As a wave of left-wing union thuggery tries to intimidate the nation, why is the progressive New York Times running an ugly campaign of character assassination against a real-life American hero who saved lives and helped to safeguard the nation’s sacred democratic process? Could it be because the newspaper is sympathetic to the goals of the thuggish community organizers and union goons intimidating state legislatures across America and wants to help advance the liberal-left narrative?

The man with the bull’s eye on his back is Brandon Darby, formerly a far-left community organizer. This heroic defector from the Left stands accused by the New York Times and by angry radical groups of becoming an agent provocateur. Unhinged anarchists across the country would love to get their hands on him. All over the Internet Darby’s name has been dragged through the mud by the Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars crowd. They accuse him of selling out and pushing the wrongdoers hard enough that he essentially became a co-conspirator. Search for his name with the words traitor, rat, or fink and you’ll see what I mean.

Darby got to this point after years of leading in-your-face protests, using confrontational tactics, and working with America-haters. But he experienced an epiphany and rejected the radical Left and its ever-present culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all. “I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” he said. “I love my country.”

The change of heart happened around the time he returned from socialist Venezuela where he had been trying to get the government there to donate to his nonprofit group. While in that country high officials in Hugo Chavez’s administration tried to get Darby to launch a terrorist network in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Darby refused.

After he returned to the U.S. Darby learned two anarchists wanted to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention. Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBI’s request, infiltrated a left-wing group that hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The FBI sent Darby to meet with the plotters. “It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of ‘black bloc’ anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary,” he explained. “They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas.” (The plot and its aftermath is described in greater detail in my upcoming book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration which will be published in mid-2011. It was also referenced in Townhall.)

The 20-something plotters on whom Darby informed, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, made riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the convention site. They also manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

Thanks to the information Darby provided to authorities, police raided a residence and found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles filled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons. “They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer,” Darby said.

Darby’s patriotic effort helped to put the would-be bomb throwers behind bars. McKay pleaded “guilty” and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered “firearm,” illegal manufacture of a firearm and possession of a firearm with no serial number. A week before, Crowder cut a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 24 months in prison for possession of an unregistered firearm.

McKay received the stiffer sentence largely because he told a tall tale about Darby’s involvement in the plot. As the U.S. Department of Justice reported in a press release available on the Internet, during sentencing the trial judge went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices. McKay also confirmed that finding, the Star Tribune reported. “I embellished – I guess actually lied – that Brandon Darby came up with the idea to make Molotov cocktails.”

Yet somehow these publicly available facts could not be located by the New York Times, America’s Google-averse newspaper of record.

Have A Very Chomsky Christmas!

On the first day of Christmas Noam Chomsky gave to me…

a handbook of terror apology

On the second day of Christmas Noam Chomsky gave to me…

2 Towers down

and a handbook of terror apology

On the third day of Christmas Noam Chomsky gave to me…

3 pogroms

2 Towers down

and a handbook of terror apology

In a 1977 article for The Nation, Chomsky made apologies for the mass slaughter in Cambodia, attributing everything to United States policy. Chomsky cultists will go to any lengths to rationalize his support of the Khmer Rouge.

On the fourth day of Christmas Noam Chomsky gave to me…

4 killing fields

3 pogroms

2 Towers down

and handbook of terror apology

Despite his posturing as a "libertarian socialist," Chomsky nevertheless has expressed supported or apologized for repressive dictators like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

"You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, Noam." "That's if you can get eggs, Fidel, what with the embargo and all!" (laughter)

On the fifth day of Christmas Noam Chomsky gave to me…

FIVE RED REGIMES

4 killing fields

3 pogroms

2 Towers down

and a handbook of terror apology

Should it surprise anyone that vicious authoritarian thug Hugo Chavez is using a law called the “Enabling Act” to solidify his brutal rule in Venezuela?

You would think Chavez would at least call his legislation something other than the same thing that Adolph Hitler called the German law that put Germany on the path to totalitarian dictatorship.

