BrothersJudd Blog

THEY WON'T EVEN HAVE MUCH DIFFICULTY RESURRECTING THEIR STATE:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:19:55 -0500

A legacy of repression: The clashes in Xinjiang are yet another reminder of the fragility of the Chinese state. How much longer can the superpower hold together? (Isabel Hilton, 09 July 2009, New Statesman)

The violence has broken a cherished thread in Beijing’s contemporary narrative: that Xinjiang, like Tibet, has been part of that elastic and untranslatable entity we know as China for 2,000 years, and that its one million Kazakhs and ten million Uighurs are citizens, like any other, of the great motherland, united in a love of the party and, today, of the neo-Confucianism that Han China now wishes to substitute for Maoism as the state ideology.

Most Uighurs do not subscribe to China’s assimilationist state mythologies. Why should they? Like the Tibetans, when Uighurs travel

to the capital they are regarded with suspicion and hotels routinely deny them entry. (Even Uighur government officials have trouble finding lodgings in Beijing.) They know that they are suspected of acts of terrorism at home and abroad, subjected to special measures and repressive campaigns against everything from their historic memory to their language and religion.

The state project that Uighurs are expected to support continues to treat them, like the Tibetans, as backward peoples to whom the Han have extended the benefits of civilisation. Han Chinese saw the militia units (bingtuan), which spearheaded the Han colonisation of Xinjiang in the 1950s, as exemplars of heroic self-sacrifice, “opening up” the frontier, and the continuing ingratitude of the Uighurs and other minorities remains puzzling to many Han.

But the people of Xinjiang (the name means new frontier) see things differently. Only in very modern times has a Han Chinese government in Beijing attempted to rule over this distant part of central Asia. It was conquered in the 18th century by the Manchu, who had also conquered China, and the 19th and 20th centuries were punctuated by repeated uprisings and armed incidents. Xinjiang was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after decades of local power struggles and the deaths, in a mysterious plane crash, of the entire leadership of the putative independent state of East Turkestan. Since then, there has been a continuing rumble of discontent, with intermittent serious episodes, some encouraged by the Soviet Union, others (in the Cultural Revolution, for instance) a reflection of China’s own chaotic politics.

What The Riots In China Really Mean: Ethnic conflict has exposed the Communist Party's vulnerabilities. (Gordon G. Chang, 07.08.09, Forbes)

The disturbances are accurately portrayed as ethnic conflict--Turkic Uighurs against the dominant Hans--but they also say much about the general stability of the modern Chinese state.

That state says the Uighurs are "Chinese," but that's not true in any meaningful sense of the term. The Uighurs are, in fact, from different racial stock than the Han; they speak a different language, and they practice a religion few others in China follow. Of the 55 officially recognized minority groups in China, they stand out the most.

The Uighurs are a conquered people. In the 1940s, they had their own state, the East Turkestan Republic, for about half a decade. Mao Zedong, however, forcibly incorporated the short-lived nation into the People's Republic by sending the People's Liberation Army into Xinjiang.

As much as the Uighurs deserve to govern themselves again--and they most certainly do--almost no one thinks they will be able to resurrect the East Turkestan state. They have even lost their own homeland, as Beijing's policies encouraged the Han to populate Xinjiang. In the 1940s, Hans constituted about 5% of Xinjiang's population. Today, that number has increased to about 40%. In the capital of Urumqi, more than 70% of the residents are Hans. In short, the Uighurs are no match for the seemingly invincible Han-dominated state.

Yet the riots of the last few days show just how vulnerable that Chinese state is, even in the face of apparently weak opponents.

When the 60% tell the 40% to go they will.

