Blogging the democratic revolution
King Gyanendra finally addressed the people. The result was less than miraculous. In it he promised to return executive power to the people and asked the Seven Party Alliance to name a new prime minister. Meanwhile, the current government would continue to function until that happens. Nothing about giving up his power. Nothing about restoring the elected parliament. Nothing actually addressing the demands of the people. There will be no rewriting of the constitution and there will be no bringing of the Maoists into the mainstream. What the King has offered them is going back to square one. Simply put,…
Boz has his weekly polls roundup from around the Americas, and first, the best part: Spanish voters rank Chavez and Castro as rock bottom from among the region’s leaders. Chavez’s trips to Spain, where he made an incredible fool of himself, obnoxious all the way, must have had something to do with this. Castro, meanwhile, speaks for himself. He’s also got updates from Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, all well worth seeing here.
The topic is hideous but it’s getting harder to ignore: Venezuela is becoming the New Medellin, an emerging drug-trafficking capital for our hemisphere. It’s a big change. As brave President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia crushes Marxist narcotraffickers in his own country, these same narcos are finding greener pastures by moving next door, to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It represents a historic shift because Venezuela’s lawmen have always fought Colombian drug traffickers like cougars to keep them out. Today, Hugo Chavez embraces these same dopers as Marxist allies in his struggle against U.S. “imperialism.” You can imagine how dispiriting this must be…
Thomas Friedman has a terrific new piece out in Foreign Policy magazine, describing something I have discussed earlier, the creepy inverse relationship between rising oil prices and declining freedom. As oil prices have shot up, many oil producing countries and regions – Venezuela, Iran, Russia – have correspondingly lost their freedoms. Others, like Nigeria and Aceh, have seen a rise of gangs and rebels, making life hell, just as surely as a tyrant. The article is not out on the Web yet but you can buy the issue, which is loaded with several good articles of great relevance. The newly…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is really starting to tumble in the Mexican presidential polls, to be held July 2. He’s still ahead, but now only by 3 or 4 points. And with three months to go before election day, his trajectory is down. Reuters has a new story here showing that for the first time in three years, he’s starting to really look shaky. AMLO is the favored candidate of the Hugo Chavez left in Mexico. But Chavez, ironically, is the main cause of AMLO’s downfall. The more Hugo Chavez talks, the more anti-U.S, rage he spews, the more insanity…
Yesterday, at a meeting with the Algerian speaker of parliament, Ammar Sadani (or Saadani), the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that the years of “discord” among the Muslim countries was over. These years of discord had allowed Israel to occupy Palestine and for the West to dominate the lands of Islam. But, the “enemies” of the ummah had been weakened by recent developments in the Middle East, and, Ahmadinejad said, Iran and Algeria could change the balance of power in the Middle East against Israel and the United States. Sadani, in support of the Iranian president, responded, ever carefully, by…
Cuba Liberal has a 58-minute-long must-see video, in Spanish, about the horrific tortures used by the Castro’s regime against all who oppose him. The video starts with the liar Castro claiming that “nobody has ever been tortured or mistreated in Cuba”. But the reality is all the opposite. Watch the video here .
Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent newspaper editor and politician on the left, has said he will run for president against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in December’s election. It’s a fascinating decision. Petkoff is an ex-leftist guerrilla who can’t stand Chavez. He was also a good government infrastructural minister who really got things done. He’s extremely competent, and I don’t care what he claims his political orientation is. He does thing right. Petkoff posts on English-language Venezuelan blogs on occasion and the one striking thing I noticed about him from his posts was his brilliance and confidence, even if I did not totally…
You thought commissars were a thing of the past? Not at UCLA. Here in the states, a fierce debate is going on as to whether illegal immigrants should all walk out on their jobs on May 1 to make a political point, one that says the U.S. economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. It’s a takeoff on a clever movie that came out recently called ‘A Day Without A Mexican.’ The problem is, if the immigrants do this, they’ll probably be fired from their jobs, negating the point of being an illegal immigrant altogether. And being fired could leave such…
I hate to have to waste bandwidth on this but there are still people out there who think Hugo Chavez has improved the situation in Venezuela, and is only in power because he is popular. Having been there and talked to people, I strongly doubt it. But I also used my eyes. If it’s true that Chavez is popular because he’s made things so much better for the poor, how come this is the Caracas reality today? The above PowerPoint presentation, courtesy of The Real Cuba shows the deterioration of Caracas from 1998, the last year before Hugo Chavez took…
Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States to meet with President Bush this week amid much fanfare. Undoubtedly any meeting between the leaders of these two countries will be historic. On the one hand you have a longtime military and economic superpower, and on the other you have a country that hopes to be that within a few decades. There????????s a lot to discuss on the table. Trade and development. Bilateral relations and common concerns. Human rights. This visit, however, will be very different from previous ones. When President Bush visited China in November last year, something unprecedented…
Nepal continues to be gripped by a national strike jointly called by the seven-party political alliance and the Maoist insurgency. People have been staying home from work and protesting in the streets, putting pressure on King Gyanendra to restore democracy in the country. So far, he has been unyielding. The political parties have called for people to take to the streets en masse Thursday, break through the police barriers, and surround the presidential palace. Diplomatic efforts to stop Nepal from falling deeper into crisis are continuing, with the arrival Wednesday of an Indian envoy offering to mediate between King Gyanendra…
Another day, another 20,000-vote narrowing in the gap between Lulu Flores and Alan Garcia, the two candidates vying for second place in Peru’s electoral race, which will go into a second round next month. Yesterday, Flores was trailing Garcia by 93,000 votes. Today, it’s 71,000 votes. There’s still about 8% of the votes to be counted. If you ask me, I think the odds are starting to go into her favor, if these expat trends continue. She’s behind but she’s also got the momentum from voters. Can it last for eight percentage points? I am starting to cross my fingers.…
Ralph Peters, writing an exclusive on Real Clear Politics notes some reservations about the very concept of democratic revolution, saying it’s a tool that requires skills and people who are just beginning to use the tool often don’t have the right skills. Do you agree with Ralph?
