Business News reported that the “protesters” surrounded the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, chained palace gates, posted no-trespassing signs, and told “palace officials that the palace is their rightful seat of government.” The PBN story noted that “Only those with Hawaiian blood, as well as news media, were initially allowed onto palace grounds.”

The Honolulu Advertiser reported that the “sovereignty group” claimed its actions were “not a protest or demonstration but a reoccupying of its legitimate seat of government.” CNN called the occupiers simply a “group of native Hawaiians.”

Are members of groups like the Hawaiian Kingdom Government serious insurgents or fringe-element kooks who are best ignored? Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain: a Hawaiian segregation bill will only make things worse, guaranteeing more such occupations and perhaps future violence.

Many mainstream media outlets have treated the pro-segregation, pro-secession bill, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), that would create a new government for “Native Hawaiians” in Hawaii, as just another bill. A sunny piece called “Freshman senators hold key to Native Hawaiian bill’s hopes,” appearing in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper focused on Congress, noted cheerfully that “the bill has a fighting chance.”

Both Honolulu papers, the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin have editorialized in favor it.

Der Stürmer The New York Times salivated over the bill (which Akaka keeps reintroducing with each new Congress). In an editorial called “A Chance for Justice in Hawaii,” the NYT says fears about the bill are all hype:

The bill’s central aim is protecting money and resources - inoculating programs for Native Hawaiians from race-based legal challenges. It is based on the entirely defensible conviction that Native Hawaiians - who make up 20 percent of the state’s population but are disproportionately poor, sick, homeless and incarcerated - have a distinct identity and deserve the same rights as tribal governments on the mainland.

The Akaka bill does not supersede the Constitution or permit Zimbabwe-style land grabs. It explicitly forbids casinos, a touchy subject in Hawaii. Any changes a Hawaiian government seeks would have to be negotiated with state or federal authorities. As has always been the case on those eight little islands, everyone will have to find a way to get along.

Of course, to find out what’s really in the bill it’s necessary to read George Will. Will scathingly criticized the legislation and pointed out that Akaka doesn’t even deny the bill could set the stage for Hawaii to exit the Union. Will wrote:

Today, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, when accurately described, is opposed by a large majority of Hawaiians and supported by only a bare majority of the approximately 240,000 Native Hawaiians in the state. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, is a genuflection by “progressives,” mostly Democrats, to “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

It would foment racial disharmony by creating a permanent caste entitled to its own government — the Native Hawaiian Governing Entity — within the United States. The NHGE presumably would be exempt, as Indian tribes are, from the Constitution’s First, Fifth and 14th amendments. It would, Akaka says, negotiate with the state of Hawaii and the United States concerning “lands, natural resources, assets, criminal and civil jurisdiction, and historical grievances.”

Reparations? We shall see. Independence — secession? “That could be,” Akaka, 83, has said, depending on “my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Predictably, Akaka himself denounced Will for writing the op-ed, calling the factually accurate column “disgusting.” Will had noted in the column that the racial purity panel the bill creates will determine who is a Native Hawaiian and therefore eligible to receive any entitlements or programs created by the new office.

My guess is Will got Akaka’s goat when at the top of the op-ed he inserted this entirely appropriate quotation that associates the bill with Nazism:

“I decide who is a Jew around here.” — Hermann Goering in 1934, when told that a favorite Munich art dealer was Jewish.

But I digress.

Just about anybody who’s anybody in the Hawaiian establishment supports this bill, including Hawaii’s Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, who has visited Washington, D.C., repeatedly to lobby federal lawmakers. The Republican In Name Only (RINO) governor has been pushing for the legislation for years.

Passed in the fall of 2007 by the U.S. House of Representatives, the proposed Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007 (a companion bill to Akaka’s legislation), introduced by U.S. Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), could be taken up by the Senate as soon as this month. According to http://www.nativehawaiians.com/, the measure is endorsed by: the Mexican American Legal Defense Education Fund (MALDEF); the National Council of La Raza; the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Congressional horse-trading has allowed Akaka-Abercrombie supporters to win the support of several Republican lawmakers. Four of the Senate bill’s nine cosponsors are Republicans: Norm Coleman (Minnesota), Gordon Smith (Oregon), and both Alaska senators, Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski. Among the House bill’s seven cosponsors are two Republicans: Tom Cole (Oklahoma), and Don Young (Alaska).

Senator John Kyl (R-Arizona) is the Senate’s foremost opponent of the legislation. He calls it a “recipe for permanent racial conflict … motivated by a desire to immunize government preferences for Native Hawaiians from constitutional scrutiny.” Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) said the legislation “is about sovereignty. It is about race. We are taking a step toward being a United Nations and not the United States.”

Contrary to an article in The Nation, the GOP presumptive presidential candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona, does not support the bill (though in 2005 he did send out confusing signals about it). Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Honolulu-born Barack Obama both support it.

