that's good. i certainly would have done so myself and contributed to the noise if i was signed up for twitter.

i wasn't trying to sound like i was whining or anything - just saying that it made it hard on our end to sort through things and find what amounted to the more "newsy" tweets. but if that's the price to pay for their freedom, it's fine by me.

Well, you know it was coming. Just saw CNN announce that Ahmedinejad is accusing the US of intolerable meddling... blah blah blah.

Any chance of that claim getting any kind of traction? I can see his supporters picking up the cry, but he has more detractors than supporters now.

Exactly. Without a really strong statement from the US about taking sides, Ahmedinejad is screwed, both at home and in the international community.

Of course, it appears Russia has legitimized his election victory by accepting him as a head of state.

"By not meddling, the United States has kept me from being able to accuse them of meddling. Which means that they are meddling by not meddling. If they had meddled, then they would not be trying to keep me from saying that they are meddling, which is really the worst kind of meddling that you can do."

What the fuck is wrong with Russia?

Do they ever get anything right?

short answer - no

longer answer - I could probably write a 20 page paper still about the causes of that, but still no

They do pretty well with vodka and petruskha dolls.

gah. russian vodka is ghastly compared to some of the newer designer-vodka. you could use it to strip the paint off walls!

Vodka is vodka for the most part.

nooooooooooooooooooooooo

no way! is this the view of an informed vodka drinker, or an admitted-neophyte?

View of a guy who tended bar for five years.

and drank a lot of vodka?

The difference between good vodka and bad vodka (read: Popov) is quite enormous.

mmhmm

But the difference between good and mid-range is much, much slimmer than other liquors.

good vodka you can sip like water and with a straight face.

bad vodka you shoot down and grimace after you swallow it.

this on the other hand may be true.

and how'd we get here from Iran?

Well not much news out of Iran, and like others have said the hashs at twitter are unreadable now.

All I know about vodka is that my parents would buy this big bottle of it... but it was a plastic bottle. And that stuff made be cringe to just smell.

that is bad vodka

The guy who apprenticed me bartending was a big scotch and whiskey snob. He used to really get a kick out of filling the empty Grey Goose, Belvedere, etc. bottles with the well vodka because he knew that he could get away with it (incidentally which I found abhorrent, but wasn't in much position to argue). Couldn't do that with many other liquors.

depends on who you're serving it to and whether they drink it straight or it's mixed in.

me i drink it straight and i could tell grey goose from anything else blindfolded

Mrs. A's parents used to have a grapefruit tree. The best and most refreshing drink that I have ever had is ice cold fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and Grey Goose.

Are you sure it wasn't because you were drunk?

Big plastic bottle is what Popov would come in. That stuff was horrible.

But when you're a poor college student.... (Not me, but a few people I knew would buy that. But I bought the cheap stuff of other kinds of liquor so I understood)

One of my best friends has drank cheap Vodka every day for the last 7-8 years.

In college we would buy this big plastic jug of a brand called "Budget Vodka". Their logo was a guy holding up a fistfull of dollars.

Net net they are still going to try and blow us up, so what difference does it make?

It appears that today's rally will be attended by Mousavi and it's expected to be the biggest rally thus far.

I'm really not sure that the violence by the religious police is achieving the purpose that they think it is at this point. The protesters are killing with kindness at this point. It's amazing to watch.

I think incremental steps towards a truly open political process in Iran would be a good thing for us. A lot of anti-Americanism in the Middle East is fomented by regimes trying to remain in power by focusing the anger of their people outward. If that piece is missing I think it will be a positive thing overall. Think of it as baby steps.

Reza Aslan appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night, and laid out the importance of what is going to happen:

What's really fascinating about what's happening right now in 2009 is that it looks a lot like what was happening in 1979. And there's a very simple reason for that. The same people are in charge -- I mean, Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Khatami, Medhi Karroubi, the other reformist candidate -- these were all the original revolutionaries who brought down the Shah to begin with, so they know how to do this right.

And so what you're going to see tomorrow is something that was pulled exactly out of the playbook of 1979, which is that you have these massive mourning rallies, where you mourn the deaths of those who were martyred in the cause of freedom. And these things tend to get a little bit out of control, they often result in even more violence by the security forces and even more deaths, which then requires another mourning rally which is even larger, which then requires more violence from the government, and this just becomes an ongoing snowball that can't be stopped.

