Thursday Morning News Roundup

– Mike Stark is kicking ass and taking names.

– But of course the teabaggers aren’t at all racist, right? Right?

– Give it up, Timmy: Our absentee governor’s Presidential aspirations got another kick in the shorts as pro-GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen’s Rasmussen Reports poll on the 2012 Republican hopefuls shows Pawlenty with only 4% support. And it’s not something that can be blamed on low name recognition, either: Republican base voters seem to genuinely and actively hate him, as 28% of them gave his name as the answer to this question: “Regardless of who you would vote for, which candidate would you least like to see win the Republican nomination in 2012?”

If Obama’s Allegedly So Unpopular…

….then why is New Jersey Republican Chris Christie, the guy who thinks he can win the governor’s mansion from Jon Corzine, invoking Obama in a very favorable way, so as to suggest an endorsement from the man?

Hilarious!

Honduras Coup, Act V, Day 2

What you can do: E-mail Frank LaRue of the UN to protest press intimidation.

Mr. Frank La Rue
Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Switzerland
Fax: +41 22 917 9006
Email: freedex@ohchr.org
______________________________________________________________________________________
Update2:
Radio Globo: There was a confrontation in one of the Colonias, Ramon Amaya Amador. Two young men, Alexander Rodas and Cesar Flores are reported to be dead. This occurred about 10PM Eastern. A caller says they were assassinated, says that four are dead. There were many shots, like bottle rockets. She adds the name and Jose Alexander. She says only Alexander was related to someone in the resistance. She doesn’t know anything about who killed them. In Cerro Grande, the police have been taking police people out of vehicles. Leticia Salomon is talking, saying that the point of the talks has been to delay.

Joseph Schansky, at PulseMedia, via Adrienne

One major effect of this curfew and the violations that it brings is that Micheletti has unwittingly drawn people to the resistance movement against the coup government who may not have otherwise been involved. The demonstrations have continued daily for four months now, sometimes taking on different forms.

An example of the varied support for Zelaya’s restoration (and against the coup in general) has been factions of the religious community. A few days ago, a group of Evangelical Christians gathered together in front of the abandoned Channel 36 television station. They planted themselves there to sing and pray for the station, for the resistance, and for Honduras. Several speeches were also made by organizers and religious figures, including priests.

When they had completed the blessing of this censored independent media outlet, they continued making the rounds, next going to Radio Globo to perform the same songs, the same prayers. It was a striking image, the Bible lying on the table next to the microphones in the studio. It conjured up big notions of God and Information and Truth and good people who believe that these ideas are not mutually exclusive.

This is an important point. No non-violent resistance movement (outside of Aristophanes) has succeeded without having a basis in religion. Religion allows one to re-channel the normal feelings of anger and grief into altruistic goals.

Ambassador Lewis Amselem was the instrument used to deliver the message to the coupistas that the imaginary government “has not been as flexible or favorable to compromise as Zelaya.” In diplo-speak, that sounds like the precursor to a tilt.

Via Magbana at HondurasOye, Police spokesman Danilo Molina is reported by Habla Honduras to have disappeared. Molina was indiscreet enough to say that the coup was a coup. A family member said “these last days he seemed pale and nervous, with a lost look, and quite thin.The girl who worked in the house of his mother told is that at night he received calls, and that he argued a lot. A couple of times, I saw him blow his nose, with tear-filled eyes… I don’t know what to think, whether it was a quarrel with women or some other thing.”

The decree which has not been repealed PCM-124-2009 is described here.

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Update:
Vos el Soberano says that the Brazilian ambassador to the OAS, Ruy de Lima Casaes e Silva has protested the “torture” directed at embassy employees (and, of course, Zelaya and companions). The lights that are focused on the embassy are so bright that even covering the windows with newspapers, aluminum foil, and black cloth does not darken the rooms. Loud music is being used to prevent sleep. Food is reviewed and sniffed by dogs. And so on.

