Honduras Coup, Act V, Day 23

Someone did a translation of a piece by Juan Almendares, which is posted at Adrienne’s.

RAJ posted a rebuttal to a comment made in a piece in The New York Times :

At this point, the options are diminishing, said Shelley A. McConnell, an assistant professor of government at St. Lawrence University and a former analyst at the Carter Center. If Mr. Zelaya is not returned, she said, the “pragmatic middle ground” may be to work with the O.A.S. to recognize the elections “under protest of how they came about.”

“You don’t punish the next guy,” she said.

“The next guy” being either coup participant Porfirio Lobos or coup participant Elvin Santos, both of whom would do very well with some punishment.

RAJ is too refined to publish my comment that Ms. McConnell appears to have fluff between the ears, but it’s a comment that I stand by. McConnell is concerned with the functionality of the Inter-American Charter to the exclusion of international law. International law is not just airy aspirations. It is the modern equivalent of the original US Constitution, a statement of fundamental human values and a Bill of Rights which serves as a beacon of hope to every person oppressed by dictatorship. The invasion of Iraq heralded an unprecedented breakdown of international law, and the unpunished coup in Honduras is of equal gravity. We ignore it– at our own peril– because it involves a small, poor nation. But precedents are set by how we treat those at the margins. If extremists were to seize power in the United States, how could we expect the world to support us in our struggle to remain free if we had despised the Honduran people as they sought merely to have enforced rights that the whole world recognizes as inherent to all human beings?

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Update.

Today’s moment of Zen. Or something. From the US Dept. of State:

QUESTION: A follow-up on Honduras. What does the U.S. think about the human rights situation there right now? There have been mass arrests, curfews, an emergency decree, and a ban on protests and media closures for three weeks during the presidential campaign. Does that undermine the electoral process, in the view of the U.S.?

MR. KELLY: Regarding the – well, first of all, our real priority here is to see this accord implemented step by step. We’ve only gotten through step one, and we need step two and step three to be implemented.

Regarding the – these reports, I’m actually not aware of these reports of any actions to – you say ban rallies and – no, I’m not just aware of those reports. I think that we would need to have more details about it for us to really comment on it.

John Kerry has blamed State for the collapse of the agreement.

Zelaya told Craig Kelly of State that he doesn’t talk to coupistas. Left unclear was whether he was talking about Micheletti or Hillary Clinton.

Laura Carlsen has a good explanation of how the US sold out the rule of law to get a couple of appointees through the Senate.

Robin Emmott of Reuters:

Poor Hondurans are going hungry and their sick children cannot obtain medicines as donors cut aid to the country following a June coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, doctors and aid workers say.

Soup kitchens have closed, medicines have become scarce, foreign doctors have canceled trips to Honduras and funding for the poor to run small businesses have dried up, increasing unemployment….

The politically isolated de facto government of Roberto Micheletti, who took power after the army sent leftist Zelaya into exile, denies any impact from the suspension of foreign aid. It says only educational projects have been hurt.

According to TeleSur, 110 mayoral candidates and 55 congressional candidates have refused to run for office.

El Libertador is reporting that coupista employers are ordering employees to vote on pain of losing their jobs.

A wonderful example of American Stalinist Art by Jon McNaughton

Received from a friend:

This is an incredible painting by Jon McNaughton.

This painting represents McNaughton’s response to criticism of “One Nation Under God.”
Read the explanation below the painting and then view the painting. You can move the mouse over any person and the right side of the screen gives a description of that person. Just move the mouse, don’t click.

Notice Jesus Christ in the center with all his garments are explained. Notice Jesus Christ holding the U.S.
Constitution. Satan is also in the painting.

This is incredible ! ! !

Click here:
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353
 
Sort of a nice, condensed history lesson.

(the image is copyrighted, so you have to click through to see it)

My response:

Yeah, this is America, alright: blaming all the ills on college professors, liberals, reporter, lawyers, and judges rather than accepting our own responsibility, pretending that Christ is at the center of American life when we have the greatest proportion of poor in the industrialized world and spend half of all the money that is spent on war, putting the African Americans and Indians at the back of the bus, barely recognizing Hispanics or Asians or people of faiths other than the Christian at all (at best, as ignorant), and imagining that the Constitution–which enshrined slavery, f’r Heaven’s sake– was inspired by God.

