Hugo Chavez has been caught with his hand in the ballot box.

It was the 32nd birthday of 1,921 Gonzálezes registered to vote in the western state of Zulia on Wednesday. But instead of celebrating with balloons and cake, many Venezuelans have been shouting fraud.

Every one of these Gonzálezes obtained their first government ID — and simultaneously registered to vote — in 2004, just before President Hugo Chávez defeated a recall referendum. And many of them registered on the same day, at the same registration center.

The case is “one for the Guinness Book of Records,” said Roberto Ansuini, a former opposition representative on the National Electoral Council who stumbled on it while looking into the registry’s reliability. He said the most Gonzálezes ever born on one day in one year in Venezuela is 89.

The González case in Zulia typifies the opposition’s claims that the registry is full of fraudulent voters — one of the reasons some parties boycotted the December legislative elections and may sit out the presidential elections late this year. Many say the case also shows fraud in the recall vote.

Maybe Hugo needs a return visit from Harry Belafonte or Cindy Sheehan to turn the PR situation around.

“Out of Ur” is a blog put out by the folks at Leadership Journal, a publication of Christianity Today. A post of theirs from March 14th was an interesting look at the Christian perspective on the education of our children. Given the various choices–public, private, homeschool–how do you decide? A pastor wrote in with his thoughts and he looks to an unlikely source for guidance; the culture of 1st century Judaism. No pat answers, but some pretty interesting observations.

I’m not sure our school choices today are all that different than the religious options of 1st century Jews. I’d like to draw some parallels. There were four major sects in 1st century Judaism: the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Zealots, and the Pharisees. Each of these sects interacted with the Roman culture differently. I see a similar pattern in how families interact with the educational options of metropolitan America.

He touches on how each of these group interacted (or not) with the culture, and how (or whether) they tried to change the culture. Being a homeschooler (actually, we are or have been all 3 types of schoolers mentioned, but have leaned towards homeschooling), I’d like to comment on his homeschooling parallel.

The Essenes lived in communes away from the influence of the Roman occupiers. Their philosophy of cultural interaction was to stay as far away from the surrounding culture as they could. They simply didn’t like what they saw. The parallel I see is with parents who choose to homeschool their children. They have looked at the options, and they have chosen to exclude their families from that aspect of cultural interaction.

If you think that homeschooling means you have no or little connection with the surrounding culture, you don’t know homeschooling. Homeschoolers often participate in many extracurricular activities, where they come in contact with the culture and socialize with their peers. They still get educated (with higher scores than the average student), but they aren’t exposed to all the excessive peer pressure and negative influences we’re reading and hearing about more and more in the public school system. Now, if removing or reducing those influences while providing a superior education make homeschoolers “Essenes”, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature (as we say in the computer field). But it’s not nearly the cloister this article suggests that it may be.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase – example of 2 employees with conflicting job instructions [#2 on Yahoo! Search]

My suggestion: Try watching “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and watch for the characters Dave and Hal.

The Democrats have unveiled a rough draft of their plan for going forward. Predictably, it’s more federal government giveaways and regulation. It includes the 21st century version of “a chicken in every pot”.

“We also believe that the nationwide deployment of high speed, always-on broadband and Internet and mobile communications will fuel the development of millions of new jobs in the United States,” Pelosi said.

Wouldn’t a chicken in every pot increase jobs in the farming sector? Let’s try that!

Look, if you want to fuel the creation of new jobs, get out of the way and let the American economy grow itself at its own steady pace. Raising the minimum wage, another familiar plank in this old, creaky platform, will kill job creation, as it prices low-end jobs out of existence. Unions love this, however, since many union contracts are tied to the minimum wage.

Here’s another doozy:

“I was told that an entry level person at Wal-Mart, who works his or her entire career at Wal-Mart, would make as much as the CEO makes in two weeks. A lifetime of work versus two weeks in the executive suite — this is not America, this is not fairness, this is not the basis of a strong middle class that is essential for our democracy. We must change that in our country,” [Pelosi] said.

Just introduce a bill that pays everyone $100,000 a year and be done with it, Ms. Pelosi. That would be “fair”, wouldn’t it?

There is little here that makes any economic sense. It is, as Alexis De Toqueville said, a case of trying to bribe the country with their own money.

First Murtha, now Feingold.

Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, preventing a floor vote that could alienate swing voters.

A day of tough, election-year talk between Feingold and Vice President Dick Cheney ended with Senate leaders sending the matter to the Judiciary Committee.

“I look forward to a full hearing, debate and vote in committee on this important matter,” Feingold said in a statement late Monday. “If the Committee fails to consider the resolution expeditiously, I will ask that there be a vote in the full Senate.”

Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal.

“Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy,” Vice President Dick Cheney told a Republican audience in Feingold’s home state.

Feingold, a potential presidential candidate, said on the Senate floor, “The president has violated the law and Congress must respond.”

Democrats talked up Murtha’s “cut and run” resolution, but ran away in droves when it came time to vote on a virtually identical bill. Now they’re talking up how the President “broke the law” (pre-declaring the results of the investigation into the NSA program) but they won’t put their votes where their mouths are, and Frist has called their bluff again.

Even as he spoke, Democratic leaders held off the immediate vote that Majority Leader Bill Frist requested. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he didn’t know if there ever would be one. Durbin said that Feingold had sought to use the censure resolution “as a catalyst” for thorough hearings and investigations.

The referral averted a debate and a vote that Democrats privately worried would alienate voters who could decide close elections.

Democrats are painfully aware that the American people are all for spying on terrorists. If it’s OK to shoot them, why not listen in on them? Now, I’m very aware that what is and is not constitutional is not up for a plebiscite, but the ConLaw types have come down on both sides of the issue, which is why there’s an investigation going on. Since Democrats don’t have a consensus there, they’ve been suggesting that the people won’t stand for this. Well, that’s what they’ve been saying, but apparently they don’t believe it themselves.

