Venezuela

Sean Penn is taking a page out of President Barack Obama's playbook but twisting it to his own socialist-friendly liking. Obama has gotten plenty of mileage for blaming his predecessor for the country's woes. Now, Penn is blaming Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro's problems on what the leader inherited from his predecessor--Hugo Chavez. Only Penn doesn't blame his late friend at all,…

On April 1 for its April 2 print edition, the New York Times allowed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro to hold forth in an op-ed about how wondrously the country has been ruled since 1998, mostly by the late Bolivarian thug Hugo Chavez and during the past year by himself. Maduro's piece made the Times's print edition. The Times posted letters objecting to Maduro's characterizations of his…

Sean Penn usually throws punches at paparazzi, but Kevin Spacey may want to watch for him on the Red Carpet, even though they've starred together in "Hurlyburly." On his blog, Kevin Spacey expressed fervent support for the opposition protesters to Venezuelan president Maduro, the successor of Penn's favorite dictator, Hugo Chavez. Spacey met for three hours with Chavez in Caracas 2007.

Pushed back from the headlines, massive protests against the repressive Nicolas Maduro regime in Venezuela continue. So do the killings by the "colectivos." If this group of thugs enforcing Maduoro's Chavista socialist nightmare were instead right-wing paramilitary types, they would long since have been christened "death squads" and garnered international attention. A story about the…

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird... It's a plane... It's a drone camera! And it was a drone camera whose video corrected the false impression left by a CNN en Español report that there was somehow an equivalency in the size of competing demonstrations on Saturday in Caracas, Venezuela. As Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News and Views complained, the CNN en Español report by Guillermo Arduino…

ABC, CBS, and NBC have largely punted in covering the protests against the leftist government in Venezuela. Since Monday, only NBC Nightly News has devoted a full report on the demonstrations in the South American country. Altogether, NBC has aired just over two minutes of reporting on the story. Brian Williams also stood out for explicitly mentioning the political ideology of the regime: "Many…

We're not always the biggest fans of CNN, but when they've provoked the ire of a leftist dictator, we have to give props. Reuters is reporting that Venezuelan despot Nicolas Maduro is threatening to expel CNN reporters from his country for daring to, well, do their jobs and report the news (h/t TV Newser; emphasis mine):

The Associated Press has published a great but disturbing story. Given the frequent and deserved grief yours truly administers when the wire service lets its readers, listeners, viewers, and subscribing news organizations down, it seems only fair to acknowledge fine work when it does occur. The real question is, in the politically charged U.S. health care environment, whether the AP's…

The Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro has put the country back into the expropriration business, seizing two oil rigs owned by Houston-based Superior Energy Services. Two different Friday headlines at Associated Press stories about the seizures, one at the AP's national site and the other at the Washington Post, appeared designed more to mislead than to inform.

In a mild shock -- mild because it's mentioned before the elections, but probably won't be when it really matters after the polls close -- Frank Bajak and Jorge Rueda at the Associated Press, in a story about how the last opposition TV station in Venezuela is being sold to an insurance magnate who is reportedly "friendly with government," noted the extraordinary handicaps that Venezuela's…

Our left-wing media’s somber, mourning coverage of Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez once again demonstrates the double standard journalists reserve for dictators. Seven years ago, the left’s greatest South American hate object, Augusto Pinochet, passed away. Never mind how he used free-market reforms to modernize Chile. Never mind that after 15 years of rule, he allowed a national plebiscite to…

CNN has just performed a valuable public service by revealing that the director of the Americas Program at the (Jimmy) Carter Center, Jennifer McCoy, is a complete moonbat. And how did they do that? Simple. They merely quoted her. Although McCoy is often cited in the MSM as some sort of expert on the subject of Venezuela such as in her recent USA column about the Chavez "legacy," her efforts…

Introducing a brief report on Friday's NBC Today about the funeral proceedings for socialist Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez, news reader Natalie Morales announced: "In Venezuela, a hero's send-off today for Hugo Chavez, a harsh critic of the U.S. who ruled for 14 years." The headline on screen during the segment read: "Saluting Chavez; World Leaders in Venezuela for President's Funeral."…

While even the left-wing outlet ThinkProgress finds it necessary to discourage fellow Democrats from eulogizing Hugo Chavez, propaganda for the late dictator keeps popping up in strange places in the New York Times. Thursday brought a couple of oddly placed propaganda pieces for the late left-wing strongman of Venezuela. In Thursday's Metro story "In the Bronx, Memories Of Chavez And His Aid…