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[Alitas]

It's a big day in Venezuela.

www.globovision.com is offering a live feed for free today. Under "secciones" you can choose "noticias en video". Choose the "gratis" feed! Although I did sign up for two weeks free subscription. The feed is better with this choice.

There are also some great blogs and sites. Here is http://www.venezuelatoday.net/ which has both pro- and anti-Chavez media sources. Personally I like the Devil's Excrement.

I'm blogging about it a bit, too.

http://www.mainegirl.blogspot.com

[moonraven]

I checked your blog. Since when am I your friend? I have a couple of anti-chavista friends, but didn't know you were one of them. What in heaven's name could have made you think that Ch�vez would not win? Venezuela is a democracy, after all--unlike the place you are living now....

Maybe you should check MY blog:
http://ravensdriftingcloud.blogspot.com

[Alitas]

MR: you should update more.

Daniel's open letter to President Carter is lovely.

http://www.daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com

[moonraven]

Alitas, You are the last person to tell me what to do. I read the letter, and it is foolish in the extreme--not to mention intentionally rude to ex-president Carter. The "fraud" theory that is being proposed and circulating on opposition websites as of Tuesday is that a Russian satellite operated by Cubans entered the voting machines and changes S� votes to No votes....Uh, these are the folks you so eagerly "hang" with? Please do not answer the question.

[moonraven]

Even Ch�vez Critics Admit: The Vote Was Clean
Por Al Giordano,
Publicado en Fri Aug 20th, 2004 a las 07:59:07 AM EST
Here on Narco News, we have skewered the transparent attempts by various international players in recent months and years to take cheap shots at the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and its president Hugo Ch�vez: New York Timesman Juan Forero, Organization of American States leader Cesar Gaviria, Venezuelan guerrilla-turned-opposition-journalist Teodoro Petkoff, the Wall Street Journal staff, and even the Carter Center's Jennifer McCoy have been deservedly lambasted here for their partisan anti-Ch�vez manipulations carried out in recent months with the imprimatur of "objective" observation or journalism.
That's why it is so convincing, today, that each of the aforementioned individuals and organizations now publicly admit, after carefully reviewing the process of last Sunday's historic presidential recall referendum in Venezuela, that the vote was fair and free.

Yes, all of them say that the hard evidence indicates nothing of election fraud, even Forero!

The irresponsible Venezuelan "opposition" is now increasingly isolated, as these former escualidos point out, due to its childish insistence that the scoreboard is wrong, the eyewitnesses are wrong, everybody on earth is wrong about the final score except them, the side that lost.

Here is a round-up of what Chavez's most extreme critics say today about the cleanliness of Sunday's referendum process and results...


What the Critics Are Saying:
Jos� de Cordoba and David Luhnow, staff reporters for the rabidly anti-Ch�vez Wall Street Journal:


Opposition leaders, stung by the dimensions of their apparent 59% to 41% loss Sunday, had charged that voting machines used during the recall had been manipulated. They cited about 500 instances where votes to oust Mr. Ch�vez tabulated by one voting machine matched the result in a nearby machine -- which they said suggests the machines had been preprogrammed to cap the number of anti-Ch�vez votes.
Carter Center officials said the pattern detected by the opposition, which showed up in groups of machines at about 700 voting tables out of a total of about 12,000 nationwide, appeared to be a naturally occurring effect that surfaced in tabulations of both pro- and anti-Ch�vez votes.

The fraud claims have stoked tensions in the world's No. 5 oil exporter, a country plagued for more than two years by political violence between supporters and opponents of Mr. Ch�vez. "What was a vote that was supposed to bring the country together instead threatens to bring more division, more ungovernability," said Margarita de Tablante, a member of the opposition Democratic Coordinator.

From the beginning, Mr. Ch�vez's government angrily denied the accusations of fraud. Smartmatic, the Boca Raton, Fla., company that makes the machines, also has said the machines are foolproof.

The Carter Center said it found a pattern of matching "yes" votes to oust Mr. Ch�vez at 402 voting tables, which each have one or more machines. It found a similar pattern affecting support for Mr. Ch�vez in machines at 311 tables.

"The most important thing is that it affects both sides," said Jennifer McCoy, the director of the Carter Center's mission to Venezuela. "It would appear to indicate a random mathematical effect."
Experts seemed to agree. Aviel Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, said he calculated odds of roughly one in 17 that two of three computers at a voting table would have identical results. That compares to about one in 15 that so far have shown similar results in Venezuela's referendum�

Since Sunday's vote in this polarized nation, international observers have urged opposition voters to accept the official result. "I'm sorry that they didn't take part in the audit so they could see it firsthand themselves," Ms. McCoy told reporters.

Juan Forero of the New York Times reports:


The resounding victory was a blow to the Bush administration, which has struggled with how to deal with Mr. Ch�vez, a leftist firebrand who presides over the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and has opposed Washington on every major initiative in Latin America.
"There's no doubt in my mind that at least in the White House - I don't know about the State Department - there was a deep desire to see Ch�vez lose," said former President Jimmy Carter...

The United States long ago threw its lot in with an opposition movement that is being discredited by foreign diplomats and many Venezuelans for insisting that fraud took place when the preponderance of evidence indicates it did not.

Dudley Althaus of the Houston Chronicle, one of the more skeptical international reporters in the U.S. toward both sides in the Venezuelan conflicts, also sees no fraud:


CARACAS, VENEZUELA - International observers overseeing an audit of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's victory in this week's recall referendum concluded Thursday that the opposition's key fraud allegation was baseless.
And even Teodorito Petkoff, editor of the anti-Chavez daily Tal Cual in Caracas, published a front page editorial yesterday, harshly critical of the opposition's claims of fraud and refusal to attend the Carter Center's audit of the voting machines:


The decision by the Democratic Coordinator not to attend the audit is incomprehensible. That additional audit was solicited by the very same opposition organization: the conditions for it were discussed with the Carter Center, which proposed it to the National Elections Council, which approved it. And, later, just when the new verification was about to begin, the CD asked for it to be stopped, and finally decided not to attend. This is suicide...