Alas, no. Same name. As Ron Radosh confirms a few days ago Chavez’s rubber stamp parliament approved a Nazi-style enabling act granting the Venezuelan strongman even greater powers than he now possesses.

The new law allows Chavez to rule by decree. It also allows Chavez to pave the way for the full-fledged communist dictatorship that he has always wanted to impose on his long suffering countrymen.

In his bid to turn Venezuela into a giant slave pen Chavez will be able to centralize control over the Internet within his country. (This isn’t exactly what President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission is attempting to do in the United States but it’s not worlds apart either). This will allow him to strangle his opposition in the media. Chavez’s party will be able to expel members of parliament who don’t vote the way he wants them to vote. He will also gain expanded powers over commerce in Venezuela by transferring state and municipal powers to “the Popular Power,” which must answer to Chavez.

He is creating a façade of a governmental structure to create the illusion that he is not a dictator. All dictators do this to create the appearance of a normal, functioning governmental apparatus. Remember how in the old Soviet Union people “voted” in so-called elections? It’s the same idea. It’s a trick aimed at giving the regime an air of legitimacy.

As Radosh writes

Clearly the [steps Chavez has taken are] a full recipe for totalitarian power, and the creation of another full-fledged Cuban-style regime in our hemisphere. The American far Left, or what remains of it, will be quite happy. Bill Ayers, who is on record as extolling Chavez’s educational system as the one he wants imposed in the United States, must be elated today when he learns that university autonomy will be abolished, and that the university will now  require “teaching courses on Popular Power and communes, and [that it] focuses the pedagogy around revolutionary principles.” Perhaps Chavez will import Ayers’ instructional manuals on how to achieve this end for the mandatory new programs.

The Chavez approach reminds Radosh of a term used in the days of the Cold War: CommuNazi.

According to Radosh

Chavez has much more in common with the activities of the Nazis under Hitler than the Communists led by Stalin, who in Eastern Europe after WW II, used so-called “salami tactics” to gain control of the parliament, and who created phony Social-Democratic groups aligned with the Communists to maintain the façade of democracy in the new so-called “People’s Democracies.”

Chavez is constructing a new make-believe system of government in which he will be able to move all the pieces around like pawns on a chessboard.

And the Obama administration isn’t lifting a finger to stop him.

Follow me on Twitter.

If there’s a silver lining in the outrageous document dump of secret U.S. documents by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks it’s this: there’s ample evidence that socialized medicine is a massive failure in Venezuela.

Of course the evidence that big government health care has failed everywhere on earth it has been tried hasn’t exactly been hiding under a rock, but it’s nice to see additional confirmation surface as the clock ticks away on the scheduled implementation of Obamacare.

According to a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in Caracas:

In recent months, protests have paralyzed hospitals across Venezuela as doctors and patients have complained of shortages of medical supplies, delays in hospital renovations and unpaid wages and benefits. Observers describe public hospitals as increasingly dangerous places where underpaid, undersupplied, and understaffed doctors struggle to provide medical services to Venezuela’s poor. Critics say that the GBRV [Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela] has created a parallel medical system-”Barrio Adentro”-that has sucked resources away from the traditional hospital network and reduced the overall quality of medical services. The GBRV has suspended doctors for speaking out about the crisis while giving former military officers and community councils a greater role in hospital administration.

Government hospitals in Venezuela are filthy hellholes. Physicians ask patients to bring basic medical supplies such as needles, gauze, and disinfectants with them. Doctors have had to dress wounds with dirty bandages. Many hospitals don’t have properly functioning plumbing, which leads to important operations being delayed.

The medical system presided over by Venezuela’s communist strongman, Hugo Chavez, can’t cut it even though thousands of medical doctors were shipped in from Fidel Castro‘s Cuba seven years ago to take pressure off the already strained system.

As it’s imposed on Americans, Obamacare won’t immediately do to America what socialist medicine has done to Venezuela, but it will lead to sharp declines in the quality of care and out-of-control increases in costs.

