37’s 4ths

July 4, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Holidays, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The Philippine Republic and the USA share July Fourth as their Independence Day.  On 4 July 1956, Vice President and Mrs. Nixon joined President Ramon Magsaysay  and First Lady Luz Magsaysay in Manila to celebrate the Philippines’ 10th and America’s 180th birthdays.   (Photo for LIFE magazine by John Dominis.)

July Fourth was always a meaningful day for RN throughout his presidency:

1969- RN spends the holiday weekend in Key Biscayne, Fla., where he attends a
parade and exchanges messages with anthropologist Thor Heyerdawl, who is on the boat ”Expedition Ra” on his way across the Atlantic.

1970- RN is at the Western White House in San Clemente, California, meeting with Vietnam peace talks envoy David K.E. Bruce.

1971- The official Fourth celebration occurs on the 5th this year and RN witnesses the certification of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution —which added eleven million new voters to the rolls by lowering the voting age to 18— in the East Room of the White House. RN’s extended remarks were particularly significant.

1972- RN gives a Fouth of July radio address from San Clemente, Calif., and reveals his plans for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976.

1973- RN issues his Independence Day Statement from the Western White House in San Clemente: “Independence Day is a day to secure our moorings, to consider how far we have come as a nation, and to understand where we must yet go. It is a day of solemnity, for the birth of our nation was a momentous event for all mankind. But it is also a day of great joy as we celebrate the wondrous blessings of liberty and freedom.”

1974- President Nixon is at Key Biscayne, Florida after having returned from the Soviet Summit in Moscow on the previous evening.  In his Independence Day Statement, he says: “The Fourth of July is a uniquely American holiday. But it is also a holiday that echoes the hopes and aspirations of people throughout the world. In each of my-trips abroad, I have seen tangible evidence of people’s basic belief in the value of the principles that underlie our Republic, and outpouring of affection and respect for the Nation that Abraham Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth.”

On 4 July 1970, RN recorded a message to be played for the crowd on the Mall waiting for the Honor America Day ceremony followed by the annual fireworks at the Washington Monument:

WE AMERICANS are known throughout the world as a forward-looking people. The United States of America is in fact a symbol of progress, of hope, and of just and orderly growth.

Yet, on one day each year we turn and look back at our past. We look back today over almost 200 years to a group of men meeting in Philadelphia and we look back in pride and in wonder, for what they did on this day is the single greatest political achievement in the history of man.

And we are the beneficiaries of that achievement.

To those of you who have gathered on this day to honor America, I send my best wishes for an enjoyable, memorable Fourth of July celebration. I know that the sponsors of this event, from every walk of life and from both major parties, have done everything they can to make this day a very special one for all of you.

Yet, there is something remaining to be done in order to make Honor America Day the kind of special occasion we all want it to be. It is my hope that each of us will take away not only our proud memories of this day, but also the living spirit of the Fourth of July as well, a spirit that created a free and strong and prosperous nation.

That is the spirit that can truly honor America, not only today but always. Let us all look back today so that we will be reminded of what great sacrifices have been made to make this day possible, and then let us turn once more to the future, inspired by what this day means to us and to all those who love freedom throughout the world.

A tip o’the Independence Cap to James Heintze.

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

July 4, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

7.4.09

July 4, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Holidays | Leave a Comment 

Super K

July 4, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Jonathan Karl has a Wall Street Journal book review of Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year, Allistar Horne’s new book about Henry Kissinger’s crucial role in diffusing international crisis and a potential World War III:

And so it was. On Oct. 6 — the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur — Syria and Egypt, backed by Russian arms, attacked Israel, prompting the most dangerous superpower showdown since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nixon, in an all-out war of his own with Congress and Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, over demands for his White House tapes, could not have been more distracted. He was drinking heavily, Mr. Horne reports, and absent from key national-security meetings. This was Henry Kissinger’s crisis to deal with.

Beyond the defense of Israel, Kissinger’s objective was to keep the Soviets out of the fighting and prevent the Yom Kippur War from turning into World War III. On Saturday, Oct. 20, he flew to Moscow to meet directly with Brezhnev. While Mr. Kissinger was mid-flight, Nixon, suddenly engaged in diplomacy, sent a letter to Brezhnev declaring that Mr. Kissinger, now secretary of state, had “full authority” to conduct negotiations. When Mr. Kissinger arrived in Moscow, he called Al Haig, the president’s chief of staff, to complain that Nixon’s letter made it impossible for him to use the ploy of saying he needed to consult with Washington before making an agreement.

“Will you get off my back?” Mr. Haig pleaded. “I have troubles of my own.”

“What troubles can you possibly have in Washington on a Saturday night?” Mr. Kissinger asked.

What troubles indeed. With the Middle East in flames and the Russians threatening to send in troops, news in Washington was dominated by the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon’s firing of the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the special prosecutor. As Mr. Haig told Mr. Kissinger: “All hell has broken loose.”

It would be up to Mr. Kissinger to deal with the Soviets and the Chinese and to broker peace between the Arabs and Israelis. To Mr. Horne, Mr. Kissinger performed magnificently during this, his finest hour. He cultivated the new relationship with China, personally meeting with Mao in Bejing. He used the China card to gain leverage over the Soviets. And he established a relationship with Anwar Sadat’s Egypt, reducing Soviet influence there and setting the stage for the Camp David accords five years later. (As for the Allende coup in Chile, Mr. Horne absolves Mr. Kissinger of any responsibility.) Mr. Horne tells a riveting story about one of the country’s most powerful secretaries of state serving, at the time, one of its weakest presidents.

“Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year” is an authorized account, and Mr. Horne is at times uncomfortably close to his subject. He describes one interview with Mr. Kissinger “over whiskey in his lair at Kent, Connecticut” and another while lunching “in London’s posh Wiltons Restaurant.” This is Mr. Horne’s style: familiarity breeding anything but contempt. At one point, discussing Mr. Kissinger’s dealings with German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Mr. Horne adds, as an aside, that he got to know “Willy” in the years after World War II and that “he was a boisterous, uninhibited, and rather lovable personality with a colossal appetite for boozing and wenching.”

Sarah Palin Is Not The New Nixon

July 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin | 2 Comments 

So Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has decided to step down before the end of her first term freeing her from the constraints of local politics. This is a possible signal she will use her free time to travel the country, effectively running for president 3 years early. TNN’s own John Taylor wrote an article shortly after the election and suggested some advice on her longterm campaign strategy for 2016. Taylor advised her to go back to work and take some time off the national stage in order to gain experience and gain “a little scarce and mysterious” credibility.

But Taylor also said that Gov. Palin should take the time to read up on international issues, meet with world leaders, and like RN become a loyal campaigner for GOP candidates in the midterm elections. Perhaps this is the route she’s going, but maybe just a tad too early for RN’s tastes:

RN would begin with the assumption that Obama will probably not fail. An incumbent is likely to be reelected, and Obama will probably not make Carter’s mistakes. Because circumstances may nonetheless hobble him, however, Mr. Nixon would advise Palin to keep her ‘12 options open, but he’d urge her to fix her attention on ‘16.

As for the present Palin, he would have enormous respect for the potential she embodies. She has an astonishing reservoir of political capital. But he would have some significant concerns. And so he would almost certainly write her a “Dear Governor Palin” letter beginning, “I am sure you are receiving a great deal of free advice from well-meaning fans and self-appointed advisers around the country. While you are of course under no obligation to give it any consideration whatsoever, I have taken the liberty of enclosing a memorandum containing just a few…” In such circumstances, his insights were usually based in the reliability of his own experience. He would make points such as this:

Take some time off the national stage. The temptation will be to accept too many of the invitations that are flowing in and to go out and challenge her critics. We’ve probably seen too much of her already just this week. Better to be a little scarce and mysterious. As RN liked to say, it never hurts to leave them wanting more.

Get back to work. Her critics say she’s a lightweight fashion plate. Confound them by being an effective governor (or senator).

See the world and meet leaders. RN would consider this crucial — first, because she’s justifiably seen as weak in foreign policy, and second, because it would help her prepare to be in power.

Do favors. Some of RN’s most important political work was done in 1964, when he campaigned loyally for the hopeless Goldwater candidacy, and in the midterm elections of 1966, doing favors that were repaid in 1968. In 2012, assuming she doesn’t run, Palin should be the most loyal and committed advocate of whomever does. Purely in terms of her own political interests, the worst than could happen is that he would win and she’d have her pick of jobs.

Don’t let your enemies define you. Palin provoked panic among abortion rights advocates. The weekend after she was named to the ticket, Andrew Sullivan republished a lie about her son Trig’s parentage on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site that obviously still rankles. Yet Palin would close herself off from growth as a leader by taking it personally. If some people despise her because of her pro-life views, what might she learn from their passion? Some women experience the possibility of restrictions on abortion as an existential challenge. She is comfortable seeing the issue almost solely in terms of the rights of the unborn. What about the rights of the half of the population that wasn’t permitted to vote until 1920? Hillary Clinton did herself a tremendous favor three years ago with a speech in which she spoke respectfully of those who hate abortion. Palin should consider making an analogous gesture, both on the abortion and the gay rights front.

Read and think. At least from afar, Palin doesn’t seem curious or self-critical. Confidence is good in a leader; smugness is not. Mr. Nixon read hungrily all his life and spent long hours in Socratic dialogs with experts, advisers, and aides. While his core principles didn’t waiver, his approach to great issues changed with the times. The anti-communist of the 1940s became the internationalist of the 1950s, the course-changing peacemaker of the 1960s and ’70s, and the elder statesman of the ’80s, respected by all his Democratic and Republican successors in spite of the circumstances of his administration’s end.

As Palin matures as a potential national leader, her views will, one hopes, become more moderate and nuanced. Her New Reagan advisers will caution her against permitting this to happen. Lost in the fantasy that Reagan’s conservative bona fides (rather than the “R” after his name) won him the ‘80 election, they’ll urge her not to tamper with the time-tested Palin brand. But if she thinks she’s fully formed and ready to be President, she’ll never make it. She’ll fade away prematurely or, at best, squander her potential on a quixotic ‘12 bid that would probably relegate her to oblivion and her party to another generation in the wilderness. If she uses the next eight years wisely, focused more on substance than on politics, she could truly be the new Nixon, and a winner.

Watch What We Do Not What We Say

July 3, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

The President held a Town Hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia, on Wednesday.  The logistics were the subject of some controversy.

Before:

And after (per the WaPo):

In the stage-managed event, questions for Obama came from a live audience selected by the White House and the college, and from Internet questions chosen by the administration’s new-media team. Of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his staff from videos submitted to the White House Web site or from those responding to a request for “tweets.”

The president called randomly on three audience members. All turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the Service Employees International Union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. White House officials said that was a coincidence.

Which Revolution?

July 3, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Europe, History, Holidays, Religion, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In my opinion, the best part of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961, had nothing to do with asking anyone anything. The moment to remember was when he said:

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.

It is interesting, even sadly ironic that what is going on in our nation right now does resemble an old revolutionary spirit, but not necessarily that of Lexington, Concord, or Philadelphia. In fact, a case can be made – if one looks closely – that the spirit of 2009 is more like the spirit of 1789 than 1776.

The American and French Revolutions are linked in our minds because of chronology; but they were vastly different affairs. One led to a new birth of freedom; the other to terror and tyranny. That one also became the model for horrors to come.

