"Yes, Kids: We Are There Now"

Tristero quotes Sara Robinson about the slide into fascism. We're at "stage 3" of the five stages in that slide:

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we [scholarly experts who track the growth of fascism] were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

What this quote doesn't say is that there is an element of historical awareness here. You may have noticed that the thugs have been quick to label people who are trying to keep meetings from devolving into fistfights 'thugs' and 'brownshirts'. Why? Because they know damned well that the best insulation is projection. You use their accusation first, so that when they make it, it seems like a reaction to what you said. Sure, their complaint is more valid than yours, but the media has no interest and no skills in discering validity or accuracy.

Hell, they'll muzzle you if you actually do make accurate accusations, because the other side knows who owns you and knows how to lean on them. Nothing Olbermann said about O'Reilley was wrong or inappropriate, but neither "Bill-O" nor his employers could stand the spectacle of a loudmouth who wasn't apologizing for their wealth and power.

Those are the "traditional elites" you see in Robert Paxton's authoritative definition of "fascism", as quoted by Robinson:

"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Community decline? Victimhood? Mass-based party of committed nationalist militants? Sound familiar? Does it bring up Glenn Beck weeping on television about how much he "loves his country" and hates the people who are defiling it? Or the nativism aimed at immigrants? Or the anti-Islamic fervor? It does to me.

Sara points out the "stages" involved in fascism. We saw stage 3 above, the one we're at now. This is stage two, which is just closing up:

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power....Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

I slightly disagree with a bit of this; while the mobs are unseemly, they don't strike me as quite like the Brownshirts of old to me. Too old, for one thing. But the rest is spot-on. The alliance between the "center-right" and the absolute crazies has been going on for a while now, but the grievances of the latter have been embraced as the cause of the former, now that they've been largely rejected by the public at large.

Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.

Stage four is a conflict between the traditional right and the hard right; the shape of the future government depends on who wins. If the tradcoms win, it's a dictatorship, theocracy, or corporatist system; if the crazies win, it's the "f" word.

But we already know who wins that fight, don't we? We've seen it before. Thomas Frank wrote a rather nice book about it, and about how the economic elites get rolled when confronted with the crazier wing. How could they not? The crazies are committed.

And, naturally, stage five is "radicalization". The new regime gets a victory of some kind—usually military—and uses it to start consolidating. The really disturbing social engineering starts. So does the expansion.

Sara goes on:

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

How do we pull back? That's my next post.

I await it with baited breath, Sara.

But this is the key take-away here. People are still thinking that this whole thing can be pushed aside by saying "these people are a minority". What they forget is that, for all its bluster about unity, fascism is ultimately driven by a committed minority. The public gets swept up in it, and that's happing right now; but the National Socialists were a tiny joke of a party for most of their existence. They are convinced that the majority has been hoodwinked or perverted in some way, and will only see appeals to majority opinion as a form of oppression and victimization.

Even if this isn't part of some slide towards fascism, remember that. The fact that they're a minority makes them more dangerous. Not less.

Falling Action

It's amazing. Watch this video:



and you can actually see the conservative movement ruining America: one obnoxious, blaring, entitled asshole at a time.

Edit: And here they are threatening to shoot union workers for "violence".



Amazing.

"Jane Galt" Truly Revealed!

HAH! Oh boy is this too good.

Mark Ames just penned an expose on Megan McArdle, my old "friend" "Jane Galt". Far from the Libertarian hero she's portrayed herself as, it turns out that Ames has revealed a person who has benefited, from beginning to end, from public largess. Why? Well, meet her dad:

Megan McArdle is the daughter of one Francis X. McArdle, who built his career as a public servant in the New York City administration, then moved over to the private side, where he could leverage his contacts with the government -- and finally moved back onto the public payroll in 2006, when Mr. McArdle was appointed by then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to advise the federal government how public funds should be spent, and on whom. Earlier this year, Mr. McArdle was reportedly in Albany lobbying the New York state government for a job as the "stimulus czar," appropriating President Obama's federal spending money.

Megan was born in 1973, a few years after Francis got his big fat job on the public payroll in the New York City administration, where he stayed for 11 years. Among the first big jobs Megan's daddy took while climbing up the public payroll career ladder were jobs as Inspector General for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Director of Program Budget for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

So Megan McArdle's entry into this world was literally greased by taxpayer funds. But of course, it wouldn't stop there.

Francis McArdle, rose up the Big Government ranks in the New York city. His public-funded career reached its peak in 1978 when then-Mayor Ed Koch named him as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where he served until 1981. That job put McArdle in control of all sorts of public works: water supply, waste water, sewage infrastructure. It's kind of fitting that McArdle's privileged childhood was funded by taxpayer's shit and urine -- a Freudian might say that this is the source of her inexplicable hatred of the same Big Government that pissed dollars and shat gold on the McArdle household.

Megan's dad moved from the public sector overseeing public works to a job with real estate developer Olympia & York -- just in time to take advantage of the huge Battery Park City project that Olympia & York was developing under contract. The success of the project relied on huge taxpayer subsidies -- at least $65 million in 1981 dollars -- as well as major public works projects to make the development attractive, including the disastrous Westway road project, which drained at least $85 million of federal subsidies until it was finally mothballed in the mid-80s, due to environmental concerns and public protests -- the kinds of protesters whom grown-up Megan McArdle would later attack. No matter, though, because by the time the Westway was canceled and all that public money was wasted, Olympia & York, Megan's daddy's company, had catapulted into one of the top real estate moguls in the world, and Megan's daddy was ready to move on to even bigger things.

In 1985, F. X. McArdle had moved from the private sector to a position that Megan understands better than any other: a lobbyist who manipulates Big Government on behalf of private companies. Francis X. McArdle was named to head the General Contractor's Association of New York. He stayed in that lucrative position for the next 20 years.

So. Her dad was a public servant who cashed in on the private side, and then made even bigger bucks as a lobbyist. Our heroic libertarian individualist is the daughter of a wealthy lobbyist.

It doesn't stop there, though:

Megan showed how much she owes to her dad's way of doing business when she admitted in a blog post that she owes her success to personal contacts "I sent out about 1400 resumes blind after my firm failed. I got not one response. All the jobs I interviewed for came from personal contacts."

We learn just how useful these personal contacts are for Megan McArdle thanks to a gushing profile on her published in early 2007 in a rightwing magazine called "Doublethink" -- put out by a corporate-funded advocacy group with ties to Tom Delay and Cato, whose mission is to "identify and develop future conservative and libertarian leaders." In the profile, we learn that Megan's first job in 2001, after graduating from the University of Chicago's graduate business program as a committed Ayn Rand libertarian, was canceled due to the market drop in 2001. So instead of flipping burgers to make ends meet, the libertarian moved back home into her parents' Upper West Side digs -- a home that taxpayer money helped to fund. There, in the hard knocks of the Upper West Side, the 28-year-old MBA seethed in libertarian anger at all the welfare queens and wasteful government spending programs she saw all around her. But it wasn't until bin Laden created an opportunity that Megan finally got a job -- as an "executive copy girl" for a post-9/11 cleanup crew near the site of the WTC. It was exactly the sort of job that those "personal contacts" can help you get in the "byzantine" world of construction in NYC.

It was at this time, living in her parent's swank Manhattan pad and working a job in her daddy's line of business, that Megan McArdle's blogging career as a right-wing libertarian crusader was born.

