Blogging the democratic revolution
Condoleezza Rice, during her trip to Kazakhstan, chased down President Nazarbaev after he left his podium and forced him to answer questions from reporters. She also called on the country to be a leader for democratic reforms in the region. Jim Hoft has a roundup. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stops the Kazakh leader in his tracks and gestures to reporters during their press conference in Astana, October 13, 2005. Condoleezza chased down Nazarbayev after their opening remarks. She stopped him in his tracks and brought him back to the stage to answer questions!… Not exactly the sort of…
One of Britain’s two greatest prime ministers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest people who has ever lived, Lady Thatcher, is celebrating her 80th birthday today. The Reuters picture show here shows her in frail health, but looking absolutely beautiful. Lady Thatcher is one of history’s most authentic revolutionaries. She not only put the ‘Great’ back into Britain, she spread freedom all through the entire world. She was a leading revolutionary in the demise of the Soviet empire, making freedom possible for hundreds of millions of people. She ended Argentina’s dirty war, toppling its dictatorship, bringing freedom…
Gustavo Coronel has a haunting essay about the terror that stalks the Venezuelan countryside, with cattle-rustlers, marauders, professional killers, paramilitaries, mercenaries, narcoterrorists and Chavista death squads. No one is safe at night – or even at day. Payoffs to different kinds of criminals to prevent them from murdering and pillaging is a way of life now. People live on a razor’s edge. That is the climate of fear that rural Venezuelans must suffer as the Chavez dictatorship takes them ever further toward oblivion. Not one word about this from the mainstream media! But I have heard these stories from my…
Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has an excellent weekly news roundup of events in Venezuela, complete with a variety of media links showing through little turning points Venezuela’s slide downward into totalitarianism. Read it here.
As we have noted in previous roundups, Evo Morales is not the worst Marxist lunatic in the Bolivian political line-up. That honor may belong to Felipe Quispe. He is a far-leftist and indigenous-“rights” romantic who openly advocates violence and who has no chance of winning the December presidential election. So, with diminishing prospects, he says he will take up arms if he loses. Boli-Nica believes that Quispe may be acting in collusion with Evo Morales. If Quispe can make himself look like people’s worst nightmare – a crazed leftist intent on confiscating everything they own, he will indirectly make the…
Whatever you do, go to THIS democratic festival celebrating of the dawn of freedom and not this Chavista one representing the road to Castrodom. IndyMedia has its announcement up on the Chavista Challenge in Chicago, with all the details about the players – CITGO cheap gas, Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover…all the Huey-Long-style pork-barrel tools that are elements of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s effort to buy a revolution of his own right here in the U.S. It’s the first time ever that a foreign leader has attempted to use the urban poor in another country to advance his political aims. Additional…
Right in the middle of fermenting Panamanian unrest over pension reform, coupled with pot-stirring by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, our Daniel of Yaracuy, Venezuela, found himself in the middle of Panama on a work visit. From shopkeepers, he learned of corrupt Chavista officials blowing in to Panama for shopping trips and money-laundering ventures, sure in the belief that they will not be noticed. One of them dropped $8,000 on a wristwatch. They’re wrong of course, the Panamanians see what’s going on and tell everything. Read the whole riveting account of Daniel in Panama’s storm here.
Ever since Gail Collins wrote her infamous editorial blasting Venezuela’s battered opposition for crying fraud in the 2004 recall referendum, I have had a change of opinion, to say the least, about the New York Times. I didn’t have it before – for a rightwinger, I have a remarkably high tolerance for left bias in the media. It’s ok, I can read between lines. But ever since Venezuela, I draw the line at the NYT as a reliable news source. I consider it no such thing. But big deal, it’s not news that another libertarian dislikes the NYT. What’s really…
Hey everyone, I’d like to thank you all for expressing your interest in participating in the Walk for Democracy in Belarus. It is an event that will be held worldwide in places as far-ranging as Nepal, Taiwan, Ghana, England, and right here in Boston in order to raise money for pro-democracy organizations that oppose the current dictatorship. I’m emailing you all to let you know the final plans and instructions for participating in the walk. Please, do not hesitate to forward this info on to anyone you know so that they can participate. The more people coming, the better. You…
This really happened yesterday. Francisco Toro writes: Twenty guys with BIG GUNS storm into your apartment one night. They say they’re from the Prosecutor General’s Office. They’re looking for materials relating to … Tulio Alvarez’s “terrorist activities.” …. They leave, a bit embarrassed. The next day, the prosecutors’ office says it has no idea who the 20 guys were. Read the whole thing here.
