Blogging the democratic revolution
Oil-rich Zulia state in western Venezuela, right under the radar, is seeking autonomy or possibly independence from Venezuela. There are now growing calls for it, from an independence group called ‘Our Course.’ Situated near Lake Maracaibo, the rightwing stronghold on the Colombian border is the only state that’s never been mowed down by the forces of Chavismo. Its governor is anti-Hugo Chavez, and its people hate the Thug more than almost anyone in the country. Its autonomy move resembles that of natgas-rich and very rightwing, market-oriented Santa Cruz province in Bolivia. But the desire to break away from an unbearable…
Glamorous Pamela over at Atlas Shrugs scored an amazing interview for her blog – an interview with UN horsewhipper John Bolton. She’s got the first two parts up and will get a third part up later. This goes to show the changing nature of blogging and how blogging is now beginning to supercede the news. Who wouldn’t want to read an interview with John Bolton? What newspaper ever tried this? It took Pamela to do it! What’s more, from Bolton’s point of view, why wouldn’t he like to talk to her as a friend – he reads her blog and…
Miguel Octavio has a couple of new pictures up showing the extent of Chavista vulgarity. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian “revolution” has come to this here.
Bubba and Junior, some of the oilmen down in Lou’siana, are getting a little disgusted about a certain Senor Chavez of Venezuela, and it might just be about to affect bidness. Seems one of Citgo’s top suppliers, Evans Oil, is preparing to dump Venezuela as a supplier and move on to other sources of petroleum. Venezuela’s cheap and Venezuela’s convenient, but that’s getting to be secondary, given one little problem: The oilmen are right peaceable people and don’t care much for Hugo Chavez’s raving anti-U.S. lunatic rhetoric these days. They know how their customers feel about these things and are…
Michelle Bachelet of Chile has just kicked Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez where it hurts again, and this isn’t the first time. Awhile back, the Venezuelan dictator said he wanted to ‘hug’ her and was met with stony silence. She’s been even more assertive on other fronts with him as well. Today, she’s somehow gotten the message to the clown that he’s not to try to upstage her during her historic presidential inauguration on March 11. Chavez is to take no ‘awards,’ make no ‘speeches’ and pander to no local leftists who might want to ‘honor’ him. If he wants that,…
It’s started. Leftist barbarians in El Salvador are burning tires and hurling explosive devices into the faces of police as their way of resolving their disagreements over the implementation of CAFTA. They are always free to not trade with us if that is their wish but they just can’t leave others alone who choose differently. That’s why they’re creating an atmosphere of terror through their incendiary devices and seeking to ruin the business climate for everyone. That way, they can all sit in the mud together with no free trade and wonder why the hell they are poor. Agencia EFE…
Source: The Nation It’s getting bad again in Thailand. The Bangkok Post says the crisis is deepening. The opposition to billionaire Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, led by rival media tycoon Sondhi Limthongkul, is giving Thaksin till Saturday to resign or they will chase him out. About 50,000 demonstrators filled the streets Sunday, and another 25,000 filled the streets Monday. All credible analysts point to 1992-style violence, the memory of which is pretty grim. An old monk-general who led that 1992 People Power revolt against what was then Thailand’s tinpot generals, has recently resurfaced at rallies and people are starting to…
Take that, Hugo Chavez! Colombia has chosen freedom and prosperity over dependency, isolation and handouts! A free trade pact was signed this morning with the U.S.! It was one long hard tough slog in negotiations, but President Alvaro Uribe and the U.S. Trade Representative finally came to common ground after lots of give and take, as is right between two good friends. Today, Colombia now has access to the world’s biggest market, will get all the computers and technology and whatever it want from our markets, and we in the U.S. in turn will benefit from Colombia’s ever more competitively…
A Chavista women’s collective in a small city called Los Teques in Venezuela recently sent this letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and some of his key minions. If this is Chavista, then we are ALL Chavistas. Their fascinating statement highlights the growing popular opposition to the corruption, the thievery, the bureaucratization and the barbarism of the Chavez “revolution.” The women are not closing their eyes. Although these women say they still have faith in Chavez, they certainly have lost any such faith in Chavez’s underlings who are supposedly distributing the spoils but in fact pocketing them. Poor people do…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis and Daniel at Venezuela News & Views alert us to a new Chavista propaganda offensive against some of the best reporting on Venezuela coming out these days. It looks like Venezuela’s attacks on the free press do not stop at its water’s edge, but extend to any media anywhere in the world that dares report the truth on Venezuela. In a spectacular article, The Christian Science Monitor sent a freelance reporter up to Venezuela’s mountain shantytowns and interviewed people about just how they felt about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Not surprisingly, Venezuela’s poor have the same…