Instead of admitting that she got her first job thanks to daddy's shady connections with the corrupt construction trades, Megan pretended that she took the WTC-cleanup job as a sort of personal penance, a gift to the people of her stricken city: "[I}t was easier to bear it all than it would be working somewhere else, and worrying, and unable to do anything about it." Really Megan, you shouldn't have born that cross for us.

There's a lot more there about the Atlantic Monthly, which I'll leave aside, since it is the former employer of Matthew Yglesias, a blogger I still respect.

And, honestly, the quality of an argument is not dependent on the identity and nature of the author. This whole enterprise of mine here would be somewhat silly if I didn't believe that. I could have just gone eponymous like the aforementioned Yglesias. I didn't, and that was for a reason.

So, instead, I'll say that this is more instructive than anything else. it's about a key problem with modern opinion journalism, which is that far, far too many people in that business are in it because of being born to the right people and belonging to the right class, instead of due to skill, talent, and insight. They are wealthy and secure enough that they don't have to worry about the economic repercussions of what they have to say; yet somehow almost inevitably spout conclusions that support the wealthy and powerful, because that's who they identify with.

And, yes, the "libertarians" tend to be the worst, because they don't understand and don't recognize the structures that placed them where they are. They want to think the best of themselves, they want to think that they're responsible for their success, so they adopt an ideology that lets them do that. It's understandable, sure, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should fall sway to that same ideology. Yet precisely because it's so convenient, they're the ones with the bullhorns, at least on "economic" issues.

I see this in a number of the defences out there, too. John Carney's rant about how "ugly" the Ames piece is ignores the privilege that he enjoyed as the son of a successful antitrust lawyer. (I have little sympathy for it anyway, considering how "ugly" the results of the policies both Carney and McArdle advocate, but regardless.) Ezra Klein posted a more thoughtful response, but again misses the point that it's McArdle's privilege that is the point here, and the incoherence of her ideological advocacy in light of that privilege.

And that's all assuming that she makes utterly impersonal, completely logical and rational arguments. But she doesn't. Her blogs have always been peppered with autobiographical details that are supposed to support her claims, and I remember "Jane Galt" constantly appealing to her authority as some kind of economic expert. She isn't, and has been roundly castigated for that already- but if you want to appeal to your personal authority, you're fair game, because it's your credibility that's at question here.

(That's also not getting into the hypocrisy of the right complaining about personal attacks. Seen her birth certificate lately?)

For all that his column may be uncomfortably personal, Ames has delivered an explosive broadside to McArdle's credibility. And considering how much he's written on privilege in America, it makes a lot of sense. "Ugly" or no.

The Disappearing History of the Republican Party

Tristero has a smart comment about the Republican party's thuggish games and the Democratic surprise over them:

The most shocking thing, and the worst thing, about the fake healthcare riots and the very real thuggishness of the paid Republican operatives involved in them is not that they're happening. That's what Republicans do, after all. No, the really terrible thing is that by all appearances, the Democratic party was caught completely by surprise.

It's as if the eight years of Bush/Cheney, with its lockstep Republican Congressional goons, its relentless intimidation and marginalization of anyone to the left of the John Birch Society, its proactive (and successful) effort to target Democrats for prosecution by hand-picked Attorneys-General - it's as if all of that - and so much more - never happened.

Democratic leadership once again failed to perceive political reality as it is in 21st century America: The Republican Party is dominated by fascists who will do anything, anything at all, to undermine what's left of this country's democracy after the successful Bush/Cheney assault on it. After all, this is a party that used the Department of Homeland Security to hunt down Democrats when they bolted from Texas in order to avoid committing political suicide. After all, this is a party that aggressively opposes the regulation of computerized voting machines, voting machines manufactured by none other than prominent members of their own party.

Shutting down town hall meetings is precisely the kind of tactic these characters love, they spend night and day meticulously planning them, and get well-paid to boot. Shame on Democrats for not seeing these latest Republican riots coming.

This isn't the only place where this is happening. Democratic legislators, too, seem to have forgotten what happened while the Republicans were in charge. That's why there's that drive for "bipartisanship"; they aren't willing or able to acknowledge that their overtures will be thrown back in their faces.

I think Tristero is right in calling the Dems out, but let's be honest: the environment has a lot to do with this, too. The Dems won big in 2008, and it makes sense that they'd think that the Republicans would acknowledge their "mandate": after all, that's what they did for the Republicans whenever they win big. They're projecting their own attitudes onto their seemingly-similar counterparts in the other party, and don't get that the modern Republican attitude and mindset is completely different than both the modern Democrats and the pre-movementarian Republicans.

And Washington is still very much a Republican-friendly town. The lobbyists are giving money to Dems, but to Republican-inspired corporate ends; and the media fetishizes a "bipartisan" community so much that they couldn't care less about what kind of country that community would build.

Just look at Broder.

In that environment, it's no wonder that Dems are ill-prepared to face the challenges ahead of them. The Republicans are still better at the game than they are, after all. It's the Republicans bankrupt, terrible ideology that lost it for them; they still walk all over the Dems when it comes to politickin'. That hasn't changed, and won't change, until the Dems give their heads a shake and adapt to fighting the opposition they have, instead of the opposition they want to have.

High-Speed Rail and Backbiting Progressives

Apologies for the lack of updates. I'll point you to this excellent takedown, by BruceMcF, of a disingenuous "Freakonomics" article in the NYTimes on high-speed rail. Here's the first bit:

Eric Morris's "Freakonomics" blog labels itself as the "hidden side of everything", this particular piece involves taking two information sources and arriving at the final conclusion:

But given the very severe budget constraints we are currently facing, a program as costly as HSR should be evaluated very thoroughly despite its considerable allure.

His first piece of information is David Levinson's estimate that the California HSR will cost $80b. And what is the basis of David Levinson's estimate? As he described it on the California HSR blog:

(5) The cost estimates in question when I was quoted in the newspaper article which was requoted by Eric Morris do in fact come from Reason Foundation (you get interviewed by a newspaper and see how many of your comments actually make it through the back end). I do think they are ballpark, and expect the official estimates are quite low, as they usually are in MegaProjects.

In other words, the cost estimate is from the anti-government-project "Reason Foundation", and David finds them reasonable based on an expectation that there will be a budget blow-out on a Mega-Project.

This is not Eric Morris citing the work of a "transport expert", but citing the reaction of a "transport export" to the work of an ideological propaganda mill. However, citing the "Reason Foundation" as the source of the $80b estimate would undermine the credibility of the blog post in the eyes of many people worried about CO2 emissions ... who would be aware of much hackery places like the Reason Foundation engage in on the issue of climate chaos.

Not terribly surprised. This happens all the time: economists cite that sort of source, other economists feel collegiate with the first set so are willing to cite it too without looking at where it's coming from...and pretty soon, The Reason Foundation, of all things, ends up quasi-"cited" in the NYT.

But I really connected to this bit from Bruce on Kos:

While the "need to support local rail" is used by the anti-rail lobby as an argument against HSR funding ... when it comes time to fight for local rail funding, the talking points from the Libertarian think tanks swing around to why Bus Rapid Transit is better. And when it comes time for a Bus Rapid Transit project, the talking points end up in favor of ... more car lanes.

I REALLY wish that more progressives and liberals understood this better. I read pissing matches between different interests that use right-wing talking points and always want to yell "They are not your friend. They do not want to privilege your cause over the other guy's cause. They want to crush you both". This happens with social as well as economic issues—I suspect a lot of the anti-erotica feminists I've seen making common cause with censorious wingnuts never stop to think what their newfound friends think of, say, contraception—but it seems most prevalent on economic issues.