It should also surprise no one that Hawaii’s Kamehameha Schools, arguably the most powerful private entity in Hawaii, wants to safeguard its privileges and racially discriminatory admissions policy by supporting the measure the Akaka bill.

For more on the Akaka bill, the racial separatism of the Kamehameha Schools, and accusations of abuse of power that surround the Schools, read “Racial Separatism in the Aloha State: The Bishop Estate Trust and Hawaii’s Kamehameha Schools,” by Phil Brand, James Dellinger, and Karl Crow, which Capital Research Center (my employer) just published.

(crossposted at NewsBusters)

Rev. Jeremiah Wright 

Now this doesn’t happen every day…

A university has withdrawn the offer of an honorary doctorate to a member-in-good-standing of America’s multi-culti America-hating left-wing elite. Northwestern University has backed out of giving the one-man Obama campaign wrecking crew known as Rev. Jeremiah Wright this high honor after Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor made a fool of himself April 28. In case you’ve been on Mars the last few days, Wright gave a widely publicized speech at the National Press Club here in DC on Monday in which he –among other things– spewed anti-American hatred, accusing the U.S. government of committing genocide and inventing HIV.

Yon Goicoechea, leader of Venezuela’s pro-democracy student movement and a fervent critic of Venezuela’s Marxist tyrant Hugo Chavez, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

According to the Cato Institute press release:

…Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela that successfully prevented President Hugo Chávez’s regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. 

A 23-year-old law student, Mr. Goicoechea plays a pivotal role in organizing and voicing opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in his country. In his commitment to a modern Venezuela, Goicoechea emphasizes tolerance and the human right to seek prosperity.

Venezuela’s student movement emerged in May of 2007 in response to a government-ordered shutdown of the nation’s oldest private television station, RCTV.  In the face of ongoing death threats and continual intimidation due to his prominent and vocal leadership, Mr. Goicoechea has been indispensible in organizing massive, peaceful student protest marches that have captured the world’s attention.

By December of 2007, the student movement was credited with defeating a proposed constitutional reform that would have concentrated unprecedented political and economic power in the hands of the government.

“Yon Goicoechea is making an extraordinary contribution to liberty,” said Edward Crane, President of the Cato Institute. “We hope the Friedman Prize will help further his non-violent advocacy for basic freedoms in an increasingly militaristic and anti-democratic Venezuela.”
 
Renowned Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “Freedom and complacency are incompatible and this is what we are seeing now in countries like Venezuela where freedom is disappearing little by little, and this has produced a very healthy and idealistic reaction among young people. I think Yon Goicoechea is a symbol of this democratic reaction when freedom is threatened.”

The prize will be formally presented in New York City on May 15. (The Human Rights Foundation sent out a companion press release which is available here.)

Capital Research Center published a paper on Chavez and his leftist American collaborators –among them former Congressman Joe Kennedy– earlier this year. The article, The American Friends of Hugo Chavez: Dial 1-800-4-TYRANT, appeared in the March issue of Organization Trends.

Lissen up, Al Gore: The current issue of Fortune magazine shows how global warming regulation has been set up to enrich participants in cap-and-trade schemes. “There has never been a better time to own a polluting factory, landfill, coal mine, or chicken or pig farm in the developing world, ” writes author Marc Gunther, who explains that a new class of traders and financiers is preparing for a bonanza of wealth resting in so-called carbon credits. CRC’s Foundation Watch has described how the UN, EU and other global bureaucracies are working with investment bankers and venture capitalists to set up the the financial infrastructure that will let carbon traders like Gore’s friends and associates get rich.

Carbon traders will pay polluters for the emission credits they receive for controlling their emissions, hold the credits as investments or sell them at a profit to other polluters who can’t or won’t change their ways. In the U.S. these credits currently have no real value because there is no market outside those who voluntarily participate in carbon offset projects.

Writes Gunther, “Last year traders bought and sold about $60 billion worth of emissions allowances, mostly in Europe and Japan, where governments regulate greenhouse gases. If, as expected, regulation comes to the U.S., this country’s carbon-trading market is expected to be worth $1 trillion annually by 2020. That’s why investment banks, utilities, industrials, and hedge funds - among them GE (GE, Fortune 500), Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPNV.L), and AES (AES) - are rushing into the business of carbon finance.”

The interesting aspect of Gunther’s article is that he describes how entrepreneurs are preparing to profit from the emerging regulatory system.  When that happens left-wing greens will discover that brokerage houses can commodify their passion to turn off light bulbs and plant trees. Then the greens will belatedly denounce capitalist exploitation of the climate crisis while corporations celebrate their contribution to solving it. 

