This one is simple: Had it not been for the music Michael Jackson created with Q - and please, let us never, ever forget Q - I would never have become a DJ. Had he not done what he did, I would be a different person living a different life. It is that simple. 

Now sure, I suppose its possible that his fanboy staffers are right in their theory that 2012 will be "different" from 2008, but.... what about everything that has gone on in the Republican Party since last fall makes anyone think that the party's base is becoming more reasonable in its outlook, and not less? What am I missing here?

So as the blood flows in the streets of Teheran, the pressure will build on for Obama to do something more. Make no mistake, if a Tiananmen style crackdown ensues, we must condemn it, and loudly. We must reappraise the timing and manner of going forward negotiations. Iran policy will need to be re-calibrated on multiple fronts. And I will be even less hopeful for any going forward diplomatic successes, with an increasingly sclerotic, repressive, insecure regime hanging on now well beyond its time. But we should not be, in a fit of ennobled but deeply misguided passion, engaging in actions like having President Obama directly contact Moussavi, or delivering a taped message to the Iranian people, and so on. For these actions will be turned on the backs of the people like the young woman massacred in cold blood today, and in short order. While those here advocating something be done might feel morally superior as they spout such prescriptions from the comforts of far-away New York and Washington, the greater blood likely to be spilled should such policy routes be followed will be on their conscience, not those of us counseling against such shallow recklessness masquerading as serious foreign policy. 

So, to answer this tortured woman’s hauntingly beautiful query which is the subject line of this post, ‘where is this place that we are only screaming to the world with our silence’? Well, yes, it is a horrible place tonight, but let us and her seek some solace in knowing that the behavior of the ruling Mullahs today will ultimately likely precipitate the death of this regime, if not immediately, with the passage of time. And, ironic and hard to accept during this emotional time as it may be, we will hasten that time likely by doing less, rather than more. Again, an edict to keep in mind here: first, do no harm. The President, I believe, understands this. Hopefully more of his fairer critics will too in the coming days, which will be very emotional ones, I know.

NYT had a partial quotes. Steve Clemons provides the entire thing.

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights. 

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion. 

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples' belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

If the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been broadcast to the entire world, Hitler's demise most surely would have come several years sooner. A picture paints a thousand words. In one second of Internet video, there are 30 frames, and thus 24,000 words. In a 30-second youtube video, there are 720,000 words. We now thousands of videos uploaded from Iran, and the number is only increasing. By month's end, there will be ten billion words worth of protest, and this is not counting the actual written words by tens of millions of world citizens.

Ever since my earliest days at America Online - back in the mid-1990s, for the record, which was before AOL was even connected to the web - I've believed that the communication infrastructures we were building would change the world. But even I didn't believe it would happen this quickly.

That Limbaugh’s argument moves by dint of unanswered rhetorical questions is damning enough—neither he nor his audience knows the answers to those questions—but the fact that, even if he knew what had happened, he would still consider it irrelevant because it happened 65 years ago.  This claim that history can expire is indicative of a strain of stupid to which those who regularly complain about the “re-FDRing of America [via] the New New Deal” should be immune. Limbaugh fears nothing more than the revival of policies more than 65 years old, yet is incapable of understanding why the Iranian people may harbor a grudge against a nation that took liberties with its internal governance until 1979?

Limbaugh’s questions amount to little more than magical thinking thrust into face of empirical evidence.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies believe the appearance of American meddling is a powerful political cudgel; to this fact, conservatives respond that 1953 was a long time ago.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies are actively working to manufacture evidence of American meddling; to this fact, conservatives reply that Obama should do their work for them.

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People.  During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran.  The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians."  John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected.  Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least.  Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is.  Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives.  The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game. 

I continue to be a little bit astonished by how little attention the political establishment is giving to the implications of the routinization of a 60-vote supermajority requirement for all Senate business. This is a very new “tradition” in American governance, it goes against everyone’s common understanding of how democratic procedures are supposed to work, and there’s very little reason to believe that the results will be beneficial in the long run. The fact that the Democrats currently hold 58-59 Senate seats is, I think, to some extent clouding people’s thinking about this. It’s quite rare for either party to have a majority that large. And the implication of the currently evolving norm is that a new president with a 54 or 55 copartisans in the Senate could find himself completely unable to confirm vast numbers of subcabinet nominees, rendering the country essentially ungovernable.

Meanwhile, the administration and the Senate leadership seems to be shockingly ineffective in bringing attention to this.

To which I would add: The Democratic Party needs to work on getting some more media-savvy leaders in Congress. The only reason this isn't a bigger deal is because the Democrats haven't made it one. I mean, sure, in a rational media system, this issues would get attention on its own. But we don't live in a wold with a rational media system. So unless the Democratic Party learns how to make the media pay attention to issues like this they won't get covered.

I know white Southerners, and the GOP gets tired of being tarred with the racist tag. That said, it's worth considering that black people get tired of being the targets of people who are tired of being tarred with the racist tag.

More TNC:

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to... the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. 

The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me. 

I have to say, TNC has more faith in the South than I do. Unless you put the stress on the word "later" in that last sentence, that is.

