Today our Venezuelan brothers and sisters are at the polls for what may be one of the last free elections in their country. They are deciding whether or not their self-proclaimed simian king, Hugo Chavez, can be president of Venezuela indefinitely. It would be naive to underestimate how corrupt Chavez and his apparatus can be, so regardless of the polls and the predictions, we will not know until the king either admits defeat as he did in 2007, or proclaims his divine kingship in perpetuity.

Whatever the outcome, the road ahead for Venezuela is a long and arduous one. Everyone knows how difficult it is to get a monkey off your back.

As an interesting side-note, the undead dictator, Fidel, has sent another message. Whether the message was sent through his computer or received during a seance, we have no way of knowing, but the moribund tyrant is watching the results in Venezuela closely.

“Our future is inseparable from what happens next Sunday, the day of the referendum on the constitutional amendment,” Castro wrote in an editorial published on the Cuba Debate Web site. “There is no alternative but victory.”

It sure would suck for Castro, Inc. to lose yet another sugar daddy, but then again, they always have Jeff Flake (R) and Bill Delahunt (D) to fall back on.