Spinning…When a Pres­i­dent who Seeks Dic­ta­to­r­ial Pow­ers in an Ille­gal Move is Removed by the Con­gress and by the Supreme Court, is it a “Mil­i­tary Coup”?.

The media dis­cus­sion of events in Hon­duras is remark­ably con­fused. Here’s CNN:

The pres­i­dent of the U.N. Gen­eral Assem­bly sched­uled a noon ses­sion Mon­day to dis­cuss the sit­u­a­tion in Hon­duras, fol­low­ing a military-led coup that ousted the sit­ting president.

and

Micheletti, the head of Con­gress, became pres­i­dent after law­mak­ers voted by a show of hands to strip Zelaya of his pow­ers, with a res­o­lu­tion stat­ing that Zelaya “pro­voked con­fronta­tions and divi­sions” within the country.

….

The coup came on the same day that he had vowed to fol­low through with a non­bind­ing ref­er­en­dum that the Hon­duran Supreme Court had ruled illegal.

Imag­ine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clin­ton, Ronald Rea­gan or some other Amer­i­can pres­i­dent had decided to over­turn the Con­sti­tu­tion so that he could stay in power beyond the con­sti­tu­tion­ally lim­ited time. To do that, he orders a nation­wide ref­er­en­dum that is not con­sti­tu­tion­ally autho­rized and bla­tantly ille­gal. The Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion rules that it is ille­gal. The Supreme Court rules that it is ille­gal. The Con­gress votes to strip the pres­i­dent of his pow­ers and, as mem­bers of Con­gress are not that good at over­com­ing the president’s per­son­ally loyal and hand­picked body­guards, they send police and mil­i­tary to arrest the pres­i­dent. Now, which party is guilty of lead­ing a coup?

This is another exam­ple of pop­ulist, dic­ta­to­r­ial, anti-democratic thought parad­ing as “demo­c­ra­tic.” I dis­cuss the issue in my recent lec­ture on endur­ing democ­racy in New Delhi.

[tomgpalmer.com]

The answer is “yes,” if the would-be dic­ta­tor is a social­ist and the main­stream media is reporting.

What It’s Like To Be a Lib­er­tar­ian.

A bit self-pitying for my taste, but the gist is spot-on.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

If you’d like a taste of what it feels like to be a lib­er­tar­ian, try telling peo­ple that the incom­ing Obama Admin­is­tra­tion is advo­cat­ing pre­cisely those aspects of FDR’s New Deal that pro­longed the great depres­sion for a decade; that prop­ping up failed and fail­ing ven­tures with gov­ern­ment money in order to save jobs in the present merely shifts resources from rel­a­tively more to rel­a­tively less pro­duc­tive uses, impedes the cor­rec­tive process, under­mines the eco­nomic growth nec­es­sary for recov­ery, and increases unem­ploy­ment in the long term; and that any “eco­nomic” stim­u­lus pack­age will inex­orably be made to serve polit­i­cal rather than eco­nomic ends, and see what kind of reac­tion you get. And trust me, it won’t feel any bet­ter five or ten years from now when every­thing you have just said has been proven true and Obama, like FDR, is nonethe­less revered as the sav­ior of the country.

Kodachrome Ends 74-Year Run.

[The Online Pho­tog­ra­pher]

Kodachrome is my favorite color film. The patent for it has to be long-expired by now, so maybe we’ll get lucky and some­one else will start mak­ing it (under a dif­fer­ent name), the way that Fuji makes Polaroid film.

Seen on a bumper sticker: Beware of invis­i­ble cows.

NASA To Trig­ger Mas­sive Explo­sion On the Moon In Search of Ice. Hugh Pick­ens writes “NASA is prepar­ing to launch the Lunar Crater Obser­va­tion and Sens­ing Satel­lite, which will fly a Cen­taur rocket booster into the moon, trig­ger­ing a six-mile-high explo­sion that sci­en­tists hope will con­firm whether water is frozen in the per­pet­ual dark­ness of craters near the moon’s south pole. If the space­craft launches on sched­ule at 12:51 p.m. Wednes­day, it will hit the moon in the early morn­ing hours of Octo­ber 8 after an 86-day Lunar Gravity-Assist, Lunar Return Orbit that will allow the space­craft time to com­plete its two-month com­mis­sion­ing phase and con­duct nearly a month of sci­ence data col­lec­tion of polar crater mea­sure­ments before col­lid­ing with the moon just 10 min­utes behind the Cen­taur.” (Con­tin­ues, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

Some­body bet­ter warn Moon­base Alpha…

@sethdill It’s copper

Ken­net­tNet intros Clarus 1.0 pet man­ager. Ken­net­tNet has released the first ver­sion of Clarus. The appli­ca­tion is used to man­age a vari­ety of pet-related doc­u­ments, includ­ing vet­eri­nary bills, expense receipts, and insur­ance or med­ical records. The soft­ware can also gen­er­ate posters for miss­ing pets, com­plete with pho­tos, details and reward infor­ma­tion.… [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

Long-time Mac users will remem­ber that Clarus was the name of the famous dog­cow.

Peo­ple don’t like to be med­dled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

River Tam

War­rant­less sur­veil­lance law­suit thrown out.

Fed­eral dis­trict judge Vaughn Walker has rejected law­suits that aimed to hold telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies account­able for their role in a con­tro­ver­sial war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram that was orches­trated in secret by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union are prepar­ing to appeal the dismissal.

The war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram is one the more con­tentious con­tro­ver­sies that still lingers from Bush’s tenure in office. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion attempted to lever­age the State Secrets priv­i­lege to block lit­i­ga­tion that aimed to hold par­tic­i­pants in the sur­veil­lance pro­gram account­able for vio­lat­ing pri­vacy laws. When it became clear that the courts were going to allow the law­suits to move for­ward, Con­gress inter­vened and passed a FISA amend­ment to grant the tele­com com­pa­nies explicit immu­nity. Pres­i­dent Obama voted in favor of immu­nity, despite con­sis­tently promis­ing to oppose it.

Click here to read the rest of this article

[Law & Dis­or­der]

A gov­ern­ment judge rul­ing in favor of the government’s inter­ests? Imag­ine that.