What is AMLO really doing? Photos like this makes one wonder

Having gone to great pains to identify Enrique Peña with reviled former President Carlos Salinas, showing at every possible occasion a blown up poster of the two together, it was more than a bit ironic that merely days after having been designated his candidate, pictures of a Yeidckol Polevnsky with Peña Nieto from an event this Monday would hit newspapers today. 

From La Jornada

A damning indictment of PAN leadership contenders: Debate "not necessary"

It's outright embarrassing, and speaks volumes of the low caliber of most of the contenders for PAN's party presidency: Cecilia Romero informed that she and the four other candidates had decided, against earlier promises, to simply skip any debates: "It was a joint decision and it is now out of the question ... we are not enemies, we are not adversaries, we are contenders in the same way."

So the PAN leadership succession is therefore, as critics have complained, merely a contest between personalities and/or based on whether one professes unquestioning loyalty or not to Calderón, rather than between candidates with well thought-out plans and visions for what they want the role of PAN to be?

I have defended and will continue defending PAN's way in which they choose their party president - by a vote in the national council rather than a debilitating mass-base election - yet to not even meet for a mere debate really serve to undermine the very point of holding this practice at all, and threatens to expose the "election" as a mere sham.

Bishop Onésimo Cepeda's convenient heart attack may save him from jail

After spending a few days in the hospital, Onésimo Cepeda, bishop of Ecatepec in Mexico State and a very close ally of Gover Enrique Peña Nieto, was released. He is facing charges of involvement in a huge fraud of valuable paintings worth an estimated $130 million - dollars, that is.

Yet given a reform to the article 55 of penal code in Mexico City in 2004, which stipulates that those over 70 with health problems may be placed in "house arrest" rather than in the dock, the bishop's heartattack - if there ever was one - may have saved him from prison. His own sister, Lily Cepeda, angrily denounced her bishop brother, claiming he faked it as a ploy to avoid prison or evoke sympathy.

When it comes to the more wacky and sinister members of the Mexican clergy such as Onésimo Cepeda, this would be less than shocking.

PAN expert Soledad Loaeza receives Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in social sciences

For students of PAN, Soledad Loaeza is a well-known name; her 1999 El Partido Acción Nacional: La Larga Marcha is a classic. Loaeza is out with a new book,  Acción Nacional, el apetito y las responsabilidades del triunfo, published by Colegio de México, her workplace.

It was just announced that she won the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in the social sciences. In that regard she offered a few thoughts on the PAN. While one cannot expect that the party would not fall into any of the nefarious practices established by PRI and its 71-year rule of Mexico, Loeaza notes,

"We can, however, demand honesty and we can complain that they have fallen into corruption very similar ore even worse that we complained about with the priístas, with regards to handouts, with extravagant expenditures of public officials. One of the main criticism that PAN historically directed to the PRI is that they had a very large administrative apparatus, that they spent too much on running public costs, that the salaries were stratospheric, and utterly unjustified. Yet now PAN has fallen into the same thing."

It's a damning indictment that sadly sums up the behavior of a great deal of the party's cadres in its decade of holding federal power.

Enoé Uranga: Jalisco governor suffers from "grave problem of homophobia"

Federal deputy of the PRD, said it best: Governor  Emilio González Márquez of Jalisco is "suffering a grave problem of homophobia," and offered to facilitate a training course for the governor with CONAPRED, the Mexican National Council to Prevent Discrimination, in response to the Jalisco governor's slurs and sponsoring of "gay conversion" events.

PRI's  Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín, president of the Chamber of Deputies, simply stated, "One cannot spend public money on whims," and said he will push for a federal audit by the Auditoría Superior de la Federación to determine the extent to which the Jalisco government has abused public funds for these and other events, which has made Governor Emilio González the laughing stock of the nation.

180 degree turn: Yeidckol Polevnsky now denies being candidate

The sharp backlash to AMLO's "appointment" of Yeidckol Polevnsky as his candidate for governor in Mexico State is causing quite a turmoil in the AMLO camp: Now, Polevnsky  herself has made a pirouette and announced she is only a "proposal" and not a "candidate" - in sharp contrast to her stringent declarations the past couple of days where she demanded that the PRD line up behind her candidacy.