The Dish

Kristol is chomping at the bit for a waterboarding.

Just released on the web: the full scene of that astonishing moment when a group of baseej is surrounded by the crowd, and disarmed. If this doesn’t unnerve Ahmadi, what will? And it makes a new and ante-upping move by the regime more likely:

Make of this what you will:

Iranian Supreme National Security Council has ordered a complete check-up of the jet which is on standby to fly Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family to Russia should the situation in Iran spiral out of control. The order, to the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard Corps, was dated on Sunday, 27 December, the second day of recent unrests in Iran. The document containing the order was sent to Shahrzad News office in The Netherlands. The letter has been signed by Said Jalili, the current secretary of the council and one of two representative of Iran’s religious leader Ali Khamenei.

An interesting glimpse into the genius of anger that is Larry Kramer:

Who is the enemy now? Not that old standby, the medical Establishment, which gave him a liver and thus his life. Nor his insurance company; Kramer gratefully pays almost nothing for the thousands of dollars’ worth of anti-viral and anti-rejection drugs delivered monthly to his door. As for homophobia, it may now be too diffuse to respond to the full-bore strategy of a Kramer-style attack. The “lack of anger” he finds around him, and which he has attempted in recent years to replenish from his own apparently bottomless supply, similarly cannot be attacked head on. And sitting on a sofa in his third-floor apartment (he’s terrified of heights because they invite jumping), sweet little Larry—asking after one’s health, cuddling his terrier—seems to know it. Of course one quickly remembers that even pets are made part of the struggle. A few years (and another dog) ago, when Koch moved into his building, Kramer was ordered by management to keep his distance, at least verbally. So when Kramer ran into the ex-mayor in the mailroom one day, he looked at his pooch and said, “Don’t go near him, Molly, that’s the man who murdered all of Daddy’s friends!”

Kramer's absolutist anger – a prophetic form of activism – met its moment in the AIDS crisis, the moment when hysteria and rage were totally appropriate.

I owe my life in part to his and others' activism. I share his anger, his isolation from the gay establishment, his loathing of the bullshit of the Human Rights Campaign, his frustration that the closet still exists, and his view that the biggest obstacle to gay equality is the self-doubt of so many homosexuals. The gay community is also, alas, criminally indifferent to its history. The memory of the plague has been wiped clean in millions of young minds. Because we do not have our own children, the lessons of our collective past are far more vulnerable. And the kids have moved on. That they barely know who Kramer is any more tells you a lot about their callowness, shallowness and also the success of the movement he helped galvanize. If all political careers end in failure, Larry's is no exception. But it is the failure of all those who helped bring about success.

We once had a long, rambling discussion about my religious faith, why he couldn't understand it, why he felt it was the reason I didn't become the gay leader he wanted me to be. But I replied then and believe now that anger at the rank injustice and cruelty against my brothers and sisters would have consumed me without such faith, and that Jesus' calm perspective on what matters to all human beings, gay and straight, has kept me as sane as I can be.

The only real answer to rage is hope. And, in my experience, hope is as much of a gift as faith. Larry has given many people hope, even as he has enraged others. One day, I pray that hope comes back to console him as well.

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."

MMMMMmmmm.

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: