Venezuela's blowhard President Hugo Chavez last week offered up his palace to citizens made homeless by floods and he's living up to it, telling Caracas residents, "Put up Gaddafi's gift. [...] I'm going to move into the tent." So proletariat!

Venezuela has been hit by deadly floods and mudslides that have claimed at least 25 lives. This has prompted President Hugo Chávez to invite dozens of now-homeless Venezuelans to stay at his presidential palace until they are resettled. How benevolent!

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez™ has tightened his totalitarian grip on the country by banning the reproduction of his "name, image or figure" for murals and other propaganda without express permission from the government. The revolution will not be illegally reproduced.

Shady political direct-mail campaigns mostly fly under the media's radar, by design. But one flyer from the "National Campaign for an Impeachment Inquiry" has surfaced, and it's a doozy. Haven't gotten it in the mail already? More details, below.

[Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez voted with a little help in that country's congressional elections yesterday. Image via AP]

Running for office in Venezuela is an expensive (and dangerous) undertaking. So an opposition candidate in the upcoming legislative elections there, Gustavo Rojas, is holding a raffle to raise campaign funds, and the prize is a free boob job. Clever!

A natural gas platform has sunk off the coast of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez announced on the Twitter.

The Venezuelan leader, or @chavezcandanga, signed up to Twitter two weeks ago, calling the service "a weapon that also needs to be used by the revolution." He already has more than 240,000 followers. And now he has Tweetstaff.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is on the Twitter! And because "the internet can't be just for the bourgeoisie," he's invited Bolivian President Evo Morales and Fidel Castro. A specter is haunting Latin America—the specter of Twitter! [Yahoo]

Venezuela's president and commander-in-insanity once likened Twitter criticism to "terrorism." Now he's ready to fight fire with fire: "Comandante Chavez is going to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online," announced Venezuela's state-run communications agency.

The prickly President of Venezuela has just about had it with the backstabby world of online political dissidence, and has vowed to fight back with a blog of his own. Generation Overshare, please welcome your soon-to-be newest comrade.

You can always count on Venezuelan dictator-president Hugo Chavez to say something stupid. Last month, for example, he claimed a U.S. weapons test caused the Haiti earthquake. Now he's launching a radio program to be broadcast whenever he wants!

• Lindsay Lohan may be into boys again, at least according to the Sun, since she supposedly spent the night with a male model who she'd been seen making out with the night before and later posted a picture of her new conquest on Twitter. Whether this is a make-Sam-jealous ploy or true love is hard to say, but rest assured her dad will probably weigh in on the matter by the end of the day. [Sun]
• A brazen jewelry thief busted into Amanda Peet's Tribeca loft on Wednesday and said, "What up, bitch? I live here" to Peet's assistant when she happened to walk in on the guy. He quickly fled, but let's hope she got out a "What up, mo fo?" before he was out of earshot. [P6]
• Jessica Simpson likes "spiritual," "artistic" and "intellectual" men because she "can bore out pretty easily." And now it's totally clear why her relationship with Tony Romo didn't work out. [Extra, People]
• CNN's Lou Dobbs says he's been receiving threatening phone calls and his house was shot at due to his views on immigration. But police don't have any any record that he's reported threats in the past and they think the shot was fired by a hunter. So, per usual, Dobbs is probably just full of crap. [P6]
• Michael Jackson's dad says his son is "worth more dead than when he was alive." The world already knew that was the way he felt, of course. But no one was expecting him to come right out and say it. [NYP]

In Moore's story—which, we remind you again, was an amusing anecdote delivered on a late-night comedy talk show program—he went to Chavez's hotel room to ask him to please quiet down and ended up partying with him all night. They consumed a bottle and a half of tequila. And the punchline was that Chavez's speech to the UN was made up mostly of things Moore said to him, while drunk.

Lawmakers in Venezuela's National Assembly have given the go-ahead to a law that would abolish violent video games and toys. That's remarkably short-sighted.

Hugo Chavez runs Venezuela like a little kid playing "If I Was President," just randomly banning things that displease him. Which, at rare intervals, results in him doing something awesome. He is the first leader brave enough to destroy golf!

Model, DJ, and rock star spawn Alexandra Richards turns 23 today. Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley is turning 66. Famed television exec (and NBC Sports chairman) Dick Ebersol is 62. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is 58. Alexis Arquette is turning 40. The rapper Soulja Boy is 19. Sally Struthers is turning 61. Garfield creator Jim Davis turns 64. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is 55. And Elizabeth Berkley, she of Saved by the Bell and Showgirls fame, celebrates her 37th birthday today.

Surely you're wondering what Glenn Beck was up to tonight, no? Oh, the usual, you know, insinuating that Barack Obama is a communist dictator because he condemned the military coup in Honduras, just like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez did.

Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan government has banned Coke Zero from the country and ordered Coca-Cola to remove the beverage from the country at once, citing dangers to the health of its citizens.

Barack Obama's been catching flack for getting intimate and flirty with Hugo Chavez at some summit this week. But Republican presidents loved their communist "key parties" even more.