The Dish

In the interaction between a Basij and a young girl, you see everything you need about what tyranny is:

"Thought I’d share a newly developed recipe for Elephant Upside-Down Surprise Cake. First you take a congressional district that has had Republican representation in the U.S. House of Representatives since two decades before the Civil War, then add a teabag, pour on some hot steamin’ Sarah Palin, add a squeeze of Rush Limbaugh, then carefully strain the mixture until there is no trace of the moderate Republican. Then just wait and watch. Pretty soon you’ll have….Surprise! A Democrat! There you go folks. Dems across the land can now send thank you notes to Our Lady of Perpetual Meddling. Can’t wait to find out whose fault THIS one is going to be," – Mudflats.

Above is video said to be from Tehran University. Enduring America's snap analysis of today's events:

There are too many spontaneous and re-routed gatherings to say that the Green movement has been suppressed. And the footage that we are coming from outside Tehran, more than in previous rallies, indicates that there is a spread of the opposition.

[W]hile the quantity of protestors may be less than expected, the strength of the sentiment is not to be underestimated. Despite all the regime’s intimidation and threats, demonstrators are openly calling the Supreme Leader a “murderer” and stomping on his picture. Security forces may able to use tear gas and bullets in the air to keep them from the largest squares but they cannot remove them from the streets.

Via Global Voices, video said to be from today of guards attacking protesters. The attack starts around the 2:00 mark:

After the jump another video that the blog Raye Man Kojast captions as:

People chant: "don't be afraid we are all together" and "guns, tanks, and Basijis have no effect anymore."

Saeed Valadbaygi at Revolutionary Road and Scott Lucas at Enduring America are both doing an incredible job keeping up with all the bits of info coming out of Iran. So are Matthew Weaver and Saeed Kamali Dehghan at The Guardian blog, a sample of which follows:

7.57am:
Unsurprisingly the state media is ignoring the opposition protests and focusing instead on the official anti-US rallies. Press TV claims: "Tens of thousands of people from all walks of life and many political persuasions have staged a rally at the site of the former US embassy in Tehran, better known in Iranian history as the 'den of spies'."

8.06am:
One of opposition leaders Mehdi Karoubi has been seen in Hafte Tir Square, according to ABC reporter Lara Setrakian, citing a colleague. Callers to the dissident Iranian radio station ePersian radio also report seeing Karoubi among the protesters, according to translations from blogger Homylafayette.

8.39am:
Police are wearing teargas masks for the first time, according to an email from a contact in Tehran. He also reports that the security forces are filming protesters and that most of the government buildings in central Tehran are closed.

9.04am:
Once again news of the protests in Tehran is spreading rapidly on Twitter as Trendsmap demonstrates.

9.39am:
Karoubi has been roughed up by "agitators," according to the reformist website Mowjcamp. His body guard helped him leave the scene, it says.

9.51am:
A friend of a usually reliable source of Twitter has been hit in the eye by a plastic bullet and has been take to hospital.

10.27am:
Security forces mainly paramilitary units from the Revolutionary Guard swept through an opposition march in central Tehran, clubbing some protesters and kicking and slapping others, according to Associated Press witnesses.

10.39am:
New video purports to show protesters dressing bleeding head wounds after clashes with the security forces.

Weigel's write-up from NY-23:

Hours before the polls closed, Hoffman backers were echoing the pundits’ spin–this race would be a referendum on President Obama, and a victory for Hoffman would put the brakes on health care reform by making Democrats worry about challenges to their re-elections in 2010. As a Hoffman victory became more and more remote, the rhetoric changed. The message became the message of two weeks ago. This election wasn’t about showing Republicans that conservatives could win. It was about showing Republicans that they couldn’t win without conservatives.

Nate Silver on Maine:

I think we have to seriously consider whether there is some sort of a Bradley Effect in the polling on gay rights issues, although one of the pollsters (PPP, which had a very bad night in NY-23) got it exactly right. As for the model, I think I'll need to look whether the urban-rural divide is a significant factor in a state in addition to its religiosity: Maine is secular, but rural. At the end of the day, it may have been too much to ask of a state to vote to approve gay marriage in an election where gay marriage itself was the headline issue on the ballot. Although the enthusiasm gap is very probably narrowing, feelings about gay marriage have traditionally been much stronger on the right than the left, and that's what gets people up off the couch in off-year elections.

