I know it’s not a lot, but 10,000 unique hits is something of a milestone for a part-time blog that I started just earlier this year. 
Thanks very much to everyone who’s taken a look, provided helpful feedback on how to make the site better or assisted me in honing Suffragio‘s coverage of world politics. I’m very much looking forward to the next 10,000 and beyond.
Forget UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. We’ve got the best parody yet of ‘Gangnam Style.’
As we look to China’s transition to the ‘Fifth Generation’ of leadership next month, which is expected to install Xi Jinping at the head of China’s government, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has filmed his own plucky parody of South Korean pop start Psy’s hit song ‘Gangnam Style.’
Not typically subtle, Ai appears with a pair of handcuffs, symbolizing his arrest in 2011, his house arrest in Beijing, which was lifted only in June of this year (he’s still forbidden to travel outside of China).
Ai’s become internationally famous — and he’s probably the most infamous opponent of the current Chinese Communist Party not currently in jail in the Middle Kingdom.
For background on ‘K-Pop,’ here’s The New Yorker opus on South Korea’s most successful export of the past decade.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains before the United Nations General Assembly just why Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a, well, nuclear time bomb.
But the only thing I could think was, “When did Wile E. Coyote become the prime minister of Israel?”
Although the Iranian nuclear program isn’t exactly a laughing matter, I think this may be even funnier than the Bibi / Duck remix.
Netanyahu was trying to argue that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon by next summer:
“A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb, before Iran gets to a point where it is a few months or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“Each day that point is getting closer, and that is why I speak today with such a sense of urgency and that is why everyone should have a sense of urgency.”
Fair enough, but I have to wonder what his staffers were thinking when they sent him to the podium with such a cartoonish prop.
This comes after Netanyahu has taken considerable criticism for pushing U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration to set ‘red lines’ that Iran cannot breach without incurring a military response from Israel and/or the West — he’s pushed so hard that the criticism has seeped into the U.S. presidential election set for November 6.
Photo credit to Mario Tama, AFP/Getty Images.
UK prime minister David Cameron stopped by The David Letterman Show (a popular late night show in the United States, for non-US readers), and flubbed a few questions.
Notably, Cameron couldn’t name who composed Rule Britannia (Thomas Arne wrote the music — not Edward Elgar, as Cameron suggested — and James Thompson wrote the poem upon which it is based) and he couldn’t translate Magna Carta (it means, “The Great Charter”). Magna Carta was the 1215 charter that limited the powers of the English monarchy and set forth certain liberties for certain English nobles — it became the foundation for much of the following English, British and American liberties, including the U.S. Bill of Rights.
By the end of it, it was clear that Letterman’s “dumb American questions” were a joke at Cameron’s expense. He took the jibe well, however, and joked, “You have found me out. That is bad, I have ended my career on your show tonight.”
British media are having a poke at the prime minister today, but it’s not likely to cause Cameron any lasting harm — indeed, it may have stepped on the attention from the media to the speech of Liberal Democratic leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democratic Party conference this week.
So this clip of Irish president Michael D. Higgins from a call on conservative Michael Graham’s radio show taking down the “tea party” movement in the United States has gone viral in the last 24 hours. 
The first thing to realize is that it’s from May 2010. Three things follow from that:
In his time as president, Higgins hasn’t picked any fights, in Ireland or abroad, however. As head of state, he does not direct policy — that job falls to the taoiseach (Ireland’s prime minister) Enda Kenny.
In the clip, Higgins comes across as passionately defending a strong role for government, but seems a little unhinged (or passionate, depending on your viewpoint) when it comes to disparaging the tea party movement, the American right and former Alaska governor and former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in particular:
The tactic is to get a large crowd, to whip them up, try and discover what is the greatest fear, work on that and feed it right back and you get a frenzy. This tea party ignorance that is being brought all around the United States is regularly insulting people who have been democratically elected.
Higgins proceeded to call Graham “just a wanker whipping up fear.”
Oh my!
To the extent Higgins seems frustrated and perplexed by the tea party movement and the American right generally, in the clip above, it’s because that strain of particularly American laissez-faire, anti-government politics is so foreign to his own social democratic tradition.
Higgins comes from the Labour Party in Ireland, which is the major leftist force in Irish politics and which has a strong social democratic tradition (in terms of comparison, it would be closer to the New Democratic Party in Canada than to the Liberal Party).
Ireland’s two main parties, historically, have been centrist (Fianna Fáil) and center-right / vaguely Christian democratic (Fine Gail).
Before his presidential election, Higgins had long served in the Dáil (Ireland’s parliament) for the Labour Party, and during the Fine Gail-led government of 1994 to 1997, Higgins served as minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht (i.e., the predominantly Irish-speaking regions of Ireland), where he established an Irish-language television station and notably, scrapped Section 31 of Ireland’s Broadcasting Authority Act, which actually forbade the Irish media from broadcasting the voice of any Sinn Féin member.