As our nation morphs its way along, en route to becoming what some liberal diehards very much want it to be, a significant number of people would seemingly prefer “Liberty – Equality – Fraternity” over “Life – Liberty – and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And it is in the parsing of those vitally important words that we find the keys to understanding where we came from, where we are, and where we are going.

One revolution was about individual rights and dreams. The other was about “the people” as a group and the highest virtue being “the greater good.” Can you guess which one is which?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, he was borrowing from 17th century English philosopher, John Locke, whose triad was “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” Jefferson’s use of this language was clearly designed to describe the rights of individual people to live free, be free, and freely pursue their dreams in a free marketplace. Those thoughts were very much in presence in that Philadelphia birthing room.

The French Revolution, on the other hand – though similar to what happened here in the sense of changing things and breaking free from an old order – had little to do with individual rights. It was all about collectivism. And in many ways, the French Revolution is the ancestor of all totalitarian systems to follow. Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot Lenin, and all other political gangsters were heirs of Robespierre and later, Napoleon. Those tyrannical manifestations were not misguided aberrations – distortions of something that started out good (like Lenin was cool, too bad Stalin messed it all up) – the seeds of the horror were present at the beginning.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th century Enlightenment philosopher, had written about volonté générale or “general will” and the Jacobins, followed by others, ran with it insisting that voice of “the people” could best, actually only, be expressed by so-called enlightened leaders.

Our revolution indeed drew a measure of strength from the Enlightenment, but it was of the earlier Locke variety. And America’s use of Enlightenment concepts was tempered by something else; something that set it apart from what happened in France – a spiritual foundation.

Vive la revolution – Vive la difference.

The French not only declared war on the monarchy, they also attacked Christianity, replacing it with a religion of the state, introducing the worship of secularism. Sound familiar?

In America, it was very different. Now, I am not one of those who spends a lot of time trying to prove the Christian bona fides of our founding fathers, but I do believe that the influence of The Great Awakening, which ended about 20 years before the shot heard around the world was fired, was still very much a part of our national fabric at the time. And another such movement, usually referred to as The Second Great Awakening began while the French were unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to be free. To ignore those religious and cultural movements in America is to miss an important piece of the puzzle.

You see, the very concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity sound nice and make for great propaganda. But in the end, without virtue born of something deeper and greater, it all ends up looking the same. This is why all totalitarian regimes like to call their realms The Peoples’ this or that – like The Peoples Republic of China, or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or The Peoples Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Fast-forward 200 plus years and here we are remembering our revolutionary beginning. As we do so, let us beware of those who share our vocabulary, but use a different dictionary.

Are we still about the individual, personal, hard-fought-for rights: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, or does the cry: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity seem to increasingly be the spirit of this age?

The reason it has all worked and endured so well in this land is because we are a nation “under God.” There I said it. There is no real liberty without that. All attempts at actual freedom end up moving toward tyranny without some sense of higher purpose and power. I believe firmly in the separation of church and state. But minus positive religious influence, a nation cannot long remain free.

Thomas Paine’s story should be a cautionary tale. He, of course, wrote Common Sense in early 1776, and it was by all accounts vital to shaping public opinion in support of our patriotic ancestors. He was a revolutionary. In fact, there is a new book out by Glenn Beck, bearing the title Common Sense, using Mr. Paine’s ideas as a springboard for his own thoughts about what is wrong with America and how to fix it. I have read Beck’s book and like it. But I certainly hope he doesn’t write a sequel, or at least delve further into Thomas Paine’s bag of literary tricks to make future points about saving America.

Mr. Paine helped us early on, but as he moved on and shared more of his thinking via his acerbic pen, he expressed ideas that, while probably resonating with some today, would in no way mesh with the spirit of 1776.

While Common Sense supported the ideas of freedom, small government, and even low taxes – all very much part of that old revolutionary spirit – by the time the French were acting out his writings became increasingly more radical. When parts one and two of his work, The Rights of Man, appeared in 1791 and 1792, he became a pariah in England and fled to France like where he was treated like a hero, being made an honorary citizen of the republic. But by this time, his writings advocated a progressive income tax, public works for the unemployed, and guaranteed minimum incomes.

And don’t even get me started on his next bestseller, The Age Of Reason; a rant against revealed religion. Paine died virtually alone and penniless in 1809. Only six people attended his funeral.

This of course, brings us back full circle to the thesis of this article – that concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, expressed individually (the intent of our founders), can only keep from drifting toward collectivism when there is a spiritual impulse – or at least a spiritual pulse.

C. S. Lewis said it very well in The Screwtape Letters more than 65 years ago:

Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool shed in his own garden.

Featured Articles — July 3, 2009

July 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The Meaning of Ricci By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Ricci case — that white firemen suffered illegal discrimination when a promotional test on which they did well was thrown out because not enough blacks did well — will have no effect on Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. While overturned on Ricci, she is protected by the four dissenting justices who upheld the side of the case she had taken as a Circuit Court judge. Sotomayor was additionally helped by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s insistence on reading her dissent from the bench, as if to emphasize the legitimacy of her position — and, by implication, Sotomayor’s.

Making History By Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his “popularity,” but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is “premature,” to declare independence now would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.” When he sat down, “all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the widows.”

California’s Budget Crisis: Is There a Way Out? By Kevin O’Leary, Time
With budget negotiations stalled, a cash crisis looming and its fiscal crisis deepening, California today will begin issuing IOUs — formally called registered warrants — to tens of thousands of businesses and individuals to whom the state owes money. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday declared a fiscal emergency and ordered a third unpaid furlough day each month for 235,000 state employees. California’s fiscal crisis has been years in the making and will not be easy to fix. But is there a solution?

The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic By Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now — whatever speech the “censored” NASA scientist is giving — perhaps he’ll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don’t count on it.

Flag Burning and Free Speech By Eugene Volokh, The Wall Street Journal
Congress is once again considering a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag. The proposal, introduced this spring in the Senate by David Vitter (R., La.), and cosponsored by 20 other Republicans and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, probably won’t get enough votes. Yet even if it doesn’t, one longstanding misunderstanding about the First Amendment is likely to live on.

Afghanistan ’surge’ will test Obama’s military muscle By Con Coughlin, The Daily Telegraph
President Obama hopes Operation Khanjar will finish off the job in Afghanistan that under-funded British forces have failed to do.

Pyongyang Pressure Points By Christian Whiton, The Wall Street Journal
Governments on both sides of the North Pacific may soon have stronger policies toward North Korea than they have in years. The question is how far democratic capitals will press North Korea to renounce its nuclear weapons programs. A key test is whether they can maintain pressure until the Pyongyang regime verifiably ends its misconduct. This is no small threat; Pyongyang has recently tested nuclear and ballistic missile weapons, not to mention its nuclear technology proliferation to terrorist-supporting states and its infamous human-rights abuses.

Iran’s Tarnished Foreign Policy By Meir Javedanfar, RealClearWorld
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad´s absence at the African Union summit was a bit conspicuous. After four years of globetrotting, it would take a lot for Mr. Ahmadinejad to give up the chance of addressing such an important forum as the African forum. The Iranian President has always felt that in places such as Africa he has an audience for his anti-American and anti-Israeli views. This would have been a perfect opportunity for him to declare his return as the new president, and to promote his image as a statesman.

Israel struggles to adapt to a changing picture of Iran By Philip Stephens, Financial Times
No one watches events in Iran more closely than Israel. Tehran has long been the abiding preoccupation, some would say obsession of political discourse in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now the story line has changed

Next Time You Think You’ve Had A Bad Day

July 2, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Next Time You Think You've Had A Bad Day | Leave a Comment 

Spare a sympathetic thought for Adrian Zackheim.  As Leon Neyfakh reports in The New York Observer:

Before his little problem came up recently, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford had a book scheduled for publication from Penguin’s conservative Sentinel imprint in March of next year. He still might! As first reported this morning by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, Sentinel publisher Adrian Zackheim is trying to figure out what to do with Within Our Means, “a manifesto about fiscal conservatism–why the government needs to spend less and fix the deficit ASAP,” now that Mr. Sanford is no longer the rising star he was two weeks ago.

We checked in with Sentinel associate publisher Will Weisser this afternoon, and he said a decision was likely to be reached next week, after Mr. Zackheim returns from a vacation in England.

“Adrian has checked in but we haven’t made any decisions,” Mr. Weisser said. “Obviously, there’s a lot to think about. We need to talk to the governor and his people. It’s just such an unusual situation. You don’t want to rush into any decision.”

Unfortunately, Sentinel has already shipped the proofs for its spring catalog to the printers, and Mr. Sanford’s book—which was to be one of the conservative imprint’s lead titles for the season—is in there front and center. One supposes it will be serve as a charming collector’s item, if nothing else.

The Washington Post, Disgraced

July 2, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Ethics, News media | Leave a Comment 

There are some alternate titles that came to mind as I prepared to write this, but since some of TNN’s readers are employees of the Washington Post – some of very long standing indeed – I thought it best to go with the least abrasive one that I thought of.

Even so, it’s rather dismaying to write this.

This morning, Politico.com reported on the contents of a flyer received by a lobbyist in the health-care field. Parts of the flyer read as follows:

“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate. Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth … Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders …

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama Administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders … Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post … An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. … A Washington Post Salon … July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m.”

That “salon” has been called off, along with all its planned successors, by Ms. Weymouth after Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli issued a memo stating that his newsroom would not participate in the project in any way, and after a storm of shocked and angry responses from news sites, blogs, and Twitterers in the media everywhere.

(Though there was quite a bit of humor among the Tweets, some quite pointed. A sample, with my comments in brackets:

For a mere $10K, Tom Sietsema will finally review Mrs.K’s in Silver Spring. [You'd have to live a half-mile from Mrs. K's, like I do, to really get that one.]

For only $10,000 the WaPo will review your stimulus package and they won’t mention that it promotes socialism! [No guesses about which Washington paper that Twitterer would cancel his or her subscription to, given a choice.]

WaPo is the new DC Madam. Let’s see her client list. [Later in the week I will look at one name that, seemingly, might be included on such a list. Hint: that name has been the subject of a dozen of my previous posts.]

For $500K, Charles Krauthammer will write a series of columns advocating war with a country of your choosing. [How about 25 gees to argue the case for war with Moldova?]

Ta-Nehisi Coates is among a host of former Post writers expressing their reactions to the news. He says, among other things:

I’m sure in the coming days we will find out that this was the brainchild of Weymouth or one of the other suits that have little if anything to do with the daily news operation. But that’s what makes it so reckless and irresponsible. With one poorly-worded flier they have left their editorial staff vulnerable to questioning as to whether sponsors will have an influence on their reporting, questions that no reporter who is simply doing their job should ever have to face. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Post’s editorial department and I applaud their response. But someone upstairs should have to answer for this[....]

But who will answer for it? Who ombuds the ombudsperson, so to speak?

Most Iran Election Historical Analogies Are Misleading and Dangerous

July 2, 2009 by Paul Saunders | Filed Under International Affairs, Iran, Nixon Center | Leave a Comment 

Originally published at US News and World Report:

Outrage over the Iranian government’s violent suppression and intimidation of dissent has appropriately produced considerable concern in the United States and fueled a debate over U.S. policy toward Tehran. Many political leaders and pundits have called for more active and vocal American support of the Iranian opposition, typically on the basis of analogies to oppressive regimes of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of these analogies are misleading and even dangerous if used as guides to policy. The historical cases most similar to present-day Iran should instill caution.

