Brainiac Conspiracy

Reflections on the Revolution

Over at The Field today, Al Giordano writes:

Analysis: What seems to be the government strategy is to have set a wide perimeter of various blocks in each direction around Enghalab Square where demonstrators were to begin their march to Freedom Square. There are also multiple Twitter reports of university students being intercepted and beaten if they leave the campus toward the demonstration route.

If this is what is happening, it is intended to prevent a critical mass of demonstrators from forming all in one place. Together with the house arrest of reporters and ban on images, the police strategy is a media strategy: to avoid the photograph or video that shows the magnitude of the protest: footage of scattershot crowds trying to get through --- or running from the shots of -- the police blockades simply do not have the emotional weight of images of a unified march.

A stage-managed repression, in other words, and this sounds about right to me. And if this was the intent, it certainly backfired on the regime today, for all it did was disperse the crowd into hundreds of smaller mini-demonstrations, each one amply Tweeted and live-blogged, with dozens upon dozens of brutalities captured for all the world to see. And as the patchwork of images, tweets and videos have leaked out over the Internet, the flames of unrest appear to have been fanned beyond the streets of Tehran to other major cities, as the video from Shiraz makes plain:

If you can't make it out, the video captures a phalanx of police beating a group of unarmed women at the university. Just the thing you want the world to see when you're trying to justify the integrity of your political system.

It has been striking, really, at how badly the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad government has misjudged recent events. They clearly did not anticipate the public outcry over the election results, they were caught by surprise at the size and strength of the opposition, and now they've helped to create a climate of increased anger and rage, with cries of "Death to the dictator" being shouted alongside "Allhu akbar." Because, see, it's one thing to rig an election, but when when you start gassing and shooting people who are otherwise behaving non-violently, guess what? Some of them will actually fight back.

Now events are threatening to spiral out of anyone's ability to control them. From Pitney's live-blog:

The chants of death to Khamenei are true . . . I witnessed peoples fear of the Basij dissapear, an 80 year old chadori woman with rocks in her hands calling for the exacution of khamenei and all Basij . . . A group of Basij were surrounded and forced in to a building, the front was blocked with garbage and set on fire, They (basij) opened fire on the crowd with what I assume were blanks, the crowed dispersed for a moment the came back with a fury . . . thats when the molotov cocktails came out. When I moved on the building was on fire . . . an hour later when I passed by again there wasn't much of a building left. There was full blown war.

This does not sound to me like something that ends well. If the country erupts into civil war, as I am starting to fear it might, the government will have no one else but itself to blame for it. Roger Cohen:

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.

Lucky for us in the States, we have someone in charge who can navigate the minefields and strike the proper diplomatic grace note.

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples' belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Nicely done. No official "condemnation," "renouncing," "outrage" or other inflammatory "axis of evil" verbiage, just a simple and eloquent plea for the lawful respect of basic human rights without hectoring and scolding. I'll admit, I still have plenty of gripes with Obama, and likely will for the foreseeable future---from his handling of the banks, to his foot-dragging on gay rights, to his defense of warrantless wiretapping and claims of executive privilege. But on days like today, I still am really, really thankful that he, not John McCain, is helming the ship of state in our country.

Finally, if the Pulitzer Committee decides to create a category for Blog Reporting, might I nominate this guy for the first prize? Sullivan's work over the past week has been nothing short of remarkable, and we all owe him (and Nico, and the folks at NIAC) a great debt of gratitude for all the information, and context, he has managed to transmit to us.

---Vitelius

Conservative Jurists: Strict Constructionists

Except, of course, when they're not:

With workplace age-discrimination claims rising rapidly, the Supreme Court made it much harder Thursday for older workers to win in court.

The 5-4 decision reversed a long-standing rule. Many federal appellate courts had decided that if a worker could show age was one of the factors in a layoff or demotion, then the employer was required to prove it had a legitimate reason for its action apart from age.