The 2011 election was a bit odd, given that Fine Gail’s candidate never really connected with voters and Fianna Fáil didn’t really offer up a candidate. The election followed a period of “two Marys” — Mary McAleese, who served from 1997 to 2011 and Mary Robinson before her, who served from 1990 to 1997, both of whom were independent candidates and both of whom changed the Irish presidential concept into something even more abstract and apolitical than the line of Fianna Fáil politicians who preceded them.
For much of the campaign leading up to the election, another independent, Irish senator David Norris (and a Joyce scholar!) was the frontrunner for the presidency, and would have become the world’s first openly gay head of state, but fell behind after being implicated in a scandal.
Accordingly, the race came down to Higgins, independent Seán Gallagher (essentially a placeholder for Fianna Fáil-minded voters) and Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Féin candidate. Higgins ultimately defeated Gallagher by 39.6% to 28.5%, although the race seemed a lot closer than the final tally indicates — Gallagher’s last-minute admission of collecting campaign funds from a Fianna Fáil fundraiser led to a fall-off in his support.
German chancellor Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world in 2012, according to Forbes magazine.
It’s a bit whimsical, but that’s probably the right call, considering that no one person has more power, probably, to determine whether the eurozone sticks together or falls apart.
Also on the list are several women of important to world politics:
Predictions, questions and thoughts:
…and here’s what the Singapore Development Unit (yes, there’s an official matchmaking agency for Singapore) is promoting for the night after National Day, which is today, August 9.
“We gotta go all the way for Singapore, you know what I’m saying.”
Singapore has one of the lowest birth rates in the world at around 115, according to the World Bank’s 2010 list. By contrast, the demographically challenged Italy is at 1.4 and Russia at 1.54.
So: ”It’s National Night, let’s make Singapore’s birthrate spike.”
H/T to James Fallows at The Atlantic, one of the most consistently thoughtful voices in Western media on Asia (and if anyone’s looking for a good August book recommendation, his new book, China Airborne, is out):
About the only thing that needs explaining is when, around time 2:18, the video talks about “putting a bao in the oven,” a bao is like a little bundle or dumpling or bun. And before that, in the line: “I know you want it / so does the SDU,” here is what they’re talking about. But even if you didn’t know that you’d get the idea. There’s a little more explanation to the right, which says a lot about Singapore in just a few lines.
The Singapore government has often been criticized for being too Gradgrind-like and strait-laced. So, no joke, congrats to whoever broke the stereotype by doing this. And … ummm, Happy National Day / Night!
Hilarious. This is why Boris Johnson won the mayoral election of London initially in 2008 as a Conservative and was reelected in May 2012, despite a strong Labour wind, defeating former London mayor Ken Livingstone by a 3% margin.
Also, forget the goofy one-eyed blobs, Boris is the true mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics. From the minute we saw him waving the Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, with his jacket opened, signalling London’s much looser approach to the Games (compared to the tightly synchronized Beijing Games), you just knew there would be no other way:
He’s rarely on-message (although he can show discipline when he wants).
He’s a bit of a goofy Etonian toff, floppy hair and all, but he’s probably the UK’s most popular politician today, with the possible exception of Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond.
As I’ve noted, he may one day be a British prime minister, as he certainly has more personality than the entire front bench of the current Tory (well, Coalition) government combined. It’s thought that David Cameron, then just newly enshrined as the new Tory leader, sent Boris off to run for London mayor to get him out of his hair as he plotted the Tories’ own return to Westminster. But given the current trajectory of Cameron’s government (with many blaming George Osborne’s* austerity policies as the main cause of the UK’s double-dip recession), it is not unthinkable that Boris may well lead the Tories in the next general election cycle or two.
Certainly, the exposure from hosting the 2012 Games will do him no harm (especially given that businessman Mitt Romney transformed his leadership of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City into a stint as Massachusetts governor and into the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2012).
H/T to Andrew Sullivan, who calls Boris the “un-Romney”.
* George Osborne serves as chancellor of the exchequer — essentially, the UK’s finance minister.
Mitt Romney’s debut on the world stage is off to a bad start. 
It’s become a bit of a campaign ritual in the United States for a presidential challenger to go on a mid-summer international trip to showcase the challenger’s ability for diplomacy in anticipation that the challenger may become the president of the United States — as executed ambitiously by Barack Obama’s July 2008 trip to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, England, France and Germany. (In Berlin, he even held a huge rally that drew thousands.)
Romney, the Republican nominee for president in the United States now challenging Obama, is currently on a tour to the United Kingdom, Poland and Israel. The trip to the UK, in particular, as the 2012 Olympic Games open in London, was designed to highlight Romney’s role leading the Winter Olympics in 2002 in Salt Lake City.
