Blogging the democratic revolution
PostGlobal hosted by the Washington Post poses a question for its readers that I think many here would find interesting to discuss: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has said bread is more important than democracy, and he may be preparing to try to dissolve the Hamas-led Palestinian parliment. Does a leader have a right to bypass democratic institutions to ensure his people are fed and secure? What we see now in the Palestinian Territories has been long coming ever since Hamas won the parliamentary election last year. Every attempt has been made — from cutting off funding to airstrikes to internal…
Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov are a pair of Russian artists who produce work such as the image above under the name ???????Dark-blue Noses??????? (???????????????????? ?????????????????). They have represented Russia at the Venice Biennale and shown widely in Russia and internationally. The Matthew Bown Gallery of London scheduled a show of their work for November 9th through December 2nd and last week the gallery????????s owner, Matthew Bown, traveled to Moscow to meet with the artists and select works for the exhibition. When he appeared at the Moscow International Airport last Friday with the above image in his possession (as well…
Amid escalated confrontation with Russia and no perspective of things getting better there Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is apparently trying to guarantee himself and his ruling United National Movement (UNM) from surprises due to a possible Moscow involvement. Saakashvili asked the parliament to cut his term by several months and hold parliamentary and presidential elections simultaneously early in 2008. By uniting two election campaigns Saakashvili, who????????s widely expected to stay for the next term, hopes to help his party win a clear majority in the parliament while his popularity will be still high. This is exactly what the opposition doesn????????t…
Under Ceausescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej regime (Dej was the political mentor of Ceausescu) 250,000 Jews have been sold by Romania. The German ethnics who held the Romanian citizenship were also sold to the West Germany. Aside from the financial transaction, Ceausescu asked Israel to smooth the relations of Romania with the United States. This is just one more despicable act of the Romanian communists. Israel paid cash for the Jews who wanted to leave Romania, but also with technology and by lobbying in Ceausescu????????s favor in Washington DC. After 1967, Romania was the only communist country who did not…
The Culebra Cut stretch of the 50-mile Panama Canal Source: AFP Getty, via Houston Chronicle Panama’s great referendum on expanding the mighty Panama Canal, to accomodate two times’ as much ship traffic, is taking place today. 1.7 million Panamanians are registered to vote on the $5.3 billion upgrade, essentially a bond project to be financed with crossing fees. Local muni-bond initiative as is, it will affect billions of people around the world. Some 70% of Panamanians are polled to favor it ahead of the vote. Panamanian babes pass a sign urging passage of the Canal referendum Source: AFP Getty, via…
What would a ‘colligation’ of all the free-market blogs in Latin America look like? As one big blog coming in from a feed? Luis Afonso Assumpcao of Swimming Against The Red Tide wanted to find out, so he set up an interesting new blog, compiling all the thoughts coming in from Miami Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and the rest of the region where longing for free markets is growing. As Hugo Chavez’s crazed empire shows high signs of meltdown, and rightwinger after rightwinger gets elected president throughout Latin America, libertarianism is an idea that is growing in importance through Latin…
Israeli President Moshe Katsav is currently facing charges for rape. Recently, an Israeli diplomatic delegation including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. An article from the Russian newspaper Kommersant quoted Putin as follows, speaking to the group: “?????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????! ???????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????! ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????! ???? ???????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????????? ????????? ????????????????! ???????? ???????????? ????????????????? ????????????????????????! ????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????????????????????????????????!” In a New York Times story, this remark is characterized as “flippant” and reported as follows: According to journalists and officials in the room and published accounts by Agence France-Presse late Wednesday and Kommersant…
Ranks are beginning to close on the question of Vladimir Putin????????s Russia in the West????????s pro-democracy circles. The question is no longer whether action is required but rather what action, how and when. Last week, Publius Pundit documented the importance of two watershed events in Russia, the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the onset of a Russian pogrom against Georgian children in Russia, in signaling a sea change in the country????????s political course. On the same day we published, the respected pro-liberty think tank CATO Institute announced that it was creating a new Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity…
The first Congress of the Independent Libraries organized by the Assembly to Promote Civil Society is underway across Cuba, and despite the brutal repression the librarians are facing. The Assembly to Promote the Civil Society is civil society coalition of 365 Cuban opposition movements that fight peacefully for democratic and regime change in the island. From Octuber 10, 2006, to February 2007, a meeting of the 152 independent libraries is taking place in numerous Cuban towns and cities. They are informing the population about the goals of the civil desobedience and non-cooperation campaigns named ???????Yo no coopero, yo si quiero…
StJacques over at Free Republic has translated a fabulous Chilean editorial from El Mercurio blasting the Venezuelan dictator as dangerous for Chile’s interests, right on the heels of Mexico’s blast at Chavez for his ego. Read it here.
They’re on something like Round 28 at the United Nations for the Security Council seat and pretty much getting nowhere. The deadlock continues to show the same wretched numbers, with Hugo Chavez at about 78 votes and Guatemala at about 108 votes, more or less. Same old score, round after round. Mexico, however, as it often does, said just the right thing, telling Chavez to throw in the towel, it was sick of his shenanigans, trying to hold the UN hostage over its little proxy games it claims to play with the U.S., when in reality, Venezuela’s contest is with…
Aman Imani, an Iranian writing for The American Thinker, has an amazingly interesting article about just what Iran’s freedom fighters are facing as they stand down the mullahs – a parasitic class that feeds off of their society and demands to be king or kingmakers. It’s full of good local details and enlightens us about just how tough the task is of reforming Iran. It’s well worth reading here.
