Democracy is built of fundamental principles that allow for growth and change to occur that is beneficial for the good of all the people: the right to vote for our leaders. Honduras is the latest battlefield where democracy quickly and prayerfully used Rule of Law to defeat a heavy-handed attack by would-be Dictator Mel Manuel Mel Zelaya. Former left-wing president, Manuel Mel Zelaya, was voted into office by the slimmest of margins (1%) and with a new vote coming up he had to move quickly to maintain power. Hugo Chavez provided him with the plan and the money needed to facilitate democratic collapse and implement a democratic transition to Communism by paying people to vote his way.
Zelaya would call for a vote known as the 4th Box, to change the constitution, eliminate term limits and give him greater power over the government. Deemed unconstitutional and unlawful by Congress and the Supreme Court, Zelaya ordered the ballots to be printed anyway, forcing the issue. Honduran printers refused to print the illegal ballots so Chavez offered printers in Venezuela, and for no extra charge the printers printed a Yes vote right in the box marked Yes. Zelaya then ordered Military General Romeo Vasquez to distribute the additional ballots to all the polling places. General Vasquez refused the order and was fired by Zelaya. Congress responded by saying he couldnt be fired for following the law and refusing to obey an unlawful order. General Vasquez was promptly reinstated and the Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya for violating constitutional law. A Supreme Court judge accompanied the military in arresting Zelaya at his home so that his paid supporters could not start a riot. Zelaya was removed to prevent bloodshed and given the choice of what country to go to. He chose Costa Rica.
Democracy defended, Dictatorship defeated Not so fast. As with any bad sportsman, Zelaya would not go quietly and sought ways to regain power though a misinformation campaign (again funded by Chavez) saying there was a military overthrow while also paying people to create protests denouncing the government, the Church, and the military. Paid Zelayan supporters, wearing red, took to the streets and were ordered to riot and destroy businesses, stores and fast-food companies in the capitol, all with cameras rolling. Peaceful pro-government supporters, wearing blue and white, also held very large rallies all over the country in support of government action and the military, but they received very little media attention. They prayed together, thanking God for their country and the lack of bloodshed.
Zelaya, the news reports said, tried to get back into Honduras by landing his plane in the capitol city airport, Tegucigalpa, where his paid supporters and the media were waiting to rush the gates and take back their leader. He was not allowed to land there. However, were he really interested in landing, there were three other airports he could have used but there would have been no media and supporters there and the effort would be lost.
A new election will be held in the fall where democracy will be exercised once again. Currently, President Roberto Micheletti is the Constitutional President of the Republic having been appointed by Congress. Zelaya issued an ultimatum this Monday stating that if he is not reinstated into power by the end of this week, then, there are other forms of actions we are already organizing for my return to the country at whatever cost.
Elvin Santos was the former Vice President, but he resigned well before any of this took place. He would have seceded Zelaya in office. Since they never replaced the Vice President, Micheletti was appointed. In the meantime Honduras is willing to stand alone against any sanctions placed upon her by Chavez, the US, or any other nation siding with Mel Zelaya.
Hondurans (over 90%) are very proud of the stance their country took to preserve democracy and thwart attempts by Castro and Chavez to infect Central American nations with Communism, and we should be too.
The Honduran people have told me again and again that what they want from the people of the United States is for us to pray for freedom and democracy and for Honduras.
I wonder if the US, faced with such a challenge, would rise up and defend our Constitution with the same fervor as Honduras from any attempt to change it into something else?
May God bless Honduras and all nations that follow her brave example of steadfast loyalty to Truth, Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/20/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
Lest we fergit, DETROIT SCHOOL SYSTEM had also recently declared its insolvency, whilst GOVERNATOR DA ARNUUULD's STATE OF CA SCHOOL SYS IS REPOR ABOUT TO [Aug 2009 - EOY '09]???
I've often wondered what the color of the sky is in Janeane Garofalo's world, and after hearing her interview on BBC Radio Saturday, I'm convinced this woman lives on another planet.
After all, in her view: "[T]he media in the States is much more to the right. I mean there is almost no liberal outlet for news commentary or editorializing." This coming from a woman who used to host a program on the far-left-leaning Air America Radio, and is a frequent guest on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" as well as Bill Maher's "Real Time."
Such idiocy made it all the more fitting that after she finished her chat with the BBC's Clive Anderson, Garofalo ended up cutting her comedy routine at the Latitude festival short due to the audience's seeming disinterest in her views.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/20/2009 00:00 ||
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Afterall, whats not to like about a utopian society that killed more people than anything in the history of the planet, One that has failed 34 times, and one that violates the Torah?
Whats not to like other than it is hip and popular because your president did cocaine and smoked pot and likes CHE? Whats not to like about all this Islam stuff too? 3 Billion people cannot be wrong right? Afterall, the world is a "democracy", right?
Yeh man. All aboard that the media should side with the government so we will all be on one sheet of music, or all three sheets to the wind.
#3
I saw Susan Faludi speak once at Stanford. Was amazed to hear her go on and on about the right wing press. Guess right and left is relative - it all depends on where you are standing.
#5
Leftism, is a form of insanity. Don't really know if it is organic or what. Anyway, the further Left the individual is, the more insane.
So, for Janeane, anything to the right of her by a certain amount is going to seem rightwing. I'd say Janeane is bark at the moon friggin crazy.
