Blogging the democratic revolution
Aman Imani, an Iranian writing for The American Thinker, has an amazingly interesting article about just what Iran’s freedom fighters are facing as they stand down the mullahs – a parasitic class that feeds off of their society and demands to be king or kingmakers. It’s full of good local details and enlightens us about…
The mighty Panama Canal route links trade between 2 huge oceans Source: The Financial Times Tiny little Panama, a jungly nation with a population only as big as Singapore’s, is about to do something spectacularly great for the entire world on Sunday. This itty bitty state has a masterplan to shower friendship and prosperity to…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is losing his UN Security Council bid badly. Now Chile has come out and said it won’t vote for him, but will abstain through the first round. Socialist Chile was one Chavez insisted he had in the bag. Well, he no longer does. The UN goes to the vote tomorrow and…
An Andean woman casts a ballot outside Quito today Source: Associated Press, via Houston Chronicle Ecuador’s beautiful women wait in line to vote Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News I am in shock. I was so depressed about the electoral prospects of Ecuador, where a Chavista prettyboy, Rafael Correa, was leading all polls, that I had…
Is there any greater freedom than to be a bozo? That’s the way it seems with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain. He really, really, really hates the U.S. He hates it with a loathing that would challenge Hugo Chavez. He kicked the U.S. out of the Columbus Day parade in Spain…
Ecuador goes to the polls this weekend and Nicaragua and Brazil are white-hot races. Boz has all the latest polls – including updates on Bolivia and Peru – plus links to many good analyses, it’s content-filled on key issues and one of his best. Well worth reading here. Not sure what he’s talking about with…
Protesting Hugo Chavez in Washington on Friday Source: Gustavo Coronel, at Venezuela Today Today, hundreds of angry Brazilians, angry Bolivians, angry Chileans, angry Cubans, angry Ecuadoreans, angry Mexicans, angry Nicaraguans, angry Peruvians, angry Salvadorans, angry Colombians, angry Argentines and others gathered at the Organization of American States to protest the international political meddling of Venezuelan…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls it just spreadin’ revolution. The rest of the hemisphere has a plainer word for what he’s up to: Meddling. And ohhh, he’s been out meddling! Nobody in the history of the Americas, including the U.S., has been ever accused of meddling so often from so many places as he has….
Now this is gross! Feel the love! Smell the sulphur! UPDATE: Miguel has some barf-alert Chavista poetry to complement some additional repulsive Chavista images here and here UPDATE: Daniel has some excellent thinking analysis of the barf-alert Chavista ‘love’ campaign and a great roundup of the other blogs that are disgussing this in this must-read…
An Avalancha. You don’t even need to speak Spanish to know what it means. Source: The Devil’s Excrement, which has tons more, keep scrolling. Too busy to write anything but the Avalancha presidential election rally in Venezuela over the weekend has yielded some unbelievable photos. Manuel Rosales of Venezuela is mounting a ferocious challenge to…
Courtesy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Sandalistas can now select five-star accomodations if they find themselves tiring of all the gunfire, fireworks and 6:00 a.m. blasted regatton that so livens up shantytown life. After all, there’s something for everyone in the world of Chavistadom! This new news item, which I have only a fragment of…
At VCrisis, Alek Boyd has firsthand info about how Hugo Chavez’s shiny new Russian weapons purchases are being used – to massacre Venezuelan and Brazilian peasants from helicopters in the deep jungle. There was a great big massacre of miners in the Amazon rainforest this week and Boyd is on the scene with tons of…
Geraldo Alckmin drove Brazil’s popular incumbent President Lula into a runoff Oct. 29 with a powerful showing in Sunday’s election. The guy rocks. Source: AP, via BBC photo gallery A massive political earthquake is shaking Brazil right now and practically no one in the mainstream media (BBC a notable exception!) is really covering it. This…
Panic has set in at Venezuela’s state oil company with the spectacular exit of 7-Eleven from the Citgo gasoline-station label. The PR damage is so bad that the entire brand may be a total loss. Indy gas station after indy gas station are yanking ties to the Venezuelan dictator-controlled oil company. This follows 7-Eleven’s verbally…
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his challenger, Geraldo Alckmin Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Singapore Today is election day in Brazil, and for 126 million Brazilians, time to decide who their next president and congressional representatives will be. Via the Washington Post, AP has a good primer on the nuts and bolts of how Brazil’s…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis writes that he’s still shaken after being attacked by a horde of 80 Chavista thugs at a campaign rally in the obscure town of Valera in the high Andean mountain state of Trujillo, over in Venezuela’s mostly rightwing west. Trujillo’s a tiny state, with a population only at 608,000, and sort…
Europe. Treasure box of civilization that every other civilization on earth, grand and small, old and new, owns a few pearls and diamonds from. Reason, individualism, liberty, fairness and linear progress from the Judeo-Christian European heritage have affected human aspirations all over the earth – everything from Pakistani kids longing for Nikes and Iranian women…
Defying the laws of economics, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez started state-run groceries for poor people to buy food at cut-rate prices. He never imagined that the little darlings he claims to champion over Big Bad Corporations might take the cheap food, buy a ton of it, and then turn around and sell it at higher…
Alek Boyd has more continuing coverage of the Manuel Rosales presidential campaign that is challenging the presidency of Hugo Chavez. Alek reports that Rosales is attracting huge, growing crowds out in the Venezuelan burgs and boondocks. He has some choice quotes from locals and some descriptive writing on what it all looks and feels like….
The world is loaded with well-wishers who have visited communist Cuba as tourists, and marvelled at beauty of the island, the sultry enticing laid-back culture of the people, the music, the ease of life, the apparent lack of materialism, the supposed universal health care, and other illusions. Over at Killcastro, a fine blog by Cuban…
What is the impact of the world democracy revolution? In Arab states, there’s been a significant change toward democratic revolution in the past two years, according to this absolutely fascinating report from a writer who visited Dubai and talked to James Zogby, a respected pollster of the Arab world. He found that young Arabs, both…
Hot on the heels of the surprise power-packed U.S. consumer boycott of Venezuelan oil, a huge refinery explosion of Venezuelan oil occurred this morning in Havana, Cuba, where considerable Venezuelan oil is being refined. Gigantic. Val has a photo of the inferno, the latest oil blow to Hugo Chavez. The Real Cuba has more photos…
Cripes, what’s got into these guys? I used to live in Singapore and I used to write for the Far Eastern Economic Review, mostly slapping around China’s oppression in those palmy expat days. Today, the once-ominiscent FEER, now a news-turned-essay magazine, and down on its heels due to the Internet and global forces, is nevertheless…
There is something majestic about the power of the markets. No dictator, anywhere can control them. They do what they do, based on thousands of decisions by thousands of individuals, acting on a collective wisdom. No central planning can match this people’s verdict in reflecting the here and now, or the future. That’s a people-power…
Venezuela tonight held its first presidential debate. But it wasn’t quite like any other debate I’ve ever heard of. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez refused to participate of course, due to a congenital inability to share the television screen with any other human being. The Caracas megalomaniac just can’t make himself do it. But that was…