Category Archives: Political Commentary

Jane Fonda’s Crush

on Che:

In case you read Town Hall, Ms. Fonda, here’s some consolation, honey: “I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)”recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girls would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”

“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.

Gallo, as you might have guessed, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who terminate carnal encounters prematurely.

If only that were the least of his crimes. Here’s how Cuba treated real feminists:

They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls prisoner Polita Grau.

The gallant regime co-founded by Che Guevara jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba — but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, etc. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

But they got free health care.

My Talk With Alan Boyle

For those people who foolishly thought that the Republican debate was more important than my conversation with Alan Boyle tonight, the podcast is up now.

[Update]

It’s all ME, ME, ME, over at Cosmic Log tonight.

So if you’ve had enough of me, don’t go there.

[Thursday morning update]

Related thoughts from Rick Tumlinson.

[Update a few minutes later]

Man, many of the comments over at Cosmic Log are typical, in their rampant ignorance and straw men.

Space Interview Tonight

Alan Boyle of MSNBC will be interviewing me in Second Life tonight on Virtually Speaking Science at 6 PM SL time (PDT). Here’s the SLURL for SLers: http://slurl.com/secondlife/StellaNova/228/226/38

This is the promo:

Alan Boyle talks with Rand Simberg

As MSNBC.com’s science editor, Alan runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences and space exploration, paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. Alan is the author of “The Case for Pluto,” a contributor to “A Field Guide for Science Writers,” and the blogger behind Cosmic Log, the 2008 recipient of the National Academies
Communication Award.

Rand Simberg describes himself as ‘just a recovering aerospace engineer.’ The Competitive Enterprise Institute describes him as ‘an expert on space technology and policy, particularly with regard to NASA and commercial human spaceflight.’ He writes widely about the politics and economics of space exploration. Read him in Popular Mechanics and Transterrestrial Musings – Biting Commentary about Infinity and Beyond! Watch him on YouTube. | Listen live and later on BTR

And yes, it will probably conflict with the Republican debate.

Operation Gunwalker

…explodes into the heartland:

what Codrea has dubbed as “Gangwalker” appears to be another attempt to provide guns to criminals in order to generate more gun crime and then more calls for gun control.

The biggest difference between the two operations at this early date only seems to be that Gangwalker is a purposeful attempt to create the deaths of American citizens in order to pursue the administration’s fanatical anti-gun agenda.

American deaths, for political gain.

Think about that claim for a minute, and what that would mean.

Operation Fast and Furious (and the suspected operations in Texas and Florida) was reprehensible and more than likely calculated to raise the level of violence in Mexico, sacrificing the lives of law enforcement officers, soldiers, and civilians in order to pursue a policy goal. It wasn’t until an American agent died that whistleblowers finally arose and cried out. It was as if Mexican lives meant less than American lives … and in this sick political calculus, maybe that was exactly the mindset.

But if Gangwalker is what it appears to be, then we are staring down a president, attorney general, secretary of Homeland Security, and key members of the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security gone entirely rogue.

If Gangwalker and Gunwalker are two sides of the same insidious coin, we’re looking at the very definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Yeah, but then I would have thought that perjury and subornation of perjury via threats and bribes by someone who swore to see that the laws were faithfully executed were as well…