Blogging the democratic revolution
Regime Change Iran posts a disturbing article in which an Iranian hardliner makes a choice declaration: ???????We don????????t need any guardian. And if necessary we will select our own president, ministers and parliament members. For without the Hezbollah forces the Islamic Revolution will collapse from within.??????? the hardliner added. On Iran????????s nuclear issue, Kharrazi noted: ???????We have oil, gas and all other natural resources and thus we don????????t need interaction with other countries. We are able to produce atomic bombs and we will do that. We shouldn????????t be afraid of anyone. The US is no more than a barking dog???????…
Chrenkoff’s Good News from Iraq installment number 21 is up! Like always, I hope you have a few hours of extra time to read it.
Matt has some recently released poll results that show slightly more Israelis would prefer kicking the Palestinians out over evacuating from the occupied territories. It was 38% for the former and 37% for the latter. Either way, including doing nothing, is simply masochistic. Some ways less than others, which is why it is better to pull out than to shove out.
Big Pharoah has a “joke of the day” for all of us. Of course, it isn’t really that funny: I have a lovely habit. Every morning I pick up my Al Ahram paper, the number one paper in Egypt, to see how they prioritize their headlines on the front page. This tends to give me an indication of what the paper wants to convey as “important” and as “not very important”. The major headline today went to the security conference in Germany! (did anyone hear about it??). Then a headline a little bit underneath announcing the score of a major…
Andy notes that rallies are taking place all over Russia, from both sides of the Putin/Pensions issue. Young members of the Young Yabloko party wearing orange scarves and bandannas also attended the rally. “The orange I’m wearing does not mean that I support the current Ukrainian leadership, but it is a symbol of freedom and democracy for me,” said Alexei Leontyev, 22. “People achieved what they wanted in Ukraine, and I want the same for Russia.” I guess that means the protesters aren’t all communists.
Terry Rogers posts an interview with Yury Yekhanurov, chairman of the parliamentary committee on industry and entrepreneurship, about developing small and medium sized businesses. ???????Will small business develop in the current police state system? My neighbors, who work at a market, have to pay kickbacks to the police and the tax people, on top of the rent. This way you can go bankrupt in no time at all.??????? ???????This is commonplace in a state that is corrupt to the bone. Even during the elections we estimated that 5.8% of the popular vote would be stolen owing to the administrative resource.…
Nathan has got his Valentine’s Day Edition (well, maybe not) of Election and Democracy Watch up. Check it out.
Georgia has been trying to get Russian military bases out for a while now, but it seems as if the situation may get worse: After a two-year interruption and ten years of futile talks, another round of Russian-Georgian negotiations on the withdrawal of Russian troops was held in vain on February 10-11 in Tbilisi. The Russian side advanced conditions that amount to a refusal to withdraw its troops from Georgia. The conditions have grown in number and in brazenness, compared to what Moscow had demanded at the preceding rounds of negotiations. The escalation of conditions is probably also designed and…
I promise I will never use such extensive alliteration again. David McDuff posts an interview translated into English with Zbigniew Religa, a professor who looks to be a promising candidate in this summer’s presidential election in Poland. He says he admires Wilson, and being the scholarly sort, he gives off that same impression. He has a good way with words. Read the whole thing.
The other week I posted my cumulation of search result queries that testified to the international infatuation with Yulia Tymoshenko. Well, she is still rather popular, but now there’s competition. That’s right, the Camp Bucca “Babes”: 13 Feb, Sun, 14:18:48 MSN Search: bucca mud wrestling 13 Feb, Sun, 16:03:07 Google: yulia tymoshenko pictures 13 Feb, Sun, 16:45:07 MSN Search: yellow rose crawford texas 13 Feb, Sun, 18:33:36 Yahoo: camp bucca party pictures 13 Feb, Sun, 19:18:13 Google: photo gallery Viktor and Katherine Yuschenko 13 Feb, Sun, 21:53:01 Google: abdymok 13 Feb, Sun, 22:15:10 Yahoo: camp bucca mud wrestling pictures 14…
I take it they are playing it safe with a precarious situation: BAGHDAD, IRAQ – With a Shiite coalition set to take power in Iraq, American officials have begun grilling top Iraqi Shiite politicians to try to gauge the extent of their relationship with neighboring Iran, a predominantly Shiite nation ruled by its clergy. The nature of the Shiite coalition’s ties to Iran has become a crucial issue now that the cleric-backed alliance has emerged as the leading faction in the new Iraqi parliament and at a time when the United States and Iran are engaged in a war of…
Not shipments of aid to flood-ravaged Venezuela, but US military aircraft spare-parts shipments. He doesn’t even need military airplanes but here is something that sticks in his craw. This is the same Venezuelan dictator who is famous for turning down a US aircraft carrier full of engineers who were ready to rebuild roads washed away by Venezuela’s 1999 floods and mudslides. He hasn’t asked for any US aid in this current flooding event either, but delay him his spare parts for aircraft with which to menace Colombia and see how he complains! The funny part is, he says Lula of…
Carlos Ball, a Venezuelan journo now at and writing for the CATO Institute, has a razor-sharp take on the meaning of dictator Hugo Chavez’s land confiscations.
