Blogging the democratic revolution
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 Primero (he has a link) are trying to cater to them. With an election approaching on Dec. 4, this trend will be well worth watching. Read it here.
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 a historic context – all through this ages, exile on a vast scale is relatively rare – but under communism it’s a perfectly accepted reality. Of 13 million Cubans worldwide, 2 million are in exile. And this, under conditions of extreme totalitarian control. If emigration…
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 about Colombia is about drugs. It happened to me during a Spanish presentation I was giving. I discussed the strong Colombian banking system and was horrified when the first question from the audience was ‘is it full of drug money?’ And these people weren’t only…
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 Rome. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had assured earlier that these kinds of obscenities at the UN – which do hurt its credibility – will stop. Well, they are not stopping. They are going on at full blast. Investor’s Business Daily has an excellent news…
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 repulsive that news is. Saddam the human shredder was into writing romance novels, this freak was into sentimental poetry. Somehow, it makes the monsters even creepier. What’s disgusting is that there are still certain kinds of people on the international left who defend him or…
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 week, albeit under greater conditions of state control. For Castro and Chavez, the idea is get online with the rest of us and appear hip or perhaps human, via the easily controlled medium of the Internet. It’s not like live TV where a tyrant could…
…in Hungary, where the memories of bleak, gray communism and the tanks and massacres of 1956 are not entirely forgotten. I wrote up the whole unexpected turn of events, with the rightful blog links on Babalu here.
In less time than it takes for a new baby to reach U.S. voting age, the nation of Estonia has transformed itself from a cold, gray, stagnant outpost of the Soviet Empire to one of the world’s most impressive dynamic democracies. Its banks are pristine, its one of the most wired countries in the world, it is famous for its absence of corruption, as well as its flat tax, its sound stable money, its property rights, its free trade (unilaterally done with no miserable CAFTA battle, as Alvaro Vargas Llosa noted.) The only shortage out there for Estonia is enough…
One of Britain’s two greatest prime ministers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest people who has ever lived, Lady Thatcher, is celebrating her 80th birthday today. The Reuters picture show here shows her in frail health, but looking absolutely beautiful. Lady Thatcher is one of history’s most authentic revolutionaries. She not only put the ‘Great’ back into Britain, she spread freedom all through the entire world. She was a leading revolutionary in the demise of the Soviet empire, making freedom possible for hundreds of millions of people. She ended Argentina’s dirty war, toppling its dictatorship, bringing freedom…
Gustavo Coronel has a haunting essay about the terror that stalks the Venezuelan countryside, with cattle-rustlers, marauders, professional killers, paramilitaries, mercenaries, narcoterrorists and Chavista death squads. No one is safe at night – or even at day. Payoffs to different kinds of criminals to prevent them from murdering and pillaging is a way of life now. People live on a razor’s edge. That is the climate of fear that rural Venezuelans must suffer as the Chavez dictatorship takes them ever further toward oblivion. Not one word about this from the mainstream media! But I have heard these stories from my…
Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has an excellent weekly news roundup of events in Venezuela, complete with a variety of media links showing through little turning points Venezuela’s slide downward into totalitarianism. Read it here.
As we have noted in previous roundups, Evo Morales is not the worst Marxist lunatic in the Bolivian political line-up. That honor may belong to Felipe Quispe. He is a far-leftist and indigenous-“rights” romantic who openly advocates violence and who has no chance of winning the December presidential election. So, with diminishing prospects, he says he will take up arms if he loses. Boli-Nica believes that Quispe may be acting in collusion with Evo Morales. If Quispe can make himself look like people’s worst nightmare – a crazed leftist intent on confiscating everything they own, he will indirectly make the…
Whatever you do, go to THIS democratic festival celebrating of the dawn of freedom and not this Chavista one representing the road to Castrodom. IndyMedia has its announcement up on the Chavista Challenge in Chicago, with all the details about the players – CITGO cheap gas, Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover…all the Huey-Long-style pork-barrel tools that are elements of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s effort to buy a revolution of his own right here in the U.S. It’s the first time ever that a foreign leader has attempted to use the urban poor in another country to advance his political aims. Additional…
Right in the middle of fermenting Panamanian unrest over pension reform, coupled with pot-stirring by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, our Daniel of Yaracuy, Venezuela, found himself in the middle of Panama on a work visit. From shopkeepers, he learned of corrupt Chavista officials blowing in to Panama for shopping trips and money-laundering ventures, sure in the belief that they will not be noticed. One of them dropped $8,000 on a wristwatch. They’re wrong of course, the Panamanians see what’s going on and tell everything. Read the whole riveting account of Daniel in Panama’s storm here.
Ever since Gail Collins wrote her infamous editorial blasting Venezuela’s battered opposition for crying fraud in the 2004 recall referendum, I have had a change of opinion, to say the least, about the New York Times. I didn’t have it before – for a rightwinger, I have a remarkably high tolerance for left bias in the media. It’s ok, I can read between lines. But ever since Venezuela, I draw the line at the NYT as a reliable news source. I consider it no such thing. But big deal, it’s not news that another libertarian dislikes the NYT. What’s really…
This really happened yesterday. Francisco Toro writes: Twenty guys with BIG GUNS storm into your apartment one night. They say they’re from the Prosecutor General’s Office. They’re looking for materials relating to … Tulio Alvarez’s “terrorist activities.” …. They leave, a bit embarrassed. The next day, the prosecutors’ office says it has no idea who the 20 guys were. Read the whole thing here.
An unusual piece of news – Barbados wants nothing – NOTHING – to do with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s pork-barrel spending on cheap oil for his small Caribbean neighors. Tiny but responsible Barbados knows that nothing comes ‘free’ and has no intention of giving away its sovereignty for a barrel of Chavez’s oil. This represents a significant David standing up to the region’s Goliath. There will likely be retribution but Barbados is uncowed. Read it here, here, and here.
Given its terrible wars and fearsome rebel groups, you might not think anything good could come out of Liberia. And, you would be wrong. Liberia has held its first successful free and fair elections this week. Long live the democratic revolution! Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has a full roundup and video well worth seeing here.
Eduardo Avila at Barrio Flores has a Bolivian blog news roundup for the week at Global Voices with a good variety of posts. Read it here.
The weakest link in the CAFTA system has, bigtime, ratified CAFTA! This is a body blow to Daniel Ortega and all his Marxist thugs! They fought with all their strength and dirty tricks to oppose this. This ratification is tremendous news. Democracy has won big in battered Nicaragua against all odds. Daniel Ortega has been handed yet another People’s Revolution of defeat. Victorious Nicaragua will get used to being a rich country now, faithful in the power of free markets to make people free. iVIVA NICARAGUA! UPDATE: Oooh, this was a hard blow – the screaming and yelling from the…
Amid a huge hullabaloo first reported by blogger Daniel Duquenal here and here, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered to finance a Brazilian samba school to dance in his honor. But being Hugo Chavez, he suddenly … didn’t come up with the pledge money. This, despite, the Brazilian school’s efforts to accomodate him, to print up programs, and incur all sorts of expenses to make that happen. Chavez stiffed them, buying lots of ‘goodwill’ for his fake revolution as word of that gets out. He’s not gonna be popular among the samberos. Gustavo Coronel tells the whole exclusive story here.