via shooresh1917.blogspot.com

These are tremendously powerful photos of the Tehran riots.

(via kellysims via gtcaz)

Update: Commenter Roozbeh suggests that the protester is not, in fact, lending aid, but “taking” the officer, and points to another photo of the same scene. In this third photo, it appears that two protesters are leading the police officer out of the crowd.

There are plenty of fairly brutal photos in that same series — many cops have responded to the protests violently, to be sure, and that’s really important to recognize. Aside from awareness of the apparently stolen election that has mobilized protesters to the streets, I of course don’t know what’s in this particular protester’s mind, but it doesn’t appear to me in either photo that he’s trying to hurt the police officer. The only thing that would resolve that would be to find him and get his description of the scene — I hope that somebody does.

Matt Yglesias asks “What are Today’s Protests Missing?” Turns out he asked much the same question a few years ago, and I had some thoughts at the time about what seems to be a common feature of both the left and right: When compared to the protest of ye old days, contemporary mass mobilization is greeted by public intellectuals with a sigh and either one of a) regret that it isn’t ye old days anymore when protests were coherent and organized, or b) dismissive sneering about how the hippies have never been good for anything and still aren’t good for anything.

This time around, Matt makes a really important point, that coherence of movements often is really only sensible in hindsight:

Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals.

That’s a part of one of the key observations I made in response to this same thread a few years ago:

The single largest event of the period was a Washington, D.C., antiwar rally of November 15, 1969, attended by an estimated 250,000 people. A quick read of the coverage of that weekend—like yesterday’s march, it really was a series of events, not a single event—demonstrates that participants were there to take part for many reasons, although they all ended up under the anti-war banner: Students protested the draft; religious activists ranging from Catholic to Quaker participated; radical leftists were there, as were elderly women and parents with their children, as were small groups seeking violent confrontations; also present were African American organizers and advocates for the poor, protesting the war’s diversion of funds from domestic programs. This is still an oversimplified list of participants; it’s clear that while the war was the most tangible target of the protests, many grievances actually brought protesters out. Like this weekend’s march, officially organized by United for Peace and Justice, that series of events had a nominal set of organizers, but plenty of other groups also participated. In a sister protest across the country, where another 100,000 people demonstrated, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Gay Liberation Front were among notable organizations represented.

This is not to say that the context for contemporary protest hasn’t changed: Political opportunity structure is different, modes and tools of mobilization are transforming, and movement organizations are functioning in some very different ways. But we need to be aware of the reality of the good old days of American protest in order to make sense of what has changed and what hasn’t changed.

Update: Brayden King, one of my old office-mates, has more thoughts on this topic. Typically for him, it’s good, smart, well-researched stuff.

Bill Kristol is apparently losing some ambition. Whereas in the past he would eagerly rewrite the McCain/Palin talking points, now he’s content to transcribe them directly from his phone calls with Palin.

Just plain folksy:

The McCains also own three 2000 NEV Gem electric vehicles, which are bubble-shaped cars popular in retirement communities.

Only the Cadillac is registered in the candidate’s name. Cindy McCain’s name is on 11 vehicles, though not the one she actually drives. That car, a Lexus, is registered to her family’s beer-distributor business and is outfitted with personalized plates that read MS BUD.

Two in twenty-four hours? I know, I know…

Shorter David Brooks: “Okay, I admit that the Palin pick was a cynical ploy of the most base and misleading kind, but that’s still no excuse for anyone else to say so.”

Go easy on me, because I don’t do this very often:

“Sarah Palin: Finally, a chick I’m happy to identify as a feminist."

Bonus insider-intellectual cheap poetry reductionism for quoting from “Prufrock.”

Double-bonus bizarro-world protesters-are-dirty moral equivalence from the comments!

The left burns bras, throws paint on fur coats, puts colored condoms on display at art shows, send Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan out, break windows, scream hate filled name calling.

The right does have it’s occasional Abotion clinic bomber as well. But the left seems to encourage their hateful side.

Sweet.

META: Insert blog post here mocking the mockery of community organizing. End it with something snappy, like, jackasses.

Does anybody have the slightest damn idea what point David Brooks thinks he’s trying to make?

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

It’s like a bizarre under-40 free-association exercise, as if by simply shouting Larry LESSIG! iPhone! C. S. Lewis [?] ! at the right pitch, he can shape argument out of incoherence. After focusing most of a column on the most trivial surface currents of nerd culture*, he can’t resist throwing in his now bog-standard “Obama-worship-cultists” ** line, only now with the added bizarrity of making a head-fake to “the role of the intellectual in modern politics.”

How do you even try take this crap on the merits?

* Seriously, he actually wrote this: “They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names.”

** And let’s entirely leave aside the fact that the young, energized, “newly militant” cohort of voters now destined to inherit the earth because the Republicans aren’t hip enough is exactly what Brooks has relentlessly mocked for being Sierra Nevada-drinking dimwits lulled into dimwitted political consciousness by an aesthete.

*** Unassociated endnote produced solely because I like Drek so much.

Loving the fact that Jonah Goldberg needs to point this out to his audience:

Michael Mann — not the Miami Vice guy — reviews the book in the Post today. [emphasis mine]

Jim Macdonald at Making Light responds to the President’s plan to make insurance premiums tax deductible:

Making yachts 100% tax-deductible won’t give everyone a yacht.

