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Remember when liberals liked to pretend they were the defenders of human rights? Then came Iran and Neda. Honestly, I wish Hillary was President. At least she’s tough.
Man, I loved this guy’s music. I was young enough to come of age during the Dangerous album. I loved it, then went backwards and bought Bad, Thriller, Off The Wall, etc. What a sad day. Farrah Fawcett sort of got over-shadowed today, which is a shame, but no one is bigger than MJ. He would over-shadow the President.
My wife loves this song, so I post it as opposed to one of the better known ones.
ANNOUNCEMENT FROM IRANIAN STUDENTS IN IOWA CITY SENT BY YASHAR VASEF
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We urge all Iranian-American citizens to set political preferences aside and come to a mourning rally this Thursday for those innocent people brutally killed in the violence in Iran. We strongly feel the Iranian community can take a stronger initiative and stand side by side among the many Iranian students that attend our events. I must stress this is not a political event so please come show support. The event will close with a candle light vigil service.
Here is the event information:
Iowa City is joining in on the global mourning protest this Thursday to remember those killed in Iran since the violence has escalated.
Who: All concerned Iowa residents
What: Mourning Rally and Vigil for Neda and others killed in Iran
When: Thursday, June 25th 7PM-8:30PM
Where: Iowa City Pedestrian Mall near the water fountains
Please wear black if applicable. Stop by for just 5 minutes or the duration of the event. Your company will be a blessing.
PLEASE INVITE ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
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Regrettably, I have not been able to post much about Iran lately, but in-laws in Iran appear to be doing well, despite it all.
Donald Douglas has posted enough for all of us, however.
I keep hearing excuses from CNN that they regret they cannot bring us actual news from Iran (despite the fact that they have correspondents there), because the government has shut them out. We call family there whenever we want and ask them what they have seen, etc. It really is pretty simple.
And now they are saying that Obama’s “Cairo speech” is possibly what set the Iranian people on the road to demonstrating. Absurd. Only people with a misunderstanding of Iran, the Iranian people, and Iran’s history would make such an asinine statement. The credit goes to the people of Iran and the people of Iran only, considering how little help and support they have received from the Western world.
Sammy Sosa is the latest in the line of baseball superstars linked with drug use (I say “linked” only because at the time it is only a leaked story that purports that he failed a test - although I have no reason to doubt it, I will stay with “linked” until there is more information).
So let’s look at the single-season home run record book:
1. Barry Bonds 73 2001 San Francisco Giants NL 1
2. Mark McGwire 70 1998 St. Louis Cardinals NL 2
3. Sammy Sosa 66 1998 Chicago Cubs NL 3
4. Mark McGwire 65 1999 St. Louis Cardinals NL 4
5. Sammy Sosa 64 2001 Chicago Cubs NL 5
6. Sammy Sosa 63 1999 Chicago Cubs NL 6
7. Roger Maris 61 1961 New York Yankees AL 7
8. Babe Ruth 60 1927 New York Yankees AL 8
9. Babe Ruth 59 1921 New York Yankees AL 9
10. Jimmie Foxx 58 1932 Philadelphia Athletics AL 10
11. H. Greenberg 58 1938 Detroit Tigers AL
12. Ryan Howard 58 2006 Philadelphia Phillies NL
Not that I am surprised, but as a Cubs fan, this one hurts. I loved Sosa and actually ran home from class every day in 1998 to catch every at bat possible in that McGwire/Sosa home run duel. As a long time Cubs fan, he instantly became my favorite all-time player. I guess now I’ll revert back to Andre Dawson. Maybe D. Lee, Aramis Ramirez, or Carlos Zambrano can take his place one day, but for now, Roger Maris moves back to the top of the all-time single-season home run charts, and Andre Dawson moves back to the top of my “Favorite All-Time Cubs” list (with all due respect to Hack Wilson or Ernie Banks, arguably much better players, my “Favorite All-Time Cubs” list only includes players I watched play - a list of “Greatest All-Time Cubs” would be a different list).
I’m not asking him to take sides in the election. He does not need to go as far as McCain requested and declare the whole thing a sham, but he can definitely use this opportunity to support the reformists and take the Ayatollah to the woodshed for the lack of basic rights for the citizens of Iran. No freedom of speech. No freedom of association. Use the soapbox, Obama. Be the leader. Someone in the world has to be the leader and be the “place” people can look when they need a champion for human and civil rights. I don’t agree with Bill Maher on anything, but he said one thing yesterday that I did agree with. He said that while he did not like Bush, Bush made most of his decisions irrespective of what it meant to his popularity and irrespective of what the polls said. Maher said he wished Obama had a “little bit of that” in him, and I agree.
