Month: December 2009

Obama’s fall:

I’ve removed Rasmussen as usual because they are such an outlier.

"President George Bush should immediately issue a blanket pardon to all members of his administration who have engaged in the war on terror, both formulating policies and implementing those policies. We must not allow the left, working on behalf of our enemies, to lead Barack Obama down this most dangerous road. The best way to stop that is for the current President to deny any ability to prosecute American heros who have kept us safe for eight years," Erick Erickson, January 11, 2009.

"We are no longer a nation of laws. […] When the men and women who run this nation, which is supposedly a nation of laws not men, choose to ignore the laws and bribe the men, the people cannot be blamed for wanting to dissolve political bands connecting them to that government," – Erick Erickson, yesterday, on Harry Reid's provision in the healthcare bill that would require a supermajority to change any regulation imposed by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards (aka "death panels").

The Daily Dish nominates not Ben Bernanke but Neda Agha-Soltan. Neda was just one young woman, eager to protest the coup that rigged and then stole the June elections in Iran. She was shot in the street by the coup regime, as shown in the grueling video above that electrified the Iranian people. Wiki tells us that

Ned? (???) is a word used in Persian to mean "voice", "calling," or "divine message," and she has been referred to as the "voice of Iran."

The most remarkable event of this past year, it seems to us, was the uprising for freedom, sanity and peace in Iran. We witnessed it thousands of miles away but the miracle of technology meant we also lived it alongside those far braver than we will hopefully ever have to be. Neda remains the symbol of that uprising and her awful secular martyrdom will never leave the psyche of the Iranian people.

We saw them this year as we hadn't before: like us, eager for change, confident in their own capacities, able to see through the lies and the certainties and the violence that marks the vicious regime they live under. We saw this movement as a spontaneous revolt against transparent injustice, but also as a response in a way to the American people, who also rose up in 2008 to demand new leadership, less confrontation, and less fundamentalism in government.

Next year will be a crucial one.

As the Ashura holiday approaches and as the death of Montazeri has infused Iranians with yet more courage to face down the neo-fascist goons who police this comically inept regime, the Green Movement faces yet another test. Will this revolution follow the last one, building and building, growing ever more radical, as the illegitimacy of the current order slowly exposes itself? Or will it be crushed slowly by the fatal combination of violence and religion?

The Dish stands with the great people of the ancient civilization of Iran. This too shall pass – the idiots and bigots, the anti-Semites and Islamists, the murderers who think God blesses torture or that nuclear weapons somehow represent achievement, the fundamentalists who send poor, uneducated thugs to brandish clubs in the streets and terrify whole neighborhoods after dark.

It's been a bewildering decade as our two civilizations have clashed and as we have seen more and more of one another. We have seen one another as enemies, as aliens, as strangers, as threats. But we have also seen one another as fellow fools and cowards, fellow heroes and family members, fellow activists and Tweeters. But I never thought, on 9/11, that this blog, almost a decade later would end a post with the following words of solidarity and hope:

Allah O Akbar!

Politico profiles Daniel Lippman, a curious new character on the journalism scene:

The 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University has become the Washington press corps’ independent fact checker, copy editor and link distributor extraordinaire.  […] Lippman mops up after the Beltway’s hacks so consistently that it’s a wonder he hasn’t yet flunked out of college. Scarcely a wanton apostrophe or misspelled name will appear in a story without Lippman’s quickly issuing forth an e-mail.

His beneficiaries include AP writers, HuffPo's Sam Stein, Adam Nagourney, Fallows, and, yes, the Daily Dish. A big tip of our hat, Daniel.

A reader writes:

I have to nominate "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."  It was written for the classic musical Meet Me In St. Louis, a depressing tune in which Judy Garland tries to cheer up her distraught family forced to move from their beloved St. Louis home when the father gets a promotion in New York.  And in the context of the film, yeah.  It's pretty depressing.  Here are the original lyrics, changed to become slightly more upbeat after Garland complained it was too depressing:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork,
Next year we will all be living in New York.

No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore,
Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow,
From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Kinda appropriate in times like these, no?

Newsweek interviewed Pawlenty. Ugh:

I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn't say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman.

It's the obviously crafted formula that tickles the gag reflex. "I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was." What can this mean? The God that created anything said what where? I presume the Bible, but you'll note he's learned not to be explicitly sectarian, so it's veiled in literalist, fundamentalist code. Double ugh:

My general view on all of this is that marriage is to be defined as being a union of a man and a woman. 

That's by way of regretting votes to protect gays from discrimination in employment and housing.

It's also implicit opposition to any form of civic recognition, including civil unions or domestic partnerships. Triple ugh:

[Palin] is easily as qualified as Barack Obama. I would argue she's more qualified in terms of leadership, experience, management, and supervision—actually running something. She was a mayor, head of an energy commission, and governor.

She is also a pathological fantasist and more proudly ignorant than any leading politician in modern times. Charles Johnson has more here.

Josh:

I think Congressional Dems' attitude toward Obama is sort of on a knife's edge at the moment, especially in the senate. Does this disappointment and upset coalesce and become more public? Or does a mix of excitement, relief or mere exhaustion wash it away and get replaced by a sense that as ugly as it all may have been Obama just passed the first major piece of progressive legislation in more than 40 years?

Yesterday we ran a video showing Iranians booing a message from Khamenei (re-posted above). Juan Cole has the details of its contents:

[Khamenei] accused the grand ayatollah of having been tested by God and of failing the test, but in which Khamenei went on to pray for divine forgiveness for his departed foe. The language of failing the test refers in fundamentalist religion to the assertion of individual ego and refusal to fall quiet when one does not get one's way. Khamenei is saying that Montazeri should have remained quiet about the 1988 massacres of dissidents, and that his standing up for human rights was a sign of human frailty and overpowering ego, which had the potential to undermine the Islamic Republic. Cult-like ideologies always attempt to silence dissidents and to paint dissidence as pure individual selfishness that leads to public turmoil.

The USG Open Source Center translated Khamenei's statement:

In the name of [G]od who is wise and merciful. We are informed that the illustrious scholar Mr Hajj Sheykh Hoseyn-Ali Montazeri has bid Farewell to this mortal coil and has hastened to the afterlife. He was an eminent scholar and an illustrious thinker and many students benefited from him. Much of his life was spent in the service of Late Imam (Khomeyni); he engaged in many jihads and endured much scorn in these endeavors. Towards the end of the Imam's life, (he failed) a difficult and momentous test. I beg almighty god envelope him his mercy and love and to absolve him by accepting the hardships (he) endured in this world as his penance. I his send condolences to his honorable wife and children and I pray for divine mercy and absolution for him.

Mojtaba Zolnour, a cleric and Khamenei's representative to the Revolutionary Guards, also tries to besmirch Montazeri.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 12 pm

Bonus P-town shot after the jump:

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2.07 pm