Friday Morning at The Confluence: News and Views

Another rainy day in Boston

Good morning Conflucians! It’s another cold, rainy day in the Boston area. I’ve gone through the stages of grief, from denial to anger, and so on, and I think I’ve almost reached acceptance. Summer is just not coming to New England this year. It’s 57 degrees on July 3. So what? I should be grateful it’s raining and not snowing, right? The local papers have started publishing snarky little articles like this one about the “bright side” to all this rain and cold.

OK, it’s wet. OK, everyone’s miserable. OK, the sun shines on every other city in the country and Mother Nature is spitting on Boston.

But instead of thinking of this weather front as a personal affront, why not grab onto that silver lining and recognize the rainfall for what it is: a respite from the rat race known as summer.
Yes, summer, the ultimate setup for personal and recreational failure, when every day is supposed to be a mini-vacation….

But now, thanks to unremitting clouds and drizzle, it’s off.

No need to squeeze into the bathing suit. Or do your hair (it’ll frizz up faster than a flash flood). Or sport a tan. Or go for that walk or run or bike ride or show up for bootie boot camp at 6 a.m. It’s pouring!

As for the beach, no wonder everyone’s lying down, exposing themselves to deadly UVB rays. Getting there is exhausting. Lewis and Clark had an easier time looking for the Northwest Passage.

Oh hardy har har. Don’t get me wrong. I’m really happy for all of you Conflucians who don’t live up here in the Northeastern corner of the country. Who knows? Maybe God is punishing us for our sins or something.

The Boston Globe reports that there is one genuine positive to all this ghastly weather.

While the onslaught of miserable June weather played havoc with people’s plans and psyches, it has also provided a quiet benefit to many city neighborhoods. Fatal and nondeadly shootings in Boston have plunged, and police acknowledge the weather has been a key factor.

Well I’m glad there really is one positive effect of the horrible weather…. So let’s see… what’s happening in the rest of the country this morning?

You’ve probably heard the Washington Post did a quick reversal yesterday on its plan to sell access to politicans and Post writers and editors. It was all just a big misunderstanding, according to Howard Kurtz.

Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth yesterday canceled plans for a series of policy dinners at her home after learning that marketing fliers offered corporate underwriters access to Post journalists, Obama administration officials and members of Congress in exchange for payments as high as $250,000.

“Absolutely, I’m disappointed,” Weymouth said in an interview. “This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do. We’re not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.”

Sure Katharine, we believe you. Some guy in marketing is taking the fall for the public relations nightmare:

The fliers were approved by a top Post marketing executive, Charles Pelton, who said it was “a big mistake” on his part and that he had done so “without vetting it with the newsroom.”

I’d just love to know if the Post actually had an agreement with the White House to participate in these “salons.” It really does sound like something this administration would do, but we’ll probably never know for sure, since investigative journalism is dead.

It looks like the Washington Post still has at least one real reporter on staff though. R. Jeffrey Smith read some recent court filings and found some interesting background on the Valerie Plame case showing that Dick Cheney was in control of the Bush administration’s revelations about Plame’s status with the CIA in order to minimize the damage caused by her husband Joseph Wilson’s critique of the case for war in Iraq. Surprise, surprise, the Obama administration is trying to keep Cheney’s activities secret.

A list of at least seven related conversations involving Cheney appears in a new court filing approved by Obama appointees at the Justice Department. In the filing, the officials argue that the substance of what Cheney told special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in 2004 must remain secret.

No such agreement was reached between Fitzgerald and Cheney at the time of their chat, according to a 2008 Fitzgerald letter to lawmakers. But the Bush administration rejected requests by Congress and a nonprofit group for access to two FBI accounts of the conversation, saying the material was exempt from disclosure under subpoena or the Freedom of Information Act.

The Obama administration has since agreed that the material should not be disclosed. A Justice Department lawyer at one point last month argued that vice presidents and other White House officials will decline to be interviewed in the future if they know their remarks might “get on ‘The Daily Show’ ” or be used as fodder for political enemies.

Gasp! Heaven forbid! You mean politicians could be laughed at? Or their actions might be used to defeat them in an election? I can certainly see why our Department of Justice would be fighting hard to prevent that. Seriously, do we live in anything event resembling a free country anymore?

World News: Iran

In world news, Iran is threatening to put some British embassy staff members on trial after they were apparently forced to “give confessions.” Isn’t it time for President Obama to either speak up more forcefully on the Iran situation? Or maybe he could allow Secretary of State Clinton to do so? On a side note, Tom in Paine has a great post up about Obama’s weak response to the aftermath to the Iranian election:

Obama played for the Fool by Amadinejad.

Gordon Brown is “concerned,” according to The Independent.

And from The Guardian UK: Iran and Britain: a new low in troubled relations

And The Lede has a photo of ballots that were used for the “recount” by Iranian officials, and they appear to be phonies (see the 12:15PM July 2 update).

