Blogging the democratic revolution
Just last year dictator-in-chief Robert Mugave ordered Operation: Take Out The Trash, bulldozing tens of thousands of makeshift homes that Zimbabwe’s people were forced to live in due to his policies. The operation displaced over 700,000 people, leaving them without a place to live. He promised the international community that reparations would be made and that all of the people driven from their homes would be given new housing. One year later, this has not happened. Amnesty International sent a team of researchers into Zimbabwe to get the story. They found that out of all the homes destroyed, only a…
Pajamas Media has an especially hilarious post by The Manolo discussing the styles and fashions of different dictators. He finds that Ahmadinejad may be lacking: Briefly and remarkably, the President of the Iran wears the same khaki windbreaker, wrinkled trousers, cheap oxford shirts, scruffy beard and wild eyes favored by the aging high school chemistry teachers everywhere. Yes, in his youth he was the firebrand who would shake the very foundations of the society, but today he is content to expound upon his paranoid conspiracy theories while exercising his petty autocratic powers over the dull kids who sit in the…
In a moment where the forces of dictatorship and tyranny seem to be pushing back against democracy, the common thread that has successfully aligned nations such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China, and Sudan have been the supply and demand of energy. While it is encouraging that the relationships forged seem to be more based on Machiavellian pragmatism then aligned ideologies or long term goals, problematic occurrences and diplomatic realignment have debilitated the West????????s efforts to act against undemocratic forces. Increasingly, the ability to act as a geopolitical actor has been taken away from the United States and the UN as…
(To hear the interview in .mp3 format or download it to your iPod, click here or right-click and choose “save target as”.) Since Alexander Lukashenka became president of Belarus in 1994, he has used every avenue possible to repress political opposition to his rule. He has jailed politicians and activists, shut down NGOs both major and minor, destroyed the independent media, and ensured that no man but he will win the so-called presidential election that is held every five years. Some of his biggest opposition, however, comes from university students who crave opportunity in a country whose government regulates the…
Hugo Chavez is so detested by average Venezuelans that he’s reduced to passing out great big bottles of rum at his campaign rallies. Voters quaff these booze bottles full of liquor, pirate-style while they think it over. Evidently Chavez thinks this raises the odds of voters checking off his name on Venezuelan election day, Dec. 3. Naturally, this has attracted street drunks to Chavez rallies and fostered a new social phenomenon – Dancing Drunks for Chavez. Miguel has the must-be-seen-to-be-believed photos in this post here. More seriously, one commentatator on Miguel’s site notes that weird dancing public drunkeness is often…
On September 3rd a disturbing number of negative developments in the area of human rights and democracy have were reported in Russia. First, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing how Russian prosecutors railroaded two former detainees at Guantanamo Bay that the U.S. foolishly released to Russia’s clutches when Russia claimed they were terrorists. The sham trials that resulted were pathetic spectacles of the classic Neo-Soviet variety, based on “confessions” that were beaten out of the suspects. HRW stated: “Police in Russia frequently use torture and ill-treatment to extract confessions.” It concluded that torture is so omnipresent in Russia that…
Deep sea oil rig, Gulf of Mexico Source: National Aeronautics & Space Administration Today, a quiet revolutionary time bomb was presented to Hugo Chavez. He has no idea what it is or what it means. But this gift means it’s all over for the brutal Venezuelan tyrant in the next few years. He won’t be bothering us anymore. He won’t be bothering anyone anymore. He’s finished. Treasure was discovered in America’s Gulf of Mexico waters today, black gold so vast and so deep and so surprising and so recoverable that overnight, America’s energy reserves have just increased as much as…
Remember that the background on this subject was given on Part One. In this part we consider rulers who should be taken out of power, but whose crimes are less in the area of international terrorism and more in terms of the damage they have done to their own people. If we take seriously the idea that all peoples should have basic rights (a la UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights), then there certainly are rulers, usually called ???????Presidents???????, who have done much more harm than good for their fellow countrymen. ***** Fidel Castro So much has been said about…