It happens over and over again. Try to get more funding for education by attacking NASA's funding? They'll agree, and cut NASA, and then cut education too. Try to get more funding for environmental protection by attacking funds used for roads? They'll agree, fight to cut the road budget, and then turn around and gut environmental protection too. Hoping you can get more money for affordable housing by saying that foreign aid is misspent when it should be spent at home? Guess what? They won't do either.

No, they'll just take the money and either plow it into district-friendly defense spending, Agribusiness, right-wing friendly manufacturers, attracting more Wal-Marts, or just making those upper-class tax cuts that their real constituents like so much. Every. Single. Time.

It always works out like that. Both sides always lose. The Enemy of Your Enemy is always going to make fools of both of you. Yet too many progressives, locked as they are in their little single-interest cages, screw it up again, and again, and again, and again. All the while providing endless cover and ammunition to the people that consider them treasonous dolts and the tremulous "moderates" who are desperately begging for their approval.

No, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Your friends are the people who believe that collective action can do good. Your enemies are the ones who don't.

All else is detail.

I'm Deeply Disappointed in Ezra Klein

Come on, Ezra, you must be joking:

"[E]ven if getting any bill called 'health care reform' passed would be good short-term politics," writes political scientist Scott Lemieux, "it's worth further emphasizing that signing a bill without (at a minimum) a public option would be a substantive disaster." Elsewhere, he says, "the public option is the core of the reform; a Blue Dog bill isn't so much half a loaf as a few meaningless crumbs." And, finally, "a bad bill would be worse than no bill."

The public option, as it exists in any bill moving through Congress, is not the core of reform, nor anything near it. It is, for one thing, limited to the Americans who buy into the Health Insurance Exchanges, and the exchanges are in turn limited to the unemployed, the self-employed and small businesses. In the House bill -- which is the strongest of the bills -- the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 27 million Americans would be in the exchanges by 2019. That's not nothing, but it's not much. Imagine half choose the public option (CBO estimates many fewer than that). You now have 13.5 million Americans in a public insurer with no substantive advantages over private insurance. That's not a gamechanger, it's a tweak.

But it's also worth offering a more general reality check here: The public option is not now, and has not ever, been the core of the argument for heath-care reform. It is the core of the fight in Washington, D.C. It is an important policy experiment. But it was not in Howard Dean or John Kerry or Dick Gephardt's plans, and reformers supported those. It was not in Bill Clinton's proposal, and most lament the death of that. It is not what politicians were using in their speeches five years ago. It is a recent addition to the debate, and a good one. But it is not the reason were are having this debate.

Rather, what has kept health-care reform at the forefront of liberal politics for decades is moral outrage that 47 million of our friends and neighbors are uninsured. That medical costs are one of the leading causes of bankruptcy in the United States. That an unemployed machinist gets screwed by fly-by-night insurance schemes while a comfortably employed banker need never worry. That the working class ends up in emergency rooms with crushing chest pains because they didn't have health insurance and didn't get prescribed cheap blood pressure medications five years before.

All due respect to a guy who got his start reading this very blog, but Ezra, are you high? Of course the Public Option is at the center of all this!

Without the public option—unless you strip out the mandates too—this whole thing becomes a bill that forces people to give money to the insurance companies! It's a gigantic handout of economic rents to the very actors who provoked the reform in the first place, and would ensure that so much insurance industry money floods into Washington that any and every attempt regulation would be made toothless within picoseconds!

And since when is it all just about the uninsured? It's not just the uninsured that is the problem. It's the underinsured: the people who can't choose their doctors, can't get the treatment they needed, and can't afford the immense co-payments for those procedures that they're lucky enough to actually get covered. I'm pretty sure that most liberals think about those people quite a bit. I imagine that a lot of liberals have been those people.

Why would Ezra, of all people, mischaracterize their concerns?

Yes, you could rationally argue—as Ezra did—that "[i]f reformers cannot pass a strong health-care reform bill now, there is no reason to believe they will be able to do it later." But what's being proposed isn't a strong bill. This isn't even a weak bill. It's billion-dollar pork to the real constituents of all those paid-for Democrats out there that might as well have"D-Insurance" next to their name.

And, sorry, but they damned well don't deserve it.

Dershowitz: Palestinians ‘Played A Significant Role In The Holocaust’

That title is verbatim from ThinkProgress. I only wish I were exaggerating:

Last week, responding to international criticism of Israeli plans to build new Jewish homes in an Arab neighborhood of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman “ordered embassies abroad to use a photo of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric.”

The decision to circulate a 1941 photo featuring the Nazi dictator sitting with the then grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini is aimed at easing pressure on Israel over a construction project on land in annexed east Jerusalem once owned by the cleric, [an Israeli] official told AFP.

Appointed “grand mufti” in 1921 by the British mandate authorities as a means to dividing and controlling competing Palestinian factions (the title and position itself was a British creation), Husseini eventually fled Palestine and attempted to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. Husseini hoped that, by collaborating with the enemy of the British, who he believed were facilitating the takeover of Palestine by Zionist settlers, he might be able both to prevent the creation of a Jewish state and establish himself as a regional power.

There is little doubt that Husseini had extreme, racist views of Jews, and that he gave support to the Nazis in hopes of gaining advantage against the British and Zionist forces in Palestine. What this specifically has to do with Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem, however, is less clear.

Doing his part to push the Israeli line, yesterday Alan Dershowitz took it even further. In his Jerusalem Post column — which, in a bit of unintentional irony, is called “Double Standard Watch” — Dershowitz questioned whether the Palestinian people, collectively, bore any responsibility for the Holocaust. “The truth,” wrote Dershowitz, “is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.”

This claim is preposterous. And, needless to say, Dershowitz utterly fails to prove it, managing only to establish the already known facts that a Palestinian leader, Husseini, had a relationship with the Nazis, and that many Palestinians still consider Husseini something of a nationalist hero. The idea that Husseini, let alone the Palestinians as a whole, played a “significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust” is laughable, as if the Nazis required one of the sub-human races to sign off on their plans for mass murder.

This is obviously not scholarship, but nor is it simply polemic. It is the attempted slander of the Palestinian people, in order to diminish their historical claim to a state with Jerusalem as its capital. In his Cairo speech, President Obama importantly recognized this claim as being co-equal with Israel’s, and admirably rejected the childishly one-sided narrative of the conflict that Dershowitz is peddling.

It’s important not to lose sight of what’s really at issue here. Lieberman’s order to push the Husseini photo and its attendant anti-Palestinian propaganda is aimed at deflecting attention away from Israel’s extremely provocative efforts to thicken the Jewish presence in occupied areas of Jerusalem. These efforts inflict an enormous cost on Jerusalem’s Arab inhabitants, who are prohibited from expanding their homes and neighborhoods, even as Jewish residents are encouraged to — and aided in it by the Israeli government and private American donors.

People differ on the Palestinian/Israeli issue. But no matter where you stand on that, you should agree that this is odious if you pretend to even a shred of intellectual decency. This goes far beyond hasbara; it's quite simply the most vicious sort of libel imaginable.

I can understand why the extremist Lieberman would pursue it, but I would have thought that even Dershowitz would have had more sense than this. No such luck, I suppose.

