Just got an e-mail from friends who are with New Tribes Mission in Mexico asking for prayer for their colleagues in Venezuela, who are being expelled from the country by President Hugo Chavez.

Neither my friends nor, apparently, the Venezuelan government, are drawing a direct connection between this expulsion order and the old-news comments of 700 Club host Pat Robertson calling for Chavez's assassination, but the BBC reports that "Caracas has suggested that American evangelicals are part of a broader conspiracy in Washington to topple a president whose regional influence is growing thanks to massive oil revenues," so it's not hard and hard not to intuit a link.

For intelligent, professional discussion of why the media should never again listen to, much less repeat, anything Robertson says, and why that's not as easy as it might seem, check out what the GetReligion guys had to say here, here and here.