Honduras dictatorship, day 346

From Comedy Central America…

QUESTION: Is that it? This is Honduras. There’s a new Human Rights Watch report out about alleged atrocities, abuses, whatever you might want to call them, during the first months or year of the Lobo administration. I’m wondering if you’ve seen this report yet. If you have, what do you make of it? And if you haven’t –

MR. CROWLEY: I haven’t seen the report itself, but obviously this is something that has been part of our ongoing conversation with the Lobo government. We do think there’s been progress made through reconciliation commission that has been stood up by the Lobo government that was called for under the San Jose-Tegucigalpa Accords. But we are – we remain concerned about ongoing human rights abuses in Honduras, and we have raised those on a regular basis with the Honduran Government. And obviously, that is critical to both Honduras and moving forward and repairing the split that does exist within Honduran society and manifested itself within the past year, but also in terms of Honduras’s broader acceptance back into the OAS and international community. Countries, including the United States, will be looking to see how Honduras improves the human rights conditions on the ground for all of its citizens.

In other comedic news, RAJ has the tale of how the Honduran government is attempting to illegally appoint public defenders for the President-in-exile so that they can hold a show trial, find him guilty, and satisfy the OAS that the rule of law has been restored. Only in Honduras.

Meanwhile, RAJ says, the International Commission of Jurists has discovered that the Honduran “justice” system, which is so intensely partisan that the courts dismissed judges purely for expressing opposition to the coup, has ignored most of the recommendations of the Commission. The punchline, as is often the case, is Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady: two parts blarney to one part Rasputin.

El Pais has constructed a map of where the cables are from. They show Honduras with only one cable. The Llorens cable is no longer findable by search on El Pais, though the cable itself is still there. The Ford cable is still there. Why is it that errors with regard to Honduras only go one way–toward sending it down the memory hole?

WSJ, where reality is optional

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

The Wall Street Journal recently published an editorial suggesting that a 2 percentage point
increase in Oregon’s top income tax rate caused up to 10,000 wealthy Oregonians to flee the
state.1 In support of its claim, the Journal points to new data showing that 10,000 fewer
Oregonians were affected by this tax increase than the state’s Legislative Revenue Office (LRO)
had originally anticipated.

But there is a much simpler explanation for this discrepancy, and it’s made clear both in the LRO
data and in its analysis of that data. These 10,000 taxpayers earned less than the LRO expected
in 2009 as a result of the economic recession, and therefore fell below the income threshold at
which the new brackets took effect….

In addition to ignoring the impact of the economic recession (or, to be more accurate, dismissing
it without explanation), the Journal’s recent editorial includes two other glaring factual errors:

* In claiming that Oregon’s situation is an “instant replay” of recent developments in
Maryland, the Journal asserts that one-third of Maryland’s millionaires “vanished from the
tax rolls after rates went up” on millionaires in 2008. This is completely false….

*The Journal also argues that a 2 percentage point increase in Oregon’s top income tax rate
will prevent wealthy Oregonians from selling their stocks: “Successful entrepreneurs like
Nike owner Phil Knight don’t get rich by being fools with their money. They don’t sell
tens of millions of dollars of assets when capital gains taxes go up.” Amusingly, however,
Knight did exactly that.

They lie about everything. Everything!

Assange, Gorbachev, Lebedev: Making Teeth Grind Worldwide

When Julian Assange doubles down, he really doubles down:

Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta will team up with WikiLeaks to expose corruption in Russian government, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

This is Mikhail Gorbachev’s and Alexander Lebedev’s paper. You know, the paper run by two gents the Western politicians and their media worship because one of them destroyed the USSR and the other is a thorn in Putin’s side?

Heh heh heh heh. Be fun to see how fast the US media does a 180 on these blokes because they’re now buds with Public Enemy Number One, Julian Assange.

EDIT: Here’s an example of the sort of laudatory story mentioning Gorby and Lebby that’s about to become very rare in the Western press.

EDIT 2: Oh, this passage from the original Bloomberg piece is even better:

President Dmitry Medvedev said the documents published by WikiLeaks don’t hurt Russia’s interests and that the Russian authorities don’t care what’s being discussed in diplomatic circles.

“When people communicate, they sometimes use very harsh language and if such a leak had happened from our Foreign Ministry or secrete services, many of our partners, including Americans, would have got an emotional charge after reading ‘kind words’ about themselves,” Medvedev said during a meeting with students in Mumbai today.

Nice zing at the paranoid hypocritical Americans, Mr. Medvedev. The Russians must be overjoyed at the chance to show themselves as the guardians of relative transparency compared to the bellicose and enraged Yankees. Managing to make Vladimir Putin look restrained and noble in comparison is not exactly an achievement to be proud of, Joe Lieberman. Or Joe Biden.

Unemployment Recovery Similar To Previous Recent Recessions

Bonddad discusses why all of the ideological camps discussing the current state of the economy have an interest in poor-mouthing it.

By way of backing up his argument, he cites the fact that the unemployment rate recovery has been so far quite similar to those of past recession recoveries.

Something to ponder.

Federal Employees: Scapegoats

That’s all I have to say about this.