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Obama was voted in to fix the economy. Instead, he is warring against it. He has done nothing to fix the original causes of our economic problems. Instead, in the midst of the deepest recession our economy has faced since the Great Depression, Obama and Speaker Pelosi have skirted the democratic process to force through possibly the most ill conceived attack on our economy in the history of our nation.
What the vote on Cap and Trade today actually was:
- A vote to enact perhaps the largest and most regressive tax in our nations history. It will hit hardest on our nation's poor and lower middle class.
- A rushed bill that Pelosi pushed through in a way that cynically circumvented our democratic process.
- A bill that not a single representative read cover to cover. Update: See this from the Strata-sphere discussing John Boehner's identification of some of the last minute changes put into this massive leftist power grab.
- A vote to creates a massive new bureaucracy.
- A vote to create a massive windfall for rent seekers such as Al Gore and his ilk who will grow fabulously wealth off this legislation while producing nothing of value.
- A vote to vastly expand the reach of federal government into every aspect of our economy and private lives.
- A vote to drive jobs overseas.
- A vote that will harm our infrastructure.
- A vote that will drive the cost of virtually every good and service in America skyward.
- A bill that will bring to a halt the building of new fossil fuel plants that our country requires to meet growing energy needs and to replace aging plants.
- A vote for a bill that requires tarrifs on countries that do not impose carbon regulation, thus making a trade war all but inevitable. Consider this the Obama/Pelosi version of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tarrif that greatly exacerbated the Depression.
- A vote for a bill that punishes traditional sources of energy at a point in time when not a single form of alternative energy has been proven cost effective or workable at scale.
- A vote that virtually insures that we will become ever more vulnerable to a true energy crisis that is all but inevitable.
- A vote for a bill based on highly politicized science falsely portrayed as settled.
- A vote to control carbon even as the last seven years have proven the falsity of the proposition that global temperatures rise with the increase of carbon.
- A vote to do all of this just as we are in the middle of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Indeed, all major economic indicators are actually worse today than they were at the same point in time after the start of the Great Depression.
And For What:
This piece of economic sepuku passed the House 219 to 212. Eight Republicans voted for this abortion. They are:
Mary Bono, 45th Dist, Calif.
Michael Castle, Del.
Mark Kirk, 10th Dist, Ill.
Leonard Lance, 7th Dist, NJ
Frank LoBiondo, 2nd Dist., NJ
John McHugh, 23rd Dist, NY
David Reichert, 8th Dist., Wash.
Christopher Smith, 4th Dist., NJ
They deserve to be drummed out of the Republican Party.
Update: Michelle Malkin provides a "Wanted" poster for the eight individuals and wonders what they could have been promised in terms of earmarks to get their vote. R.S. McCain says something entirely appropriate - until these eight are gone, "not one red cent" to the N.R.C.C.
Update: EU Referendum notes the vote as a sign that "insanity rules" on this side of the pond as well as their own.
This is a dark day indeed. I am almost tempted to say that the Republicans should cease all opposition to this bill. Letting it into law will do more to spell the death knell for the far left than a thousand floor speeches will do.
Prior Posts:
25 June 09: What Was Voted On By The House Today
22 June 09: Making Pravda Blush
18 June 09: Depression (& Depressing) News
11 June 09: The Looming Crisis In Energy Costs
9 June 2009: Fiddling While Rome Freezes . . . And Crops Fail
8 June 2009: Of Villians, The Economy & On-Rushing Trains
3 June 2009: Road To Ruin
28 May 2009: A Bit Of Honest From Speaker Pelosi
22 May 2009: Beware The Climate Change Industrial Complex
16 May 2009: Cap, Trade & Theft
14 May 2009: Heading Towards A Self-Inflicted Depression
13 May 2009: EPA's Latest On CO2 - Bizarre, But Hardly Unwelcome
13 May 2009: Internal Dissent On Regulation Of Carbon Dioxide
12 May 2009: Cap & Trade - Back To The Future
29 April 2009: More Green Blasphemy
25 April 2009: Our Drive To A Green Nirvana
19 April 2009: Throwing Green Fuel On An Economic Fire
Saturday, June 27, 2009
What Was Voted On By The House Today
Friday, June 26, 2009
Three Deaths - Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, & Michael Jackson
This past week has been hard on the celebrities in America, with the death of three people who, at various times, were important parts of our cultural milieu.