Some have compared Iran to the Philippines in 1986 or South Korea in 1987, both cases in which the Reagan administration lent support to domestic groups pressing for greater democracy (after a stolen election in the Philippines and in restoring direct presidential elections in Korea). These two analogies are both fundamentally flawed because both countries were American allies over which the United States had considerable leverage. To the extent either case can be compared to Iran, they are more similar to the Iran of 1979 than 2009.

Others warn that Iran is headed toward a situation similar to 1989’s Tiananmen Square. This implicitly suggests that the George H. W. Bush administration could have prevented the Chinese government’s decision to crack down on China’s pro-democracy protesters, which seems doubtful but is ultimately unknowable. However, the focus of this comparison is typically criticism of the Bush administration’s post-Tiananmen engagement with China. Either way, there has thankfully been no event on this scale in Iran. Partially motivated by the collapse of communism in Central Europe, Tiananmen also demonstrates the potential danger of using strategies that were successful in one place and time in a radically different environment. (Though the blame for the outcome lies overwhelmingly with the Chinese government, not the protesters.)

The bulk of the history lessons filling editorial pages have to do with America’s Cold War and modern policies toward the U.S.S.R. and former Soviet bloc countries. Some mention Hungary in 1956—when the U.S. essentially encouraged a revolt via Radio Free Europe but was ultimately unwilling to come to aid the country’s revolutionaries—or the Prague Spring in 1968, which Washington did not particularly encourage beforehand or support afterward. Both demonstrate the calculations that have led past American leaders, Republican and Democratic, to shy away from active intervention in such circumstances.

Others cite the Reagan administration’s support for Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement in the early 1980s, though few acknowledge that the Solidarity protests led to the imposition of martial law and considerably greater repression. Poland did not have a non-communist government until 1989, nine years after the first Solidarity strikes. The fact that Soviet leaders—and Polish and other Central European leaders—were no longer prepared to use large-scale violence to suppress opposition was decisive in the largely peaceful revolutions of 1989.

Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution is another popular case, doubtless because it is a recent example of electoral fraud akin to Iran’s and because American political intervention was important to Viktor Yushchenko’s eventual installation as president. Yet “revolution” is clearly an overstatement of the degree of change in Ukraine and its subsequent governments have been quite unstable. Actually, the country’s recent history is an illustration less of the success of U.S. pressure in producing democracy than of the fact that democracy requires much more than the ‘right’ election outcome, especially in a divided country.

Finally, many talk of the Soviet Union, especially of President Reagan standing up to Soviet leaders or Reagan and others supporting Soviet dissidents. U.S.-Soviet relations are mostly irrelevant to Iran, however. At the time of the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. was the pre-eminent threat the American national security and was a global competitor. The United States subordinated much of its foreign policy to the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Few today seem prepared to afford Tehran the same role in shaping U.S. global policy and strategy, notwithstanding the real danger of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its regional support for terrorism. Moreover, America’s defense of Soviet dissidents was a long-term strategy, like support for Solidarity, not one expected to produce the immediate results for which today’s observers appear to hope.

One of the most wrong-headed comparisons between Iran and the former U.S.S.R. is the comparison to the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin’s iconic image resisting the coup atop a tank, which has led some to complain that Mir Hossein Mousavi lacks Yeltsin’s courage. The problem with this line of thinking is that Yeltsin was already the president of the Russian Federation at that time and had the backing of Russia’s parliament. Perhaps even more important, there was a tank in front of the parliament for him to stand on because the Soviet armed forces were divided. There is scant evidence of such divisions in Iran.

Historical patterns can clearly be useful tools for thought and action in shaping policy, but in using them it is essential to avoid becoming locked in to psychologically appealing narratives that can skew expectations. It is likewise important to remember that history took a long time to happen and that most of the decisive events to which we look back were the final stages of extended processes. What does this mean for U.S. policy toward Iran? Stay calm—and don’t try to turn today’s events into something they are not.

RN, Apollo, And Obits

July 2, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | 5 Comments 

The Smoking Gun is featuring documents that the Nixon White House prepared before the Apollo 11 mission in the event that it ended in tragedy.  Discover mutters that reading the plan “gives us the creepy feeling of reading the obituary of someone who is still alive.”  I hate to break this to the folks at Discover, but news organizations do write obituaries of prominent people while they are still alive.   (That practice was the premise of a couple of episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a Nixon-era sitcom set in a Minneapolis TV newsroom.)

If they have any sense of responsibility, presidents and other decision-makers draft “worst-case” contingency plans.  So do lots of other people.  Radio listeners here in Southern California are accustomed to ads for Forest Lawn Mortuaries.

So, like, this is news?

Featured Articles — July 2, 2009

July 2, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Let the Usurpers Writhe By Roger Cohen, The New York Times
Think of normalized relations with the United States as the big prize. Who gets to deliver it? One thing is certain: Iran’s ruthless usurpers are determined to ensure reformists are never in a position to claim the breakthrough.

Why Russians Love Putin By David Ignatius, The Washington Post
As Barack Obama packs for his trip to Russia next week, he should bring along a copy of “The Brothers Karamazov.” For the modern Russia of Vladimir Putin is still struggling with the same political riddles that Fyodor Dostoyevsky described 130 years ago.

467K Jobs Cut in June; Jobless Rate at 26-Year High By Neil Irwin and Michael D. Shear, The Washington Post
Employers kept slashing jobs at a furious pace in June as the unemployment rate edged ever closer to double-digit levels, undermining signs of progress in the economy, and making clear that the job market remains in terrible shape.

Cap-and-Trade a Risk Worth Taking By E.J. Dionne, The New Republic
Hours before the House passed its cap-and-trade bill last week, freshman Democrats Tom Perriello and Frank Kratovil were pondering the political fallout of the votes they were about to cast in favor of a plan Republicans were denouncing as “cap-and-tax.”

Fuel Standards Are Killing GM By Alan Reynolds, The Wall Street Journal
General Motors can survive bankruptcy far more easily than it can survive President Barack Obama’s ambitious fuel economy standards, which mandate that all new vehicles average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.

Iraq & Iran offer President Obama the chance to tell a tale of two conflicts By Michael Goodwin, The New York Daily News
At one time or another, most Americans probably have confused Iraq and Iran. But for now there is an easy way to tell them apart: American policy finally is working in Iraq while it is flailing in Iran.

Who Can Possibly Govern California? By Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine
Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has an emergency button under his desk that was installed 30 years ago after former City Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a window and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Not knowing what the button was for, Newsom kept pushing it on his first day in office, only to have three sheriffs rush in repeatedly.

To Catch a Tiger By Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic
Sri Lanka’s brutal suppression of the Tamil Tigers offers an object lesson in how to defeat an insurgency. Or does it?

A Family’s Valor, a Nation’s Freedom By Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal
At a dinner last week in California, I was reminded of the debt we owe to those who have, for 233 years, sustained our freedom and independence. One remarkable family in particular exemplifies the best in the American spirit of courage and sacrifice.

Has Obama Turned on Israel? By Alan Dershowitz, The Wall Street Journal
Many American supporters of Israel who voted for Barack Obama now suspect they may have been victims of a bait and switch. Jewish Americans voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama over John McCain in part because the Obama campaign went to great lengths to assure these voters that a President Obama would be supportive of Israel. This despite his friendships with rabidly anti-Israel characters like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and historian Rashid Khalid.

Time for an Israeli Strike? By John R. Bolton, The Washington Post
With Iran’s hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel’s decision of whether to use military force against Tehran’s nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever.

Russia Is Back on the Warpath By Cathy Young, The Wall Street Journal
With President Barack Obama’s trip to Moscow on Monday, you might expect Russia to avoid stirring up any trouble. Yet the Russian media are now abuzz with speculation about a new war in Georgia, and some Western analysts are voicing similar concerns. The idea seems insane. Nonetheless, the risk is real.

The facts of the election are disputed. Iranians can make the next one better By Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian
For all those who wish to commemorate Neda, democracy can be delivered – with the help of legitimate monitors

“The Fix” Is Keen On Nixon

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza credits RN with a bold, active,  and paradoxically unassuming foreign policy that did so much to reduce tension on the international stage:

Nixon was an extremely active presence on the international stage throughout his presidency — and several of his trips reached near-iconic status. He was the first American president to visit the People’s Republic of China (in 1972) — despite his strong anti-Communist stance — and is widely credited with helping to thaw relations with that country. (Nixon’s surprise visit became so well known that the mere mention of “Nixon in China” has become a stand-in for a bold, unexpected political move — heck there is even an opera dedicated to the visit.)

Later that same year, Nixon huddled in Moscow with Leonid Brezhnev, the head of the Communist party in Russia, and Brezhnez reciprocated with a visit to the U.S. in 1973 — back and forth visits credited with the detente between the two nations. And, it was Nixon who (finally) brought an end to the war in Vietnam by declaring a settlement that preserved “peace with honor” for the United States. It’s hard to come up with a modern American president who had lower expectations on the international stage and who went on to accomplish so much.

Secretary Clinton Pushed President Obama To Speak Up

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Fox News’ Brett Baer reports:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly spent two days urging President Obama to toughen his language on Iran’s post-election crackdown before he finally took her advice. The Washington Times writes that the president resisted Clinton’s initial counsel, and that when he finally relented, he did not tell her first.

The president had been criticized for his cautious tone on the situation. Then at last week’s news conference, Mr. Obama said he was “appalled and outraged,” and he “strongly condemned” the violence.

An administration official called it “a happy surprise. It was echoing the line the secretary had been pushing for a couple of days.”

But the Times characterized it as — “the first known example of awkwardness between the two former rivals” — since Clinton took the job.

Mousavi, Karrubi, And Khatami Stand Firm Against Government

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Via CNN:

Presidential candidate Mehdi Karrubi wrote a letter in his party’s newspaper, saying he would not recognize the government and vowing to “stand by the people and the revolution, until the end of my life.”

His statement prompted Iran’s government to block publication of the newspaper.

Ahmadinejad’s main political rival, Mir Hossein Moussavi, also released a statement Wednesday criticizing the government and its crackdown on the media, which he said has created a “bitter, coup d’etat atmosphere” in Iran.

“We will stand firmly in order to preserve this valuable accomplishment [revolution],” Moussavi said. “Unless we succeed in this, this government will not have legitimacy. The system and the heritage of the Islamic revolution are the fruits of our 200-year-old struggle against oppression.”

Iran’s former reformist President Mohammad Khatami called on Iranians to keep up the struggle, noting that “all doors are not yet closed.”

“We must not lose our social capital this easily,” Khatami told progressive Iranian newspaper Tahile Rouz. “I know Moussavi as one of the faithful, original and valuable capitals of our revolution, and considered his return to the political scene as a great chance.”

In his statement, Moussavi called for the release of jailed reformists and said he will participate in the creation of a “legal organization” that will release proof of fraud in the June 12 presidential election, and take its case to the courts.

He said the current political issue is a “family dispute” and cautioned against asking for outside help, warning, “We will regret it.”

Newsweek: Dummies and Dummier

July 1, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | 4 Comments 

The new Newsweek’s summer reading issue includes a feature called “Best.  Books.  Ever,” in which well-known individuals recommend four of their favorite books in their particular areas of interest.   

