How do people put others previous quotes in those grey boxes?

<block quote> paste the quotation in </block quote> There should be no space in "blockquote"

The irony is that Resident Bush has never been elected and in fact was the beneficiary of a judicial and vote manipulation coup.

Chavez enjoyed a massive plurality, all vetted by Jimmy Carter's group, The Carter Center, while GW Bush's election failed to meet the simple guidelines suggested by President Carter's voting rights group.

Had Carter's group not been barred from monitoring our elections this last presidential election cycle, we may have seen the monkeyshines that passes for democracy in our country in our slide towards fascism.

Do not look where the man behind the curtain points; look at the man behind the curtain.

And let's face it Hugo is a megalomaniac.

This is the culmination of a post hoc ergo prompter hoc argument.

By quoting Wiki to say he is "accused" of seeking dictatorial powers, then deftly sidestepping the proudly confessed, demonstrable, and active role the private media took in the coup against him while saying he is accused of taking press freedoms, and then citing the accusations of some opposition parties that he has fixed elections without citing things like outside funding for the referendum he handily won, you are allowed to conclude with a variation of the initial premise that he's a strongman, a dictator, a wildman, an egomaniac, whatever.  (It should be noted that in the run up to the election these parties were polling badly.  Faced with certain defeat, might they choose to cast a shadow over the election by claiming corruption rather than fall in ignominious defeat?  But here I merely speculate.)

I am open to facts --  quotes from the Economist are not the same -- but rather facts that he has rigged elections, committed mass murder, taken away press freedoms, invaded other countries under false pretences.   Does he stand accused of torture, of disappearing his citizens?  

Is he a demagogue?  For speaking on the TV and radio weekly to the populace, thus bypassing the media the openly and proudly participated in the coup?  What makes him a demagogue.  Surely merely improving the lot of the poor doesn't count as demagoguing.  

In this post as elsewhere, the straw man is put up that "some on the left" support Chavez no matter what.  Maybe.  But I reach my conclusions based on hard evidence and this post has little other than agenda-driven innuendo and fact-impoverished accusations.

As for Evo Morales -- he campaigned on a promise to nationalize the natural resources, got elected, and kept his promise.   That might be a definition of democracy.  I'll have to check.

That means it's OK for Bush to undermine our democrarcy but it's not OK for Chavez to undermine his.

I think your reasoning is just a little hypocritical.

When I assign research papers to my students, I inform them that should they use Wikipedia as a source, they will fail that paper. It is not considered reliable.

On the issue of American mainstream media, or the dreaded MSM as we here call it here, is controlled absolutely by corporations whose only interests are those of their stockholders. I can assure you that they have no intention of rendering an accurate picture of Chavez's government policies. The last thing that American corpomedia want is to let the American people know that there are countries where the elites do not call the shots. Venezuela has suffered from U.S. supported dictators for a long time. During that time, the people of Venezuela have suffered an almost non-existent educational system, no support for small business, an invisible healthcare system, run-down or non-existent infrastructure, right-wing death squads and a brutal right-wing suppression of dissent. Chavez has turned this around. He has organized teaching coops and increased literacy to record levels.

The amount of hysterical red-baiting we see in the media today regarding Chavez would make Joseph McCarthy proud. That most people in the US have neither inclination nor the intellectual skills to see through the transparent scaremongering of the right wing noise machine is testimony to the nearly total brainwashing of America's middle and lower classes.

The sad and sickening part is that the right wingers on this site will cheer on the fascists, laughing and heaping scorn even as the right wing government they adore strips the country of freedoms, fiscal responsibility and the moral high ground that America, at one time, could claim to some extent.

Yeah, the big bad socialists threaten our way of life. Who knows? We may have to suffer universal health care, a clean environment, a living wage, a culturally tolerant society, a fair society. Oh, what a travesty.

Someone who writes stuff like that obviously does not know what a dictatorship is, besides all of those comments have a strong denotative interpretation of the facts.

My country survived a 48 year fascist dictatorship. In those days opposition parties were very happy if allowed to participate in elections, even though they knew there would be more votes from dead people than from living ones, and that the state police controlled the whole balloting process. And of course some months later the people involved in the opposition parties would be hunt and sent to jails from which they might not come back.

Comparing Chavez to a dictator is a nonsense. If someone from a political side opposing yours is elected (like Chávez or Amahdinejad), that doesn't mean an election fraud, it just tells you that other people think different from you.

Why drill it when it is so evident we will waste it? If we drill it in two decades, it might be make an enormous difference.

Also, why not use up other people's oil first?

Best,

Matt

Solar preheat and then electrical resistance heat for steam injection seems doable, and sustainable for a few hundred thousand barrels/day.

Less aluminum production, more heavy oil might be the tradeoff.

This post needs to be responded to because while the Oil Drum has been an invaluable source of information the information here is just factually wrong.  Venezuela is not producing 2.6 MBPD as the author cliams.  It is producing over 3 MBPD.  In fact for 2005 it produced precisely 3.08 MBPD.  I am mystifified that the author claims as his source the International Energy Agency when the IEA published a very nice chart in its March 2006 Oil Market Report detailing Venezuelan prodution.  I posted a copy of that report in the following post:

http://oilwars.blogspot.com/2006/04/venezuelan-oil-numbers-confirmed.html

To a certain extent the confusion is understandable given that Venezuelan oil production consists of different types of oil and the figures can easily be manipulated by leaving out certain types of oil.  But you will note when they are all tallied Venezuelan production is over 3 MBPD and has been increasing ever since the oil strike ended in 2003.

For those who prefer visuals I did a graph of the IEA numbers with the OPEC quota superimposed here:

http://oilwars.blogspot.com/2006/05/myth-of-declining-venezuelan-oil.html

As you can see Venezuela essentially produced at quota last year, save for a slight shortfall when they did have some production problems.

You will also note that Venezuelan production has been steady over chavez's tenure, save the the strike.  The major cut in prodution came in 1999 when Chavez first came to power and cut production to conform to OPEC quotas, Venezuela had been a quota buster to that point, and boost prices.  So the people, such as the Rigzone article which is a piece of crap, who say Venezuelan production is down 60% simply have no idea what they are talking about.

Here is an article on it by Oliver Campbell who is an excellent source of information on the Venezuelan oil industry having worked both for Shell in Venezuela and later for PDVSA:

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=23128

Of course, the other HUGE difference is the Canadian oil is not located in a country ruled by OPEC quotas and the Orinoco oil is.  That makes the Canadian oil profitable to exploit while the Venezuelan oil isn't from the Venezuelan governments point of view.