Thanks to those stubborn things called facts, today it’s the Washington Post under fire, not the subject of their Thursday hit piece, Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio.

And now the WaPo memory-holing has begun.

First, the Miami Herald came out swinging against WaPo’s embellishment of Rubio’s so-called embellishments, then the Senator himself hit back, then we learned the troubling back-story of the WaPo “reporter” who wrote the piece, and now the once-legendary newspaper has taken to quietly scrubbing the original story in order to make it look like something closer to the truth.

Here are the two opening paragraphs of the original WaPo story, which was re-published at Yahoo:

But today at the Washington Post’s own website, here’s what the story looks like: (more…)

The same WaPo that crowd-sourced Sarah Palin’s emails; the same race-baiting WaPo that made a front page story out of a 30 year-old rock; the same WaPo that ignored the Jeremiah Wright story (h/t: Jim Geraghty) –  has now launched a partisan attack against Senator Marco Rubio, a man widely believed to be a leading contender for the Republican Vice Presidential nod in 2012.

One-by-one the MSM is attempting to pick our candidates off with lies, half-truths, innuendo, and phony narratives — especially our non-white, non-male candidates who represent a unique threat to the re-election of Barack Obama and the Democrat party in general. Yesterday, the Washington Post launched the latest narrative missile in this ongoing media campaign, but thankfully the Miami Herald has already fired back (as has Rubio):

Did the Washington Post embellish Marco Rubio’s ‘embellishments’?

The Washington Post just released this interesting story headlined “Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show.” The paper flagged a clear inaccuracy in his official Senate biography that states the Senator’s parents “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

That’s false. Rubio’s parents came to the US before then, in 1956. They remained in the US after Castro took over in 1959. They returned to Cuba for brief stints early on, before the country devolved into Soviet-style totalitarianism.

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Your taxpayer dollars at work promoting Cuba’s failed socialist system … PBS recently aired a report on Cuba’s outstanding health care system.

This was simply unbelievable.

Out state-run media is no longer just liberal – It’s communist:

They forgot to mention that Cuban President Raul Castro just warned his fellow Cubansthat they are running out of time and if they don´t change now, their will be an economic collapse.

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Atlantic journalist and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg is trying to understand why blacks are such “very forgiving people.”

Why does he think they are?

Well, how could any black American be, or even think about being, a Republican when, according to Goldberg, Republican “party officials…. venerate the Confederacy.”

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg (seated left) enjoys the Havana Aquarium with Fidel Castro and Che’s daughter (behind Goldberg, with blondish hair)

Translation: When it’s clear, at least to Goldberg, that the Republican Party is a party of racists, how can they get, or expect to get, black votes?

Goldberg presented this ponderous dilemma to Mississippi Governor, and chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association, Haley Barbour.

Barbour explained that Confederate Memorial Day in his state is a statutory precedent long preceding his tenure as Governor and the state legislature in Mississippi is, and always has been, controlled by Democrats. (more…)

Hired help might be hard to find nowadays—but not for Fidel Castro. Jack Benny had his Rochester. Louise Jefferson had her Florence.  And Fidel Castro now has his Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s freshly-minted “Cuba Expert.”

Last month Fidel Castro granted Goldberg an extensive “interview.” This week a seemingly conscience-pricked Goldberg cops a plea for the arrant apple-polishing that resulted. Regarding his portrayal of a “benign” and grandfatherly Fidel Castro whom he also called a “great man,” Goldberg rationalizes thusly:

A close reading of the human rights literature suggests to me that the leadership of Cuba is not morally comparable to the leadership of Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela.

Well, Mr. Goldberg, perhaps a closer reading might help. To wit:  In his book Against All Hope, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 years in Castro’s dungeons, forced-labor camps, and torture chambers, then served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, reveals how at one point in 1961, Castro’s Gulag held 350,000 political prisoners. Freedom House estimates that half a million Cubans have passed through Castro’s Gulag. That’s out of a Cuban population at the time of 6.4 million. (more…)

Time Magazine just ran an article on U.S.-Cuba relations which employs the word embargo (as in big, bad bully U.S. against innocent little free-health-care provider Castro) eight times. The term travel ban figures in the article’s very title.

