Blogging the democratic revolution
The bloggers have come up with a real big one on voter fraud in Venezuela. Miguel explains it out very well here. Venezuelan congressional elections are being held on Dec. 4 and a court has ruled in favor of stacking the vote today. See my post here. But that’s not the only problem. Now Javier at Notiven has found thousands of Gonzalezes all born on the same day and the same state, 95% of them in Zulia. He’s got the documents to go see. Here is a translation below from the original on Notiven: Can Venezuelan Electorate Authority explain this?…
On Academic Elephant’s superb blog, I found a small post that resonated with me: The tendency of the mainstream media to belittle U.S. officials when they visit small countries. There are all kinds of valid reasons to criticize them, and from many angles. But to savage Donald Rumsfeld because he paid a visit to distant Mongolia or distant Paraguay is absolutely despicable. The news media has mocked such visits, written them off as proof that Rumsfeld can’t get any other friends, and insulted the countries themselves and their customs. Elephant notes that the media focused almost exclusively on a horse…
Charles Krauthammer really gives it to Brent Scowcroft today – as the world’s foremost anti-revolutionary. Scowcroft has spent his entire life obstructing democratic revolution. If you believe in democratic revolution, you will never look at that man the same way again. He pretends to be oh so safe and sane. But he’s set democracy back decades in many places and still hasn’t paid a cent for it. Read it here.
In a significant defeat for Venezuela’s democracy, a new voting system installed by the Chavista government, called ‘los morochas’, which disproportionately benefits Chavista incumbents, was affirmed by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, an appointed body stacked with Chavista loyalists. It is expected to raise Hugo Chavez’s representation in the Congress – where he already has a majority – to Kim Il Sung levels of popular ‘support.’ The bell tolls for Venezuelan democracy with this ruling. Non-government organizations like Sumate have stated that this is a blow for democracy and there is no chance of fair elections being held now. This is a…
…on poverty figures. It’s one of the most disgusting things he’s ever done. Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, in one of his best columns, uncovered what bloggers have been saying all along: poverty has risen, not fallen, in Hugo Chavez’s ’21st-century-socialist’ Venezuela, supposedly a champion of the poor. They of course meant: creating more poor during a time of record high oil prices. The item is here. Miguel Octavio had the original item on the re-cooked statistics on poverty, probably as a result of Oppenheimer’s column. In all, it amounts to the Cubanization of Venezuela’s once-reliable statistics, a corruption…
Boz has an excellent roundup of all the polls being taken around the hemisphere, with at least one for each country. The polls are invaluable tools for sensing which way the winds of change are blowing in this coming fateful election year in the Americas. He also has a link to a very valuable poll from The Economist that shows how the attitudes of the public from different countries stack up against each other. In this particular poll, note the powerful pro-market sentiment expressed by the stars of Colombia, who rate number one in our hemisphere for faith in free…
The United Nations has issued another report regarding the situation between Lebanon and Syria, which takes notice of Syrian actions above and beyond that of the assassination of ex-PM Hariri as laid out in the Mehlis Report. The Larsen report, prepared by UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen for the purpose of measuring the success of implementing resolution 1559, warns about an increase of arms flow from Syria to Palestinian camps, as well as the continued presence of Syria-backed Hizb’allah and the economic pressures that Syria is trying to exert on Lebanon. The full text is here, and here are the relevant…
With the media headlining the anti-war camp’s bullet points and trumpeting the fact that 2,000 U.S. troops have now died in Iraq, it is time for some perspective. While we always hope to keep our own casualties to a minimum, war is part of the routine of life, and the reality of war is that casualties are inevitable. The idea that 2,000 fatalities is a high number for a war of any significance is not defensible. Below I have listed the total number of American military fatalities for the two world wars, the Korean war and the Vietnamese war (non-combat…
The big news in Azerbaijan is that, less than two weeks away from parliamentary elections scheduled for November 6, President Aliyev has ordered that NGOs be allowed to monitor the election and that indelible ink must be used to prevent double voting. All of these are measures requested by the OSCE in order to hold transparent elections. So I’ve titled my post to mock the headline used by ABC News, as you’ll come to find out, for good reason. Oct 25, 2005 ???????? BAKU (Reuters) – Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday ordered steps to ensure a November 6 parliamentary…
Venezuela’s main newspaper, El Universal, in a true blog style, is now putting out a weekly roundup of all the Zimbabwe-style land confiscations engulfing Venezuela under the far-left Chavez regime. The list of all the farmers who have had their ranches taken away ‘in the name of the people’ is long and horrible, given the fact that all of these productive farms will soon fall fallow. It’s also revolutionary tinder. No society can build itself on a foundation of stealing from others. It’s an important roadmap for the coming news and there is enough of it going on now that…
As we noted here, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has offered to take questions from the public through the BBC. It’s about what you’d imagine, with readers asking some fairly tough questions, along with plenty of softballs, and Chavez replying glibly and smoothly. If you ask me, it looked coached, due to the suaveness of Chavez’s answers, quite unlike the rougher impromptu ones he gave to Ted Koppel and the Washington Post. Contentwise, it sounds as though Chavez intended to be a crowd-pleaser in the West, because his BBC words not matching his words at home. If that’s so, it’s a…