Apologies Won't Help, Mr. Aso

Sure, Taro Aso has a lot to apologize for, but I honestly doubt it's going to help much:

Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso has publicly apologised for what he called his failures and for his ruling party's string of local election losses.

He spoke hours after dissolving parliament ahead of an early general election scheduled for 30 August.

Opinion polls suggest the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) could lose heavily to the opposition Democratic Party (DPJ) in the election.

A DPJ victory would end five decades of almost uninterrupted rule by the LDP.

'"My shortcomings caused mistrust from the public and I apologise from my heart for this," Mr Aso said to his party's legislators in a televised speech.

"I reflect humbly on this situation and will fulfil my responsibilities while keeping in mind the people who support the LDP."

He also apologised for a series of LDP defeats in local elections. It was after losing control of the Tokyo assembly two weeks ago that Mr Aso said he was calling an election for 30 August.

Earlier on Tuesday, the cabinet gave its formal backing to Mr Aso's plan to dissolve parliament.

Declining support

Japan is in a deep recession and correspondents say that at times the prime minister has appeared indecisive.

Last week, Mr Aso survived a no-confidence motion put forward by the opposition in the lower house. But the upper house, which is dominated by the opposition, passed a similar motion.

LDP rebels tried unsuccessfully to remove him before he could dissolve parliament, believing he was leading them to a historic defeat.

Opinion polls published by the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers on Monday suggested that support for Mr Aso had continued to decline since previous surveys last month.

They showed him trailing Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama.

Correspondents say the Democratic Party favours more independence from the US, a greater Japanese contribution to peacekeeping missions and a smaller role for government.

Mr Aso is the fourth prime minister since the party won the last election to the lower house of parliament in 2005.

Not only the fourth PM, but honestly a bit of a sacrificial lamb. He has a history of public comments that have been...poorly received, shall we say...among Japan's neighbors. He has never been the biggest mover-and-shaker within the LDP, and hasn't held the types of positions that are usually synonymous with being a power-broker in the party. He wasn't expected to do well, and doesn't appear to have done much to defy those expectations. The election is the DPJ's to lose.

And assuming they don't, we could be in for a very, very interesting time in Japan.

Iranian Protesters Assaulting Prison/Television Station?

It's hard to say, because it looks like communications in Iran got cut off again, but various accounts on Twitter seem to imply that masses of protesters are swarming the main state TV station and Evan prison.

New Protests in Iran

"The air was thick with tear gas, so much that you couldn't open your eyes."

Yes, there's been another protest—and another crackdown—in Iran today. No great surprise. The man leading friday prayers was Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the leader of the Assembly of Experts and the guy that a lot of people (including myself) have been looking towards to end the situation in Iran.

His speech today didn't necessarily live up to those hopes. He called for freedom of expression, legitimate government, and everybody to "obey the law". He said that there should be more and better investigation of the almost-certainly-fraudulent June election, and that the hardliners had gone over the line. All true, but he wasn't calling for Khamenei or Ahmadinejad to step down, and wasn't fully aligning himself with the opposition.

Still, it may have been enough, as anti-governmental protests were again sparked. Here's one video:



...and here's what they did in response:

You may have missed it, but that was indeed tear gas.

It gets worse. The basijis outside the university where the sermon was given were carrying knives:

7:14 AM ET -- A caller from Tehran to EPersianRadio.com says that several women were stabbed by plainclothes paramilitaries outside Tehran University. "Blood everywhere," she says. "Please tell everyone to get away from the university."

A reader's contact in Iran says something very similar: "The basijis had knives with them. That's why everyone around the university has knives. He says its really bad."

And, apparently, Mousavi was there.

But here's the kicker: the Iranian mindset has changed. They don't trust the official line anymore. Even now, even this long after the protests were squelched and the repression got stepped up, they aren't buying it. They're criticizing the leadership, the system, and those who support it. Some are even bitterly saying "God has cursed Iran."

No, that isn't as good as one would have hoped at the height of the uprising. But it's still important. It says that the government lacks legitimacy. Now, that's a word that tends to get thrown around a lot: people will say that a president or prime minister lacks legitimacy, or that a congress lacks legitimacy, or that any number of other things lack legitimacy. But that isn't really what it means.

What legitimacy really means is that the government has an acceptable basis for the power it wields. A government isn't really anything other than a bunch of guys with guns and tanks unless people agree that it is. It's all smoke and mirrors, really, a kind of shared illusion. But it's a really good shared illusion, and one that makes society work.

Usually, people do grant it legitimacy. Either because of elections, or because of primogeniture, or because of nationalism, or just because it seems like the only available option. In Iran, it was because there was a modicum of democratic legitimacy, and a lot of religious legitimacy, and the two combined to buttress one another: the state could be Islamic because the people agreed it should be Islamic, and they in turn had the power to reaffirm and guide that state through having the power to elect its members, either directly or indirectly.

(Remember, even the Supreme Leader is the appointee of a democratic body.)

But, now, since they no longer believe they have that ability to reaffirm or guide the state, many clearly no longer believe that it's legitimate. That's no surprise: even Machiavelli understood that turning a Republic into a Principality is intensely difficult, and generally not worth the trouble, because people will remember that they once had rights and will not easily give them up. The Iranian leadership is learning that too.

The shared illusion is no longer shared. It's faded in the mind of many Iranians. They aren't going to believe in it again anytime soon. And even though some of their countrymen still believe, it's going to be harder and harder for them to sustain that illusion.

Some will bend. Some will break.

I still believe its just a matter of time.

A Simple Question...

How on earth did this joker land the job of being the voice of "economics" on About.com?

Sure, the site's been in some decline of late. But you'd think they would have cast a bit of askance eye on someone who tries to criticize Paul Krugman on the grounds that "[w]hat Krugman is basically saying is that the last stimulus package raised real GDP but did nothing for employment. So in order to do something about employment we should have... another stimulus package!"

To which one can only respond with, well, this:

CUTTING INTEREST RATES RAISES UNEMPLOYMENT!

OK, not really. But here’s what the data actually look like:

(Picture removed of correlation between interest rates and unemployment.)

Of course, we all understand that the correlation runs the way it does because the Fed cuts rates in an effort to fight recessions.

But here’s the thing: a lot of people are asserting that because unemployment has risen along with the budget deficit, fiscal expansion has failed or even made things worse. Why don’t we apply the same standards to monetary policy?

OK, I actually know the answer: it’s ideological. Fiscal expansion bothers people because it violates the dogma that government is the problem, not the solution, whereas monetary policy has become accepted as a mainly technocratic thing without political implications.

But if we treated fiscal policy the same way we treat monetary policy, it would be clear that we need more stimulus, not less.

Of course, this guy teaches at the University of Western Ontario, which isn't exactly a bastion of Keynesian thought.

(Well, maybe I should say "teaches", as he isn't a professor. Or a doctor. Or an academic economist, arguably, since his Ph.D is going to be in Business Administration. When he finishes it. But, whatever, close enough.)

Still, his responses stand out simply because of how ludicrous they are. Sure, there's a cottage industry in really inept attacks on the man, but at least they make real arguments. The best this guy can come up with is this dribble?

Don't, aha, quit your day job.

China, Iran, and The YouTube Effect

So as I said, the Internet is being blamed for the Chinese strife and is being shut down:

Chinese authorities blame foreign activists for inciting violent protests this week in Xinjiang, and say the Internet enabled them to do it. Uighur groups have used the Internet to rapidly get out images from what they say was a provocative government crackdown on a peaceful demonstration.