My eyes are practically filled with tears of joy on this news. Something our Salvadoran and Honduran and Nicaraguan friends have been PRAYING for for years has really happened … A-G-A-I-N-S-T … A-L-L … O-D-D-S!!!!! If there is a such thing as miracles, this is it. Thousands of undocumented workers from war-torn El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America have had their temporary protected status in the U.S. extended. President Bush hinted at it in his state of the union message but I was not sure what he would do. News reports continuously said that Bush would let this bill…
Two big developments on the truly revolutionary idea of free trade extending from the North Slope all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Colombia is on the edge of signing a free trade pact with the U.S., according to Rob Portman of the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. The pact, if they can reach the finish line, is Colombia’s ticket to the first world and a stinging blow to the hideous anti-free-trade regime of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who has destroyed much of his country’s private sector, branding it an enemy instead of a job- and value-creator, and driving it out…
Alek Boyd has another bombshell on the details of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s family fortune and all its offshore accounts. Using the offices of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Chavez has a sprawling network of bank accounts spread through Panama, Europe, Brazil and other places, amounting to billions of dollars in ill-gotten wealth. What, you may ask, does this have to do with revolution? The answer is, a lot. It was vast corruption on a Plutus-like scale, in billions, that brought down the Marcos and Soeharto regimes in Philippines and Indonesia, both of which triggered massive moves to the streets to…
Is Venezuela running out of oil? This Bloomberg article certainly suggests it, and if so, it’s an earmark of a communist regime. There’s no such thing as a communist regime without shortages. Russia the breadbasket ran out of wheat. Cuba the sugar king ran out of sugar. Vietnam the rice bowl ran out of rice. China the Middle Kingdom ran out of everything. And now, Venezuela, with the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, is having trouble with its oil production, enough so that the energy-saving measure of natural gas substitution has been introduced to the domestic population, which…
Right under the news radar, the U.S. and Colombia are hashing out their last differences for the free trade pact that will create confidence and prosperity on an untold scale for already star-performing Colombia and will enrich and enliven the U.S. with the bright and brilliant side of Colombia from its private sector, not its ugly drug and crime side, which will be destroyed. It’s a great occasion for joy and it might even happen by the end of this week. There’s one nation watching this, one that already has a defacto free trade pact with the US due to…
Every dictator dreams of consolidating power into the ‘dictator for life’ designation and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is no different. Today he’s announced he’s set to change the constitution to his liking, which would mean he would no longer be limited to two terms, but to as many as he wants. As many unlimited terms, with unlimited power and nonexistent accountability as he likes. It’s Chavez’s dream. Given his way of running elections on a Chavez-wins platform, that means dictator for life. Miguel has a translation of newspaperman Teodoro Petkoff’s reaction here. Petkoff writes: Chavez is ???????studying??????? the possibility of…
Peruvian police have just rubbed out the “military” chief of the vile Shining Path guerrilla gang, which in the last year or so, has been making an unwelcome if sporadic recrudescence. It’s the most significant loss for the terrorist group in years. The dead thug, who ate his lead breakfast up in the coca country known as Tingo Maria, called himself “Compadre Clay” I suppose after the landmines he probably laid. He was known to police as Victor Aponte Sinalagua. Gone. The genocidal Shining Path is reponsible for 30,000 to 70,000 deaths beginning from 1980 through 1992, and probably many…
Miguel has parts II and III on the vast, tangled, family fortune of the Hugo Chavez family of Venezuela, none of it acquired honestly. So much for the “revolutionary” man of the people! He’s nothing but a two-(billion)-bit chorro. Read it here and here.