This post is a supplement to my last post on the municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, intended to provide a summary overview of the situation in that country. First I suggest that you read Daniel Drezner’s article on the Saudi elections. It covers most of the territory, but make sure you read the comments, as a couple of them (one by myself) point out inadequacies. Second, if you have not already, read my post below, An Islamist Perspective on Saudi Elections. Drezner’s article mainly deals with the moderate reformists and the politically dominant Saudi-Wahhabi bloc, but my post deals with…
Below is a translation from the pro-Islamist London-based newspaper, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, on the municipal elections in Saudi Arabia. I was thinking about translating some articles from Saudi papers and their reports on the political success of the process, but what I read sounded too much like something from Pravda on the economic rejuvenation of the Ukraine in the 1920s. I have a few comments below. Keep in mind that the interviewee is considered an ally of Osama bin Laden; see links at bottom in this regard (and keep in mind that the writing style was clumsy in the original, the…
They just got released, and as expected, the Shiites dominated: BAGHDAD, Iraq Feb 13, 2005 ???????? Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims won nearly half the votes in the nation’s Jan. 30 election, giving the long-oppressed group significant power but not enough to form a government on their own. The Shiites likely will have to form a coalition in the 275-member National Assembly with the other top vote-getters the Kurds and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s list to push through their agenda and select a president and prime minister. The president and two vice presidents must be elected by a two-thirds majority. The…
I just received this email from The Dread Pundit Bluto: A family member serving in Kuwait says that the troops there don’t have access to news about the area because the only major news source in the camps is CNN. He says the troops have been trying to find information on blogs. Recent terrorist activity in Kuwait makes this a pressing issue, especially since al-Qaeda linked terror cells have admitted wanting to target routine convoys from Kuwait to Iraq. This is not the sort of thing CNN reports until it’s too late. This is a post summarizing recent events in…
Miguel’s got an impressive analysis of the extent and severity of damage in Venezuela’s recent floods, focusing on what the government could and didn’t do to prevent the disaster which has now claimed over 100 lives.
The thuggery of Venezuela’s dictatorship does not stop. Last week, they made a travesty of justice. They threw respected constitutional lawyer Tulio Alvarez in jail for two years for ‘slander’ which is to say, warning the truth about some corrupt congressman, a Chavez crony, lining his pockets. But that was just an excuse. The real reason they threw him in jail was for his report on the recall referendum fraud, a document so all-encompassing and so slam-dunk against the whole scam that it apparently still scares Chavez. Here is that document, translated into English. You’ll never look at that recall…
The hemisphere’s dictators, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, have each weighed in with narcissistic fears for their sorry hides. Val tells us that Chavez is brooding that the US would actually bother with an invasion of his tropical mess. (Sorry Hugo, we don’t want the reconstruction costs from your years of neglect!) Meanwhile, fidel outdoes him by saying that if anyone shoots his little buddy, Hugo Chavez, it will be the United States’ fault, even if a Venezuelan takes care of business. Speaking in a six-hour speech, the murderer of thousands blubbers: ‘This comes from a…
Hugo Chavez hurled his uncouth insults at US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Now Mugabe of Zimbabwe’s getting in on the act. There must be something about a successful Black woman that arouses their Inner Barbarian because they’re both coming out of the woodwork like roaches and getting counted.
1999 was a warning to Venezuela – at that time, at least 30,000 people died in mudslides due to government neglect and never got any aid after that either. This week the torrential rains have returned and it turns out the communist government of Hugo Chavez has had much better things to do than reinforce hillsides where his “beloved” poor live over the past six years. 4000 people have been evacuated – and a lot got out on their own, already fully intuiting that the government wasn’t going to do a thing help them. Here is Miguel’s photogallery of the…
Torrential rains have left about 5000 people homeless in Venezuela. Venezuela’s land expropriators have got just the solution for them…here. Amazing how one problem solves the other.
I forgot that my big research paper for the year is due on Monday. Oops. If anyone knows about how the Office of Unemployment in Florida (or anywhere else) works, let me know. Specifically if it saves the government more money than it puts into preventing fraudulent unemployment claims.
Carlo Stagnaro suggests that the European Union is ignoring Putin’s abuses because he signed on to the Kyoto Protocol. I’d like to add that signing on to Kyoto itself is a kind of abuse. I’m not sure if Putin will ignore it or not, but it makes the perfect excuse to put into place anti-free market measures and further government control. UPDATE: Kirk posts in the comments section: I think it is important here to note the reason why Russia decided to ratify the Kyoto Treaty in the first place – the European Union agreed to support Russia’s bid to…