Ed McMahon, one of the great pitchmen of the 20th century, has long been out of the public eye. He will forever be remembered as Johnny Carson's sidekick on the Tonight Show, a gig that lasted him for more than 30 years and was the stuff of some of funniest comedy I can recall. And then there were his countless appearances in other venues, such as Star Search. Before entering show business, he was a Marine, having served his country in WWII as a fighter pilot. In his private life, he was the father of six.
Unfortunately, MacMahon apparently made some bad financial decisions and lived beyond his means, causing turmoil in the last years of his life. He finally passed away from bone cancer on June 23 at 86 years of age.
Two days later, Farrah Fawcett passed. I, along with many young males of the era, kept a poster of her on my wall circa 1976. She was certainly one of the most beautiful women of the 70's. She was my generation's Marilyn Monroe, with her iconic poster being the best selling poster of all time. Beyond that, her life seemed a tension between her willingness to exploit her looks and her desire for privacy and not to be exploited as a sex symbol. As she aged and fell from the public eye, the latter won out and she agreed to be photographed nude in about 1995 in Playboy, providing them with their best selling issues of the decade. She finally lost a three year battle with anal cancer on June 25.
And of course, on that day, Michael Jackson died of a massive heart attack. He was as pathetic and troubled a figure off stage as he was talented on-stage. He seemed to live life in a bizarre alternate universe that involved, if not paedophilia, then at least inappropriate relationships with children. As with both MacMahon and Fawcett, his passing is a sad day, though I find the coverage of his passing and the adoration heaped upon this man seemingly with no acknowledgment of the whole man troubling indeed.
At any rate, this has been a bad week for celebrities. May they rest in peace.
Gov. Sanford - Time To Resign Or Be Prosecuted
Carrying on an affair while in office - very poor judgment, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Leaving for a roll in the hay with mistress over Father's Day - judgment now at slimeball level. Give me the stone, I'll throw it.
The governor goes off the radar and is uncontactable, leaving the state without its Executive and without turning power over to the Lt. Governor - its time to resign with whatever grace he can muster.
The governor gets caught and makes a tearful mea culpa - cry me a river. Actions have consequences, and while I may feel some remorse for the governor, saying "sorry" does not begin to fix the problem of a governor whose lack of judgment in his personal life held out the potential for serious damage to his state.
Making the trip on the public's dime - you're out of there, Bozo. And if the state wants to file criminal charges over misuse of funds, they are completely warranted.
Iran Update - 25 June: Mousavi Fights Back, Dissidents Call On Israel To Help In The Commo War
Many things of import happened in Iran today, but I held off writing this post to see if a rumor spreading on twitter could be verified. That rumor was that Iraq's senior cleric - and Iran's most popular cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - had publicly denounced the Iranian regime for its brutality. I've blogged about Sistani's importance here. If you haven't read it, you should also see this 2007 Boston Globe article, "Shi'ite Cleric Gains Sway Across The Border." If the rumor was true, the importance of a public denunciation from him could not be overestimated. Unfortunately, I could not verify it.
The most important development has been Mousavi's decision not to capitulate to pressure from the theocracy and to come out swinging. This from yesterday's LA Times:
After days of relative quiet, Mir-Hossein Mousavi launched a broadside against the Iranian leadership in comments published today, suggesting that the political rift over the country's disputed presidential election is far from over.
The former prime minister turned artist and scholar accused Iran's supreme leader of not acting in the interests of the country and said Iran had suffered a dramatic change for the worse.
He slammed state-controlled broadcast outlets, which have intensified a media blitz against him and his supporters with allegations that recent unrest over the disputed June 12 presidential election was instigated by Iran's international rivals. And he vowed to pursue his quest to have President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection annulled.
Read the entire article. There has been some question, given his relative quiet of the past few days, whether Mousavi was getting cold feet and would fall from the titular forefront of this revolutionary movement. That is the subject of Krauthammer's article today, noting that the revolution may wilt if it does not find its Yeltsin. Mousavi appears, for the moment, back on track now to try to fill Yeltsin's shoes, though the effectiveness of the theocracy's repression is relentless. Indeed, the same LA Times article linked above goes on to say that Mousavi met with a 70 person group of university professors on Wednesday and that, immediately following the meeting, the professors were arrested en masse by the regime.