The court's conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, threw out this two-step approach. Instead, the court said, workers bear the full burden of proving that age was the deciding factor in their dismissal or demotion.

Because workers claiming such discrimination almost certainly will not be present while their employers discuss laying them off or demoting them, analysts said, it will be extremely difficult to obtain hard evidence that age was the key factor.

"This is a significant and marked change," said Diana Hoover, a corporate defense lawyer in Houston. "It imposes a difficult burden on the employee. You are not going to have an employer stand up and announce, 'I'm discriminating against you because of your age.' "

Good to see a least one socialist justice calling bullshit:

The dissenters, led by the court's senior justice, John Paul Stevens, described the ruling as "especially irresponsible" and "an unabashed display of judicial lawmaking." Stevens seemed particularly upset that the court had decided a different issue than it had announced when it accepted the case last year.

"Unfortunately, the majority's inattention to prudential court practices is matched by its utter disregard of our precedent and Congress' intent," he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

A Washington lawmaker who's been around the legal block a few times puts it in perspective:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) likened it to the Lilly Ledbetter decision from two years ago.

In that case, the same 5-4 majority said a woman who for years had been paid less than men for the same work could not sue because she had not learned about the discrimination until she retired -- long after the statute of limitations had expired.

Congress passed a bill to reverse the Ledbetter decision early this year. President Obama made it the first measure he signed into law.

Leahy said in a statement that the age-bias decision "reminds me of the court's wrong-headed ruling in Ledbetter. Five justices acted to disregard precedent and ignore the plain reading and common understanding of the statute that Congress passed to protect Americans from discrimination based on their age." (Emphasis aded.)

And so now Congress must intervene, as it did with Ledbetter, to write into law what had been accepted legal practice before the Strict Constructionists® decided to upset the apple cart. And it will likely have to do so with DNA evidence as well after the Court's decision in Osborne, which essentially puts the court's imprimatur on the founding principles of Napoleonic Law.

So the next time you hear some wingnut dittohead rant about "big government libruls," remind them that maybe there wouldn't be such a pressing need for liberal big government if their buddies from the Federalist Society would kindly stop legislating from the bench.

---Vitelius

Thursday One-Liners Thread

• June 18, 2009: The day I stopped reading the Post's opinion page for good.

• I said it once, some time ago, but it will take a good year or two for Obama to clean out the Augean stables of the Bush-era bureaucracy.

• Is the Public Option dead in the water? It's increasingly looking like it:

A Senate source just passed me the latest outline of the Senate Finance Committee's health reform proposal. This is the post-CBO revision. Apparently, after the committee staff received the scores, they dug deep and quickly developed this proposal to circulate among members and then send back to CBO. It was presented earlier today at a closed-door meeting.

Sources say that it's a major scale-back of the outline they had before. Specifically, subsidies have dropped from 400 percent of the poverty line to 300 percent. Medicaid eligibility has been tightened to 133 percent of poverty for children and pregnant women and 100 percent of poverty for parents and childless adults. The plans being offered in the exchange have seen their actuarial values sharply lowered.

Beyond the changes, this is also the clearest look we've had at the specific policies being considered. There's a fairly strong individual mandate, albeit with exemptions for those beneath the poverty line, those who would have to spend more than 15 percent of income for a plan, and undocumented workers. There are a variety of options for an employer mandate, or the absence of one. Sen. Kent Conrad's co-op idea is up for discussion. There's no public plan mentioned anywhere in the document.

And why is the Senate Finance Committee being considered the supreme arbiter and lawgiver on health-care legislation, anyway? Obama needs to send Rahm to the Hill to rap some knuckles---or threaten a veto of his own party's health-care bill if need be.

• Come to think of it, Obama may get to wield his veto power even before the health-care bill crosses his desk.

• The Karroubi campaign released a video this week. The parallels to a certain American leader are obvious. (Full translation available here.)

On the subject, Juan Cole provides necessary context to today's day of mourning in Iran. A must-read.