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Update: Everyone needs to go to this site and see the pictures. #17 especially.
Update #2: To hell with it. Here it is (AP has copyright):
Go see it in context at the link above. See it large there, too. This photo should win some type of award. Unbelievable.
Original post:
Mother-in-law spoke with grandmother-in-law who still lives in North Tehran (Mousavi area) and the demonstrations and “riots” are still going strong. Grandmother-in-law has been unable to get out of the house for days. All of the cousins, aunts, and uncles are participating in the protests.
Throw the bums out!
PS - Obama, please stop with the Carter-like “let’s not saying anything so that we can be on good terms with whomever the winner is” crap. Denounce the oppression. Denounce the suppresion of free speech and peaceful demonstration. Denounce the killing of protesters by security forces.
I’ve also heard that Obama will not say anything because he wants to be able to “work with” Ahmadinejad if he is, in fact, the winner. Hmmm. Sounds like Bush’s Saudi Arabian policy: do not criticize too harshly those with whom you need to work. We’ll wait with bated breath as the liberal MSM gets around to criticizing Obama
And don’t forget that the last time Iran erupted it was a Democratic President who sat idly by and let the mullahs come to power. I’m not advocating medling, or even declaring that the election was a fraud (we can’t possibly actually know whether it was or not). But now would be the time to harshly and very sternly and publicly denounce the oppression and restrictions placed by the regime on the people of Iran. The people of Iran are the most favorable to the West than any others in the region (outside of possibly Israel). Iranians like the US, they like American things, and they want to be a Western country. Unlike their Arab neighbors, they do not want theocracy (for the most part). They are also very highly educated.
Obama also seems to forget that unlike the other dictatorships in the Middle East, the Iranian one has only been around for 30 years. Young people can actually remember what it was like to live under some other type of regime. In the Arab world, most people have been under lock-and-key since their grandfather’s time (or worse). They are conditioned. Iranians still remember what it was like to wear Western clothes, listen to Westen music, meet Westerners traveling through their country to see the history and culture, etc.
Azadi bareya Iran!
Others:
- Pajamas Media: “[T]he BBC…estimates between one and two million Tehranis demonstrated against the regime on Monday. That’s a big number. So we can say that, at least for the moment, there is a revolutionary mass in the streets of Tehran. There are similar reports from places like Tabriz and Isfahan, so it’s nationwide.”
- Boston.com: Unbelievable photography of the riots. I love picture #17, where the women, covered by their chadors, run to the aid of a man being beaten by security forces.
- Politico.
- The Hill: “House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lambasted the White House in a statement Monday afternoon, as reports came out of Iran of at least one protester killed in the tumult after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed a landslide victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi on Friday. “The Administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights represents a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Middle East,” Cantor said. “President Obama must take a strong public position in the face of violence and human rights abuses. We have a moral responsibility to lead the world in opposition to Iran’s extreme response to peaceful protests. “In addition, Iran’s clerical regime has made clear that its nuclear program will move forward,” he said. “The United States cannot trust the aspirations of a nation that is a state-sponsor of terrorism, and the Administration must work with Congress to do everything in its power to deny Iran nuclear weapons.”
- Hot Air.
Update #2 - 6/14/2009 @ 9:30 a.m. CST: Michael Totten has a great article up about the current violence. He has some of the same videos I have below.
The BBC says clashes between demonstrators and police in Tehran are the most violent in a decade.Video below shows a human wave of demonstrators chasing frightened police officers.
And Andrew Sullivan reports that Twitter stayed up in Iran despite the fact that all other modes of communication were down. Of course, Sullivan is so jaded by his own liberalism that you have to take most of his anecdotes and conclusions with a grain of salt. He comes to the conclusion that people that are protesting Ahmadinejad are the same people that elected Obama in America: “They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.” Uh, obviously the people in Iran today - the Youth - are in the same generation of voters that supported Obama (among others), but they really have nothing else in common. Drawing comparisons between Iran’s pseuod-democracy and America’s real one is ludicrous. Yes, the young generation in America was similarly deprived of their freedom like the Iranians. Ridiculous. Sullivan will take any opportunity to score political points, but what he is actually doing is minimizing what’s going on in Iran. To the average observer, if Iran is downgraded to ‘like America’s election in 2008,’ then there isn’t much to watch. The people do not have it that badly. Bush was elected twice and then his party was defeated and we had a peaceful change of power. Our freedoms have not changed. Unlike the stark contrasts in Iran, we did not go from a closed theocracy with no freedom of speech, association, or thought to an open, liberal society. We’ve always been an open, liberal society, and we merely stayed so after Obama was elected. There are no parallels between the Iranian election and the American one, and to make connections is unfair to those in Iran who are dying and being clubbed by police and the Revolutionary Guard, who openly support ANTARinejad. The logic is similar to those liberals who have equated the current Iranian troubles with Bush/Gore’s Florida fiasco. Well, if only Iran’s biggest concern were the recounting of a handful of counties in a single state, with the decision being made by a legitimate court not answerable to anyone, much less a ‘Supreme Leader.’ Sullivan is a hack.
