If you’re looking for canned news on this, that’s going to be hard, as most news organizations have been shut down by the Ayatollahs. Here’s the best I can come up with:
Wikipedia (terms and background info):
- 2009 Iranian election protests
- term: Ansar / Ansar-e-Hezbollah
- term: Basij militia
- Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the theocratic leader of Iran; President Ahmadinejad is the day-to-day person in charge of things. Mousavi is an elder reformist statesman who ran against the President, won the actual vote, and as soon as it was obvious that the President was losing to someone who might challenge the hardliners and theocrats, the hardliners and theocrats announced (after shutting down the news channels, texting and so forth) that their guy had really won, and we have the guns, and what are you going to do about it?
- Riots and protests have swept Iran ever since. Hardliner militias (see groups mentioned above) have been attacking and killing protesters. There are calls for a national strike today/tomorrow.
Sources for new information:
- #Iranelection on Twitter (very rough and busy)
- AlJazeeera in English (video feed) (website)
- Niac-insight boils down the raw info from Iran messaging
- Photos of the protests from the Boston Globe and Flickr amateurs on the scene and more here.
- Andrew Sullivan is hot on this trail.
- Obama’s reactions so far.
- Nico Pitney at the HuffPo is doing a good liveblooging update on stuff.
- Gary Sick’s blog and Juan Cole are also gathering some good stuff.
Daniel Larison on the state of the Republican Party and why (read the whole thing):
One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the crash solely on the other party, which had not been in power during most of the period in question. One might be able to understand, if not condone, this on account of the timing right before a general election, but the infuriating thing is that they actually came to believe that these tall tales were correct and they have continued to repeat them as if they were true. Unanimous House GOP opposition to the stimulus bill seemed unwise to me at the time because it suggested that the party had learned nothing from its electoral repudiations, and more than this it suggested that the party was unwilling to take responsibility for decisions that its leaders had endorsed over many years…In short, the leadership took the wrong side on the obviously winning issue of resistance to the bailout and then took the right, but politically toxic side in the stimulus debate, all the while believing that it had behaved both responsibly and cleverly. If there is to be any credible Republican opposition to centralization, it is not going to come from the current House and Senate leadership. The leadership must be replaced. It will be as clear a break with the Bush-accommodating ways of the past as the GOP can manage at the moment, and it could bring to the fore a new set of leaders in the minority to craft an agenda, or for that matter simply an alternative budget proposal, that will not be immediately laughed out of the room.
Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen. Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie. But the level of ranting and screaming on the subject will further alienate the non-base GOP, who are dropping off the Republicans in droves, especially the younger voters who don’t automatically share those views.
Here’s a map from AP of the major stimulus projects on a county-by-county basis. Zoomable flash. In my case, the big project in my area is the resurfacing and repair of a major nearby road that we use on a daily basis that is pothole city (which is unfortunately a widespread problem in the Chicago area after this last winter). They’re also fixing our own street.
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say. To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.
There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss. Where they could trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease. The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.
Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all. And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information. Information they didn’t have.
My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out. And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.
I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam. But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise. As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.
And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual. Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do. Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.
Well, the Senate can filibuster a Supreme Court nomination. And I have no idea who Obama will pick. But you can rest assured that the confirmation will be messy no matter who he picks, considering what’s been going on over the last little bit. I’m not looking forward to it at all.
…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries). Interesting news coming out of it, of course. Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.
Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked? Not really. It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously. It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.
I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-r
The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*. As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large. Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.
You’d think some folks would learn…
I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.
Conservative writer and pundit who, as he put in in reference to another conservative pundit: Worst of all, he is someone whom liberals do not automatically dismiss as an idiot.
If you’re looking for a conservative writer who has a good connection to the reality-based universe, try him. I’ve had good luck with him so far.
I’m confused, folks. Which side is the Republican leadership on; the side that wants to work over Wall Street, or the side that wants to Let Greedheads Free?
If you’re wanting to discuss the whole AIG matter rationally, I have some reading assignments for you: Numerian at the Agonist, Ezra Klein at the American Prospect, Eliot Spitzer (yes, him) in Slate, Glenn Greenwald in Salon on finger-pointing, and Ezra Klein again on different finger-pointing. And the details on the bonuses.
An amazing mess. I think this calls for fraud indictments up and down the corporate ladder, and into Congress. And at this point, I’m very much unsure that there’s any good way to get that bonus money out of the hands of the present and past staff of the London office of AIG. As much as it feels good, I have to look at the law on this and figure out what legally could be done, especially since the bonuses have already been paid to people working in another country who probably aren’t subject to US tax laws.