Following Sunday's violence in Xinjiang region, Chinese authorities were hasty to point fingers.

At a news conference Monday, Xinjiang's police chief Liu Yaohua blamed the World Uighur Congress, an international Uighur rights group.

Liu accused the organization of distorting China's ethnic and religious policy to stir up conflict. But he especially singled out the Internet, describing it as the main medium that foreign forces use to communicate with Uighurs in China.

Uighur activists say a peaceful demonstration Sunday in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, turned violent after police began cracking down. Chinese authorities accuse groups like the World Uighur Congress of masterminding a riot from afar, in an effort ultimately aimed at creating an independent Xinjiang.

The government has acted quickly to block access to information. Authorities acknowledge that Internet service in Urumqi has been interrupted, but they do not say how long it will be out. They say the interruption was done legally, and is necessary to maintain social stability.

Twitter disabled

In Beijing, the Twitter messaging system, which protesters in Iran recently used to report on police crackdowns there, has been disabled. And while cell phone connections in the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi, still operate, getting a call to the city, or making an international call from there, is proving difficult.

Xiao Qiang teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He also edits China Digital Times, a round-up of Chinese-language content on the Internet.

"Internet is playing a bigger role this year," Xiao noted. "Partially because what happened in Urumqi was immediately exposed by lots of cell-phone cameras, digital cameras, videos - there's a lot of witness(es), people [who] immediately wrote and sent out video images on the Internet."

The Green Uprising appears to be spreading, as is the response. They're blaming "foreign activists" just like Khamenei 'n Co, and are once again shutting down the Internet in a near-panic after videos started spreading of what was going on.

(Supposedly; the videos I've seen are a bit unclear as to what's going on. Lots of people, but no indication of the nature of the violence.)

Still, it does make me think. The biggest problem with mass protest these days is that it isn't massive enough. People tend to be either too insular or too spread out to be exposed to the site of tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or millions) of people making their voices heard. The newsmedia has never been really comfortable with it, and tends to retreat to their talking heads and safe, comfortable "analysts" as soon as they possibly can. Because they were the gatekeepers, viewers were exposed to the analysts, and not to the protesters.

Looks like those days are over. Video is everywhere, that much is clear. Unless you shut down the Internet entirely, you can expect that there will be video of protests. Lots of video. High angles, low angles, in-crowd angles, anything you can think of, and rest assured that it'll all end up on YouTube and the like. (But mostly YouTube.)

There were a lot of articles written about "the CNN effect"; about how newsmedia could be used to affect foreign policymaking, and about how it can be and is manipulated to serve factional ends in conflict zones. With the newsmedia declining in relevance and discarding more credibility by the day, what's striking is that individuals are stepping up.

Call it "The YouTube Effect." It's like the CNN Effect, but many-to-many. There are no gatekeepers involved, except perhaps for the video hosts, and therefore nobody for powerful agents to spin or pressure. The video tends to be raw and powerful, so viewers don't think they're being manipulated, even if they are. The timing is instantaneous: you can have a video up within minutes of taking it. And thanks to the other tools available, distribution of the links and quick expert analysis can happen almost as quickly as the footage itself.

Most importantly, it's enormously difficult to stop. Look at the lengths that China and Iran had to go to. Yes, they eventually shut things down. But it takes so much time, so much work, and such heavy repression that they're practically forced to shut the entire Internet down, since a single hole will be used to sneak more information out.

But A modern economy can't function that way. It needs communication. It needs connectivity. Repressive agents are forced to make a choice: either cripple their economy, or open the door to footage getting out. In the long run, they must choose the latter. But because they do, and because there's no "news cycle" online, they run the risk of tension flaring up after they think it's all over.

At least the CNN effect could be handled by expelling the reporters. But the YouTube effect? Nobody really knows how to "handle" that. Or if they can.

It might have an effect in the west, too. The western newsmedia—especially American news—tends to discount or downplay protests as fringe and ineffective. Part of that is because people never really see the size of the protests, and are forced to rely on inaccurate descriptions by those "experts" I mentioned earlier. That's over. Video showing just how big a protest is can be out online within minutes. If there are tens of thousands of people, rest assured that you can easily show people that there are tens of thousands of people. That may—and likely will—revive public protest in the West.

Nobody can be fully sure where this will end up. Many-to-many video distribution is a new thing, and arguably a bigger deal than many-to-many text distribution was. We're moving away from YouTube-as-harmless amusement to YouTube-as-vital service. But where it goes after that? It depends on people react.

Timeline in Western China

Facts seem thin on the ground about the brutal and bloody conflict in Western China, but I found a timeline from The Australian that I think may help out:

The sequence of events is contested, but goes like this. In Shaoguan City in distant Guangdong province two Uighurs were accused of raping a Han Chinese girl. The Chinese authorities now say this accusation was baseless. However, it led to some kind of anti-Uighur pogrom and at least two Uighurs, and possibly a few more, were killed.

This led, the next day, to a demonstration against the general repression of Uighurs, China's biggest Muslim minority, in Xinjiang's capital city, Urumqi. The Uighurs have a lot of grievances. The Australian government clearly thinks some of them significant, as Uighur issues always figure in the annual Australia-China human rights dialogue. When the Chinese communists took control of Xinjiang in 1949, ethnic Han made up about 6 per cent of the population, with Uighurs the vast majority.

Today, the Han make up about 50 per cent, with Uighurs a minority in their own homeland. There are several other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. It is now a very segregated province. Urumqi has clear Han and Uighur districts, and throughout Xinjiang there are separate Uighur, Khazak and Han villages.

The practice of the Muslim religion is very circumscribed. Individual visits to Mecca for the haj are illegal. Religion is discouraged in schools, religious festivals not fully celebrated.

The vast natural resource development has resulted in jobs for Han, not for Uighurs. Although Xinjiang is formally designated a Uighur Autonomous Region, all political power, most political positions, most jobs and most economic development has gone to the Han. Some Han are recent migrants, others were forcibly relocated to Xinjiang during either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.

The Uighurs say the recent violence began when their peaceful demonstration was met with savage brutality by Chinese police. We cannot know for sure what happened, but the Uighur claims are plausible as they would be consistent with Chinese police behaviour elsewhere in China and especially in Xinjiang.

The Chinese authorities say the violence began when the Uighur demonstrators went on an anti-Han rampage. Subsequently Han mobs went on an anti-Uighur rampage. If any other country were managing a minority region with this degree of crudity there would be immediate calls for greater autonomy and perhaps self determination. But, as usual, the Chinese have the international community bluffed. They have achieved this with Xinjiang in part by convincing the world that all Uighur activists are 9/11-style terrorists.

In fact, the Americans are trying to find homes for the Uighur residents of Guantanamo Bay because they have come to the conclusion that they pose no terrorist threat.

There have been Uighur separatist terrorist bombings in China, but independent analysts believe the number of Uighurs involved in international jihadist terrorism is tiny. However, by its recent behaviour China certainly risks radicalising young Uighur men.

No kidding. Leaving aside the anti-China stuff, it seems very, very unlikely that the Uighur are extraordinarily radical. The extent to which they're radicalized seems to be line with their difficult situation, not any kind of extremist Islamic theocracy.

But it's hard to say exactly what happened, because the Internet has been, you guessed it, blamed for this and shut down. More on that in the next post.