John Ensign death watch: A fiver says he doesn't last in Senate beyond the end of the month. Then again, he is a Republican, so I could be wrong.

• Looks like Cash for Clunkers will soon become law. A nice gesture, I'll admit, but I wonder about its efficacy, particularly in a recessionary economy. I mean, how many owners of old beater vehicles are looking to purchase a new car nowadays?

• White supremacists really are the nicest bunch of people, aren't they?

---Vitelius

While We're Talking About Censorship . . .

I'm sorry, Barry, but there really is no excuse for this.

---Vitelius

The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast

Like most of you, I’ve been watching for the latest news from Iran virtually every hour since Saturday morning. The funny thing is (like most of you again, I imagine), I’m not camped out in front of my TV, surfing from CNN to MSN to NBC and back---matter of fact, I haven’t even turned on the set since the polls closed in Tehran last week. Instead, I’m hitting the “refresh” button on my iMac for the latest updates from the likes of Andy Sullivan, Nico Pitney, the folks at The Lede, and others who’ve been relentlessly (and heroically) live-blogging the events as they’ve unfolded before our eyes. If this seems a less-than-revelatory admission, perhaps we should pause for a moment to reflect on how far we have come in the advancement of interactive technologies, and what their presence portends for the future of liberation movements---and totalitarian governments---such as we have seen forming spontaneously in Iran right now.

What I mean is this: what we have beheld on our screens over the last three days---and what we are likely to continue seeing well into the future---is not a single solitary image in a fixed point in time, as with a lone protester staring down a tank in Tiananmen Square (via the linear medium of TV) to be re-played over and over until it borders upon political cliche; nor is it an after-the-fact, second-hand account of a Solidarity rally in Gdansk (via daily/weekly print media). These are, at best, second-hand accounts viewed through a filter mechanism (a TV show, a newsmagazine), and while they may be “accurate” in their own way, they tend to keep us at a distance from the event described or the thing being depicted. They also, more often as not, require third-party translators to provide added context, analysis, and other forms of intellectualization, which, again, render the movement even further in the abstract.

Instead, what we are seeing in Iran right now via the Internet is the digital equivalent of a dynamic organism springing magically to life---a continuously evolving community of simultaneous tweets, replies, chat posts, status updates, Jpegs, video clips; the sheer mass and volume of which define and clarify the collective narrative more powerfully than any written essay could ever hope to achieve (though Roger Cohen and Robert Fisk have both delivered brilliant works in this regard). It’s all happening in real time---not edited down and pigeonholed into a three-minute slot on a network nightly news program, squeezed between the weather forecast and local sports scores, so it defies old-media compartmentalization. Most amazing of all, there’s little that any government, however repressive, can do about it.

And all these tweets and updates and YouTube videos require no interpreters, no pundits or think-tankers, to tell us what they mean, or to provide intellectual qualifiers; their meanings are clear and unfiltered, and whether or not we speak Farsi, and whether or not we know how to spell the names of the candidates, it scarcely matters at all. Who needs a translator to explain the rage, frustration, anger, fears and suffering on display in this clip? YouTube bears witness more faithfully and truthfully than any MSM journalist could here.

Regardless of what the actual outcome of the Iranian elections actually were (and we may never know the exact numbers), it’s now obvious that a lot of people over there are seriously fed up with their government, are demanding drastic changes from it, and we---the plugged-in masses----are now connected directly to the struggles and aspirations of these protesters as they progress in real time, even from our home redoubts, thousands of miles away. Those marchers in the street are no longer some third-person constructs as in print or on TV, but real people with whom we’ve formed connections in real time, however superficial, via Facebook, Twitter or our personal blog pages. And by extension, their cause now becomes our cause, too, in a manner more urgent in its immediacy than anything we have experienced in the past through the multi-filtered, more discriminating lenses of 20th-century media. And this instantaneous solidarity of the airwaves has, I think, to some degree emboldened the protesters on the streets of Tehran and Tabriz in the pursuit of their cause. They know the outside world is on their side, in the kind of real and tangible way that previous liberation uprisings could not know, and which they could not rely upon for inspiration.

