Blogging the democratic revolution
Via WILLisms, and Stefania, I just spotted this week’s Carnival of Revolutions, very nicely done this week by Ken McCracken, and full of good stuff. Read it here.
This is just what we were looking for – of all people, my boss at work discovered it and sent it to me. Just what we wanted to see, a free-market Brazilian blog written by a smart Brazilian that tells us the deal about what’s going on in Brazil. I’m really excited! The blog, called…
Source: Babalu The photographs will break your heart. Ten people from Cuba, where Hurricane Dennis hit this year, riding the worst piece of rusted junk you can see, inventively powered by a tractor motor and some strange orange sail, rode through HURRICANE RITA and its storm-tossed seas for a week in the Florida Strait determined…
Alvaro Ruiz-Navajas has started a terrific new blog on Bolivia, with his first post loaded with intelligent insights. I look forward to seeing his thoughts as they come, going into the Bolivian election in December. Go see the excellent new blog here.
The magnificent writer and thinker, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, has a truly awesome, knock-your-sock-off essay today on the demise of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, why it’s important, and why we should care. Brazil’s soft left revolution that so many have staked their hopes on has collapsed, leaving the hard Chavista left in place,…
Not through guerrillas this time but through pork-barrel-spending. Along with Hugo Chavez’s oil billions, Evo Morales has taken the lead in the Bolivian polls. Castro knows exactly why he’s doing this. Do we? Read the whole thing here or here. It’s on Real Clear Politics here.
Thousands of Congo’s displaced exiles are returning to their homeland in extreme hardship solely for the privilege of voting. Don’t anyone ever tell me they had the option to vote here in the states and just didn’t do it. Look at what these brave revolutionaries in Congo are doing. The news item is here and…
Indonesia is at the boiling point with a whole string of frightening developments. Oil prices are going through the moon and the indonesian government, which subsidizes oil, is being crushed by those higher prices. That’s sent the miserable-anyway currency, the Indonesian rupiah, to its lowest levels in four years as capital flight takes off. Meanwhile,…
They’re so darn dumb. How does anyone get that dumb? Rule Number One: You DO NOT do drugs in Asia. Rule Number Two: You DO NOT transport drugs in Asia. Rule Number Three: You DO NOT associate with anyone who does drugs in Asia. Rule Number Four: You read the signs at airports, the ones…
Why is he doing this to us? He’s appointing incompetent cronies left and right. Who am I talking about? Not some corrupt Chicago machine pol or some New Orleans lowlife political vermin, but George Bush himself! Apparently, he never learned ANYTHNG from Katrina! Do we really need a Julie Myers, age 36, experienced at writing…
Alexandra Beech, who is Venezuelan, has written a compelling personal story of her observed differences between Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe – and she notices that the differences between the two men are strong. The essay, which amusingly enough has the same title as mine here, couldn’t be more different in…
Brazil’s failure as a regional leader in the face of growing communist aggression from the likes of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is a major concern, I argue, in this American Thinker essay here. UPDATE: It’s on Real Clear Politics this morning here. VCrisis has an in-depth analysis from a famous…
Daniel has a good thorough roundup of the ongoing electoral mess in Venezuela, which faces congressional elections on Dec. 4. This will be one hell of a fateful day for this country’s ‘democracy.’ Chavez is likely to totally consolidate power and end elections forever more in Venezuela after this. There’s the interesting problem of his…
Miguel Octavio writes a post about the unbelievable hassle of getting a passport out of Venezuela. He studiously describes the incredible shenanigans citizens must go through (something the FARC, which gets its Venezuelan passports handed to them never worries about) including high bribery rates, unfathomable delays, government blacklists, and now a particularly slimey government official…
Marvelous Miguel Centellas of Ciao! blog had just what I was looking for, commentary on the news here showing that Marxist Evo Morales has taken the lead in the presidential polls. Miguel cautions us not to despair, Bolivian voters tend to break away from the frontrunner at the last minute so in this regard, maybe…
The lumbering, overbearing, porkbarreling, intrusive U.S. Federal Government is getting waaaaay too full of itself and overconfident, too. It’s now gotten into its fat head the idea of suing the Club for Growth, one of our favorite must-read blogs at PubliusPundit. It’s doing so on an accusation of soft-money financing. But the fact is, Club…
NewsHounds is a leftwing site but I am going to agree with them – strongly – that Fox News gave a boorish interview with President Alvaro Uribe and this marvelous – truly marvelous – president of Colombia responded with stunning class, dignity and intelligence. Newshounds called it very right this time. You have to read…
A source in Colombia has emailed me to say rumors are flying that Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, the Marxist FARC guerrilla chief of chiefs, has been shot dead – UPDATE from my source: died in bed. If it’s true he’s been shot or captured, it has the significance of the U.S. taking out Zarkawi or Bin…
Harry Hutton has a whole gallery of these Colombian FARC-slaying babes of politics. These women are anti-narcotics cops in the belly of the world’s worst narcotics beast, women who are winning Colombia’s war on terror without any need for U.S. troops. And, yes, they do have looks. For FARC’s ugly phony-revolution guerrillas, these real revolutionary…
UPDATED: While President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia was ringing the opening bell of the New York stock exchange today, his ministers back home were announcing that interest rates would be slashed 50 basis points and nearly a billion more dollars in debt was being repaid. Meanwhile, Colombia’s trade surplus was expanding, tourism was up 19.5%,…
The signatures that led to a recall referendum in Venezuela last year have since become Hugo Chavez’s blacklist against his political enemies. Aleksander Boyd has a stunning collection of screenshots showing how Venezuela’s increasingly freedomless regime has used the latest technology to perpetrate low-tech vengeance. It’s a don’t miss because there’s something mind-changing about the…
That’s what Alexandra Beech argues is the real meaning of Secuestro Express, a scary new movie about ‘express kidnappings’ in Venezuela that is making waves in Hollywood. Read her fascinating analysis here.
Driving Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is his animosity directed at the U.S. He loathes the U.S. not only because it’s what he really feels (he is said to stiffen in the presence of U.S. citizens) but almost as importantly, because it is politically useful. In Chavez’s logic, if all the blame about the poverty and…
One of the most difficult things for outsiders to understand about Venezuela is the passion with which both sides argue about the April 2002 political mess that shook Venezuela. Chavez calls it a coup attempt. Opponents say it was pre-planned violence. Tiny details are bickered over and held up as proof. To an outsider, it’s…
Qando.net blog has a point-by-point comparison of the land confiscations going on simultaneously in both Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Other than his hint that Hugo Chavez, unlike Robert Mugabe, is actually a reasonable man who doesn’t quite realize what he is doing, it is a very valuable list of comparisons whose facts speak for themselves. Read…