Blogging the democratic revolution
Unofficial counts are giving Mubarak a vote count perhaps as high as 80%, with liberal opposition candidate Ayman Nour only up to 12%. This is, perhaps, pretty realistic given the circumstances, and for more on that you should read my previous post. I went into great detail on how fraud and irregularities can be committed by the government, and because of all of these things, the opposition is now claiming massive fraud in the elections. CAIRO (AFX) – Indignant opposition candidates and independent monitors claimed that incumbent Hosni Mubarak’s camp had massively violated electoral law during Egypt’s first contested presidential…
It’s one or two days since my FARC news roundup and today I’ve noticed all the non-FARC Colombia news. Google Colombia, skip the FARC pieces, and notice what news is left. Notice how marvellous Colombia’s government is, what fine things it’s done to make Colombia the great wealthy country it’s meant to be, and take a look at the string the visionary measures Colombia’s taken to secure its long-term future. This is the quietest, most peaceful revolution in the world. And it is a real revolution – a great sudden change from 40 years of narcoterrorist warfare and institutional weakness.…
The Dominican Republic has just ratified entry into CAFTA. Wheeeee!!!!!!! This is great news! Dominican Republic was considered the weakest link in the CAFTA state lineup. I thought it wouldn’t happen. I read so much negative news in the local press about this factory layoff and that protest and that opinion poll that I didn’t think it could possibly be true. I was wrong. My embassy source, who insisted otherwise, was right – Dominican Republic is onboard bigtime. The legislature passed the treaty by a 118-4 margin, mopping the floor with the local anti-CAFTA crowd. Yep, 118-4. And that’s great…
Egyptians voted on Wednesday in the country’s first ever multi-candidate presidential elections. They no longer had to choose between yes or no for Mubarak, but between ten different candidates. Despite this, however, the day was marked with intense voter apathy. Egyptians are casting their ballots in the country’s first ever presidential election. And no-one in Egypt doubts who will win. The incumbent – Hosni Mubarak – who’s been in power for 24 years and is running for another six-year term, faces no real competition from the nine other candidates, most whom are virtually unknown. The better known ones, such as…
Yikes, I almost forgot about this. Don’t miss this week’s carnival of revolutions! 100% democracy goodness.
The Zimbabwe effect is rolling in fast and thick in Venezuela. Confiscations of churches, land, businesses and bank accounts are accelerating. Each day brings news of new expropriations in ‘the name of the people.’ Never before has such an abuse of property rights been so bold. Today, we noted that a Church had been taken over on these dubious grounds with Alek Boyd’s story here. But that’s hardly all. Tomas Sancio shares his thoughts on the blatant theft of several grain silos belonging to a beer company in Venezuela. Supposedly they were ‘idle’ but Tomas asks, ‘what is the definition…
Three attacks on the Church from the hemisphere’s Marxist Axis in two days makes me think there may be a coordinated effort by Chavez-Castro & Friends to confront the Church. Given the weak state of the Church in most of the world, it’s hard to grasp why dictators should see it as such a threat but perhaps this is an region where the Church remains a robust force. It certainly was in Poland back in the 1980s. There may be a brewing showdown between the Church and communism, something not seen since Pope John Paul II verbally mauled Daniel Ortega…
The ongoing election fraud scandal surrounding President Arroyo is coming to an official close, as the opposition was not able to garner the 1/3 vote necessary to bring an impeachment trial to the Senate. The Philippine Legislature ended the impeachment process against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Tuesday, finally dismissing all three complaints against her. While her adversaries reiterated that they were committed to fighting on – and staged the largest street demonstrations since the crisis began – the Legislature’s move is likely to ensure Arroyo’s hold on power after more than three months of political turmoil. After marathon debates…
Going after the families of dissidents still in the country is a common tactic of dictatorships, so this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Registan reports on testimony implicating the regime in what it does best. Pressure on dissenters and their associates or families has long been a common factor in Turkmenistan according to Farid Tukhbatulin. He heads the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights, another Turkmen rights group. ???????If the authorities cannot get those who are abroad then their families and relatives who live in the country are harassed,??????? said Tukhbatulin, speaking from Vienna. He added that his brother had…
Marianna, the blogosphere’s resident election observer, has posted her latest report.
