This Is Going To Steam A Lot of Buns

I'm with Spencer Ackerman on this one;

No Hot Dogs For Iranian Regime Skullcrackers

This started out, at the beginning of the month;

A New Iran Overture, With Hot Dogs

SAN SALVADOR — Having sent the Iranian people a video greeting on their New Year, President Obama is now inviting them to help celebrate a quintessentially American holiday, the Fourth of July.

Last Friday, the State Department sent a cable to its embassies and consulates around the world notifying them that “they may invite representatives from the government of Iran” to their Independence Day celebrations — annual receptions that typically feature hot dogs, red-white-and-blue bunting and some perfunctory remarks about the founding fathers.

Then, following the rigged election, the protests, the murder of their citizens, the State Department has indicated that if still intends to fire-up the barbecue, and keep the Regime Thugs on the A-List;

There's no thought to rescinding the invitations to Iranian diplomats," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

"We have made a strategic decision to engage on a number of fronts with Iran," Kelly said. "We tried many years of isolation, and we're pursuing a different path now."

But he said it was not clear if Iranian diplomats had accepted the invitations.

Maybe those representing the Iranian Regime can bring some of their homeland games to the bash.

You know, things like the "three-legged-races", where they could have two Iranians, perhaps imprisoned protesters, with only three legs between the two ...

Or, "Bobbing for Apples", which, I might think, for the Iranian Regime, that this is just a variation of Waterboarding, only the players are kneeling, having the Royal Guards assisting them, holding their heads in the water, so they will have a better chance, presumably, of "snaring" one of the apples ...

I hope the State Department has balls, that, instead of "red-white-and-blue bunting", they hang "green-and-white".

Perhaps, invite those banned soccer players, as well.

Top Ten Cloves: Possible Reasons There Was More Votes Than Voters In Iran

News Item: Worst. Damage Control. Ever

10. Looking back over the old Shah of Iran's playbook, to see what went wrong

9. Surprisingly, Ralph Nader got about 4% of the over-vote

8. Ballot-stuffing teams didn't stop to watch Susan Boyle

7. It was a sign, for Ahmandinejad to get almost a 2-1 ratio of votes, that he successfully employed Karl Rove's New Math

6. Ken Blackwell was seen, hanging around the Vote-Counting room

5. Supreme Leader didn't want to spend the money to do the "purple-finger" thing

4. Was a condition, for Ahmandinejad to name Dick Cheney as the head of his committee to vet the Vice President slot

3. CIA got wires crossed, thought Obama White House wanted to keep Ahmandinejad in office

2. Actually, some of the Die-Bold machines crashed, as a 3-1 ratio for Ahmandinejad was what was planned

1. Since everyone is using Twitter, thought that everyone got 140 votes each


Bonus Iran Riffs

Prairie Weather: "Oops. We screwed up. But that doesn't change the results of the vote."

Steve Benen: WHEN STRONG VOTER TURNOUT IS TOO STRONG...

NYT: Iranian Guards Issue Warning as Vote Errors Are Admitted

Robin Wright: In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences

James Joyner: 'Watching the Fall of Islamic Theocracy'

Steve Clemons: Khamenei's Mystique Shattered in Eyes of Iranians

GREEEEEEEEEEEEN!

"It's Now All of Iran!"

Somebody Check Jim Baker's Passport!

Isfahan

Along with it being another cumbersome day on the homefront, I have to be honest, it was rather depressing, the news coming out of Iran today.



CNN has been on-the-case (albiet, doing mucho reporting on posts from Twitter, Facebook and others). Perhaps we need to come up with a new code, being, if "RT is "Re-Tweet", that CNN has been engaged in "RBRT" (Rebroadcasting Re-Tweets).

Which is a few boatloads more that MSNBC has been doing.

If they are not just flat-out obtuse, than the MSNBC suits must be in a coma, running their infamous "Doc-Blocs", while Tehran burns.

Surely, if one is not missing, there must be a white woman in distress among the Iranian throngs.

How to stay on top of the breaking news there, guys ...

Here's some posts you should check out, to get a handle on what's going on, and, to see, that this is far past the rigged election, they be remaking the country over there ... Just what comes out at the end is what we have to shake the Magic 8-Ball to see...

There's two people that have been doing yeoman work;

Andrew Sullivan - Live-Blogging Day 8

Nico Pitney - Iran Updates (VIDEO): Live-Blogging The Uprising

Two posts, worth reading, from Al Giordano;

Tehran’s Freedom Square Will Be “the Palpitating Heart of the World”

Iranian Bus Workers Join the Resistance



The Flying Monkeys, and Right Wing Freak Show are throwing their feces around ...