Ed Morrissey:

It’s never a best-case for the GOP when a Democrat wins, but by keeping Dede Scozzafava out of the seat, the GOP has the chance to win this seat back in a year with a better candidate — perhaps Hoffman, perhaps another Republican who shares core principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism.  Dislodging an incumbent Republican would have been considerably more difficult, and a unified GOP should win this district — especially given the signals sent everywhere else to Democrats.

Erick Erickson:

I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.

Chris Lawrence:

Would Hoffman have been a more reliable Republican vote than Scozzafava? Probably. But Owens, if he’s anything like the vast majority of his future colleagues, will almost certainly vote with the Democrats more than 90% of the time; even the most “disloyal” Republicans only break from their party around 35% of the time while the vast majority only defect less than 10% of the time. In other words, conservatives have probably traded a reasonably Republican vote in the House for a reliably Democratic one, which in the grand scheme of things is not likely to be smart politics.

Larison:

What is more encouraging to me is that the wins by Christie and McDonnell show that competent center-right candidates interested in governance and all those “parochial” local issues can tap into voter discontent and win electoral victories. Hoffman’s possible defeat suggests that campaigns dominated by the presence of national activists, empty sloganeering and indifference to local interests may not gain traction even in those districts that are traditionally inclined to favor the politics of someone like Hoffman. Those of us who would like to see Democratic domestic agendas thwarted without empowering the Palins of the world may have managed to get exactly the results we would wish to have.

Richard Just:

Pundits have made much of the fact that the country is in a populist mood these days. The populism they are referring to is generally understood to be more right than left. But if an upshot of this mood is declining tolerance for the practice of people buying political office with their own money, then that's one (minor) thing for liberals to celebrate on an otherwise lousy night.

Ben Smith:

I think the temptation to read too much into [Bill Owens win] is probably to be resisted. The central dynamic was locals against outsiders, not liberal against conservative.

James Joyner:

[T]hese races demonstrate that Republicans can win — even with all the damage to the brand suffered in recent years — given both an opening and a solid candidate.

Josh Marshall:

Will Republicans do Obama a big favor by nominating a crop of Hoffmans for 2010?

"An interview with Oprah Winfrey is already scheduled, and I’m also hoping to have the opportunity to talk with Bill O’Reilly, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Tammy Bruce, and others, including local Alaska personalities Bob & Mark and Eddie Burke. (Variety is the spice of life!)," – Sarah Palin.

Variety! They are all Palinites, apart from Barbara – and she's a celebrity interviewer.

Where are the journalists actually asking questions? Should I put in a request?

Larison joins me in defending Trita Parsi:

If Goldberg had any interest in being fair to Parsi, he would have to acknowledge that Parsi has also argued for a pause in pursuing any engagement with Tehran in the wake of the June crackdown. That means that Parsi has changed his position on engaging Tehran to take a somewhat harder line than he once held. Whether or not this is the right move, this put him among those opposed to engaging the Iranian government under its current leadership at the present time. As far as I know, this remains Parsi’s position today. Obviously, he is nothing like “the AIPAC of Iran,” and referring to him as a lobbyist for Tehran is false and reprehensible.

Reihan differs:

[W]hile Parsi is undoubtedly a believer in democratic liberalism who wants to see Iran radically reform its institutions, he objectively serves Iranian interests insofar as he discourages Western efforts to exert pressure on the regime. This doesn't make Parsi a bad person. Plenty of Iranian dissidents believe that a democratic Iran should have a nuclear deterrent. Plenty want a denuclearized Iran, yet believe that Western pressure amounts to a kind of imperialism that should be actively resisted. This isn't that complicated.

It just means that in taking the nuclear issue as our prime focus, we are essentially cutting off most of the Iranian opposition.

Scott Lucas guides us through the president's statement on 13 Aban:

At first glance, it is extremely clever: Obama turns the history of the 1979 Embassy takeover into his desire to “move beyond this past and seek a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect”.

Obama then moves to the current nuclear talks — “if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community” — but it is his shift to the situation inside Iran that is most significant. Having already declared, “We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs,” he concludes:

Iran must choose. We have heard for thirty years what the Iranian government is against; the question, now, is what kind of future it is for. The American people have great respect for the people of Iran and their rich history. The world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice, and their courageous pursuit of universal rights. It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.

To my knowledge, this is the first direct comment by a high-level US official, let alone Obama, on Iran’s political situation since June.

Full statement here.

Yglesias makes an important point:

I think another issue here that’s rarely noted in these discussions is that the median age in the Gaza Strip is 17.4 years. This is, in other words, primarily a population of children we’re talking about. They didn’t vote for anyone.

But a lot of them died.