Castro’s Stalinist regime just released pictures of 16-year-old Elian Gonzalez, resplendent in the uniform of a Communist Party youth. The timing of the photo release may coincide with the tenth anniversary of Elian’s shanghaiing from the U.S.

The magnitude and methodology of  the snow-job Fidel Castro, with the aid of his ever-faithful  MSM and Democrat allies, pulled on the American public (69, per cent of whom  fell for it and  embraced Castro’s position on the kidnapping) is partly explained here.

Thanks to MSM-Castroite collusion most  people forget  (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy– which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence—frantically buried by the mainstream media—was overwhelming.  Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

In phone call after phone call from Elian’s Cuban family to Elian’s Miami family, the Cuban Gonzalez family always made themselves very clear:  “Please take care of Elian. His father’s on the way….even if he has to row over in a washtub.” (more…)

The New York Times’ leading in-house global warming obsessive, Thomas Friedman, has quite a column today. It is more a tantrum, really, as so many of his offerings have verged on being of late, if one that I find, even for him, remarkably detached. Maybe it’s that possible conflict of interest — I’m not talking about the 7.5 bathroom Bethesda mansion with no visible signs of windmills marring the vista of Mr. “I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America”…it’s just about other people having to look at the eyesores — but somehow he can’t even remember his own hobbyhorses when offering the world one another iteration of what is increasingly his only note. Let’s start there, with his favorite subject, “global warming.”

Today, in telling us how to turn the tide swamping his and other soft-ish totalitarians’ favored agenda, Tom says:

Here are the points I like to stress: 1) Avoid the term ‘global warming.’ I prefer the term ‘global weirding,’ because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes.

While he has already been called out elsewhere for being a little repetitive on this, allow me to say…Of course, you do, dear. (more…)

Remember when the Left was the champion of the Little Guy?  When they hated the “undemocratic” Electoral College and passed the 17th Amendment to force the direct election of Senators?  When Andrew Jackson effectively invented the modern Democratic Party by throwing open the doors of the White House to the people and defying Supreme Court orders?

Well, that was then and this is now, because here comes Kurt Andersen in New York Magazine to tell us that the problem with democracy is… you guessed it:

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic. (more…)