It will destroy America as we know it, sucking up tax dollars to the point where there won’t be much money left for anything else.

–

Follow me on Twitter.

I honestly do not understand individuals who admire communists. Maybe I am a delusional daughter of Lithuanian immigrants who “brainwashed” me with their anti-communist rhetoric. Maybe I am a paranoid conservative eager to dispel the myths that communists are not worth celebrating. Either way, it is frustrating that some Americans do not understand how evil these people are and fail to grasp the insurmountable number of people they killed! Try explaining that to my peers in college who hang up flags of Che Guevara and embrace the works of infamous Marxist-Leninists. Now, communists—alive and dead—continue to plague the halls, dorm walls, and social hubs at universities. Here at UC-San Diego there’s even a Che Cafe and  several  homages paid to a Messianic Obama around campus.

Recently, I crossed paths with the famed red drink adorned in Cyrillic and a haunting portrait of V.I. Lenin called Leninade.

Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever. -Vladimir Lenin

People will argue that this drink’s message is a harmless play on words and mockery of communism. Regardless, my fellow Eastern Europeans with an understanding of communism and its travesties find this gesture extremely offensive. It can be appropriately compared to plastering one’s college dorm walls with a poster of a shirtless Vladimir Putin—Russian Prime Minister and former KGB operative.

The photos will inevitably trigger mass swooning by women all over Russia – as well as unfavourable comparisons of their husbands to Mr Putin’s manly physique.

Making communism sexy and appealing is only going to aid the cause of advancing this oppressive—albeit failed—system, not prevent it. Let us hope that college students do not swoon over pictures of Hugo Chavez, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro because it is not sexy and hip!

Leninade is adorned with the phrases, “”POPAGANDA,” “Get Hammered and Sickled,” “A Taste Worth Standing in Line For,” and “Drink Comrade! Drink! It’s This or the Gulag!” Does Leninade creator Danny Ginsburg understand what he is propagating? Placing communist rhetoric on pop drinks and posters is only going to leave Obama Zombies susceptible to this doctrine. Ginsburg is obviously not sensitive to the victims of Lenin and their families with this gesture. Lovely when “humanitarian,” so-called liberals don’t condone these killers in their campaigns, right?

Time will only tell if naive Americans will finally grasp that communism is ill-fated, not something worth capitalizing on.

“Hey what’s up with you Neo-Cons?! Didn’t you get the memo that the Cold War was over?”

No, we didn’t.

The Department of Justice:

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department today announced that a scientist and his wife, who both previously worked as contractors at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, have been indicted on charges of communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official and conspiring to participate in the development of an atomic weapon for Venezuela, among other violations.

The 22-count indictment, which was returned yesterday by a federal grand jury in the District of New Mexico, was announced by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Kenneth J. Gonzales, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico and Carol K.O. Lee, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque Division.

The defendants are Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni (Mascheroni), 75, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Argentina, and Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni (Roxby Mascheroni), 67, a U.S. citizen.  Both were arrested by FBI agents this morning and made their initial appearance in federal court in Albuquerque today.   If convicted of all the charges in the indictment, the defendants face a potential sentence of life in prison.

Now might be a good time to revisit Ron Radosh and Joyce Milton’s The Rosenberg File.

Keep you eye on how The Nation responds to this story — if they even bother to.

Oliver Stone is basically Michael Moore on Slimfast (or maybe some other white powder.)

(Then again, given today’s revelations, maybe that should read “Mel Gibson without the Tourette’s…”)

When it comes to Stone’s on-again, off-again relationship with the facts, don’t get me started on JFK (no, seriously: don’t).

Now Stone has a new film out called South of the Border, and I hesitated to even bringing it up because, well, more people will read my post about it than will ever view the actual film.

But when a “cultural reporter” for the New York Times accuses Stone of  peddling inaccuracies, I pay attention.