Tim’s El Salvador Blog has a fascinating update and discussion of the famous “14 families” who supposedly rule and control El Salvador. I remember how big a deal that was during the El Salvador War in the 1980s. Today, they are now the “8 Conglomerates.” The discussion is also important, and I half agree with each of the sides. Number one, I do think there’s such a thing as oligarchs in Latin America and while their billions do not bother me, and I make no advocacy of taking them away, they frequently are where they are due to certain privileges…
Kyrgyzstan, formerly the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic during Soviet times, gained its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Askar AKAYEV became President of Kyrgyzstan and the country seemed to be on the road to democracy. However, over time corruption became rampant, the country suffered from a poor economy, and there was blatant nepotism in the country. This led democracy activists to protest against his government. The Kyrgyz non-governmental organizations (NGO) and many young people began protesting the corruption, and against unfair parliamentary and presidential elections. The Kyrgyz government cracked down on…
According to Peru’s official election results page, the battle for a second-place spot for the May runoff shows that free-market Lourdes Flores is beginnning to sharply gain on disastrous ex-President Alan Garcia. If she can completely overtake Garcia, she will be the one to face Ollanta Humala in May, and may well win. As Peruvian expat votes roll in, there’s now less than a 100,000-vote difference between Garcia and Flores. Garcia’s lead above Flores is just 93,818 votes. A few days ago, it was over 200,000 votes. The expats seem to be making a difference. Lobo en Peru has some…
What do most Americans think of when they hear the terms “Middle East” or “Arab world”? Perhaps images of angry young men wearing green head bands, marching to their death, in the West Bank, or car bombs in Baghdad. Others might think of imposing sight of Saddam Hussein or Yasser Arafat; the more informed might imagine the image of Muamar al-Qaddafi, decked out in his flamboyant robes. Many might imagine impoverished beduins or angry mobs protesting against the Zionist Enemy as they carry placards as they advance down a beige boulevard in Cairo or Damascus. Few would imagine Rami Khoury,…
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recently ruffled feathers in the Arab world when he publically questioned the loyalty of Arab Shiites not only to the Arab nation, but also to their own homelands. “Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not the countries they are living in,” he said. Such fears in the Arab East are long standing and often taken in a very matter of fact way when the region????????s Sunnis look at their Shiite neighbors???????? affinity for portraits of Iranian political leaders and mosques built with Iranian funds. Suspicion among the region????????s various groups has only been…
Today is the 45th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs exile invasion of Cuba. Back in 1961, when John F. Kennedy was president, an organized group of Miami Cuban exiles trained as a brigade around Central America and elsewhere and tried to retake their island from the murderous regime of Fidel Castro during his first years in power. Castro in those early years first claimed he was a democrat, and then rapidly instituted an orgy of bloodshed, slamming 3,000 Cubans up against the wall as “enemies of the people” and shooting them dead, including many children, without trial or due…
Like a beautiful woman who’s unaware she’s beautiful, free trade is the unconscious crowning glory of the George Bush presidential administration. The US Trade Representative’s Office has about 200 staff and pound for pound, packs more value for us taxpayers and the work of our government than probably any other office. Its tiny staff negotiates these things, working hard 16-hour days. Amid the tons of paperwork, I’ve talked to them, and they always see the next mountain and hurdle. They talk of obstacles and frustrations. They don’t think they are any good, they worry ab out everything. They never quite…
Breaking News: Italy’s former Minister for Reforms, Calderoli, affirms today that if the Court of Cassation confirms the not irrelevant irregularities, the election outcome could change and the center-right could continue to govern. Please read this news here . “Not only are a lot of votes being contested, but so are the election irregularities and both could change the outcome. The latter are being contested because of what was on record and how it was transcribed. These particular irregularities, which have to be sniffed out, took place all over the country”. Calderoli continued, “I would like to give you an…
A common canard from the left is that Miami Cubans are crazed retrograde reactionaries, still pining for property they lost when the communist regime of Fidel Castro conducted wholesale expropriations against what was Cuba’s then-ample middle class in 1959. Anyone who knows Miami Cuban Americans knows that’s false. It’s a comic-book kind of stereotype, and has its origins in the Castro propaganda machines of Cuba themselves, which consider these fellow Cubans the implacable enemy. What’s interesting to speculate about is why it happened. Castroite communists, being materialists, and having materialism at the bedrock of their ideology, have a vulgar obsession…
Brave Cubans opened other more independent libraries. One was opened in Regla and the other in Havana; the latter was founded by the Cuban Liberal Movement. Below, some members of the Liberal Movement in Havana:
It started back in September 2005 when 18 children from the Chechen village of Staroshchedrinskaya were hospitalized with signs of poisoning, and then a month later 8 more children from the same school were hospitalized with the same symptoms. In December 2005 13 more children from the Chechen Shelkovskaya district were hospitalized with very similar symptoms. Since December more than 50 other children have developed the same symptoms, including children in the Chechen villages of Shelkozavodskaya and Starogladovskaya. The symptoms are fatigue, asphyxia, headaches, convulsions and hysteria. Some children also reported memory loss and hallucinations. All most all of the…