Blogging the democratic revolution
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…
Bolivian government coca-leaf graffiti targeted at dissidents in Santa Cruz Source: AP, via Yahoo! News Argentina’s Cronista Comercial newspaper last week released an Argentine foreign ministry study, whose authors used various corporate-risk business models to forecast a 56% chance of civil war breaking out in Bolivia in the next few months. It’s faster than anyone thinks. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News At issue is the growing tyranny of Bolivia’s leftwing populist president, Evo Morales. His popularity numbers have dropped, and in Bolivia’s industrious, entrepreneurial, job-creating and mixed-race east, discontent with his Marxist remedies is growing. Morales…
The European Commission has announced that Romania and Bulgaria are set to join the European Union at the beginning of 2007. It truly is an historic achievement; something that bodes well for the future of the two countries and the continent as a whole. The European Commission has announced that Romania and Bulgaria will be admitted to the EU in January 2007, but under strict conditions. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said both countries had made enough progress to join the union. But they will be checked for progress in curbing organised crime and corruption, and ensuring food safety and…
Gates of Vienna posts and interesting article, along with his own commentary, regarding a recent referendum in Switzerland in which around 2/3 of the population voted to tighten the country’s asylum laws. This is what happened: According to early poll projections, Switzerland has voted heavily in favour of making it harder for asylum-seekers to gain entry to the rich Alpine state. Despite warnings of damage to Switzerland’s humanitarian reputation, some two-thirds of voters appeared to have said ‘yes’ in referendums on laws limiting access for non-European job-seekers and making the country’s asylum rules amongst the West’s toughest. They seemed also…
Whoo hoo! Our favorite writer, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, has done the impossible in a new essay – taken on sex in Colombia as a struggle for democracy. A perfect topic for Publius Pundit to link, so go see what he’s written here. In Colombia, young women have told their young men to drop the gangster and gun and drug crap or else they’ll get no sex from them. Apparently, it’s very primal and effective, for a society at its wit’s end. Yep, no sex, those who can’t drop their barbarian activity can be laughed at by their peers as maricones…
The mystery country in the United Nations voter lineup for Security Council seats, Chile, led by a socialist with roots in the Allende era, is apparently fed up to the quick with the government of Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s anti-American diatribes disgusted most nations that had planned to support Venezuela over Guatemala for the Security Council seat, but didn’t bother Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet all that much. More recent Chavista attacks over the weekend, charging her with being rightwing – on the weekend she laid a wreath at the spot where Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated, was an entirely…
Boz at Bloggings by Boz has a must-read collection of poll numbers, many the last pollings that will be available before elections next week in Brazil and Nicaragua. He has a special item on Brazil here, as well. I love his item on what Guatemalans have on their minds, it’s something that will provoke a knowing nod from people who know what common sense is. And Peru’s opinion poll revelations confirm just what we have been thinking about Alan Garcia. Read Boz’s latest poll numbers here.
I was going to put together a Venezuela blog roundup but Daniel got there before me, putting together a fine collection of Venezuelan blog posts in these fermenty times, and saying all the stuff I wanted to say. It reminds me of Daniel’s and my own simultaneously-made observation that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit did exactly for Miguel Octavio what Hugo Chavez did for Noam Chomsky – rocketed him up to Number One. For Miguel, Glenn’s link yesterday got Miguel’s blog over 13,000 hits and put him at the very top of the salon.com blog rankings for two days in a…
By popular demand, I post Alvaro Varga Llosa’s awesome essay on Chavez’s appearance at the United Nations and what it really means for Venezuela. For educational purposes, only Ch????vez’s Inferno By ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA September 25, 2006; The Wall Street Journal Page A14 It would have been more appropriate for Hugo Ch????vez to brandish Dante’s “Divine Comedy” than Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival” during his sulfuric broadside at the U.N. last week. In the first part of the Italian masterpiece, the author undertakes a journey through the nine concentric circles of the Inferno, each representing a type of evil. Dante’s description…
Alek Boyd has an excellent new photo show of scenes from the Chavista political “base” around Caracas. He shows dilapidated housing and garbage flung all over the place, in pictures that make Tijuana look like Beverly Hills. Check it out, here.
Following the famous United Nations devil speech, this is the singularly best Hugo Chavez cartoon I’ve ever seen, snidely illustrating the realities of the U.S.-Venezuela relationship. I’ve never seen anything so mean. Hugo comes out absolutely pathetic, you’ll never look at him the same way again. See it here.
