A heartwarming story… Globovision had gone to a small cluster of tents assembled near the presidential residence, La Casona. (more…)

The opposition—struggling to come up with a reason why Rosales is polling between 20 and 30 percentage points behind Chavez—has resorted to colored pencils… (more…)

Sorry for the lack of posting, but anyone familiar with my predilections will know that the fact that the Second Annual Book Convention is in town is more than enough reason to keep me from the computer. (more…)

Here in Caracas, everyone is making contingency plans.

Or, why I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Democrats winning the House/Senate.

So we’ve found an apartment. It’s too expensive, but we needed something. It’s also deep within sifrinolandia, the fortified state-within-a-state of the wealthy opposition. (more…)

We recently had the honor of hosting Robin Hahnel, who spoke at the CIM as well as to my students. Hahnel spoke, quite fittingly given the context, on the need for a new model of participatory socialist planning, to replace market socialist models on the one hand and authoritarian planning on the other.

Much ado currently about a recent speech by PDVSA president Rafael Ramirez, in which he declared the "new PDVSA" to be "red from top to bottom," and furthermore urged those non-revolutionaries in the ranks to step aside and make room for a Bolivarian. (more…)

So, Chávez didn’t turn up at the event yesterday. For still unknown reasons, he was replaced all day by the less-than-charismatic VP, José Vicente Rangel. (more…)

Several people, over the past few days, have jumped in front of Metro trains during the morning commute. (more…)

The other day, Rosales once again put his foot in his mouth, this time referring to the fact that on December 3rd, the opposition would be celebrating "our defeat." Even the opposition press was a bit ruthless on this, as we see via La Hojilla.

So, our house was robbed last week while we were there. I was hoping to blog about it at length, but am feeling less and less like doing so as time passes. The frightening part was listening to the whole thing through our bedroom door, but we were quite lucky and are fine, but have moved out and are looking for a better place…

In better news, we will meet Chávez tomorrow…