Several days ago, I blogged that the U.S. should be doing all in its power to covertly support the uprising, noting in the comments that the greatest need was to counter the theocracy's attempts to shut down communications and to facilitate as much as possible communications to and inside of Iran. Congressional Quarterly is reporting that Senator's McCain, Graham and Lieberman are drafting legislation to require the U.S. to do precisely that. Good for them, but what that tells us is it is likely Obama has our covert operators sitting on their thumbs at the moment. If so, that is an atrocity. If Obama still has dreams of crafting a grand diplomatic bargain with the butchers of Tehran, he is a danger to us and the world. As Robert Averich states, Obama seems to have graduated from the "Neville Chamberlain school of international relations."
Communications is critical to this ongoing revolt. In fact, it is important enough so that some of the protesters inside Iran are reaching out for assistance to Israel. This from Arutz Sheva News:
. . . "Dear Israeli Brothers and Sisters," writes Iranian dissident Arash Irandoost, "Iran needs your help more than ever now. And we will be eternally grateful. Please help opposition television and radio stations which are blocked and being jammed by the Islamic Republic (Nokia and Siemens) resume broadcast to Iran. There is a total media blackout and Iranians inside Iran for the most part are not aware of their brave brothers and sisters fighting and losing their lives daily. And the unjust treatment and brutal massacre of the brave Iranians in the hands of the mullah's paid terrorist Hamas and Hizbullah gangs are not seen by the majority of the Iranians. Please help in any way you can to allow these stations resume broadcasting to Iran.
"And, please remember that we will remember, as you have remembered Cyrus the Great's treatment of you in your time of need," Irandoost concludes, signing his blogged call for help "Your Iranian Brothers and Sisters!"
In an interview with Israel National News, Iranian expatriate pro-democracy activist Amil Imani said that Irandoost's message represents the sentiments of much of the youth in the streets in Iran. They have a strong belief in the technological know-how of the Israelis to overcome the Iranian regime's attempts to block communications. . . .
Shiran Ebadi, famous Iranian female lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, made a statement the other day that she is willing to represent the family of the slain girl, Neda Soltana, in an action against the government. Iranian News announced today, reported at the blog NIAC, that a formal complaint has been filed against Ebadi to strip her of her license to practice law for "repetitive infringement of Islamic decrees, Sharia law and the constitution."
I blogged in the post Faultlines Developing that significant cracks throughout the regime were becoming apparent. Yet another became apparent today when President-elect Ahmedinejad held his formal victory party. All members of Iran's 290 person stong Parliament were invited to attend. The BBC is reporting that a substantial majority, 185, did not attend. The BBC, stating the obvious, notes "the move is a sign of the deep split at the top of Iran after disputed presidential polls."
There was supposed to be a general strike on Tuesday, though there was no confirmation of it occurring from any of the news sites. The progression of the 1979 protest went from street demonstration to general strikes. That will likely be the next phase of things if the revolution continues to grow. Gooya News now has pictures from a strike among the bazzaris in at least one city, Saghez, in the Kurdish region of Iran.
Lastly, via Hot Air, here is a BBC interview of the doctor who attempted to treat Neda, the girl brutally murdered by the basij during a protest in Iran.
Prior Posts:
24 June 2009: Glimpses Into Chaos - Iran, 24 June
23 June 2009: Obama, Iran & The Rising Of The Sun
23 June 2009: Obama On Iran: A Broken Moral Compass, A Distorted Perception Of Reality
21 June 2009: Faultlines Developing
21 June 2009: When The Regime Will Fall
20 June 2009: The Regime Turns On Its Own People (Updated)
20 June 2009: Life, Death & Terrorism On Iran's Streets - Neda
19 June 2009: Countdown To High Noon
19 June 2009: An Iranian Showdown Cometh - Liveblogging Khameini's Speech At Friday Prayers
18 June 2009: Iran Update
16 June 2009: Iran 6/16: The Fire Still Burning, An Incendiary Letter From Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, State Dept. Intercedes With Twitter & Obama Talks Softly
16 June 2009: Breaking News: Vote Recount In Iran, Too Little, Too Late
15 June 2009: Iran Buys Time, Obama Votes Present, Iraq's Status Is Recognized
15 June 2009: The Fog Of War - & Twitter
15 June 2009: Chants Of Death To Khameini
15 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Tehran Is Burning; What Will The Iranian Army Do? (Updated)
13 June 2009: The Mad Mullah's Man Wins Again - For Now
15 April 2008: The Next Moves In An Existential Chess Match (Background On Iran's Theocracy)
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The Orwell-Obama-Hoyer Pay As You Go Legislation
Democrats won't be the party of deficits.
Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md), Congress Must Pay for What It Spends, WSJ, 25 June 2009
To see Democrats at their most Orwellian, no need to go further today than Steny Hoyer in the WSJ, shilling for Obama's "pay-go" legislation and blaming all deficits on a combination of profligate Bush spending and "reckless" Bush tax cuts. As the Wall St. Journal's senior economic writer, Stephen Moore, explained in a recent interview:
President Obama can read the opinion polls, and he is seeing what we've been talking about every night, which is the American people are absolutely incensed about the debt that's going on in this country. And so now President Obama is trying to sound like a born-again deficit hawk.
The difference between Obama's words and deeds is a vast and yawning chasm. It is true that the greatest sin of post-Reagan era Republicans has been to jettison fiscal discipline. It is a fundamental failure that has allowed the left to paint Republicans as hypocrites. But for the left to claim the mantle of "fiscal discipline" for themselves is to pass beyond the bounds of any reasonable definition of the word "hypocrisy" and enter into Orwellian space. But that is precisely where Hoyer, on behalf of Obama, takes us today.
The Hoyer article deserves a full roasting, so here goes.
In recent years, America's fiscal story has been one of steady decline -- from record surpluses to record deficits. In 2001, the federal government had a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. Today, we are looking at a fiscal year 2009 deficit of $1.7 trillion.
"Steady decline?" In other words, today's multi-trillion dollar deficit is the natural evolution of the Bush years? The actual budget deficit in 2006, before Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats took control of the purse strings, was $248 billion. The only way you go from that to a $1.75 trillion deficit in 2009 and describe it as a "steady decline" is to redefine the word "steady" to mean "fell off a cliff."
Further, the Clinton surplus was the function of an accounting gimmick with Social Security enacted during the 90's. Social Security surpluses of those years - and continuing through today - were used to buy government bonds, thus making the annual revenues a part of the general funds of Congress (and that a profligate Congress spent wholesale every year). It was and is a vast Ponzi scheme. Our actual national debt increased every year under Clinton. Social Security is now a time bomb set to blow up because the left in Congress refused to do anything about it. The huge number of baby boomers who gave the government the illusion of surpluses in the Clinton years are starting to make claims on the system that will steadily grow and overwhelm the system in just a few years.
A number of factors have brought us to this cash-strapped point, including reckless tax cuts, the cost of two wars, entitlement programs that have grown on autopilot, and the necessary, though costly, efforts to get our economy out of recession.
Wow. There is not a shred of intellectual honesty in that sentence.
1. Bush's tax cuts not only raised tax revenues because of an expanding tax base, they did so at the greatest rate in our nations history.
That was completely predictable from the historical data we have on the effect of tax cuts on the American economy during the 1920's, 60's and 80's..
2. The cost of the two wars we are fighting added to our deficit, but pale in comparison to real culprit, the growth in domestic spending. To put this in perspective, the total cost of the Iraq War from 2003 to 2008 was $551 billion dollars. Obama quadrupled that in his first hundred days with massive domestic spending - which, as an important aside, he did at the cost of our national defense. His budget reduces defense-related R&D, cuts major weapons systems, cuts missile defense, and holds defense spending below inflation, resulting in an ever-shrinking defense budget. As Michael O'Hanlon wrote in the Washington Post:
After three months of very impressive decisions regarding national security, President Obama made perhaps his first significant mistake. It concerns the defense budget, where his plans are insufficient to support the national security establishment over the next five years.
The truth of our deficits is ever increasing profligate spending above tax receipts on the domestic front - something Obama has just put on steroids.
3. The entitlement programs didn't grow on auto-pilot. "Auto-pilot" suggests that no one has attempted to curb the growth. The truth is that Steny Hoyer and the left beat back every attempt at reforming Social Security. Does this look like "auto-pilot" to you.
