Blogging the democratic revolution
Turkish PM Tayyip Erdo????an visited Algeria this past week. Meeting with Algerian National Assembly Speaker Amar Saadani on Monday, Erdo????an met with president Bouteflika on Tuesday. After their three hour meeting, the two leaders announced an accord of “friendship and cooperation.” Erdo????an visited a veterans cemetery and the Algerian military museum, surveying artefacts from Algeria’s Ottoman period and praising Algeria’s veterans. “…..The heroes of the struggle for independence in Algeria are the best examples for today’s generations,” Erdo????an said. Erdo????an also made statements in relation to his county’s desired assencion into the European Union, sating that ???????If the EU is…
Celebrating democracy, with a great leader they voted for and won! You know what this means … I don’t have to explain a thing… Source: Reuters, via Yahoo!
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Colombia is headed for the polls today, and wonderful President Alvaro Uribe is likely to win in a landslide. He only needs to get past the 50-percentage point mark to avoide a runoff, and that’s likely to be a piece of cake for him. He’s got a 30-point lead in the polls over his nearest rivals. It’s not hard to see why. Uribe’s brought confidence, security and prosperity to Colombia, something it’s not seen in decades, something that looks so fresh, so beautiful, so different, so amazing … how could Colombians not pass up on such…
East Timor, with less than a million people, is like a small town, with small-town niceness … and small-town small-mindedness. It’s also coming off a 25-year populist guerrilla war for independence, meaning that there are a lot of unemployed soldiers and guerrillas around, without a purpose. The barely-developed half-island won its independence from Indonesia in a 1999 referendum that came about by fluke, when, in an unguarded moment, the loose-tongued, clownish Soeharto successor, BJ Habibie, said that if the Timorese really wanted a referendum, he’d darn well give it to them. It turns out they did. And independence, after decades…
Why is this man smiling? And why should we smile back? This may shock you, but he’s happily, shamelessly taking credit for the U.S. House and Senate votes on immigration this week. He didn’t have all that much to do with it, except a little and except that it was none of his business. Nevermind. We gotta smile back. Fox’s political party is reaping big from these immigration reform bills being hashed out in Washington. And Mexican elections are around the corner. With World Cup headed at us like a freight train in June, something that will stop all political…
Read this entire article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs. But if you don’t, then you should at least see the following, which is relevant. It is written by Jorge Castaneda, once Mexico’s foreign minister, regarding to two different lefts in Latin America. A TALE OF TWO LEFTS Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for…
Who is President Bush????????s favorite choice to become Secretary General of the United Nations? Look for the United States to support the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, to replace Kofi Annan when his term expires Dec. 31. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the President of Latvia, has a history that has taught her the importance of democracy and freedom. President Vike-Freiberga was born in Riga, Latvia in 1937. During World War II Latvia was occupied by the Russians, then the Germans, then again by the Russians, and then was forced to join the Soviet Union at the close of the war. After the…
Ibrahim Gambari is the man behind the scenes in Burma lately. He’s the undersecretary for political affairs over at the UN, and on a recent trip, he was actually allowed to meet with the leaders of the military junta. Even more, he was the first foreign diplomat in a very long time to meet with detained democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her jail time is supposed to be over on May 27th, at which point she would be thrust back onto the political scene. Will she be let out? Gambari offers us some clues as to what is…
I can????????t top Rob????????s pictures of the Montenegro celebrators, but the Montenegro vote for independence does have significance for Serbia and the Balkans over and above the beauty of their independence supporters. Everyone (including me), and especially the intelligence agencies in Europe, expected Serbia to turn over Ratko Mladic prior to the May 1 deadline issued by the EU. Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (CTFY) accused Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of misleading her by insisting a month ago that Mladic’s arrest was imminent. The failure of Serbia to capture and…
The SMCCDI has two reports on the protests underway in Iran here and here. Below, some photos of the demonstrations. In my next Iran-related post, I’ll write more in detail about these demonstrations.
Students are protesting in Iran, and according to this report, it’s against Iran’s nuke program. Some of it has turned violent. Police are blamed. GatewayPundit has the scoop, and a tremendous roundup of this big potential democracy revolution here.
It was Publius’ and Venezuela Today‘s scoop last May 10. Hugo Chavez has a new role in Hollywood, not as an Oliver-Stone conspiracy hero, but as a videogame villain. Apparently, he caught wind of our post because we were the only ones posting about it, and has now blown up, calling it a CIA conspiracy and all kinds of entertaining things that ensure his reason for being in the world videogame pantheon of villains. Enjoy this news here!
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…