Winds of Change

(Our apologies to Arthur for not posting this piece in a timely matter. He penned this June 22nd, and my how news changes rapidly in our times. His comments are very important, however, and worth reading. We've included an update at the end. Ed.)


I have probably bored everyone with my musings on the Iranian election already. Now I am going to bore you some more. Something seems to be happening in Iran that may, just may, bring substantial change to one of the world's largest theocracies. In theory a religious state might strike some people, like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, as a really blessed state. In practice, religious political systems quickly are taken over by political figures adept at giving a nod and a wink toward sacred teachings, while busily stealing from the treasury whatever they can steal. Cynical? Naah, I base that on my knowledge of Tibetan history, both the most religious and the most dangerous government of the 20th century. A friend of mine's father was in the government, in a senior post. He told his son that his greatest accomplishment was to have held his job for sixteen years without getting killed. So much for Shangri-la, the mythic kingdom.

In Iran the theocrats, or, call them "the Mullahs" if you want to do some Iran-bashing, are Islamic leaders who like power and money. It is an open secret that if one gets into the upper reaches of ecclesiastic power in Iran that money magically seems to flow towards you and your extended family. What a miracle! What a blessing! Be assured that if we ever get a Huckabee or Palin into power in our country the exact same thing would happen. Mike Huckabee is Ayatollah Khamanei, without a beard. A strong comparison? Sure, but I firmly believe that if we let jive-talking fundamentalist nutbags like Huckabee into control of our government our country would look a lot like Iran within a few years. And boy would he and his family be "blessed" by amazing financial good fortune. A scurrilous claim? Look at Huckabee's tenure as Governor of Arkansas and you will find the account of a big dispute over his acceptance of "gifts" from his "grateful citizens". Trust me, Huck makes Clinton seem like a choirboy.

And now, will Iran bust free? Well, an important religious authority just admitted that in 50 districts there were more votes recorded than there are registered voters. That's not good. Important religious figures and bodies are starting, step by step, to turn away from the current "Supreme Leader" and even question the position itself, suggesting that replacing the position with a group might be a better idea. The current Supreme Leader is said to want his 40-something year old son to replace him, in an eerie echo of monarchy. Perhaps the Iranians can remember all too well how that worked out for us? or how much that reminds them of the Shah? The current Supreme Leader is said to have cancer, is not thought likely to survive the year, so this election dispute may be no more than a pantomime, with a more important succession drama playing itself out in the background. Support for Ahmadinejad may be intended to buy his loyalty to guarantee a line of succession.

Meanwhile young people are coming out on the streets, as young people are inclined to do, and some of them will be killed each day, in hopes that their voices and their sacrifice will spark a change in their nation. It's very gutsy. Could I have done it when I was twenty or so? I'm not sure, but I applaud their courage and their conviction. I hope it is not in vain. The great thing is that the entire dispute has already served an important purpose, to humanize and personalize the Iranian people in a way that all of our government's Iran-bashing had almost managed to make impossible. In order to destroy a nation one has to first turn it into a cartoon boogeyman, peopled with dupes and thugs. We have tried to do that to Iran, but the Iranian people have broken free of that stereotype. They are no longer faceless fanatics, but they are now imprinted on our minds as brave young men and women, passionate about their votes being counted and their voices being heard. I was stunned and impressed that there were as many women, of all ages, in the demonstrations as there were men. Incidentally, President Ahmadinejad recently proposed a change in Iranian law that would permit a man to divorce his wife without notifying her first. Gosh, wonder why those women were out in the streets in such numbers? Do you suppose there is some connection between the two things?

Arthur

Click HERE for update

Weekend Update - Tabloid Edition

• Okay, Mark Morford will help us out of this one, so let's get it over with. Michael Jackson is dead. Could we please get back to reality now?


• Arthur writes: "In an attempt to drive Coca-Cola out of India a nationalist group has a new weapon. It may work in India, among the most fervent, but I doubt that it will enjoy any wider popularity. By the way, I see this story as more interesting than Mark Sanford's affair. Another Republican hypocrite? Yawn. Talking about family values and chasing after a lady in Argentina? Stale news."


• Ever hear of the Bakken Formation? Probably not. But you should. North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation. A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil. That's a bunch of oil. So why aren't we drilling?


• New York police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, forty years ago. Days of rioting followed. Gay people are still second-class citizens in this country. Frank Rich comments.


• Okay, just one about Mark Sanford, we can't resist. Maureen Dowd writes how he got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.


