Blogging the democratic revolution
The Miami Cuban community is often maligned as a bunch of “older Cuban men” who’ve not been able to get over the loss of their “stuff” from the thieving and murderous reign of Fidel Castro. They are portrayed as troglodytes, fanatically rightwing, living in the past, playing dominoes, recalling the good old days, sexist and totally irrelevant. Definitely not the “in” crowd to such “cognoscenti” who dismiss them. Well, Miami Cubans have a way of throwing those stereotypes right back in the faces of their accusers, who are often U.S. leftist ignoramuses with no understanding of the Cuban-American experience, no…
The Amir of Kuwait, Amir Sabah al-Ahmad, has dissolved the Kuwait parliament with new elections set for June 29 (the constitution requires that they be held within two months). This follows a week of intense conflict unprecedented in Kuwaiti history brought about in response to a government proposal to limit the number of voting districts from 25 to five. Opposition members of parliament – formal parties are not allowed under the Kuwaiti system – are protesting because, they allege, the new system will allow the government to redraw the boundaries in a way that hugely favors a minority of the…
I have dreaded this topic, because I hate the revolting Jimmy Carter more than anything. The only good thing Jimmy Carter did was give back the Panama Canal and make me a flaming Reagan Revolutionary. In other words, he’s a perfect example of a stopped clock being right exactly twice a day. Everything else Carter ever did was not only bad, it was PROFOUNDLY bad. He’s a textbook example of what not, what never, to do. That’s why his Carter Center’s coming back into the news is so utterly repellent. But come back he is. He’s sent his emissaries back…
Economist Steve Hanke has a brilliant essay in today’s Wall Street Journal on his experience and knowledge of Montenegro. Professor Hanke is one of the most important sources of reliable information on the country’s progress and very knowledgeable about the leadership of the country. Notice that recurring theme of currency turmoil that has begun to recur in the Fareed Zakaria essay on populism and on the Pedro Camargo Ecuador essay – it is the very same story, in spades, in Montenegro. Currency devaluation and economic mismanagement are as good triggers as any for independence and democratic revolution. For Montenegro, the…
Nutsy leftwing conspiracy-theory-loving Hollywood director Oliver Stone repudiated Hugo Chavez’s claim that Stone would be making a movie, all about him. And that’s not surprising. Stone is trying to go mainstream in the U.S. film scene, cranking out a watchable, straightforward, decent portrayal of 9/11 cops in his upcoming World Trade Center movie, which is probably well worth seeing when it arrives in August. Even if it were a crappy movie, I’d go see it anyway, based on Stone’s public repudiation of the brutal Venezuelan dictator this week. That stung Chavez hard, in a way the dictator didn’t expect. After…
Peru held important presidential debates this weekend, which seemed to show lightly socialist Alan Garcia holding his ground against Chavista favorite Ollanta Humala. Garcia currently has about a 13 percentage point lead. Alvicho at Off Topic has an excellent roundup of all the blog and other news sources on this landmark debate, to give you a feel for how it all went and what it means here.