Cable television—and CNN in particular, with its extended live newscasts--—pried open the door twenty years ago. Now, the universality of the Internet, of digital media and social networks, has flung the gates wide open. The malign forces of censorship and repression can now be exposed, and the cause of freedom eloquently espoused, by anyone with a Blackberry and a working Twitter account. Governments can react post-facto, as Iran’s has, by expelling foreign journalists, by attempting to disable Internet access, by confiscating cameras and all the rest. But in a technologically developed nation such as Iran, it’s almost impossible to stuff all the electronic genies back in the bottle once they’ve been released. The government may still have the guns, but we’ve got the numbers. And barring a campaign by the government of wholesale slaughter and genocide, the numbers will eventually win out. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in South Africa, and eventually, one day soon, it will happen in Iran.

Contra McLuhan, the media is not the message anymore---as the Green Revolution proves, in the very palpable way it has impacted the lives of millions of people around the world in only a few days, the new media of the digital age is the messenger now. And while an unfiltered media apparatus carries potential great risk as well as reward, by and large it strikes me as a very good thing indeed.

And while we’re at it, let’s take a moment to honor those great American patriots who’d have preferred to bomb these people three years ago instead of engaging with them now.

---Vitelius

Intransigence We Can Believe In

Head-scratching time; Why is Team Obama running interference for the Netanyahu coalition this morning after the prime minister’s defiant speech yesterday? From today's gaggle, Robert Gibbs:

Well, look, I think the government -- the Netanyahu government took a big step forward yesterday in acknowledging for the first time the need for a two-state solution.  I think the President believes that there is a long way to go and many twists and turns in the road to get there, but is pleased thus far with the progress that's being made. And I think yesterday's speech certainly is a big part of that.

Q: Is he going to be able to do something to get the Palestinians on board? What is he going to do --

Gibbs: Well, I think we're working and discussing with all involved how we can move this process forward, how we can create a two-state solution whereby Israel and the Palestinians live side by side in peace and security. I think what Mr. Netanyahu said yesterday is an important part of that reform.

Well, okay, this is fine if "progress" is measured only by Benjamin Netanyahu's willingness to begrudge the existence of a Palestinian state next to Israel. If one considers what was actually said, it's hard to see where any true "progress" is to be made by the current ruling coalition in Israel.

The speech was like a nod to the old pre-intifada way of looking at the Palestinians, but at the same time mentioning two states.

It seemed to be no to dividing Jerusalem, no to the return of refugees or an independent state, and no to a real settlement freeze. But you'll be well-off and taken care of.

Seems to me that a more reasoned analysis than the Obama administration's can be found here:

Netanyahu's provincial remarks were not intended to penetrate the hearts of the hundreds of millions of Al Jazeera viewers in the Muslim world. Instead, he sought to appease Tzipi Hotovely, the settler Likud lawmaker, and make it possible to live peaceably with the settler foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. Netanyahu's demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people didn't even leave him an opening for forging reconciliation with the Arab citizens in the country.

In other words, a speech composed for domestic consumption only. And even then, "domestic consumption" doesn't even include all Israelis, as Jimmy Carter pointed out:

"In my opinion, Netanyahu brought up several obstacles to peace in his speech that others before him have not placed," Carter told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

"He insists on settlement expansion, demands that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state even though 20 percent of Israel's citizens are not Jews," the former US president said.

Ha'aretz pretty much sums up Netanyahu's Profile in Courage™ moment:

I guess we should admit it'd be hard to talk about giving up settlements in front of an audience from Bar Ilan---although Obama was able to talk about Holocaust denial, support for Israel and Coptic Christians in front of about 10 thousand Arabs.

Either way, good luck working with this clown, Mr. President.

---Vitelius