4. The massive spending by Obama was not "necessary" to get our economy out of recession. It was a choice the left made to fund every liberal special interest program they could think of under the rubric of Keynesian economics. Other alternatives to stimulate the economy were equally viable, but none offered the left a chance to go hog wild at the public trough.
But by far the worst decision was the abandonment in the Bush years of the principle that our country should pay for what it buys. It's time to learn from that error and establish that principle in law. President Obama has made the pay-as-you-go rule -- a.k.a. "paygo" -- a central part of his campaign for fiscal responsibility. Under paygo, Congress is compelled to find savings for the dollars it spends.
This is a joke, right? True, Bush and the Republican Congress deserve opprobrium for their lack of fiscal discipline. But their lack of discipline is infinitesimal compared to Obama and the far left who control Congress and the purse strings today. In this instance, a WaPo graph is worth nine trillion words:
The truth is that this pay-go legislation is a penultimate act of political cynicism. Its the left trying to cover-up their Obama Gone Wild spending spree by turning reality on its head. There are two truths to this snake oil Steny Hoyer is peddling. The "pay-go" legislation Hoyer is hawking specifically exempts Obama's multi-trillion dollar pet projects from its restrictions. It will provide cover for the largest planned expansion of spending and borrowing in our nation's history. It's only practical effect beyond pure propaganda for Obama will be to make tax cuts a thing of the past.
In the 1990s, paygo proved to be one of our most valuable tools for climbing out of a budgetary hole. As President Obama put it earlier this month, "It is no coincidence that this rule was in place when we moved . . . to record surpluses in the 1990s -- and that when this rule was abandoned, we returned to record deficits that doubled the national debt."
President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress set paygo aside, turning borrowed money into massive tax cuts for the most privileged. Borrowing made those tax cuts politically pain-free as long as Mr. Bush was in office, but it only passed the bill on to the next generation -- along with ever-inflating interest payments.
As I indicated above, a good part of the budget "surpluses" of the 1990's were nothing more than accounting changes that, in essence, made of Social Security a ponzi scheme. To the extent there was any fiscal discipline, it was the discipline imposed by Newt Gingrich and the House on the Clinton administration. As discussed in the quote below, pay-go legislation played little if any role in imposing fiscal discipline during the 90's as it was regularly ignored under House rules.
Pay-go was terminated in 2001 to allow for the Bush tax cuts - and you can see the result in the graph above. We didn't lose revenues, we gained them on a historic scale. Yet under pay-go, the math would have ignored this historical certainty and required massive cuts in spending to enact the tax cuts. Pay-go, since revived by Pelosi as a House rule in 2007, has been equally ineffective. It has been regularly ignored whenever convenient for Democrats - such as, for example, when passing Obama's massive 9,000 ear-mark strong "stimulus" package. This from Brian Riedl at the Heritage Foundation:
PAYGO has proven to be more of a talking point than an actual tool for budget discipline. During the 1991-2002 round of statutory PAYGO, Congress and the President still added more than $700 billion to the budget deficit and simply cancelled every single sequestration. Since the 2007 creation of the PAYGO rule, Congress has waived it numerous times and added $600 billion to the deficit.
Creating a PAYGO law and then blocking its enforcement is inconsistent and hypocritical. And given their recent waiving of PAYGO to pass a $1.1 trillion stimulus bill, there is no reason to believe the current Congress and the President are any more likely to enforce PAYGO than their predecessors were. And even if it were enforced, PAYGO applies to only a small fraction of federal spending (new entitlements). Consequently, PAYGO is merely a distraction from real budget reforms that could rein in runaway spending and budget deficits.
You can read the rest of Mr. Hoyer's Orwellian scratchings here. Pay-go legislation really is political cynicism taken to its zenith. And neither Steny Hoyer nor Obama display the least bit of intellectual honesty in pushing it as political cover for an experiment in deficit spending that could truly doom our economy.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Watcher's Council Nominations & An Opening
Each week, the members of the Watcher's Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for best post. The Watcher publishes the results each Friday morning.
There is an opening at the Council if you would like to nominate your blog for the Council. If you go to the Watcher's site, you will find instructions on how to apply on the right-hand sidebar.