Dr. Juan Almendares, published at Quixote Center:

The concrete method of the golpistas is to promote a “syndrome of attrition and of physical, mental and political exhaustion”. The strategy seeks to defeat the opposition by means of irregular warfare; media, religious and military terrorism; detentions, beatings and torture. It includes assassinations of leaders, teachers, artists, youth and women–femicide has increased by 60 percent. The economic cost of the military coup in the first three months has been over $800 million, implying a loss of nearly $30 million a day.

But in the face of all this pain and suffering a giant has awoken; a new hope has been born. The people has rediscovered itself. Moved by its dreams of freedom, it acts in defiance of those who have hitherto sought to shut it out from the making of history.

The myths of media power have been shattered. The powerful, with their technology of manipulation, have failed to deceive the people. The walls of silence have collapsed.

________________________________________________________________

Yay! Via Rus/Adrienne/Globo, we have the soundtrack to the resistance! Definitely worth listening to and downloading.

It turns out that Micheletti has an arrest record. Vos El Soberano dug up an article from 1980 in which he was accused of swindling (I think the legal term would be improper conversion). A psychological evaluation was requested because of his apparent mental instability. As president of the transit union TUPSA, he was accused of taking advantage of a situation in which heavy rains had caused damage in north Honduras to skim public transit receipts in El Progreso. He was released because fellow unionist demanded his release.

AFP reports:

Honduras’ de facto regime blared loud music at the Brazilian embassy to intensify pressure on deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as talks on the months-long crisis were in limbo Wednesday….Insulza on Wednesday criticized the regime for the “continuing hostility” against the Brazilian embassy, following accusations from Zelaya and his supporters inside the compound of increasing harassment.

“We’ve been bombarded with loudspeakers playing music at the highest level,” Rasel Tome, a legal advisor to Zelaya, told Radio Globo in Honduras Wednesday.

“What we’ve been living is typical of psychological operations between armies.”

Amid growing frustration and divisions in Honduras, some 2,000 supporters of the deposed president took to the streets of the capital in protest on Tuesday, a day after Micheletti lifted an emergency decree restricting civil liberties.

Reuters:

The United States has revoked the visas of more Hondurans to pressure the facto government to end a three-month political crisis, a U.S. official said on Wednesday….

State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said the department had canceled visas for “a number of Hondurans who are members and/or supporters of the de facto regime.”

Former Police Commissioner María Luisa Borjas says that the recent landings and crashes of planes carrying narcotics suggest that the people running the government are in league with the traffickers [which would make sense: traffic is up, so crashes are up]. She was fired some years ago for (according to the police) divulging confidential information or (according to her) stating that the police were committing murders. Ms. Borjes says she has seen film of police unloading drugs. The regime is printing up ballots for the election that’s unlikely to happen.

Miguel Insulza is reporting to the OAS today. According to HondurasCoup2009, there’s a report by EFE to the effect that Insulza will blame the coup government for the impasse. This would be fair since they are to blame for the impasse.

Radio Globo: At the OAS, Insulza is no longer optimistic. Unfortunately, Globo is broadcasting more static than speech. Channel 36 is better… wow! The Nicaraguan delegate excoriated the US for its embargo of Cuba. Day by day, US hemispheric hegemony is decaying. Back to Globo: an extended and vociferous reading of a Psalm: The Lord is my Rock and my Redeemer; maybe Psalm 62.

Endorsed by Mercury Rising

(Image from The Guardian; endorsement is based purely on Guardian’s description, below. Mercury Rising has received nothing of value, not even a kind word, in exchange for this endorsement.)

Alison Flood, The Guardian:

For those unable to stomach Sarah Palin’s forthcoming “mom’s-eye view of high-stakes national politics” Going Rogue, small US publisher OR Books has announced that it will bring out Going Rouge, an alternative view of the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, on the same day.

Parodying the cover of Palin’s memoir (subtitled An American Life), which sees a relaxed-looking Palin in front of a blue, cloud-strewn sky, Going Rouge (subtitled An American Nightmare) places Palin in front of thunderous clouds and lightning.