NO MORE TIRS:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:33:13 -0500

An Iranian Icon on Today's Protests: A decade before the massive demonstrations of the last month, a young Iranian became a symbol of student protests—and spent years in prison for it. Ahmad Batebi, now 32 and living in Washington, talks to The Daily Beast’s Reza Aslan on the 10th anniversary of the uprising known as 18 Tir. (Reza Aslan, 7/08/09, Daily Beast)

Early on the morning of 18 Tir—the date according to the Iranian calendar—while most of the students were asleep, Basij forces raided the dorms of Tehran University, indiscriminately beating and arresting people. In the melee, a bullet whizzed by the ear of Ahmad Batebi, a young university student, and lodged itself in the chest of his friend. Batebi took his friend’s shirt off and used it to put pressure on the wound, but to no avail. He then ran to the front of the protests and held the shirt aloft for all to see, a witness to the massacre that had just taken place.

A photographer in the crowd snapped his picture. The next day, the image was splashed across the cover of The Economist and instantly became a symbol of the uprising: It was the lonely Chinese man standing before a phalanx of tanks at Tiananmen Square, or, more perhaps more fittingly, it was Neda Agha-Soltan slowly bleeding to death on the streets of Tehran, blood pouring from her mouth and nose.

The day after Batebi’s picture appeared, the police arrested him. He spent the next 10 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, in a cell the size of a bathtub. He was repeatedly tortured and forced to undergo a mock execution. The government wanted him to sign a statement saying the blood on the shirt was not blood at all—it was tomato sauce. Batebi refused.

After suffering two strokes, Batebi was temporarily released from prison in 2007 to receive medical attention. With the help of Kurdish militants, he fled Iran, smuggled first by car, then by donkey, through the mountains of Kurdistan into Iraq. He was granted asylum by United States in 2008 and now lives in Washington, D.C.

For 10 years, the government of Iran has allowed no commemoration of the events of 18 Tir. But this year, despite the brutal crackdown on protests, mass demonstrations have been planned, not only all over Iran, but all over the globe.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the day that changed his life forever, and may yet prove a catalyst for change in Iran, The Daily Beast sat down with Ahmad Batebi. [...]

How do you see the current crisis playing out?

The one thing history has taught us is that no government can defy the will of its people for long. The whole world is moving toward greater human rights and democracy. All people want these things. No one wants dictatorship. No government is powerful enough to stand against the will of the people forever. Chile, Argentina, Yugoslavia, etc. All of these dictatorships eventually collapsed, and the same thing will happen in Iran.

The people of Iran have turned on a light. The flame may dim a bit now and again, but it will never die. This is a long war, a gradual process. It may take another 30 years, but freedom and democracy will come to Iran.

WINNING THE WAR ON SCIENCE:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:57:31 -0500

Obama's new NIH chief links God, science (LAURAN NEERGAARD, 7/08/09, AP)

President Barack Obama is choosing an influential scientist who helped unravel the human genetic code - and is known for finding common ground between belief in God and science - to head the National Institutes of Health. [...]

The folksy Collins led the Human Genome Project that, along with a competing private company, mapped the genetic code - or, as he famously called it, "the book of human life."

"It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God," he said at a 2000 White House ceremony marking release of the genome's first draft.

For that work, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award. But he may be more widely known for his 2007 best-selling book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."

If you wonder what makes us exceptional, we have a chief scientist who's a Creationist whereas the leaders of Europe's established religions aren't.

THE BLOODY BIRTH OF RATIONALISM:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:26:33 -0500

Thousands beheaded in French Revolution named online (Daily Telegraph, 7/08/09)

The names of thousands of people beheaded during the French Revolution are going online for the first time on Wednesday through Ancestry.co.uk. [...]

Among the 'French Deaths by Guillotine, 1792-1796' detailed to mark Bastille Day are King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette.

Olivier Van Calster, managing director of genealogy website Ancestry.co.uk which is publishing the names, said: "The French Revolution was a brutal and gruesome period of history, with repercussions that were felt both in France and across the world socially, culturally and politically.

THE FOLKS WHO DEPRIVED THEM OF DDT ARE BACK TO HELP THE POOR:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:17:41 -0500

Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick: James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book (James Delingpole, 8th July 2009, Spectator)

So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? ‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’

This no-nonsense approach may owe something to the young Ian’s straitened Sydney upbringing. His father was crippled with MS, leaving his mother to raise three children on a schoolteacher’s wage. ‘We couldn’t afford a TV — not that TV even arrived in Australia till 1956. We’d use the same brown paper bag over and over again for our school lunches, always turn off the lights, not because of some moral imperative but out of sheer bloody necessity.’

