There are reports of their fleeing Tehran, now besieged by bussed-in pro-Khamenei fundamentalists, and reports of their being placed under arrest. The regime is clearly trying to have them killed:
Taghi Karroubi said guards assigned to his father, Mehdi Karroubi, stopped providing security for him Monday, apparently on police orders. The measure means that the elder Karroubi cannot go outside safely, his son said, describing the situation as "quasi house arrest."
I have no real claim to movie judgment, and have been forced into cine-cramming in the last few years by my movie-obsessed other half and a close friend whose tolerance for various forms of 1970s camp and cult far exceeds my own. But I did enjoy three movies this year more than most. By far the funniest was “The Hangover,” a genuinely goofy male movie that almost equaled Pineapple Express in the merriment measurement. By far the deepest was “The Hurt Locker”, an understated but all the more powerful film about the war so many have now forgotten, a war that still keeps 150,000 Americans perched on the edge of the ungrateful volcano that is Iraq.
My favorite has to be District Nine, a sci-fi parable set in South Africa that I caught only recently. A race of Zoidbergs lands on earth … and the whole thing is somehow as plausible as sci fi can get. Worth a Netflix.
We saw Avatar yesterday. There’s no question it’s a landmark in technical film-making, and the first movie in 3D that really made it seem like a viable alternative to traditional movies. Cameron’s genius is on full display – but also his flaws: the simply awful screenplay, the cipher characters, the Spielbergian schmaltz that ruined Titanic. But all of that is forgivable in the face of the awe the visuals evoke. They transport you elsewhere. Which, after this year, seems like an even better place to be.
My column assesses the impact of Obama after a year of political struggle, awful choices, and grinding, if as yet unacknowledged, success:
As with most attempts to judge Obama, a little perspective helps. So let’s review, shall we? This is the biggest single piece of social legislation in 40 years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts it will indeed insure 30m people. And this is only the end of year one. In the stimulus package in the spring, Obama invested an unprecedented amount of federal money in infrastructure, with an unsung focus on non-carbon energy sources. He engineered a vast and nerve-racking banking rescue that is now under-budget by $200 billion because so many banks survived. He organised the restructuring of the US car industry. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina Supreme Court justice, solidifying his non-white political base. If market confidence is one reason we appear to have avoided a second Great Depression, then the president deserves a modicum of credit for conjuring it. Growth is edging back into the picture. No recent president has had such a substantive start since Ronald Reagan. But what Reagan really did was to shift the underlying debate in America from what government should do to what it should not. His was a domestic policy of negation and inactivism, and a foreign policy of rearmament and sharp edges. Obama has, in a mirror image of 1981, reoriented America back to a political culture that asks what government will now do: to prevent a banking collapse, to avoid a depression, to insure the working poor, to ameliorate climate change, to tackle long-term debt. The point about health insurance reform, after all, is that it represents a big expansion of government intervention in the lives of the citizenry — and that’s a game-changer from three decades of conservative governance.
In some respects, the right, however unhinged, understands the importance of what Obama has accomplished more than the purist, whiny left.
Yes, this first year is marked more by the miracles of what didn't happen – a Second Great Depression, a Second 9/11, an Israeli strike on Iran, a banking collapse, a health insurance reform failure – than what did. And yes, Obama is on notice that, whatever the enormity of the mess he inherited, the opposition has no sense of responsibility for any of it and will blame him for everything and anything. All he has going for him is the American public's ability to see through the dust and fury to the realities beneath.
And Obama is changing those realities. More than most seem to currently grasp. This is liberalism's moment – its most fortuitous since 1964, its chance to prove that government is indeed needed at times, as long as it knows its limits, and the balance of the American polity needs active, intelligent government action now. What Obama is doing is trying to cement this new liberal era in the conservative institutional structure of American government.
Against massive, unrelenting, well-moneyed, ideologically manic opposition – and a fickle, purist, prickly liberal elite in his own party.
Well, no one said it would be easy.
(Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty.)
Conor Friedersdorf sees a chink in the lobbyists' armor:
As professional lobbyists grow ever more powerful, it is increasingly consequential that members of Congress spend significant stretches of time hundreds or thousands of miles from their constituents, but mere minutes away from every K Street firm. An e-Congress wouldn't merely result in legislators more attuned to their constituents by virtue of spending their working lives among them — it would make influence peddling far more difficult on lobbying firms, who'd find it more expensive and time-consuming to get face-time with multiple senators and Congressional representatives, or to simultaneously court a senator, six members of the federal bureaucracy, a few political journalists, and a dozen House underlings.
Neither should the impact an e-Congress would have on congressional
staff be underestimated.
Staffers in their twenties and their thirties are enormously influential in shaping the agenda of the men and women for whom they work, and they are, by and large, denizens of Washington. This changes the characteristics of those willing to apply to be staff members — it skews the labor pool toward people who want to live Inside the Beltway, making a career there. Inevitably, whoever is hired loses touch with constituents, at least relative to a hypothetical staffer who ate, drank and dated among the folks back home, as opposed to living among other District of Columbia politicos.
Impressive:
In my view, heads should roll because this latest attempt at mass murder was clearly preventable if the government had been competent. I mean: the nutjob’s dad had had a meeting with the fricking CIA! If they could listen as well as they destroy evidence of war crimes, we might have avoided this.
But that doesn’t mean we should give terrorists more credit, more credibility and more power over us than they deserve. Here is one of the smartest things Bill Maher has ever said on the subject, and it’s worth recalling as we go through another mass conniption and as Cheney pulls another stunt in defense of his record of presiding over 9/11 and then trashing the rule of law:
Those befrocked, super-rich religious dudes who have issues with sex – no, not the Vatican, the trust-fund Islamists – have adopted the classic stoner technique of shoving the stash in the bush:
This is not the first time a ‘butt bomber’ has used the nether regions of their body to try and explode a suicide bomb. In a previous column of mine, I wrote about the would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (head of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts) who apparently decided in October 2009 to hide his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.
The consequences of these fundie-undies are grim:
Sadly, as I had written before, after this most recent Christmas Day incident with Northwest Airlines Flight 253, there are only two things that are going come out of yet another silly and tragic episode of ‘toilet terrorism’: 1) Airport screeners will probably now invest even more money to buy latex gloves and; 2) In addition to already removing half of our clothing at the airport, young brown six-foot-four Muslim males (like myself) who fit the ‘racial profile’ will probably have to spend a little more time at the airports ‘assuming the position’ and ’spreading our cheeks’ the next time that we want to board an airplane. Thanks a alot, Butt Bombers…
Yes, Palin can't even handle a friendly sit-down with the last surviving reality-based cable news outlet. Here's the sad program note:
Sarah Palin signs copies of her book, Going Rogue: An American Life at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati. BookTV visits the bookstore and records Gov. Palin's opening remarks, talks to attendees in line at the signing, and discusses the coordination and preparation for the event with the store's marketing and event coordinator.
An interview with the store's marketing director!
Tucson, Arizona, 4.25 pm
The Dish 