Democrats have a new candidate plus DACA & Impeachment & other stories

Democrats have a new candidate plus DACA & Impeachment & other stories 11/14 by Silvio Canto Jr | Politics:

Democrats have a new candidate plus DACA & Impeachment & other stories.........and other stories....click to listen:

Thursday’s video: DACA is back.....before The Supreme Court......l

Thursday’s video:

DACA is back.....before The Supreme Court......

Click to watch

Evo to Mexico

Let me confirm that I did not see this one coming.  In other words, I saw the possibility of President Evo Morales resigning, but did not think that he’d end up in Mexico.

So why is Morales in Mexico?  Why not Cuba or Venezuela?  Maybe Morales sees those two regimes in trouble, too.

Morales claims that his life was in danger and that may be true, given the tensions in the country.  My guess is that it was his political life that was endangered.

He claims that there was a “coup.”  That’s false.  What we saw in Bolivia was a simple case of election corruption, as Agustin Laje reported:

Let us remember, or instead let us say (since little to nothing has been said by the press) when about 83% of the votes were counted in Bolivia, the results suggested that the country would go in for a second round of elections.

But all of a sudden, the counting stopped for more than 20 hours.

Then the final results appeared “magically,” once again enshrining Evo Morales as President, by a margin of 0.14%.

The fraud was so evident that the OAS described the process as “null and void.”

Best of all, the good people of Bolivia did not stand for it. They forced Morales to resign and face the consequences.

Morales ran to Mexico instead of answering for electoral fraud.

Why did President Andres Lopez-Obrador bring a man involved in political corruption to Mexico?

On the surface, Mexico is buying into the idea that Morales’ life was in danger.

I think that the real reason is that Lopez-Obrador is in deep political trouble, from the recent military defeat at the hands of cartels, the massacre of women and children in North Mexico, the daily homicides on a path to break all previous records and the Mexican economy slowing down.

So Lopez-Obrador brought Morales to change the subject and give the Mexican left something to cheer about.

Based on my conversations with Mexican friends, no one is crazy about Morales bringing his show to Mexico.

As a friend said:  Who is going to pay for his settlement in Mexico?   It won’t be Bolivia.  It does not sound to me that Mexicans want to pick up the tab either.  So let’s hope that Morales has a few dollars in a secret account somewhere.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

What will Spain look like in 50 years?

As you may know, my maternal grandfather was born in Asturias and came to Cuba with his brothers in the 1920’s.  My other 3 grandparents were born in Cuba but they were the offspring of the many Spanish immigrants who settled the island.    In other words, I’ve always had a special love for Spain and those traditions, specially Navidad, that I grew up with. 

Over in Spain, they are trying to form a governing coalition.   They call it a triumph but time will tell. 

However, putting together a government may be the least of Spain’s worries. 

We are witnessing the change of a country and continent.

The statistics are stunning:

The figures from the National Institute of Statistics showed that the number of babies born in Spain last year was 6.1 percent down on the previous year.

But the stand-out figure was that births in Spain have dropped by an eye-opening 40.7 percent over the last decade, according to the study titled The Natural Movement of the Population.

In 2018 there were 369,302 babies born in Spain, some 23,879 fewer than in 2017.

In the same year there were 426,053 deaths recorded in Spain, which was a slight rise (0.4 percent) on 2017.

Those figures meant the Spanish population had dropped for the fourth consecutive quarter.

In other words Spain has 56,262 fewer citizens than it did 12 months ago.

 Why does it matter?   Why do we care about birth rates?    

The answer is that babies are the future and the ones who will carry the culture forward.    

At these rates, are we confident that it will be Spain in 50 years?  Who is going to stand up for its history or even language?    

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.

We remember Jim Piersall (1929-2017)

We remember Jim Piersall, who was born on this day in 1929.    He died in 2017.  

This is from SABR:   

Jimmy Piersall played 20 years of professional baseball, including parts of 17 in the major leagues. He is best known for his nervous breakdown and hospitalization during his rookie season of 1952, an ordeal that led to a best-selling autobiography and two movies. 
Few could have imagined in 1952 that Piersall would have 15 years of high-level baseball left in him, seasons filled with colorful incidents and episodes, or that he would be employed in baseball for 20 years after that. 
Whether he was arguing with an umpire, yelling at opposing players from the bench, hiding behind a monument in Yankee Stadium, or running the bases backwards, Jimmy Piersall made baseball fun for many years.

His baseball career was not bad:   .272 BA & 1,604 hits in 1,737 games.   

Piersall wrote a book and a movie was made about his career.

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