That’s definitely the America that I know and do my best to love despite its many faults, chief among which is hypocrisy and second of which is maudlin art.

Things You Don’t See Much In US Media

A man in Germany murdered a pregnant woman in open court in front of her husband, who was himself stabbed and shot at by apparent accident when he tried to save his wife. Why was she attacked? Because she wore an Islamic headscarf.

That reminds me: News accounts keep saying that over a hundred shots were fired by the alleged gunman in the Fort Hood shootings. Yet he only had one or perhaps two guns and was not known to have reloaded them, from any accounts I recall. Some of those bullets had to have been friendly fire.

Honduras Coup, Act V, Day 22

US Government exerts pressure on Micheletti dictatorship

(Image from El Heraldo. SubSubsecretary Craig Kelly, of the US State Department delivers a stern warning to ruling oligarch Roberto Micheletti)

I’m sort of back. I’ll try to post a little. And I’m very grateful to Phoenix Woman for carrying the ball.

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Update: RAJ at Honduras Coup 2009 links to a La Tribuna article in which the Police Commissioner, Danilo Orellano is going to proceed criminally against news media which promote a boycott of the election. He has made a blacklist of everyone on the left, “from A to Z,” and blames the left for bombings and the destruction of electrical towers, even though the police have not managed to make any arrests.

Commenter Iqui Balam links to a piece in Habla Honduras in which Andres Pavón of the human rights group CODEH alleges that the military plans a massacre. Soldiers would disguise themselves as a “armed commandos of the Resistance,” and on the 29th of November would murder memvers of the far right Unión Cívica Democrática to destroy popular support for the Resistance. It might also get the UCD to attack the Resistance, thereby relieving the dictatorship of that chore. According to Pavón, military men loyal to Honduras told him this.

Via the Honduran embassy, former Ambassador White exposes the ineptness of the State Department’s maneuvering. Via Brother John, White has also dismissed the Venezuelan role in the run-up to the crisis, pointing out that Venezuela merely filled the vacuum that the lack of US leadership opened up. Brother John also reports on death threats against Father Salomé Peñate and the strong solidarity which the diocese has shown in resistance to these threats.

More on the dangers of pet ownership

Alfie the Arsonist

From the Beeb:

A family had to escape their blazing home during the night after their dog managed to knock their cooker on and set their kitchen on fire.

Accidental arsonist Alfie – now dubbed the “Alfonist” by the family – turned on a griddle attachment, which had a deep fat fryer on top.

Paul Gregson, his wife and two sons were alerted by the smoke alarm, but managed to get out safely with Alfie.

The house in Llanfairfechan, Conwy, suffered thousands of pounds of damage.

A cat would never have done this.

Accidentally, anyway.

Honduras Coup, Act V, Day Twenty-One: Interesting Connections

We all know about the ties of Lanny Davis to the coup leaders. But I just found out that a Minnesota politician has a more wholesome connection to Honduras.

State Senator Tarryl Clark, D-St. Cloud, is running for Michele Bachmann’s seat. She’s announced her campaign crew, and I couldn’t help noticing this passage:

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (GQRR) has been chosen as the campaign’s pollsters. GQRR has a long history of working with Minnesota candidates and organizations, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak, State Senator Ted Mondale, the Minnesota DFL Party, Education Minnesota, the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota and Growth and Justice. GQRR is a Democratic polling firm that provides research and strategic advice, with experience in over 80 countries and a list of clients that includes President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and South African President Nelson Mandela.

Leading the research and strategic consulting effort is firm President Al Quinlan, who has advised a broad range of political candidates and elected officials, including Vice President Walter Mondale and Senators Amy Klobuchar, Tim Johnson, Tom Daschle, Mary Landrieu, Chris Dodd, and Jeff Bingaman. Quinlan also provides strategic guidance to Governors Bill Richardson, Ed Rendell, John Lynch and David Paterson. In the 2008 cycle, Quinlan advised several winning candidates, including Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Tom Udall, and Representatives John Adler and Gary Peters.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because GQRR did one of the two polls that have helped undercut coup leadership propaganda claiming that Zelaya was and is unpopular in Honduras.

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Added by Charles. Channel 36 has been running screen tests like the following as protests against harassment.

The text says All of Honduras repudiates the coupista government for the attack against Channel 36.

Former Defense Secretary and constitutional law expert Edmundo Orellana has two recent articles, which are described by RAJ:
One: A Constitutional Convention is essential.
Two: the Tegucigalpa “accord” is, legally, a mess.

The brother of former president Rafael Callejas, the engineer José Eduardo Callejas Romero was brutally murdered by two assassins on a motorbike. He was a supporter of the coup, but there is no direct evidence tying this to a political act.

RNS of Honduras Coup 2009 has an important comment here. I asked him whether he thought that recent killings were political. His opinion is that none of these are the work of the resistance, that there are (a) kidnappings for ransom, and (b) contract killings having to do with the corruption that plagues Honduras. Until the police start producing some plausible suspects, that’s probably our best hypothesis.

Via Ovid, in a comment at A Lovely Promise, an article by Professor Stephen Zunes:


It has been a great credit to the pro-democracy forces that, save for occasional small-scale rioting, the movement has largely maintained its nonviolent discipline. It would have been easy to launch a guerrilla war. Much of Honduras consists of farming and ranching country where many people own guns. The neighboring countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have experienced bloody revolutionary struggles in recent decades. Yet, despite serious provocations by police and soldiers loyal to the provisional government, the movement has recognized that armed resistance would have been utterly futile and counter-productive. Indeed, they recognize that their greatest strength is in maintaining their commitment to nonviolence.

The RPM’s Wishful Thinking WRT MN-01

Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a Republican-boosting political blog founded by “independent” Michael Brodkorb (a guy so “independent” that he left MDE to be the deputy chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota) posted that MN-01 is rated “Leans Republican” by CQ, without providing a link.

As DJ Danielson’s tweet points out, CQ actually rates the seat as “Likely Democratic”.

Yes, the Republicans want that seat. No, they’re not going to get it, not so long as Tim Walz is in it.

The dangers of pet ownership

From http://icanhascheezburger.com

Friday Cat Blogging

It’s not a keyboard, it’s a cat bed.

Honduras, Act V, Day Seventeen: What Lanny Davis (and Jim DeMint) Hath Wrought

Way to go, Lanny! Your influence on the State Department’s weak-tea Honduras policy (and in making sure that SoS Clinton and President Obama didn’t do much to oppose the coup, much less stop it once it had started) may well just cause the violent mass bloodshed your golpista paymasters claim to want to avoid.

UPDATE: Add Jim DeMint to the mix, too — or at least he’s boasting about it:

An outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis in Honduras late Thursday dropped his opposition to two State Department nominees, saying that the administration has reversed course.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint said on the Senate floor that he’d spoken with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who told him that the administration would recognize the election Nov. 29 in Honduras, “regardless of whether former President Manuel Zelaya is returned to office.”

“I am happy to report the Obama administration has finally reversed its misguided Honduran policy and will fully recognize the Nov. 29 elections,” DeMint said, noting that the stance means he’ll lift his objection to the nominations of Arturo Valenzuela to be assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs and Thomas Shannon to be the U.S. ambassador to Brazil.

This ties into the fact that the Senate Republicans have been blocking pretty much every key nomination Obama’s made, aside from a few high-profile ones they waved through so as to preserve the appearance of being nicey-nice.

UPDATE 2: President Zelaya, having discovered that golpista Roberto Micheletti is to head the fraudulent “unity government”, has decided not to aid in giving the process a false veneer of legitimacy and is urging a boycott of the upcoming elections. Honduras still has no legitimate government and will not have one for the foreseeable future.