Blogging the democratic revolution
As the release of the Mehlis report edges closer, Bashar is beginning the process of elimination. That is, of those who would implicate his goverment. Ghazi Kanaan, the Syrian interior minister, has been found dead in his office with a bullet in his mouth. President Assad’s Interior Minister General Ghazi Kanaan, who ruled Lebanon for years as Syria’s military intelligence chief, committed suicide Wednesday a few days ahead of the expected release of a U.N. report into the assassination of ex-Premier Rafik Hariri. He was 63. Kanaan’s Aide-de-Camp Brigadier Walid Abaza told the Agence France Presse that Kanaan shot himself…
Given its terrible wars and fearsome rebel groups, you might not think anything good could come out of Liberia. And, you would be wrong. Liberia has held its first successful free and fair elections this week. Long live the democratic revolution! Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has a full roundup and video well worth seeing here.
Eduardo Avila at Barrio Flores has a Bolivian blog news roundup for the week at Global Voices with a good variety of posts. Read it here.
The weakest link in the CAFTA system has, bigtime, ratified CAFTA! This is a body blow to Daniel Ortega and all his Marxist thugs! They fought with all their strength and dirty tricks to oppose this. This ratification is tremendous news. Democracy has won big in battered Nicaragua against all odds. Daniel Ortega has been handed yet another People’s Revolution of defeat. Victorious Nicaragua will get used to being a rich country now, faithful in the power of free markets to make people free. iVIVA NICARAGUA! UPDATE: Oooh, this was a hard blow – the screaming and yelling from the…
Amid a huge hullabaloo first reported by blogger Daniel Duquenal here and here, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela offered to finance a Brazilian samba school to dance in his honor. But being Hugo Chavez, he suddenly … didn’t come up with the pledge money. This, despite, the Brazilian school’s efforts to accomodate him, to print up programs, and incur all sorts of expenses to make that happen. Chavez stiffed them, buying lots of ‘goodwill’ for his fake revolution as word of that gets out. He’s not gonna be popular among the samberos. Gustavo Coronel tells the whole exclusive story here.
Venezuela’s oil, however you think it should be allocated, belongs to Venezuela. But that’s not how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez sees it. He’s now on the verge of appointing a hardcore German Marxist who had and maybe still has ties to the Baaden Meinhof terrorrists to lead Venezuela’s oil company. Not unreasonably, Alek, who is Venezuelan, views this as an unusually brazen sort of treason. In Hugo Chavez’s revolution, ideology is much more important than citizenship. It’s essentially an Sandalista idea and part of a vast phony revolution that he’s been promoting with the ultimate aim of making Venezuela a…
Today the Marxist FARC guerrillas of Colombia attempted to murder a close senatorial ally of President Alvaro Uribe with a car bomb. They have tried for years to kill Uribe, probably hundreds of times, but the popular president’s security is too tight. So this time, the detested Marxists went after his allies. It was the first car-bomb attack in Colombia in a couple of years, and only for one reason: President Uribe has rounded up vast numbers of the terrrorists and put them in jail where they belong. But he’s not done yet and there are still a few lurking…
The Iraqis have worked out a very good deal amongst themselves. So good, in fact, that one key Sunni group is dropping its opposition to the constitution. The deal would allow the December parliament to make amendments to the constitution, in which Sunnis and liberal secularists will have a much higher representation and voice than the currently Kurdish and religious Shiite dominated parliament. It also works out some other key issues. BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi leaders reached a breakthrough deal on last minute changes in the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would reverse its…
This week’s carnival of revolutions is up! It’s very interesting this week because all of the worldwide developments are related back to Armenia, another country looking for proper democracy. It gives a special insight into that country in the context of democracy at large.
I was sitting in a shisha bar with some friends the other night, and soon enough I was talking with my friend from Lebanon about the Mehlis report, the implications for Syria, and what will happen to President Lahoud. He is a Christian and a supporter of General Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and went out on the streets during the Cedar Revolution, so the topic always incites him (which is fine with me, who else am I going to discuss Lebanese politics with?). It was fun because I hadn’t written much about goings on there of late, and in particular,…
Harry Hutton lived through it here. The revolutionary courage of Colombians still blazes like an emerald.
For all those who imagine that ‘land reform’ based on the confiscation of private property yields anything but Zimbabwe, Miguel Octavio has a sad news item describing how confiscated land in Venezuela’s western Zulia state a couple years ago has since gone from productive to fallow, the inevitable end-product of socialist redistribution. It’s something nations that have experienced communism already know. Read it here.