He had already annoyed Obama supporters yesterday when his aides awkwardly asserted that Romney’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” would somehow help him understand better the “special relationship” that both Americans and the British so fondly fete:
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the Telegraph quoted the adviser as saying, “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Although the Romney camp likely meant to highlight that he would be a more “Atlanticist” president than Obama (whose foreign policy emphasis has been more on China and the Pacific than many of his predecessors), there were no mistaking the awkward racial overtones in the criticism of the United States’s first non-white president.
He then mistakenly referred to Ed Miliband, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, as “Mr. Leader.”
But the real shocker has come today, when Romney not-so-subtly hinted that the Olympics aren’t assured of success and that some difficulties in preparations had been “disconcerting.” British prime minister David Cameron, himself beleaguered by a sinking double-dip recession and a phone-hacking scandal that has enveloped some of his closest aides, snarked back:
“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” an allusion to Salt Lake City, which hosted Games that Mr. Romney oversaw.
Ouch! Continue reading Romney/Cameron tiff showcases often odd relationship between US, UK leaders
…here’s a throwback from the bad old days of the PRI era: José López Portillo, president from 1976 to 1982, who bears a striking resemblance to the character of George Bluth from Arrested Development.
Cornballers in every kitchen!
But seriously, Mexico is not going to go back to the López Portillo era if, as polls predict, the PRI sweeps elections on Sunday.
Too good to be true, especially for a Saturday.
It appears that the Zimbabwe government’s twitter feed is still having some growing pains:
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: We unreservedly apologise for saying whites are pink like raw meat We demanded it be deleted and have will return Cde Soddy as moderator. [7 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: Cde Chinx has been removed from twitter duties. We will however give him a fertile piece of land to farm. He is a good man, just angry. [6 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: We look forward to Cde Sodindo’s return & in the mean time our tweeting is on hold. We have also downloaded a spell check 2assist Cde Soddy. [6 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: Last tweet from Cde Chinx “Cdes I am sorry for my mistake, I have lots of angry against the white- I am sorry.” [6 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: 2show how dedicated & committed Cde Chinx has been he also asked that we tweet this photo of him & our beloved leader: pic.twitter.com/jIpNLKo1 [6 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: Cdes and friends! Its me cde Soddy! I will continue to tweet revolutionary statements and information for beloved party. Pamberi.NeZANUPF [2 hours ago]
ZANU PF @zanu_pf: Cdes and friends please realise that despite our vigorious screen process, something wrong tweet, slip out. We are new to this twita thing. [2 hours ago]
Comrade Chinx’ Dickson Chingaira is a longtime supporter of the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party of Robert Mugabe, and he has long had a cultural role in Mugabe’s governments — he is especially well known for his pro-liberation songs from the 1970s and in ensuing years. It appears he has not had the best string of luck recently, though: he had his mansion bulldozed in 2005, had to become a fishmonger in 2010 and now has been ousted from his Twitter perch.
Even on a day when Labour has done amazingly well in local elections across the United Kingdom, Labour leader Ed Miliband can’t seem to get a break, having been hit with an egg in Southampton while otherwise on a bit of a victory tour.
It’s still been a better 24 hours for Miliband than for Conservative prime minister David Cameron, who’s now apologized to his party for the dismal local election result — for what it’s worth (not much), if translated into a general election vote, Labour would have won with 39% to just 31% for the Tories (but ask William Hague how his 1999 win in local elections turned out for his Tories in the 2001 general election).
Labour has taken over 700 council seats from the Tories and from their governing coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, who have had an even worse election than the Tories. Labour has also shined in Wales and in Scotland, which is somewhat of a damper for the nationalist parties as well.
In London, Labour is winning 42% of the vote to just 33% for the Tories, and even the race for mayor is closer than expected — incumbent Boris Johnson is still leading Labour candidate and former mayor Ken Livingstone.
With 20 days to go, Charlotte says “non” to each of the 2012 presidential contenders. A bit lighter, as we emerge from the Toulouse aftermath and its impact on the campaign. H/t to The Guardian. 
So here’s the oft-hailed future savior of Canada’s Liberal Party Justin Trudeau (son of that Pierre Trudeau, the 1970s and 1980s Canadian prime minister).
He’s shown here at a charity boxing match with Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau from Thursday. Apparently, Defence Minister Peter MacKay (the leader of the Progressive Conservative party at the time of its merger with Stephen Harper’s western Canada-based Canadian Alliance) totally wimped out of Trudeau’s challenge.
Stats: 40 years old, 6’2″ and 175 pounds. Not bad for someone who places top among voters in the 2013 Liberal leadership race, even though he ruled out a run six months ago.
Certainly a better bod than Bob Rae, Stephen Harper or Thomas Mulcair (but let’s see what André Boisclair is up to these days).
Presented without comment — as the formal Mexican presidential campaign is about to begin with official campaigning permitted to start on Friday, though, it looks like the PRI has learned how to be hip.
Fasten your cinturón de seguridad.