"Competition is a good thing . . . Choice and competition is what we want,"

I cannot for the life of me figure out how the Republican party managed to box itself into an anti-competition position on health care reform. They are opposed to the idea of a public option because they are afraid that for profit health insurers won't be able to compete fairly? That argument requires that they admit upfront that our current for-profit system is less economically efficient than something the government would set up. Or, to put it more plainly, that government can run health insurance better than private enterprise can. But in the name of "freedom" and "free enterprise," they are going to defend the current system nonetheless. That's their starting point on this? Really?

...part of what’s wrong with the world is that the very same people who spend a lot of time cheerleading for free markets and donating money to institutions that cheerlead for free markets—businessmen, in other words—are the very people who have the most to gain from markets being totally dysfunctional. The absolute worst place on earth you can find yourself as a businessman is in the kind of free market you find in an Economics 101 textbook. As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc. So when it comes to something like health insurance, you have people on the left who want public policy to aim at replacing the market with publicly run entities and you have people in the business community who want public policy to aim at making the market as dysfunctional as possible. So you get what we have, which sucks.

+ Ezra Klein continued to make news with his new Washington Post blog, this time with an exclusive interview of Sen. Kent Conrad, who offered an interesting compromise proposal this week: rather than a single national public plan, perhaps regional (or national?) co-ops would do the trick.

[T]hrough intimidation, violence, manipulation, and outright fraud, the Iranian regime has once again made a mockery of democracy, and confirmed its repressive and dictatorial character.

We as Americans have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with people when they are denied their rights by repressive regimes. When elections are stolen, our government should protest. When peaceful demonstrators are beaten and silenced, we have a duty to raise our voices on their behalf. We must tell the Iranian people that we are on their side.

For this reason, I would hope that President Obama and members of both parties in Congress will speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now, and unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians who went to the polls in the hope of change and who are now looking to the outside world for strength and support.

As Nico points out, numerous experts and human rights groups have been begging for the President to do precisely the opposite. At this stage, nothing could possibly be worse for the opposition than for them to look as if they are backed by the United States. And by nothing, I mean nothing. Actively supporting the opposition, even if the support amounts to nothing more than words, would allow the hard liners to paint the opposition as tools of the United States, virtually guaranteeing a crackdown far worse than anything we are seeing today. 

“Here is my country,” a young woman said to me, voice breaking. “This is a coup. I could have worked in Europe but I came back for my people.” And she, too, sobbed.

“Don’t cry, be brave,” a man admonished her.

He was from the Interior Ministry. He showed his ID card. He said he’d worked there 30 years. He said he hadn’t been allowed in; nor had most other employees. He said the votes never got counted. He said numbers just got affixed to each candidate.

He said he’d demanded of the police why “victory” required such oppression. He said he’d fought in the 1980-88 Iraq war, his brother was a martyr, and now his youth seemed wasted and the nation’s sacrifice in vain.

Quoting Ferdowsi, the epic poet, he said, “If there is no Iran, let me be not.”

Kevin Sullivan argues that we're seeing the end of the "pretense" of theocratic rule in Iran. I'm with Liah Greenfeld on this one. Religion is the mask behind which authoritarian rulers have hid for millennia. One cannot be truly religious and obsessed with power here on earth at the same time, because to be truly religious is to believe that there is something much bigger and more important than this world. When "religious fundamentalists" seek earthly power, they are using the language of religion to justify and explain their actions to themselves and the world. But they are not truly religious. If we could come to grips with that simple historical fact, it would fundamentally change the way we handle our conflicts with fundamentalism. To get to the point: the pretense of religion has always been a pretense. If these events help people inside and outside Iran see that, then we are moving closer to a true read of the situation.

But my point was that the principles of classical liberalism know no inherent race, class or gender. The challenge for conservatives is to include all citizens into this project of formally equal, self-reliant individuals, able to forge their own futures without being molly-coddled or bossed around by government any more than absolutely necessary. Making these principles universal is more than a few generations' work - but the point is: they can be universal.

OK, I'll bite. Conservatism by definition values the conservation of tradition. Traditionally, the principles that he correctly identifies as those of "classical liberalism" have never been applied universally. Thus, the fight to universalize those principles is by definition a fight to upend tradition. It is at its very essence anything but conservative. And yet Sullivan calls himself a conservative. I don't get it.

Palin: We are the only state with a negative tax rate, where we don’t have any income, sales or property tax statewide, and yes we have a share of our oil resource revenue that goes back to the people that own the resources. Imagine that.

Hannity: And it went up higher since you’ve been the governor and you negotiated with the oil companies. That all went up so people get a bigger check.

Palin: There was a corrupt tax system up there and we had a couple of lawmakers end up in jail because of the tax system that was adopted so we cleaned it up and said we wanted a fair and equitable share of the resources that we own, and the people will share in those resource revenues that are derived.

Hannity: …The price of oil is going up again.  It’s not quite at $140 a barrel, but it’s on its way up to $70 and $80…

Palin:  Yeah, well and I thank God it’s not at $140.  You know people say, “Hey, Alaska!  85% of your state budget is based on the price of a barrel of oil.  Aren’t you glad the price is going up?”    I say, “No!”  The fewer dollars that the state of Alaska government has, the fewer dollars we spend.  And that’s good for our families and for the private sector.

It is astonishing how utterly incoherent she is. And by extension, how incoherent the entire right wing of this country has become.

Video here for those so inclined. 

In a related point, this: