"Sean Penn Meets Chavez in Venezuela"

[GreenPartyVoter]

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Sean Penn applauded President Hugo Chavez as the Venezuelan leader lambasted the Bush administration and demanded an end to war in Iraq.

Chavez met privately with the 46-year-old actor for two hours Thursday, praising him as being "brave" for urging Americans to impeach President Bush.

"In the name of the peoples of the world, President Bush, withdraw the troops from Iraq. Enough already with so much genocide," Chavez said before an auditorium packed with his red-clad supporters.

Penn sat near the front, at times applauding and nodding in agreement. He is the latest in a series of celebrities who have visited Caracas, including Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte.

http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20070803/D8QPIPH80.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. The Bolivarian Revolution is showing us the way back to democracy!

The people of the south rule! They have worked long and hard, and suffered greatly, for this moment. As Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, said: "The time of the people has come." And this is evident in the elections over the last several years, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile (and will soon be evident in Paraguay, as well).

The lessons of this peaceful, democratic, leftist (majorityist) revolution, that we need to take heed of, are these:

1. Transparent elections (!)
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.

In Venezuela, they use electronic voting, but it is an open source code system--anyone may review the programming code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the votes, as a check on machine fraud.

In the U.S.A., we use electronic voting, run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations. And we handcount ZERO of the votes in many states and an entirely inadequate 1% in the best states.

This is why Venezuela has a president who acts in the interests of his people, and we have Bush/Cheney.

Venezuelan elections are also heavily monitored by the OAS, the Carter Center and EU election monitoring groups, who have unanimously certified them as honest and aboveboard. We have no such controls. This is how the Bushites (and collusive Democrats) have managed to destroy our election system. Step One back to democracy is to regain PUBLIC control over vote counting. Step Two, citizen/grass roots organization and activism needs to occur simultaneously (and, as to public control of vote counting, prior to Step One). And then, anything is possible, as the South Americans are demonstrating. Think big!

I want to thank Sean Penn for his activism. He speaks for those of us who have no voice in the corporate media. And I hope that the Number One message he brings back to this country, from Venezuela, is the necessity of transparent elections.