The Yes Men Do It Again

If you’re going to do protests as theater, do them right — and the Yes Men do them perfectly.

Please, Tom Donohue, please sue the Yes Men! That will be the dumbest lawsuit since Oscar Wilde sued his lover’s dad for “libel” that — as Daddy was all too ready to prove — was absolutely true even if misspelled.

Honduras Coup, Act V, Day 1

What you can do: E-mail Frank LaRue of the UN to protest press intimidation.

Mr. Frank La Rue
Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Switzerland
Fax: +41 22 917 9006
Email: freedex@ohchr.org
______________________________________________________________________________________
As of today, we enter Act V. Today there is no meeting between the Zelaya and the coup negotiators. The talks are deadlocked. The State Department will be forced to issue a statement within a few days. The coup can’t move openly because the UN human rights negotiators are in town, but they are assassinating people at a ferocious rate. The resistance will be extremely active because this the military can’t be too obvious about repression. I only wish that I could guarantee that this is the last act.

Update2
Channel 36: For the first time in many weeks, I am seeing people protesting without being enfiladed by troops. It’s a huge demo, but in a rural area. One of the grandmothers chants Olancho! A lady calls in to say that there was terrible repression in San Pedro Sula. Micheletti’s negotiators have been sitting alone at the Clarion Hotel all day. Coupista Wilma Morales speaks. She claims that things are different than have been reported in the press. Arturo Corrales went to the Brazilian embassy and they talked.

Nell has a post with this interesting point, among others [added: see here for source]:

A hundred members of the social-democratic party PINU, including several of their candidates, have denounced their presidential candidate’s support of the coup and will withdraw unless Zelaya is restored. Three weeks ago, 68 Liberal Party candidates announced their withdrawal en masse…

Dario Euraque’s story:

After a military coup in Honduras this past June, Trinity College Professor of History and International Studies Dr. Dario A. Euraque was illegally ousted from his position as Director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH)….

On July 13, 2009, the newly instated Minster of Culture Myrna Castro insisted that Euraque allow the Honduran army to keep its reserve forces in the former presidential palace, which also serves as home to the national archives. Euraque refused, claiming that Castro had no legal say over the matter.

“I challenged that,” said Euraque, “I told the reservists they couldn’t do what they wanted to do. I knew that sooner or later I would be dismissed.”

On August 20, 2009, Castro issued a dismissal letter to Euraque, but was told she had acted illegally since only the IHAH Board of Directors had that power. She then conspired to hold a secret meeting of the board on Sept. 1, and two days later Euraque was officially dismissed.

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Update:
The government is slashing the budget 60%. Except for the military.

Tiempo: A decree limiting press freedom [PCM-M-016-2009] was finally repealed. But another decree exists that allows Conatel to repeal licenses at whim. Reporters without Borders says that Honduras ranks 128 out of 173 in press freedom. This is sort of like the Wolves Guild saying that Something Must De Done, because lambs are running short.

More evidence from Josh Rogan at the new neo-con Foreign Policy that the State Department is preparing to sell out all its principles:

Jim DeMint is ready to release his holds against two top administration Latin America appointees, the South Carolina senator told The Cable, and he predicts the State Department will soon recognize the upcoming Honduran elections as legitimate….DeMint is singularly holding up Shannon’s nomination to become ambassador to Brazil as well as the nomination of Arturo Valenzuela to take Shannon’s post. Shannon just returned from Honduras, where he met with de facto regime leader Roberto Micheletti as part of an Organization of American States delegation.

Sara Miller Llana of Christian Science Monitor:

Leticia Salomon, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, doubts the efficacy of church efforts at reconciliation,­ since residents perceive that both the evangelical and Catholic churches both supported Zelaya’s ouster, and said the media are just as mistrusted. A truth commission could help unify the country, she said. “Or this fight will continues for the rest of our lives,” Prof. Salomon said. “We need to recuperate the basic democratic principles of tolerance and plurality.”