There’s growing commentary and criticism of photographs released by Iranian authorities of ballots included in the Guardian Council’s recount on Monday. The Huffington Post and Roozonline, an online news daily, are among the many observers, including opposition candidate Mohsen Rezai, highlighting two points:
1. The name Ahmadinejad appears to have been written on many of the ballots in exactly the same handwriting.
2. The ballots don’t appear to have been folded.

Reuters has a somewhat unsettling story about Israeli submarine drills in the Red Sea.

World News: Honduras

I’m still confused about what is really happening in Honduras. I realize that a few of our readers do have strong opinions about this situation, and I’d love to hear more from them. I found a few opinion pieces this morning, but I’m not sure which writers to trust.

Octavio Sanchez, “a lawyer, [and] a former presidential adviser (2002-05) and minister of culture (2005-06) of the Republic of Honduras” writes in The Christian Science Monitor that there hasn’t been a coup, and the ousting of Zelaya was in accord with the Honduran constitution and the rule of law:

When Zelaya published that decree to initiate an “opinion poll” about the possibility of convening a national assembly, he contravened the unchangeable articles of the Constitution that deal with the prohibition of reelecting a president and of extending his term. His actions showed intent.

Our Constitution takes such intent seriously. According to Article 239: “No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says “immediately” – as in “instant,” as in “no trial required,” as in “no impeachment needed.”

Johann Hari writes in The Independent that there has indeed been a coup and it is a reminder of “the other 9/11.

For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende – a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority – was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described “fascist”, General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to “disappear” tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington DC, by Henry Kissinger.

[….]

Honduras is a small country in Central America with only seven million inhabitants, but it has embarked on a programme of growing democracy of its own. In 2005, Zelaya ran promising to help the country’s poor majority – and he kept his word. He increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and “the rich must pay their share”.

The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country’s wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them.

But this wave of redistributing wealth to the population is washing over Latin America. In the barrios and favelas, I have seen how shanty towns made out of mud and rusted tin now have doctors and teachers and subsidised supermarkets for the first time, because they elected leaders who have turned the spigot of oil money in their direction. In Venezuela, for example, the poorest half of the country has seen its incomes soar by 130 per cent after inflation since they chose Hugo Chavez as their President, according to studies cited by the Nobel Prize-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz. Infant mortality has plummeted.

At The Washington Post, Carlos Alberto Montaner writes about the importance of “Preventing a Honduran Bloodbath,” by holding the November election right away and reducing the influence of Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega, who are “already talking about invasions and resorting to force.”

…if there is still something worse than the depressing spectacle of a freely elected president forced to leave his country at gunpoint, it is that same leader trying to force his way back in. If Zelaya returns, he will be arrested and charged with an array of crimes. His imprisonment will embarrass any who decide, irresponsibly, to accompany him on such a mad adventure.

This is most grave. Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega are already talking about invasions and resorting to force. That could unleash a bloodbath and would certainly destroy the weak political institutions that Honduras labored to achieve three decades ago, when the era of military dictatorships mercifully ended. Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue, put it this way: “Zelaya is fighting with all the institutions in the country. He is in no condition really to govern.”

And that’s the truth. According to Mexican pollster Mitofsky’s April survey, Zelaya was Latin America’s least popular leader. Only 25 percent of the nation supported him. Another survey found that 67 percent of Hondurans would never vote for him again. Why? Because the Hondurans attributed to him a deep level of corruption; because they assumed he had links to drug trafficking, especially drugs originating in Venezuela, as former U.S. Ambassador to the O.A.S. Roger Noriega revealed in a well-documented article published in his blog; and because violence and poverty — the nation’s two worst scourges — have increased dramatically during his three years in power.

The BBC has interviews with Hondurans on the ground.

Alexander Cockburn: Did Obama know about the Honduran coup all along?

The Honduran elite viewed Zelaya, elected to his four-year term in 2006, with growing alarm and communicated their disquiet to Washington, where the military and civilian intelligence agencies were already being diligently primed by their substantial assets and agents inside Honduras, historically an important CIA and military staging post in Central America.

If you have other useful links on the Honduran situation, please post them in the comments.

Economics

Vanity Fair Story on Joseph Cassano, the man who bought down AIG (PDF).

I wrote a post on Cassano a couple of months ago: I’m no Economist, but I Think We Need Prosecutions.

Andrew Grice tells the banksters to “get real.”

The Lighter Side

Is Mark Sanford mentally ill? Some say yes.

An interesting blog post on Mark Sanford

Sanford: I’m too Sexy for my State

Disclosure: I was bored by the Sanford story, but now that mental illness may be involved, I’m fascinated.

Prehistoric Cave Artists were Women: Study

Andrew Sullivan still thinks there is something fishy about Trig’s birth and parentage. WTF?!

Richard Posner (a judge, seriously!) thinks all hyperlinks to and paraphrasing of news sources should be banned in order to save dying newspapers. Again, WTF?!

Michael Jackson’s $25,000 custom casket. That’s chump change!

Statue of Liberty Crown to Reopen on July 4.

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