Dear old Gus Dur of Indonesia is the one of the best Muslims I have ever known. He’s a holy man whose life of prayer reflects vividly in the life he leads. He is humble, gentle, kindly and noble. I used to talk to him back in Jakarta, years ago, before he became Indonesia’s first democratically elected president as Abdurrahman Wahid. Gus Dur is his Javanese nickname and he was the leader of the PKB party in the post-Soeharto ruins, and with Amien Rais of the more Islamic-fundamentalist Muhammadiyah/PAN faction, and Megawati Soekarnoputri of the very secular, abangan, ecumenical PDI-P,…
So goes the apocryphal “chutzpah” story of the man who was put on trial for killing his parents and asked the judge to show him some mercy for being an orphan. Such also is the world of Chavistas who get caught with their hands in the till. Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles has a short “stomach turner” on a local Chavista official, who ripped off the state coffers bigtime, and then after he was caught, started hollering political persecution – using the very language of political dissidents. Francisco says this is not only infuriating but downright dangerous for the real…
Ahead of December’s presidential elections, Venezuelans don’t have many avenues within their own government to plead for free and fair elections. Political power is consolidated into the hands of a single party, and what’s more, that one party is very closely aligned to the ideals of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who has not allowed a free and fair election in Cuba in 47 years. As a matter of fact, Castro’s operatives taken over many operations of the Venezuelan government, without even a smokescreen of “assistance,” but just as pure undisguised control. What’s at stake in this December vote is Hugo…
Confederate Yankee posts an interesting statement originating from Hezbollah in Lebanon, and looks at what it might mean. “Hizbollah is not a tool of Iran, it is a Lebanese project that implements the demands of Lebanese,” Kassem said in an interview in the Hizbollah-controlled southern suburb of Beirut. “Iran is a big country with real capabilities and can defend itself if it is exposed to American danger.” He believes that 1) “Hezbollah has reason to believe that a conflict between Iran and Israel is a near term possibility.” And 2) “Hezbollah believes that the conflict will be of sufficient magnitude…
A quote from Michael Totten’s latest dispatch from Ramallah: ???????What do you think about the prospects for peace now that Hamas won???????? I said. ???????The Israelis have an opportunity,??????? he said. ???????A piece of the puzzle was missing before. Permanent peace must have the signature of the Islamists. Now the Israelis can get it.??????? The Israelis can get it if the Islamists will give it, and if they will give it sincerely. That doesn????????t look even remotely likely any time soon. I asked Yossi Klein Halevi if it was even possible to be optimistic under the circumstances. He said ???????I????????m…
Montenegro is no longer the suffix of Serbia. With an overwhelming turnout, just over the required 55% needed votes were cast in favor of independence, making it the last country to break away from the core of what once was Yugoslavia. There are a lot of issues here. Will the Serbian unionists fight back? Can a state so small defend itself an build a proper economy? What about EU membership? These are the questions that will be answered in the coming days, months, and years. So I will not bother with them now. It will come. Peaceful self-determination is a…
For a dictator, the truth hurts, and that includes what’s written on the Internet. Killcastro at the Killcastro blog is a computer wizard more than a little familiar with the tactics of hackers and cyberattacks, and he’s always alert to trouble from the dictator Havana. He got one this week from a group that appeared to be from the U.S., but when he probed it a little further, found its base in Havana, Cuba. It was at a location near Hotel El Nacional, a ritzy place in Havana, where the G-2, Cuba’s secret police, are known to have haunts. I…
I got a call from Beijing, Red China earlier this week from a friend who lives there. He told me he saw a growing willingness of the people from the outer cities to challenge the authorities. He also saw a growing willingness in the authorities to repress such people. The cops, he said, had it down to an art. He was in downtown Beijing on other business this month when he happened upon a large group of protestors, maybe 100 people, holding banners, passing out fliers and demanding justice for their dead killed in a police massacre last year in…
That’s the analysis of Academic Elephant in this well-thought out essay on how we should think about the growing power of the Fidel Castro regime. Should the U.S. lift a trade embargo on an increasingly aggressive regime, fortified by Venezuelan oil, like Cuba? Read the whole thought provoking thing here. And don’t miss Elephant’s special Contra Tyrannum feature, focused this week on Castro’s Cuba here or here.
This past week, the biggest and most economically critical city of all South America was beseiged by drug thugs from Brazil’s abysmal favelas. The ghetto barbarians, acting on orders from their leader, who’s somehow has a cellphone in jail, killed over 200 people, mostly cops. Imagine if New York City lost 200 cops in a week of drug violence? More ominous still, the violence wasn’t stopped by the cops or troops or anyone restoring order. It was stopped because the authorities made a deal with the thug called “Marcola” who had just got done killing 200 people, burning 80 buses…
Two big elections in the troubled Andean states in the next two weeks – Colombia and Peru. Will the voters go Chavista or seek something more economically viable? Will it be a lunge for the messiah-savior of leftwingery or a vote for reality? See what Boz has on the latest polls, as well as doings in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Brazil and others here.