State Department Bobblehead Theater performs, “Increasingly Tenuous Grasp on Reality,” Starring Ian Kelly

QUESTION: Anything on – anything new on Honduras?

MR. KELLY: Anything new on Honduras. Well, just to update you that the negotiations continue, that – between the two teams with the help of OAS officials. They’ve reached agreement on most aspects of the Guaymuras version of the San Jose Accords. There’s just one – there’s one article that remains a point of contention, and that’s Article 6, which deals with the restoration of individuals to positions that they had before June 28 – right? Yeah, that’s – most importantly, President Zelaya.

And we just urge the two sides to stick to it, and we urge the de facto regime in particular to help open a pathway for international support of the election by concluding the agreement. We believe that an agreement is – could lead to elections that are internationally recognized, and is ultimately the way out of this crisis, but –

QUESTION: Is there any meeting planned – several people from the Honduran electoral tribunal are going to be in town this week. Are they meeting with anybody at the State Department?

MR. KELLY: Oh, I’m not aware that they are.
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Adrienne has tracked down some of the music videos of the resistance. I recommend watching and listening to them. They are what you hear again and again on Radio Globo and the images give a sense of place and people. The image above is from Honduras Resiste!

Allan MacDonald on Obama v. Wendy Avila, as translated by Miss Machetera.

Just Because It Needs Reiterating

Someone who should have known better thought he’d demonstrate his Yahweh-given testosterone-blessed moral and intellectual superiority to little old me by sending me this e-mail:

Phoenix:
Looked at your blog and a particular ad …
How many deaths did Saddam Hussein cause? Tortures? Mass graves? Horrible acts against humanity?
And your casualty list is WAY off – I think you need to get the real numbers of the actual invasion to overthrow Saddam – and not the reconstruction period in which the Saddam loyalists and the Islamic fascists caused to continue the violence.
I think it would be wise to get some real stories from real Iraqi – not leftist propagandists.
What specific socialist party do you belong to? Anarchist group?
If Mexico needs a revolution it needs to be conducted in their country – not America. Get over the fact that Mexico lost any imagined real estate north of the Rio Grande. The Mexican War is over and Mexico lost. The Texans became an independent republic before becoming a part of the United States.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You get the picture — it’s the standard right-wing excrement fling, where all sorts of absurdities and non sequiturs are flung, and a straw image of me created for the dung-flinger to attack.

I’d considered doing the sort of point-by-point factual rebuttal that is almost always wasted on these people — for instance, if all the Iraqi deaths are the result of those icky Sunnis, how does he explain the Lidice-on-steroids committed against Fallujah for six months in 2004 in retribution for the deaths of four Blackwater personnel? — but instead, since he was kind enough to diagnose me (or at least his straw creation of me) as a socialist, I thought I’d return the favor and show him how the GOP has for decades recruited people like him (remember, these are Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s words, not mine):

”You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

”And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.”’

Wonder why and when the GOP stopped being the Party of Lincoln? Wonder why they’ve had a lock on the South for nearly forty years now? Wonder no more.

Oh, and if the gent of the e-mail wants to talk with a “real Iraqi”, I suggest he try sending an e-mail to Riverbend — assuming she’s still alive, which is not exactly a safe assumption.

Honduras Coup, Act IV, Day 29

What you can do: E-mail Frank LaRue of the UN to protest press intimidation.

Mr. Frank La Rue
Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Switzerland
Fax: +41 22 917 9006
Email: freedex@ohchr.org
____________________________________________________________
Radio Globo: Zelaya has terminated the talks. It sounds permanent. Channel 36 is back. Zelaya says the coup has engaged in a hurtful process. He will raise his denunciation on Wednesday to the OAS.

Micheletti wants to have the Congress and the Supreme Court deliver a report on the causes of the coup before he’ll sign off.