Steven Benen takes apart The Cheney Fluffer, and Little Billy Kristol in "DO THEY KNOW THE OTHER SIDE EXISTS?..."

Mike Madden, of Salon, has Mousavi: "I am prepared for martyrdom"

Carnegie Endowment Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour: Is Mousavi willing to risk "slaughter" in the streets?

Larisa Alexandrovna: Iran's protest not as bloody as feared and US double standards...

Anonymous, on Salon: Khamanei weeps, he tells us there was no vote rigging, and he seems to give a green light for a crackdown

And, Juan Cole turns it over his Informed Comment to Jeffery Lyons (Reuters Tehran bureau chief from 1998-2001, is the co-author of Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran. His latest book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury Press), for a "man behind the curtain" view, with "Lyons: Khamenei's Past Power Play against the Clerics May Weaken him Now in Confronting the Reformers"

The Respite

Back in the early 1960's, the Duke Ellington Orchestra embarked on a State Department-sponsored world tour, primarily hitting the Middle East, in what later would be heard in his "Far East Suite";

The album's title is something of a misnomer, since only one track – "Ad Lib on Nippon", inspired by a 1964 tour of Japan – is strictly speaking concerned with a country in the "Far East". The rest of the music on the album was inspired by a world tour undertaken by Ellington and his orchestra in 1963, which took in Beirut, Amman, Kabul, New Delhi, Sri Lanka, Tehran, Madras, Mumbai, Baghdad, and Cairo (visits to Istanbul, Nicosia, Cairo, Alexandria, Athens, and Thessaloniki were postponed when the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy reached the tour party).

One of the tunes, "Isfahan" became a jazz standard, and here it is;

Duke Ellington - Isfahan



Hopefully, tomorrow, we'll be back in-the-groove ...

From The Rooftops ... Allah Akbar!

GREEEEEEEEEEEEN!

I am a sucker for these kind of things (like the girls softball game last year, where the opposing team carried the girl who hit the winning hit, but was injured, and unless she crossed the plate - no substitution allowed - her team would lose).

And, yes, the title is a riff on those Spanish soccer announcers gooooaaaallll calls

H/T to Andrew Sullivan for being on the case, of the Iranian Soccer Team members wearing green, in support of the protesters back home.

Sullivan wrote;

Playing a critical game right now - and look at their wrists. They took the bands off in the second half. God knows what they were told in the half-time. But for those who still don't believe this is a genuinely national movement, open your eyes.

From CNN;

Iran's soccer team wears symbolic green bands

Members of Iran's national soccer team wore green arm and wrist bands Wednesday during their World Cup qualifying match against South Korea.

The team does not normally wear green bands

As to the green wrist bands, from Think Progress;

After half-time, only one player kept his green wristband on. Iranian bloggers speculated that “Ali Abadi, chairman of the Iranian Football Federation (FFI), who is close to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had telephoned Seoul during half time and instructed the players to remove the green wristbands immediately.”

From the rooftops ... Allah Akbar!


Bonus Iran Riffs

Somebody Check Jim Baker's Passport!

How High The Moon

"It's Now All of Iran!"

Bonus Bonus

Ray Charles - Bein' Green - CD Quality Audio

How High The Moon

Sorry, Garlic Fans, we got jammed up on the homefront today, that left little time to get much writing done (we did get one post finished, only to have news early this evening blow it out of the water, so a rewrite - if possible - is in order, to salvage it).

So, we had a hankering for this tune tonight, and we can use it to give a "Shout Out" to Mir Hosain Mousavi, and all his supporters, that, maybe, maybe, they can steal the election back (or get some serious concession out of it).


How High The Moon - June Christy

How High The Moon (1995 Digital Remaster) - June Christy


(Here's a version of it, with Nat King Cole, June Christy, Mel Torme)

Somebody Check Jim Baker's Passport!

We could, perhaps, use the byline for this, and include "Cleveland, Iran".

It is being reported, from credible sources, that the Iranian Election this weekend makes the Bush Cronies robbery of 2000 (and 2004) look like stealing lunch money.



The Iranian branch of election-fixers haven't even bothered to wink-and-nod ...

Is Mir Hosain Mousavi in the process of becoming the Iranian Al Gore?

