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Hugo Chavez: No Golf for You!

worst_shot_ever

worst_shot_ever

I leave big divots
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Chevez is an unbelievable fool, and he makes a fit symbol for all that is wrong with centralized communist governments. He also dislikes golf.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/americas/12venez.html?_r=2&hp

Chávez Loyalists Push to Close Golf Courses
Leslie Mazoch/Associated Press

In 2006, a former mayor of Caracas tried but failed to seize control of the 18-hole course at the Caracas Country Club to build thousands of homes for the poor.

Published: August 11, 2009

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s political movement has found a new target: golf.

President Hugo Chávez says some golf courses could be better used for the poor.

After a brief tirade against the sport by the president on national television last month, pro-Chávez officials have moved in recent weeks to shut down two of the country’s best-known golf courses, in Maracay, a city of military garrisons near here, and in the coastal city of Caraballeda.

“Let’s leave this clear,” Mr. Chávez said during a live broadcast of his Sunday television program. “Golf is a bourgeois sport,” he said, repeating the word “bourgeois” as if he were swallowing castor oil. Then he went on, mocking the use of golf carts as a practice illustrating the sport’s laziness.

The government’s broad nationalizations and asset seizures have gone far beyond the oil industry to include coffee roasters, cattle ranches and tomato-processing plants.

If the golf course closings go forward, the number of courses shut down in the last three years will be about nine, said Julio L. Torres, director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation. A project on Margarita Island, designed by the American architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. and intended to be South America’s top course, was halted because of financial problems.

Most of the closed courses are in oil regions, near Maracaibo in western Venezuela and in Monagas State, in the east, and were initially built for Americans working in the oil industry. Mr. Chávez’s purge of dissidents from the national oil company focused suspicion on the golf courses, which were seen as bastions of the old elite.

A housing shortage has also pushed the government’s hand, Mr. Chávez said last month, when he questioned why Maracay had so many slums while the golf course and the grounds of the state-owned Hotel Maracay, a decaying modernist gem built in the 1950s, stretch over about 74 acres of coveted real estate.

“Just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois can go and play golf,” he said during his television program.

Backing up Mr. Chávez, a noted baseball fan, state media here have gone after golf.

Mario Silva, a Bill O’Reilly-esque host of an acidic commentary program called “The Razor Blade” on state television (imagine Mr. O’Reilly speaking against a background of portraits of Jesus, Mr. Chávez and Fidel Castro), told viewers that golf was simply a sport of the elite.

Mr. Chávez’s loyalists have taken aim at the sport before. Juan Barreto, a former mayor of Caracas, tried to seize control of the 18-hole course at the Caracas Country Club to build thousands of homes for the poor in 2006. The move set off infighting among Chavistas, as the president’s followers are known. After a legal battle, Mr. Barreto backed down.

Critics of the antigolf campaign point out that Venezuela’s top ally, Cuba, is going in the opposite direction. Canadian and European investors are seeking to build as many as 10 new courses in Cuba as part of the Cuban government’s bid to raise tourist revenues.

“China has more than 300 golf courses, and look what’s happening here,” said Mr. Torres, the director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation, invoking another Communist country with which Venezuela has warm ties. “We’re going from 28 courses to 18.”

In Maracay, officials are considering building low-income homes on the golf course or turning it into a campus of Mr. Chávez’s Bolivarian University. In Caraballeda, plans are advancing to turn the course into a park for children.

Mr. Chávez, for his part, said he had no plans to outlaw golf. “I respect all sports,” he said. “But there are sports and there are sports. Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport?”

He then answered the question: “It is not.”
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Just add that to the laundry list of reasons that he needs to be forcibly removed from his office.
 
I think Castro did the same thing in Cuba. Recently he started allowing them again to increase tourism.
 
Once the Castro regime has passed, I honestly see communism crumbling in Cuba. I believe that the people want the same lifestyle that they enjoyed in the first half of the 20th century. One man wrecked the economy of an entire nation. I'd love to go to Cuba. Maybe in a few years...
 
I tried to talk my wife into going to Cuba for a day a couple of years ago while we were in Mexico for vacation. I couldn’t convince her though. I would love to see first hand what it is like there today and then to compare what I think it will be like in twenty years. I think it will become the Vegas for the East Coast.

Regarding Chavez, his talk is getting extremely tiresome.
 
We had something similar this happen in Vegas a few years ago. A guy was buying public land cheap to use as public use golf courses. He'd build the courses, and in a few years would claim he was losing money. Did not matter he was charging pretty high green fees. He would then go to the local government folks for their permission to change the golf property into housing tracks. This of course made the original cheap property (for public use) worth more money, with which he could claim huge profits.

Pretty sure this does not go on anymore after some important folks were caught with the proverbial egg on their faces.
 
AHacker'sHacker said:
I tried to talk my wife into going to Cuba for a day a couple of years ago while we were in Mexico for vacation. I couldn’t convince her though. I would love to see first hand what it is like there today and then to compare what I think it will be like in twenty years. I think it will become the Vegas for the East Coast.

Regarding Chavez, his talk is getting extremely tiresome.
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Cuba, from the 20's through the 50's was the hot spot. It was Vegas before Vegas was there. All the biggest acts went there, I'd love to see it return to that glory. I've talked to some folks who went there in the 40's and 50's, and they all describe a happening spot.
 
this is the cook that owns all the Shell gas stations....if you use Shell you are funding terrorism indirectly! :bulgy-eyes:
 
CITGO is the national company, not Shell IIRC.
 
Same cook that Joe Kennedy was pimping for.
 
Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il should play 18 together.

And it's too bad no one told Lorena Ochoa about golf being a tool of the elite and oppressing the poor.
 
MO_Hacker said:
Didn't she just marry one of those elite people????
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She's about to. She also has used her golf earnings to build schools for poor kids. She makes a point of treating the grounds crew to lunch at every tournament she plays.
 
ClairefromClare said:
She's about to. She also has used her golf earnings to build schools for poor kids. She makes a point of treating the grounds crew to lunch at every tournament she plays.
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Oh I'm not questioning her, I just thought she was marrying a very wealthy gentleman.
 
ClairefromClare said:
She's about to. She also has used her golf earnings to build schools for poor kids. She makes a point of treating the grounds crew to lunch at every tournament she plays.
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I don't know if she still does it but, IIRC, she used to personally make them breakfast.
 
OFvar said:
this is the cook that owns all the Shell gas stations....if you use Shell you are funding terrorism indirectly! :bulgy-eyes:
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Shell is a Dutch company, your mixing it up with Citgo. I was under the assumption that Citgo doesnt have any company operated stations in the states. They are ran by jobbers and dealers.
 
OFvar said:
this is the cook that owns all the Shell gas stations....if you use Shell you are funding terrorism indirectly! :bulgy-eyes:
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Let's not even bring this up again! Check Snopes about this.
 
You know the easiest way to beat communism is just feed them a steady diet of Miami Vice, MTV and McDonalds................pretty sure in the end that is how the USSR got beat right? :banana: Yee Haw!

Far as Chavez goes I would looooooove to see some of the "proletariat" with actual brains, "rise" up and take over, there are enough ak's and ppl willing to fight for anything down there that it would be a quick job IMO!
 
kidzwitgunz said:
You know the easiest way to beat communism is just feed them a steady diet of Miami Vice, MTV and McDonalds................pretty sure in the end that is how the USSR got beat right? :banana: Yee Haw!
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Sorry dude, everyone knows Rocky IV and the Scorpions "Wind of Change" toppled the U.S.S.R.
 
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