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Monday, June 29, 2009 - 7:32pmSanction this postReply
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Link didn't seem to work, here it is:



Post 1

Monday, June 29, 2009 - 7:39pmSanction this postReply
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I fixed the link.

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Post 2

Monday, June 29, 2009 - 8:15pmSanction this postReply
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The deposed dictator Zelaya (1) Proposed an unconstitutional referendum to remove the one term limit on the Honduran presidency. He (2) disregarded the Honduran Supreme Court ruling that the referendum was unconstitutional and he (3) fired the head of the Honduran military illegally for failing to use force to impose the referendum against the Supreme Court ruling.

Do we hear Obama saying we have to see how things will "play out"? That we can't know what is really happening there? That we have to respect Honduran sovereignty?



Post 3

Monday, June 29, 2009 - 9:02pmSanction this postReply
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Mara Liasson must be terrific in bed. I have never seen a woman so able to bend over backwards and stick her head up her own ass.

Post 4

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 3:26pmSanction this postReply
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"Honduras Defends Its Democracy" Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal, June 29

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had [Hugo] Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

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Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 4:11pmSanction this postReply
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Obama is beginning to make Jimmy Carter look like Ronald Reagan

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Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 4:14pmSanction this postReply
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Speaking in favor of those goals most precious to Chavez, the Castro brothers, and Zelaya can be difficult to do. As Ted described in post #3, it requires getting one's head into just the right position.


(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 6/30, 4:15pm)


Post 7

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 7:32pmSanction this postReply
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Rush:

"You know they have to be laughing at us in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iran to everywhere around the world. They're laughing at us because they're laughing at the naivete or at the good fortune that they have witnessed in having this man, Barack Obama, be president of the United States. He certainly clearly seems to have inherited Marxist tendencies from his father, Barack Obama Sr. So I think the question needs to be asked point-blank, Mr. President, if your foreign policy doctrine, so to speak, is to endorse Marxist, leftist regimes, no matter how they come to be either by force or by ballot, then you should say so. He should be pressed to say so. Do you support and endorse Marxist left -- well, the answer is obviously, yes! He's very friendly with Ortega, he's very friendly with Chavez, and he hadn't met Castro yet but I'm sure that would be an old home meeting as well. Doesn't it appear this way, folks? He's endorsing and very friendly with Marxist leftist regimes no matter how they come to power. Now, why? Let us ask why, and let's get beyond the ideology."

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Wednesday, July 1, 2009 - 10:21pmSanction this postReply
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"Nothing So Shocking About This Coup" Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald, June 30

Here's a question for all these new-found defenders of Honduran democracy: Where were you last week? Perhaps if some of these warnings about sticking to the constitution had been addressed to President Zelaya, the Honduran army would still be in the barracks where it belongs.

For weeks, Zelaya—an erratic leftist who styles himself after his good pal Hugo Chávez of Venezuela—has been engaged in a naked and illegal power grab, trying to rewrite the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for reelection in November.

First Zelaya scheduled a national vote on a constitutional convention. After the Honduran supreme court ruled that only the country's congress could call such an election, Zelaya ordered the army to help him stage it anyway. (It would be ''non-binding,'' he said.) When the head of the armed forces, acting on orders from the supreme court, refused, Zelaya fired him, then led a mob to break into a military base where the ballots were stored.

His actions have been repudiated by the country's supreme court, its congress, its attorney-general, its chief human-rights advocate, all its major churches, its main business association, his own political party (which recently began debating an inquiry into Zelaya's sanity) and most Hondurans: Recent polls have shown his approval rating down below 30 percent.

In fact, about the only people who didn't condemn Zelaya's political gangsterism were the foreign leaders and diplomats who now primly lecture Hondurans about the importance of constitutional law. They're also strangely silent about the vicious stream of threats against Honduras spewing from Chávez since Zelaya was deposed.

Warning that he's already put his military on alert, Chávez on Monday flat-out threatened war against Honduras if Roberto Micheletti, named by the country's congress as interim president until elections in November, takes office.

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Post 9

Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 1:44amSanction this postReply
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I suspect that the Army officers of Honduras swear an oath to defend their constitution as do American officers. The president violated his oath, and the supreme court was attempting to fulfill theirs and being blocked by the president. The only choice the army had to make was to remove him from office. To fail to take what was the only act left would have been failing to defend their constitution.

Some South American military coups are just power grabs that diminish freedom. In Thailand there have been about 18 military coups in recent decades. The Thai appear to use the process as a kind of checks and balances thing against excessive administrative power just something to do every now and then to break up dangerous power clusters - although I'll admit to being somewhat bewildered by much of their political scene.

Honduras makes me wonder if our Joint Chiefs ever get together over a beer and raise hypotheticals about what would it take in our country to justify a coup to protect the constitution.

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Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 3:40amSanction this postReply
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Now THAT would make for a good book...

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