Syrian Interior Minister Ghazi Kenaan died yesterday in his office, and the Syrian government says that it was suicide; he shot himself through the mouth. But was it? Kenaan was head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon from 1982 to 2003, and basically ran the country for Syria. He was recently questioned as part of the investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri led by Detlev Mehlis (see my post, Another Assassination Attempt in Lebanon: Syria & the Mehlis Investigation, for background). Nine Lebanese security officials with close ties to Syria were detained as part of the…
With parliamentary elections on a few weeks away, and the prospect of a colored revolution on the horizon, the Freedom bloc (comprised of three major parties) is uniting with another opposition party, the National Unity bloc, in order to support each others’ candidates and ensure that the government doesn’t rig the election. Executives of Azadlig (Freedom) bloc of three main opposition parties and the National Unity bloc have agreed to cooperate at the November parliament elections. Under the agreement they signed, the two organizations will join efforts at ensuring a democratic and fair election, eliminating irregularities, supporting each other????????s candidates…
An unusual piece of news – Barbados wants nothing – NOTHING – to do with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s pork-barrel spending on cheap oil for his small Caribbean neighors. Tiny but responsible Barbados knows that nothing comes ‘free’ and has no intention of giving away its sovereignty for a barrel of Chavez’s oil. This represents a significant David standing up to the region’s Goliath. There will likely be retribution but Barbados is uncowed. Read it here, here, and here.
As the release of the Mehlis report edges closer, Bashar is beginning the process of elimination. That is, of those who would implicate his goverment. Ghazi Kanaan, the Syrian interior minister, has been found dead in his office with a bullet in his mouth. President Assad’s Interior Minister General Ghazi Kanaan, who ruled Lebanon for years as Syria’s military intelligence chief, committed suicide Wednesday a few days ahead of the expected release of a U.N. report into the assassination of ex-Premier Rafik Hariri. He was 63. Kanaan’s Aide-de-Camp Brigadier Walid Abaza told the Agence France Presse that Kanaan shot himself…
Given its terrible wars and fearsome rebel groups, you might not think anything good could come out of Liberia. And, you would be wrong. Liberia has held its first successful free and fair elections this week. Long live the democratic revolution! Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has a full roundup and video well worth seeing here.
Eduardo Avila at Barrio Flores has a Bolivian blog news roundup for the week at Global Voices with a good variety of posts. Read it here.
The weakest link in the CAFTA system has, bigtime, ratified CAFTA! This is a body blow to Daniel Ortega and all his Marxist thugs! They fought with all their strength and dirty tricks to oppose this. This ratification is tremendous news. Democracy has won big in battered Nicaragua against all odds. Daniel Ortega has been handed yet another People’s Revolution of defeat. Victorious Nicaragua will get used to being a rich country now, faithful in the power of free markets to make people free. iVIVA NICARAGUA! UPDATE: Oooh, this was a hard blow – the screaming and yelling from the…
Amid a huge hullabaloo first reported by blogger Daniel Duquenal here and here, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered to finance a Brazilian samba school to dance in his honor. But being Hugo Chavez, he suddenly … didn’t come up with the pledge money. This, despite, the Brazilian school’s efforts to accomodate him, to print up programs, and incur all sorts of expenses to make that happen. Chavez stiffed them, buying lots of ‘goodwill’ for his fake revolution as word of that gets out. He’s not gonna be popular among the samberos. Gustavo Coronel tells the whole exclusive story here.
Venezuela’s oil, however you think it should be allocated, belongs to Venezuela. But that’s not how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez sees it. He’s now on the verge of appointing a hardcore German Marxist who had and maybe still has ties to the Baaden Meinhof terrorrists to lead Venezuela’s oil company. Not unreasonably, Alek, who is Venezuelan, views this as an unusually brazen sort of treason. In Hugo Chavez’s revolution, ideology is much more important than citizenship. It’s essentially an Sandalista idea and part of a vast phony revolution that he’s been promoting with the ultimate aim of making Venezuela a…
Today the Marxist FARC guerrillas of Colombia attempted to murder a close senatorial ally of President Alvaro Uribe with a car bomb. They have tried for years to kill Uribe, probably hundreds of times, but the popular president’s security is too tight. So this time, the detested Marxists went after his allies. It was the first car-bomb attack in Colombia in a couple of years, and only for one reason: President Uribe has rounded up vast numbers of the terrrorists and put them in jail where they belong. But he’s not done yet and there are still a few lurking…
The Iraqis have worked out a very good deal amongst themselves. So good, in fact, that one key Sunni group is dropping its opposition to the constitution. The deal would allow the December parliament to make amendments to the constitution, in which Sunnis and liberal secularists will have a much higher representation and voice than the currently Kurdish and religious Shiite dominated parliament. It also works out some other key issues. BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi leaders reached a breakthrough deal on last minute changes in the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would reverse its…
This week’s carnival of revolutions is up! It’s very interesting this week because all of the worldwide developments are related back to Armenia, another country looking for proper democracy. It gives a special insight into that country in the context of democracy at large.
I was sitting in a shisha bar with some friends the other night, and soon enough I was talking with my friend from Lebanon about the Mehlis report, the implications for Syria, and what will happen to President Lahoud. He is a Christian and a supporter of General Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and went out on the streets during the Cedar Revolution, so the topic always incites him (which is fine with me, who else am I going to discuss Lebanese politics with?). It was fun because I hadn’t written much about goings on there of late, and in particular,…
Harry Hutton lived through it here. The revolutionary courage of Colombians still blazes like an emerald.
For all those who imagine that ‘land reform’ based on the confiscation of private property yields anything but Zimbabwe, Miguel Octavio has a sad news item describing how confiscated land in Venezuela’s western Zulia state a couple years ago has since gone from productive to fallow, the inevitable end-product of socialist redistribution. It’s something nations that have experienced communism already know. Read it here.