Franken in, Palin Out

There have been worse times. At least politically.

Massive and Bloody Repression of Uighurs in China

The BBC has the story:

Violence in China's restive western region of Xinjiang has left at least 140 people dead and more than 800 people injured, state media say.

Several hundred people were arrested after a protest, in the city of Urumqi on Sunday, turned violent.

Beijing says Uighurs went on the rampage but one exiled Uighur leader says police fired on students.

The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month.

The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says this is one of the most serious clashes between the authorities and demonstrators in China since Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Eyewitnesses said the violence started on Sunday in Urumqi after a protest of a few hundred people grew to more than 1,000.

Xinhua says the protesters carried knives, bricks and batons, smashed cars and stores, and fought with security forces.

Wu Nong, news director for the Xinjiang government, said more than 260 vehicles were attacked and more than 200 shops and houses damaged.

Most of the violence is reported to have taken place in the city centre, around Renmin (People's) Square, Jiefang and Xinhua South Roads and the Bazaar.

The police presence was reported to be heavy on Monday.

Adam Grode, an American studying in Urumqi, told Associated Press: "There are soldiers everywhere, police are at all the corners. Traffic has completely stopped."

A witness in the Xinjiang city of Kashgar told AP there was a protest there on Monday of about 300 people but there were no clashes with police.

It is still unclear who died in Urumqi and why so many were killed.

The Xinjiang government blamed separatist Uighurs based abroad for orchestrating attacks on ethnic Han Chinese.

But Uighur groups insisted their protest was peaceful and had fallen victim to state violence, with police firing indiscriminately on protesters in Urumqi.

Dolkun Isa, a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Munich, disputed the official figures, saying the protest was 10,000 strong and that 600 people were killed.

He rejected reports on Xinhua that it had instigated the protests.

Xinhua had quoted the Xinjiang government as blaming WUC leader Rebiya Kadeer for "masterminding" the violence.

But Mr Isa said the WUC had called on Friday only for protests at Chinese embassies around the world.

Alim Seytoff, the vice-president of another Uighur group - the US-based Uighur American Association - condemned the "heavy-handed" actions of the security forces.

"We ask the international community to condemn China's killing of innocent Uighurs. This is a very dark day in the history of the Uighur people," he said.

When asked about the rioting, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that all governments must protect freedom of speech and "the life and safety of civilian populations".

A spokesman for UK PM Gordon Brown said Britain was urging "restraint on all sides".

The Chinese government must be on a hair-trigger right now, considering the Iranian case, their rising unemployment, and the growing sense that economic growth is not going to continue indefinitely. I'd be suprised if we don't see more of this. Unfortunately.

Edit: Subsequent stories put it across that the violence has ben primarily Uighur-on-Han, not Han-o-Uighur. I'm skeptical about that: this piece in the Brisbane Times compelling demonstrates victims on both sides. The problem, naturally, is that we don't know what's really going on. The censorship wall in China is too strong.

Anyway, I'm doing a follow-up.

Key Iranian Clerical Group Says "Fraud!"

According to the New York Times, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum has called the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "illegitimate":

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.

The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.

Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s most senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution.

With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics — formed under the leadership of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.

The news has been lighter than it was earlier, both because of the media crackdown and because the resistance has moved away from the gigantic open protests and because the repression of expression has been so terrible. And things have been discouraging.

But this is positive news. It demonstrates that despite the outward appearance of calm, many clerics recognize the dangers of a military regime with Ahmadinejad's face...and are cognizant of the public's anger bubbling below the surface.

Keep in mind that the last revolution fomented for over a year. This issue was never going to be resolved in a day, or a week, or a month. Yes, the western media has moved on to endless pre-scripted elegies of an entertainer. But as everybody with any sense has said since this begun, this is not the west's story. It is Iran's.

The Post Really is Going Downhill

Oh, look, a discredited neoconservative advocating blowing something up for its own good. In the Washington Post. Again.

Remember when there used to be a difference between the Post and the Times?

Wait, What?

Did Dana Milbank really call Nico Pitney a "dick" on air?

Michael Jackson Dead at 50

It's everywhere, so I'm not going to link.

The man lead a troubled life at the very least, but nobody had as much of an impact on 20th century pop music as he did.

Persiankiwi arrested?

From the tweeter

# Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar - #Iranelection Sea of Green25 minutes ago from web
#
thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green - pls remember always our martyrs - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar #Iranelection28 minutes ago from web
#
we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast - #Iranelection

Devastating if true. Persiankiwi has been absolutely heroic. I hope he/she gets out.

A Simple Question on the Public Option:

"If private health insurance companies can't compete with a robust public option, why have private health insurance companies?"

Massacre in Iranian Baharestan Square?

From the reliable tweeter "persiankiwi":

# Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard - #Iranelection -5 minutes ago from web
#
they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us - #Iranelection10 minutes ago from web
#
Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan - unbelevable - ppls murdered everywhere - #Iranelection14 minutes ago from web
#
they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us - #Iranelection15 minutes ago from web
#
in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - #Iranelection RT RT RT17 minutes ago from web
#
reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq - now - #Iranelection - Sea of Green - Allah Akbar19 minutes ago from web
#
ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting - from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys #Iranelectionabout 2 hours ago from web
#
so many ppl arrested - young & old - they take ppl away - #Iranelection - we lose our groupabout 2 hours ago from web
#
saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - she had no defense nothing - #Iranelection sure that she is deadabout 2 hours ago from web
#
they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals #Iranelectionabout 2 hours ago from web
#
I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war - #Iranelectionabout 2 hours ago from web
#
just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals - #Iranelection RT RT RTabout 2 hours ago from web

This is entirely unconfirmed. But if true, it speaks to the desperation of the regime. If they're willing to go to this extent post-Neda, the situation must be incredibly, incredibly dire for them. They need control and need it now.

Edit: Here's Sully:

That's the impression from several reports now coming in. Stay tuned. From an interview on CNN:

"I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. they were cursing and saying very bad words to everyone. This was exactly a massacre... I don't know how to describe it."

Intolerable.

Stratfor's Derailment

By the by, anybody else noticed that Stratfor seems to be just completely without a clue on the Iran issue? I just read George Friedman's latest and it features a lot of assertions that don't even pass the laugh test: that there are no protests outside of Tehran, that it's all just wealthy kids, and (most bizarrely) that there was no serious irregularities in the election.

That last one is just ludicrous, for reasons that have been exhaustively repeated: Moussavi somehow lost his home town, Karroubi didn't have as many voters as campaign workers, supra-100% turnout in 50 cities, multiple witnesses corraborating ballot-switching, statistical analysis, etc.

But it's the others that are more surprising. Yes, you could theoretically make this argument the day after the election. But it's been made perfectly clear that it is Ahmadinejad and Khamenei whose positions are weak (not Rafsanjani and the opposition clerics), that the military is divided at best, and that popular outrage over the repression is quickly replacing outrage over the election itself as a motivating factor. No sensible analyst would ignore these things when trying to describe the situation as it stands or likely future scenarios, so why is the guy running the vaunted Stratfor not doing so?

(Hell, isn't Stratfor all about open intel analysis? How is it that they're missing the volumes of Sigint coming out of Iran?)

Well, honestly, that's a rhetorical question. I know the answer. Friedman put his reputation on the line as someone who believes that Ahmadinejad has popular support and is going to retain power, and knows that the only way he can salvage that reputation is if he sticks with his prediction. He's not a pundit, paid for being entertaining: he and his company are contracted based on their track record, and admitting to miscalling something this big could have a serious impact.

