Blogging the democratic revolution
Gisele Bunchen in Esquire, 2004 Source: Thomas Hawk blog Beautiful Gisele Bundchen of Brazil has always been my favorite supermodel. Her regal good looks, her tall physique, and her unusual grownup features have always made her a natural for the camera and great photographs. Now she’s given me a reason to really like her – by telling Hugo Chavez he’s repulsive. In fact, she pretty much screwed up her stately nose, narrowed her feline eyes, and sweetly told the fat, leering Venezuelan dictator that he was the Swamp Thing. The Venezuelan dictator had been ogling her like a pervert, in…
What’s gotten into Brazil’s supposedly decent president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva? He flew up to Venezuela and openly endorsed Hugo Chavez for president, hugging and kissing him, and openly meddling in an election for a country that’s not his own. Oddly enough, Chavez did not do the same for him, which is to say meddle, as he openly and shamelessly did in Peru and Mexico. Meanwhile, the lovefest between the Brazilian and Venezuelan leaders comes a day after Peru’s leader, Alan Garcia, paid a visit to Lula and then openly declared verbal war on Chavez, calling him the scum…
Lula By A Light Year – Brazil’s Lula landslides to reelection Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has cruised on to an easy victory in Brazil’s runoff election. He’s got more votes than he did last time and the total ballots aren’t even fully counted. With 94% of the tally counted, the final score was 61-39, a very strong showing. See for yourself at Brazil’s official election site here. Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has some excellent analysis, along with some translations from the Brazilian local press about why this has happened. It…
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…
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…
Major mainstream television networks in France and Brazil have both taken aim at the odious regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. And I don’t mean something small. They’ve put out huge high-advertising long programs out, firing a unusual cannonade at the dictatorship. This has never happened before. These TV programs document Cuba’s long lines, miserable shortages as a way of life, bureaucracy, commissars, vaunted health care that is nothing but a failure, monstrous communist indoctrination that passes for “education,” secret police surveillance, jailing of dissidents, and complete lack of freedom. It’s realistic programming on Cuba that no one in either…
Democratic revolution is spreading across the world, in the greatest news and megatrend story of possibly the century. But for those of us who are already in democratic regimes, we sometimes wonder if there is much more we can do except watch and applaud. There is partisan political activism, of course, but that isn’t for everyone. And we can’t get involved in partisan politics, except maybe to cheer at the sidelines. So how does the free world participate in advancing democracy and beating back tyrants? Well, just look. Today, the West struck a couple of significant blows against tyranny —…
Babes of Beirut cheer Brazil Source: AP, Reuters, AFP, via Yahoo! News What’s up with the Babes of Beirut? They’re busy cheering Brazil, which beat Ghana today, moving on to the semifinals in the World Cup! One day it’s a democracy struggle, and as democracy wins, next up, it’s soccer. It’s the same babes, and either way, you know what that means – they’re on the cutting edge of revolution. Today, they’re out in full force cheering Brazil, and according to this excellent post by Ya Libnan, they’re the team of choice. As Nouri has noted in this excellent post…
Oh, to hear how some Americans talk! – the Chinese are a menace, and Latin America is full of different kinds of Mexicans all of whom want something from us before they go communist, same as the Chinese. In fact, probably joining the Chinese! That’s how the world looks to some on the right who don’t look too closely. I’ve seen it on bulletin boards and heard it on talk radio shows and listened to it from friends. It’s all scarily wrong. And fortunately, not the foreign policy of the U.S. Most in that establishment see far more closely what…
This past week, the biggest and most economically critical city of all South America was beseiged by drug thugs from Brazil’s abysmal favelas. The ghetto barbarians, acting on orders from their leader, who’s somehow has a cellphone in jail, killed over 200 people, mostly cops. Imagine if New York City lost 200 cops in a week of drug violence? More ominous still, the violence wasn’t stopped by the cops or troops or anyone restoring order. It was stopped because the authorities made a deal with the thug called “Marcola” who had just got done killing 200 people, burning 80 buses…
