Blogging the democratic revolution
Now this is something you have to see! Venezuela’s Francisco Toro has challenged Venezuela’s Gustavo Coronel to an ‘Opinion duel’ on a special blog they set up for just that purpose. They are arguing about the nature of the ‘ni-ni’‘s, those people in Venezuela who have not made up their minds about whether they support…
Breaking news – and likely trouble. An electoral board has ruled that the Dec. 4 presidential election will not go through, due to a redistricting dispute. Now, the possibility of roadblocks and using food as a weapon looms. The current caretaker president – who’s in office only because the last two presidents were thrown out…
The bloggers have come up with a real big one on voter fraud in Venezuela. Miguel explains it out very well here. Venezuelan congressional elections are being held on Dec. 4 and a court has ruled in favor of stacking the vote today. See my post here. But that’s not the only problem. Now Javier…
On Academic Elephant’s superb blog, I found a small post that resonated with me: The tendency of the mainstream media to belittle U.S. officials when they visit small countries. There are all kinds of valid reasons to criticize them, and from many angles. But to savage Donald Rumsfeld because he paid a visit to distant…
Charles Krauthammer really gives it to Brent Scowcroft today – as the world’s foremost anti-revolutionary. Scowcroft has spent his entire life obstructing democratic revolution. If you believe in democratic revolution, you will never look at that man the same way again. He pretends to be oh so safe and sane. But he’s set democracy back…
In a significant defeat for Venezuela’s democracy, a new voting system installed by the Chavista government, called ‘los morochas’, which disproportionately benefits Chavista incumbents, was affirmed by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, an appointed body stacked with Chavista loyalists. It is expected to raise Hugo Chavez’s representation in the Congress – where he already has a majority…
…on poverty figures. It’s one of the most disgusting things he’s ever done. Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, in one of his best columns, uncovered what bloggers have been saying all along: poverty has risen, not fallen, in Hugo Chavez’s ’21st-century-socialist’ Venezuela, supposedly a champion of the poor. They of course meant: creating more…
Boz has an excellent roundup of all the polls being taken around the hemisphere, with at least one for each country. The polls are invaluable tools for sensing which way the winds of change are blowing in this coming fateful election year in the Americas. He also has a link to a very valuable poll…
Venezuela’s main newspaper, El Universal, in a true blog style, is now putting out a weekly roundup of all the Zimbabwe-style land confiscations engulfing Venezuela under the far-left Chavez regime. The list of all the farmers who have had their ranches taken away ‘in the name of the people’ is long and horrible, given the…
As we noted here, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has offered to take questions from the public through the BBC. It’s about what you’d imagine, with readers asking some fairly tough questions, along with plenty of softballs, and Chavez replying glibly and smoothly. If you ask me, it looked coached, due to the suaveness of Chavez’s…
Stefania in Sardinia reminds us to think of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who is marking her tenth year of house arrest under the thugs who run Burma. Suu Kyi is the rightful leader of Burma. She also is a brave woman who has stood up to the gross tinpot military thugs in her struggle…
The great Rosa Parks died today, a leader in the civil rights struggle that completely changed the U.S. for the better, and radiated its message of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness throughout the world. In no small part did it inspire the Philippine People Power Revolution of 1986, the Czech Velvet Revolution of…
Given that politicians tend to hone to their campaign financiers’ agendas, it’s pretty creepy to see that Evo Morales has gotten a new Web site – financed and hosted, not from his home country, as any self-respecting candidate for president would want, but brazenly from MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA. Morales, you will recall, is running for president…
Right on the heels of the Bolivian factory workers’ history-making march to demand a free trade pact at the U.S. embassy gates, one of Hugo Chavez’s minions has come out to condemn free trade with all of the Americas (ALCA), and said MercoSur (a smaller non-U.S. trade bloc dominated by Brazil and Argentina) is the…
As the U.S. attempts to spread democratic revolution around the world through the sharing of our hope, something insect-like is eating away at our national fabric and forcing growing numbers of us to wonder if the emporer might eventually not have clothes. It’s our country’s repeated failure to adhere to international agreements. I’m not talking…
Thousands of Bolivian workers marched on the U.S. embassy yesterday to demand … A FREE TRADE PACT WITH THE U.S. Now who knew that? For god sakes give them their free trade pact! We’ll all benefit if we can buy Bolivian goods! I lift my first cup of Trader Joe’s Bolivian Blend coffee to toast…
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,…
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…
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.