So, amusingly, we get the spectacle of Stratfor staying firm- hoping against hope that the "twitterers" get put down.

Does Rafsanjani Have the Votes?

Linked from Huffington Post, there's info that Rafsanjani may be close to pulling together enough Assembly of Experts votes to pressure or remove Khamenei. It's on EurasiaNet, here's a quote:

Now that Ayatollah Khamenei has become inexorably connected to Ahmadinejad’s power grab, many clerics are coming around to the idea that the current system needs to be changed. Among those who are now believed to be arrayed against Ayatollah Khamenei is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi’a cleric in neighboring Iraq. Rafsanjani is known to have met with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s representative in Iran, Javad Shahrestani.

A reformist website, Rooyeh, reported that Rafsanjani already had the support of nearly a majority of the Assembly of Experts, a body that constitutionally has the power to remove Ayatollah Khamenei. The report also indicated that Rafsanjani’s lobbying efforts were continuing to bring more clerics over to his side. Rafsanjani’s aim, the website added, is the establishment of a leadership council, comprising of three or more top religious leaders, to replace the institution of supreme leader. Shortly after it posted the report on Rafsanjani’s efforts to establish a new collective leadership, government officials pulled the plug on Rooyeh.

Bolding is mine. Another source linked by the Post said that he's already pulled together 40 AoE clerics to have the thing annulled.

And here's another shocker:

It says Khamenai has lung cancer and wanted to have his son as Supreme Leader (the position that Rafsanjani wants), and that the attempt to alter the election results was done in an attempt by Khamenei to eventually allow his son Mojtaba to replace him. It says that at the core the argument is not just about Mousavi but the overall system of government, as it's becoming a like Monarchy rather than a republic. So far, it says, most of the clerics have not accepted Ahmadinejad presidency, and quotes Ayatollah Javadi Amoly saying of the attack on Tehran University students, 'no Muslim will destroy another's property, they must be foreigners.'

How, ah, North Korean of him.

The big question up until now has been what's going on in Qom. Although these reports might be right, might be wrong, I think it's probably safe to say that Rafsanjani is getting some serious traction, especially on this "Council" concept. I can see the clerics being uncomfortable with another Supreme Leader but being fine with a Supreme Council, and I think the rest of Iran would probably prefer that state of affairs, too. (Especially with the elected Assembly having proven that they serve as the ultimate check on the Supreme Leaders' authority.)

Twitter Fraud?

So, according to Steve Clemons, the embassies might not have been taking in the injured after all?

A high quality map of Tehran-based foreign embassies taking in those who needed help was distributed. I posted the link on my blog here at The Washington Note.

And then a counter campaign also appeared warning those injured to stay away from Embassies because the basij were waiting for them at the embassy entrances.

I now must publicly question the entire exchange over twitter. I did get my link to the embassy roster and map -- not from twitter -- but from a friend who is an Iranian diplomat that has been stationed in an Asian country. I don't think he maliciously sent be bad information, but I do think he may have recycled other material that was being pushed out through the new media.

The reason that I know this is that I had a note come to me from a senior staff member of the British Embassy to the United States -- who after seeing my blog and a similar reference on Huffington Post that the UK Embassy was taking in injured protesters contacted the Foreign & Commercial Office in London to confirm.

The British Foreign Ministry spoke directly to the British Ambassador in Tehran who said that the reports of the British Embassy taking in injured were incorrect. I would say fraudulent.

So at the very least the Brits weren't taking people in. But were other embassies?

The Anti-Islamic Long Game

I hadn't thought about something in the Moussavi speech, but he gave a big reason why you're seeing so many neo-cons shit on this thing.

I'll reproduce it here and then explain:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.

This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism. Imam’s fantastic art was to neutralize these dichotomies. I had come to focus on Imam’s approach to neutralize the burgeoning magic of these. Now, by confirming the results of election, by limiting the extent of investigation in a manner that the outcome will not be changed, even though in more than 170 branches the number of cast votes was more than 100% of eligible voters of the riding, the heads of the state have accepted the responsibility of what has happened during the election.

Bolding mine. Think about it. If this coup takes place, if the elections are made meaningless, who wins? Not just the anti-democratic forces in Iran, oh no. The neoconservatives who say that Islam is incompatible with democracy win. A BIG part of their argument against Islam and a big weapon in their war against Islam—and, let's make no mistake, a lot of these guys are barely hiding it—is that while a state can be run by Christian or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist principles, running a state by Islamic principles is impossible. They claim that those states will inevitably slide into dictatorship. By extension, permitting devout Muslims to engage in democracy was a bad idea, especially in western states. To the neocons, Muslims are a threat to democracy itself.

(Mark Steyn has built his career on this assumption.)

Iran's elections, dubious as they were, were the single counter-argument. They were an argument that here was an openly Islamic state that was nonetheless an actual Republic, with all that that entails. It isn't perfect, and isn't even good. But it could improve, without being rescued by the secular west and without being turned into an American client state. The foundations were there.

If the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei/Yazdi faction wins, the perception that Muslims are a danger to democracy will grow like a weed in the rest of the world. The tension between Muslims and non-Muslims will only increase. The "clash of civilizations" really will be in danger of taking place.

That's just what they want.

Roger Cohen on Iran: "Iran has waited long enough to be free."

I'm just going to quote.

The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”

A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.

Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.

He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Garbage burned. Crowds bayed. Smoke from tear gas swirled. Hurled bricks sent phalanxes of police, some with automatic rifles, into retreat to the accompaniment of cheers. Early afternoon rumors that the rally for Moussavi had been canceled yielded to the reality of violent confrontation.

I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basijis. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted.

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

The world is watching, and technology is connecting, and the West is sending what signals it can, but in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, understood that, weaving a little plurality into an authoritarian system. That pluralism has ebbed and flowed since 1979 — mainly the former — but last week it was crushed with blunt brutality. That is why a whole new generation of Iranians, their intelligence insulted, has risen.

I’d say the momentum is with them for now. At moments on Saturday, Khamenei’s authority, which is that of the Islamic Republic itself, seemed fragile. The revolutionary authorities have always mocked the cancer-ridden Shah’s ceding before an uprising, and vowed never to bend in the same way. Their firepower remains formidable, but they are facing a swelling test.

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging.

There were about 20 of us gathered there, eyes running, hearts racing. A 19-year-old student was nursing his left leg, struck by a militiaman with an electric-shock-delivering baton. “No way we are turning back,” said a friend of his as he massaged that wounded leg.

Later, we moved north, tentatively, watching the police lash out from time to time, reaching Victory Square where a pitched battle was in progress. Young men were breaking bricks and stones to a size for hurling. Crowds gathered on overpasses, filming and cheering the protesters. A car burst into flames. Back and forth the crowd surged, confronted by less-than-convincing police units.

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.”

Later, as night fell over the tumultuous capital, gunfire could be heard in the distance. And from rooftops across the city, the defiant sound of “Allah-u-Akbar” — “God is Great” — went up yet again, as it has every night since the fraudulent election. But on Saturday it seemed stronger. The same cry was heard in 1979, only for one form of absolutism to yield to another. Iran has waited long enough to be free.

I have nothing to add to this.

Edit: This is off topic, but I just added the "Iran" and "Iranian Election 2009" tags to the past few days of entries. Those can help focus people on the coverage and analysis provided here.

