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Chavez to rule by decree
...The National Assembly granted President Hugo Chávez broad powers on Friday to enact laws by decree, undermining the power of a new Congress that takes office next month with a bigger opposition bloc. Mr. Chávez, left, has argued that he needs decree powers to fast-track financing to help the victims of recent floods and landslides, and to hasten the transition to socialism. … The assembly approved the powers for 18 months. ...

Hugo Chavez: CommuNazi
...Also happy will be former Nation publisher and editor-in-chief Victor Navasky, now a major professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Sent to Venezuela in in 2007 by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that set up an investigation of Chavez’s war against a free press, Navasky reported that he would go, although he explained, “I knew Chávez was overwhelmingly popular with the poor and I wasn’t interested in participating in an anti-Chávez hit job, even in the worthy cause of human rights.” Notice how Navasky, the very model of a New York City leftist, puts human rights by the wayside when it comes to extolling the revolutionary virtues of a would-be Communist dictator. As Navasky sees things, the threat to a free press was not Chavez, but the “media owners.” To criticize Chavez, evidently, amounts to nothing but a “hit-job.” No wonder Chavez loves the likes of Navasky and Oliver Stone. Navasky must pine for the day when The Nation would be mandatory reading in this country and Fox News would be closed down. As he wrote, Chavez’s goal of “socialism in the 21st Century” is one “to be nourished as an ideal to pursue rather than a policy to be mocked.”...

...There is one good historical precedent for what Chavez is attempting, and it does not come from the history of Communist countries now long gone. Rather, it comes from the policies established by Adolf Hitler after the burning of the Reichstag by an arsonist in 1933. Arguing that the Communists were trying to subvert the German government (Chavez, of course, says the anti-Communists are doing the same in Venezuela), Hitler asked President von Hindenburg to pass an “emergency decree” to allow the Nazi government to have full emergency powers. All civil liberties were suspended, and mass arrests followed of Communists, socialists, trade unionists and other opponents of the regime. Opposition delegates were removed from the Reichstag, giving the Nazis a legislative majority that did not exist before.

New elections were set for March 5, 1933. By passing the Enabling Act — the same term used by Chavez today — Hitler sought to abolish democracy by formally democratic means. ...