Venezuala's President Hugo Chavez has closed his country's one private television station because it continually was too critical for him.

This led to protests in Caracas:

Venezuelan police fired tear gas and plastic bullets Monday into a crowd of thousands protesting a decision by President Hugo Chavez that forced a television station critical of his leftist government off the air.

Police fired toward the crowd of up to 5,000 protesters from a raised highway, and protesters fled amid clouds of tear gas. They later regrouped in Caracas' Plaza Brion chanting "freedom!" Some tossed rocks and bottles at police, prompting authorities to scatter demonstrators by firing more gas.

In an amazingly obtuse Richard Cohen column, filled with a number of howlers, this one stuck out for me:

[I]it is with Iraq that real and long-term damage [to "liberalism"!] has been done. For years to come, his war will be cited to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy -- to further discredit John F. Kennedy's vow to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty." We shall revert to this thing called "realism," which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues. The debacle of Iraq has cost us -- and others -- plenty in lives. But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well.

This is just about the stupidest thing I have seen written, and boy is that saying something, in a long time.

Forget the pure fantasy that the Iraq Debacle was a "war of liberal impulse," what about the idea that a liberal foreign policy means war first? Are you kidding me? In short, this is madness. War is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing, always to be undertaken only as a last resort after all other FOREIGN POLICY recourses have been attempted. There simply is no first resort liberal war. The idea is moronic, as well as an oxymoron.

When Alberto Gonzales was nominated for Attorney General, some hispanic groups swallowed their doubts about his political history and supported him because he was a Latino.

Some of those groups are now expressing buyer's remorse.

"I have to say we were in error when we supported him to begin with," said Brent Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Gonzales, Wilkes said, has not aggressively pursued hate crimes and cases of police profiling of Hispanics. "We hoped for better. Instead it looks like he's done the bidding of the White House."

Janet Murguia, president and chief executive of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic rights group, called Gonzales "a follower, not a leader."

Count me among those who never understood their support for Gonzales in the first place.

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All good things come to an end. Cindy Sheehan has tendered her resignation letter.

While I appreciate her service, I have thought for a while she needs to get her life back. As the mother of a son who would be of draft age if there was a draft, I can't imagine the devastation that she and the other mothers of the 3,500 soldiers killed in Iraq endure on a daily basis.

Cindy channeled her grief into a public cause to end the war that a majority of Americans now believe we should exit from. She deserves a lot of credit.

But she also deserves a life. I'm sure her son would want her to have one. The war is not going to end by demonstrations near Bush's ranch at Crawford, Texas, nor by Cindy continuing to be arrested at peace marches. Those days are over.

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Huffington Post gets a blog-lift (y.i.c.t.p., as Skippy would say). And it's a good one.

And to organize it all we've created five new sections: Media, Business, Entertainment, a culture and lifestyle section called Living Now, and a Politics section that will feature our political editor Tom Edsall and a shared-content partnership with Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo. Plus, we've improved the design, navigation, and search function to help you find what you want more easily.

The front page will continue to feature our signature group blog and breaking news stories, but it was clearly no longer big enough to contain all the great stories, blog posts, and features we wanted to share with you. So each new section will have its own "front page" with fresh editorial talent and a constantly growing list of bloggers.

I think it's a great progression, and I would have expected nothing less from Arianna and her crew. And yes, when I have something to say, I'll still be a guest poster there.

We have the early winner for the most ironic column of the year, the "estimable" David Brooks delivers:

. . . Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

You remind us of this with every column Mr. Brooks. I have not read Gore's book, and Gore may indeed be a strange egg. But having read David Brooks for too many years, and having dedicated a good deal of time proving (yes, I proved it) that he is a mendacious, insecure, unethical, STRANGE man, it ill behooves him to call anyone else strange. We have many unkind words for Friedman, Broder, Klein and others. But nothing compares to the bizarre mind that David Brooks possesses. Married to his utter lack of fealty to the truth, to honest argument and to decency, it takes some nerve for Brooks to write what he does about Gore. But the success of David Brooks can only be attributed to gall, talent and intelligence surely can not explain it. They are nonexistent in him.

My all time favorite blogger is Digby. So it saddens me greatly to see these words come from Digby:

Glenn Greenwald's post from Saturday critiquing Jonathan Alter's piece in the latest Newsweek about the Iraq war vote. Glenn is correct that this false dichotomy of "support the troops" vs "support your constituents" is a GOP talking point that has become conventional wisdom largely because the Democrats conceded it. I can't answer for why they tend to do this, but it's one of the biggest problems we have --- and it isn't just the Democrats who do it, it's the netroots too. Every time we reinforce GOP memes about Democratic "cowardice" we help them make their case. Language is important and it's a big failure among the left that we fail to understand how our own words work against us. I'm guilty of it too.

Poor, poor Wolfie. He didn't deserve to lose his job at the World Bank. But for the big, bad media, it never would have happened.

The only good news is that Bill Frist has taken himself out of the running for his replacement.

Meet the new Rudy -- the silly comb-over is gone. And he's trying out a new personality.

Mr. Giuliani laughs, he gestures expansively, he even pokes fun at his tendency to wax a wee bit authoritarian. (He suggests a touch of the cane was necessary to impose discipline on that liberal asylum known as New York.) He shakes hands with reporters he once viewed as “jerky” and assures them he is fine with tough questions about abortion, where he has settled on a position supporting a woman’s right to choose, and about gun control, where is he at least halfway into a policy back-flip.

Expect the next change to be to his wardrobe.

He dresses in the one-size-too-large suits he has favored since his days as a federal prosecutor, with the top shirt button fastened and tie knotted tight. It is difficult to imagine anyone asking him a “really dopey” (two favorite Giuliani words now in abeyance) question about his favored style in underwear, as someone once did of Bill Clinton.

Thank goodness only Judi has to see him in his underwear.

Jimmy Ray Bromgard was convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence and released from prison.

Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath continues to assert he believes Bromgard to be guilty.

It's not even a case of the unidentified co-ejaculator.

In most of the cases where prosecutors have refused to believe in an exoneration, they have cited evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime to argue that the DNA was left by a second, unidentified offender. It is rare for a prosecutor to dispute a DNA exoneration when there is no evidence -- as in Bromgard's case -- that more than one person committed the crime.

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Marcy (Empty Wheel) argues that the sentencing letters written on behalf of Scooter Libby should be made available to the public.

Team Libby disagrees (brief here), asserting that the letters are not judicial records because they haven't been filed with the Court (they were submitted in camera through the Probation Department) and aren't subject to the First Amendment, and because the privacy interests of the authors outweigh the interest of the public's right to know. Also, Libby argues, since courts have discouraged or prohibited the disclosure of such letters in the past, a change in this case might have a chilling effect and deter supporters of defendants in future cases from writing candid letters of support.

Team Libby is particularly concerned about bloggers:

Given the extraordinary media scrutiny here, if any case presents the possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers, it is this case.

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To all who served in our wars, and their families, thank you for your sacrifice.

To our President: It's time to leave Iraq. We cannot win this civil war. We can only lose more precious lives.

Bring the troops home now.