Via Real Clear Politics, Donald Rumsfeld has presented his thinking on the new kinds of challenges the U.S. faces as it fights the long hard war on terror and seeks to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world in spreading the idea of democracy. He lays out all the angles on how this is playing out in democratic revolution – through technology and the power of ideas here. This happens to coincide with what we’ve been seeing on the State Department’s Web site, debunking all the flying-saucer theories put out by leftists and assorted ignoramuses and tinfoil-hat wearers…
Dying to know the deal on Peru (hint: to watch a Marxist sink?) Want to see what kind of garbage Telesur is up to? (hint: maybe this explains why Uruguay asked to have its name taken off the masthead?) Want to see something cool out Mexico? (hint: the good guys are continuing to rise). Boz at Bloggings by Boz has the week’s poll numbers from around the hemisphere in this election year right here. Meanwhile, a note: One of the polls cited by Boz, on Venezuela, has been identified with documents as a government-controlled polling entity by Alek Boyd. Check…
In a beautiful statement, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on the world to stand up for Venezuela’s battered democracy. Rice appealed to the governments of Austria, Spain, Brazil and others to get up off their duffs and face facts and start saying something to defend the last tattered remains of Venezuela’s democracy. To date, they’ve not done a thing. But now the time for hiding, hunkering down, pretending there’s no problem, and turning one’s head is long, long gone. Rice specifically cited Hugo Chavez’s monstrous Sumate trial against Venezuela’s battered civil society democrats, something that is the biggest…
Eduardo at Barrio Flores has an item you’ve got to see to believe – some Bolivian minister is publicly saying he wants coca – that’s right, COCA – fed to schoolchildren, given its nutritious qualities. Ummm, tasty, delicious, crispy, chewy … coca leaf! If you thought it was white-trash heaven to fill the baby bottle with Coca-Cola, wait till you see these Bolivian green Cheerios! Cripes, this is what we call the slippery slope, first coca would be made legal, now it will be fed to children. Heck, it should be required chewing for everyone, given this guy’s mentality. Dogs,…
Miguel found something on VCrisis that I’d missed, a remarkable consultant report outlining the ownership structure of a string of state-owned companies controlled by the family of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez along with an analysis of the potential of these entities for money-laundering. The network of what the Chavez family controls, in food processing and other fields is striking and tangled. This explains a lot about why the Chavez government is so obsessed with food production, price controls, driving the private-sector to its knees and military control. It’s not just a bid to let Castro take over, although that’s part…
As hearings begin on Capitol Hill over Google’s kowtowing to the repressive Chinese regime, China itself is cracking apart INTERNALLY over its Google censorship. Party officials have taken on other party officials and they are all slashing at each other at the top levels of Chinese government. Christian Science Monitor has the story here. Pamela at Atlas Shrugs is doing some terrific, tremendous blogging about this Google controversy. Read her latest in full here. Rebecca McKinnon at RConversation has news from Capitol Hill and further background here and here. Or go here and just keep scrolling.
This just in from Goldman Sachs – I have not seen this in the media but this is a credible source. I suspect the U.S. company is Heinz: Land Expropriations Continue The National Land Institute continues to survey large rural estates with a view to repossessing land holdings that are considered idle or underutilized or whose private property titles cannot be certified. Since last year, a number of high-profile rural estates have been taken over by the State and given to small local cooperatives. In the latest development, the Land Institute claims that a large property owned by a US-based…