Hightower Lowdown

The business elite of Honduras staged a coup this summer. They saw the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, getting serious about shifting power to the poor people of this Central American republic, so they deported him at gunpoint and installed their own guy as the nation's unelected jefe.

Zelaya is now camped inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, while the usurpers have drawn denunciations from every other Latin American country and finger wagging from the Obama administration. So the cabal is now taking steps to repair the situation.

Are they begging forgiveness and restoring democracy? No. They've launched a lobbying campaign in our country, hoping to keep the Obama administration from helping Zelaya return to the presidency.

The coup-masters have already spent more than $400,000 on Washington lobbyists, including Lanny Davis, a long-time confidant of Secretary of State Clinton. To cover the Republican side, the Hondurans enlisted the Cormac Group of influence peddlers, headed by John Timmons, a former aide to Sen. John McCain.

And the usurpers have rallied a small group of right-wing Republican Congress critters to run a "Save the Coup" campaign. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint-- who has declared he wants Obama to fail--flew to Honduras in October to hold hands with coup leaders and returned to tell Fox News that Honduras is America's "best friend in the hemisphere...but we are trying to strangle them [sic]."

It's not the country we're trying to strangle, but the elites who grabbed power for themselves.