• All this stuff going on in Iran have the neo-cons sputtering and spitting. "The democracy movement in Iran has thrown Republican ideologues into such a tizzy of circular logic that they're stepping on their own dicta." From The Nation.

Politics III

(Arthur continues his analysis and observations of the Iranian election with this third installment.)

Turns out, according to CNN, by law no Iranian election can become official until three days after the vote, to permit any issues of vote fraud to be judged. On that basis the outcome of the election is not and cannot be official yet, but Ayatollah Khamenei has called it already, in an apparent violation of Iranian law. A source tells CNN that the three other opponents are pulling their political strings, going to the highest level of religious leaders who pull the strings behind it all, sort of like a religious Supreme Court, who make really quick rulings.

It may be over, or it may be just the start of something remarkable. The US is doing a good job of keeping quiet, which is really, really smart. Stuff happens, but intruding into the middle of this mess would be exactly the sort of thing a dumbass like Bush would do, but which Obama will not do. It is the difference between having a President who is a dumbass, as opposed to one who is really, really smart, who thinks and works to understand before he opens his mouth.

Was the election in Iran an honest one? No, there seems to be clear evidence that none of the figures released are remotely credible. The tip-off is that the Azeri region, which could be expected to support Mousavi, who IS an Azeri, is claimed to have voted for Ahmadinejad. As if. The home towns of other challengers were equally uninterested in voting for them, while in past elections that would have been the normal pattern. In short, the current President of Iran is a lying weasel. Will the powers-that-be in Iran go along with this charade, or will they call a halt to such widespread institutional dishonesty? Stay tuned. Again, I think we are watching history being made. There is some impressive brinksmanship playing itself out on the world stage. It may work, it may not.

Arthur

Latest News Update

Weekend Update - Right-Wing Hate Edition

• Longing in the Age of Obama: Remember the good old days? When the air was thick like curdled paste and the days were long like sad, lonely sighs and evil -- sweet, dependable evil -- was like some sort of predatory perfume salesgirl and we were all trapped in the same apocalyptic department store? Mark Morford remembers Dubya.


• So now we can only assume that government agents are now, as we speak, waterboarding that nutbag who killed the abortion doctor along with the old fart who shot up the Holocaust Museum, right? Well, they're terrorists, right? On American soil, right? And we've got to get information out of them, like what the heck were they thinking. Joshua Holland tries to explain the 'eliminationist mindset.'


• Bill Moyers is alive and still going strong. Here's Moyers on the gun-crazy culture of America.


• Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment. The NYT's Paul Krugman lays it on the line.


• "This is the lunatic right, for whom the election of Barack Obama was much more than a political defeat: It was a racial and existential nightmare." Tim Rutten of the LA Times says perhaps we should take another look at that Homeland Security report warning of the dangers of domestic terrorism.


• We know that they changed the name of Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Airport presumably to not only honor his firing of the air traffic controllers but also honor his open hostility towards the citizens of the Nation’s Capital, but did you know that Ronnie was kept alive by Devine Intervention? Oh yeah Baby.


• On Wednesday, Fox News’ Shepard Smith responded to the tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist by saying that it was time to re-think the Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism that conservatives disparaged. “The right went absolutely bonkers!" said Smith, adding that the report was a “warning to us all” and that DHS was “warning us for a reason.”

Politics II

(This first part was sent in by Arthur last night on the eve of the Iranian election results. The second part below is from this morning.)

Iran, Tomorrow

Will it be a first round victory? or a run-off in a week? Will the election be stolen? Stay tuned. The outcome may be anticlimactic, or... it may be the spark for something surprisingly positive. Certainly many Iranians believe the latter. There are a lot of reasons for us all to care a great deal. The nuttiest of the Iranians are fairly nuts, the more intelligent and moderate center is surprisingly hungry for change and a reconnection to the rest of the world. Remember, these are not Arabs, these are Persians, a proud and ancient civilization that is quite capable of surprising us all. Oh, and the number of Iranians who are under 30 and don't recall the revolution? More than 80%. There is a pent-up energy that will either find a legal outlet, or in a worst case scenario there will be chaos. This may be anticlimactic, but it has the potential to be far, far more interesting. Click here.

To the Victor Goes the Spoils

When al Jazeera calls out an election as not being credible, people in the Mid East listen. One way or another Iran is likely to pay a price for holding an election and then turning it into a mockery. Oddly enough, it sometimes takes a gaffe like this to drive home to people in a region the importance of fair elections.