Gunther notes that Credit Suisse is already creating new investment products, bundling up carbon offset projects and then slicing them into securities priced according to risk:

 ”If this sounds familiar, it should–it’s the carbon finance version of those collateralized debt obligations that investment banks used to sell mortgages.” 

David Brock’s Progressive Media USA (PMUSA), which vows to spend $40 million attacking John McCain in coming months, has just launched its website.

It isn’t quite a carbon copy of Brock’s Media Matters for America site, which hunts down an elusive creature in the media jungle known as “conservative misinformation,” but it seems to have been modeled on it.

Here is an excerpt from the site’s welcome message date-stamped yesterday:

Welcome to Progressive Media USA, your home for pushback against the right-wing media machine!

For too long, right-wing messages have gotten a free ride in America’s media landscape. The press consistently fails to ask hard questions about failing conservative policies and leaders, often showing little regard for balance, fairness, accuracy, or truth. Progressive Media USA exists to combat this troubling trend.

Progressive Media USA is a new non-profit working to inform you about the risks of conservative policies and leaders by ensuring that progressive voices are heard in the public debate. We will work tirelessly to make sure you know the truth, fact-checking conservative policies and accusations, reporting and researching progressive ideas, and providing a platform for prominent progressive voices to be heard loudly and clearly.

Working with folks like you, we will ensure progressive ideas are heard throughout America.

Given that the left already has the bulk of the news media, Hollywood, and academia incessantly blasting the progressive message to all corners of the several states, it’s hard to imagine Brock turning up the volume any higher, but to each his own.

TPM Election Central reports that PMUSA has also launched a separate anti-McCain site called McCainSource.com complete with news articles, op-eds, and custom-made videos. According to its “about” page:

The goal of McCainSource.com is to make sure the public understands that the policies of John McCain are just like the policies George Bush - the same old commitment to endless war, trillions to Iraq, tax cuts for millionaires, no plan for universal health care and no plan for our economy.

Meanwhile, PMUSA scores a mention in today’s New York Times article on liberal and Democratic campaign finance efforts.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that George Soros’s Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O’Grady notes that

Thursday’s vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Movement,” which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC…

…Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian “human-rights” group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.

…In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros’s Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament…[emphasis added] 

Get out your stopwatch and time how quickly Soros’s paid shills at Media Matters for America write up a post denouncing the WSJ report.

We also have to wonder why Aprodeh received assistance from the taxpayer-funded Inter-American Foundation.

What is this silly preoccupation so many politicians have with so-called negative campaigning? And, what’s all this hubbub about the so-called negative campaigning being conducted by the North Carolina Republican Party against Barack Obama?

As Steve Chapman of Reason writes, there are “only two tests voters should apply to any campaign attack: Is it true, and is it important?” He’s right. Voters learn about candidates through advertising. As long as the information presented is true, what’s the big deal? Voters can decide for themselves whether the information is relevant.

Although there have been plenty of allegations of negative campaigning by the two Democrat presidential candidates against each other, let’s look at the most timely example of alleged negative campaigning.

The GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee John McCain is denouncing the North Carolina Republican Party for running a fact-based ad critical of Barack Obama. Reuters reports McCain said the state party was “out of touch with reality” for refusing to pull the ad.

In an NBC interview aired on Friday, the Arizona senator said he has done all he can to persuade the state party to cancel the television ad that criticizes Obama as “too extreme” because of controversial remarks made by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

“They’re not listening to me because they’re out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable,” McCain told NBC’s “Today” Show.

And?

The ad (video available here) shows actual footage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the now-retired pastor of a church Obama attended for decades, engaged in one of his well-publicized hateful, anti-American rants. The ad calls Obama “too extreme for North Carolina” and notes that “for 20 years, Barack Obama sat in his pew, listening to his pastor” while displaying a photo of the two men together. It then shows video footage of Wright’s “God damn America!” sermon.

So, what’s so unfair about the ad?

The ad truthfully associates Obama with Wright. What’s wrong with that? After Wright’s sermons began getting attention on the campaign trail, Obama suddenly began criticizing those sermons. In his “A More Perfect Union” speech on March 18, Obama said Wright’s sermons

expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

That’s fair enough, but Obama expressly refuses to distance himself from the man he identifies as his spiritual mentor. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community…[and] my white grandmother,” he said.

One could argue that it would be silly for Obama to disown Wright. For years, Obama used his association with Wright in order to advance in Chicago politics. The damage is already done. That’s the risk one runs when one hitches one’s future to the career of another.

Of course you can’t hold a candidate responsible for everything those associated with him say, but when a candidate really seems to enjoy the presence of grievance-mongering people (for example, Obama’s wife Michelle) who show disdain, if not outright venomous contempt for America, people are entitled to judge that candidate based on those associations.

Maybe they’ll think it’s important; maybe they’ll think it isn’t. Apparently Senator McCain doesn’t think that’s right.