What the Hell is Going on in Qom?

My heart dropped, I'll admit, when I read on the Huffington Post liveblog that the Assembly of Experts declared its "strong support" for Khamenei and its messages. It baffled me as much as disappointed me, since the few bits of information I'd heard suggested that there was more division than that.

And then, well, this:

Earlier today, the Tehran Times posted an article claiming that the powerful clerical group, the Assembly of Experts, had on Saturday "expressed its 'strong support' for the Supreme Leader's statements on the presidential elections on Friday." It would have been a major blow to reformists' efforts to win the support of many senior clerics.

But as it turns out, it's not true. Reader Ali writes in:

I just wanted to point out that the letter of support written by assembly of experts in support of Khamenei's sermon is only signed by the deputy leader of the assembly, who is a former head of the judiciary and a staunch supporter of ahmadinejad, as well as a rival of Rafsanjani for the assembly's leadership election. He is the only one signing the letter and the government sponsored news media are reporting it as a letter from the full assembly.

And reader Majid provides more details:

Once again thanks for the great job in reporting the events. Just a comment about your 7:33pm item about the Assembly of Experts. The statement is not by the Assembly of Experts, but by Mohammad Yazdi, the head of the "Dabirkhane" of the Assembly of Experts. His statement doesn't carry much weight and definitely not a blow to the freedom movement. After all, there are certainly many Khamene'i loyalists in the Assembly of Experts and such comments could be expected from these cowards.

it makes sense that Yazdi would try this. He's the guy who believes there is no place in Islam for democracy, and that a Rafsanjani-elevated compromise candidate like Khamenei was somehow divinely ordained. But why on earth did they think they could get away with it? Are things so bad that Khamenei's allies are just desperate to try to buttress his authority? Or are they confident they have control?

And why didn't someone else, like Montazeri, respond with some variation on "you don't speak for me"?

Canadian Embassy Not Accepting Protesters?

That's the rumor I'm seeing on Twitter. While every european embassy is helping people getting shot and gassed, the Canadians turn them away?

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

Bombing, Violence in Iran

...and the predicted vicious crackdown's started as a "response".

Mousavi's been quoted by a twitterer as "ready for death."

This is terrible.

(Or, alternately, its' been blamed on MEK, the neocon's pet terrorist group, to try to help associate the protesters with the West. It might even have been them, but I find that unlikely. This smells of a set-up.)

Edit: The Huffington Post says that it was quite possible that the state-run media announced that the bombing had happened before it took place.

These events, horrible as they are, do say something: the regime is weak, and the various factions within the iranian clergy might not be moving in Khamenei's favor. This is not the behavior of someone who is secure in his power. These are all desperation moves.

On the clergy's power here, , see Jonathan Lyon at Juan Cole's site.)

"Apply the Fear of God"?

I don't know exactly what I was expecting from Khamenei's speech...

...but I definitely wasn't expecting him to basically tell the basiji to go to town because the election was perfectly fair and the protesters are the tools of the British and, um, "dirty Jews".

I had thought he might try to wriggle out of this, and there were rumors going around that the Assembly of Experts had advised him to play it down. Either those rumors aren't true, or he couldn't give a damn.

What the Hell? Froomkin's Out?

You've gotta be kidding me. Dan Froomkin was probably the best writer the Post had, certainly better than almost anybody regularly on their Op-Ed page. Sully detailed a bunch of responses that all added up to "the Post is going hard Neo-Con", and I can't say I disagree. But I am quite confused, since who the hell is going to listen to a neocon THESE days?

Is This Really About Khamenei

Here's a Followup to the earlier post about Rafsanjani and the Assembly of Experts.

Tehran Bureau suggests that this conflict is really about succession after Khamenei. It's a struggle between those who believe that the Supreme Leader is chosen by God—with the job of the AE is to figure out who that choice is—and that elections are irrelevant foolishness...

...and, well, everybody else.

The "no election" camp includes one fellow in the AE, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who believes that people are "sheep" and issued a fatwa saying that cheating was allowable in this election. He talks repeatedly about the "Islamic Government of Iran", instead of the "Islamic Republic of Iran". You know who else uses that term "Islamic Government"?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yep, he and his followers are all part of this group, too.

That's why Rafsanjani is such a big target. All the first-generation revolutionaries are:

The first goal is to purge first-generation revolutionary leaders (with the exception of Ayatollah Khamenei). The main target here is former president Rafsanjani, a powerful politician who heads two important Constitutional bodies, the Assembly of Experts (AE), and the Expediency Council that arbitrates the differences between the Majles (parliament) and the Guardian Council. Also included in this group are Mr. Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, a mid-ranking cleric, former Speaker of the Majles, and a strong critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad; Mr. Mahdi Karroubi, the second reformist candidate in the election and a disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini; and Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main reformist candidate, and Iran’s Prime Minister in the 1980s.

Why do they want them out of the scene? For two reasons. One is that the coup leaders consider themselves — and rightly so — as the saviors of Iran. They are the ones who fought Iraq for eight years. Secondly, at least part of the IRGC high command wishes Iran to be in a perpetual revolutionary state, but believes that the first-generation of revolutionaries have sold out the ideals of the 1979 Revolution.

In his “victory” speech on Sunday, Mr. Ahmadinejad never once mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic, or even Ayatollah Khamenei, his main supporter. The significance of the intentional omissions should not be missed. Just as Joseph Stalin and Deng Xiaoping kept Vladimir Lenin’s and Mao Zedong’s pictures everywhere, they always acted in the opposite way of what they appeared to be advocating; Iran’s second-generation revolutionaries will keep Ayatollah Khomeini’s pictures everywhere, but will act against his teachings, including his most famous saying,

The scale [for people’s acceptance of a politician] is people’s vote.

The second goal of second-generation revolutionaries is moving the country closer to an “Islamic Government,” and further away from an “Islamic Republic.” This is done by making elections a meaningless process by resortign to any means available, including rigging and manipulation. This move has marginalized reformist and democratic groups in Iran.

The third goal is to start preparations for the eventual successor to Ayatollah Khamenei. He is known to be ill. By accusing Mr. Rafsanjani of corruption, the second-generation revolutionaries wish to eliminate him — the head of the Assembly of Experts appoints the Supreme Leader — as the natural successor of Ayatollah Khamenei, hence paving the way for Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi who is a member of the AE. Everything appeared to have been planned well in advance, but the coup leaders did not expect the people to stand up to them.

This is a pivotal moment in Iran’s history. If the reformists and the Iranian people cannot reverse the outcome of Iran’s rigged elections, Iran will enter a dark period of dictatorship, with no light at the end of the tunnel. The country will be controlled completely by the military/security forces, with an unelected Supreme Leader as its titular head, and no elections (or extremely meaningless ones). This would be a terrible development for the rest of the world as well.

From what I understand, it may well be Montazeri, not Rafsanjani, that is the natural successor to Khamenei. But aside from that, this seems a cogent analysis of the struggle. There is always a struggle between those of a religion who believe in democracy, and thsoe who believe that since God is omnipotent and omniscient, any leader of a religious government must be the right one.

This was always the danger in Iran. Now it appears to be coming to pass.

Edit: Khamenei apparently called the protests "vandalism." He either has no idea he's in trouble, or is desperately trying to discredit them using his authority.

He really shouldn't try. His authority won't survive the attempt.