Glenn has found an important source on the doings in Syria, the benighted sub-Axis-Of-Evil tyranny. Intellectuals of all stripes are being rounded up by Syrian goons in the heaviest crackdown on dissidents in years. First in line for government oppression are those who have criticized the Syrian involvement in Lebanon. One by one, name by name, they are disappeared. It’s believed that the international lull in attention of Syria’s role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is what’s emboldened the tyrants. That underscores the need to turn the heat up on Syria over its murderous practices.…
Via Real Clear Politics, I have found an exceptional essay by the excellent Fareed Zakaria on the problems Americans have perceiving the world’s vast move toward democratic revolution. Zakaria writes that Americans are pretty convinced that their country is the beacon of freedom. And with its visa lines and 12-million-strong illegal alien count, who is to argue with us? But he discusses how inside countries like Russia and Singapore, there really are a lot of people who support their existing governments, flaws and all. And part of the reason they do is that they have the memory of the world…
Looking out the window on an air flight to Miami, Ziva at Blog For Cuba can’t help but look over and across the vast blue Florida Strait for traces of all those thousands from Cuba who desperately tried to make their way to freedom, and died trying. Her haunting post is here.
In London, site of the cold-blooded Islamofascist train and bus bombings in 2005, terrorism is a serious subject. We already know that the London cops, having shot an innocent Brazilian in string of police errors, aren’t really up to the frightening task of countering such major-league terrorism, and the city is full of hundreds of thousands of home-grown Islamofascists and their imported mullahs who “love death.” What’s stunning is that, surrounded by real terrorists, the trivial mayor of this vulnerable city, should be so quick to label a Venezuelan blogger as a supporter of terrorism. We’ve never heard him go…
As part of a new, despot-pleasing goodie package, the European Union wants the United States to sell Iran new airplanes so that it can modernize its decades old fleet. They already fell for this once — back in 2005, the Bush administration signed an order allowing the U.S. to sell aircraft spare parts to the maligned regime as part of an earlier incentive design to halt uranium enrichment. Given that Presidenti Ahmadinejad has already refuted the offer before it has even been presented, doing such a thing wouldn’t make sense. The U.S. may not be officially at war with Iran,…
By Pedro Camargo Special to Publius Pundit De facto, Hugo Chavez is adding Ecuador to his growing roster of Bolivarian nations. He is close now with the final steps in place. Ecuador is following the Chavez nation-destroying playbook by ending its international trade and its own democracy. How did Chavez do this? Easy. He followed the Fidel Castro playbook. Harkening back to Napoleon????????s assault on Moscow, Chavez, as the Russian monarchy in the early 19th century knew, applied their best weapon: time and patience. Patience and time. In this case, time and patience has been propelled by oil profits out…
The discussion began here at Publius when A.M. Mora y Leon linked to a piece at the new Foreign Policy blog, commenting that whenever there are searches for sex material, the vast majority of them come from domain extensions that pertain to highly Islamist countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Just going through the top keywords in our statistics, “Iran”, “sexy”, and “women” are in the top ten. I’ve noticed that these words are generally used in the same search string. As good looking as Persian women are, they only seem to lose out in the search to one woman:…
Like a world-class military, Egypt’s judges are highly professional and technocratic — ardent defenders of the law. That’s why, over the past year, thousands of them have taken to defying the Mubarak regime which has, in turn, sought to corrupt and strangle the institution of the judiciary. They were prevented from overseeing the counting of the results during last year’s parliamentary and presidential elections. A Mubarak tool was chosen to oversee the case of opposition leader Ayman Nour. Two prominent judges were stripped of their immunities and put up for disciplinary hearings after correctly alleging that last year’s elections were…