One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’

Who’s afraid of billions of people?: In the run-up to the UN’s World Population Day, spiked argues against all attempts to cajole, coerce or convince people into having fewer kids. (Brendan O’Neill, 7/08/09, spiked)

[O]ur attitudes to the population level fundamentally reflect our attitudes to human ingenuity. The population debate is frequently dressed up in demographic and scientific clothing, but really it is a political issue, reflecting different political attitudes. Where you stand on population today tells us a lot about where you stand on the idea of progress, of civilisation, and of humanity itself.

It’s worth asking what drives the population-control and population-reduction lobby. These people have been around for a few centuries and their arguments have changed over time. For one of the first population scaremongers, Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century, the main problem was that if too many people were born then there wouldn’t be enough food to feed them. He vastly underestimated the ability of industrialised society to create more and more food.

In the early twentieth century there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments: some claimed that there were too many Africans and Asians, who might weaken the power of white European nations.

More recently, the population-control lobby has adopted environmentalist arguments. It now says that too many people are demanding too much of Mother Earth, using up all of her resources and destroying her biodiversity. Some greens even refer to humans as a ‘plague on the planet’ and a ‘pathogenic organism’. In other words, humanity is a disease making the planet Earth sick.

The fact that the presentational arguments of the population-reduction lobby can change so fundamentally over time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows that this is a political outlook in search of a social or scientific justification. It is an already-existing prejudice, held by certain kinds of people, which looks around for the latest trendy or respectable ideas to clothe itself in.

It is time we questioned, if not demolished, some of the supposedly respectable ideas that today’s Malthusians surround themselves with.

As many of the poor as they'll tolerate they want to keep backwards.

DIALOGUE?:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:53:23 -0500

The Uighurs’ cry has echoed round the world: The deaths in northwest China are, sadly, the inevitable result of the repression of Turkic peoples over six decades (Rubiya Kadeer, 7/08/09, Times of London)

The massacre of Uighur demonstrators in the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar has been reported in every language, from English to Chinese to Portuguese to Arabic. While the intense repression against Uighurs is normally ignored by both the Chinese Government and the international media, the deaths of hundreds of protesters and the injuries of hundreds more has exposed the brutality of Chinese government actions toward Uighurs in a way that cannot be ignored.

Instead of taking action to recognise the cause of Uighurs’ demonstrations, or to acknowledge that the problems in East Turkestan [known by the Chinese as Xinjiang] derive from the Chinese Government’s inability to resolve discontent, Chinese officials have resorted to blaming “outside forces”, including me and one of the organisations I lead, the World Uighur Congress. Just as Chinese officials placed the blame for widespread demonstrations in Tibet on the Dalai Lama, they claim that overseas Uighur organisations “instigated” the demonstrations in East Turkestan. I in no way organised or called for any demonstrations.

I condemn the violence that has been carried out against the Uighur people. I also condemn the violence some Uighur demonstrators have committed. I am absolutely opposed to all forms of violence, and believe it is only through dialogue and attempts at mutual understanding that we may achieve peace.

There'll be peace when the Chinese acknowledge that Uighurstan is a separate nation.

NOT EXACTLY A PORTRAIT IN COURAGE, IS HE?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:53:10 -0500

Democrats shy away from health care tax: Rifts threaten Obama deadline (Jennifer Haberkorn, July 9, 2009, Washington Times)

Cracks in President Obama's health care reform plan formed Wednesday as his August deadline appears to be slipping away amid angst from Democrats over taxing employer benefits to help pay for the $1 trillion makeover.

Top Democrats, including Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who is helping craft the measure, and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York said the idea isn't politically viable.

"Fifty-three percent of my constituents would be taxed under that proposal in Connecticut," said Mr. Dodd, who is acting chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

ADIEU, ADU:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:47:42 -0500

United States 2 - 0 Honduras: Quaranta, Ching break deadlock for U.S. (ESPN SoccerNet, 7/08/09)

Quaranta was one of several new players on the U.S. roster for the Gold Cup. The Americans have a nearly entirely different roster from the U.S. team that made a surprise run to the Confederations Cup championship game last month; most regulars were given a rest for the Gold Cup.

The Americans last played Honduras on June 6 in a World Cup qualifying match, but the only American who was dressed for that game and Wednesday's match was Benny Feilhaber, who came on in the 64th minute.

"There were times in the game we couldn't find the right rhythm," U.S. coach Bob Bradley said. "But I think there was still a good understanding of pushing the tempo. When we push the game for 90 minutes, we think that's an advantage for us."

Both squads had several opportunities before the United States broke through.

In the 15th minute, Quaranta had a header go wide left of the goalpost. Adu started the sequence with a nifty heel kick to Robbie Rogers, who took the ball deep into the left side of the penalty area before sending a cross to Quaranta in the middle. He dived and sent the header toward the post.

The Americans had another chance in the 22nd minute. Kyle Beckerman passed to Ching in the box. Ching chipped the ball over goalkeeper Donis Escobar, but he couldn't regain his footing as he chased down the ball and Honduras cleared off the goal line. Ching had another chance in the 51st minute when he took a cross right in front of the net and his shot went over the bar.

Honduras had a golden opportunity in the 30th minute. Walter Martinez had a breakaway with only goalkeeper Troy Perkins to beat, but his shot was just wide, hitting the right side of the goal netting.

The substitutions of Davies and Feilhaber in the 64th minute seemed to re-energize the American offense.

This was supposed to be Freddy Adu's big chance to show what he can do, but he was awful in the game against tiny Grenada and was the first man substituted for in this one, which, perhaps not coincidentally, was immediately followed by the two goals. At least at this point in time, if you're trying to win you can't have Feilhaber on the bench and Adu in the game.

MORE:
Quaranta Finds Net, and Finds His Way Back, for U.S.: United States 2, Honduras 0 (Paul Tenorio, 7/09/09, Washington Post)

Santino Quaranta charged toward one of the few corners of RFK Stadium where there were more red-clad fans than those in blue and white and slid on his knees, arms flexed out to the side, "a million things" rushing through his head.

The moment could not have been more perfect.

Making his return to the U.S. national team for the first time since 2006, and marking yet another inspiring step in his comeback from a drug addiction that nearly derailed his career and his life, Quaranta had just buried a blistering shot from the top of the 18-yard box to give the United States the lead over Honduras -- turning this already special night into the ideal memory.

With his first goal ever for the United States, in front of his hometown crowd, Quaranta, the 24-year-old D.C. United midfielder, turned a previously scoreless game to the Americans' favor and eventually into a 2-0 victory in the first round of the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

"It was a very special night for me, personally, but to be back wearing the [U.S.] jersey was probably more special," Quaranta said. "Just to be back on the field with the team and to listen to the anthem was very emotional for me. Because it has been such a fun and long road back."

On Tuesday at training, Quaranta said it would be difficult to hold back the emotions of returning to the field in a U.S. jersey in front of his home crowd. During the anthem, Quaranta clenched his eyes tightly shut and stared at the ground, trying to contain those feelings.

But after the goal, the emotions overflowed.

WELL, HE HAS TRIED CASTING HIMSELF AS ANOTHER REAGAN:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:44:07 -0500

Economy could make Obama, Democrats vulnerable in 2010 (Christine Romans, 7/08/09,
CNN's American Morning)

They are two presidents from different parties but have striking similarities.
President Obama maintains that investing in key areas such as health care will help stabilize the economy.

Former President Ronald Reagan and current President Obama are incredibly popular, and both faced rising unemployment early on.

Reagan's experience could be instructive for Democrats today; the GOP lost 26 seats in the 1982 elections. Reagan's popularity could not trump double-digit unemployment.

