Blogging the democratic revolution
Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States to meet with President Bush this week amid much fanfare. Undoubtedly any meeting between the leaders of these two countries will be historic. On the one hand you have a longtime military and economic superpower, and on the other you have a country that hopes to…
Like a beautiful woman who’s unaware she’s beautiful, free trade is the unconscious crowning glory of the George Bush presidential administration. The US Trade Representative’s Office has about 200 staff and pound for pound, packs more value for us taxpayers and the work of our government than probably any other office. Its tiny staff negotiates…
Over 40 bloggers have mulled and mused about German-American relations in a new carnival feature put together by the secret diplomats who once ran Daily Demarche, that late lamented cool blog that exposed the seamy underbelly of pinstripe diplomacy. German-U.S. relations are currently seen in a tattered state over the Iraq War, but Germany is…
Sunburnt and exhausted, I return from the biggest rally for immigrant rights in the history of Los Angeles. Five hundred thousand mostly Latino, mostly young, and mostly protest-babe-caliber people marched in the streets of This Proud Capital Of The Third World to demand a halt to various immigration control measures in Congress – like building…
Somewhat I feel vindicated. In August last year I posted an extremely thorough piece of investigative blogging regarding Smartmatic; the e-voting machines vendor, which owns Sequoia, that has proven so useful to Venezuela’s wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez. The recent e-voting fiasco in Chicago comes to prove the hypothesis that one thing is to observe how…
Glamorous Pamela over at Atlas Shrugs scored an amazing interview for her blog – an interview with UN horsewhipper John Bolton. She’s got the first two parts up and will get a third part up later. This goes to show the changing nature of blogging and how blogging is now beginning to supercede the news….
Bubba and Junior, some of the oilmen down in Lou’siana, are getting a little disgusted about a certain Senor Chavez of Venezuela, and it might just be about to affect bidness. Seems one of Citgo’s top suppliers, Evans Oil, is preparing to dump Venezuela as a supplier and move on to other sources of petroleum….
Take that, Hugo Chavez! Colombia has chosen freedom and prosperity over dependency, isolation and handouts! A free trade pact was signed this morning with the U.S.! It was one long hard tough slog in negotiations, but President Alvaro Uribe and the U.S. Trade Representative finally came to common ground after lots of give and take,…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis and Daniel at Venezuela News & Views alert us to a new Chavista propaganda offensive against some of the best reporting on Venezuela coming out these days. It looks like Venezuela’s attacks on the free press do not stop at its water’s edge, but extend to any media anywhere in the…
My eyes are practically filled with tears of joy on this news. Something our Salvadoran and Honduran and Nicaraguan friends have been PRAYING for for years has really happened … A-G-A-I-N-S-T … A-L-L … O-D-D-S!!!!! If there is a such thing as miracles, this is it. Thousands of undocumented workers from war-torn El Salvador and…
Rock singer Carlos Santana is famous for wearing a great big Che Guevara t-shirt at the Oscars a couple years ago. Cuban-American Pundits blogger Conductor met the guy on the street by chance in Sausalito, wearing his ‘Che is dead’ t-shirt and provoked the rock star into a conversation with him. I had expected Santana…
The setup seems so marvelous, the U.S. bipartisan congressional National Endowment for Democracy gives funds to many nongovernment organizations around the world to spread democratic revolution. But what happens when the grants blows up in the recipients’ faces? Such as Venezuela, where Maria Corina Machado is facing charges for taking the money? Does anyone look…
I watched the President’s State of the Union address with a French diplomat friend and my friend remarked that about 2/3 of Bush’s speech was on foreign policy, with a significant amount of it on democracy movements. “As it should be,” he added. I thought there was a nuance to it, though, and it was…
Mexico’s governor of Sonora state makes an impassioned declaration about how free trade works awesomely in his state and in neighboring Arizona. He explains how free trade lifts businesses across the board. How great it is to look on Mexico as an equal neighbor instead of a problem issue. That’s the beauty of free trade…
Hillary Clinton, on her latest rumble and tumble of speeches aimed at the Bush administration, has accused it of downplaying Iran as a threat to national security and has subsequently called for sanctions against the regime. But in the wake of so many lobbying and corruption scandals in Washington, is Hillary playing a game of…
Unbelievable. Code Pink, an anti-American, anti-Iraqi-freedom, anti-Iranian-democracy full-Sandalista nuisance group, has taken to photoshopping photographs of Iranian freedom babes brave enough to protest against the monstrous mullahs of Iran, and used their beautiful images as recruiting tools for their own odious, anaphrodisiac cause. This cause just happens to be cut-and-run from Iraq, so that mullahs…
Today is the 300th anniversary of the birthday of Benjamin Franklin. He was anything but a Babe of Politics, but he was a magnificent revolutionary at a very old age – showing you don’t have to be! Franklin’s inspiring revolutionary history as well as his many revolutionary inventive and institutional accomplishments are recounted in this…
Brazil announced today that its state oil company, Petrobras, would spend $18 billion to develop its Santos Basin offshore natural gas reserves in a bid to reduce its dependence on imported natural gas, explicitly, from nationalization-minded leftwing Bolivia. Eighteen billion. That’s big money. A whole Iraq-War trove of cash. A massive, history-changing investment. Why the…
…and not just in Caracas. But what’s happening in Caracas is bad enough. Here is a Guardian account, straight out of the history of the Soviet Union with ‘Venezuela’ pasted over the ‘Russia’ part. It is a real escalation of the shortages that are engulfing Venezuela – and soon it will be made worse by…
It’s written all over the visa lines, stretching from Mexicali to Caracas, from Havana to San Salvador, from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil, from La Paz to La Paz – and like the Drug War, its most violent edge is at the 1400-mile-long U.S. Mexican border, from Matamoros and Brownsville to Tijuana and San Diego where…
A Saudi national studying at Arizona State University, a party school by all counts and from my own recollection, thinks that the school should sanction the possibility of expelling students for wearing any clothing with the ASU logo when posing for dirty, dirty magazines. The ASU Web Devil reports! If one student leader has his…
Hugo Chavez is meddling in more than just Bolivia. He’s got a northern front and that’s the U.S. Using the good offices of willing dupes like Congressman Bill Delahunt and Congressman Jose Serrano, he’s delivering cheap oil through their offices in return for their support in U.S. Congress. Next time Hugo Chavez invades a small…
Christian Science Monitor has some hagiography on Hugo Chavez’s own house organ, Telesur, insisting that it’s — no, really — full of professional journalists. It cites as proof the Telesur chief, the creepy, rat-like former Chavez shill and spokesman, Andres Izarra, a man who was suddenly forced to leave CNN a few years ago, and…
”We are not a shill for anyone in this,” claimed Steve Schwadron, chief of staff to U.S. Congressman Delahunt who’s just concluded an oil-for-loyalty deal with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, in the first-ever brazen effort to buy political influence through cheap oil to the underclass through the offices of willing U.S. Congressman. The real story…