Terry Trippany plays the role of Watcher of Weasels. Do visit the Watcher's Site for his theme of the week. This week, it is the techniques of propaganda being employed by the one:
Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (…) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (…) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.
Those aren't actually Obama's words - nor Terry's, for that matter, they're Hitler's. Terry quotes liberally from Mein Kampf to show that Obama's techiniques in fact have well trod historical antecedents. Do read Terry's entire post, When President's Tell Yarns: A Culture Of Deceit.
This week's nominations are:
Concil:
The Provocateur - Too Good To Check: How the Conservative Media Unwittingly Smeared ACORN and Handed Them a Gift
Joshuapundit - Obama’s Press Conference: The Fiction Starts To Crack
The Razor - Iran and the Seasons of 1989
Rhymes With Right - NY Times Buries Important Detail In Promoting Another Law Limiting Second Amendment Rights
Wolf Howling - Obama On Iran: A Broken Moral Compass, A Distorted Perception Of Reality
The Glittering Eye - Thought Experiment: the Great De-Leveraging
The Colossus of Rhodey - Why does the Left accept the legitimacy of “elected” dictators so quickly …
Right Truth - The Fence Sitter
Soccer Dad - The njdc’s ledge
Bookworm Room - An Open Letter to the Iranian People
Mere Rhetoric - It’s Official: Obama Policy Triggers “Most Tense Encounter” In Years Between US And Israel (Plus: Can You Guess MR’s Blind Item?)
Non-Council
Submitted By: The Provocateur – National Review - Misremembering Reagan
Submitted By: Joshuapundit and Rhymes With Right- Dry Bones - Obama’s 3 AM Phone Call
Submitted By: Wolf Howling – Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog - Obama’s Phil Cooney And The New CCSP Report
Submitted By: The Glittering Eye – Christopher Badeaux / The New Ledger - Through the Looking Glass With Andrew Sullivan
Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey – Oliver Kamm - Reaching out to ‘the Muslim world’
Submitted By: Right Truth – AP – AINA - Unrest could hinder Tehran’s regional goals
Submitted By: Soccer Dad – Instapundit - Why worry about an EMP attack?
Submitted By: Bookworm Room – The Futurist - Eight Ways to Supercharge the US Economy
Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric – Christopher Hitchens - Persian Paranoia
Submitted By: The Watcher – Michelle Malkin - Who’s funding the Obamacare Astroturf campaign?
Glimpses Into Chaos - Iran, 24 June
The Iranian demonstrators of 1979, whose children are demonstrating today, would not have dreamt that the turban was simply going replace the crown and that Iran would go from one repression to another. However, it is not the labelling of a state as "Islamic" that makes it just or unjust, but its structures: does it have sufficient checks and balances between the branches of government, is the leader accountable and replaceable by the people freely; are the people sovereign or the clerics?
Asim Siddiqui, From Imam To Dictator, The Guardian, 24 June 2009
From today's protests in Iran. "Death to the dictator."
This from a CNN Interview with an unnamed woman in Tehran discussing what she saw happening in Iran today:
I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone.
They tried to beat everyone on Saadi bridge and throwing them off of the bridge…. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, who was watching the scene, he just fainted. I also saw people shooting, I mean the security forces shooting on people, on Lalezar. Of course were afraid….
They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. They were cursing — saying very bad words to everyone. They were beating old men. And this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us.
And this from a medical student working in an Iranian hospital translated from farsi and posted at The Guardian.
only want to speak about what I have witnessed. I am a medical student. There was chaos at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them. This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff.
The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help--I'm sure it will even be worst tonight. What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year-old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared?
This issue is not about cheating (election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people. They've put a baton in the hand of every 13-14 year old to smash the faces of "the bunches who are less than dirt" (government is calling the people who are uprising dried-up torn and weeds). This is what sickens me from dealing with these issues. And from those who shut their eyes and close their ears and claim the riots are in opposition of the government and presidency!! No! The people's complaint is against the egregious injustices committed against the people.
As this woman indicates, part of the modus operandi of the government is to try to prevent the people whom they have slaughtered from becoming martyrs, with people coallescing around their graves. The dead are carted off and buried, the bodies not returned to their families, and memorials are outlawed. In the case of Neda Agha-Soltan, murdered while standing in the street at a protest on Saturday, it has gone even beyond that, with her family forcibly removed and no longer contactable:
Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.