"If we look back at 1982, as soon as the unemployment rate hit 10 percent, there was a political dynamic that changed significantly ... and it became much harder for the incumbent party to be able to make their case," said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research at Strategas, an investment strategy and policy research firm.

HYPERAMERICAN-IN-CHIEF:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:36:13 -0500

Mourn on the 4th of July: Liberals say that the United States is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, but behind the façade little has changed. With his government of warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, Barack Obama is merely upholding the myths of a divine America (John Pilger, 09 July 2009, New Statesman)

Barack Obama is the embodiment of the “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that “everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but “US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all”. It is as if “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening . . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British “influence”, albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land “where miracles happen”. Justin Webb, until recently the BBC’s man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the “city on the hill”.

Europeans "reacted" to George W. Bush's moralism by electing leaders just like him--Merkel, Sarkozy, Harper, etc.. Did they really expect that America would elect someone less like him?

IT'S TO DARWIN'S CREDIT...:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:21:16 -0500

The Darwin Myth: Charles Darwin was a kind and polite man, but his take on evolution led to social Darwinism and the Nazis. (Bill Muehlenberg, 9 July 2009, MercatorNet)

Wiker also highlights the major disconnect between Darwin and Darwinism. Darwin the man was kind, polite, humane, a great husband and father, and a gentleman. He was a philanthropist, and keenly supportive of the abolition of slavery movement. But his take on evolution ran directly counter to all of this, for it led of necessity to social Darwinism and the logic of the Nazis.

According to Wiker, social Darwinism is not the misapplication of Darwinism, “it is Darwinism”. While the first 85 pages of The Darwin Myth provide the biographical details, the last 85 pages make the case for this intrinsic connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism. To make this case, Wiker reminds us that Darwin’s two most famous works are really one book in two volumes. His famous 1859 volume, The Origin of Species, which dealt with evolution as applied to plants and animals, was followed up by its 1871 sequel, The Descent of Man, which took evolutionary theory and applied it to humans. The two go together and should be read as such.

The end result is a worldview that totally contradicts Darwin as a person, including his passionate abolitionism. In his earlier book he had written about the “slave-making instinct” found in nature. He used the example of how little black ants were enslaved by big red ants. This was how nature – and evolution – worked. It was neither right nor wrong – it just was, as is everything in a purely naturalistic evolutionary account of things.

So, when he penned his next volume, he sought to show that mankind operates in the very same manner as the rest of the biological world. Man is merely an animal, and he too proceeds by principles of natural selection just as other animals do.

Morality itself is simply a product of evolution. Morality thus becomes whatever helps one tribe or race to survive over against another tribe or race. Therefore that which is “good” is whatever helps a particular race or people to survive. If survival is the ultimate “goal” of evolutionary processes, then the stronger species will win out and rule over the weaker, and that is just the way it goes.

But how could an abolitionist like Darwin promote a view which seems to provide a fixed biological rationale for slavery?

It meant that he had to step back from the obvious implications of his own theory.

...that even he found his ideology appalling.

REPUBLIC OR REVOLUTION?:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:18:05 -0500

In Iran, a Struggle Beyond the Streets (MICHAEL SLACKMAN, 7/08/09, NY Times)

Most telling, and arguably most damning, is that many influential religious leaders have not spoken out in support of the beleaguered president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Indeed, even among those who traditionally have supported the government, many have remained quiet or even offered faint but unmistakable criticisms.

According to Iranian news reports, only two of the most senior clerics have congratulated Mr. Ahmadinejad on his re-election, which amounts to a public rebuke in a state based on religion. A conservative prayer leader in the holy city of Qum, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini, referred to demonstrators as “people” instead of rioters, and a hard-line cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for national reconciliation.

Some of Iran’s most influential grand ayatollahs, clerics at the very top of the Shiite faith’s hierarchy who have become identified with the reformists, have condemned the results as a fraud and the government’s handling of the protests as brutal. On Saturday, an influential Qum-based clerical association called the new government illegitimate. [...]

