Honduras Coup, Act III, Day 20/Updated

Members of Congress who expressed concern to President Obama regarding Honduras policy, thanks to Nell of ALovelyPromise, who credits Greg Weeks. The text of the letter is here:

Raul Grijalva James McGovern Jose Serrano
John Conyers Chaka Fattah Mike Honda
Barbara Lee Jesse Jackson James Oberstar
Dennis Kucinich William Delahunt Jan Schakowsky
Donna Christenson Sheila Jackson Lee Linda Sanchez
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Final update. Very few newspapers have been following the coup in any detail. In the Guardian, Seumas Milne had an OpEd.

From Adrienne Pine:

Military sharpshooters shot into a crowd of protesters in an incident apparently initiated by the president of the de facto Congress, Congressman Marvin Ponce viciously beaten and shot at (currently being treated for two bullet wounds and internal injuries, Congress turned into virtual concentration camp.

She doesn’t give a source. Honduras Oye says that the president of the Congress verbally insulted protestors, they responded in kind, and the police and military were given the order to “mop up”:

The mopping up consisted of mass detentions, tear gas (sometimes directly sprayed into eyes of detainees), shooting with rubber bullets, shooting with live rounds, and reports of torture in the basement of the Congress building.

And the helpful Deputies in the Congress must have gotten themselves “deputized” because they ended up assisting the police-military with interrogations and verbally terrorized the detainees.

Members of the press were in for the worst beatings and perhaps torture (although I’m not sure what kind).

The Congressional building used for torture. One can hardly imagine a better image for the death of a democracy. AP and Reuters did not see fit to mention it.
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Amy Goodman did an interview with Jeff Sharlet, who wrote a book called The Family. The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. The interview is fascinating from a dozen angles, including the fact that this group was formed primarily to bust unions. Theologically, it’s fascinating because the Family’s belief is that Power = God, one of many heresies directly contradicted by the gospels.

The primary acolytes of the Family are, of course, Republicans. But my ears went up when Sharlet described the Democrats on which the Family has some degree of influence. One was Senator Mark Pryor, who famously said, “Jesus didn’t come to take sides. He came to take over.” And a second was… Hillary Clinton.

Caption: The US supports dialogue and negotiation to seek peace in Honduras

Image from Guillermo Fuentes, Rebelion.

Furthermore– and this was something that came as a surprise to me despite 15 years of studying the Christian Right– the Family recruits even among non-Christian foreign leaders. There has always been a firewall for heresies (like Power = God) within the Christian Church, namely the tendency toward sectarianism. If the Protestants were doing it, the Catholics could be counted on to be against, and vice-versa. Pentecostalism was the one break in the firewall, since it brings people together across all divides.

And this brings us to Honduras.

MoDo: She Wants Bill Clinton. Badly.

Why else would she ruin a perfectly good date with a perfectly good man by doing nothing but gossiping about Bill Clinton?

This also helps explain her intense hatred of Hillary. Here’s a woman who can’t keep any relationships going, and the man who she can’t stop thinking about, even when she’s allegedly discussing health care reform, is never ever ever going to divorce Hillary for her. The contrast must be galling.

Wednesday Morning Good News Roundup

— See what a couple of billion can bring? Cash for Clunkers, in addition to jump-starting the US auto industry and the industries that depend on it, is directly responsible for a big jump in the average fuel efficiency of cars on the road:

The average mileage for new vehicles rose from 21.4 miles per gallon in June to 22.1 mpg in July….

Study co-author Michael Sivak noted the improvement came even as gas prices fell and unemployment levels shrank somewhat. Normally, those factors lead to the purchase of more gas guzzlers. The higher mileage shows the effect of Cash for Clunkers, Sivak said, and he expects the jump to be even bigger when August figures come out. That’s because the trade-in rebate program only got going late in July.

— Small manufacturers are starting to recover from the crash, and even to start hiring again. This is borne out by the renewed demand for taconite iron ore from the MinnTac mine in northern Minnesota, which will soon be running at pre-crash levels of activity.

— Even during the economic meltdown, wind turbine installations are proceeding apace:

The U.S. wind energy industry installed 1,210 megawatts (MW) of new power generating capacity in the second quarter, bringing the total added this year to just over 4,000 MW – an amount larger than the 2,900 MW added in the first six months of 2008, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) found in its second quarter (Q2) market report.

During the second quarter, the U.S. wind energy industry completed a total of 1,210 MW in 10 states. These new installations nudge total U.S. wind power generating capacity to 29,440 MW, according to the report.

— Wind farms as tourist sites? You betcha. People come from hundreds of miles to see them.