Thus, Melissa Gilbert selects Hollywood memoirs, Dr. Drew chooses Self Help books, and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson scans the universe.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward’s area is “Political Scandal,” and, in the style of the feature, his titles are listed without comment under  a short headline and illustrated by the book jacket.

Three of his  four books are:

All the King’s Men — Robert Penn Warren’s novel about Huey Long — under the headline “How to corrupt a politician.”

In Retrospect — Robert McNamara’s memoir of the Vietnam war — under the headline “If you can handle the truth.”

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — the first volume of John LeCarre’s Smiley trilogy — under the headline “Of and for spooks.”

The fourth is RN’s RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, and the headline is “Dummies’ Guide to evading history.”

RN’s is the only snarky headline on the whole page.  Arthur Schlesinger’s worshipfully tendentious biography of his hero Robert Kennedy is called “A Kennedy book with perspective.”  And even Hannibal Lecter is cut some slack in the headline for Patricia Cornwell’s selection of The Silence of the Lambs (”So you can root for the bad guy”).

My first reaction was that the headlines for RN and The Silence of the Lambs had been transposed.

My second reaction was: What the hell is up with this and what’s up with Bob Woodward?

But then, recalling my days as a magazine editor, I realized that Mr. Woodward, like the rest of the authors, had simply complied with the request for a list of his four favorite books by submitting…..a list of his four favorite books.

All the additional prose was added by editors and sub editors — whose job is to fill up the space and to make things pop off the page.  The chances of the wiseacre who tarted up Mr. Woodward’s list having read any of the books on it are, I’m guessing (but it’s an educated guess), slim to nil.  (I’m also guessing that Mr. Woodward is not best pleased with someone else piggybacking a facile judgment —or, more likely, a mindless quip— on his reputation.)

Slim to nil might also describe the number of people who will read this page in Newsweek. And slimmer to niller the number of people who will notice, much less pay any attention to, the headlines above the titles.

But words, like ideas, have consequences, and the mindset displayed in this headline —frivolous, careless, and inaccurate— is disturbing.  Magazines have editorial hierarchies whose job it is to catch errors and maintain standards.

One may not agree with RN’s treatment of Watergate in his memoirs.  But with more than two hundred and fifty of the book’s thousand pages devoted to it, the author can hardly be accused of quantitative evasion.  And qualitatively, as even the unfriendly reviews indicated, he didn’t flinch from addressing all the charges leveled and issues raised by the congeries of troubles known as Watergate.

While the book tells the story as RN experienced it —not, I submit,  an unreasonable or unexpected approach for an autobiography— it presents the facts in considerable detail.  So, one wonders, who’s the dummy?

The Basij Trumping Up Charges Against Mousavi

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, International Affairs, Iran, Latin America | Leave a Comment 

The Iranian regime’s paramilitary group and enforcers of last month’s illegitimate elections want reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi’s head:

The semiofficial Fars news agency said the Basij – known as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s street enforcers – sent the chief prosecutor a letter accusing Mousavi of taking part in nine offenses against the state, including “disturbing the nation’s security,” which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment.

This development has seemingly slipped passed President Obama, who is now isolating the Central American country of Honduras for ousting a president who was also on an illegitimate power grab.

Is Iran’s Green Revolution The New Sino-Soviet Split?

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs, Iran, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen has some insight on the Obama administration’s musings over which course to take with Iran:

The chessboard is moving demonstrably in the U.S. direction.” That is the takeaway, said Congressional Research Service Middle East analyst Kenneth Katzman , from recent assessments by administration officials. “What I heard them saying is, ‘Let’s take advantage of that now, while we have the chessboard, and try to get a nuclear deal and get that resolved, rather than the whole ball of wax.’”

Added Katzman, of the perceived trend: “The strategic picture in the Middle East has moved to the U.S. advantage. The Lebanon elections, reengagement with Syria, stability in Iraq, have added up to a shifting chessboard against Iran.”

The indispensable chess master Henry Kissinger wouldn’t have arrived to such a conclusion. In his book Diplomacy, he introduces President Nixon’s triangular diplomacy as a break from the emotive and overly confrontational “theologians” and the “psychiatric school” who believed Soviet tension was based on their collective insecurity of American aggression and the perception of their adversary’s expansive options. Such all or nothing approaches, Dr. Kissinger believes, limits the statesman’s number of squares on the chess board. “Blinded by ideological preconceptions” most policy makers completely overlooked geopolitics and the “strategic opportunity” introduced by the ongoing Sino-Soviet split and the 1968 deployment of Soviet troops to the Chinese border. Not Nixon, he saw leverage as key to moderating, finding common ground and establishing détente with the Soviet leadership.

I would be hard pressed to re-produce an analogous scenario in establishing leverage in talks with the very hostile, revolutionary, theocratic (and frequently apocalyptic) Iranian regime that said yesterday that they want to “break the monopoly of global powers,”  but the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (who is by no means a foreign policy realist or an advocate for talks with Iran) comes awfully close when he says the regime’s Achilles heel is not its isolation or its vulnerability to a gasoline embargo:

Third is that the Achilles Heel of the Iranian regime isn’t its “isolation.” (What kind of isolation is it when Ahmadinejad’s “election” was instantly ratified by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev?) Nor is it its vulnerability to a gasoline embargo, vulnerable though it is. Its real weakness is its own domestic unpopularity, which has at last found expression in a massive opposition movement.

Bingo! The regime’s weakness is its domestic unpopularity. Because of the protests of millions on the streets of Tehran over the past 3 weeks, Iran’s leadership has been splintered exposing rifts between hardliners and reformists who before have functioned very quietly and comfortably within the opaque veneer of the vast clerical, political and military apparatus.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, once the presumed successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, condemned the violence against the protesters and decried the legitimacy of the elections as ” no one in their right mind can believe.” The Speaker of the Majlis (Iran’s parliament), Ali Larijani argues that the people no longer trust the country’s legal system expressing his desire that certain members of the Guardian Council “would not side with a certain presidential candidate.” And Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, the once  reformist president, and now the richest man in Iran and a very powerful cleric with weight on the Expediency Council and Assembly of Experts is an avowed supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi and is reported to be scheming for the ouster of the Supreme Leader.

The Supreme Leader’s response to the public protests have been decidedly brutal but not untactful or irrational. As Charles Krauthammer noted in last week’s column for the Washington Post:

Their brutality has been deployed intelligently. The key is to atomize the opposition. Start with the most sophisticated methods to block Internet and cell phone traffic, thanks to technology provided by Nokia Siemens Networks. Allow the more massive demonstrations to largely come and go — avoiding Tiananmen-style wholesale bloodshed — but disrupt the smaller ones with street-side violence and rooftop snipers, the perfect instrument of terror. Death instant and unseen, the kind that only the most reckless and courageous will brave.

Terror visited by invisible men. From rooftops by day. And by night, swift and sudden raids that pull students out of dormitories, the wounded out of hospitals, for beatings and disappearances.

For all our sentimental belief in the ultimate triumph of those on the “right side of history,” nothing is inevitable. This second Iranian revolution is on the defensive, even in retreat. To recover, it needs mass, because every dictatorship fears the moment when it gives the order to the gunmen to shoot at the crowd. If they do (Tiananmen), the regime survives; if they don’t (Romania’s Ceausescu), the dictators die like dogs.

The regime’s methods of limiting public displays by the jamming of communication flows, a sophisticated strategy of crowd control and the selective use of lethal force indicate that at the very least they are concerned about international perception and self-preservation (Khamenei’s recent speech at Tehran University also suggests that he is unable to alienate Rasfanjani and other key opposition).

Here is where President Obama’s support would have been key — and still could be — to unveiling and sustaining the momentum behind the critical mass of opposition forces:

The conventional  — and now unpopular in Washington — association of this position are those of “neocon” Weekly Standard and PNAC (Project for the New American Century) fame.  However, this position isn’t limited to regime change. Nor is it a position that would have conflicted with the Nixonian worldview. For one Nixon, as Dr. Kissinger noted, wasn’t in favor of limiting his options. Secondly, he would have delicately seized the opportunity of applying leverage of an embattled regime against its own existence, thus prompting the incentive to denuclearize.

The regime also has an Arab problem, as Laura Rozen notes Hezbollah’s recent loss to a Western backed coalition led by Saad Hariri and the stability in Iraq has moved the chessboard back in the United States’ direction (though Rozen is naive to believe that any of these developments were caused by President Obama’s inauguration. Lebanon has been at least 4 years in the making, and Iraq is a product of “the surge” 2 years ago). These developments can thus be seen as significant reductions in Iran’s ability to export revolution and gain concessions out of its adversaries.

As Mark Bowden wrote in his book Guests of The Ayatollah: The First Battle In America’s War With Radical Islam, starting under then President Rasfanjani and later President Mohammad Khatami it appeared until Khamenei and the mullahs subdued the reform movement, that democracy was evolving and free speech and debate started to blossom. With their hopes dashed, many Iranians stayed away from the polls in 2005, giving now President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a victory in run-off elections.

Now with a cheated and angry people determined for regime change the only option for Khamenei — other than the use of force — is reform. President Obama would be well suited to leverage this new dynamic to induce the regime to abandon its nuclear program, terror funding and — in the long term — press it to negotiate its way out of existence. 

Featured Articles — July 1, 2009

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Learn from France — and consider banning the burka By Christopher Hitchens, Daily News
Last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his support for legislation to ban the burka, the dark, heavy and not-too-comfortable garment worn by many Muslim women. The question arises: Is this forcible French secularism run amok, or a prohibition that Americans, who often believe we have struck a better balance between church and state, might entertain?

Just Do It By Thomas Friedman, New York Times
There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption.

“Better” Health Care?, By John Stossel, RealClearPolitics
President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But there’s no free lunch. In England, health care is “free” — as long as you don’t mind waiting. People wait so long for dentist appointments that some pull their own teeth.

Obama’s Statist Ambitions By Gene Healy, CATO Institute
“I am a firm believer in the power of the free market,” President Obama told the Wall Street Journal recently. The “irony” surrounding his public image as a collectivist, the president insisted, was that “I actually would like to see a relatively light touch when it comes to the government.”

What’s the Chance of Stability? By Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami Herald
The United States, the OAS, the European Union, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro — most of all, Chávez and Castro — want Manuel Zelaya immediately restored to the presidency of Honduras. He was expelled from the country on the morning of June 28.

Iran talks must be delayed By Trudy Rubin, Philadelpha Inquirer
Now that Iran has officially confirmed its tainted election outcome, President Obama must reconsider how to deal with the regime. The big question is whether Obama should junk his plans for direct engagement with Iran’s leaders after their brutal crackdown on civil protest. “There’s no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,” the president said last week.

What will happen to Iraqi reconstruction when all the marines are gone? By Gaeme Wood, Foreign Policy
Last week I listened to Maj. Ashley Burch, a Marine civil affairs officer in Ramadi, explain a raft of ambitious reconstruction aimed to smother the town of Karmah — a persistent center of insurgent activity — in American largess. I was duly impressed. Then, as I walked out of the office, I glanced at a wall map of eastern Anbar province. A bright stripe of yellow Post-its ran across the 104 km highway that connects Ramadi to Baghdad, each with the words “No-Go Zone” written across the top and a date, with the more recent dates closer to Baghdad.

From Gdansk to Tehran By Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek
Iran’s Twitter-fueled protests may be using modern technology, but they’re drawing from an older playbook: Poland’s Solidarity movement of the 1980s.

