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 | 5 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 | 3 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:

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