Larry Rohter explains:

One month ago, I incurred the wrath of Oliver Stone for stating the obvious in an article I wrote:  his new movie South of the Border, ostensibly a “documentary” about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and a group of supposedly like-minded South American colleagues, is so riddled with errors, misrepresentations, fabrications and fraudulent statistics as to be useless except as an example of over-the-top propaganda.  At the screening for the movie that I attended, I counted more than two dozen assertions that are demonstrably incorrect, but chose, in the limited space available to me, to focus on but a handful.

Rohter places much of the blame on the film’s co-screenwriter, Mark Weisbrot:

Weisbrot is an economist, not a historian, and apparently not a very good one.  Either he is so incompetent that he can’t read a simple table or he is deliberately manipulating the numbers.  The latter seems more likely, since reputable economists have chastised him for such lapses in the past.  For example, Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan who once was chief economist for the Venezuelan Congress and now teaches at Wesleyan University, has written a scathing paper called “How Not to Defend the Revolution:  Mark Weisbrot and the Misinterpretation of Venezuelan Evidence.”  (…)

South of the Border is riddled with other errors and misinformation like this, but Stone and Weisbrot refuse to acknowledge them.  They continue to insist, for instance, that Chavez’s main opponent in the 1998 election was not Henrique Salas Romer, the former state governor who got 40 percent of the vote, but Irene Saez, the beauty queen who received a mere 3 percent.  By that novel and bizarre standard, George Bush’s main opponent in the 2000 election was not Al Gore but Ralph Nader, and Ronald Reagan’s main opponent in the 1980 election was not Jimmy Carter but John Anderson.

Oh, dear.

It gets better, as Rohter takes up that “Carter” ball and runs with it, slamming the former President at length.

Rohter’s article is long and may try the patience of anyone not passionate about South American politics and history, but it is worth reading as a righteous takedown of Stone, Carter and Chavez. Read it: it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Stone manipulates history in an attempt to promote his socialist buddy, Hugo Chavez.

For the umpteenth time, leftist movie director Oliver Stone praised his favorite South American communist strongman Hugo Chavez.

“I admire Hugo. I like him very much as a person,” Stone said in Caracas, Venezuela, where he was promoting his latest cinematic atrocity, South of the Border. Internet Movie Database (IMDB) describes the movie as “[a] road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media’s misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents.” (Sounds like a Media Matters project, doesn’t it?)

A news report fails to recognize the political objective of Stone’s latest movie. The propaganda flick “features informal interviews by Stone with Chavez and six allied leftist presidents, from Bolivia’s Evo Morales to Cuba’s Raul Castro,” AP reports.

Stone shared his affection for Chavez with the world. “He’s a soldier and he speaks from his heart,” said Stone. “His vision is huge. … And he will go down in history.”

Stone said he hopes his celluloid journey into fantasyland will help people better understand Chavez who is wrongly ridiculed “as a strongman, as a buffoon, as a clown.”

“This is a positive portrayal of a man who Americans do not have access to,” he said. “He is demonized in the American and European press as a monster.”

Would that Chavez were portrayed in the media as a monster. As if!

The media downplays the fact that Chavez openly works with terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and FARC. Hamas and Hezbollah have offices in Caracas and Chavez funds FARC. A congressional report indicates Iran’s fanatical Revolutionary Guards are active in Venezuela. A State Department report notes Venezuela’s close working relationship with terrorism-sponsoring Cuba.

And Stone loves this guy.

Follow me on Twitter.

NOTE: This is a slightly modified version of a post I put up at BigJournalism. One of the professional Media Matters character assassins, Simon Maloy, whose job consists of smearing whomever the group’s masters at Democracy Alliance require, labeled me an “all-around clown” for defending Beck’s statement. I replied on Twitter in an NSFW manner (writers who cover Media Matters can tell you about the powerful urge to cuss that takes over one’s body when reading the group’s hate site). This means I was attacked twice in the same day by Media Matters, which I can only hope is a sign I’m doing something right. -MV

To the leftists at Media Matters for America, even mere days after a suspected Islamist bomb plot was defused in Manhattan’s Times Square, national security is one big joke.