Unclubbable Man Joins World’s Most Exclusive Club

June 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Senate | 1 Comment 

Robert Nedelkoff has examined the mathematics of Senator-Elect Franken’s “victory.”

The Wall Street Journal today examines the ethics of the Franken camp’s found-votes recount strategy:

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don’t end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

In politics, as in life, you make your own luck.  Republicans tend to take a half-hearted —not to say half-assed— approach to the rough and tumble of electoral politics.  This is through excesses of timidity rather than of virtue, to be sure — but the result is the same.  And the word for the candidate who comes in second is still “loser.”

As far as the Senate Democrats who have so eagerly awaited the arrival of this new colleague — good luck to them.  I suspect that they may soon be experiencing a case of the “be careful what you wish for” syndrome.  As Robert Nedelkoff indicates, the world’s most exclusive club will now be welcoming an unclubbable man.  During my several years at Late Night with David Letterman and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, I only dealt with a handful of people who were truly  unpleasant and disagreeable.  The soon-to-be Junior Senator from Minnesota was a member in bad standing of that unappealing club.

Magic Number Or Misery For The Democrats?

June 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, Congress | 2 Comments 

This morning the Minnesota Supreme Court handed down its decision in favor of Al Franken in his eight-month battle with incumbent Senator Norm Coleman over the narrow margin of the election to determine the occupant of Minnesota’s seat in Capitol Hill’s upper chamber. Soon after, Coleman announced that, instead of taking his battle to the level of the Federal courts, he would concede defeat, leaving the way open for the onetime Stuart Smalley to take his seat.

(Richard A. Baker, the Historian of the Senate, was quoted as saying that Franken’s swearing-in would mark the first time a professional comedian had ever become a Senator. It’s hard to read that statement with a straight face. For example, for two terms in the 1950s and the 1960s one of our Southern states was represented by a very amiable gentleman, now deceased, who did not make much of a legislative mark, but was renowned in some circles for his habit of throwing empty bourbon bottles out of the window of his quarters in the Senate Office Building after consuming their contents. If Rick Perlstein can guess who that was, he gets a free steak dinner from me.)

On the surface, Franken’s victory looks like the ultimate triumph for the Democrats. Thanks to Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican side of the aisle they now hold 60 seats, the supposed filibuster-proof majority. But Franken’s arrival, as no doubt many Democratic senators – perhaps even one as obtuse as Harry Reid – are aware, constitutes a mixed blessing at best.

As I said once or twice at TNN earlier this year, Franken’s career has been spent doing and saying things more or less antithetical to the usual background of a United States Senator. For well over thirty years he made his living being provocative and, not infrequently, insulting. The snide, snarky remark is sure to come more readily to his lips than genial words of consensus. Once he goes on C-Span and opens his mouth – and, indeed, he will be one of the Senators handling the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor – he is sure, sooner or later, to come up with utterances that will provide prime fodder for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and all their colleagues in the worlds of talk radio and cable TV commentary. Before long, even our Vice President might seem the model of thoughtfulness and discretion.

So a major task facing the Democrats, if they want to improve their numbers come 2010 rather than lose seats, will be to find some way to muzzle old Al at the right moments – before the watchword across the media becomes: “….and doggone it, people don’t like him.”

Journalism 101 With Bob Woodward

June 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media, TV News Personalities, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Youtube is setting up a kind of journalism school of the internet, featuring clips in which various eminences of the Fourth Estate attempt to explain their profession in the space of five or six minutes. The project is being undertaken with the cooperation of many of America’s surviving dailies, and the “faculty” includes many names not widely known outside their particular cities except by their peers in the profession.

But some of the names that have been recruited for the project so far are known from coast to coast, and beyond: Arianna Huffington, Tavis Smiley, Katie Couric….and Pulitzer-winning Bob Woodward. Woodward’s clip is chock-full of old photos of himself, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee striking the poses familiar to all students of the cinema of the late Alan J. Pakula). Over these images, the reporter’s voiceover describes how he got started breaking local stories, until the day he and his partner Carl came across a “metro” subject that, well, jes’ grew.

It all makes one wonder when the Youtube academy will include a clip in which Bernstein offers his sage reminiscences about the art of ordering Brandy Alexanders at just the right moment when investigating a sizzling story in mixed company, back in the days when the art of journalism involved far more than poking around with a computer.

Where Was Hitchens In The Early Seventies?

June 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Christopher Hitchens takes a look at the latest release of Nixon recordings at Slate. For the most part, his remarks about President Nixon, Dr. Henry Kissinger, and Rev. Billy Graham are precisely what one would expect him to say – especially when he presents variations on the remarks found in his best-selling book God Is Not Great.

But one sentence leaps out from the article:

At least nobody ever accused Nixon or Kissinger of having any sort of sex life while in office—the distinctly dank reek of the absence of same can be detected throughout the taped records.

Well….liberal and radical (and, oftentimes, conservative) pundits and journalists accused Dr. Kissinger of all manner of things during his tenure as National Security Advisor. But an absence of libido was never among the charges leveled at the man who gave the world the maxim “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

To answer the question in this post’s title, at the time Dr. Kissinger was often photographed with ladies as notable as Barbara Walters, Gina Lollobrigida, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, Samantha Eggar, and Jill St. John on his arm (before he remarried in 1973), Hitchens was working on the staff of the New Statesman. His duties there would likely have required him to examine English-language newspapers not only from London (where the Fleet Street press constantly ran photos of Kissinger with various lovelies) but all over the globe (including papers in which many more pictures could be found). It’s difficult to believe that Hitch’s eye never wandered away from the editorials and news articles to see the abundant visual evidence of Kissinger’s appeal to the opposite sex.

And where President Nixon is concerned, allow me to quote Barbara Walters’s words about her interview with him from her 1970 book How To Talk To Practically Anybody About Practically Anything: “I find that he has sex appeal— he’s slim and suntanned and . . . well, he’s just sexy, that’s all. And I call that charming.”

(Yes, younger readers of TNN, despite what you read in the papers or at DailyKos, there were presidents with “sex appeal” between Kennedy and Obama.)

The Strike Has Been Called

June 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | 2 Comments 

This just breaking on Twitter, amidst dwindling crowds and a crackdown on communications throughout Iran, Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard have called for a general strike:

The Facebook pages of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard called for an Islamic National Strike late Tuesday night.

Mousavi’s page updated first, about 7 p.m. local time, stating, “Strike: The manner of a man is better than his goverance. Help to bring this message back to IRAN.” Three hours later the status updated to “Dont underestimate the power of National islamic Strike.”

And early Wednesday, around 2 a.m. local time, both he and his wife’s pages updated to “Islamic Strike, help to spread the Voice out to fight the Bullets.” The message was posted twice in a row on both accounts.

There is no way to be sure Mousavi or his campaign staff are behind the accounts at this time. His page was utilized heavily leading up to Election Night and he now has more than 107,000 supporters. It has been used in the past since the election to let people know about upcoming events and demonstrations.

Text in Persian next to the updates ask people to spread the word via any means possible. A document written in Persian is attached, but it is an image file, so BT was unable to immediately translate it. Many are saying on Twitter that the file provides details on the strike. Some say the strike is to be held next Monday through Thursday and others say July 15-17.

It’s unclear how the word will spread as the Iranian government has utilized technology from the French Nokia-Siemens to monitor calls and censor the web, but many continue to use satellite communication to tune into Voice of America (VOA) and BBC Persia.

“The New Nixon” Improves “Nixonland”

June 30, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks | 4 Comments 

In an interview with the editor of the History News Network, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein tips his hat to TNN:

I actually quite appreciated most of what was said at the New Nixon blog. New Nixon blogger Jack Pitney made several useful corrections in particular I was able to incorporate into six subsequent printings.

President Obama Comes Out Strong For Iran Honduras

June 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs, Iran, Latin America | 1 Comment 

Somebody phone Mir Hossein Mousavi President Obama has found his inner jingo.

Obama said yesterday that the ‘coup’ against Honduras’s leftist President Mel Zelaya was illegal, recalling America’s dark past of not standing for fledgling Latin American democracies when they didn’t act in their larger neighbor’s  interest.

This reaction is a stark contrast to Obama’s remarks about Iran’s election ‘irregularities’ in which he didn’t want to be seen as meddling and said there was no way of investigating foul-play because international observers weren’t present. Then, Obama recalled our shameful past of meddling in sovereign nations. Charles Krauthammer explains:

Now Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is threatening a military invasion.

Featured Articles — June 30, 2009

June 30, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Iraq: Mission Not Yet Accomplished By Jawad Al Bolani, Washington Post
Today is the deadline by which U.S. troops are to withdraw from major Iraqi cities. This clear line in the sand must provide some relief to many Americans, whose sacrifice has been extraordinary

Obama, Like Carter, is No ‘Realist’ By Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post
For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy’s barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12’s stolen presidential elections.

The Court Changes the Game By Linda Greenhouse, The New York Times
THE law of employment discrimination today is not what it was before 10 a.m. Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled against the City of New Haven for scrapping a fire department promotional exam that appeared to favor white test-takers.

Justices Reject Sotomayor Position 9-0 By Stuart Taylor, National Journal
The Supreme Court’s predictable 5-4 vote to reverse the decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor and two federal appeals court colleagues against 17 white (and one Hispanic) plaintiffs in the now-famous New Haven, Conn., firefighters decision does not by itself prove that the Sotomayor position was unreasonable.

On Race, The Slog Goes On By George Will, Washington Post
Although New Haven’s firefighters deservedly won in the Supreme Court, it is deeply depressing that they won narrowly — 5-4. The egregious behavior by that city’s government, in a context of racial rabble-rousing, did not seem legally suspect to even one of the court’s four liberals, whose harmony seemed to reflect result-oriented rather than law-driven reasoning.

Iran: The Whole World is Watching By Jon B. Alterman, World Politics Review
Four decades ago, when police and national guardsmen attacked protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the protesters shouted, “The whole world is watching.”

A Coup In Honduras By Roger Noriega, Forbes
Meeting in urgent session in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, the Organization of American States (OAS) issued a demand that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya be restored to power, calling his ouster earlier that day “an unconstitutional alteration of the democratic order.” The OAS Permanent Council proclaimed that it would not recognize any government resulting from that “coup d’état.” Pretty strong stuff–but too little, too late.

Berlusconi Is The New Sarkozy

June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs | 1 Comment 

Joshua Keating, the editor over at Foreignpolicy.com explains that just as French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s frivolous courtship with supermodel Carla Bruni was on the cover of every French tabloid it became an opportunity for him to augment his presence on the international stage. Italian President Silvio Berlusconi had apparently been taking notes:

But instead of focusing on improving his domestic standing, Sarkozy looked abroad. He embarked on a whirlwind round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, Caucasus, and Africa, making the most of his term as EU president. He’s also emerged as Europe’s leading campaigner for international financial regulation, an ironic twist for the leader who was once attacked by French leftists for his “anglo-saxon” economic philosophy.

And while the Bruni jokes haven’t gone away, he’s certainly more respeted on the world stage than he was a year ago, his approval ratings (while still low) have improved significantly, and his party earned a commanding victory in the recent European parliament elections.

So all this international travel may ultimately pay off for Berlusconi. Though it should be noted that his approval ratings have barely fallen at all during the current round of scandals. Having his own media empire certainly helps. No such luck for Sarko.

