Blogging the democratic revolution
Alan Garcia, probable winner, Peru presidency, and second-time lucky Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! … and his far-left Hugo-Chavez-style opponent, Ollanta Humala is trailing by about five percentage points. Assuming there are no surprises, this represents one of the greatest political comebacks of all time – the greatest comeback since …. Nixon. And it’s nothing to cry about either, we can be as happy as the people in the pictures, because although wilder things have happened in politics, it’s everyone’s victory this time. GOOD!!!!!!!!!!! Garcia savoring victory, happy he beat both Hugo Chavez & his own record Source: Reuters, via Yahoo!…
Hong Kongers hold a vigil to remember young people who died at Tiananmen Square in the name of seeking liberty for China. Source: Associated Press, via Yahoo! In Hong Kong, tens of thousands of people – some 44,000 – commemorated the 17th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre in China. Even more bravely, some people in China came out to march in Tiananmen itself to commemorate the anniversary. Their signs were torn up by Beijing cops and they were promptly repressed. This commemoration was for one of the most significant democracy struggles of our times. And based on the growing…
Communism or capitalism? It sounds a little stark, but it might come down to that. Today’s the second and final round of Peru’s election for president and Peruvians today are heading to the polls. Peru’s presidential ballotSource: UPI, via El Comercio Peruvians voting in the Inca city of Cuzco Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! They will decide whether to choose Alan Garcia, a former president, or Ollanta Humala, a cashiered ex-army officer, as their next president. Alan Garcia after casting his ballot Source: AFP, via Yahoo! The former, Alan Garcia, is a failed leftist ex-president from the 1980s who says he’s…
Today’s the Big One, Peru goes to the polls today. I’ll have something up on that in a minute but here is an important background topic I post as a sidebar: Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s political meddling in Peru during its election. At times, it’s been the central issue of the entire Peruvian campaign in the second round. Meddling is such a vague term. If a foreign leader expresses preference for a certain candidate in another country’s election, I don’t exactly consider it major meddling – I consider it really just dumb. After all, voters do not have to heed…
I visited Yaracuy, Venezuela, a few months ago. It’s an agricultural state famous for its sugar and it looks like this: A Yaracuy sugar farm But the atmosphere was tense everywhere, for land wars were going on, and people were getting their farms confiscated. That wasn’t the only fear. Every day, I witnessed people worrying about kidnappers grabbing them for ransom. Farmers cellphoned their wives every few hours from the fields and the pickup trucks to assure them so that they didn’t worry. Everyone tried to keep a low profile because fear reigned the day. Still, the fear of the…
It’s happening in three countries of the Americas, simultaneously at this very moment: Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In at least two of the three cases, Venezuela and Bolivia, there’s a rapidly building case for civil war as productive land owners seek to defend their life’s work from the Mugabization of it all into smoking ruins. Bloodshed will follow. Land wars are nothing new in Latin America but they haven’t happened in about two decades, so this is a negative new development powerfully signalling a spread of tyranny. In every land war, a dictator seeks to destroy the very concept of…
The Big One, Peru, is ahead tomorrow. Will it a Chavez pawn take power in Peru? Voters go to the polls about it in just a few hours… Boz has the last and latest polls on that, and more polls from around the Americas in this key election year. Go see if Hugo Chavez really is a goner in Peru or not. Boz has got it here.
President Putin might want to watch out! A colored revolution may be brewing in his own backyard, as the protest babes advance on him. This babe, who represents the most decadent kind of freedom (my favorite kind), is setting up a youth group as an alternative to the many pro-government ones set up over the past few years. Serious threat or publicity play? You decide. All I know is if I were a male Russian teenager, I’d be rushing to join this club. RUSSIA’S most famous party girl has formed a political youth movement that could undermine one of her…
Elections to the lower house of the Czech Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, begin at 2:00 PM on June 2 and end at 2:00 PM on June 3. The Chamber of Deputies is the more important part of the bicameral Czech Parliament. The Chamber of Deputies has 200 members, elected for four year terms. A party needs 5% of the vote to be represented in the government. In the election four years ago the Czech Social Democratic Party (center-left) received 30.2% of the votes and they currently hold 70 seats, the Civic Democratic Party (center-right) received 24.5% and hold 58…
Nazanin, a 17-year-old Iranian girl, who was attacked by an Iranian rapist thug in a Tehran park as her weaselly, masculinity-challenged ‘boyfriend’ ran away, was left to defend herself with a small knife, and in the course of that act, accidentally killed the vile bastard, who is now in hell where he belongs. But that wasn’t enough for Iran’s mullahs. Showing the depth of their ethics, they insisted that SHE, the helpless teenager, was the real criminal, and Iranian society could simply not exist in its current form if Iranian rapists were not allowed to do as they wished to…
Whenever Sandalistas gather in Caracas, the net result is a grotesque orgy of consumption, where leftwing political tourist after leftwing political tourist buys up Che t-shirts, Hugo Chavez barbie dolls, hippie bracelets, Castro bumper stickers, tapes of Chavez’s speeches, pot-leaf ski caps, fake Birkenstocks, Hugo-Chavez coffee cups, hammer and sickle posters, Allende backpacks and anything else the exporting merchants of capitalist China can dream up, sure these suckers will buy, mom’s credit card or not. These vast Sandalista bacchanals help these leftists feel good about themselves as they consume away like Roman epicures – amid the sea of quietly piled-high…
