Blogging the democratic revolution
George Bush has a way of surprising dictators. He gets in their faces when they least expect it. He’s bold. He says what he means and means what he says. Nice to see a real man. Today he symbolically snapped a great wet towel in the face of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Bush openly met with Venezuelan dissidents, like Babe Of Politics, Maria Corina Machado, giving the NGO leaders from Sumate the full White House tour and VIP treatment, making sure there were lots of cameras around to see the intention. Bush doesn’t do nuance. He likes people who like…
Stefania Lapenna writes a dazzling essay today on The American Thinker, outlining the meaning of Cuba’s democracy conference held in Havana, including many aspects of it that might not be so obvious. Stefania is a brilliant young thinker whose original work will be read for years to come for its insight. Think I’m exaggerating? You won’t after you read it here.
Of all the disgusting prosecutions, this one, against the great Oriana Fallaci, probably the finest journalist alive, is the most despicable. No one can compare to Oriana, no one has written with more powerful, penetrating insight and determination than she has. You don’t even need to agree with her to appreciate her. I tend to defend Islam, but she is far harsher. Doesn’t matter. No one writes more compellingly than Oriana, a true journalist’s journalist. Which is why the Italian prosecution’s charges against her are so shameful. My own feeling about how nations want to tailor free speech is that…
Lovely Stefania in Sardinia, Italy has some truly awe-inspiring near-live photos from the ongoing Cuban Democracy Convention outside Havana right now. The power of these pictures is unbelievable. Only in the blogosphere can any revolution be so chronicled. I dare you to look at these photos without weeping. See them here.
I admit that I ran across this item on accident, because as under-publicized as it is, that would be the only way to find it. While speaking to the International Republican Institute — one of the main organizations that allocates democracy building aid — President Bush proposed creating a special corp of federal workers that would help young democracies create a sustainable future. WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush, seeking to put muscle behind a promise to support young democracies, said Wednesday the administration is creating a special corps of federal workers that will deploy quickly to help foreign governments in…
Note: I posted this earlier at Bloggledygook, but then realized that the back story has a lot to do with the struggle for Cuba. Make no mistake: there are those who will do anything to make excuses for Fidel. A post in abdymok on Reporters Without Borders (or RSF for Reporters sans fronti????res) caught my eye this morning. Founded in 1979 by Robert Menard, RSF is a rights organization based in France that monitors press freedom abuses around the globe, with special focus on Cuba. It has been a frequent and vocal critic of the US, most recently over “self-censorship”…
Here is the first mainstream media editorial I have seen hailing Cuba’s brave democratic revolutionaries – it can be read here.
Castro’s henchmen have disappeared their first delegate to the Conference on Civil Society. His name is Antuan Clemente Hernandez. His event is to be held this weekend. They know what a threat it is to the communist regime. It’s Cuba’s Charter 77, its Declaration of Independence. And its participants face the same risks as those brave men of history. Stefania has the first alert, and my writeup on Babalu about this struggle against a monster who cannot countenance freedom is here. UPDATE: Juan Paxety has information about a new support center for the Civil Society assembly inaugurated in Miami here.
The wording of the election law amendment is vague on some points, but it appears that the women of Kuwait have been granted the right to vote and run in elections. The prime minister, Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, said that he planned to name a woman minister. “I congratulate the women of Kuwait for having achieved their political rights,” he said. Kuwaiti women join their counterparts from the neighboring Gulf countries of Qatar, Oman and Bahrain in having the vote. The amendment, which was finalized after several years of debate and struggle by Kuwaiti women, passed by a vote of 35…
Luis Tascon, the Venezuelan congressman who put signers of a recall referendum against dictator Hugo Chavez on a special Internet-accessible blacklist, has met a miserable demise. In this way, he would seem to parallel Joseph McCarthy, who died an isolated drunk. That said, the signers of the petition cannot be compared to McCarthy’s targets – they were not interested in operating in secrecy, for one, they were not interested in subverting the U.S. system in the name of Joseph Stalin, and they were not doing anything illegal. No, Venezuelans just woke up one morning and realized that signing a legal…
Val has important updates on Cubans’ efforts to forge a civil society from the depths of Castrodom. Note that they are doing it from Havana, showing a courage we can only marvel at. And in what will surely go down as a vote of shame, there were actual U.S. Congressinsects who voted against supporting them in their effort to end tyranny. Why oh why are these lowlife citizens of our free country? There is no order in the universe! Read it here and here. UPDATE: The Weekly Standard’s item is here.
