“Nicaragua” on The Daily Caller

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — President and one-time Sandinista revolutionary Daniel Ortega appeared to have won easy re-election in Nicaragua, according to results released Monday, overcoming a constitutional limit on re-election and reports of voting problems. (more)

The children of Muammar Gaddafi have called on their father to give up leadership and leave the country to receive political asylum from the President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, Army Radio reported on Wednesday. (more)

On January 5, Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Steve King (R-IA) introduced H.R. 141 to repeal Obamacare. A vote on the bill, scheduled for this week, has been postponed because of the shootings of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Arizona. When it does come up in the House, it will pass; but even if it also passed in the Senate, the White House has said that President Obama will veto it. The question then becomes, what can Republicans in Congress do to thwart the implementation of Obamacare while they work to elect a Republican president and a Republican Senate in 2012 so they can repeal it in 2013? (more)

Some folks are alleging that Tehran and Caracas have inked a deal that will establish a joint ballistic missile base in Venezuela, where Iranian missiles, potentially capable of reaching the United States, would be stationed. (more)

A top Nicaraguan diplomat was found murdered in his Bronx apartment Thursday morning when his driver came to take him to the United Nations General Assembly, police sources said. (more)

There are many things you can call Fox NFL sports analyst and coaching legend Jimmy Johnson but “wimp” is not one of them. (more)

Andrew Romanoff, the Democratic Senate candidate in Colorado who was offered key administration jobs by the White House to convince him not to run, is known for his successful record in the Colorado legislature, where he rose to be speaker of the House. (more)

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected international criticism of a deadly raid against a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza earlier this week, saying the blockade of the Palestinian territory is needed to prevent missile attacks against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. (more)

Wednesday, President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon stood side by side on the White House lawn, smiled, and attacked an American state.  It was a display grotesque and bizarre, laden with the stink of lies and ripe with hypocrisy.  For a half hour or so, the two men hammed it up for the assembled international press, reveling in themselves as they mischaracterized a law that, most likely, neither of them managed to read.  Calderon later addressed Congress.  Again, he targeted the U.S., focusing on Arizona’s immigration law and its nonexistent human rights abuses.  As he did so, he received a standing ovation from those who populate the left side of the aisle. (more)

Over the course of good years and bad, the countries of Latin America have recently been taking diverging paths to very different futures. (more)

Abstract: In the real world, as opposed to what French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls President Barack Obama’s "virtual world," America faces the reality of Iran’s intransigence and aggressiveness; China’s headlong pursuit of its own national, regional, and global interests; Russia’s determination to regain its Near Abroad; the Arab states’ refusal to accept any kind of a reasonable settlement of the kind that Israel has already offered under several governments; Syria’s designs on Lebanon; and Hugo Chávez’s designs on the weaker countries in Latin America. President Obama’s foreign policy agenda of gradual American retreat will have inexorable consequences: When erstwhile allies see the American umbrella being withdrawn, they will have to accommodate themselves to those from whom we were protecting them. If Obama proves impervious to empirical evidence and experience, all these accommodations, the weakening of alliances, the strengthening of centers of adversarial power in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, and elsewhere will continue until we are awakened by some cataclysm. (more)

Abstract: "The fall of the [Soviet] empire," former Czech president Vaclav Havel wrote, "is an event on the same scale of historical importance as the fall of the Roman Empire." It is true that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine–that the Soviet Union will use force if necessary to ensure that a socialist state remains socialist–and in so doing undercut the Communist leaders and regimes of Eastern and Central Europe in the critical year of 1989. But why did Gorbachev abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine? One Western leader above all others forced the Soviets to give up the Brezhnev Doctrine and abandon the arms race, brought down the Berlin Wall, and ended the Cold War at the bargaining table and not on the battlefield: President Ronald Reagan. (more)