It appears Iran's regime continues its brutal crackdown making large scale use of hired thugs. This from the Guardian:
Newspaper Roozonline has an interview (in Persian) with one of the young plainclothes militiamen who have been beating protesters.
UPDATE: Robert says the man is paid 2m rial per day, which would be about £1220 for ten days of work. A hefty fee, even by UK standards. A reader writes: "You can imagine what that kind of money means to a villager from Khorasan".
The Guardian's Robert Tait sends this synopsis:The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault protestors with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as "Hajji", who has instructed his men to "beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won't be able to stand up". The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such as Khuzestan, Arak and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says, have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly-paid than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview provides a key insight into where Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests.
Clashes occurred throughout Iran, with possibly the largest being in front of Iran's Parliament building. Hundreds of basij, the theocracy's nazi style "brown-shirt" army of thugs, attacked protestors throughout the day and sped into action whenever groups of ten or more people were seen.
It is now night in Iran and, in what must be the most ironic twist to this revolt, people are acting in the same fashion that Ayatollah Khomeini, father of this theocracy, told Iranians to do three decades ago as a sign of their desire to overthrow the regime. Cries of “Allahu Akbar!” are being shouted throughout Tehran “with deafening intensity.”
A final look at today, with police clubbing men and women on the streets, though no protest is apparent:
This Day In History - 24 June: Scotland Wins At Bannockburn, Medieval Dance Fever, & A Poor General Haig Cost The UK
Art: Tantallon Castle, North Berwick, Scotland, Thomas Moran
1314 – : The Battle of Bannockburn concludes outside of Stirling Castle with a decisive victory of the 6.500 Scottish forces led by Robert the Bruce over a much larger English force. It was the decisive battle of the First War of Scottish Independence with Scotland regaining its independence a decade later.
1340 – A large French fleet that had been gathered for the invasion of England was engaged and destroyed by Edward III of England in the Battle of Sluys, an early and important battle in the Hundred Years' War. It destroyed most of France's naval capacity and virtually insured that the war would be fought on French soil.
1374 – A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion. It was likely caused by ergot poisoning.
1812 РNapoleon's Grande Arm̩e of 650,000 soldiers crosses the Neman River, beginning the invasion of Russia. By November, the Army would be in full retreat, with only 27,000 able bodied soldiers left, the rest ravaged by starvation, disease, or fallen to the war.
1916 – Mary Pickford, a slient film star, is the first actress to get a million dollar contract.
1916 – The Battle of the Somme begins with a week long artillery bombardment on the German Line. There is likely no better example of poor generalship and the cost that means in blood. General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces, used a cookie cutter strategy of artillery fire followed by massed, slow moving frontal attacks on an enemy dug in and firing machine guns. In two weeks of battle, the Brits would suffer 350,000 casualties, with the 1st day of infantry attacks, July 1, being the bloodiest day in English history. The British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead. Haig should have been executed.
1948 – Start of the Berlin Blockade. The Soviet Union cut off overland travel from the West to West Berlin in an effort to take de facto control over the city. They would maintain the blockade for almost a year in one of the first battles of the Cold War.
1957 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment in Roth v. United States, a fractured decision that actually led to the vast expansion of the porn industry and the Sexual Revolution of the 60's.
Births
1813 – Henry Ward Beecher, American clergyman and reformer (d. 1887)
1895 – Jack Dempsey, American boxer (d. 1983)
Deaths
803 – Higbald of Lindisfarne. He had been the Bishop of Lindisfarne from 780 until his death. He was present for the famous Viking raid and slaughter at Lindisfarne in 793 and is remembered for memorializing the event in his letters to Alcuin of York.
1519 – Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara and a member of the infamous Borgia family that "came to epitomize the ruthless Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption alleged to be characteristic of the Renaissance Papacy."
