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 just how tough the task is of reforming Iran. It’s well worth reading here.
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 huge swathes of the world, north and south and east and west, doing more for the cause of peace and unity than just about any other nation on earth. The world is going to be different after Sunday. On Sunday, Panama’s voters among its 4…
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 will have the results around 12:00 p.m. Eastern, so this contest for the fate of the free world’s democracies versus the world’s worst tyrannies won’t be long. Venezuela Today is up again and has the whole roundup here. UPDATE: As the vote goes on, Fox…
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 trouble blogging. The guy was total Chavista and not only that, he was gross in a way only Ecuadorean politicians can be. You know, like El Loco. He actually went walking around taking his belt off, and cracking it against anything he could find, saying…
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 a few years ago and invited in Cuba instead. Columbus Day – which in Spain is National Day – is a big deal there. Then in another incident, Zapatero pointedly refused to stand for the passage of the U.S. flag at a parade. “Why should…
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 his first Nicaragua item, though!!!
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 dictator Hugo Chavez against their countries. Chavez seems to think he has a sayso in the affairs of every single country in the region. Turnout for the short notice rally was very good. Here is the original flyer and I’m gonna get photos… El Universal…
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. In so short a period of time! Just look at today’s morning edition of El Universal, the main newspaper in Caracas, which has a string of meddlings described. Baduel: Military bases are for Bolivian troops Salvadorian Gov’t to investigate Venezuela’s meddling into internal affairs Ch????vez…
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 post here.
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 brutal leftist dictator Hugo Chavez in the December elections and this past weekend, hundreds of thousands of battered Venezuelans rallied in a dramatic show of force. They covered Caracas. I’ve never seen so many people in once place at once! These honorable democratic revolutionaries are…
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 from EFE, only goes to show that Chavez is not even trying to pretend anymore that’s he’s down there with the people. He and his sandalista pals on tour from Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and Paris and London have gone upscale. They’re…
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 photos and interviews with locals. These are Hugo Chavez’s death squads up close. Death squads from the air, with the willing collaboration of Vladimir Putin. Read the whole thing here.
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 ought to be a much bigger story than it is being made out to be. I am sort of amazed at the lack of attention. The pillar of the responsible left, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, faces a growing prospect of being toppled as momentum…
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 spectacular pullout, a U.S. consumer boycott, as well as Citgo’s own of pulling of the Citgo label from about 1800 stations that the Venezuelan energy company could no longer supply due to crumbling productive capacity. Which is a shame, because it was a good company…
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 elections work in this post here. According to Arthur Ituassu, of Brazzil magazine: They will be choosing their president and vice-president, twenty-seven governors, senators and state assemblies, as well as 513 federal deputies. What should be a party for one of the biggest democracies in…
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 of Juan Valdez territory, where some people wear ponchos and ride llamas and donkeys. Its biggest city, Valera, looks like this: Valera, in the Andean state of Trujillo, Venezuela Source: Municipal Government of Valera But Alek said thousands of Valera citizens attended a Manuel Rosales…
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 demanding their human rights, to India demanding its place at the UN Security Council. All of these are derived from the heritage of reason which began in Europe. But the LAST people who seem to be aware of this are Europeans themselves. They don’t even…
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 prices on the street, making a tidy profit. Never occurred to him that capitalism could be practiced by poor people, too. So over in Venezuela, market economics have taken rein from Chavez’s much-touted cheap food, whether Chavez likes it or not, as poor Chiclet-sellers, known…
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. See his latest here.
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 exiles who have actual experience of Cuban life beyond the tourist spots at Varadero and central Havana, and who currently have some of the deepest contacts and connections inside the real Cuba, they printed a smuggled-out letter from a Cuban inside Cuba, that tells the…
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 men and women, in their 30s and 40s, are beginning to lose interest in a Pan-Arab identity, a dead end that has brought nothing but anguish and poverty since the post-colonial tinpot-dictator era of the 1960s. Instead, they are starting to see themselves as citizens…
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 and details. Along with this, this, this, and this, just this past week, Venezuelan oil production under a communist regime is profoundly strained – beset with accidents, safety violations, waste and destruction. Even if oil prices rise as a result of all this, if Hugo…
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 back on the Singapore sheet list. In fact, this time the Singaporean government has downright banned it. And for SUCH a Singapore reason! They said the FEER failed to provide the name of someone they could serve papers to, in the (inevitable) event they sued…
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 Hugo Chavez repeatedly disparages and discounts even as he claims to represent the aspirations of the people. Today, it wasn’t George Bush who spoke but the People of the United States who issued a majestic market verdict on him. That was evident in action taken…
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 no problem for Venezuela’s enterprising private sector. Globovision took his long windy speech off state TV, ran half the screen with the dictator’s bloviating, and then had Venezuelan opposition candidate Manuel Rosales reply to each and every Chavez lie and idiocy. Can you imagine? They…