This should be a story in The Onion

Unfortunately, it’s a story in The Intercept. Jon Schwarz (h/t to NashVegasDawg)

 

Many news outlets covered Univision Communications’ purchase last week of a stake in The Onion, the world’s leading news publication. According to NPR, Univision bought a 40 percent controlling interest in the company, and also acquired the option to buy the remainder of The Onion in the future.

But what’s gotten no attention at all is that Haim Saban, Hillary Clinton’s biggest fan and financial supporter, is Univision’s co-owner, chairman, and CEO. Saban and his wife, Cheryl, are Hillary Clinton’s top financial backers, having given $2,046,600 to support her political campaigns and at least $10 million more to the Clinton Foundation, on whose board Cheryl Saban sits. The Sabans are also generous supporters of the overall Democratic Party infrastructure, donating, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a total of $16.1 million since 1989 to Democratic and liberal candidates, party committees, leadership PACs, and federally focused 527s.

Saban is a rabid supporter of Israel and a business partner of the Murdochs.

The limited hangout: Clinton admits Honduras coup role

This actually came out a couple of months ago, but as part of keeping the record on the Honduran coup, I thought it was worth posting.

Mark Weisbrot, Al Jazeera:

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a review of Henry Kissinger’s latest book, “World Order,” to lay out her vision for “sustaining America’s leadership in the world.” In the midst of numerous global crises, she called for return to a foreign policy with purpose, strategy and pragmatism. She also highlighted some of these policy choices in her memoir “Hard Choices” and how they contributed to the challenges that Barack Obama’s administration now faces.

The chapter on Latin America, particularly the section on Honduras, a major source of the child migrants currently pouring into the United States, has gone largely unnoticed. In letters to Clinton and her successor, John Kerry, more than 100 members of Congress have repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in Honduras, especially since the 2009 military coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. As Honduran scholar Dana Frank points out in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-backed post-coup government “rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries,” opening the door for further “violence and anarchy.”

…

Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” Clinton writes. “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

…

Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.

I would say even more damning is Clinton’s characterization of Kissinger as “a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. ” Kissinger is a war criminal, and a promoter of Operation Condor, including a direct role in fomenting the massacre in Chile.

If Hillary Clinton is a friend of Henry Kissinger, she is no friend to liberty and the rule of law.

The Telemundo GOP Debate That Wasn’t

As Charles mentioned last week, the three remaining major Democratic candidates (Linc Chafee and having bailed, and Jim Webb probably preparing for a third-party run from the right to try to do to Hillary Clinton in the general what he couldn’t in the primary) met on Telemundo for a forum, using the time slot that was supposed to be filled by the third Republican presidential debate. (Univision is carrying one of the Democratic debates in March, which is probably why the Telemundo Democratic event became a forum instead of a debate.)

Greg Sargent has a nice article explaining how the GOP shot itself in the foot with Latinos as the entire party strove to see who could out-Trump Trump in showing their hatred for immigrants:

Republicans are pulling out of their only scheduled debate that would be aired on a Spanish-language TV network. So Democrats may respond by holding a second gathering aired on one.

[…]

But you’d think it would be a good idea for Democrats to try to make this happen. The RNC is claiming there will be another debate scheduled to replace the cancelled one on NBC and Telemundo. But RNC chair Reince Priebus has declined to say whether Telemundo would be included in the replacement debate. Obviously the RNC did not cancel this debate because of the Spanish-language network’s participation; it had many other reasons for doing so. But one consequence of this decision could be that Republicans end up holding no debate aired on a Spanish-language network. If Democrats do add a second such gathering, they would then be able to argue that they are far more interested in communicating with Latino voters than Republicans are, which is a good message for the general election.

Indeed, one of the GOP campaigns — that of Jeb Bush — is actually protesting the decision to cancel the NBC/Telemundo debate, and demanding that Telemundo be reinstated, presumably because Latino outreach would be good not just for Jeb Bush, but for the GOP overall. Guess which GOP candidate isopposing a reinstatement of Telemundo? Yep: Donald Trump. All this comes after GOP establishment types went into full-scale panic earlier this fall over the damage Trump — with his call for mass deportations and suggestion that Mexican immigrants are rapists — may already be doing to the GOP brand among Latinos. And it comes as incoming House Speaker Paul Ryan is renewing his pledge not to act on immigration reform while Obama is president.

Looks like Jeb’s finally realized that he shouldn’t have let himself get panicked by the base’s craving Trump’s blatant expressions of bigotry. The key for him, as it always has been, is to sit back and let Trump suck up all the oxygen to Jeb’s right, killing off all of Jeb’s rivals on the right; then, when Trump fails to advance past Super Tuesday, be ready to pick up Trump’s crestfallen supporters as the last man standing – and, more importantly, a man who won’t scare off moderate voters in the general election. The question for Jeb is if he has any backers left who are going to be patient enough for this strategy to work.