The mighty Panama Canal route links trade between 2 huge oceans Source: The Financial Times Tiny little Panama, a jungly nation with a population only as big as Singapore’s, is about to do something spectacularly great for the entire world on Sunday. This itty bitty state has a masterplan to shower friendship and prosperity to huge swathes of the world, north and south and east and west, doing more for the cause of peace and unity than just about any other nation on earth. The world is going to be different after Sunday. On Sunday, Panama’s voters among its 4…
Louis Goodman over the the Foreign Policy blog takes a look at this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize, and discovers that the prizes for less science-centric, more socio-culture specific areas are going to people from the developing world. At first glance, this year’s crop of Nobel prizes came out quite nicely for the United States. Americans, after all, swept the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. But a closer look suggests room for improvement. Americans dominate in the “easy” sciences????????fields where it is comparatively less difficult to establish consensus????????but lag in the arguably more complex realms of advancing…
I thought that headline might grab your attention. Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, said something that reminded me of an idea that I was pondering about a year ago but never followed up on. RFE/RL: Professor Fukuyama, some of your critics say that your ideas about the primacy of liberal democracy created a climate suitable for the self-assured behavior of the U.S. government in world affairs. Do you feel responsible to any extent for this? Fukuyama: Well, no. I think that the Bush administration, to the extent that they thought they were using…
Between them, Russia and China account for 17% of the world????????s territory (roughly 26 million square miles out of about 150 million total) and nearly 25% of its population (almost 1.5 billion people out of over 6 billion total). Yet, the two countries only account for 7% of the world????????s nominal economy ($3 trillion out of $44.5 trillion). True, they account for 17% of the world????????s economy adjusted for ???????purchasing power parity??????? ($10.5 trillion out of $60.7 trillion), but even here their share of wealth lags far behind their share of the population, and the idea of ???????purchasing power parity???????…
All the oil money in the world can’t help him now! Chavez pulled out all the stops to get a rotating seat on the United Nation Security Council, all in the name of challenging U.S. imperialism. Oil contracts with China, bond buyouts from Argentina, subsidized energy all over the world. Billions of dollars in political influence flushed down the toilet, being lost to U.S.-backed Guatamala, who never raised a peep during the whole affair. This is what a real vote looks like — something Chavez hates — so imagine how much he can’t stand democracy now! So far it looks…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is losing his UN Security Council bid badly. Now Chile has come out and said it won’t vote for him, but will abstain through the first round. Socialist Chile was one Chavez insisted he had in the bag. Well, he no longer does. The UN goes to the vote tomorrow and will have the results around 12:00 p.m. Eastern, so this contest for the fate of the free world’s democracies versus the world’s worst tyrannies won’t be long. Venezuela Today is up again and has the whole roundup here. UPDATE: As the vote goes on, Fox…
An Andean woman casts a ballot outside Quito today Source: Associated Press, via Houston Chronicle Ecuador’s beautiful women wait in line to vote Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News I am in shock. I was so depressed about the electoral prospects of Ecuador, where a Chavista prettyboy, Rafael Correa, was leading all polls, that I had trouble blogging. The guy was total Chavista and not only that, he was gross in a way only Ecuadorean politicians can be. You know, like El Loco. He actually went walking around taking his belt off, and cracking it against anything he could find, saying…
Is there any greater freedom than to be a bozo? That’s the way it seems with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain. He really, really, really hates the U.S. He hates it with a loathing that would challenge Hugo Chavez. He kicked the U.S. out of the Columbus Day parade in Spain a few years ago and invited in Cuba instead. Columbus Day – which in Spain is National Day – is a big deal there. Then in another incident, Zapatero pointedly refused to stand for the passage of the U.S. flag at a parade. “Why should…
David Sasaki has an interesting post on “The Freedom of Familiarity” — or alternatively, the slavery of choice. He discusses the boundaries of freedom of choice, such that there is some point that so many alternative choices are available that either a person cannot simply settle on one thing or he may simply never be able to decide. The context in which he writes this is a very familiar scene: going to the cafe to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee. There are three cafes here in Caracas where I have my morning coffee, palmera or cachito…
Ecuador goes to the polls this weekend and Nicaragua and Brazil are white-hot races. Boz has all the latest polls – including updates on Bolivia and Peru – plus links to many good analyses, it’s content-filled on key issues and one of his best. Well worth reading here. Not sure what he’s talking about with his first Nicaragua item, though!!!
Protesting Hugo Chavez in Washington on Friday Source: Gustavo Coronel, at Venezuela Today Today, hundreds of angry Brazilians, angry Bolivians, angry Chileans, angry Cubans, angry Ecuadoreans, angry Mexicans, angry Nicaraguans, angry Peruvians, angry Salvadorans, angry Colombians, angry Argentines and others gathered at the Organization of American States to protest the international political meddling of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez against their countries. Chavez seems to think he has a sayso in the affairs of every single country in the region. Turnout for the short notice rally was very good. Here is the original flyer and I’m gonna get photos… El Universal…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls it just spreadin’ revolution. The rest of the hemisphere has a plainer word for what he’s up to: Meddling. And ohhh, he’s been out meddling! Nobody in the history of the Americas, including the U.S., has been ever accused of meddling so often from so many places as he has. In so short a period of time! Just look at today’s morning edition of El Universal, the main newspaper in Caracas, which has a string of meddlings described. Baduel: Military bases are for Bolivian troops Salvadorian Gov’t to investigate Venezuela’s meddling into internal affairs Ch????vez…
Apparently, an anarchic landmass with a nuclear weapon. I feel like this post should have been written back in 2002 when it was revealed that North Korea was working on a nuclear weapons system. The end result seemed inevitable even then. With thousands of pounds of artillery armed just miles from Seoul and the prospect of mushroom-cloud catastrophe just about anywhere, Kim Jong-Il had everyone blackmailed. He was going to get what he wanted no matter what and nobody had the balls to stop him. But really, there is only so much the United States can do short of invasion…