My hometown newspaper has begun carrying State of the Union, in what seems to be an attempt to balance the near-scandalous presence of Doonesbury on its editorial page. (Doonesbury, of course, having only relatively recently been brought out of exile from somewhere in the classifieds section.)

Now, I know, humor is in the eye of the beholder. But man, this is one seriously un-funny comic strip. It’s described as

Combining startling caricatures with a sly sense of humor and a sharp eye for satire, this innovative new strip will be sure to tickle your funnybone while making you think.

What do you think?

Let’s see: “Startling caricature,” sure, in the sense that I imagine a peanut could quite literally draw a better caricature of Jimmy Carter. As for making me think, well, here’s another one. Because CNN is the enemy! Or this one as proof that the cartoonist needs some editorial oversight. Innovative? Sure, if you consider it an innovation to make three-hour talk radio shows into four-panel condensed versions. That one made me think, “I wonder if this is what it’s like to literally be clubbed senseless by Glenn Beck?”

From a survey of holiday spending in the state:

Pollster Bruce Merrill reports that 18 percent of Arizona Republicans he questioned earlier this month say they intend to spend more on holiday gifts this year than they did a year ago.

By contrast, Merrill said Tuesday that only 10 percent of Democrats — and 11 percent of independents — are planning to increase holiday spending.

Okay, that’s interesting. I wonder what explains the difference?

One possibility, said Merrill, is related to the fact that the Democrats are taking control of Congress.

“There’s a lot of discussion coming out of Washington that a lot of the tax cuts are not going to hold on higher socio-economic people,” he said.

[...]

“So maybe Republicans are figuring we’d better spend our money while we’ve got it,” he said.

That just doesn’t strike me as a plausible explanation. If foreward-thinking wealthy Rs are anticipating losing their tax cuts, surely they’re forward-thinking enough to understand that the IRS doesn’t care that they spent the money on Christmas gifts?

I would think that one of these are more reasonable mechanisms:

• If you really want to go the tax-cut route, did Rs receive greater proportions of the cuts this year, and as a result are more inclined to increase their spending?
• Rs feel better about the economy?
• Rs are disproportionately into the super-duper expensive model of the PS3?

To really tell the story, we ought to know if the spending difference is really uncharacteristic. This story from ABC news discusses 2005 holiday spending, but has no breakdown by political party.

Wow: Flagstaff soldier killed self in protest.

According to KNAU, an Army investigation found that Peterson had objected to interrogation techniques that were being used on prisoners.

“She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage,” stated the KNAU report.

She was subsequently assigned to monitoring Iraqi guards at the base gate and was sent to suicide prevention training, stated the KNAU report. And on Sept. 15, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle, according to KNAU.

The KNAU report also stated that Army spokespeople for Peterson’s unit refused to describe the interrogation techniques and that all records of the techniques have been destroyed.

Update: More on this from Editor and Publisher.

Late update: The local radio station that broadcast the story just issued an apology, noting that there is no evidence tying Peterson’s suicide to her objections to interrogation techniques.

I’ll make no pretense of open-mindedness about the congressional race brewing in my district here. Every single time I’ve heard Rick Renzi speak about something that I care about, I’ve been thoroughly insulted by him. His campaign has really brought divisive rhetoric to a higher plane lately, though, as he repeatedly slurs his opponent Ellen Simon. It takes a fairly breathtaking level of audacity to tar Simon as having “Nancy Pelosi views” while dodging local debates and hiding from his own constituents.

Renzi shows plenty of contempt for the Constitution by maligning Simon for taking money from an attorney who has represented terrorist suspects in court. Hi, Rick, Sixth Amendment, much? That of course is pretty standard Rove-style water boarding carrying, so it doesn’t really come as any kind of surprise. What I really, truly am surprised by is Renzi’s calling Simon to task for being from the scary midwest:

ACLU President Ellen Simon’s Cleveland values are completely out of touch with the values of rural Arizona, and she ought to be ashamed of her disgraceful record.

Whew knew that Cleveland is the new San Francisco? Cleveland?

You don’t need to be a college dive bar veteran to know that “overly friendly” is how your friends refer to the guy who sits a little too close and shakes their hands just a little too long. It’s the kind of signal for “he gives me the creeps, so don’t wander too far away” that we all learned in middle school, at the very latest. It’s code, guys, and not at all complicated. Which is why the excuse that Foley’s emails were just “overly friendly” and therefore didn’t raise any eyebrows is so absurd.

The other reason is the context in which it’s being used. Any involvement with kids means hyper-vigilance. The YMCA knew it way back when I taught Teen Camp, and this was before Myspace and AIM sexed the kids all up. Universities certainly know it: It’s why we don’t close the door when our students are in the office and why, when we TAs get even a hint that something’s hinky with a student, we scurry to our advisors to stay far, far ahead of it.

In that kind of environment, and the page program where kids live in a dorm and have a curfew, is unmistakably that kind of environment, not acting on something because it is simply overly friendly is idiotic malfeasance.

PS: Oh, and the “the Speaker was too busy to do something, what with doing the Peoples’ Business” excuse, which I’ve heard bandied around today, doesn’t help the case any. It does change the tone slightly, from “We’re craven political goons” to “We’re craven political goons who are also inept.” But that’s not a net plus.

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