That's how the Shah was removed from power, was these mourning ceremonies. And so Mousavi very smartly calling for an official -- not a rally -- but an official day of mourning tomorrow. I think we're going to see crowds that we haven't even begun to see yet, and then follow that, on Friday, which is sort of the Muslim sabbath, the day of prayer, which is a traditionally a day of gathering anyway. This is just beginning, Rachel, this is just the beginning.

Maddow had a pair of segments last night on Iran that were quite good.

SI

I had a roommate who did that, too.

SI

Reza's interview is around 11 minutes in.

Oh, and I feel a little bad about this but about half the time I hear news on Iran, this little clip goes through my head:

Marge: Can we get rid of this Ayatollah T-shirt? Khomeini died years ago.
Homer: But, Marge! It works on *any* Ayatollah: Ayatollah Nakhbadeh, Ayatollah Zahedi...even as we speak, Ayatollah Razmada and his cadre of fanatics are consolidating their power.

SI

:D

In an attempt to change the subject, the Iranian government is claiming it thwarted a terrorist plot led by external enemies (Israel) on election day.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DAH850653.htm

And that's why they felt it was necessary to rig the vote.

Is it me, or does this government just seem to be behind one step (or two) at every turn? That tactic should have been used early on. At this point, few will see it as anything other than desparate.

"The 'U.S. meddling' angle didn't work yesterday. Let's go for the 'Israel hates us' angle today."

I <3 this post.

I think the Iranian government is underestimating the ability of many of the Iranian people, but there will be millions who believe what the government says... no matter how outrageous it seems to us.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the reaction of the Iranian government is that it (for now anyway) seems completely uninterested in world opinion. "The whole world is watching" really doesn't matter if you don't mind the world watching you crack skulls.

Yeah, that's turned out pretty well for the ruling classes in Burma, China, North Korea - Saddam didn't have any problems when he was merely committing genocide against the Kurds and Shia. The only hope relies on either Rafsanjani/Montazeri effecting a coup of Khamenei/Ahmadinejad or with the IRGC refusing to fire when ordered and effectively switching sides.

I'm also not sold on the angle that Obama shouldn't be vocally supporting the protestors. Not to the point where I think he's in the wrong or a coward, but it's been pointed out that Bush's words in Lebanon certainly didn't do any harm if not actually helping the situation. So any commentators/posters wasting time arguing that conservative people are idiots and the protests would immediately be accepted by the population as American stooges (particularly since Ahmadinejad's supporters already claim/believe this, and it's pretty hard to convince the millions marching/supporting the other side that they are puppets) is as dumb as the conservative pundits saying Obama is selling out the Iranian people.

There is deep-seeded hatred towards America in Iran. Rafsanjani, Mousavi, and all the revolutionaries were among the leaders of the anti-American and anti-Shah rebellion in 1979. To be branded as being overtly supported by America would be a severe blow to what they look to accomplish.

Win, lose, or draw, Iran's foreign relations won't be drastically different with Mousavi or Ahmadinejad at the helm. But having moderate reformists like Mousavi MIGHT nudge the Islamic Republic towards a much more isolationist policy than a hostile one.

It probably can't get any worse than Ahmadinejad.

Photos from today's rally.

Flickr: mousavi1388's Photostream

This video seems worth sharing.

To me, there is something much more powerful about the silence than I would have expected.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Opposition supporters march in Tehran

Where the heck do you get a 100 foot green banner like that?

Edit: Actually, it looks like it might be much longer than that.

Khamenei has rejected the issue of vote fraud and has backed Ahmedinejad fully.

This is either the end, or just the beginning.

There were all kinds of weird things coming out of his mouth.

I do think at this point the fate of Khamenei is tied to that of Ahmadinejad. If one goes down, so does the other.

"YOU CANNOT SAY THERE IS FRAUD, THE DIFFERENCE IS 11 MILLION VOTES!" The fact that the difference is 11 million votes, and that ALL the handwritten votes were counted in under two hours... Heck, it take us almost two weeks to count and canvass the handwritten votes here in the Philippines.