Stefania in Sardinia reminds us to think of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi who is marking her tenth year of house arrest under the thugs who run Burma. Suu Kyi is the rightful leader of Burma. She also is a brave woman who has stood up to the gross tinpot military thugs in her struggle to bring democracy to her beautiful country. She is a revolutionary democrat who ranks with Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel in the annals of revolution. But her struggle is long and hard and she is still under house arrest by these unsavory, illegitimate rulers who…
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 1989, the anti-apartheid struggle won in South Africa in 1990 and even the current struggle for civil society in today’s Cuba, as well as the struggle against dictatorship in today’s Venezuela. Parks was a lone individual who triggered a vast revolution in the early ’60s…
Given that politicians tend to hone to their campaign financiers’ agendas, it’s pretty creepy to see that Evo Morales has gotten a new Web site – financed and hosted, not from his home country, as any self-respecting candidate for president would want, but brazenly from MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA. Morales, you will recall, is running for president of Bolivia on a legalize-cocaine election platform.UPDATE for Eduardo: Morales SAYS he’s not for legalizing cocaine, only the coca leaf, but there’s no such thing as cocaine without the coca leaf. I think his stance is a ruse. Morales also claimed he was ‘only’ for…
Right on the heels of the Bolivian factory workers’ history-making march to demand a free trade pact at the U.S. embassy gates, one of Hugo Chavez’s minions has come out to condemn free trade with all of the Americas (ALCA), and said MercoSur (a smaller non-U.S. trade bloc dominated by Brazil and Argentina) is the way to go. Something in the Bolivians’ actions has stuck in the chavista craw. There is something odd about how they are raging against trade with the U.S. so virulently all of a sudden. When we last heard from such people, they were ranting on…
Iraq now has a constitution: pick your poison. (This is just a news update, any analysis will follow.)
A parliamentarian was killed while touring a prison, protestors took to the streets to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Kulov, an extraordinary session of parliament was almost held to that end, and it’s coming out that the assassination might have political implications much more far ranging than at first glance. This also follows government plans to possibly illegalize protests. What’s going on in Kyrgyzstan? New Eurasia has a roundup. Saturday saw protests on the main square, Ploshchad Ala-Too, by supporters of the murdered deputy Tynchbek Akmatbaev, who called for Kulov’s resignation . Riots began earlier this week, as MosNews…
I have just posted my Middle East Week in Review news bulletin.
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 about U.S. failure to heed corrupt multilateral organizations like the United Nations or bureaucratic-till-the-point-of-pointlessness organizations like the World Court or the European Union. On those matters I remain unyielding in criticism until they change. It’s something else. The U.S. is starting to get a reputation…
In its ongoing crackdown on pro-democracy reformists, the Uzbek government has arrested Sanjar Umarov, the leader of Sunshine Uzbekistan and a potential challenger to President Karimov. The New York Times has more, though a lot of the information seems to come from the Sunshine Uzbekistan website. MOSCOW, Oct. 23 ???????? The leader of an Uzbek opposition coalition that has criticized the nation????????s authoritarian government was arrested Saturday night and accused of corruption, his family and an international human rights organization said. The office of the coalition, Sunshine Uzbekistan, was raided, and records and at least one computer were seized. The…
Thousands of Bolivian workers marched on the U.S. embassy yesterday to demand … A FREE TRADE PACT WITH THE U.S. Now who knew that? For god sakes give them their free trade pact! We’ll all benefit if we can buy Bolivian goods! I lift my first cup of Trader Joe’s Bolivian Blend coffee to toast these Bolivians as I wake to this terrific news! Best kind! Long live free trade with Bolivia! Source: Diario Correo del Sur Now let’s face facts: Bolivians do not want communism. Most Bolivians do not want Evo Morales as their next president. Bolivians especially do…
Following up on yesterday’s journalist poetry awards, Academic Elephant submits this Haiku loaded with meaning and insight (text by nutjob Arabist Juan Cole): Partition is the consequence of failed co- lonialism. Beautiful! If anyone else composes some news poetry, please send it along (or post it in comments). Oh, and while I’m on the subject of Cole, here‘s a recent post by Anton Efendi of Across the Bay that I meant to link to recently, dissecting the latest ass-headedness from Prof. Cole — it’s about the authenticity of the letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi.
For those of you who have been here with Publius since the beginning, you may remember that I used to do daily roundups of the news in Lebanon during the Cedar Revolution. It’s been quite a while since then, but with the dissemination of the Mehlis investigation report (read my post on that here), a spark has been set anew in the country. The Lebanese blogosphere is quite active right now, so it’s important to highlight the awesome work and insight that’s being put out there. I’ve been watching From Beirut to the Beltway quite a bit, as it has…
Some jackass “journalists” desecrated their supposed profession: story here. Read the whole thing.
The Mehlis report was released today, and it was the historic bombshell that everyone knew it would be. It implicated Syrian and Lebanese intelligence chiefs and military generals, all the way up to members of Assad’s family. The commission was also extended up until December in order to allow for further investigations into more recent developments and leads. And, speaking of those leads, Mehlis deleted the names of some of those suspected of conspiring in Hariri’s murder for reasons not yet known, though I can imagine it has to due with following up with evidence by December. Here’s what happened:…