Rick Rozoff

The United States are back in Latin America. The military coup in Honduras marked the beginning of Washington’s renewed grip on that continent. While another coup was thwarted in Paraguay, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have been deploying new forces to encircle the ALBA countries with a view to attacking Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. Readying for the gathering storm, Chile has embraced the North-American camp and stockpiled a powerful arsenal.

November 28 will mark five months since the coup led by U.S.-trained commanders deposed the president of Honduras, the next day will see a mock election in the same nation designed to legitimize the junta of Roberto Micheletti, and the day following that will be a month since Washington signed an agreement with the Alvaro Uribe government in Colombia for the use of seven military bases in the country.

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Rebecca Solnit

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell. California, 283 pp, £19.95, January 2010, ISBN 978 0 520 25477 0

The Colorado River no longer reaches the sea. Its dams and reservoirs are failing, silting up while the water level drops.

The supply of stories has perhaps been the American West’s only reliable bounty. The difficult thing has been finding people to notice them, let alone tell them well. The Indian wars, still unfinished as tribes continue to struggle for rights, territory and cultural survival; the resource rushes, the Gold Rush in particular, which turned San Francisco into a cosmopolitan city standing alone in the wilderness; the once astonishingly abundant salmon runs that sustained soil and trees, as well as birds, bears and humans; the timber wars; the rangeland wars; the radical labour and environmental movements; the attitudes people adopted towards a harsh, unfamiliar, often sublime landscape; the evolution of European cultures in a non-European terrain and the arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants to shape a hybrid culture: all these have had their occasional historians, though most Americans were raised to believe that history happened somewhere else. The San Francisco Public Library has an overflowing case of books on the East’s Civil War, but only a handful on the war that transferred a million square miles or so of Mexico to the United States, including California and most of what we now call the West.

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Marco Villa

President Obama and the Democrat’s cap-and-trade plan would tax anyone who uses energy. Everytime you turn on your lights, you’ll be taxed.

The Eurocrats have themselves a new summit where world leaders will meet once again and engage in alarmist rhetoric about “global warming” and Big Governments will then purpose new tax and regulatory burdens on their citizens.

The Copenhagen Summit to take place in December will be Kyoto Redux - the failed European scheme to undermine American competitiveness under the rubric of environmental conscienceness.

Barack Obama had intended to have Congress pass his cap-and-trade tax bureaucracy before heading to Denmark so he could pander to European socialists. But, alas, only the House of Representatives has passed this new massive tax bureaucracy and the Senate will not even start debating it until next year.

You’ll hear a lot of Al Goresque fear mongering in the days leading to and during Copenhagen, but here’s what you should know before you make up your mind about “global warming” and whether we need Big Government to tax and regulate our lives even more:

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Sibel Edmonds

Dear Mr. President:

Today is the official Presidential Turkey Pardon Day for 2009, your very first since taking office. I understand you are planning to fly your pardoned bird(s) First Class to California, where they will live at Big Thunder Ranch at Disneyland. How lucky are these birds, how kind of you to value their lives and freedom, and how generous of you to release them.

Mr. President, there are many innocent human beings who have been caged for over six years, under deplorable conditions, including torture – despite being innocent and having done nothing wrong. Their last ten months of detainment and torture have taken place under your watch, per your orders, and with your instructions.

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