See also Jim Warren on other misuses of bailout money, and other voices on accountability issues. I also strongly recommend reading Felix Salmon’s finance blog regularly, along with the comments.
Anyone who proclaims that they have the one true simple answer short of ‘prosecute ‘em all’ isn’t as well informed as they think they are…and lack of being properly informed is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush. Details in the 10 o’clock news.
Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees. Give them bonuses!
The UK economy is looking at it’s worst year since 1931. I assume that includes the war years as well…cripes!
Bernie Madoff may be pleading guilty, but the trust level in the economic wise guys is dropping faster than the Dow Industrial.
Norm Coleman’s entire donor list just had their credit cards hacked, which is always a good way to get more contributions because they trust that you know what you’re doing.
The problem is that if Obama’s people are looking at a vast mess, what about the Republicans who allowed it to get out of hand in a big way? Well, frankly, they don’t have a clue as to what to do, because they really didn’t have a clue about the whole affair in the first place. Or they knowingly let their buds in for a slice of the pie without a care in the world for the long-term results. And if Obama manages to pull this one off, they’re politically screwed; a grateful public won’t listen to them any quicker than they listened to Herbert Hoover after he left office, and for the same reasons. So their only strategy is to take out their “money” wrenches (the monkey wrenches they used to get money out of lobbyists and contributors) and wooden shoes (sabots in French) and throw them into the works of what Obama’s doing, in the hope that they can gum things up enough to blame him for everything.
Of course a certain number of Republicans are so solidly safe that they can get along one way or the other. But the bulk of members of congress need to be able to say to constituents and donors alike that they’ve done something. And absent earmarks, that would require members of the minority to forge some kind of compromises with members of the majority on the big issues of the day. Which is precisely what almost no Republicans seem inclined to do at the moment.
Of course, all the crash is also hitting the lobbyists and the buddies, who are being beaten to death. The collapse of the Dow has beaten the crap out of many companies, especially those who where most dependent on a share of the financial services pie (like GE and GM and AIG, sucked dry and down by the debt-handling end of the business). Also, the more you were dependent on wild consumer shoppies for bigger ticket items, and on lots of cheap and easy credit to keep your business going, the more you are well and totally screwed. Once the spigot dies on those two taps, your business is irredeemable hash.
I’m not worried about a bunch of wanna-be John Galts out there who proclaim that you can’t regulate or tax me, and if you do I’ll pick up my toys and go home. Go right ahead and try, since you idiots were the ones who got us in this mess with your bonuses-all-around, your bigger-size-of-the-company-means-my-manh
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can’t have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses — and you can’t have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.
You can’t have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.
And, ultimately, you can’t allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn’t get it then; they still don’t get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).
Now that the Republicans don’t seem be be getting any leverage out of calling Democrats a buncha liberals (’socialists‘ seems to be the term in use, and I’m waiting for ‘pinko Commie’ any day now), they are now starting to go after each other; Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steele are going at each other for being a disgrace to the party and so on.
Steele: “Yes he is incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.”
Rush: “To us, bipartisanship is them (Democrats) being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.”
Isn’t that special?
And in more idiocy, Roland Burris just set up his Burris in 2010 for Senate Web site up. And while all this goes on, in the real world, the median home price in Detroit goes to: $7500. Not a typo.
The new African American head of the Republican party making racist comments about Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal, going on about ’slum love’. Same guy who was talking about his hip-hopization of the face of the GOP (I want to watch Boehner and Cantor do hip-hop in the well of the House, yes I do) and threatening GOP Senators who voted for the Stimulus Bill to cut off their future campaign funding in public. Needless to say, the Senators are not amused.
The GOP just can’t give up the whole Obama-is-not-American idea. Of course, the state of Hawaii (run by a Republican Governor) has come out and squashed the whole idea, stating absolutely that state records show that he was indeed born in Honolulu. But folks like Senator Richard Shelby and conservative nutballs like to keep this going.
Why? Well, part of this is because it’s useful to hot up the idiots who are looking for some sort of way that they can declare a Democratic President a Traitor To The Realm on the git-go, and adding in the racists who don’t really think Africans can be Americans doesn’t hurt, either. Some are riled enough to talk up secession, armed rebellion and the like. After all the damn kill-the-socialist stuff last fall, I’m only partly surprised.