I'm confident in my analysis because I have a brother in law, that falls pretty much in the same category as she does. He is so wacked out he is virtually non-functioning. The family makes sure he is fed and housed.
For every Janeane that has managed to make some sort of living leveraging what passes for talent, there are tens of thousands languishing in their own personal Hell. Someday, we'll need to warehouse them, or eliminate them, hard decision, but it will need to be done.
As for her looks, at one time she was not unattractive, not Cindy Crawford certainly, but not hideous. As she has slipped deeper into her insanity, she has covered herself with tats that make no sense to anyone but her. And those glasses are real passion killers. I actually pity her more than I hate her, but, if it was legal I'd hunt her down in a second and remove her from the gene pool.
#6
Whenever a liberal complains about the "conservative" media, it means that she is so far left that indeed, the MSM does look that way from her perspective.
#12
I know, I know, she's absolutely stunning, but please remember there's undoubtedly 160 or 180 million men (possibly more) somewhere that are sick and tired of her SHI*!
...The other day, I got it in my head that we don’t hear the word “fink” anymore. It used to be a big word, but it’s fallen into disuse.
On Twitter, I joked that it was time for us to reclaim the word “fink,” and then tried it out a few times. I called another blogger a fink, and he took it in the spirit it was offered, as a joke. Then someone else reminded me of The Wizard of Id cartoons, and the line used by the commoners, from time to time, shouted out from the crowd: “The King is a Fink!”
In the cartoon, the fink-shouter was usually hidden – there would be a voice in the crowd, or a cloaked figure on a horse, passing the castle would let fly with it: “The King is a Fink.” Anonymity was preferred because the King was a short despot (once upon a time, all despots were short, but that has changed) who could not be trusted to bear patiently and magnanimously with free speech.
I know politicians are fair game, and if they can’t roll with punches, they oughtn’t pursue office, but I’ve never liked name-calling. On this blog, I have always made it my rule not to use ugly nicknames about presidents or ex-presidents; it’s a matter of respect for the office, and civil discourse.
So, by my lights, anyway, a king may be a fink, but not a president. A president, after all, must answer to his electorate.
That’s true, isn’t it, that a king rules, while a president leads? That a king demands service, while a president serves?
Hmmmmmm. Feels like lines are blurring, doesn’t it?...
...A president who can arbitrarily decide to take taxpayer money by the greedy mittsful, without at least giving them a receipt – why, that’s a president who is barely acting like the leader of a republic at all. That’s a president who is acting more and more like…well…kinda like king.
And as we all know, “The King is a Fink.”
Posted by: Mike ||
07/20/2009 14:02 ||
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During last week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Republican senators kept bringing the conversation back to 2001 -- the year when Sonia Sotomayor delivered the most famous version of her line about how a "wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences" might outshine a white male judge." It was left to a Democratic senator, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, to ask about the much more interesting year of 2028.
By then, according to recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, some kinds of affirmative action may no longer be permissible. In 2003, writing for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, Sandra Day O'Connor upheld race-based discrimination in college admissions ... but only for the current generation. Such policies "must be limited in time," she wrote, adding that "the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
It was a characteristic O'Connor move: unmoored from any high constitutional principle but not without a certain political shrewdness. In a nation that aspires to colorblindness, her opinion acknowledged, affirmative action can only be justified if it comes with a statute of limitations. Allowing reverse discrimination in the wake of segregation is one thing. Discriminating in the name of diversity indefinitely is quite another.
It's doubtful, though, that Sonia Sotomayor shares this view.
"It is firmly my hope, as it was expressed by Justice O'Connor," she told Senator Kohl, "that in 25 years, race in our society won't be needed to be considered in any situation."
But O'Connor didn't hope; she expected. And Sotomayor's record suggests that there's a considerable difference between these postures -- that for the nominee, as for most liberal jurists, as long as racial disparities persist, so too must racial preferences.
This is the big question underlying both the "wise Latina" contretemps and the controversy surrounding Sotomayor's role in Ricci v. DeStefano. Whither affirmative action in an age of America's first black president? Will it be gradually phased out, as the Supreme Court's conservatives seem to prefer? Or will it endure well into this century and beyond?
To affirmative action's defenders, Sotomayor's confirmation hearings have been an advertisement for the latter course. Here you have a Hispanic woman being grilled by a collection of senators who embody, quite literally, the white male power structure. Her chief Republican interlocutor, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, even has a history of racially charged remarks.
But the senators are yesterday's men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.
The nation's largest states, Texas and California, already have "minority" majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites -- black, Hispanic and Asian -- will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they'll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, "every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation."
As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.
A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians -- and a source of permanent grievance among America's shrinking white population.
You can see this landscape taking shape in academia, where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves. You can see it in the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American "kingmaker" with a direct line to New Haven's mayor. You can hear it in the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.
And you can see the outlines of a different, better future in the closing passages of Barack Obama's recent address to the N.A.A.C.P., in which the president presented an insistent vision of black America as the master of its own fate.
Affirmative action has always been understandable, but never ideal. It congratulates its practitioners on their virtue, condescends to its beneficiaries, and corrodes the racial attitudes of its victims.
All of this could be defended as a temporary experiment. But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed -- and we will all have been corrupted by it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