(Via Vos) Another leader of the resistance, a teacher named Eliso Hernández Juáre, was murdered, according to Dick Emanuelsson. He was a candidate for a vice-mayoralty in Santa Barbara. In the interview, Emanuelsson says that a man known as The Hindu “El Zapatazo” (The Kick in the A–) was kidnapped by the security forces after leaving the embassy. Juan Barahona denies that they are seeking arms, as the coupista press has gleefully reported. (Also via Vos) Cesar Ham has withdrawn as a candidate because Zelaya has not been restored to power.

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As of 1PM Eastern, Radio Globo is back on the air! Or at least theoretically. I don’t see how they can get their broadcast apparatus in shape in a few hours. According to Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle at Adrienne’s, the Congress has been dissolved, but I don’t see any confirmation of this [added: it's possible he means "recessed" rather than "dissolved."]

Tiempo: Liliana Valiña and Roberto Dessogus have arrived in Honduras as representatives of the UN High Commissioner to investigate human rights abuses. They will stay in the country until November 7th. In addition to the murders, kidnappings, rapes, physical assaults, illegal detentions, and the arbitrary use of curfews, they will document the closure of newspapers, intimidation of media, arrest and aggression against newspaper reporters and photographers, and illegal restiction of constitutional guarantees. The resistance will hold a one-day strike during this week. A new prison is being built in San Pedro Sula on land donated by the owner of Tiempo, Jaime Rosenthal Oliva. The prison will use containers as cells.

Allan McDonald: The book on the left says Human Rights. The one on the right says Violations. (Image from Habla Honduras)
.

Pepe Escobar has an article in ATimes from a month ago saying bluntly that the US was endangering its own best interests by siding with the coupistas. It’s well worth reading with the perspective of recent events to understand just how stupid the Administration’s policy is.

RAJ rehearses the pro-coup arguments and explains that they are based in ignorance. But there is this one item that makes police spokesman Daniel Molina’s statements broadcast on Hojilla (see yesterday’s post) even more relevant:

Pro-coup apologists ignore the abundant documentation provided by the Supreme Court itself, which shows that the Armed Forces were given orders to carry out the raid on President Zelaya because the Public Prosecutor expressed a lack of faith in the National Police, whose role detaining a high government official to take his testimony should have been

In the Hojilla film, he ssuggests that the police were not regarded as reliable, and that he himself approves of Zelaya, even though he approves of the coup.

Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle says that:

The regime has already unequivocally stated that it will not make the necessary concession to sign an agreement, and just dissolved Congress [unconfirmed], which had the power to override it. And I understand their firmness and I don’t know why it surprises anyone. Neither the Arias Plan nor any other proposal on the table offers a long-term solution for any of the parties, but the prospect for the coup protagonists–the businessmen, politicians and military officers that promoted it, hatched the plan, and carried it out–are the bleakest. … At this moment, the coup regime does not have a rear-guard, nor an escape plan, and it has compromised the security of its proponents in the process of trampling the rights of the majority. The is no action without a reaction and when the actions are of a brutal nature, the reactions are not entirely predictable, nor are they entirely rational. …And the idea that free, fair and democratic elections could be carried out in a month and a half–when we are living under a formal and informal state of siege, in a militarized country with daily violations of human rights that turns its back on the world more and more each day–is a monstrous perversion of political-judicial fetishism and a fantasy of the mafia bosses of diplomatic realpolitik….And it is important to understand this because from this understanding–that the coup regime will not cede, period, and that presidential elections without restoration of legal order will not resolve but will rather aggravate the problem–we must derive a strategic alternative. The President must continue fighting to exhaust diplomatic means, because this is what his position as statesman demands of him. Furthermore, as I see it, the President must demonstrate openness to the coup regime, he should send them conciliatory signals, offer them the peace pipe, because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy. He won’t come back otherwise. And perhaps the Resistance needs to regroup in a safer space….The OAS and countless other organizations and governments have been mocked by the regime, while the heroic Resistance has had to pay for our well-intended clumsiness with blood and pain and death and torture. No more. This is the end of the game. It’s over.