Schoenfield: The Case For Meddling

June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran | 1 Comment 

Gabriel Schoenfield writing at The Wall Street Journal wants the CIA to get back in the business of covert support and subsidies for parties who want to reduce tensions with the United States:

In the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the U.S. faced similar problems in various locales around the world. One of them was Italy, where there was a very real danger that the highly organized Italian Communist Party — benefiting from huge covert subsidies from the Kremlin — would come to power via the ballot box. Soviet funds had enabled that party to build a dense network of paid organizers that operated in every region and created front groups in every sector of society, from farmers to veterans to students.

The prospect of Italy becoming the first country in Europe to fall to Communism via subversion rather than direct force of Soviet arms was not, at the height of the Cold War, something the U.S. could abide. So the CIA was instructed, first by Harry Truman and then by Dwight Eisenhower, to stop it. It was the challenge presented by Italy’s vulnerability in its 1948 election that prompted the fledgling spy agency to create its Office of Policy Coordination. The banal-sounding name was a cover for what was an aggressive tool of covert political propaganda and paramilitary operations.

Over the course of the 1950s, the CIA secretly funneled money to forces in Italy’s political center. This enabled democratically oriented parties to match the Italian Communist Party activist for activist. When revealed years later, the policy was subjected to scathing criticism. But it had worked. Fragile Italy remained democratic in the 1950s and is a stable democracy today.

Harsh criticism of such operations — beginning in the 1970s when all the CIA’s secrets spilled out — is what prompted the U.S. to dismantle its capabilities in covert political action. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, legions of agency critics said, was both immoral and illegal.

As a matter of law, the critics are right. Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it. This is what the Soviet Union did in Italy, and it is what Iran, by organizing terrorist structures in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, has been doing intensively for 30 years.

As for the moral issues involved in covert operations, they are the standard ones of balancing means and ends. Self-defense is the basic right of every state; open warfare is certainly permitted to uphold it. Covert warfare, so long as it is similarly defensive, is no different. Yet throughout our history, a higher moralism has periodically come along and led us to shun intelligence operations, as when Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson famously declared that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” Stimson then shuttered his department’s code-breaking operation just as terrible storms were beginning to gather across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Today, as a breaking point in the Islamic Republic appears to recede from view as a result of brutal violence, the U.S. appears utterly powerless to influence the course of events. Yet how much better off both Iran and the world would be if the CIA, operating covertly through local friendly forces, could have helped, say, to spark a general strike to topple the ruthless regime of the ayatollahs.

Iran Certifies Election Results, Rasfanjani Has Votes To Oust Khamenei

June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | 1 Comment 

After offering a 5-day extension to investigate vote-rigging claims, the Guardian Council has certified the June 12 election results igniting unrest on the streets of Tehran:

Late Monday, hundreds dared to defy the government’s ban on street protests, marching down the main road through Tehran, called Vali Asr. Witnesses said that there was a human chain of government-aligned militia blocking their path. The government has barred all independent coverage of events in Iran, jailing hundreds of journalists and revoking the credentials of hundreds more. When news of the certification broke, the streets rang with furious chanting.

Earlier Monday, state television said the Guardian Council had begun a random recount of 10 percent of the ballots in Tehran’s 22 electoral districts and in some provinces. Opposition candidates refused to participate by sending observers, and the recount aroused new skepticism when the official news agency IRNA said that in one district, the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won even more votes than in the first official count.

On Monday night, state media suddenly announced that the Guardian Council had finished the recount and officially confirmed the declared landslide for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is launching a judicial inquiry into the ’suspicious’ death of Neda Soltan in attempt to remake the narrative as a Zionist plot:

President Ahmadinejad called for an investigation into the killing of Neda Agha Soltan, pressing the government’s contention that the young woman who has become an icon of government repression of protestors was killed by a foreign agent.

Finally, the billionaire and very powerful cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani has called for a probe into the elections and according to the Jerusalem Post might have enough votes to oust Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei:

Meanwhile, the Al-Arabiya satellite television news channel quoted a “high-ranking” source in Qom claiming that Rafsanjani, a key supporter of Mousavi, has garnered enough support among leading Iranian clerics to remove Khamenei, but that an announcement is being delayed amid differences on who or what should replace the supreme leader. There was no independent confirmation of this report.

Rafsanjani is known to have met with the Iraq-based Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s representative in Iran, Javad Shahrestani. Some sources have raised the unlikely possibility of Al-Sistani, who has been quoted as saying that “Islamic jurisprudence holds the killing of a single human being is like the killing of all humanity,” issuing a fatwa condemning the regime brutal response to post-election protests.

Al-Sistani is said by some sources to have an ongoing feud with Ahmadinejad. He reportedly refused to see Ahmadinejad when the latter visited Iraq in March 2008, having never previously refused to meet an Iranian leader.

Rafsanjani called on Sunday for a systematic and just probe into claims of fraud in the June 12 national elections, Reuters reported.

But in the increasingly slim possibility Khamenei goes down it won’t be without a fight:

The Tabnak news agency, quoting Etemad newspaper (belonging to Karroubi) stated that the Keyhan newspaper has stopped publishing Ayatollah Javad Amoli´s column. This has been a permanent feature of the newspaper for a number of years.

This is yet another sign of the growing rift between the clergy and Ahmadinejad. It must be noted that Ayatollah Amoli (relative of Aki Larijani) was a supporter of Ahmadinejad. In fact it was at his house where Ahmadinejad was filmed talking about his holy moment a the UN when he felt an aura surrounding him.

However, due to Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei´s efforts to reduce the power of the clergy, relations soured. In fact, according to Rooz daily, prior to the elections, Ayatollah Amoli belonged to a group of clergy who issued a fatwa stating that cheating in elections are forbidden (haram).

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, Ahmadinejad´s messianic ally, issued another fatwa saying that it is permissible (halal) to cheat, if its in the interest of the regime. Keyhan sides with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

This development is yet another important indication of the chasm created between Tehran and Qom. How much has this caused? The results will become evident when the question of finding a replacement for Khamenei arises, or when Khamenei dies. The hand over of power, and how smooth or hard it will be, is going to be a good yard stick to measure the damage.

Meddling In Honduras

June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, International Affairs, Iran, Latin America, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the Obama administration are condemning the military ‘coup d’etat‘ in Honduras that placed popularly elected President Mel Zelaya to exile in Costa Rica yesterday.

According to Mary Anastasia O’Grady in today’s Wall Street Journal opinion page, it was Zelaya — who is a member of Venezuelan dictator for life Hugo Chavez’s leftist coalition of Latin American states  — who was aiming to subvert the democratic process, attempting to circumvent Congress and re-write the Constitution to rescind presidential term limits. The military was just upholding their constitutional obligations:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya’s next move will be. It’s not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating “the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter” and said it “should be condemned by all.” Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya’s foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. “We won’t go backwards,” one sign said. “We want to live in peace, freedom and development.”

The administration’s swift condemnation of the Honduran military is in fact an interesting development. Rather than apply the ‘measured’ and neutral approach maintained in the aftermath of Iran’s rigged elections, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are picking sides, calling on the military to respect ‘democratic norms.’

This new found idealism has thus far not been reserved to regimes whose motives run antithetical to U.S. interests. Interesting for an administration that has wrapped itself in the shroud of realism.

Hugo Chavez, who has repeatedly trumped up charges and jailed his political opponents  has not been rebuked or sanctioned for violating the Inter-American Democratic Charter. And the administration has made it an all but foregone conclusion that Cuba will be brought out of its isolation even though dozens of dissidents and journalists remain imprisoned by the Castro brothers.

It took several more murders and beatings on the streets of Teheran for President Obama to finally admit the futility of the ‘engagement’ charade and speak out — albeit in relatively general terms –  against the brutality of Iran’s clerical-military apparatus. This wasn’t before drawing a moral equivalency between the Khamenei backed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leader of the people’s democracy movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The message President Obama is sending is clear, his diametric shift in public diplomacy is now predicated on the perceptions of those traditionally contemptuous of American power, with the hope that our diminished presence will limit our role as occassional whipping boy. Hopefully he’ll come to grips with the reality that our emasculation will make us a permanent one.

Featured Articles — June 29, 2009

June 29, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Why We Need a Second Stimulus By John B. Judis, The New Republic
Our country’s unemployment rate, which has risen every month this year, now stands well above the worst case scenario of the Treasury Department’s stress tests. Yet we are inundated each month with reports that, in spite of a rising rate of unemployment, the slump has “bottomed out” or is even over.

Losing His Mojo? By Rich Lowry, The New York Post
Starting with his win in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008, he has been, if not the one we’ve been waiting for, the one best suited to tap the wellsprings of public sentiment and capitalize on political circumstances for his own and his party’s benefit.

The Power of Iran’s Iron Fist By Dieter Bednarz, Der Spiegel
Tehran is in a state of emergency as the government continues its increasingly brutal crackdown against protesters. Hardliners and opposition politicians are searching for a compromise behind the scenes, but Iran’s supreme leader is refusing to make any concessions.

New Rift Opens Over Rights of Detainees By Jess Bravin, The Wall Street Journal
The Justice Department has determined that detainees tried by military commissions in the U.S. can claim at least some constitutional rights, particularly protection against the use of statements taken through coercive interrogations, officials said.

Stonewall Plus Forty By Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
The most improbable of America’s mass movements for civil rights—improbable at the time, inevitable in retrospect—got its start at a most improbable hour in a most improbable place.

3,000 Protesters Clash With Police, Local Employees From British Embassy Detained

June 28, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Smaller protests continue as Mir Hossein Mousavi vows not to back down from his challenge of the June 12 election results. The report is here.

Superior

June 28, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

No  one ever accused RN of perfection.  Throughout his career, reporters and cartoonists dwelt on his mistakes, his quirks, even his physical flaws: recall Garry Wills’s long, bizarre description of his face in Nixon Agonistes. As Eamon Javers wryly notes in Politico, the current president has a different image:

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

June 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | 2 Comments 

The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time, forty years ago in 1969, when Richard Nixon became POTUS.

GET BACK (THE BEATLES WITH BILLY PRESTON) performed by THE BEATLES

Forty years ago this week, the Number One song in America was (as it had been since 24 May) the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

Pace maker and peace maker: Billy Preston recording with the Beatles in the January 1969 “Get Back” sessions at Abbey Road studios in London.

By the beginning of 1969, when the Beatles went into the studio to begin work on a new LP and film project —in which the making of the album would be recorded in documentary style— the tensions that would soon tear the band apart were already at work.

George was unhappy and quarreling with Paul; Ringo felt unappreciated; and Yoko Ono was now silently shadowing John in an impassive-aggressive way that even today still seems more than slightly creepy.

In fact the atmosphere was so poisonous that, when George Harrison found keyboard player Billy Preston hanging out in the lobby of the Apple offices, he immediately invited him to join the band in the studio. As Harrison later recalled, Preston “came in while we were down in the basement, running through ‘Get Back,’ and I went up to reception and said, ‘Come in and play on this because they’re all acting strange’. He was all excited. I knew the others loved Billy anyway, and it was like a breath of fresh air. It’s interesting to see how nicely people behave when you bring a guest in, because they don’t really want everybody to know that they’re so bitchy… He got on the electric piano, and straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room. Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we’d created among ourselves.”

In fact, “Get Back” is attributed to “The Beatles with Billy Preston” — the only such shared credit in their entire catalog.

