Blogging the democratic revolution
Daniel in Yaracuy has another elegantly done post comparing and contrasting two court verdicts in two highly politicized cases, one for the opposition, and one for the ruling party. As may be imagined in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the reality shows that Chavistas get about three times as much ‘justice’ as Venezuela’s battered opposition. I’ll add…
Val Prieto at Babalu has found the most incredible Italian film quietly describing the always constant move toward democratic revolution. Just to see it is light and edifying – its charm and creativity and emotion capture the spirit perfectly. See the whole marvelous thing here.
The Primero Justice party has pulled out of the coming Venezuelan election Sunday, leaving just Hugo Chavez’s MVR party all by its lonesome to run for Congress. This news comes from Marta Colomina, a well-known journalist in Venezuela. This pullout represents the full unification of the Venezuelan opposition, something never seen in Venezuelan history. They…
Aleksander Boyd has posted a long and extensive report on the state of democracy in Venezuela from its leading democracy advocate, Sumate. The report shows in precise terms the parlous state of Venezuelan democracy and the news is not good. But it is a very important and historic report and Alek read all of it…
Now this is something you have to see! Venezuela’s Francisco Toro has challenged Venezuela’s Gustavo Coronel to an ‘Opinion duel’ on a special blog they set up for just that purpose. They are arguing about the nature of the ‘ni-ni’‘s, those people in Venezuela who have not made up their minds about whether they support…
The great Rosa Parks died today, a leader in the civil rights struggle that completely changed the U.S. for the better, and radiated its message of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness throughout the world. In no small part did it inspire the Philippine People Power Revolution of 1986, the Czech Velvet Revolution of…
As the U.S. attempts to spread democratic revolution around the world through the sharing of our hope, something insect-like is eating away at our national fabric and forcing growing numbers of us to wonder if the emporer might eventually not have clothes. It’s our country’s repeated failure to adhere to international agreements. I’m not talking…
Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis has an great post about how he, as a citizen journalist, confronted power directly in the most amazing way I’ve ever seen anyone in the blogosphere do. It’s a great lesson in creativity for any democratic revolutionary anywhere in the world. From his exile in London, he learned of a London…
Matt Margolis at Blogs for Bush was invited to Congress to talk to and query congresspeople about their stances on issues. It’s a great new experiment in participatory democracy and they are inviting any of us to send them questions to ask the congresspeople. (They probably aren’t the only ones invited, so if you know…
The U.S. needs to get its act together on certain things. Like this, that Glenn Reynolds has noticed here.
Tuesday’s essay on property rights by the great Carlos Alberto Montaner, has awesome intellectual firepower. He is the best writer I know of anywhere in the world, and this is his most luminous essay. Montaner writes about how the destruction of property rights, as is happening in Venezuela, makes democratic revolution nearly impossible. He carefully…
One of the biggest triggers to revolution in any country is the concept of ‘rent-seeking.’ It’s a concept that’s largely foreign to us Americans, but perfectly understood by many people in other cultures. It’s the concept of someone exacting unfair payments over others because of some fundamental and resented privilege. If you were in the…
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…
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…
Singapore arrested two bloggers for making offensive-to-Islam remarks on their blogs, with charges of contributing to religious hatred. The de-facto state-controlled Singapore tabloid, The Electric New Paper, breathily noted that this pair also even was ‘said to contain vulgarities.’ In Singapore they have laws against that kind of thing. I am an ex-Singapore resident who…
Following up on Glenn’s post, I’ve just donated to and would recommend donating to the Union for Reform Judaism’s Disaster Relief Fund. They have an option to donate specifically for Katrina help, and 100% of your donation is used for relief. You don’t have to be a member or anything to donate (I’m not). Check…
This blog post is difficult to write – it doesn’t really seem revolutionary, so I didn’t want to write anything. But it is relevant. We in the U.S. seem frozen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. If it was just the winds, big deal, it would have a simple, if costly solution. But it’s so…
Every reason about why Iraqis are divided over the constitution, from Islamic law to oil distribution to Saddam’s tighty whities, has been beaten like a dead camel in the desert. And almost all of these controversial issues have been worked out, getting down to nit-picky arguments about words like a and the. Important words, no…
Venezuela’s revolution is complex because it has two sides claiming to hold the revolutionary mantle. The reality is, only one does, the one that does the democratic housework, not the one that spends the night painting the town – with red graffiti. What do the real revolutionaries do? They build the case for democratic revolution….
A young Mexican politician, Gabriela Cuevas Barron, 26, is fighting the onslaught of Hugo Chavez-style communism in Mexico by opposing the candidacy of leftwing PRD presidential contender Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. She continually exposes his sorry record – the bribes, the payoffs, the padded invoices, the neglected police services, the welfare handouts, and the corruption….
I’m going to make this short and sweet. Bill Roggio posts the latest excerpt from the Iraq constitution and believes that the threat of Islam being a main source of legislation, thus creating an Islamic state like Iran, is overstated by the media. Here is the excerpt: The political system is republican, parliamentary, democratic and…
If you’re sick and deranged like me, you’ve been refreshing Iraq the Model every five minutes to see the latest updates on the National Assembly meeting. It looks as if they have delayed the vote on the draft itself for three more days so that the parliamentarians will have time to read it over, discuss…
The Cuban dictator was lying in wait for about three months, silently, stealthily, like a shark in stilling water … and then the brutal tyrant moved. Friday the Monster At Our Gate confiscated the land and house of the homeowner who lent it to Cuba’s fearless civil society democrats who riveted the world with their…
In the new era of revolutions, tyrants often are reluctant to send troops in to shoot when the millions of people roll into the streets demanding justice. They don’t want CNN’s cameras on them and 20-year war crime trials in the Hague to follow. That’s one reason why the whole world has seen a democratic…
For anyone else watching the riveting countdown to the constitution, Iraq the Model is the place to be. Omar has been giving up-to-the-minute updates on the National Assembly session, which was required to approve a draft constitution for referendum by midnight. They convened at just past 11, which really means that they were cutting things…