The Financial Times describes the gang riots that have taken Sao Paolo by storm: Life in S????o Paulo returned to something like normal by the middle of this week after prison riots and attacks on police and property orchestrated by organised crime left 132 people dead and 53 injured between Friday night and Tuesday morning. But many wondered what kind of normality it was. The handling of events by authorities, and especially the way they were brought to an end, suggested a lack of control amounting to a crisis of governability. Although for the families of the victims the impact…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is nothing more than a brutal leftist thug with aspirations of being the next Simon Bolivar, the next Fidel Castro. He seeks to unite all the nations of Latin America under his wing, so that together, they may challenge the United States. He would lure them into his axis with the promise of U.S.-financed cheap oil, yet punish and intimidate any who don’t go along with his direction by cutting off that same oil. He’s telling all nations that it’s either him or the U.S., and the U.S. has nothing to offer them. Every last nation…
President Lula da Silva of Brazil is not stupid. After a softie performance in the first week after Bolivia “nationalized” Brazil’s $1.6 billion in investments there, downplaying any opposition against the taking of it, or any animosity against Bolivian President Evo Morales, he unexpectedly came out and laid the blame for this mess right where it belonged: at Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Lula is a gentle man, but in this case he came on uncharacteristically strong: He demanded that Chavez stop meddling in the Southern Cone, and warned the Venezuelan dictator that there would be consequences. Lula knew very well…
This week, Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas industry. He didn’t do it as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez did, by a hundred kisses of law, order, and win-win “people’s” baloney, but in the old 1960S style: with guns and goons. Like a pirate, he confiscated the assets of others and called them his own. Then he demanded that the rest of the world like it. This thug creates no value, produces no product. All he does is take from others. Brazil, Argentina, Spain and indirectly, Chile, were most affected. In that, he struck out at his best potential allies in order…
With the nationalization of Bolivia’s energy resources, the two biggest victims in this are socialist Brazil and socialist Spain. Franco, I am still waiting for you to give us word from Spain on this Bolivian travesty, so in the meantime, consider Brazil: Evo Morales is determined to play approximately the same tormenting role to Brazil that Hugo Chavez plays to the U.S. – that of underdeveloped big energy supplier that revels in politicizing the energy supply and seeking very high prices. Bolivia is actually better positioned than Venezuela for that nuisance role, because natural gas, which Bolivia exports to Brazil,…
As oil prices hit $75 a barrel, the U.S. is right now caught up in an idiotic debate over supposed price-gouging at the pump. Congress wants to investigate oil companies over it. What they should be doing is asking why the U.S. is dependent for its oil on anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. We are dependent on him, he knows it, and he abuses us for it. It’s him who, along with his pals the ayatollahs, is deliberately trying to drive oil prices up to $100 a barrel, not the oil companies. That’s not all. Chavez harasses U.S. oil companies…
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.
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 ‘Swimming Against The Red Tide’ written by Luis Alfonso Assumpcao, in Porto Alegre (!), Brazil, hits home runs!!!! I guess he saw the leftist hippies up close and wanted to say something. His blogroll links to sterling free-market other blogs we are great fans of.…
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, a disturbing development for an entire continent. He carefully explains the conditions that led to the huge cascading corruption scandal in Brazil and why it’s so bad. He also cites the controversial Brazilian writer, Olavo de Carvalho, as a source. I’m so thrilled he’s writing…
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 Brazilian writer about the internal problems that are debilitating the Brazilian government, hampering its capacity for leadership. It’s well worth reading here.
A political corruption scandal over slush funds to supporters is deepening in Brazil, and could extend to the highest reaches of government. It’s a shame, because President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is a true revolutionary leader who means to do what’s best for Brazil. Left-leaning but fiscally responsible, he’s no Hugo Chavez. But Randy at Beautiful Horizons lists a growing litany of scandals and their knock-on effects. Could this topple the Lula government? It’s not known yet. Randy writes: …it certainly seems to me that none of this is good for Lula. While it would be catastrophic for it…