Paxety Pages

Voices rose and tempers flickered, but the discussion stayed civil as special interest groups made their demands on the struggling Organization of Americans States on Sunday in a stab at a hemispheric town meeting as the 35th general assembly got underway.

The suggestions, admonishments and requests ranged from upgrading hemispheric support for science and technology education, to an end to racial and other forms of discrimination, to the right to indigenous lands and scores of other issues.

But as new orders and requests were piled on the 34-member hemispheric organization, many of the groups invited to a face-to-face meeting with OAS ambassadors or foreign ministers politely reproached them for failing to follow through on existing mandates, from democracy issues to human rights.

Get that? Now the struggling  O.A.S. is a victim because delegates and lobbyists had the audacity to ask the group to do something. What is the OAS supposed to be? An American EU where our betters tell us what reforms are necessary?

Go read the whole thing for more idiocy.

Update - To see how silly Ms. Bussey's story is, go here and read the same newspaper's story on Secretary Rice's address to the assembly.

''We must act on our charter to strengthen democracy where it is weak,'' she said. ``In places like Bolivia, and Ecuador, and Haiti, the institutions of democracy have brittle roots.''

In Bolivia, President Carlos Mesa faces almost daily protests demanding his resignation, while the government of Lucio Gutiérrez fell in Ecuador last month and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to flee Haiti last year.

Not once, however does the article mention Cuba.  One has to turn to the San Jose Mercury News to read this:

Rice also pointed to the success of Cuban-Americans in Florida and around the country to contrast against the economic shortcomings of the island's communist economy.

"Here in Florida, we can glimpse the future potential of a free Cuba. As recently as 1999, the two million Cubans in the United States earned a combined income of $14 billion. Now compare that with Castro's Cuba, a country of 11 million citizens and a GDP only slightly larger than $1 billion," she said.