1908 – Grover Cleveland, President of the United States (b. 1837)
1987 – Jackie Gleason, American actor and musician (b. 1916)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Obama, Iran, & The Rising Of The Sun
. . . Since taking office, Obama has argued that reclaiming America's moral authority by ending torture and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay provides essential diplomatic leverage to influence events in such strategic parts of the world as the Middle East and Central Asia. The speech he delivered to the Islamic world in Cairo eights days before the June 12 Iranian election sought to do that by providing what the president saw as an unvarnished accounting of U.S. policy in Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday, the NYT attempted to make essentially the same argument. The claims of the White House and their NYT sycophants to the contrary, Obama contributed nothing to the cause of this rebellion. There is not a single fact to suggest that this rebellion in Iran occurred because of an "Obama effect," nor that "the mere election of Barack Obama in the United States had galvanized reformers in Iran to demand change." In his prior acts of outreach to the mad mullahs, Obama only bestowed legitimacy on Iran's theocracy. The greatest threat to Iran today comes from a democratic Iraq on its border that honors the traditional Shia practice of quietism - i.e., maintaining a wall between mosque and state. Iran is a deeply troubled country of 60 million people held under the rule of a medieval theocracy by ever greater repression. The theocracy itself is illegitimate when looked at in terms of a millenium of apolitical Shia tradition - a tradition shredded in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and his velyat-e-faqi, a new philosophy justifying and requiring theocratic rule. And indeed, the most popular religious figure in both Iraq and Iran is now Grand Ayatolah Ali Sistani, an adherent to the quietist school. And if you want to see how that was having an impact on Iranians, do see this 2007 Boston Globe article, "Shi'ite Cleric Gains Sway Across The Border."
The White House, along with the assistance of the NYT, is now taking credit for the revolt in Iran, tying the motivation of rank and file Iranians to risk life and limb in protest of their government to Obama's Cairo speech occurring two weeks before the election. This becomes truly an act of divine intervention when one realizes that the "speech was not broadcast in Iran, where the goverment jammed signals to block satellite owners from watching." But Obama and his many Obamaphiles in the MSM are not about to let facts get in their way. It is impossible to imagine a more aggrandizing and arrogant spin of fantasy.
Update: Via Gateway Pundit, now Rahm Emmanuel is explicitly mouthing this ridiculous meme.
The Washington Post reported today:
"We're trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves," said a senior administration official who, like others, declined to be identified, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
Obama's approach to Iran, including his assertion that the unrest there represents a debate among Iranians unrelated to the United States, is an acknowledgment that a U.S. president's words have a limited ability to alter foreign events in real time and could do more harm than good. But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic's Islamic authority in its 30-year history.
The fact that Obama's Cairo speech never made it into Iran kind of puts the kibosh on the White House claims that the speech played a role in motivating the protests. Further, even if Obama's Cairo speech was not jammed throughout Iran, nothing Obama said in Cairo could possibly be construed as giving impetus to Iran's rank and file to risk their very lives for democracy. Indeed, Obama clearly signalled in the speech that he had no intention of continuing to promote democracy in the Middle East. And lest there be any question about that, Obama "zeroed out funding for pro-democracy programs inside Iran from the State Department budget for fiscal 2010."
A viable argument can be made that we are seeing the wages of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. As I wrote last year:
That said, even if Iraq plays some role in Iran's uprising, it is beyond challenge that the major causes of Iran's rebellion have been present for years. Brutal repression, a mysoginist culture that legally treats women as second class citizens, a thoroughly corrupt theocracy, unemployment above 20% and inflation at equal numbers. All of that is multiplied in importance by the fact that a majority of Iranians are under thirty years old and who have little opportunities open to them under Iran's theocracy. Most of these causes were present in Iran a decade ago and gave life to the "Tehran Spring" uprisings. The final straw giving rise to those uprisings was a belief that conservatives were keeping the reformist President Khatami from enacting reforms. In the instant case, what has caused today's revolt is the perception that mid level cleric cum Supreme Guide Khameini committed massive election fraud in order to keep a reformer out of office.
For Obama or his sychophants to claim credit for this uprising leaves one near speechless. It follows the same logic as saying that, because Obama said the sun will rise yesterday, the fact that it rose today is proof that Obama is the cause of it. That this tripe is being peddled by the NYT yesterday and reported without the scorn it deserves from the Washinton Post today - apparently without either even checking to see whether the speech was broadcast in Iran - establishes possibly the high water mark of the MSM's unquestioning love for the One. They are not a questioning press. They are instead unfiltered conduits for raw spin from the White House. To go any further than this in order to show their love for the One requries a hotel room.
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