REPUBLICANS Delay US Nominees over Honduras Policy

[magbana]

Republican delays U.S. nominees over Honduras policy

By Susan Cornwell
Reuters
Tuesday, July 21, 2009; 2:16 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Republican senator unhappy with U.S. policy on Honduras delayed on Tuesday a committee vote to confirm the nominee to head the State Department's bureau of western hemisphere affairs.

Conservative Senator Jim DeMint, who has expressed concern over Washington's call for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to be reinstated, invoked his right to ask the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to postpone voting to confirm Arturo Valenzuela, currently a professor at Georgetown University, to be assistant secretary of state.

DeMint also asked for a delay in confirming Thomas Shannon as U.S. ambassador to Brazil. Shannon currently holds the assistant secretary's post.

Both votes had been set for Tuesday afternoon but are now likely to be held next week.

DeMint is one of 17 Republican senators who wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this month asking the administration to reassess its stance on Honduras.

The group said it worried that Washington's pro-Zelaya stance would legitimize "abuses of power" and "violations of the Honduran constitution" by Zelaya before he was ousted by the army on June 28.

Efforts to broker an end to the Honduran power struggle collapsed on Sunday, after interim leader Roberto Micheletti rejected a proposal to reinstate the overthrown president.

Clinton spoke to Micheletti by phone after the talks fell apart and warned him he could face cuts in economic aid unless he strikes a deal with his rival.

DeMint and other Republicans have said they believe Hondurans were acting lawfully when they ousted Zelaya after he had sought to hold a referendum on overhauling the constitution to allow his re-election.

A spokesman for DeMint said on Tuesday the senator was also displeased at Valenzuela's refusal to discuss Honduras at length during his nomination hearing.

At the hearing, DeMint asked why Washington would want to be on the same side as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, in the Honduran crisis.

"President Obama rushed to side with Chavez and Castro before getting the facts. Now it's clear that the people of Honduras were defending the rule of law," DeMint said on Tuesday, through his spokesman.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)
"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072101860.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. If we wanted nazis making our foreign policy decisions for us we would have elected them.

DeMint has always been a super loon.

He needs to drop dead.

His filthy fundie murderers' gang wants to reactivate the living hell on Central America Reagan unleashed, just as they are managing to heal from it.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Again and again and again our corpo/fascist press lies about the Zelaya referendum.

Look at the length of the sentence they have to write to get their lie in there, and the devious way that they turn a far rightwing "talking point" into a "fact":

"DeMint and other Republicans have said they believe Hondurans were acting lawfully when they ousted Zelaya after he had sought to hold a referendum on overhauling the constitution to allow his re-election."

This is UNTRUE. Here is the entire wording of the ADVISORY referendum that Zelay proposed:

"Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?"

There is not one word in it about term limits. Zelaya would be term limited out long before any such constitutional process could be implemented, especially since it was a mere opinion poll, with no force of law. And if a Constituent National Assembly would ever be formed, numerous issues would be on the table in a representative body, and whatever they ended up proposing would be put to a vote of the people. This was a general reform proposal--as has happened in numerous Latin American countries, recently and in the past--and it IS Constitutional in Honduras, under the current Constitution. Honduras badly needs to be reformed. It is a country run by ten rich families--an Oligarchy--and a client state of the U.S. And the allegations that it is illegal to reform the Constitution--or even to propose for it an advisory vote--are absurd. If it is a democracy, the people hold the right to determine their own Constitution.

The Washington Past is not the only corpo/fascist 'news' outlet that keeps repeating this lie (that Zelaya was proposing to change his own term limit). They all have done it, repeatedly, in one form or another, including the BBC. It is inexcusable. But since they all promoted the idea that Iraq had WMDs, I can't say that it surprises me.