Blogging the democratic revolution
Here’s my sad nominee, from Reuters AlertNet: Just down the street a fading “USA Is Good” slogan was daubed on a wall, a reminder of the days just after Saddam’s fall in 2003, before American occupation, insurgents bombings, kidnappings and shootings dashed hopes. (Formatting mine. Credit: Michael Georgy, Reuters.)
Investor’s Business Daily has an amazing editorial today suggesting that oil prices have probably peaked. It cites significant trading activity showing that some very big players are selling oil stocks like a herd of panicked elephants, unafraid to take losses now – because they know the losses are going to be bigger later. It’s really…
Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has an great post about how he, as a citizen journalist, confronted power directly in the most amazing way I’ve ever seen anyone in the blogosphere do. It’s a great lesson in creativity for any democratic revolutionary anywhere in the world. From his exile in London, he learned of a London…
Boz has a new collection of polls from around the Americas, and with more than a dozen elections scheduled for this hemisphere in the coming year, they are all worth watching. One of the most significant polls he’s found is on Mexico, showing that upstart-dinosaur Arturo Montiel Rojas, was running even with establishment-dinosaur Roberto Madrazo,…
Mark Steyn has a new killer essay at the Spectator about the collapse of Russia and the spread of Islamic fascism. It’s worth reading if only for the, er, fowl pun partway down page one (there’s one that’s actually funny further down, but I won’t ruin it for you). Excerpt: Moscow has reduced Grozny to…
As parliamentary elections on November 6 near, hardliners within the Azeri government are feeling the heat and are cracking down on reformers within their midst. This has culminated in the firing and arrest of Economic Development Minister Farhad Aliyev and his brother Rafiq Aliyev, who is the owner of Azpetrol, the biggest privately owned oil…
Matt Margolis at Blogs for Bush was invited to Congress to talk to and query congresspeople about their stances on issues. It’s a great new experiment in participatory democracy and they are inviting any of us to send them questions to ask the congresspeople. (They probably aren’t the only ones invited, so if you know…
Eduardo Avila of Barrio Flores has a good weekly roundup of news from the growing Bolivian blogosphere. Go see it for its different thoughts on the political situation, particularly from a new blog he’s found by a Bolivian indigenous blogger who’s now at university – he comments on academic corruption but seems to have a…
Miguel Buitrago of MABB on Bolivia has a chart showing that the regions in Bolivia that receive the most and the least government spending. Guess which ones are the richest and which ones are the poorest? Go see here. For those who claim more government spending means more wealth, that the rich are only rich…
An international panel ruled that the Mexican government cannot prevent former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda from running for president as an independent in 2006. Castaneda is a former NYU professor who, although distinctively left-leaning, is on the DEMOCRATIC left, and more to the point, is not a muddlehead. He wrote the first scathing biography of…
There’s been some buzz created with regards to the auditing of votes in Iraq due to ‘unusually high turnout.’ In fact, it was the top story on Google News the other day, though I’m not really sure why, given that the biggest effect it will have is delaying the results only a couple of days….
Colombia’s constituional Supreme Court has ruled that Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe can run for re-election as president again! Earlier on, Colombia’s Congress had voted to change the constitution to allow Uribe to run for a second term, and now the Court has given the green light. There’s one more ruling awaited in November, but, like…
Boz has a fascinating collection of polls from around the Americas in several countries signalling the political temperatures in assorted hot spots like Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and others, all put together in a clean roundup of news. Don’t miss the weird Argentine soccer poll at the bottom. Well worth a click here.
The U.S. needs to get its act together on certain things. Like this, that Glenn Reynolds has noticed here.
Francisco Toro has an interesting item about the growth of the ‘ni-ni’s in Venezuela’s political system. These are the people who are neither for Chavez nor for the opposition to Chavez. They are sort of fence-sitters, or, as Francisco suggests, the political center. As a group, they are growing, and new parties like Venezuela de…
Yesterday’s The Messenger (an english-language Georgian daily) covers the formation of a new political party out of smaller opposition groups, primarily the Conservatives and the Republicans. This new party shares in the heritage of the Rose Revolution, although it now finds enough room for disagreement with the ruling National Movement: Several leading members of both…
When your country becomes a totalitarian regime, you often preserve your identity through exile. This is largely because all institutions have been shattered in your country and there is virtually no possibility of democratic resistance to tyranny. Every institution is politicized in a communist regime. It’s shocking to think about this matter of exile in…
One of the rarest things on the blogosphere is a non-Sandalista, non-foreigner-financed, non-foreigner opinioned, non-angry-Latin-intelligentsia Colombia blog that’s by a Colombian about marvelous Colombia. I have had yet to find one – until now. Unfortunately, you bring up Colombia – even to a Latino audience in the states – and the first thought they have…
The day of solidarity with Belarus on Oct. 16 that I talk about was an outstanding success, even moreso than I thought it would be. Over 100,000 people lit candles in their windows all around Belarus on Sunday in a form of protest yet unseen in this country, where protestors are roundly beaten and arrested….
Miguel Octavio has some utterly repulsive photos of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in the throes of love. Look at those two embrace! What’s hard to believe is that Mugabe, one of the world’s foremost creators of famine and hunger today, was so much as allowed in at this United Nations conference in…
Jailed Abimael Guzman, the Pol-Pot-ian Marxist terrorist leader of Peru’s Shining Path, which terrorized Peru for 20 years, gave Peru corrosive, confidence-killing hyperinflation, and murdered no less than 35,000 to 70,000 people, mostly from among the poorest of Peru … was a bigtime writer of fuzzy love poetry. The story is here. You know how…
Transparency International’s famous corruption perceptions index for 70 countries of the world was released this morning. Notice those nice Estonia and Barbados ratings! Notice those hideous Burma and Belarus ratings! The press release and the list of rankings is here. UPDATE: Veneuzela’s Aleksander Boyd has some additional commentary here.
Val Prieto at Babalu blog has an excellent news roundup – called ‘a link ajiaco‘ in ‘Cuban,’ with all the significant news and events happening in and around Cuba in the blogosphere. He’s done it up bien. Read it here.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa has a great discussion about Argentine-Cuban poseur revolutionary Che Guevara on NPR. Hispanicon has the link to the audiotape, and it can all be found here.
Venezuela’s bloggers have found a call from the BBC World Services to submit questions to Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez online. This event probably is part of a coordinated propaganda effort from the Western hemisphere’s communist tyrants to reach out to the outside world through the Internet. Fidel Castro did almost the very same thing last…