We have previously discussed the question of Russia????????s membership on the G-8 panel; given Russia????????s feeble economic performance and, more importantly, its widespread corruption and anti-democratic politics, it is virtually impossible to offer any cogent argument in favor of membership. Russia simply is not qualified. However, there is a second major question which is harder to resolve. Should Russia be admitted to the World Trade Organization? The WTO is not analogous to the G-8; it is a populist body, not an elitist one, and Russia????????s issues of democracy and corruption are less relevant here since there are some countries with…
President Evo Morales of Bolivia was the first Bolivian president ever to skip the famous Expocruz, the Santa Cruz cow show. He did so because he considers its denizens capitalists. Out in Bolivia’s Butch-and-Sundance territory, nothing’s more important than this show. Miguel Centellas, in this post here, noted that Morales’ absence from the show worried his Cruceno parents every bit as much as renewed violence in the streets. He writes: But threats by Evo’s supporters to shut down the Feria Expocruz, a small scale regional, industrial “world’s fair” in Santa Cruz has my parents worried (not least, of course, because…
Manfred Nowak, the UN’s chief man on anti-torture, said today that torture in Iraq is worse now than it was under Saddam. “What most people tell you is that the situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand,” Mr Nowak said in Geneva. “The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein.” The State Department is outraged about this, taking the comment as hypbole and moral relativism. A State Department official in Washington, asked about Professor Nowak’s comments, told The Times:…
A string of high-level surveys of social development over the past year have equated Russia????????s level of achievement with that of the African nation of Niger, a landlocked sub-Saharan state of 14 million roughly half of whose national budget is derived from foreign aid. In October of last year the ???????Corruption Perceptions Index??????? from the German think tank Transparency International surveyed 159 nations and found that only 30 (less than 19%) were less corrupt than Russia. Russia found itself tied for 9th most corrupt nation in the world with Niger and Sierra Leone. Then in June, Foreign Policy????????s ???????Failed States…
Something very little noticed but very important almost slipped under the radar. Perhaps one of the biggest policy detours ever is about to happen in the Middle East. No, Bush is not pulling out of Iraq, and no, Hassan Nasrallah hasn’t played groundhog and come out of hiding. What has happened, in fact, is that the Arab states — which have historically argued for a nuclear-free Middle East (except for Saddam) — are beginning to rethink their loving attachment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Abdul Rahman al Attiyah, said at its most…
Below this is an email from a cousin of mine and his friend who is currently studying and working with an NGO in Thailand. He leans to the left, as you may notice, but provides a great description of what it’s like on the ground level after the military coup. Plus, he knows his stuff. Take a look. ***** by David Ferris & Terri Bennett For those of you who don’t know, I found out last at 11PM that there was a military coup here yesterday. The military’s top general (Songthii) lead tanks into Bangkok, declared a coup, and took…
Hugo Chavez addresses the United Nations General Assembly Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News If Hugo Chavez had wanted to repel the American public, he could not have done a better job than this morning, speaking before the United Nations. Waving a Noam Chomsky book like a late-night K-Tel salesman, he found time to hawk Chomsky tomes, which I am sure was effective – given that people will want to know exactly what he filled his head with after a rant like that. Next, the oily encyclopedia salesman began raving that George Bush was the devil. He yelled about the smell…
In Hungary over the past 48 hours it’s the Nika riots all over again. Sort of. First, political parties in Hungary do not immediately line up into conveniently-intelligible left-wing/right-wing definitions, though some are easily mappable for Americans (the SZDSZ are basically libertarians). See my previous posts here and here for some quick shorthand. What do we know? We know that Prime Minister Gyurcs????ny shot his mouth off at a private meeting of the Socialist Pary (MSZP), which was then leaked to the press, and the entire country fell into political paroxysms. But that’s what happens when the Prime Minister publicly…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis has an interesting item up about his trip to the slums of Caracas. You know, THOSE slums, the pivotal no-man’s-land where no one is safe, but everything hinges on, in December’s coming Venezuelan presidential election. Chavez is a populist and has maintained power on the backs of this poor vote. Alek chats up these Chavista voters over in their icky, scary, horrible red tumbledown cinderblock slums, and has a lot of photos. These conversations are much more interesting firsthand from the Chavistas themselves than filtered through the santized prism of the western Sandalistas, who often claim…
I don’t think many people will be scratching their heads about the coup in Thailand, at least if the entire ordeal is about what we think it is. The events leading up to this make it clear. The impasse of Thai politics in which Prime Minister Shinawatra is accused of corruption yet hugely wins polls anyway, leading to mass protests, has caused one election already to be ruled invalid. Since then not much has happened, but it has created a certain political vacuum in which case both sides are preparing for a repeat of 1992. Perhaps the army really is…
Thai military tanks surrounded the presidential house as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra made a speech at the United Nations in New York. Source: Reuters, via News.com.au Goodbye, democracy. Thailand’s military has launched a coup to overthrow the government. All the good English language Thai Web sites, like The Bangkok Post and The Nation are down, probably from huge traffic. The U.S. stock market, fearful of what events in Thailand can do to world markets, is falling over this. A well-placed correspondent in Bangkok right now e-mails to me: It’s the army commander, overthrowing Thaksin. Nothing to do with Islamofascists or…
There’s such great blogging going on in Venezuela these days that I almost feel I have been remiss in keeping track of it all. Ahmadinejad of Iran is in Caracas, Chavez is running for reelection, and Venezuela’s economy is falling apart. Here is a brief blog roundup from some of the finest: Daniel, of Venezuela News & Views has a great bloggy mishmash (or since he is in France now, let’s say ragout) of acid comments about Chavismo with several pearls of observation, like this one about current condition of Chavez here: The historian in this blogger has seen too…
Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez are again talking about dependency and how all the ills of the poorer nations are caused by the richer nations; particularly the USA. At the meeting of the so-called Non-Aligned Nations in Cuba, Chavez said, ???????To be radical is not to be insane, it’s to go to our roots. Let’s go to our roots, let’s be truly radical,” Chavez told diplomats and leaders from two-thirds of the world’s countries. He concluded by chanting “Patria o Muerte!” (“Fatherland or Death!”), a favored Castro rallying cry. Well, those roots are dependency theory, blaming the First World for…
Rightwing Swedish babes celebrate their victory over socialism Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News In a wonderful surprise, Sweden’s center-right bloc has defeated the long-ruling socialist coalition, in Sunday’s parliamentary election, 48%-46.2%. A new government is being formed now. The winners are a four-party bloc who’ve been out of power for 25 years. They have just ousted the ruling 3-party socialist coalition which has held power in its current lineup for a decade. Meanwhile, taking in just 35% of the vote, the socialist party itself had its worst showing since 1914! The center-right, led by 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt of the centrist…