This hardly has to be said… but here’s another example of fanatical Islamists going nuts over humor. It’s just like the Danish cartoon controversy. Someone does a parody and suddenly hundreds of people are out on the streets causing trouble! The usual suspect, Hezbollah, is behind the latest street rioting in Lebanon, where a television station broadcasted a mock of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and they apparently got peeved. BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) – Hundreds of Shiite Muslims enraged by a TV comedy that mocked the leader of Hezbollah took to the streets of southern Beirut on Thursday night, burning car…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez addressing OPEC this morning Source: Associated Press, via Yahoo! OPEC is holding its quarterly meeting in Caracas right now and sure enough, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his new best-friends-forever in the Iranian regime have sought hard to cut oil production to drive up prices and stick it to the Americans. That’s gone over like tar sands in the Hummer tank among the OPEC heavies, and these nations, mostly Arabs, who KNOW what the oil cycle is like, and who know that $70 a barrel oil is always a prelude to $8 a barrel oil, have…
No more than three days ago, I wrote: On the political level, despite all of the killings, things have chugged along slowly but surely. Of these developments, however, the most interesting and perhaps the most important has always been the breakdown of the Shiite alliance as each party pursues its own interests in the new Iraq. Up until now it has always been simply on the political level, with parties haggling over minister portfolios and nominations. Now the politics have converged with the violence. With the tough issues coming to the forefront, such as disarming sectarian militias, distribution of oil…
In all the societies of the Arab world in which there has been a serious push for democratic reform, success has been mixed, but in none of them has it turned out so disastrously as in Palestine. Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza last summer and the Palestinian elections earlier this year brought to power the Islamist terrorist movement Hamas, and result which was greeted with wide dismay in the free world. What was less noted was that the favored Fatah, the secular nationalist party of the late Yasser Arafat, is also terrorist. It has maintained its own terrorist wing, the…
Vietnam is the latest in a string of countries to negotiate a trade pact and open up its markets to U.S. companies: Vietnam and the United States have signed a new trade deal which will open the Southeast Asian country’s markets in virtually every sector. It paves the way for Vietnam to enter the World Trade Organisation this year, 11 years after it began applying. Vietnamese officials want to finish talks with the Geneva-based WTO in July. The new agreement is the latest in a series of business deals and diplomatic steps by Hanoi to integrate its fast-expanding economy into…
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States embarked on a mission to assist the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries to establish democracies. The US saw as a key factor in establishing democracies that the emerging nations go through a period of transitional justice. One of the keys to transitional justice was to encourage these new nations and their governments to adhere to the rule of law. The Department of State spends billions of dollars on programs and training to encourage the rule of law, and many embassies have personnel assigned as Rule of Law Coordinators.…
From the news: PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia (AP)–The Nonaligned Movement, the world’s biggest bloc after the U.N., emphatically backed Iran Tuesday in its nuclear standoff with the U.S., and condemned Israel for occupying Palestinian lands. Meeting in Malaysia’s administrative capital, the foreign ministers of NAM member nations also demanded that Israel accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty without delay and open its nuclear facilities to international inspection. On Iran, the ministers “re-affirmed the basic and inalienable right” of all countries to develop, produce and use atomic energy “for peaceful purposes, without any discrimination and in conformity with their respective legal obligations,” said…
Fifteen years ago pro-democracy activists in Russia tore down a statue in front of the Moscow KGB Headquarters. The statue was a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the predecessor agency of the KGB. Back in 2002 the mayor of Moscow suggested that the statue be restored, which caused an uproar, and even the former KGB official, and President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was opposed to the restoration. Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, was responsible for mass arrests, brutality and thousands of executions. Once, when discussing the type of person he was looking for to work…
I don’t know exactly why but this manic photo caption by Castro-regime Cuban boat refugee Charlie Bravo at KillCastro absolutely cracks me up every time I read it. See what you think here.
The road to forming a new Iraqi government, from the elections in December last year to its actual formation no more than a week ago, splintering between the country’s different ethnic and religious groups has been everyone’s concern. Sunnis attacking Shiites, and vice versa. Even with the end of the insurgency, the development of death squads supplied by Iran have continued the extra-judicial killings. On the political level, despite all of the killings, things have chugged along slowly but surely. Of these developments, however, the most interesting and perhaps the most important has always been the breakdown of the Shiite…
Twenty-four years ago, June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan spoke to the British House of Commons. In that speech President Reagan said, in part, the following: We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention — totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have…
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! I never thought I would utter such words. A long time ago, Alan Garcia was Peru’s pain-in-the-ass leftwing president, from 1980-1985. He was only 35 then, and apparently not the same person he is now. He’s grown up. And he’s turned his spectacular talent to be a pain-in-the-ass to the guy it belongs on: Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Garcia’s reading Hugo Chavez precisely in bullseye language that resonates with Peruvians … and with me. He’s telling Hugo Chavez to his face exactly what a creepy tinpot dictator he is, which is something Chavez needs to hear.…
Polls have closed at 3 p.m. today. These elections were to elect governors of several Italian provinces,city councils and a regione, Sicily. First exit polls ( be cautious, we may recall how they were dead wrong in the recent political elections in Italy) are like the following: Election for the governor of Sicily: Salvatore Cuffaro ( Democratic Christian Union of the Center, center-right) 53,1 % , Rita Borsellino ( center-left ) 42,2. Source: Ansa. Election for the City Council of Milan: Letizia Moratti (center-right) 49-51% , Bruno Ferrante (center-left) 48-50% . Still too close to call. I expect Moratti to…