The Dish

As the deadline for a nuke deal approaches, the Tehran coup regime, facing massive protests tomorrow, appears to offer something new: sending its nuclear fuel to Turkey rather than Russia and France. Andrew Sprung tries to figure out what, if anything, this means.

Our charming Nigerian Islamist was not on a no-fly list as such, as I wrote earlier:

The sources said the suspect flew into Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on a KLM flight from Lagos, Nigeria, and is not believed to be on any "no fly" list, although his name does appear in a U.S. database of people with suspect connections. He did not undergo secondary security screening in Amsterdam, the administration official said.

It's seasonally quiet in the West, but in Iran, this weekend could be the most important since the June Revolution began. It's Ashura, the mourning festival that begins today and culminates tomorrow. Ashura symbolizes resistance to oppression to the last drop, and because Shia Islam identifies with the oppressed in that story, any government brutality in these days could be a p.r. disaster for the coup regime.

Already there are reports of intense street fights as the Baseej try to prevent any attempt to begin the momentum for demonstrations. Tomorrow, there will be massive crowds on the streets which the legitimate government of Mousavi, Karroubi and their followers will attempt to coopt. Here's a helpful BBC primer on what lies ahead:

Via Iran Unfiltered, a scene of a sudden eruption of protest and chanting from today:

Iran Unfiltered explains the chants:

A note about the protesters' slogans: in one video, the people are chanting "Muawiyah, be ashamed / Abandon your rule." Muawiyah, the first caliph of the Ummayad dynasty, is a hated figure in the Shia world. He is not only hated for his own battle against Imam Ali (the first Imam of the Shia world), but also because he is father to Yazid, the villain of the Shias' narrative of Ashura. The chant obviously compares Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to Muawiyah. In another video, they chant "This is the month of blood / Yazid is overthrown." As mentioned, Yazid is the caliph reviled by Shias for his role in Hossein's death.

More videos here. The Dish will be following tomorrow's critical events very closely. Ayatollah Khomeini cited Ashura as the real spark for the revolution that brought down the Shah.

This National Geographic chart, which I stumbled upon while reading that magnificent magazine on the airplane, truly blew me away. If anyone can look at this and not see a simply insane way to distribute health care, a system so inefficient no socialist country could ever replicate it, then they have stronger rationalization skills than I possess.

Americans are being ripped off. The current reform will only move this line marginally, but it will begin that vital process – because it will almost certainly improve the health outcomes of the 30 million or so people who will soon have access for the first time to insurance. And its cost-control measures, pushing back ever so slightly against fee-for service medicine at a time of limitless healthcare potential, might help too.

What this this graph does do is show why the current system, while providing excellent care for many, nonetheless does so at crippling expense to everyone. Without the kind of reform Obama has initiated, there's no way this will get better. We should think of this health insurance reform as the beginning, not the end, of some public policy sanity. And conservatives would do better to help add more cost-controls than run around screaming socialism when the current system has failed so dramatically in any collective or economic sense.

A classic Jihadist profile:

He is the son of the recently retired Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria, Dr. Umaru Abdul Mutallab. The Al-Qaida-linked Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab is an engineering student at University College London.  Saharareporters sources have revealed that prior to his sojourn in the UK, Farouk had studied at the prestigious British School of Lome, Togo. Where he passed his International Bacchalaureates Diploma before moving to UCL.

It sure isn't poverty that forces these loons to do what they do. It's religion.

That's the word from DHS. I still want to know how on earth he got on that plane with that stuff.

As in the Marx Brothers:

No doubt I'm the 5000th caller with this point, but Krugman lifted the "sanity clause"  line from the Marx Bros., or, if you prefer, from George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind who wrote the screenplay for "A Night at the Opera". This is in the famous "contract scene".  Google it and you'll get a Youtube hit (speaking as a cog, among the cognoscenti, A Night at the Opera is generally considered the Bros. second-best film, after Duck Soup).

Go read Hannah Rosenthal's interview with Ha'aretz, and you will see why the neocons are so hostile to her appointment as the Obama administration's Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Here are her offensive remarks:

"We have seen huge increases in anti-Semitism. Research shows that 46 percent of the population in Spain has negative views of Jews – in Spain. Two days ago it was reported that anti-Semitic incidents in France more than doubled last year. Ninety-five percent of the Jordanians and Egyptians have negative views of Jews. How can we hope to get to this goal with this climate."

She goes on:

"I do believe that some of the criticism against Israel is anti-Semitism but not all of it is. And I think that healthy democracies – and Israel is one – has to do self reflection and the world looks at the light unto the nations and says I agree to this policy or I don't agree – that is not anti-Semitism. But having the UN single out Israel for 170 resolutions over the last five years – when everybody knows that Sudan is committing genocide and they have only five resolutions. When Israel is the only agenda item on the human rights council – I think it's legitimate to look at this singling out, holding Israel to a different standard than the rest of the world. I think that crosses the line to anti-Semitism."

"But it is not anti-Semitic to look at a certain policy of Israel and say – I disagree with it. Half of the population in Israel isn't anti-Semitic by not agreeing with policies."

This breaks the AIPAC unofficial line that any criticism of Israel's policies is anti-Semitic unless proven otherwise. But this is the last straw: she criticized the Israel ambassador Michael Oren's remarkable, undiplomatic snub of AIPAC's generational rival, J-Street:

Remarks by Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, against the liberal Jewish lobby J Street were "most unfortunate" according to Hannah Rosenthal, head of the U.S. administration's Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

This is how my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg responded to this comment:

Talk about sticking your nose in places where it doesn't belong. The Obama Administration official charged with monitoring worldwide anti-Semitism makes her first target… the Israeli ambassador to the United States? I'll be taking bets now on how long Hannah Rosenthal lasts in the job.

First, this is untrue. As you can see, in this same interview she is highly critical of the UN and brutally frank about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East. But for simply criticizing Oren's direct intervention in domestic Jewish-American politics, and his picking and choosing which pro-Israel group to snub or endorse, she is beyond the pale.

How long before she too is called an anti-Semite? Or has she been already?

Paul Krugman, someone one doesn't associate with much wit or humor, pens this paragraph about the John Birch Society Republicans:

In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.