Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

James Woods, Nichole Kidman, Rene Zellweger, Halle Berry, Brad Pit, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro

A lot of good stuff in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, but absolutely one of the more interesting tidbits was in the entertainment column of their Parade magazine. Some guy answers questions. A lot of it is "where are they now" or "what's filming when" kind of questions. And then there was this question, published today:

Q: I'm interested in where Fidel Castro gets the dough to shore up his bankrupt regime. Can you illuminate?

Great question. Why the heck haven't I seen this in the Philadelphia Inquirer in the more serious sections before? But whatever, I'll take it in the Sunday not-too-serious magazine section of the paper.

A: In the wake of the collapse of the USSR, which bankrolled him to the tune of $4 billion a year, Castro has turned to Hugo Chavez, Marxist president of Venezuela, the world's fith-largest oil-exporter. In addition to shoring up Castro, he's funding revolutionaries and terrorists throughout Latin America.

Wow.

Seriously. Good job to Walter Scott. When everybody was bad-mouthing Pat Robertson, how many stories did you read that mentioned this fact? While I still don't think Robertson as a minister should have said what he said, don't you think this would have helped put things in perspective for readers?

I hope they aren't going easy on Chavez because of their dislike of Robertson. To be fair, I learned about Hugo Chavez through the blogosphere. It wasn't like they were writing a bunch of stories giving people detailed information on Chavez prior to Robertson's comments.