Arthur

Boys Gone Wild

In all the publicity over former VP "Dick" Cheney and his daughter making the rounds of television programs to talk about how limited the use of "harsh interrogation techniques" was... here comes a fairly articulate former detainee to make a liar out of Cheney. No, they never waterboarded this guy, but they seem to have come up with an entire host of interesting "techniques" designed to wear down detainees and make them sing like songbirds, parroting the words fed to them by their captors. As I heard this guy talk I vaguely remembered the story of six or eight men being arrested in Bosnia who were planning to blow up an American embassy. And then the story died and was never mentioned again and here is an explanation as to why.

Think for a minute if a group of American Red Cross employees had been in Iraq or Morocco and had been falsely charged with some dastardly plan, then exonerated, and another government, oh, let's call it Russia or China for example, had kidnapped them in front of their families as they were being released from prison, rushed them to an airport and flew them to a desert Gulag for them to be tortured and mistreated for more than seven years.

What would we think of a nation that did that? Stop and think of the current uproar over North Korea snatching two American journalists (both employed by a company that Al Gore runs incidentally) and sentencing them to twelve years of hard labor. Oh, the infamy! But in regard to the beam in our own eye (to throw in a Biblical allusion) we say nothing, or we try to dismiss, marginalize, shelve and forget what our nation has done. With regard to Guantanamo Bay we have already released hundreds and hundreds of detainess, pretty much just saying "Oops, so sorry, my bad" and now the courts are forcing us to release people like this, who seem to also have been imprisoned and mistreated for no reason. It raises the question; what was the purpose of the Guantanamo facility? Was it a vast research center, designed to study how to break the will of prisoners? Using as their raw material a large group of people arrested at random? If that sounds like the sort of thing that Stalin or the Communist Chinese did and still do, you are right. Maybe it should have been called Gulag Bay. Let's call it what it was. It was a Concentration Camp, into which marginalized and suspect individuals could be thrown based on false and baseless accusations. In Afghanistan it is said that there was a $20,000 or $30,000 bounty paid for "bad guys". In a lawless culture rag-tag militias used the program as a revenue source, settling personal scores by selling individuals to the US in order to earn blood money. Our armed forces, given conflicting guidance and pressure from above, pretty much ran wild, like drunks on a Spring Break from Hell. Things like this happen in every war, but this became an institutionalized form of stupidity. And we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

I remain puzzled by the caution of the Obama administration. I kind of THINK that the reason is that raising the issue will not bring back the dead or heal the abused and their hope is to be able to tackle some massive issues, get them in place, and then come back and make this right. Maybe that is politically smart, but in the meantime I applaud those who are hammering away at our government to force accountability. We need transparency, we need a national discussion of what was done in our names, in the end we will need some form of accountability, though what form that will take is not clear to me. I can only tell you this, no more Medals of Freedom please.

And understand this; what we did as a nation pales beside the horrors of everyday life inside China and many other nations. All one needs to do in China is put a foot wrong and you disappear, sometimes to never be seen again. No one knows how many people there are in Chinese prison camps, but some estimates are as high as 16 to 20 million. Given the size of the areas in China reserved for such "camps", and the great secrecy under which they operate, a high figure like that is possible. Another issue in China is the "harvesting" or human organs for sale to visiting "transplant tourists" by timing executions to their travel schedule. Thrifty, thrifty, thrifty. China has put on nice clothes and some lipstick, but underneath the governing elite are still pigs. But is that the point? That we are less dreadful than Communist China? Wow, what an honor! No, it is time to take back the soul of our country. The world expects no less of us and in fact yearns to have our country to admire once more. Our good name, among nations, was one of our most powerful diplomatic tools. Instead of leading a race to infamy, I for one will be glad when our country gets back on track and takes up in earnest the battle for the welfare of our people, and those of other nations. It is not a zero-sum game. Others do not have to lose for us to win. We probably do need to step up our efforts to control world population, but that is another discussion. And I wish that Right to Lifers would consider the concept of Right to a Decent Quality of Life. Much of the world lives in abject squalor, where human life is in some cases worth less than the life of a cow. If we are all part of the same vast human family, some of our cousins are in trouble. If you were an epidemic, looking for someplace to get a start, where would you begin? In Manhattan, or in the middle of a festering slum in Brazil?

