President Mulino at the United Nations. Photo from his Twitter / X feed.
It’s not as if…
President Mulino isn’t on a mission to the UN like General Torrijos undertook. He’s not rallying the non-aligned nations behind the cause of Panama’s decolonization. Unlike Che Guevara, he’s not at the UN imparting a photogenic young badass image on the cause of Latin American revolution. Instead, President Mulino is at the UN to threaten sanctions against countries that take Panama to task for laundering the funds of their tax evaders and gangsters.
They don’t even live in Panama, Mulino pleads. Is that his excuse about convicted money launderer Ricardo Martinelli, the leader of his party, who’s holed up in the Nicaraguan Consulate — technically a spot of Nicaraguan territory — and issuing political pronouncements from there instead of serving his long prison term for stealing more than $70 million from the Panamanian people and laundering the proceeds through several other countries as well as this one?
Will the Third World line up behind Panama as it resists European and OECD gray lists? Instead of hassling Venezuelans, will the police go out of their way to be discourteous to US or French citizens found on the isthmus? Will Russian or Chinese ships get better spots in the lines to transit the Panama Canal than Spanish or Swiss vessels?
Our president is making us look ridiculous at the United Nations. That image will cost ordinary Panamanians in the long run.
THIS Republican lady, Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobson, sent out absentee ballots to overseas and military voters with Kamala Harris not listed. She blamed it on a contractor, of course.
Implosion talk
So the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States says that Democrats intend to fly black women into the United States to have abortions.Is Part B of the hallucination that he’s going to turn in as many Democrats as possible to The Bogeyman?
Near the top of the North Carolina ballot, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was outed in an online Mediaite column for some outrageous posts he made on a disgusting social mediium page, CNN picked up on it, checked it out and ran with it, the guy’s top campaign staffers quit, and now North Carolina becomes a major presidential battleground state with the GOP in retreat. So Robinson is threatening to sue CNN.
Meanwhile in Montana, the GOP secretary of state brazenly sent out absentee ballots to overseas voters without Kamala Harris listed as a candidate. In many a red state, with fewer than 90 day to go before Election Day, Republican elected officials have shut down thousands of voting site in African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods. It’s a great set of opportunities for the judiciary to define what is and isn’t a free and fair election, but we all ought to know better than to rely on the current US Supreme Court to do the right things.
For ordinary citizens, the thing to do is register, vote, swamp the desperate Republicans in a tidal wave of votes, and afterward insist on full civil and criminal accounting for the liars and cheaters.
Sir Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England, from a 1617 portrait by Paul van Somer.
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
Bear in mind…
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
Dorothy Day
I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.
Miguel de Cervantes
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
Abigail Adams
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