Question 1. What embargo? Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.”

And yet:  according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce (that you’d hope Time could dig up) the U.S. transacted $710 million worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in 2008, and has transacted more than $2 billion worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in the last decade. Currently the U.S. serves as Castro’s Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. Furthermore, the U.S. has been Castro’s Cuba’s biggest donor of humanitarian aid including medicine and medical supplies for decades. All this together with the almost $2 billion a year in remittances sent from the U.S. ranks our nation right between Red China and Hugo’s Venezuela as a Castro business partner.

Question 2. What Travel Ban? The term seems pretty self-explanatory, right? (more…)

This just in from the New York Times.

The Obama administration is planning to expand opportunities for Americans to travel to Cuba. The policy… is meant to loosen restrictions on academic, religious and cultural groups that were adopted under President George Bush and return to the “people to people” policies followed under President Bill Clinton… Those policies, officials said, fostered robust exchanges between the United States and Cuba, allowing groups … to share expertise as well as life experiences.

In fact, these groups shared much more than “life experiences.” The Times is much; too bashful in detailing just how “robust” these exchanges with Cuba had gotten during the Clinton administration.

Mr. and Mrs. Kendall Myers, Cuban spies in the State Dept.

No mention by the Times, for instance, that the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent resulted precisely from all that “sharing” by the Clinton administration with Stalinist Cuba, a regime Obama’s very State Department lists as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Schizophrenia by any other name

“Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of his hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere,” asserted the Clinton Defense Department’s “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba.”

From Havana Castro immediately hailed the report as “an objective report by serious people.” (more…)

The dictator who came the closest in history to igniting a nuclear war made several public appearances recently to predict imminent nuclear war. The cataclysm he craved in Oct. 1962 will erupt, he warned on Cuban TV, when the Israelis and their Yankee vassals provoke Iran in the straits of Hormuz.

That’s not a typo above. Castro, who co-sponsored the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism, says the Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog. Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and docile.  The main instigators, the ones carefully setting the trap to ignite nuclear war are those crafty Israelis. “The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous,” he revealed last week.

Fidel Castro, that sentimental old fool, has excellent reason to bask in the fond memory of imminent nuclear war. “Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them.  And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.

– Che Guevara, November 1962.

“My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York City

– Raul –not Fidel—Castro, Nov. 1960.

But “Hay Caramba!” the Stalinist trio fumed and raged for years afterwards. “Nikita Khrushchev, that sniveling maricon, snatched that magic button-pushing moment from our eager fingers!”

“We should deliver a nuclear first strike,” read the telegram from Castro to Khrushchev on Oct. 28 1962. (more…)

Castro’s regime has agreed to release 52 political prisoners in the coming months and according to the New York Times, “this would reduce the number of prisoners of conscience on the island by about a third.”

“We think that’s a positive sign,” said Sec. of State Clinton. “It’s something that is overdue but nevertheless very welcome.”

“Gosh, Castro only jails about 150 political prisoners?” might remark a typical Times reader (maybe even Hillary). “So why all the fuss about Cuba’s human-rights problems? Heck, we keep almost double that many prisoners in Guantanamo!”

In fact, the Times (“Fidel Castro is not only NOT a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist. In Cuba there are no communists in positions of control.” New York Times, June 1959) probably picked up the political prisoner release story from the Associated Press, another outfit with “a past” on Castroism. (more…)

The FBI arrested fiery New York columnist, Vicky Pelaez in late June.  An editor and writer for the Spanish language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa, she was charged with being an unregistered agent of the Russian government.  Her far-left, anti-American columns won accolades from American progressives, and from the Hispanic diaspora in the U.S.  Released on bail to home detention during the Fourth of July long weekend, she was part of the spy swap in Vienna today that saw ten confessed Russian agents exchanged for four Russians accused of working for the U.S.