To understand the nature of the conflict, it is essential to look back to the founding of the republic. Ayatollah Khomeini built on two different and often contradictory principles, one of public accountability and one of religious authority. To tie it all together, Ayatollah Khomeini imported a centuries-old religious idea, called velayat-e faqih, or governance of the Islamic jurist. Shiite Muslims believe that they are awaiting the return of the 12th Imam, and under this religious concept the faqih, or supreme leader, serves in his place as a sort of divine deputy.

From the start, there were intense disagreements over how this idea should work. Those conflicts, though, were muted partly by Ayatollah Khomeini’s exalted status, and by a unity forged by an eight-year war with Iraq. When the war ended and Ayatollah Khomeini died, the conflicts erupted. On one side, many clerics once close to Ayatollah Khomeini, including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, wanted to emphasize the republican aspect of the state without eliminating the special role of the supreme leader. Mohammad Khatami, a midlevel cleric, was elected president on a reform platform.

But Mr. Khatami’s ability to carry out his policies was blocked by hard-liners who saw his vision of Iran as a threat to their interests.

IT'S ON:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:15:37 -0500

GOP’s Baker leaps into race against Patrick: Healthcare executive’s entry alters 2010 dynamic (Andrea Estes and Matt Viser, July 9, 2009, Boston Globe)

Charles D. Baker Jr. announced yesterday that he will resign as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care to seek the Republican nomination for governor, a move that infused more drama into an already chaotic political week and paved the way for a potentially momentous 2010 campaign.

Baker, who has been seen by many of the party faithful as the leading Republican challenger, is planning to run a campaign that leverages his strong background in state government and his firsthand knowledge of the state’s healthcare system. He intends to challenge Governor Deval Patrick’s approach to the fiscal crisis and his collaboration with the Legislature to raise the sales tax. [...]

Though largely unknown to the general public, and without a compelling story like Mitt Romney’s performance running the Salt Lake City Olympics, Baker has an almost cultlike following among Massachusetts political insiders and the business elite. He is often cited for his low-key but firm approach to problems and a legendary grasp of complicated issues. Baker served as a senior aide to two Republican governors, Weld and Paul Cellucci, before taking the helm of Harvard Pilgrim, which he helped navigate from the brink of insolvency earlier this decade and put on solid financial footing.

“I consider myself a Baker Republican,’’ Weld said yesterday from New York, where he is in a private law practice. “When I was in office, I would turn to him in private after virtually every meeting and say, ‘What do you think we should do?’ I don’t recall he and I ever disagreeing. He knows more about government than I do or ever did.’’

Weld added: “I think I’m not taking anything away from any other candidate . . . but I think Charlie Baker is different. People with that much ability and that much devotion and that much sand and gravel don’t come along all that often.’’

Whether admiration among the powerful elite is enough to propel Baker into office is not clear. While his announcement injected new life into the dwindling ranks of a state GOP hoping to recapture the governor’s office, Baker faces significant hurdles. Among them: building a campaign fund large enough to overcome his low name recognition and persuading voters to elect someone to the highest office in Massachusetts whose sole electoral experience is as a one-term Swampscott selectman. In that last regard, there is precedent: Patrick had never held elective office, and neither had Weld.

Baker is far more likely to run on his experience with healthcare and his ability to run a major organization than anything else. He will also point to his time as state secretary of administration and finance under Cellucci and Weld, and as state secretary of health and human services under Weld, to highlight his ability to understand the workings of state government and the budgets that fund them.

Baker’s announcement was but one major event in another frantic day in Massachusetts politics. Earlier, state Treasurer Timothy Cahill stopped by Quincy City Hall to change his party affiliation from Democrat to unenrolled, a first step toward his own gubernatorial campaign.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:52:22 -0500

R.I.P., AUGUSTUS:

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:20:03 -0500

Man dies after falling into vat of chocolate in NJ (AP, 7/08/09)

Authorities say a man has died after falling into a vat of melted chocolate in a New Jersey processing plant.