To read some of the news, one might think the U.S. is the only place affected by the rise in world energy prices. After all, we are the world’s largest energy consumer (no value judgment, I add) and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez often makes anti-U.S. statements expressly for the purpose of driving up prices, something he can benefit from. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Zarkawi, bin Laden, and other terrorists expressly target U.S. economic interests in a bid to wage economic warfare on us. Usually that means attacks on critical energy supply. Sometimes they gain small victories. Europe has diversified…
The news announced over the weekend that Venezuela was seeking to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, just happened to coincide with Pat Robertson’s claims (which were in the news months ago) that Venezuela is cozying up to Iran for nuclear purposes. (We know, Pat.) Francisco Toro has some very interesting thoughts about this baffling trend that seems to kind of skim over our US-American eyes, given that Hugo Chavez here is largely viewed as a clown (and therefore ineffective) – along with some pointed observations about where this all is headed. Read the whole thing here and here. Aleksander Boyd…
I’ll be in New York City this weekend. If you feel so inclined, maybe shoot me off an email and we can meet up for coffee while I’m there.
I’ve been re-reading a few passages from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s excellent book about the debilitating myths frequently found in Latin America that harm its development. The book is called ‘The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.’ It has whole chapters on entitlement, Castro worship, liberation theology, nationalism, poverty, blaming the gringos, consorting with Sandalistas, and other useless, unconstructive things. Today I found something in the Cuban state press about Argentina that so haunted me I thought I would share it here. Argentina is blaming its shopkeepers for inflation, the mighty bete noire…
I think property rights is rapidly emerging as a central revolution of our time in many areas. It touches even the United States, as the Kelo case demonstrates. Private property is the one thing communist regimes oppose. It’s also the key to freedom and the only basis for rule of law. And what a coincidence, in the countries where there are the biggest fault lines on property rights, a communist regime is somewhere in the background, be it China or Venezuela. Via Fiscal Study (a great blog), linking Global Voices, and also via Simon World, a very important Chinese blog…
Singapore threw into jail a couple of ethnic Chinese Internet posters who wrote derogatory remarks about their Malay countrymen. As I wrote here, this kind of thing goes on all the time, and I’ve seen it myself. But this time, the Singaporean government cracked down, swiftly and surely laying down its brand of justice, something that may have a chilling effect on Internet freedom. The Internet is one of the few places where one can feel free in taut neat Singapore. For a country so obsessed with its international ‘competitiveness’ it doesn’t look auspicious. But a look at the government’s…
Via Real Clear Politics, the Washington Post has an astounding article about a young rock band in Indonesia that is defying the vicious local Islamofascists by singing innovative songs against Jihad terrorism. Every time the terrorists threaten to blow them up, the youthful band comes up with a new song, calling it their next new ‘smart bomb’ aimed at the Islamists. They are literally defying death by singing songs condemning terrorism. And they just keep doing it. There are signs that this group is changing Indonesia, a nation that is full of intelligent, interesting young people who have no interest…
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty has several long pieces regarding the war on terror following President Bush’s speech. Read them: – Four years later, no clear winners in the war on terror – Who is the enemy, and how is it changing? – Can West fight terror and still maintain civil liberties? – Global war on terror faces government with unique enemy
Thousands of people are being arrested, demolotions continue, inflation is skyrocketing, and there are even rumors of a military coup as even the army isn’t receiving food and pay crucial to their loyalty to Mugabe. This is Zimbabwe today. D.B. Light rounds it up.
I knew of the hunger strike of two Cuban ’75’ dissidents in Fidel Castro’s prisons but had very little information about Castro’s actual GULag at Guantanamo, and the conditions of which that led to the drastic hunger strike. Today, Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady has done a great public service by publicizing this terrifying communist dungeon that stands alongside what she calls, in comparison, the ‘tropical resort’ of the U.S. Guantanamo terrorist prison that has been subject to such international reproach. On the human rights violations that are occurring at Castro’s Guantanamo, the media and international left are utterly…
Andy Young has a good post on Russia’s closed cities, in which over 2 million people are sealed off from the world.
Miguel Buitrago of the excellent MABB blog has a fascinating post on the different political party programs of the candidates for Bolivia’s elections. He lines them all up side by side, helpfully laid out in bullet points. Read the whole thing here. My own analysis on one detail: Take a good look at the hard-left plan of action for the Evo Morales MAS program – and then notice the packaging – it bears all the earmarks of U.S.-based Sandalista organizations for its otherwise communistic program. Twenty years ago, did leftists package their collective farms and forced indoctrinations as ‘microenterprise’? Try…
Why does Chavez remain popular? Here’s a frank and intelligent discussion of the matter in terms even I can relate to here.