U.S. Congress has just passed a resolution offering support and encouragement to Cuba’s brave civil society advocates, who, like the creators of the Declaration of Independence, are meeting in perilous conditions in Castro’s island hellhole to forge the beginnings of a new civil society, a new social contract, a new means of governance in what they hope will be a free post-Castro Cuba. It is a thing of beauty to know there are such brave souls out there willing to fight for what is right at their own potential peril. It’s also gratifying to know that the better members of…
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has created another useless union this week, positively thrilling the Canadian press, but in Latin America, there is nothing new about it. So here is the deal: In Argentina during the 1990s, people used to joke about the extent of something known as ‘the corporate republic’ or ‘corporate state.’ The corporate state is not about companies but the expansion of medieval-guild-like organizations designed to keep individual people out of the system in the name of some exclusive collective. That’s what this new Chavez union is. But despite what Chavez claims, he’s hardly first to the party. In…
Is Jordan heading toward a constitutional crisis? It is rare for Al-Jazeera to report from Jordan on anything, but just now (about 8:00 a.m. Wednesday in Jordan time) I saw a report on a sudden outburst of public anger from opposition parliamentarians over the lack of democracy. Jordan has had an elected parliament for years, but elections are always rigged and the institution has been kept pretty harmless under both the late King Hussein and his son, the current monarch, King Abdullah. I took special interest in the story because I spent a year living there. Jordan is a pretty…
Tip of the hat to The Emirates Economist for letting me know about this item. Two weeks ago, the parliament voted 24-20 to give women the right to vote in municipal elections. This was heralded as a great first step, but skepticism still remained. And for good reason. The bill failed to pass the second round of voting. Kuwait City: A Bill granting Kuwaiti women the right to vote and contest in municipal council elections failed to pass muster in the second round in the parliament yesterday. The Bill was passed in principle by the parliament on April 19. However,…
I just came across this article in Mosnews saying that $5 million has been set aside in the soon-to-be approved emergency war spending bill for democracy programs in Belarus. The U.S. Senate has approved an extra $81 billion war budget that includes $5 million for programs aimed to support democracy in Belarus, RIA Novosti reports. The programs will be under the control of the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The Bureau announced earlier this month that $2 million would be spent on ???????consolidation of democratic parties??????? in Belarus. I started looking around the bill for it,…
I know that the third round of municipal elections in Saudi Arabia are coming up, so I checked out Arab News, which has a lot of material up, but I came upon this article noting that legislation had been passed in Kuwait allowing women to both vote and participate in municipal elections. KUWAIT CITY, 20 April 2005 ???????? In a first step toward granting women full political rights, Kuwaiti lawmakers agreed yesterday to allow women to vote and run in local council elections, but the measure requires more legislative action before it would become law. The measure was taken on…
When thousands of Venezuelans came forward last year to exercise their legally guaranteed democratic right to sign a petition to recall their president, precious few realized the kind of use dictator Hugo Chavez could and did make of that signature list afterward. It was published on the Internet – the names, addresses and social-security-number equivalent of all those who signed. It was used to blacklist signers, deny people work, target dissidents. Thousands of people were affected, not just in those who were not hired for jobs, but for those who were denied services, lost rights, got harassed and were brutalized.…
Will Franklin is looking at Bhutan’s Freedom House ranking, the king’s policies, and the newly proposed constitution. Here is the entire thing in PDF. He notes: Bhutan’s proposed constitution is ambitious, bordering on too ambitious. The beauty of the American Constitution is its relative simplicity, which has helped it stand the test of time. Bhutan’s is certainly more manageable than the voluminous phone book known as the European Union constitution, but it still might face some minor problems due to its broad nature. For example, preventing “unlawful attacks on honour and reputation” might conflict with the protection of freedom of…
Previous statements have said that they would not contest the election results in court, as it would be futile given that it is controlled by Mugabe. Now, they have decided to do so in the districts where the most flagrant violations occured. Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has reversed its earlier decision not to challenge the results of last week’s parliamentary election in court. The party is now taking cases of what it calls the most blatant irregularities to the Electoral Court. The Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, will challenge one or two results from…
This article caught my eye just before I went to hit the bed. Very sneaky. Very smart. Observer teams from African countries and regional organisations have been unanimous in declaring the elections free and fair, but the US embassy said that although the Zimbabwe government had not invited it to send observer teams from abroad, it had sent 25 of its Harare-based diplomats to observe the process in almost half of the 120 constituencies. Their reports showed “several patterns of irregularities” – the exclusion of observers from four polling stations, the failure to publish the results of each polling station…
Hat tip to Andy for this article. The King of Bhutan, a small country located near undemocratic Nepal and India, has drafted a constitution to allow for multi-party democracy. The king of the Himalayan state of Bhutan announced the end of a century of absolute royal rule yesterday with the publication of a draft constitution to establish a multiparty democracy. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck said that by the end of the year his 700,000 subjects would be given the right to elect two houses of parliament, whose members would be empowered to impeach the monarch by a two-thirds vote. Bhutan,…
Last Friday, the Venezuelan government declared a new law, one that makes it an actual crime to ‘offend Chavez.’ Chavez of course will say when he is offended. The king decides. And this means bloggers. A new Venezuelan blogger, called Jolly, gives his take here.
John Burgess over at Crossroads Arabia notes an article in Arab News that says 87% of Saudis favor female participation in elections. JEDDAH, 16 March 2005 ???????? A survey conducted by an independent agency in Jeddah showed 87 percent Saudis backing women????????s participation in elections. It also reflected the greater role of media in educating the public on the polls. ???????Eighty-seven percent of 240 Saudis who took part in the survey called for women????????s participation in the next round of elections,??????? said Dr. Muhammad Fashetan, chairman of the SAS Center for Opinion Survey and Consultancy in Jeddah. He said the…
The Jordanian government has been for years one of the more open of Arab states, with its monarchs – first the long-ruling King Hussein and now his son King Abdullah – ruling with a relatively light hand (I spent 1997 living in Jordan). Yet as democracy movements gain strength in other parts of the Arab world, Jordan seems to be moving toward a crackdown on professional associations. This is how the London-based Al-Hayat describes the new law in its March 5 article, “Jordan: The issue of freedom and human rights increases the attention of Washington and its demands”: It appears…