The concept of the new album —which was tentatively titled “Get Back”— was, precisely, to get back to the band’s earlier, simpler roots in terms of songs, arrangements, and production. This was to be a straightforward studio album minus the bells and whistles and overdubs that had started with Sgt. Pepper.

McCartney gave it the title by adlibbing “get back to where you once belonged” — referring to the song “Sour Milk Sea,” written by Harrison and recorded by Apple artist Jackie Lomax, which expressed the lyrical imperative “Get back to where you should be.”

So the phrase “Get Back” perfectly expressed the project’s intention and purpose of getting back to musical roots and basics. And during the extended jam-sessions-cum-rehearsals that became known as the “Get Back Sessions,” the band played scores of songs. But Lennon, who otherwise liked the song, claimed that every time McCartney sang the words “get back,” he glared at Yoko Ono. Lennon told Playboy in 1980: “I’ve always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul’s ‘Get Back.’ When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line ‘Get back to where you once belonged,’ he’d look at Yoko.

Paul McCartney’s attempts to mock and/or satirize Tory MP Enoch Powell’s infamous “River of Blood” anti-immigration speech provided both the backstory and the genesis of “Get Back.”

In the wake of the American riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., British Tory MP Enoch Powell made an inflammatory speech about the threat he claimed Britain was creating as a result of admitting the numbers of immigrants that would end up creating, in Britain’s insular society, the destructive problems that were endemic in America.

Powell was a classicist, and what the press immediately dubbed the “River of Blood” speech was named for one particularly vivid image came from Virgil’s Aeneid:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

It had been on Paul McCartney’s mind to address this bitterly-raging immigration debate —which was particularly focused on immigration from Pakistan— by sending up Powell’s rabble-rousing words.

At one of the “Get Back” sessions, McCartney improvised a “Commonwealth Song.” There is only one rough take of it, and the lyrics are fragmentary and only intermittently intelligible. But the message was clear: “You’d better get back to your Commonwealth Homes.”

You can hear the “Commonwealth Song” here at 3.28.

Commonwealth Song

Immigrants, immigrants had better go home,
Tonight Commonwealth… [Labor Party Prime Minister Harold] Wilson said to the immigrants,
You’d better get back to your Commonwealth homes,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said you’d better get back… home!

Now Enoch Powell said to the folks,
He (inaudible) to the colour of your skin,
He said he don’t care what it’s…
So Ted Heath said to Enoch Powell he said you better get off…,
Enoch… Enoch you better go home!

So Wilson said to the Premier, come on we gotta swing,
We gotta go back to the summat or the other
So Enoch Powell said to Wilson/Heath by… the Commonwealth!

If you don’t want trouble then you better go back to home!

Then John Lennon sings:
I went to India, I’ve been to old Calcutta and I’ve had enough of that,
I’m coming back to England-town.
(Paul: Yes, welcome!)
And dirty Enoch Powell and he’s had enough of coloured men.

Paul: Commonwealth!
John: Yes?
Paul: Can you hear me Commonwealth?
John: Yes!
Paul: Well Enoch Powell you gotta go back to home!

The “Commonwealth Song” was a discrete composition that remained unformed and unrefined. The melody (even where the lyrics talked about going back home) has nothing to do with the melody of “Get Back” which emerged for “No Pakistanis” — another even less subtle McCartney attempt at sending up Powell.

Once again the song was spontaneous and fragmentary.

…was a Puerto Rican… living in the USA.
Get back! Oh, get Back! Get back to where you once belonged.

…don’t dig no Pakistani’s taking all the people’s jobs.
Oh, get back! Get Back! Oh, get back to where you once belonged.

…was a Pakistani…
don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.
So, get back! Get back! Get back to where you once belonged.

As the song ends, the “Get Backs” are given an over-the-top satiric fierceness.

There was only one take of the “Commonwealth Song” and “No Pakistanis” at the “Get Back” sessions, which indicates that they were incidental jams that might have been intended to work through some ideas, or that might simply have been intended to relieve the tension and pass the time. This became relevant seventeen years later when the Get Back sessions became public and, despite the evidence at ear and the common sense of the situation, McCartney was accused by some of racism.

By way of explanation —and defense— he told Rolling Stone magazine:

When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to “Get Back” which were actually not racist at all – they were anti-racist. There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever. So in one of the verses of “Get Back,” which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about “too many Pakistanis living in a council flat” — that’s the line. Which to me was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis… If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favorite people were always black. We were kind of the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown.

Once “Get Back” gelled, the lyrics took a completely different direction.

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner
But he knew it couldn’t last
Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, Jojo
Go home

Get back, get back
Back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Back to where you once belonged
Get back, Jo

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman
But she was another man
All the girls around her say she’s got it coming
But she gets it while she can

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, Loretta
Go home

Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Oooh…

Get back, Loretta
Your mama’s waiting for you
Wearing her high-heel shoes
And her low-neck sweater
Get back home, Loretta

The eleventh take (of fourteen) from the January 27th recording session was released in the UK as a single on 11 April, and in the US on 5 May. It immediately shot to Number One on the charts in both countries (for five weeks in England and a month in the States.)

As with all things Beatles, the exegeses of the song’s meanings are extensive. Tucson, Arizona, was the home town of McCartney’s fiancé Linda Eastman. Some thought that Jojo referred to a popular bar; others thought it referred to Ms. Eastman’s first husband Joseph, who had abandoned her and their daughter.

McCartney has claimed that the final lyrics are purposely ambiguous and mean nothing in particular. As he told a biographer: “Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and they’re not, let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind, again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous, I like doing that in my songs.”

Three days after the recording session, the Beatles went to the roof of their Apple offices on London’s tony Savile Row for what would turn out to be their last public performance.

They did three slightly differing versions of “Get Back” — and might have done more had the neighbors’ complaints not brought the police — and inspired McCartney’s extemporaneous addition: “You been out too long, Loretta! You’ve been playing on the roofs again! That’s no good! You know your mommy doesn’t like that! Oh, she’s getting angry… she’ll have you arrested! Get back!”

On 12 March, McCartney married Linda Eastman at the Marylebone Registry Office; on 20 March, Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. By that time the “Get Back” project had already been shelved and the dissolution of the band had begun. But all four members liked the title song so well that they agreed to its release as a single.

Against the Beatles’ wishes, Capitol Records hired producer Phil Spector to produce an album from the “Get Back” sessions. Spector made a new mix of “Get Back” in March 1970, and an LP —now titled Let It Be— was released —a year after the single— on 8 May. To the original 11th “Get Back” take of 27 January, Spector added dialog from the rooftop session. Now McCartney is heard saying “Thanks, Mo” — referring to Ringo’s wife Maureen who was cheering enthusiastically. And Lennon closes with: “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the band and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”

Here is Spector’s sweetened and revised version — the twelfth and last track on Let It Be.

The original, unreleased, version can be heard on several bootlegs and, legally, on the 2003 release Let It Be…Naked.

Alan W. Pollock’s invaluable and inimitable “Notes on ‘Get Back’” answer any and all questions about the song. His conclusion is sad and wise:

In hindsight you’ll notice how the release of several Beatles singles seemed carefully timed as if to serve as a musical road sign, offering the observant follower a clue to the new direction ever so slightly ahead of the actual bend in the road. To the extent that you can trace this pattern you have to wonder how much of a conscious decision lay behind it.

“Get Back” (b/w “Don’t Let Me Down”) surely belongs to this group of singles. But whereas singles like “Paperback Writer” / “Rain” or “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever” each signal a compositional or stylistic leap in their wake, “Get Back” is musically rather simple stuff by comparison; its particularly enduring significance being more closely related to the chronicled history of the group per se.

As we all know, the combined album and film project named after this song was fated to end up as the painfully sad and the at times excruciatingly well documented commentary on the group’s inevitable breakup. The final edit and mixdown of the “Get Back” materials was aborted and indefinitely postponed in midstream until, almost a year later, long after the recording of the valedictory “Abbey Road” album, it was eventually post-produced and re-edited in order to be released under the transmographied title (not to mention, aptly reworded overarching message) of “Let It Be”.

Featured Articles — June 28, 2009

June 28, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The Flaw in Obama’s Israel Policy By David Ignatius, Washington Post
Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, seemed perplexed during his visit to Washington this month: At a time when America and Israel agreed on all the big issues — from Iran and North Korea to Afghanistan and Pakistan — how could the little issue of Israeli settlements on the West Bank get in the way?

Americans Will Regret Health Care ‘Fix‘ By George Will, Washington Post
“In the beginning,” says a character in a Peter De Vries novel, “the earth was without form and void. Why didn’t they leave well enough alone?” When Washington is finished improving health care, Americans may be asking the same thing. Certainly the debate will compel them to think more clearly about this subject.

Republicans in the Wilderness By Thomas Sowell, Detroit News
A Gallup poll last week showed that far more Americans describe themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals.” Yet Republicans have been clobbered by the Democrats in both the 2008 elections and the 2006 elections.

What happens next in Iraq? By Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer
As U.S. troops pull back Tuesday, new violence is likely, maybe progress.

The Wall Isn’t Falling By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?

Negotiate With Who? By Amir Taheri, The New York Post
PRESIDENT Obama remains adamant about his policy of “engagement” with Iran. Yet he may soon find it hard to find a credible interlocutor in Tehran.

Which State Security Branch Rules Tehran’s Streets? By Nahid Siamdoust, Time
Two weeks after the contested results of Iran’s Presidential elections led to widespread street riots and demonstrations across the country, the Islamic Republic pronounced its harshest threat yet to protesters. At the official ceremony for Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric who often delivers the sermon, said those who agitate on the streets were “waging war against God,” a crime that carries the death sentence.

Happy Negotiations!

June 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rebuked President Obama’s remarks about the brutality inflicted on the Iranian people by their own government:

“It is enough,” he said. “Do not disgrace yourself further by such language and behavior.”

Ahmadinejad also said he will take a tougher stance against the West in the next four years of his presidency:

“Without a doubt, Iran’s new government will have a more decisive and firmer approach toward the West,” Ahmadinejad said. “This time the Iranian nation’s reply will be harsh and more decisive,” to make the West regret its “meddlesome stance,” he said.

The word ‘meddlesome’ — or at least its root — was stolen right out of President Obama’s mouth:

“It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling — the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections.” Obama said at a White House Press conference with South Korean President Lee.

And unfortunately the word ‘regret’ was used to leverage Obama’s tentative stance on the people’s revolution and his passive invitation to corner America’s foreign policy into being defined by its enemies’ perceptions.

Funny because the mullocracy doesn’t mind being meddlesome at all. Nor do they ever regret it.

Liddy, Hunt, And The Power Of Song

June 27, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon Administration figures, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

What are the citizens of Vermont doing, now that the United States is being remade along the lines most of them seem to favor, and they no longer have to plot to secede from the Union to join Canada?

Well, tonight, and next Tuesday, some of them will be going to see a new musical at the Paramount Theater in Rutland. The show is called Room 16, by the youthful team of Stephen Sislen (composer and co-lyricist) and Ben H. Winters (book writer and co-lyricist), and its subject is nothing less than the Watergate break-in. From what I could gather in these articles from the Rutland Herald and Vermont Public Radio’s site, the show focuses on the relationship of the break-in’s two main planners, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.