They could care less about U.S. security as long as they get to stick the knife in Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, conservatives, and others deemed enemies of George Soros’s utopian “open society.” It’s all about scoring against their political enemies and they don’t care if innocents get hurt in the process.

So it’s no surprise that the media bias analysts at the Soros-embraced “watchdog group” enjoy mocking Glenn Beck at every opportunity. They hate the Fox host and everything he represents, especially his ability to influence the nation’s political debate – I get it. But they’re playing with fire when they ridicule Beck for warning about the subversion threat posed by Venezuela’s communist strongman Hugo Chavez.

In response to the May 4 “Glenn Beck Program,” Media Matters posted a brief video clip from the show with the following snotty headline: New conspiracy theory: Beck suggests Chavez and others have sent in special teams to “nudge” U.S. toward “collapse.”

In the clip Beck is showing saying:

These are the guys…and we did this in Russia, we sent them in. We sent them in. we send them in when a country’s about to be toppled. [In the] Soviet Union we did it. I’m sure we did it in Poland. These are the guys that don’t overthrow regimes, they help. They just nudge. They help. Do you really think that we’re the only country that does that? Have you ever seen the revolutionaries in Colombia that hate America, want to destroy us, have been waiting for a big communist revolution? Do you really think [with] our open border nobody has been sent up here, just waiting, from all over the world? You think Hugo Chavez hasn’t thought, hey, go send a few people up there to help? [emphasis added]

While I have no proof Chavez has agents in the U.S., the notion isn’t as farfetched as Media Matters would suggest. Beck didn’t just conjure up the idea out of thin air.

Of course, some might have difficulty taking Chavez seriously. He’s the unstable fellow who blamed the devastating earthquake in Haiti on the United States and called President George W. Bush “the Devil” during a speech before the United Nations General Assembly.

But it’s important to remember that Chavez openly cooperates with terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and FARC. Hamas and Hezbollah have offices in Caracas and Chavez funds FARC. A congressional report indicates Iran’s fanatical Revolutionary Guard is active in Venezuela. A State Department report notes Venezuela’s close working relationship with terrorism-sponsoring Cuba.

But Media Matters, in their rush to condemn what they deem “conservative misinformation,” have flippantly dismissed the growing threat that the Chavez junta poses to the people of the United States.

Reformed leftist and FBI informant Brandon Darby has confirmed that when he visited Venezuela in 2006 Chavez’s henchmen tried to convince him to found an anti-American revolutionary terrorist group in Louisiana as the state struggled to regain its footing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

In the month he was in Venezuela, Chavez officials introduced him to executives of PDVSA, the government-owned oil company that owns CITGO, which operates a chain of gas stations in the U.S. They pressured Darby to journey to neighboring Colombia to meet with a group aligned with the narco-terror organization FARC and to visit another revolutionary group in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Darby refused.

Chavez already runs what political scientists call a “public diplomacy” campaign in the U.S. to help bolster American support for his regime.

The propaganda effort consists of funneling discounted home heating oil to former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) nonprofit group, Citizens Energy Corp. The nonprofit then distributes the oil to poor people, and useful idiot Kennedy gets to pose as a humanitarian.

The CITGO program is not terrorism – technically – but it is a soft attempt at domestic subversion. As such, Media Matters may make fun of Beck all they want, but I’m afraid that his theories about Venezuelan involvement in America aren’t that far-fetched – at all.

As I wrote in the April 2010 issue of Townhall magazine: Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called “friends.”

* * * * *

Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?

Neither did I until recently.

That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

Brandon Darby, who in recent years also refused leftists’ invitations to get involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.

After years of in-your-face protests, confrontational tactics and working with America-haters, Darby eventually experienced a political epiphany. He rejected the radical Left and its culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all.

“I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” Darby told me in an interview. “I love my country.”

But Darby didn’t always love his country.

[...]

He openly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he considered too corrupt and oppressive to be reformed. He expressed his hatred of police as guardians of the status quo. He consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers, radical feminists and black nationalists.

