Inside the Beltway

HOLA HOLLYWOOD

Oddly enough, both Sean Penn and Michael Douglas went to Cuba this week. Mr. Penn is seeking an audience with Fidel Castro on behalf of Vanity Fair; Mr. Douglas is perhaps just seeking an audience, staging a convivial stroll through Havana on Tuesday.

Well, OK. But wait. “Without Fidel,” a new book by Ann Louise Bardach, reveals that movie stars who venture to sunny Cuba do not tote their privacy with them.

“One Cuban security official, Delfin Fernandez, who defected in 1999, claims that the surveillance of foreign diplomats, businessmen, and even visiting movie stars with sophisticated listening devices and hidden video cameras, is routine. Fernandez said he had personally spied on Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss during their visits to Havana,” Ms. Bardach notes.

What does it all mean?

“Hollywood’s useful idiots go to Cuba,” advises Big Hollywood .com.

RATING HATE

Some are uneasy about the hate-crimes measure signed into law by President Obama on Wednesday as part of the 2010 defense authorization bill.

“Predictably, cable news networks CNN and MSNBC considered this good news, dressing it up in the language of civil rights. Just as predictably, they failed to consider the chilling effect the legislation could have on traditional religious speech and other consequences to American liberty,” Colleen Raezler of the Culture and Media Institute tells Inside the Beltway.

“Liberals who love to draw lessons from the practices of other nations need only look to Great Britain, Sweden and Canada to what hate crime protections for gays has wrought,” she says.

“In a slap to the face of our servicemen and women, they attached ‘hate crimes’ legislation to the final defense bill, forcing Congress to choose between expanding hate crimes or making our military go without,” says Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “This hate crimes provision is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

THEY’RE ALL GONERS

Uh-oh. Zombie voters walk. The nonpartisan research group Aristotle International compared federal, state and local lists of deceased or relocated voters to reveal Wednesday that 16,331,707 (or 8.9 percent ) of all registered voters are “deadwood” - a 3 percent increase compared to last year. In all, nearly 10 percent of voters listed on registration rolls are ineligible to vote.

“Deadwood on voter rolls complicates the electoral process and can cause problems like fraud and vote miscounts. It always creates a perception of low voter turnout,” company CEO John Aristotle Phillips tells Beltway “It gets down to this: by depressing turnout, dead voters make the rest of us look bad.”

They also deplete campaign funds.

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