Blogging the democratic revolution
Now this is gross! Feel the love! Smell the sulphur! UPDATE: Miguel has some barf-alert Chavista poetry to complement some additional repulsive Chavista images here and here UPDATE: Daniel has some excellent thinking analysis of the barf-alert Chavista ‘love’ campaign and a great roundup of the other blogs that are disgussing this in this must-read…
Over the weekend, the anti-democratic crisis brewing in Russia took a horrifying turn for the worse. On Friday, the Associated Press reported that the Moscow police were circulating requests to primary schools requesting that they be provided with lists of all students with Georgian-sounding last names; the orders came in the wake of the forcible…
An Avalancha. You don’t even need to speak Spanish to know what it means. Source: The Devil’s Excrement, which has tons more, keep scrolling. Too busy to write anything but the Avalancha presidential election rally in Venezuela over the weekend has yielded some unbelievable photos. Manuel Rosales of Venezuela is mounting a ferocious challenge to…
It is traditional thought to immediately consider a military coup bad because they usually are. Take the many horrors of Africa and Latin America, for example. There have certainly been ambiguous exceptions, such as Pinochet’s coup in Chile which still inspires much debate. But nowadays things are a bit different. Military coups are occurring for…
Courtesy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Sandalistas can now select five-star accomodations if they find themselves tiring of all the gunfire, fireworks and 6:00 a.m. blasted regatton that so livens up shantytown life. After all, there’s something for everyone in the world of Chavistadom! This new news item, which I have only a fragment of…
At VCrisis, Alek Boyd has firsthand info about how Hugo Chavez’s shiny new Russian weapons purchases are being used – to massacre Venezuelan and Brazilian peasants from helicopters in the deep jungle. There was a great big massacre of miners in the Amazon rainforest this week and Boyd is on the scene with tons of…
As Publius Pundit readers know, a crisis is brewing in Georgia. After discovering a spy ring seeking to subvert the current pro-West presidential administration on Russia????????s behalf, just as Georgia entered the final round of talks on NATO membership, the Georgian government took action to arrest the conspirators, who included several Russian military officers. In…
Geraldo Alckmin drove Brazil’s popular incumbent President Lula into a runoff Oct. 29 with a powerful showing in Sunday’s election. The guy rocks. Source: AP, via BBC photo gallery A massive political earthquake is shaking Brazil right now and practically no one in the mainstream media (BBC a notable exception!) is really covering it. This…
Not that he ever really had it, but President Bachelet was considering supporting Venezuela’s candidacy for a rotating seat on the United Nations security council that’s coming up. Possibly no more. A.M. Mora y Leon already posted up an article showing Bachelet’s absolute fury over remarks made by the Venezuelan government that the Christian Democrat…
Panic has set in at Venezuela’s state oil company with the spectacular exit of 7-Eleven from the Citgo gasoline-station label. The PR damage is so bad that the entire brand may be a total loss. Indy gas station after indy gas station are yanking ties to the Venezuelan dictator-controlled oil company. This follows 7-Eleven’s verbally…
If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB…
The Assembly to Promote the Civil Society, an umbrella organization gathering over 300 Cuban opposition movements that fight peacefully for democratic and regime change in the island, is planning a meeting of the independent libraries. They will inform the population about the goals of the civil desobedience and non-cooperation campaign named “Yo no coopero, yo…
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his challenger, Geraldo Alckmin Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Singapore Today is election day in Brazil, and for 126 million Brazilians, time to decide who their next president and congressional representatives will be. Via the Washington Post, AP has a good primer on the nuts and bolts of how Brazil’s…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis writes that he’s still shaken after being attacked by a horde of 80 Chavista thugs at a campaign rally in the obscure town of Valera in the high Andean mountain state of Trujillo, over in Venezuela’s mostly rightwing west. Trujillo’s a tiny state, with a population only at 608,000, and sort…
Europe. Treasure box of civilization that every other civilization on earth, grand and small, old and new, owns a few pearls and diamonds from. Reason, individualism, liberty, fairness and linear progress from the Judeo-Christian European heritage have affected human aspirations all over the earth – everything from Pakistani kids longing for Nikes and Iranian women…
Defying the laws of economics, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez started state-run groceries for poor people to buy food at cut-rate prices. He never imagined that the little darlings he claims to champion over Big Bad Corporations might take the cheap food, buy a ton of it, and then turn around and sell it at higher…
Alek Boyd has more continuing coverage of the Manuel Rosales presidential campaign that is challenging the presidency of Hugo Chavez. Alek reports that Rosales is attracting huge, growing crowds out in the Venezuelan burgs and boondocks. He has some choice quotes from locals and some descriptive writing on what it all looks and feels like….
The world is loaded with well-wishers who have visited communist Cuba as tourists, and marvelled at beauty of the island, the sultry enticing laid-back culture of the people, the music, the ease of life, the apparent lack of materialism, the supposed universal health care, and other illusions. Over at Killcastro, a fine blog by Cuban…
What is the impact of the world democracy revolution? In Arab states, there’s been a significant change toward democratic revolution in the past two years, according to this absolutely fascinating report from a writer who visited Dubai and talked to James Zogby, a respected pollster of the Arab world. He found that young Arabs, both…
The Moscow Times newspaper maintains an impressive stable of pundits analyzing Russian political developments, and their weekly columns are often required reading for those who wish to understand and properly respond the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union. Two recent examples deal with the disturbing and self-destructive rise of official anti-Americanism in Russia: Georgy Bovt documents…
Hot on the heels of the surprise power-packed U.S. consumer boycott of Venezuelan oil, a huge refinery explosion of Venezuelan oil occurred this morning in Havana, Cuba, where considerable Venezuelan oil is being refined. Gigantic. Val has a photo of the inferno, the latest oil blow to Hugo Chavez. The Real Cuba has more photos…
Jonathan Scheele, head of the European Commission’s Delegation to Romania said about the upcoming accession of Romania to EU that, “There will be no more reports by the European Commission and it will therefore be very important for the Romanian political class, civil society and Romanians in general to take responsibilities.” Easier said than done….
On the left above, you see the face of pro-U.S. Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko before he sought the presidency of his country. On the right, you see his face shortly after he made that decision. What happened? Well, he ingested a large amount of highly toxic chemicals, and it wasn????????t a suicide attempt. Many people believe…
Cripes, what’s got into these guys? I used to live in Singapore and I used to write for the Far Eastern Economic Review, mostly slapping around China’s oppression in those palmy expat days. Today, the once-ominiscent FEER, now a news-turned-essay magazine, and down on its heels due to the Internet and global forces, is nevertheless…
There is something majestic about the power of the markets. No dictator, anywhere can control them. They do what they do, based on thousands of decisions by thousands of individuals, acting on a collective wisdom. No central planning can match this people’s verdict in reflecting the here and now, or the future. That’s a people-power…