John Credson, a Chicago Tribune reporter, has a very revealing article on the “revealing” of Valerie Plame. Turns out, as has been noted in the past, that her cover, such as it was, was paper thin even by CIA standards. While the Brewster-Jennings cover was rather light in hindsight, her use of a US embassy as an official address was a dead giveaway in foresight, according to CIA vets. The kicker is that her obvious tie to the government preceded the attempt to pass her off as a disinterested private-sector consultant, not to mention that later on she had a parking spot at Langley.

Genuine NOCs, a CIA veteran said, “never use an official address. If she had [a diplomatic] address, her whole cover’s completely phony. I used to run NOCs. I was in an embassy. I’d go out and meet them, clandestine meetings. I’d pay them cash to run assets or take trips. I’d give them a big bundle of cash. But they could never use an embassy address, ever.”

Another CIA veteran with 20 years of service agreed that “the key is the [embassy] address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn’t an NOC, period.”

After Plame was transferred back to CIA headquarters in the mid-1990s, she continued to pass herself off as a private energy consultant. But the first CIA veteran noted: “You never let a true NOC go into an official facility. You don’t drive into headquarters with your car, ever.”

A senior U.S. intelligence official, who like the others quoted in this article spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that Plame “may not be alone in that category, so I don’t want to suggest she was the only one. But it would be a fair assumption that a true-blue NOC is not someone who has a headquarters job at any point or an embassy job at any point.”

Things are looking better for Scooter Libby.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Just in case this is glossed over on the nightly news, here’s some new information on the Iraq WMD issue. Tapes and documents are being translated, and more details have come out today.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

“Uranium from Africa”. Gosh, that phrase really sounds familiar.

The documents also speak of burying prohibited missiles, according to a government official familiar with the declassification process.

But it is not clear whether Baghdad did what the documents indicate, said the U.S. official, who asked not to be named.

“The factories are present,” an Iraqi aide tells Saddam on one of the tapes, made by the dictator in the mid-1990s while U.N. weapons inspectors were searching for Baghdad’s remaining stocks of weapons of mass destruction.

“The factories remain, in the mind they remain. Our spirit is with us, based solely on the time period,” the aide says, according to the documents. “And [inspectors] take note of the time period, they can’t account for our will.”

Whether or not it was acted on, it was certainly planned and intended. But there is further information that indeed Hussein was in the WMD biz.

Mr. [Bill] Tierney [who translated the tapes for the FBI] said that the quote from the Saddam aide, and scores of others, show Saddam was rebuilding his once-ample weapons stocks.

“The tapes show that Saddam rebuilt his program and successfully prevented the U.N. from finding out about it,” he said.

There also exists a quote from the dictator himself, who ordered the tapings to keep a record of his inner-sanctum discussions, that Mr. Tierney thinks shows Saddam planned to use a proxy to attack the United States.

Of course he’d use a proxy. That way the anti-war Left would continue to insist that he had no ties to terrorism. Hussein knew his audience.

And stay tuned…

There is more to come. House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, told The Washington Times that about 500 hours of additional Saddam tapings are still being translated and analyzed by the U.S. In addition, in Qatar, U.S. Central Command’s forward headquarters in the Persian Gulf, sit 48,000 boxes of Iraqi documents, of which the military has delivered 68 pages to the committee.

“I don’t want to overstate what is in the documents,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “I certainly want to get them out because I think people are going to find them very interesting.”

He said the office of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is now weighing the congressman’s request to release 40 of the 68 pages.

Of the tapes released so far, Mr. Hoekstra said, “Everything [Saddam] is doing is saying, ‘Let’s take it and hide it’ with a clear intent. ‘As soon as this is over, we’re going to be back after this.’ ”

The article goes on to cite the evidence that the WMDs may indeed have been shipped to Syria, citing satellite photos. Even the Duelfer report acknowledged this possibility. Because, after all, this was a murderous dictator we’re talking about.

Mr. Tierney said he thinks the regime poured chemical weapons into lakes and rivers and sent other stocks over the border to Syria. Mr. Tierney served as a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s.

“The ISG, they were lied to in a very systematic way,” he said. “Lying. They were very good at it.”

But will the press notice, and will the Left care?

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Deroy Murdock notes the good things that have been happening in the black economic community under the Bush administration. His sub-heading is, “Will the Dems lose a reliable constituency this year?” My answer to that is “No”, if you mean that in 2006 (and even 2008) the percentage split of black voters between Republican and Democrat will mirror the nation’s at large. However, I have a feeling it’ll continue the trend toward Republicans in both years. When you consider how most blacks voted against the same-sex marriage issue, in addition to Murdock’s economic numbers, I think the wake-up call has been heard.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

Well the Dubai port deal has come to a halt, and the Democrats are overjoyed that they were able to appear more concerned than Bush about port security. But it could have been worse for the Republicans. Bush could have tried to sell management of port to the Chinese.

Oh wait. That’s been done already, by a Democrat, no less, and with the support of some of the same Democrats who were up in arms about this deal. And China (with, incidentally, not only ports but the US technology they got from Clinton as well) has nukes that they could smuggle into the country (if you believe the UAE could have done that) in the event of a outright battle over Taiwan.

I can see both sides of this issue, which is why I haven’t blogged about it a lot. However, just keep this bit of history in mind when Democrats try to use this scenario as “proof” of their homeland security credentials

The silver lining:

Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001. That had declined by 148 in 2005.

The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971 — 3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million.

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.

But leave it to the press to emphasize the cloud. The headline?

8,000 desert during Iraq war

Oh, that liberal media.