Are the Iranian Ayatollahs adios?

Allah O Akbar!

You could, it appears, alter the infamous Apocalypse Now line to "I love the smell of a fixed election ... It smells like revolution!"

It's hard to grab the narrative here, with so much still very fluid, as to the news going on inside, and coming out of, Iran.

So, we're just going to lightly riff here, and point you to a whole, great bevy of posts (and, you can go out to Memeorandum, for a cavalcade more).

Not surprising, Al Giordano has his finger-on-the-pulse, and a great headline - A World at the Edge of Its Seat;

That this video made it out of the country and on to the Internet this morning tells you everything you need to know about the difference between the youth uprising in China's Tienanmen Square twenty years ago this month - quashed with a massacre - and what is possible in Iran. Today, the world is wired from the bottom up: personal video cameras, cell phones, text messages, YouTube and the Internet in all its manifestations. Whatever is happening right now in Iran will not be easily swept under the Persian rug.

Andrew Sullivan points out that "The Revolution Will Be Twittered", and, in another, pointed out by a reader, that "Iran is headed for civil war."

"Tehran Burning", according to Libby Spencer, on the Impolitic, who then points to some great videos over on Michael Totten's blog, who notes that "The BBC says clashes between demonstrators and police in Tehran are the most violent in a decade."



There are also reports that Mousavi has been arrested (or has been placed in "house arrest).

Salon has a post up, from "Anonymous" on what's going down in Iran.

Juan Cole has a great read in "Stealing the Iranian Election" (and another, on Salon), as does Gary Sick, with his "Iran's political coup".

First, Cole;

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

Now, Sick;

The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his “green wave” began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” this may have been too much.

• On the basis of what we know so far, here is the sequence of events starting on the afternoon of election day, Friday, June 12.
• Near closing time of the polls, mobile text messaging was turned off nationwide
• Security forces poured out into the streets in large numbers
• The Ministry of Interior (election headquarters) was surrounded by concrete barriers and armed men
• National television began broadcasting pre-recorded messages calling for everyone to unite behind the winner
• The Mousavi campaign was informed officially that they had won the election, which perhaps served to temporarily lull them into complacency
• But then the Ministry of Interior announced a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad
• Unlike previous elections, there was no breakdown of the vote by province, which would have provided a way of judging its credibility
• The voting patterns announced by the government were identical in all parts of the country, an impossibility (also see the comments of Juan Cole at the title link)
• Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene`i publicly announced his congratulations to the winner, apparently confirming that the process was complete and irrevocable, contrary to constitutional requirements
• Shortly thereafter, all mobile phones, Facebook, and other social networks were blocked, as well as major foreign news sources

[snip]

In their own paranoia and hunger for power, the leaders of Iran have insulted their own fellow revolutionaries who have come to have second thoughts about absolute rule and the costs of repression, and they may have alienated an entire generation of future Iranian leaders. At the same time, they have provided an invaluable gift to their worst enemies abroad.

Steve Clemons, on The Washington Note, has two great posts up - "Iran: There Will Be Blood" and "Anatomy of Iran's Right Wing Coup", while Ali Frick, at Think Progress points out that the Right Wing Freak Show is blaming Obama, for Ahmadinejad, and the entire fraud election.

Lastly, the Guardian UK has an excellent article - "The Iranian election controversy: what happens now?" - that lays out, succinctly, the happenings, what's going to happen, if that can be predicted at this particular moment.

It would appear, that the Iran its' citizens woke up to today, and the many mornings to come, is going to be vastly different than the Iran that was in place before this heisted election.

As we noted above, to stay on top of this, go to Memeorandum, for the newest reports and posts.

And, you gotta be thinking, that somewhere, wherever they are, James Baker, and, perhaps, Katherine Harris, have bags packed, and placed near the door, possibly expecting a long-distance phone call, saying they are needed, pronto, and to bring the whole team over, the Ayatollah's want the Deluxe Bag Job, now that they have, seemingly, screwed up the basic intro package.

Or, maybe, the Carlyle Group will dispatch him ...

Yes, Allah O Akbar ...

From the rooftops ...

Bonus Cleveland, Iran Heisted Election Links

Steve Hynd: Still Confused About The Iranian Election

Nate Silver: Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed

Juan Cole: Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections: Rejecting Charges of a North Tehran Fallacy

Jill: The Iranians are not sitting idly by and watching their election be stolen by right-wing thugs

Digby: Iran

Brad: Memo to the Iranians