Sandmonkey has an update on the Egyptian elections taking place very soon. In sum, the NGOs want to monitor the election, the electoral commission said no, the courts said yes, the commission said “screw you,” and for some reason a delegation from the House of Representatives doesn’t mind. It goes back to the judicial rebellion a couple of months ago, when somewhere around 4000 judges all demanded that they be given complete oversight of the election process, not limited to just the polls as the government has tried to do. Most of the fraud will occur behind the scenes, after…
The FARC’s massacre victims this past week. Source: Yahoo! The FARC makes my blood boil. There is no eviler organization in this hemisphere than these murderous Marxist narcoterrorists. Nothing good has anything to do with them. These monsters put necklace bombs around housewives in the mountains just to see what a blown-off head looks like. Today they pulled so much garbage in Colombia I thought it was worth a news and blog roundup. I would be so much happier if I could write ‘FARC Roundup’ instead. This is what the bastards did today: They called for the murder of all…
The biggest argument I’ve made with regards to the political crisis in Nepal has been that the king’s taking of absolute power will drive the political parties and civil society into the arms of the Maoists, mostly because they are in opposition to the king. It isn’t that the pro-democracy parties agree with the Maoist philosophy, but that they are acting out of the necessity of survival. And now, the Maoists have declared a ceasefire and the parties have entered into talks with them on how to unseat the government. KATHMANDU, Sept. 3 (Xinhuanet) — Seven Nepali political parties have…
RFE/RL has an interesting story on the rise of social unrest in China. Scarcely a month goes by without news coming from rural China of often-violent protests by locals over corruption, land-grabs, taxation, or environmental issues. The authorities are struggling to stem this rising tide of challenges to abuses that are probably inherent in any one-party dictatorship. It discusses in-depth a lot of the themes I went over in a post I wrote recently. With protests growing in the double-digit percentages a year, their sizes increasing, and the violence escalating, this is something that needs to be watched very carefully…
In the Chavista Revolution in Venezuela, no one is more neglected than the helpless. There are all kinds of soup-kitchen programs and money flying around, but they benefit only those who can help Chavez politically in return. That excludes many. Chavez’s revolution is Marxist, and as such, its philosophical foundation is materialism. For Chavez, the materialist fuel driving his revolution is U.S. dollars from Venezuelan oil revenue. This is an advantage no previous communist state has ever had, neither Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea nor Cuba, making Venezuela’s descent into communism one virulent revolution that will be hard…
Alright guys, I had some sporadic internet access that allowed me to do a few posts, but the past two days it has been down completely. I’m in Boston, unpacked, got my new laptop, and best of all the internet is up and running at amazing speed. Posting regularly returns tomorrow!!
Miguel Buitrago at MABB in Bolivia has a truly marvellous election update complete with biographies of all the players in the upcoming election in December. That is going to be a BIG one – so it’s best to get up on these characters. Miguel has done a fantastic job well worth reading here.
What does 6,000 extrajudicial killings by police sound like? Oh, but you remind yourself that Argentina’s and Chile’s dirty wars have long been over, as dictators like Pinochet are brought to justice. Well, there is one part of South America where these dirty wars have not stopped – in fact, they have started. Venezuela, one of the few countries in South America with no history of a dirty war is resurging as the dirty war capital of the Americas, a horrific title as the bodies and mass graves turn up, a title that one had hoped had long passed for…
Transitions Online offers a nice three page article on the second wave of transition in the post-Soviet space, and its relation to happiness; or rather, it’s negative counterpart. Go ahead and read the whole thing. A few things I’d like to add, though, is how post-Soviet development in each of the occupied countries has contributed to the political tremors that have been shaking the region. For example, we see nations like Serbia and Ukraine that retained their authoritarianism all throughout the ’90s, ushering in new revolution. Throughout all the corruption, cheap sell-offs of state assets, censorship, and oppression, people have…
I hadn’t noticed this since I was moving, but The Belmont Club linked to my essay, “It all comes down to federalism,” and discussed it with a great deal of historical context. Here’s an excerpt with the conclusion: Each behind his Mason-Dixon Line. Of course it can hardly stop there. With a Shi’ite state in southern Iraq and an independent Kurdistan, fueled by vast oil reserves, the wrecker ball may keep on rolling. Syria and Turkey, with their large Kurdish minorities would soon have to reckon with the new Kurdish state. Iran may try to dominate southern Iraq, but a…
I’m in quite a bit of a mood for Russia at the moment after finishing Kremlin Rising. The book went into detail about Putin’s life and how he has consolidated power to the Kremlin since being elected, but it both started and ended with the massacre at Beslan School No 1. The authors themselves were WaPo correspondents and in Beslan during the hostage crisis, and they go into great detail about the actions of both the Chechen terrorists and the outright corruption of the Russian security forces, of which the latter is quite extensive and relatively untold since it isn’t…