Hugo Chavez lives on in Venezuela:
Late socialist leader Hugo Chavez's chosen successor Nicolas Maduro won Venezuela's presidential election by a whisker but now faces opposition protests plus a host of economic and political challenges in the OPEC nation.
The 50-year-old former bus driver, whom Chavez named as his preferred heir before dying from cancer, edged out opposition challenger Henrique Capriles with 50.7 percent of the votes in Sunday's election, according to election board returns.
Insert here your best joke about the country being thrown under the bus that Maduro is driving.
East Germans couldn't make socialism work, what hopes to the idiots who follow Hugo's (!) particulary stupid version of that failed economic model have?
So I advise Venezuleans to just lie back and think of Hugo, as they experience the joys of Chavezism without Chavez, which they apparently still think is a good idea.
UPDATE: I may have been too harsh in my judgment:
[The] Obama administration said it was refusing to the accept the official results of Sunday's vote without a full recount given the closeness of the result: a margin of 50.8 percent to 49 percent favoring Maduro, the chosen successor of Chavez, who succumbed to cancer last month.
In Chavez's home state of Barinas, police fired tear gas and plastic bullets at protesters heeding the Capriles' call for protests by marching on the provincial headquarters of the National Electoral Council.
Perhaps a majority of voters really weren't blind about Maduro's inadequacies to be president. After our recent experience, I assumed that just doesn't matter anymore.