[...]

But around the same time, the former radical community organizer was turning away from radicalism, and at tremendous personal risk, he undermined a left-wing terrorist plot to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. If he hadn’t taken action, Americans exercising their free speech rights and police officers might have been killed.

Without informing his fellow anarchists, Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBI’s request, infiltrated a leftwing group known as the Austin Affinity Group. The outfit had joined with a larger coalition of progressive organizations that facetiously called itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee.” The committee hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The FBI sent Darby to meet with anarchists who were developing their plan at a bookstore in Austin.

“It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of ‘black bloc’ anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary,” he explained. “They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas.”

[...]

ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who worked as a professional agitator for the violent Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, would have preferred that Republican delegates be incinerated.

He denounced Darby for working with the authorities to disrupt the domestic terrorists. “It seemed so, how should I say it, ’60s?”

It’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,” Rathke wrote on his blog.

This response to ideological apostasy is not altogether surprising. Leftists who abandon their faith are demonized by their former co-religionists. Relentless attacks on Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and former radical David Horowitz continue to the present day, decades after they moved rightward.

[...]

The full article has been posted with kind permission of Townhall magazine at BigGovernment.com.

Actor Sean Penn loves Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez so much he wants journalists who dare to call Chavez a dictator put in prison, FoxNews.com reports.

Appearing on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, the Oscar-winning actor said

Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it, and this is mainstream media, who should — truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said that apart from an immediate incitement of violence, Penn may say virtually anything he wants in the “political arena.”

“What he is saying is protected, as wacky and weird as it is,” said Napolitano. “But the substance of what he’s saying would be absolutely contrary to the First Amendment, which fully protects all political opinions. So if a journalist says Dick Cheney should go to jail, the journalist is privileged to say that.”

“Mr. Penn is calling for a communist-like regime in which journalists who criticize the government are sent to jail because of that criticism,” Napolitano said. “That is utterly un-American and hasn’t happened here since the Civil War.”

Penn also previously called the Chavez-crafted constitution of Venezuela, which gives the president the power to rule by decree, “a very beautiful document.”

It is unclear what Penn thinks of Chavez’s crackdown on the media –including the movie industry– in Venezuela. After local filmmakers protested Chavez’s plan to give taxpayers’ funds to the American actor Danny Glover to produce movies, Venezuela outlawed two local film guilds, Variety reported.

Sebastian Pinera, Chile's New Right-Wing President

Leftists in Latin America are in trouble.

Costa Rica, Brazil, and Panama, for example, are all countries where the left has been defeated in recent elections or is in serious trouble. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s approval ratings are down to an all-time low of 27%, and sinking almost as fast as Barack Obama’s. To add insult to injury, Latin Americans are no longer buying the leftist rhetoric. In a survey last month, a staggering 59 percent of Latin Americans surveyed agreed that a market economy is best for the future of the region.

And now, in the latest rejection of socialism, billionaire Sebastian Pinera has won Chile’s election, becoming the nation’s first democratically elected right-wing president in 52 years.

…a change will be good for Chile. It’s like opening the windows of your home to let fresh air come in. Better times are coming for Chile.

In Chile, Pinera’s promises to return to free-market principles have resonated with the people. After years of recession and failed socialist policies, Pinera, a Harvard-trained economist, has made it his goal to expand Chile’s economic growth 6 percent a year. Chile, which has the highest standard of living in Latin America, is one of the world’s largest producers of copper. After the socialist nationalization of the copper industry by a succession of leftist governments, billions of dollars in copper revenue were squandered in failed social programs.

This win should really rattle Chile’s socialist neighbors. Land-locked Bolivia, ruled by socialist and Chávez-wannabe Evo Morales, has been pressuring Chile to provide it with access to the sea for years. Chávez himself may soon feel the coming tide. Pinera will be no Chávez clone; he will be more like Colombia’s conservative President Alvaro Uribe, an outspoken critic of socialism and Chávez, and a friend of the United States.