A sample from a Pelaez editorial in El Diario, translated from Spanish scorched the policies of her adopted country:  “…refusing to hear … the popular resistance and the opinion of the majority of countries in the world, the Big Boss [the United States] supported the putschists’ … illegal [Honduran] presidential elections…” Pelaez finished her Dec. 1, 2009 anti-American rant, written in her comfortable suburban house in Yonkers, N.Y., with a tired revolutionary screech, “as long as injustice and poverty remain dominant, the struggle will continue.”

Soviet intelligence operatives (the KGB and its successor, the SVR), starting in the 1920s, recruited agents in the press to influence American opinion.  The goal of the communist influence messages, as directed by Vladimir Lenin, was to destroy “the Main Enemy” from within.  Lenin used this tactic, learned in his own Revolution, because he knew the Soviet army was too weak to take on the American military.

The influence message, boiled down to its essence was, and is, “America is an irredeemably racist, sexist, foreigner-hating, imperialistic, war-mongering country that deserves to be destroyed.”  Repeating this message over and over, like an advertising campaign, rooted the message deep in the psyches of the past several generations.  The ultimate result of decades of propagating this message through the press, education and academia, and Hollywood has been the attitude known as Political Correctness. (more…)

Vicky Pelaez

The 11 arrests so far are the tip of iceberg. Many more to follow, many in South Florida.

The “South American country” where Vicky Pelaez picked up her payments from Russia’s SVR was Venezuela.

Russia’s SVR, Castro’s DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia) and Chavez’ SEBIN, (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia) (are all linked. They all share agents and information.  Castro-Cubans run Chavez’ intelligence agency practically lock, stock and barrel.

Vicky Pelaez was a frequent traveler to Cuba where she met with Castro’s DGI Pictures exist of those meetings.

Prominent figures in South Florida under investigation and net is closing on them. One suspect was very close to a U.S. Presidential candidate during the 2008 campaign.

Sensationalist?..Perhaps. But I quote Cuban-American Arturo Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran and former Castro political prisoner who had a key role in identifying Castro spies and alerting the FBI to their attempted infiltration into the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift. Details of his vital work here. (more…)

The Huffington Post’s Cuba-based writer, Margarita Alarcon, informs us that treating Cuba, “this small island,” as “a threat to U.S. integrity so much that the Department of State puts it on its list of terrorist nations is considered tantamount to political dementia.”  In fact, Margarita Alarcon’s views closely parallel those of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s former Latin American head, Ana Belen Montes.

In a 1998 report entitled “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba” and largely authored by Ms. Montes, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that:

Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of its hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere.

The Clinton administration based its Cuba policy on this eminently authoritative report. After all, its primary author had access to all U.S. intelligence on Cuba and led briefings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon regarding Cuban policy. “On Cuba,” one government official said. “Montes was who you went to.”

Four years after issuing that report, its primary author was in U.S. federal prison having been convicted of espionage, (the same charges against the Rosenbergs) and having narrowly dodged their death sentence only with a plea bargain. Turned out that Montes, (a frequent visitor to Cuba on “academic exchanges”) had been working for Castro since the 80’s. (more…)

I spent much time during the past few weeks helping my son study for the state-wide World History test he took a few days ago. Working with him through his studies, I learned his class presented a brand new version of history, a version that never occurred. Some can argue different versions/interpretations of events that happened centuries ago, but his text book and curriculum distorted events I saw with my own eyes.

The text-book in question is called World History Patterns of Interaction, and is published by McDougal Littell.  Particularly upsetting was the section of the book covering the period from the end of WWII through the 1980s. It sets up the Cold War period with the mistaken politically correct explanation that both sides were aggressors. On page 983 it says:

Both sides believed that they needed to stop the other side from extending its power.”  What it should have said was that the Cold War was a battle between the Soviet side wanting to expand its communist philosophy across the world, and the west trying to prevent the takeover.