Wonderful stuff from conservative pundit Daniel Larison on this after the cut:
( Read the rest of this entry » )On the one hand, practically everyone in Illinois Democratic politics has called for Burris to resign his Senate seat, along with the big Chicago newspapers and the Washington Post. Senator Durbin corralled him today and told him to his face. His response:
We are not hearing that I should resign. Quite to the contrary, we keep hearing from people all over this nation, all over this state that say, “Roland, you cannot step down You are the best thing to happen to Illinois and the US Senate ever.” We are committed to doing Illinois’ work in the US Senate and all of this silly stuff about Rod Blagojevich isn’t about Roland Burris.
If I admitted I heard voices like that, they’d put me in a mental health ward, not the US Senate. The short version is that Burris’ ego will never let him resign. You’d have to toss him out.
- Senator Schumer is saying that if a state government doesn’t want any of the stimulus money, they shouldn’t be forced to take it; however, you can’t pick what parts you will or won’t take. Sounds good to me. And Governor Sanford of South Carolina says that he’ll pray for you if you’re down and out, but horrors, can’t take that stimulus money. I want to see him do that and see what happens to his party in the next election with those people he prayed for.
- Robert Reich on deficit cutting and stimulus and the recession. Short version: #3 is the real worry.
- British bankers don’t like all this no-bonuses talk and demand more goodies. The reason is simple; the world they live in has purple paisley skies and endless bonuses for just showing up at the office.
- McCain: your new helicopter costs too much. Obama: I didn’t order it, your buddy Bush did, I’m happy with what I’ve got, and I’ve told the people involved to suss this all out and figure out if we really need this.
- New idea: an infrastructure bank.
- As the Philadelphia papers were tanking, their run-them-into-the-ground CEO was getting massive pay raises.
Even though Tierney in January 2008 demanded a 10% cost concession from workers, his own pay was bumped up 3% in May 2008 to $618,000. Then came the big boost around Christmas.The Inquirer and Daily News join a growing list of newspapers forced into bankruptcy after sharp declines in advertising destroyed their ability to service big debts taken on when they changed hands…It also raises the prospect of big losses by the lenders that provided the balance of more than $400 million in debt financing. The list of largest unsecured creditors was topped by Royal Bank of Scotland, which is owed $22 million. As of Jan. 31, the company said it still owed $395 million to lenders.
He also made it clear that he won’t let his desire for bipartisanship undermine important initiatives. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”
But beyond his specific policies (and whether one supports them or not), Mr. Obama is emerging as the very model of the type of person one would want in high public office. He is intelligent, mature, thoughtful, calm in the face of crises and, if the nation is lucky, maybe even wise.
When asked about the sharp drop in the stock markets after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced an expanded bank bailout plan last week, Mr. Obama replied:
“I am not planning based on a one-day market reaction. In fact, you can argue that a lot of the problems we’re in have to do with everybody planning based on one-day market reactions, or three-month market reactions, and as a consequence nobody was taking the long view.
“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”
To me, it’s about time someone was a grownup and took the long game rather than the quarterly report and the overnight ratings.
Now Attorney General Lisa Madigan (major Democratic pol in Illinois) wants Burris investigated. He’s toast, sooner or later. His desire to run for the seat in 2010 was feeble at best, but this and the Republican upset over things will make it impossible to win even the Primaries, and it’s obvious that he BS’d the impeachment committee about his contacts with Blago. He’s too proud of a man to quit, though. We’ll see what happens.
“Anyone who suggests otherwise,” Mr. Burris added, “or would insinuate that my testimony in person or in writing is anything other than fully compliant with the committee and consistent with the truth is simply playing at partisan politics.”
Roland Burris NOW admits that Blago’s brother hit him up for big contributions just before the selection of Mr. Burris for Obama’s old Senate seat. His defense on anger that has arisen about his backtracks on sworn testimony to the Impeachment Committee sounds an awful lot like Bill Clinton’s ‘depends on your meaning of what is is” legal slice-and-dice cuteness - I didn’t care much for that, either.
I think the only real solution is for the Illinois State Legislature to pass a Special Election bill to cut this crap short and elect someone else to fill the rest of Obama’s term, and for the Feingold Amendment to the Constitution (make all Senate vacancies filled by special elections) to become the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution. Yes, I’m a Democrat, but I’m a good-government sort who has always considered Burris a hack, and think we could have a lot better in that seat.
The Illinois GOP is hot on this one because it upsets the Democrats, of course. And the Democrats don’t know what to do because they don’t want to possibly lose the seat to some numbskull Palinite Republican in an open election, and will wring their hands a lot and wish it would all go away, which will not help their chances if this gets much worse and people demand Burris’s removal, or in a special election, or when the seat is up again in 2010.
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