Update - 6/13/2009 @ 10:00 p.m. CST: Some random quotes from Iranian facebook friends/family:
The western media is doing a terrible job exposing the ‘election’ for the blatant fraud and internal military coup that it was by any objective measure… please correct mis-information where ever you see it… we cannot let them get away with this…
my heart aches deep, and my soul soars far to my land… i ache with you.
I just watched a video where a young man was being dragged away by the riot police and a few plain clothes men. These people are no different than the nazi gestapo and they have a boa constrictor like hold on the people. It truly is sad. But have faith. This may be the beginning of the end for these vultures.
From friends and family in Iran, and from some other sources.
Brian used to report on emails now and again, and I’ll do the same thing. I got this from SteveMaloneyGOP, a self-described member of the GOP. I think this is ridiculous.
I imagine you’ve heard about David Letterman’s offensive and degrading comments about Sarah Palin and her 14-year-old daughter Willow. Among other things, Letterman called Gov. Palin a “slutty flight attendant.” About Willow, he suggested she might be raped and “knocked” on the Yankee Stadium Field by Alex Rodriguez.Sean Hannity asked, “Where is the outrage from liberal women’s groups?” Sean hasn’t grasped yet that “liberal women’s groups” have nothing to do with 90% of the women in America — or the world.
I want to urge you to communicate your disgust with Letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Our goal must be to put people like Letterman out of business. In their celebration of depravity and degradation, they are doing great damage to our culture and our country.
Come on. Yes, we can want people like Letterman off the air, but do it by refusing to tune in to his show. Using the FCC to “shut him down” because you think his show is deprave - because he made a tasteless joke - is a little “Islamic Republic-ish” to me. We can talk about Letterman all we want. We can criticize him all we want. But we don’t call for his head via some government organization. That’s thuggery and it is no better than the liberals who would shout Scalia off the stage or destroy a recruiting center. Does that sound like something a Founding Father would support?
Letterman is shameless and his jokes are not funny. So I watch Conan instead. But Letterman has the right to speak and he has the right to keep his show as long as somebody is willing to pay him to do it. Even if it is shameless and “deprave.” Even if he says things that would make your mother blush. Relax. The antidote to nasty speech is more speech (blogging, etc.), not less (i.e. the FCC).
Conservatives got smashed in the last election. Associating the GOP with such strong-arm government tactics as shutting someone down via the FCC is not going to help bring conservatism back to power in the United States. Rather, it will guarantee it never wins again.
This sort of goes along with my “Chill Out, Pam” post of a few weeks ago, wherein Pam Geller overdid the hyperbole slightly in comparing Obama and his victory to the Nazis in Germany, etc. Now I do not know about Mr. Maloney, but Pam has some serious readership out there. These types of ridiculous emails (and if I am getting them I know hundreds of other people are, too) just kill the conservative movement. If I were not so sure of my conservative values - if I were a “moderate” or an “independent” or one of those “I voted for Clinton, Bush, and Obama” types - I would be moving to the left right now. Maybe not ideologically, but I would be voting for Democrats.
The Republican Party needs an exorcism. We need true conservatives. We need ideological conservatives. We do not need irrational fear-mongerers (whether the subject is Muslims abroad or liberals at home). We do not need “big government can sanitize our deprave world” types (the FCC should not even exist, much less be used as a political tool!!). We do not need theocrats. We do not need the Pams of the world that tell us they have written “15 books in 6 languages” and therefore they somehow “know” something is afoot as if they’ve actually lived through any real revolution (unlike my spouse, who was born in the Middle East). And since when did the bald assertion that you have authored a number of books (subject unknown) make you an expert on revolution? Anyone can write a book. Hey, I speak 4 languages (albeit two of them not very well), I’ve lived in 4 countries, and my wife and in-laws all faced real revolution and war and had to seek asylum in a foreign country. I guess I’m an expert on revolution now? Of course, not. But at least I’m rational enough to know that.