The book also whitewashes the tyranny of Castro’s communist Cuba. Page 985 says “Soviet aid to Cuba ended abruptly with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. This dealt a crippling blow to the Cuban economy.”  There was no mention of the brutality of the Cuban regime; the fact that all opposition newspapers had been closed down, all radio and television stations were in state control, or that moderates, teachers and professors were purged. Nor was there any mention of the torture and inhumane treatment in Cuban prisons that is still happening today. (more…)

So what’s the most dangerous nation on earth for journalists? Which nation jails and tortures them at the highest rate?

The question was answered on June 16 by the Committee to Protect Journalists‘ Executive Director, Joel Simon. The setting was a hearing on “Press Freedom in the Americas,” held by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.  And quite interestingly, none of that very hemispheric press has yet seen fit to report this item.

So let’s ask the multiple Peabody and Emmy award winning American journalist Dan Rather if he knows who jails and tortures the most journalists on earth.

Fidel Castro is Cuba’s Elvis!

Nope.  Seems that Dan’s no help. Okay, now let’s ask the same question to Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism- winner, Andrea Mitchell: (more…)

Three times last week CNBC aired an hour-long special titled “Escape from Havana.“ “

Between 1960 and 1962, more than 14,000 Cuban children were secretly flown to the United States to escape Fidel Castro, “reads the catchy CNBC teaser.  “Today, many of the Pedro Pans have thrived in America… Each has walked a long road and fought to overcome profound obstacles on their way to the American dream.  In our documentary, you’ll meet a big-city mayor, an accomplished author, a singer, an activist, a professor, and a business leader. They were all part of a secret and improbable plan to escape a dictator’s rule and fly to freedom.”

CNBC seemed to promise   love, war, danger, intrigue, heartbreak, and a heart-warming Horatio Alger finale.  And indeed, accurately told, the story of thousands of Cuban parents desperate to save their children by spiriting them to the traditional land of the free as Soviet proxies Fidel Castro and Che Guevara tightened their grip around Cuba’s throat would provide all of the dramatic elements above –and in spades.

We still await such a depiction.  Instead NBC gave us cleverly-disguised Castroite propaganda. (more…)

Imagine a Breitbart contributor thanking Timothy Mc Veigh in the acknowledgements to his books. Imagine a Tea Party speaker doing same. Imagine a Heritage Foundation Senior fellow proudly acknowledging how Timothy Mc Veigh “championed” his research and writings.

Might the MSM notice? Might they react?  Might their reaction consist of more than a few polite coughs behind the hand?

Well, here’s New York Times contributor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig in the acknowledgements to her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution:

In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and  Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.

“Fine, Humberto,” you say.  “But just who are these folks who championed Sweig’s book? And how on earth can you equate them with Timothy Mc Veigh?” (more…)

In 1979 David Halberstam’s book, The Powers That Be, claimed that the major media had “stopped following the news and was now making the news. “An account of the rise of the modern media as an instrument of political power,” reads the jacket. Cuban regime defectors report that this became one of Fidel Castro’s favorite books. Not that he learned anything from its pages; simply that he received smug confirmation for something he’d plumbed decades before Halberstam.

Things have changed. And though MSM agencies with Havana bureau’s still perform for Castro like trained seals, bloggers (and the new media in general) are increasingly vexing the Castro regime. Reuters, AP, and CBS might clutch the regime’s hand-out sheets and eagerly transcribe them. Upon hearing Castro’s whistle, ABC, NBC and the AP might come running, their tongues out and their tails wagging.

The Cuban-American bloggers at Babalu Blog, on the other hand, watch the clown-show with bitter mirth while rubbing their hands. Ed Mc Mahon never lobbed it over so temptingly for Johnny.  Babalu blog founder and guiding light Val Prieto along with managing editors Alberto de la Cruz and George Moneo were recently interviewed by Dr Helen Smith of Pajamas TV. And as much fun as they have with this venture, you’ll see that their mission amounts to more than eye-poking.  Much of the best reporting on (and from) Castro’s fiefdom is by Spanish language bureaus. Among Babalu bloggers’ tasks is to scour these stories, and translate the juiciest morsels into Red state English for U.S. consumption. (more…)