The pipeline wars

Pepe Escobar of Asia Times had an important interview on DemocracyNow describing how Baluchi anger at an Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline that is planned to traverse their territory but not provide them any material compensation is behind the Jundullah suicide bombing that killed a number of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders. (Baluchistan straddles the Iran-Pakistan border, giving extremists excellent intelligence and, absent regional agreement that Jundullah is A Problem, safe harbor). Escobar says that the US provided substantial payments to Jundullah to conduct operations, including perhaps this one:

PEPE ESCOBAR: …. They must have an extraordinary intel on the ground to mount an attack by a suicide bomber against top Revolutionary Guard commanders, including the number two of the armed forces of the Revolutionary Guards who came from Tehran for this meeting.

And the purpose of the meeting was to reconcile Sunnis and Shiites in a small town near the Pakistani border on the Iranian Baluchistan side. So, what does that tell us? It tells us that what Jundallah, which was founded in 2003, and it’s basically a Pakistani-based Sunni outfit composed of Baluchis and against the power in Tehran, basically, the Shiite power in Tehran, they are at the moment organizing what they have called three months—four months ago, in fact, May, before the Iranian presidential elections, a strategic corridor. This strategic corridor starts in Afghanistan in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, crosses through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan in the Tribal Areas through Pakistani Baluchistan and all the way to Iranian Baluchistan. So this is a Sunni hardcore, destabilizing strategic corridor.

Honduras Coup, Act IV, Day 28

What you can do: E-mail Frank LaRue of the UN to protest press intimidation.

Mr. Frank La Rue
Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Switzerland
Fax: +41 22 917 9006
Email: freedex@ohchr.org
____________________________________________________________

Update:

Demo in Colonia 21, Tegucigalpa, Saturday October 17. Image by Casiopea (Chiapas Indymedia)

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Day 112 113  of resistance.

Adrienne has written letters to the lobbyists for the coup.

After police spokesman Daniel Molina’s disastrous casual chat, which ended up on Venezuelan television, the police have been muzzled, according to Mirada del Halcon.

Via Sandra Cuffe, a piece by Jerome Duval on the Media Coup. Here’s a bit of the history, from before the coup, that hasn’t been covered on the blog already:

To restore balance in media and give voice to those whom the media increasingly ignored, Zelaya launches a free public weekly at the end of 2007, Citizen Power, which promotes citizen participation. Afterwards, Channel 8 was nationalized. It no longer broadcast due to the mismanagement of Elías Asfura. Of course, after the coup d’etat, Citizen Power ceased to exist, and the employees of Channel 8 were let go. Channel 8 was again in the hands of Elías Asfura, their old owner, who was also the owner of television channels 8, 12, and 30.

Maria Rita Matamoros on Honduras Resists:

Here we are in a tremendous insecurity. We are full of fear because they are entering the neighborhoods in operations to arrest the people who are resisting. You just saw that they are taking our pictures, recording our faces and later they follow us and kill us. So there is a tremendous persecution. People are afraid to put themselves out there because they fear for their lives. They have killed a few people already. They are driving about in motorcycles shooting people. I think the more powerful countries should step in to help us because the poor of the country don`t have anything to defend ourselves with. We don’t have anything. We only have water and towels [to relieve the symptoms of tear gas]. They are coming to control us and later kill us. People are hurt with bones broken, with their lungs spitting up blood. They are killing us in the roads. They are on motorcycles dressed as civilians. The first thing they do is take their picture and then kill them. They identify them and they kill them. I hope people around the world raise their voices that people do something because we are dying. one by one they are eliminating us.

Someone said that the Court at the Hague would not accept Honduras as a case because as bad as it is, it isn’t genocide. I think that if the Court read that statement, they might be inclined to consider the case. A terrorist regime is running Honduras. They have succeeded in terrorizing many people who would otherwise be on the streets.