The brief description of the musical at ASCAP’s site gives an indication of the plot: “though initially wary of each other, the two soon become successful co-conspirators…and pals.” Not much different from The Producers, in other words, and we all know what a massive success that show proved to be.

Last year Room 16 was featured in an ASCAP/Disney workshop in New York, and Youtube has clips of three songs from it: “Room 16,” “After November,” and “Under Control.” Watching these clips, it’s quite apparent that Sislen has a superior gift for melody in the grand Broadway tradition and that he and Winters can produce lyrics on the same high level. (Indeed, their songwriting style somewhat brings to mind Liddy’s favorites, John Kander and Fred Ebb of Cabaret fame.) It’s hard to say to what degree the show’s book would follow the historical record, but then again, The King And I and The Sound Of Music are not exactly models of fidelity to the facts.

No word yet on when or if the show will reach Broadway, but considering that John Adams’s Nixon In China is probably the most produced opera from the second half of the twentieth century, Room 16’s chances of further success may be quite good.

Moonwalking With Steve Martin

June 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Comedy, In Memoriam | 2 Comments 

At the New Yorker, actor and comedian Steve Martin writes a humorous and affectionate tribute to the late Michael Jackson:

As a dancer, Michael Jackson was great. He was like Fred Astaire. This video, a parody of the “Billie Jean” video, was done for “The New Show,” which was a prime-time NBC program that Lorne Michaels did in 1983-1984, when he wasn’t producing “Saturday Night Live.” This was the opening—it was the first piece on the first episode of the show. Michael Jackson had recently done what I consider to be his life-changing performance on the Grammy Awards, where he did the Moonwalk and threw his hat offstage. He was just brilliant. Then the “Billie Jean” video came out. And this was a parody of that.

I’m not sure whose idea it was; it might have been Lorne’s. Pat Birch choreographed it. The hard move was that little leg twist that he did. You really have to throw your leg. I did it a thousand times in about three days. And a couple of weeks later I noticed—er, I have a pain here. The pain lasted about two years, then it went away on its own.

Here is Martin’s priceless attempt:

The Great Purge

June 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

The U.K. Times is reporting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will crackdown on opposition beyond the scope of his constitutional power:

Opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, are bracing themselves for a purge if, as expected, he returns to office following the country’s bitterly disputed presidential election.

His defeated rival, Mir Hos-sein Mousavi, who came a distant second in a poll he insists was rigged by the regime, has continued to defy what he has called “huge pressures” to halt his campaign for a new vote.

Last week his communications with the outside world were severely restricted, his web page was taken down and his newspaper was closed, with 25 of its employees arrested.

Supporters said they feared Mousavi could become another Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader who has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house arrest.

Continue reading.

It’s The Security Forces Stupid

June 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

People power can be potent, but its limits have become evident on the streets of Tehran today.

Accordingly, David Sanger writes in this version of New York Times Magazine the fate of the theocratic regime hinges on the loyalty of the security services:

Still, a common thread is clear: It is the security services on which the regime’s fate ultimately hinges. If they decide their best interests lie with the powers that they have protected, and that have protected them, they will stick it out. If they decide they are more likely to prosper under new leadership, power can collapse at the speed of a show trial.

There have been reports of ambivalence, reluctance, and outright defection from the state police and the Revolutionary Guard, but I wouldn’t expect a widespread culture change in the state security apparatus anytime soon.

Primarily, the vast countrywide network of Basij militiamen would lose the mystique and martyr-like status gained from the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War should the regime become anything but hard-line Islamist and anti-West.

For their brutal methods used against peaceful dissidents, they could also be brought up on war crimes charges, effectively making their relinquishment of power all the more problematic.

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

June 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

This week’s Reward was a recent gift from an old friend: the O’Neal Twins’ rendition of Prof. Ronnie Felder’s gospel classic “Jesus Dropped the Charges.”  It’s hard to decide which is more brilliant — the infectious tune or the tight and clever lyrics — but no decision is required.

The O’Neal Twins —Edgar on the piano and Edward as lead vocalist— were born in St. Louis on 17 August 1937.  In 1969 they were voted the World’s Greatest Gospel Duo by the National Association of Television and Radio Artists.  In 2004 they were inducted into the International Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

I was guilty
Of all the charges,
Doomed and disgraced.
But Jesus,
With His special love,
Saved me by His grace.
He pleaded,
And He pleaded,
He pleaded my case.

Jesus dropped the charges,
Jesus dropped the charges,
And now I’m saved through grace and faith.

I was guilty
For oh so long
Lived in sin too long.
But Jesus,
With His special love,
Reached down with His arms so strong.
He picked me up,
Turned me around,
Gave me a brand new song.

Jesus dropped the charges,
Jesus dropped the charges,
And to Him I belong.

He dropped the charges,
Jesus dropped the charges,
Although I was wrong.
He dropped the charges,
Jesus dropped the charges,
Showed me right from wrong.

He dropped the charges,
Jesus dropped the charges,
He cast them all away.
At Calvary I heard Him say:
“Case dismissed, case dismissed —
Saved by grace.”

Edward O’Neal passed away in 1990; Edgar died in January 2008.

Featured Articles — January 27, 2009

June 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Iran’s Second Sex By Roger Cohen, The New York Times
From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.

Silence Has Consequences for Iran By Jose Maria Aznar, The Wall Street Journal
If there hadn’t been dissidents in the Soviet Union, the Communist regime never would have crumbled. And if the West hadn’t been concerned about their fate, Soviet leaders would have ruthlessly done away with them. They didn’t because the Kremlin feared the response of the Free World.
The prescience of protest By Natan Sharansky, The Los Angeles Times
Once again, the world is amazed. As with the seemingly sudden appearance of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, or the gaudy, grand-scale collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of that decade, the massive revolt of Iranian citizens has elicited the unmitigated surprise of the free world’s army of experts, pundits and commentators. Who would have known?

Iraq on the knife’s edge By Peter Feaver, Foreign Policy
With all the excitement further east, it is almost possible to forget that the coming week will be a momentous one for Iraq. Almost possible, but not quite, because tragically, Iraq still generates more than its fair share of newsworthy events.

When There’s a Will By Greg Sheridan, The Australian
BARACK Obama has become ahero to the Palestinians. Meanwhile, a poll published in The Jerusalem Post shows a minuscule 6 per cent of Israelis believe Obama’s administration and policies are pro-Israel.

What will happen when U.S. combat troops withdraw? By Fred Kaplan, Slate
By June 30, all U.S. combat troops are scheduled—in fact, they’re required—to be withdrawn from all of Iraq’s cities, towns, and villages.

What the Energy Bill Really Means for CO2 Emissions By Bryan Walsh, Time
With a razor-thin margin of just seven votes, the House of Representatives on Friday evening passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act — the first bill to put a fixed and declining cap on U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Republicans and Democrats in the House spent much of the day sparring in sharp language over the bill, which will reduce U.S. carbon emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% below by 2050.

A Different Kind Of Inauguration

June 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Michael Jackson was always a keen reader of comic books, and in the 1980s he was often referred to in them. Comicbook.com takes a look at some aspects of his association with the comics world. It’s been widely reported that in his last weeks the Gloved One enlisted the help of TV’s Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, to help get in shape for the marathon series of London concerts he planned to undertake next month before tragedy struck.

But did you know that Jackson reportedly once met with Stan Lee to discuss buying Marvel Comics – the whole shebang? With Spidey and the Fantastic Four in the hands of MJ, the whole course of history might have been changed.

And speaking of Marvel, back in the early ’70s it had a short-lived title called Spoof, somewhat in the tradition of the 1950s Mad. The cover of issue #3 (for January 1973) featured the first appearance of Jackson on the front of a comic book. He was depicted with his brothers, Bob Dylan, the former Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, and the Osmonds in the grandstand of that year’s Presidential inauguration in Washington, watching as John Lennon swore in David Cassidy as Chief Executive. The foreground of the cover showed Spiro Agnew casting a baleful glance at Richard Nixon and saying, “You had to lower the voting age to 18.” (The scene was clearly inspired by that wacky old movie Wild In The Streets.)

Send Green Balloons To The Sky

June 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

(H/T: Andrew Sullivan)

From Voice of America:

Groups of Iranians visited a Tehran cemetery Friday and released green balloons to pay tribute to a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan they say was killed by Iranian security forces.

Strong Statements From Obama And G8

June 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

President Obama railed against the Iranian regime’s treatment of dissidents:

In Washington, President Obama accused Tehran of violating “universal norms, international norms,” and saying that the bravery of the Iranian people is “a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice.”

He also said that he doesn’t take Mahmoud Ahmedinjad seriously:

At the news conference on Friday, President Obama dismissed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s gibe. “I don’t take Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran,” he said. “And I’m really not concerned about Mr. Ahmadinejad apologizing to me.”

Rather, Mr. Obama said, the Iranian president should “think carefully about the obligations he owes to his own people. And he might want to consider looking at the families of those who’ve been beaten or shot or detained.”

The G8 also came out with a statement but with some reservations to appease Russia:

At a meeting in Trieste, Italy on Friday, the foreign ministers from the Group of Eight issued a joint statement saying they “deplored post-electoral violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians” and urged Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression. Along with the United States and Italy, the group includes Japan, Russia, Canada, France, Germany and Britain.

The statement called on Iran to “guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process,” but it said the door must remain open to dialogue with Tehran on its contentious nuclear program, news reports said.

The joint statement was a compromise between some European countries seeking a harder line, and Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said at a news conference in Trieste that while Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over use of force in Iran, “we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.”

“Our position is that all issues that have emerged in the context of the elections will be sorted out in line with democratic procedures,” The Associated Press quoted him as saying. Unlike other G-8 members, Russia has recognized the election result and played host to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Guardian Council: Election Healthiest Since Revolution

June 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Not very encouraging news:

“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”

The statement fell short of formal certification. But it offered further evidence that despite mass demonstrations and violent confrontations with those who call the election a fraud, the authorities are intent on enforcing their writ and denying their adversaries a voice.

Initially, three losing candidates registered complaints of electoral irregularities, but one of them, Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, withdrew his objections on Wednesday. Mr. Moussavi said Thursday he had come under pressure to drop his complaint.

Absent international observers, the Guardian Council will conduct a courtesy 10 percent recount to validate the fraud:

“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”

The statement fell short of formal certification. But it offered further evidence that despite mass demonstrations and violent confrontations with those who call the election a fraud, the authorities are intent on enforcing their writ and denying their adversaries a voice.

Initially, three losing candidates registered complaints of electoral irregularities, but one of them, Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, withdrew his objections on Wednesday. Mr. Moussavi said Thursday he had come under pressure to drop his complaint.

Mousavi: Khamenei And Ahmadinejad Have Blood On Their Hands

June 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Mousavi on his Twitter page — at the very least — said as much implicity:

Mir Hossein Mousavi says he holds those behind alleged “rigged” elections responsible for bloodshed during recent protests. #IranElection

Cleric: Rioters Waged War Against God

June 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Before President Obama enters into nuclear disarmement talks with the current regime, he should take a listen at the vitriolic statements from the Khamenei crowd. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami (no relation to former President Mohammed Khatami) is the latest no to draw any nuances at today’s Friday prayers:

Khatami, a member of the powerful Assembly of Experts, said the judiciary should charge the leading “rioters” as “mohareb” or one who wages war against God.

“They should be punished ruthlessly and savagely,” he said. Under Iran’s Islamic law, punishment for people convicted as “mohareb” is execution.

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