Take it easy on the rhetoric. Stick to policy. Stick to conservative talking points. We have common sense on our side, if we stick to the conservative script and leave all the hyperbole aside.
Couldn’t have happened to a bigger idiot.
Remember that tell-all book about A-Rod?Just a month after making headlines with its allegations that the New York Yankees star likely used steroids as far back as high school, Selena Roberts’ “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez” has vanished from best seller lists.
Published in early May by HarperCollins with an announced first printing of 150,000, “A-Rod” has sold just 16,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75 percent of industry sales. The book sold 11,000 in its first week, then quickly faded.
You all remember Selena Roberts, don’t you? She’s that idiot that jumped all over the Duke lacrosse kids calling them rapists, etc. before any facts were known. She went on nationally televised shows and convicted these kids of heinous crimes. Then the charges were dropped and the prosecutor was disbarred for violating at least a dozen ethical canons in order to further his political career. And then Selena Roberts said nothing. No apology. No nothing. In fact, she defends her statements, as absurd as they were.
Well, Selena learned a lesson most of us probably learned in grammar school. If you lose credibility on an issue, even one time, people will never believe you again. You can be wrong. That’s fine. We’re all wrong on occasion. Sometimes we are very wrong. That’s fine. Just admit it. But when you refuse to admit it and lose credibility like Selena has, your career is over if your career relies on your credibility. Serves her right.
What’s the difference between the Bagram Air Force base holding enemy combatants in Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Naval Base holding enemy combatants in Cuba? Well, Obama thinks the guys in Cuba deserve habeas corpus rights, but that the guys in Afghanistan do not (personally, I don’t think any of them deserve habeas corpus rights, but that is another story). Both bases are on foreign soil. Both bases hold enemy combatants. Both bases are run by the American military machine in some way. But Obama wants to justify different treatment of the prisoners.
As a candidate for president, Obama praised a Supreme Court ruling last June that granted prisoners at Guantanamo habeas corpus rights to challenge their detention. He applauded Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush as “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo.”But an April 2 decision by U.S. District Judge John Bates that applied the Boumediene ruling to some Bagram prisoners is forcing Obama to confront the question of whether he’s presiding over his own “legal black hole” at the prison in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration is challenging this ruling in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., arguing that Bates’ ruling would for the first time in American history extend habeas corpus rights to non-Americans in a theater of war in a foreign territory.
The Bagram site, they contend, is not like Guantanamo because the United States has become de facto ruler of the Cuban base after maintaining control of it since 1903.
But Bates ruled that some of those held at Bagram who were captured outside Afghanistan “are virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene,” describing them as “non-citizens who were… apprehended in foreign lands far from the United States and brought to yet another country for detention.”
There is no legal justification for treating the detainees differently. Obama, the “novice” Commander-in-Chief, jumped on the anti-Guantanamo bandwagon early in the primary season as a way to satiate the liberal base and win the nomination long before he had any idea about what the reality as President would be. Now Congress is refusing to fund the closing of Guantanamo because no one wants the prisoners on US soil and no foreign country wants to house these terrorists, either. But Obama didn’t shoot off his mouth about Bagram, did he? He doesn’t owe a debt to the liberal base with regard to Bagram, does he? He wants Bagram open and the prisoners subject to his whim because he knows that’s the safest way to house them. But he has to fulfill his promise on Guantanamo, despite the lack of any substantial difference between Guantanamo and Bagram.
Hope and change.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday he supports gays being able to marry but believes states, not the federal government, should make the decision.“I think, you know, freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney said in a speech at the National Press Club. “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”
Cheney, who has a gay daughter, said marriage has always been a state issue.
“And I think that’s the way it ought to be handled today, that is, on a state-by-state basis. Different states will make different decisions. But I don’t have any problem with that. I think people ought to get a shot at that,” he said.
Thank you, Mr. VP. This has been my stance on gay marriage forever. Marital status has always been a state issue and should continue to be. Heterosexual couples are married and divorced under the state law of the state in which they are residents. There is no reason homosexual couples should not have their status similarly determined.
Conservatives need to leave the morality and “God says it’s a sin” arguments at home. Those are too easy to attack, considering that we do not officially legislate on the basis of morally (although, technically, we certainly do). Rather, all of our laws are supposed to be based on the supreme law of the land and the authority delegated from it: Constitutionally, the federal government does not control the marital status of individuals (other than through the “Full Faith & Credit Clause”). Thus, the states do. Ask a liberal to refute that. They cannot.
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Since 2/27/2009
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