Communism

New York Times veteran foreign reporter John Burns has retired after 40 years with the paper, closing a career of covering hotspots like Afghanistan, China, and Iraq, where Saddam Hussein threatened his life for his brave reporting from Baghdad for the Times and CBS News. A friend gave him the title to this essay of recollections of some of the worst places on Earth: "It's not how far you’ve…

A Reuters report published late Saturday evening ("Obama meets Venezuela's Maduro at time of high tensions") is astonishing for what it ignores. The unbylined report from Panama City opens by referring to how "the United States recently placed sanctions on Venezuela." Indeed, President Barack Obama did just that in an executive order on March 9, stating that he was "declaring a national…

As we know - America’s media is for the most part decidedly Leftist, often befuddled and rarely right.  So when they wade into an intricate issue like President Barack Obama’s Net Neutrality Internet power grab - we can only expect even more Leftism, befuddlement and wrongness. On February 26, the Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pretended to be Congress and rewrote…

Appearing as a guest speaker at the Reagan Library in 2008, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was asked who his "wow interview" was with, or what person would fit the bill. Williams tweaked the question before responding in a way that prompted an approving murmur through the audience, which presumably was what he intended.

In conjunction with the U.S. diplomatic delegation arriving in Cuba on Wednesday for talks with the Communist regime, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and NBC Nightly News went out of their way to all but again ignore the brutal past of the Castro government  and instead stage unapologetic promotions of the country that lies 93 miles to America’s south. All told, NBC Nightly News spent a…

During Thursday’s NBC Nightly News, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell enthusiastically promoted the new and “dramatic changes” set to go into effect on Friday that will allow Americans to more easily trade with and travel to/from Cuba as causing the Cold War to end. In leading off her report, Mitchell announced to viewers: “In Havana, dramatic change after more than a…

The latest report out of Venezuela by the Associated Press's Hannah Dreier has a time stamp of 1:15 p.m. today. This means that the wire service has had plenty of time to report, and has chosen not to report, a powerful pastoral letter issued yesterday by that country's Catholic bishops (original in Spanish; full Google Translation) denouncing that country's descent into a system they described…

Three results returned in a search at the Associated Press's national site on "Venezuela" tell us almost nothing about that country's deepening economic crisis. An unbylined January 10 item reports on the visit of Nicolas Maduro, the country's de facto dictator, to Iran in hopes of "stabilizing" (i.e., raising) oil prices. A second unbylined report on January 9 tells readers that there's really…

What is it with the establishment press and communism? The earth's most murderous political philosophy and its most murderous practitioners still get undeserved and occasionally even complimentary attention, while their crimes against humanity get brushed aside, ignored, or downplayed. A Christmas Day item from Romania at the Associated Press illustrates the point. The first six of its eight…

New York Times reporter Damien Cave reported from Havana that Obama's liberalized policy shift toward Cuba meant that that country was finished with its "venerable....leader" (not ruthless dictator) Fidel Castro, and also took a shot at "stiff-backed critics of Fidel’s government." As Miami bureau chief, Cave fostered a bizarre obsession with hypothetical inequality that might transpire in a…

Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas is exultant that we are “finally moving on” from the embargo “despite the wailing and teeth gnashing of the [Marco] Rubios and [Bob] Menendezes of the world, and the new generation of Cuban Americans is leading the way.”

Those who rail at Fox News for allegedly being a haven of unbridled, uninterrupted conservatism usually and conveniently fail to remember that Shepard Smith is there. Smith's take yesterday on the potential pitfalls of a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, particularly on the commercial front, was nothing short of astonishing. His primary fear, expressed in an interview with Gerri Willis of the Fox…

The Esquire blogger is pleased that with Obama’s executive action on immigration and the shift on Cuba, “the Republicans now have two major freak-outs in their base that will do nothing except inflame the implacable Right, and thereby cripple the party's ability to reach out to the new Hispanic voters it claims it wants to attract.”

Two guests on this evening's Ed Show on MSNBC revealed what lies just below the surface for many in the current protest movement: opposition to capitalism. First up was Rosa Clemente, a "hip hop activist" and 2008 Green Party VP candidate: "Capitalism, I think that is the institution all over this country. It is really the oppressive force." Next, Georgetown Prof. Marcia Chatelain, who said that…