Month: July 2010

Providing some historical perspective on Iran's Greens, Michael Singh keeps hope alive:

All three opposition movements [of the 20th century] took years to consolidate before becoming powerful enough to force change on the regime. The Constitutional Revolution, which is thought of as emerging around 1905, as protests broke out over tariffs, was in fact a continuation of events that began in 1891, with the campaign to overturn an exclusive tobacco concession the shah had granted to the British. Similarly, Mossadeq’s National Front achieved power in 1951, but this was after decades of discontent with a monarchy that had descended into disorder following World War II. … The Islamic Revolution of 1979, moreover, had roots going back to 1960–4, when riots against the shah swept the country and Ayatollah Khomeini and many other activists were exiled.

On the current unrest:

[T]he Green Movement is built on discontent that predates the June 2009 elections: it is the same dissatisfaction that led to Khatami’s landslide electoral victories in 1997 and 2001 and to the student protests between the late 1990s and today. Just as reform movements past were slow to build, today’s cannot be declared over because of the Green Movement’s apparent sluggishness.

Meanwhile, Ahmadi continues to alienate conservative hardliners.

(Photo caption from Life Goes On In Tehran: "A man selling two puppies on the side of the street. Technically pets are illegal in Iran. But that doesn't stop people from buying their cats and dogs. Even if it takes buying them from a shady dude! And for some reason pet food isn't illegal. So you can actually buy pet food in most stores.")

The neo-fascist punched her in the face. Now we have the photograph of her chipped teeth.

“We’ve taken great pains to make clear what were all about. We view ourselves as a new civil rights movement…. committed to something that in the 1960s was key: the right to vote," – Brian Brown, National Organization for Marriage's executive director. Chris Geidner does a double take.

New Hampshire is not Palin country.

We have a new comic action hero: Foreskin Man! (Not for the squeamish). He's fighting male genital mutilation – and his official website is here.

Nate Silver introduces a new measure for

polling and strategy memos which are vapid, disingenuous, jargony, or just plain fucking wrong. The scale is dubbed the Pennometer after former Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who was a master of the genre; it runs from 0 Penns for memos that are honest and persuasive to 5 Penns for those which might as well have been penned by Penn himself.

First up: the memo that just told us the Democrats cannot lose the House in November:

 

Heh.

They work:

[L]arge shares of seniors mistakenly believe the law includes provisions that cut some previously universal Medicare benefits and creates “death panels.”  Half of seniors (50%) say the law will cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare, and more than a third (36%) incorrectly believe the law will “allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.”

Ten questions every supporter of Sarah Palin should ask themselves.

Like most analysts, Josh Barro approves of extending unemployment benefits:

We could eliminate these fears [of structural dependency] by making Unemployment Insurance adjustment an automatic, rather than political, process. I haven’t seen any specific formulas proposed (if a reform is on the table, readers, please alert me) but in general UI should be extended when unemployment is high and/or rising, and contracted when it is low and/or falling. A formulaic adjustment program could mimic what Congress habitually does already, but without generating market uncertainty—or incurring risk that Congress will be too timid to pull the trigger on abbreviating UI benefits in recovery.

You ask; Goldblog answers.