A new UN report about the cultivation of drugs in Afghanistan finds a “staggering” increase of 60% compared to last year. The overall volume of production has risen from 4100 tons to 6100 tons, according to the report. The UN anti-drug chief rightly urged the Karzai government to crack down against the warlords and corrupt police and administrative officials warning that a continuity in the trend could threaten democracy in the country. This increase in the cultivation is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan. Since 2001–when the Taliban put a highly successful ban on cultivation–drug production has been steadily increasing.…
The shocking news was reported by RIA Novosti on August 30th that Russia????????s most prominent and well-respected newspaper, Kommersant (???????the Merchant???????), had been sold to Alisher Usmanov (pictured below), the owner of the Metalloinvest and Gazprominvestholding holding companies, the latter a subsidiary of Kremlin-controlled Gazprom. Usmanov is an Uzbek-born oligarch who has served six years in prison for fraud. RIA also reported that ???????Gazprom Media, the division of the state-owned energy giant, has in recent years taken control of once independent television station NTV, its satellite division NTV+, regional broadcaster TNT, Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy) radio station, broadsheet Izvestia…
Another domino falls. Another symbol, if not the representative of Russian independent media, has been scooped up by a Kremlin ally. The business daily, Kommsersant was sold this week for $300 million to Alisher Usmanov. Usmanov is the owner of Owner of Oskol Steel Mill, the Ural Steel industrial complex, the Lebedinsky Iron Ore Mining and Processing Facility, and Mikhailovsky GOK (he and his partner Vasiliy Anisimov acquired the latter in the beginner of 2005. Ranked the 25th richest man in Russia and the 278th in the world by Forbes with a net worth of $2.6 billion, the 52 year…
Miss Indonesia Universe, crowned Aug. 25, 2006 Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News! Miss Kazakhstan World 2005, Miss Kazakhstan Universe 2006 Source: Missosology Miss England World 2005 Source: Yahoo!, via My Pet Jawa Miss Afghanistan Earth 2003 Source: Wikipedia What do these girls have in common? They’re all Muslim beauty queens, showing off their hair, faces, arms, legs, and much more. Nothing remarkable about that in modern society – everyone’s got to wear a bathing suit sometimes, and no, I don’t mean this – but for perverse, repressed, bitter, dirty-minded Islamofascists, it’s something that’s utterly forbidden. The Age of Democratic Revolution…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, still refusing to concede the July 2 election Source: Agencia EFE, via Yahoo! Mexico A Spanish newspaper today warned that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who refuses to concede the election he lost last July 2, is gravely abusing not only Mexico’s democracy, but his own political viability and his left cause itself. El Pais writes that Lopez Obrador is doing incalculable damage to Mexico’s institutions, his prospects as a future candidate and that this refusal to budge will likely drag the progressive cause into oblivion. AMLO, the paper writes, is increasingly is “a prisoner of his…
Adam Gadahn Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News Al-Qaida released a video of a local American, Adam Gadahn, inviting us all to ‘convert or die‘ to bin Laden’s perversion of Islam, following an introduction by al-Qaida monster, Dr. Zawahiri, who’s bin Laden’s Number Two. It’s not his first time in a bin-Laden video. He’s recognizable as the U.S. citizen who made a threat to blow up Los Angeles a couple years before. Now he’s hit the big time, a spot on a Zawahiri Internet broadcast. Since he’s a former heavy-metal dude turned Islamofascistist fanatic, his new identity must make him feel…
As if arbitrary arrests, “repudiation acts” and vile assassinations by hanging were not enough, the Castros’ regime ordered their Gestapo to arbitrarily arrest doctor Darsi Ferrer in Havana and attempt to assassinate his 5-year-old son. Darsi Ferrer leads the Center for Health and Human Rights “Juan Bruno Zayas”, affiliated to the Assembly to Promote the Civil Society. Darsi has always helped the Cuban poor by bringing medicines and clothes to women, children and elders. The State Security cannot stand this activist’s committment with the Cuban people and his calls on the world community to do something to rescue the Cubans.…
The decision, by the State Department, to grant a visa to former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to play taqyia to promote the genocidal Islamist agenda of the Islamic Republic he is part of, has justly angered many, from Jewish organizations to U.S. Senators and Congressmen. But of course it has angered much more the Iranian freedom fighters, both in Iran and outside, who had always trusted the U.S. gov’t in its promises to stand with the Iranian people against the murderous and terrorist Mullahs’ regime. Some of the most active and genuinely committed Iranian opposition groups in the U.S. launched…