Arthur

Politics

Every once in a while a nation throws an election that harkens back to the glorious days of early democracy. Ironically, there may be such a sprawling, brawling, hot-tempered election going on right now in... Iran. Iran? one axis of the "axis of evil"? Interestingly, it should be noted that hardline President Ahmadinejad was elected in 2004, after President Bush called out Iran as part of the axis of evil, though Iran had been trying to work with the US in regard to controlling the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now, with Obama's election and his speech in Cairo, all bets are off. A more moderate President is likely to be elected, by a convincing majority if this story has it right. And Ahmadinejad? He is not going out without a fight. Since he has backing amongst organized groups of fundamentalist street thugs who are likely to do a lot of stupid things this week, this election could signal a huge shift in direction for Iran. Iran is a very young country, with something like 60% or so of the population under the age of 30. Although satellite dishes are technically illegal, no one cares. Since news only happens on government TV channels, everyone listens to the BBC. There is a restlessness in Iran that seems ready to burst free.

It makes our elections seem tame, doesn't it?

TEHRAN — The leading candidates are accusing each other of corruption, bribery and torture. The wife of the strongest challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to sue him for defaming her. And every night, parts of the capital become a screaming, honking bacchanal, with thousands of young men dancing and brawling in the streets until dawn.

Arthur

Weekend Update - D-Day Edition

• Sorry, Dick. You can't have it. You can't have even a moment of credit, a glimpse of sympathy, any sort of merciful forgiveness just because you sort of, kind of half-assedly came out in support of gay marriage, again, even though you actually didn't. Mark Morford says "Nice Try, Dick."


• "The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power." Think some pinko liberal leftie said that? Think again.


• Here's a shocking little story about Bill O'Reilly being caught in a lie. Okay, so it's not shocking.


• And speaking of Fox Noise, the Evil Murdock has recently launched a website called Foxnation.com. The Fox Nation has displayed an uncanny ability to mislead readers, twist the truth, spread wild conspiracy theories, and misrepresent the reporting of legitimate journalists and media outlets.


• President Barack Obama's pick for intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department withdrew from consideration Friday amid questions about his role in the CIA's interrogations of suspected terrorists. You see, his name was Mudd, with two d's, and ... oh, never mind.


• Here’s conservative icon and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. “Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.” M. Kane Jeeves asks the all-too important question "At what point, in America, did it become okay to be stupid?"


• Rachel Maddow investigates the insane claims of Liz Cheney and her father, Darth. Guess what, they're both lying.


• Here's one that would cause Uncle Bob to break out the brandy: What are Christians to do when faced with evil, logical, scientific reasoning that "mocks the Bible?" Answer: "Christians must learn to think critically, deconstructing the news we read and watch and submitting it to biblical analysis. "

"Just One Of Him Is Worth Ten George Bushes"

The speech.


The reaction, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.


Coming from the WSJ, that's a rave review. I would agree with the general theme of the article, "Great speech, now what?" I think Obama did a good job of leveling the playing field, recasting the debate; everyone has a position, everyone has complaints, everyone wants something, now what? I don't remember much about the "Road Map" other than that the Bush administration was long on maps, short on being able to read them.

Like many others I consider the Middle East to be the most intractable trouble-spot in the world. There are nukes and nuts and there is a long history of bad decisions. Don't believe me? Relatively few know it, but Israel secretly helped to create Hamas, to act as a religious alternative to Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Boy, that really worked out well, didn't it? Fatah was staggeringly corrupt, Hamas is fanatically nuts. It is hard to choose which one should be more dubious of. In the middle are the Palestinian people, poorly governed and lead, disenfranchised, badly in need of new and more far-sighted leadership. Then there is Israel, expanding into lands taken during the 1967 war, in clear violation of UN orders to not do so. To date the UN has been unable to sanction Israel because the US vetoes any such attempts, but what if we were to stop doing so? And now the Netanyahu government is complaining that they had "side agreements" with Bush that permitted them to expand settlements, even though on paper they agreed not to do so. Brilliant. And we are supposed to honor such secret agreements, even when they violate UN mandates? I suppose we could, but wouldn't that make it far, far more complicated to find peace in the region? It seems to me that the Bush approach to peace in the Middle East produced results all right, but not the results we hoped for.

The best that can be said about George W Bush at this point is that his tenure has had the effect of making pretty much anyone who succeeded him look good. as a man on the street in Cairo said in speaking of Obama, "Just one of him is worth ten George Bushes". Okay, we have ten, shall we try for twenty?

Arthur