Defending The Right To Vote: Hillary Deploys Marc Elias, Calls Out Jeb

In which Hillary does the resoundingly right thing, even if it’s probably for icky selfish partisan motives:

The speech that Hillary Rodham Clinton gave at Texas Southern University on Thursday regarding the right to vote even was better than I expected it to be. It was a thwacking, name-checking jeremiad that took for granted the obvious fact that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that is its only real energizing force, has embarked on a systematic campaign to disenfranchise those voters unlikely to vote for Republican candidates, and that the campaign has been abetted at the highest levels of conservative politics which, in this case, happen to include the Supreme Court of the United States. She talked about how Rick Perry had worked to restrict the franchise in Texas, and how Scott Walker had done so in Wisconsin. Then, she said this.

“And in Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state officials conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election of 2000.”

Yeah, she went there.

And not just with her speechifying, either. She brought in Marc Elias, and he and other pro-voter groups have already been going to town against Ohio, Wisconsin, and many other states.

Here are the things you should know about Marc Elias:

He’s very, very smart.

He’s very, very hardworking.

He’s very, very honorable.

He hires people who are just like him in these regards.

He and his people do thousands of hours of research on a case before agreeing to take it.

He and his people will know the details better than the locals involved. (This was shown to brilliant effect in his handling of the Franken-Coleman battle.)

He doesn’t play to lose.

Same GOP/Media Complex That Freaked Over Hillary’s Cattle Futures Barely Notices Romney’s $100 Million IRA

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest makes a good point:

Back when Bill Clinton was President there was a huge media-swarm controversy because a decade before her husband was elected Hillary Clinton had made $100,000 over ten months by investing in cattle futures. Now, skip forward to 2012. Report after report circulates about a candidate for President who owns a secret company in Bermuda, Swiss and Cayman Islands bank accounts and an IRA containing as much as $100 million — and who may have filed SEC documents containing false information (a felony). Huge media swarm this time? Not so much.

As Johnson points out, the feeding frenzy against Hillary took place in the early and middle 1990s — mostly before the rise of the internet, in other words — yet online searches for articles on Hillary Clinton and cattle futures turned up over 350,000 hits; if all the stories written about this subject were put online, the total would likely be significantly boosted.

Those of us who have followed the story of conservative and Republican bias in US media are not a bit surprised by this. Earlier this year, to note a recent example, we saw the FAIR study showing that the guest lists of Sunday talk shows are skewed heavily in favor of conservative and Republican viewpoints.

Hillary Clinton, Then And Now

Here’s what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has to say about the Egyptian government’s attacks on the press:

“There is a clear responsibility by the Egyptian Government, including the army, to protect those threatened and to hold accountable those responsible for these attacks. The Egyptian Government must demonstrate its willingness to ensure journalists’ ability to report on these events to the people of Egypt and to the world.”

From WikiLeaks (via Abe Sauer and The Guardian) we find this from January of last year:

2. I am deeply concerned by instances of inaccurate and unfavorable international media coverage of America’s role and intentions in Haiti. This misinformation threatens to undermine the international partnership needed to help the people of Haiti, and to damage our international engagement across the range of issues. It is imperative to get the narrative right over the long term. Where you see ill-informed or distorted perspectives in your host country media, I direct you as Chief of Mission to personally contact media organizations at the highest possible level – owners, publishers, or others, as appropriate – to push back and insist on informed and responsible coverage of our actions and intentions, and to underscore the U.S. partnership with the Government of Haiti, the United Nations, and the world community. It is important that you and other members of your Embassy team engage opinion-makers in setting the record straight on America’s commitment to assist the Haitian people and government in recovering from this disaster.

Why Going After WikiLeaks Is Wrong

The US Government’s vicious attacks against WikiLeaks and its allies (an attack that includes the psychological undermining of PFC Bradley Manning, treatment that won’t get him to provide true and accurate information but will eventually destroy him mentally) only reinforces for observers the deep and searing hypocrisy of the US preaching on freedom, democracy and transparency to people it doesn’t like (such as the Iranian government) while allowing the hostile coup takeovers of countries like Honduras by people who are against democracy, freedom and transparency, and show that by their eagerness to kill thousands upon thousands of their own people.

It was already laughable, in light of what was already known about America’s foreign policy, for Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman to blather about how important it was for Iran, a nation they hate and want to destroy, to respect internet and other freedoms. Now that the US’ true attitudes towards freedom, democracy and transparency have been revealed for all to see, the wildly intemperate scorpionlike reaction of Clinton, Lieberman, Biden and most every other prominent American politician or government official just reinforces what we all knew.