Communism

Bob Ley, ESPN's longest-serving commentator, was in Cuba yesterday after the Tampa Bay Rays defeated the island nation's national team 4-1 in an exhibition baseball game. Shortly after the conclusion of that game, ESPN had Ley report from a rather nice-looking streetscape in Havana (not your typical avenue in the workers' paradise). As he did, a demonstrator interrupted him. ESPN, acting as if…

Quite a few conservatives were incensed over the photo of President Obama and other officials, including John Kerry and at least one of Cuba’s many vice presidents, standing against the backdrop of a several-stories-tall steel relief mural of Che Guevara. Consequently, quite a few liberals told those conservatives, in effect, to get a life. One of those liberals was Steve Benen, the primary…

If you haven't had a chance to watch the premiere season of USA’s Colony then you have missed some really well done television. The good news is you have plenty of time to binge all ten episodes, as it is not slated to begin season two until 2017.

The Americans returns tonight with its fourth season debut at 10 PM EDT/PDT. It will pick up after last season’s dramatic ending which juxtaposed then-President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech with two undercover KGB agents in the U.S. distraught by the charge as their frantic teenage daughter, who just recently learned their true identity, gets on the phone to tell her pastor that her…

Many left-wingers still insist that supporters of Donald Trump are conservatives, but Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins finds Trump backers “far less terrifying” than staunch right-wingers. In a Sunday post, Atkins opined that even though Trump’s base voters tend to be mean and “ignorant,” movement conservatives are “more morally objectionable” because they believe in “economic royalism.”…

Appearing as a panel member for Tuesday's election coverage on CNN, liberal commentator Van Jones went over the top again as he compared GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to a "strongman" like former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. At about 8:10 p.m. ET, shortly before Marco Rubio announced that he was ending his campaign for President, Jones suggested that Rubio might stay in longer…

The Washington Post's obsession over Donald Trump is a sight to behold — but not a pretty one. On Monday, following two week-earlier Trump-demonizing columns, one comparing the billionaire to medieval emperor Charlemagne, and another claiming that Trump's electoral progress thus far had helped her understand "exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany," the Post issued a house…

If form holds, the Democratic Party's presidential candidates in the U.S. will continue to spout various forms of socialism and class warfare as the answers to this nation's woes in hopes of buying enough "free stuff" votes to hang on to the White House. Venezuela's apparent imminent economic collapse poses a problem for this strategy. The country's problems are the direct result of 15 years of…

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

On Friday's Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN, during a segment devoted to discrediting President Ronald Reagan's conservative credentials and painting modern Republicans as far right, host Erin Burnett proclaimed that Republicans "would hate that guy," and joined with CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in suggesting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's views on some issues are closer to Reagan's.

During the darkest days of communism, Romanians had something to brighten their oppressed existence—illicit American movie parties. Under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, the Eastern European country had very little contact with the West. But thanks to Teodor Zamfir who was willing to smuggle VHS tapes, and his translator Ilina Nistor who dubbed them, over 3000 movies made it over to Romania …

In his new documentary, Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore jaunts around Europe showcasing what he deems enlightened social and economic policies, including Italy’s lengthy paid vacations, Norway’s treatment of prison inmates, and France’s school-lunch program. New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden observed that Moore’s “examples…are cherry-picked to make American audiences feel envious and…

New York magazine’s Chait thinks that in a sense, conservatism and Communism aren’t such strange bedfellows when it comes to economic matters. In a Sunday post, Chait categorized “American conservatism” and Marxism as “rigid dogma,” whereas liberalism, he argued, focuses on “data.” Chait contended that “liberals would abandon, say, new environmental regulations if evidence persuaded them the…