Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Just in case anybody didn't quite get the message about what they thought of the judges at the Supreme Justice Tribunal (TSJ), a group of students took a small flock of chickens with them. It was priceless, bless 'em.
They had marched to Venezuela's highest court to protest against the judges' not having ruled on writs submitted by aspirant candidates who've been banned by Comptroller General Clodosbaldo Russian from standing for election.
Their slogan of the day took the form of a Venezuelan colloquialism involving a rooster – dejar la mamadera de gallo. Roughly speaking, this boils down to the equivalent of the English phrase, Stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
It was not the first time that students had set the pace with a little more than a touch of disrespect and irreverence towards their elders. But it was quite the funniest exercise in lampooning people in power they've come up with so far.
There was, of course, a serious side to the protest. Brian Fincheltub of Universidad Santa Maria said they were there on behalf of other people, both young and not so young, who belonged to families of people blocked by Russian. They demanded that the judges rule on the inhabilitados, by which they meant against Russian. "We don't want a country where the authorities don't respond to the demands and necessities of the Venezuelan people," Fincheltub said.
The ban was not their only gripe. There was criminal impunity and sick people turning up at hospital only to find nobody there to attend to their needs. The implication was that it was time somebody else got a crack at running the country.
Not long after the protest against the judges' slow pace on banned candidates, TSJ president Luisa Estella Morales declared a new law constitutional. This law added Bolivarian to the title of the National Armed Forces (FAN) and had been promulgated by a decree published in the Official Gazette that very morning.
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