Oh great......

Someone in Haiti must have uttered the karmicly charged words, "Well it can get worse....."

And of course as any who has served in the military knows, it can ALWAYS get worse.

In Haiti to top off their debilitating poverty, their hurricanes, their earthquakes, their cholera, their everything else, they just got Baby Doc back.

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is the former "President for Life" aka dictator of Haiti. He inherited the position form his father "Papa Doc" Duvaleir when he was 19. The reign of the Duvaliers was so bizarre and twisted that Hollywood would have a hard time making a movie out of it. The father was a voodoo houdan and declared himself the incarnation of Baron Samedi. He kept the heads of past enemies in his house so he could commune with their spirits. He established militia/secret police called the Tonton Macoutes who roamed the countryside pillaging at will.
the younger Duvalier inherited all this power and for the most part ignored it and used the country as a giant piggybank to fund a massive playboy lifestyle. He left the actual running of the country to his mother and various of his fathers cohorts and lived large.

To our eternal shame, the US supported the Duvaliers because they were anti communist. We provided millions of dollars in aid to the country, the majority of which went directly into the Duvaliers personal accounts.

In 1985 riots began in the city of Gonaïves which spread across the country and in early 1986 Baby Doc fled the country.

Now he is back. They are saying on the radio that his return was a surprise. But he had hundred of "supporters" cheering him at the airport, a police escort, and rumors say that he was traveling on a Haitian diplomatic passport. So it wasn't a surprise to somebody.
God only knows where this is going to go, but it won't be a good place. Frankly, if he ends up in charge in Haiti again, I say we wash our hands of the place.

what a mess

A nutjob shoots a congresswoman and it is Sarah Palin's fault. That seems to be what Tom Ashbrook of On point Radio thinks at least. Tom seems to have entirely missed the vitriolic rantings of the left against Republicans over the past 8 years. There used to be a blog I was a regular reader an commenter on called BlueGirl RedState. I eventually quit even reading it becasue the level of discourse had gotten so vitriolic and hate filled that I couldn't stand it. Ashbrook obsessed over Palins used of the word "Targeted" and the fact she had crosshairs on the congressional districts she was targeting. As if she were the only politician or organization to used shooting analogies in the world.

All of that aside of course the shooter, Jared Loughner, seems to have been almost an anarchist judging from his writings and the comments of people who went to school with him.

I'll be honest, my first thought when I heard about the shooting was "Please God don't let it have been a Hispanic shooter. The US really doesn't need the shit storm that the hard case anti illegal immigration folks would have raised over that.


The government will of course over react to this. There will be huge crack downs on any available target so that congress can show people that they are "getting tough" on someone. Gun control legislation will pop right back up into the forefront. Oh well, it is the price we pay.

Hmmmmm

The stat counter that Blogspot has put into their system shows a couple of hits here from the site Vote for Democracy. I went to their site and there doesn't seem to be a link to me but that is ok. the site itself is pretty interesting, it is sort of a election poll. Not really a valid poll because there is not way they could get a representative sample but it is still kind of neat.

Go by and give them a look.