The election is done, Porfirio Lobo won and Mary O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal has an excellent re-cap of the whole affair.

I’ve been asked by numerous people, “So what is it that’s going on in Honduras?”
Go read O’Grady. It will take you 2 minutes.

Congratulations to Honduras!!

This is it!!! Election day in Honduras.

Best of luck you guys.
Now, go, read LaGringa.

Supposedly this is a news, straight news story out of the LA Times. Here’s the lede.

The de facto rulers of Honduras will observe more than elections Sunday: They staged the first military-backed coup in Central America in 16 years — and got away with it.

?news?

It goes on to talk about how the US government has agreed to recognize the Honduran elections tomorrow and that the earlier accord is still in affect, but get this:

Zelaya and Micheletti both agreed to the deal. Zelaya and his supporters assumed Congress would vote before the election, but no sooner was the ink dry than congressional leaders, many of whom backed the coup, announced that they would not convene until after the election.

Still, U.S. officials decided to lend support to the vote.

“This is an electoral process that follows the normal electoral calendar under the Honduran Constitution, and it had been underway for several months prior to the coup,” Arturo Valenzuela, the U.S. assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, said this week.

“This was not an election invented by a de facto government in search of an exit strategy or as a means to whitewash a coup d’etat.”

But others say a bad precedent is being set that will undermine Washington’s ability to work in the region at a time when President Obama has pledged a “new beginning” in U.S.-Latin ties.

“The U.S. needed a way out,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director for the Americas Society think tank. “But what we’ve done is allow a coup to stand. And I fear this will erode regional consensus about the defense of democracy. . . . The U.S. has lost its moral authority to push back” on other issues in the region.

Though it seems something of a moot point, the Honduran Congress plans to convene Wednesday to debate whether Zelaya should be reinstated. As expected, the Supreme Court, which earlier endorsed the coup, issued a nonbinding judgment Thursday recommending against Zelaya’s return to office because of pending criminal charges against him.

So
a) Honduras is doing exactly what it agreed to do and “yet still” the US is going to recognize the election. HUH??

b) even though the election is going on just like it was planned before Zelaya was ever removed from office somehow acknowledging this is “bad precedent” and we’ll lose our “moral authority” in Latin America because

c) we’ve “allowed a coup to stand”!

The author of this “news” piece has her head under a rock. The US was not going to invade. It’s ONLY option is to not acknowledge tomorrow’s election results. Zelaya could not have run EVEN if he was returned to the presidency. (though he tried to change that) What exactly should the US have done, Ms newspaperreporter??

She agrees Zelaya ignored a court order which is why he was “ousted”. She agrees the election were setup long ago. And they she snarks that the Honduran Congress is going to meet next week to determine if Zelaya should return to office this last month and a half before the new president is sworn in AS IF doing it two weeks ago would have been a GOOD thing, but doing it next week is not sufficient.

?? No flipping wonder the “news” is not listened to. She writes of human rights abuses in Honduras by Micheletti’s government. Who could believe her? From her first sentence she lost her credibility with me.

In the meantime, a zelayista candidate IS in the running in spite of the “news” article you may have just read.