News Roundup for 6/16/09

Making the world safe for democracy

-Headline of the day-
"U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran."

The online service that allows users to broadcast their every waking thought has become pretty much indispensable to Iranians who are presently taking the elections in their faux-democracy one helluva lot more seriously than we take ours.

Which might go some way toward explaining why the US Dept. of State got hold of the guys who run it -- presumably by phone -- and asked them to put off a planned upgrade for a little bit. The work would've resulted in a scheduled outage, just as Iranians were using the service to arrange protests and share news with the outside world.

State is downplaying their involvement, going along with the Obama administration's public policy against seeming to be "meddling" in the election. "We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication," was all they'd tell Reuters.

"This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media," State spokesperson Ian Kelly later told reporters. It's not -- most emphatically not -- meddling.

#IranElection goes on... (Reuters)


-Those damned, liberally-biased neocons-
Many on the right are critical of Obama's (seemingly) hands off approach to Iran's disputed elections. They're urging a more critical tone because, if there's one thing we've learned about dealing with Iran, it's that if you shake your finger at them and tell them they're bad, they'll shape right up and do exactly what you tell them to.

But it turns out that others on the right have caught the lefty crush on Obama and worship at his commie feet. Then again, what do they know? I mean, it's not like they're experts on Iran or anything, like Michelle Malkin is. As always, she's wearing out her copy & paste key combos. For a professional writer, she doesn't seem to do a lot of actual writing...

No, these Obama apologists are busy-body know-nothings like Ambassador Nicholas Burns, who the report calls "George W. Bush’s top negotiator with Iran." This lunatic thinks that poking Amadinejad in the eye right now is a bad idea.

"President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see a very aggressive series of statements by the United States that would try to put the U.S. in the center of this,” Burns said. “And I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly... This is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of."

Wiser minds have better ideas. Ask John McCain...

Too bad that guy lost the election, huh? That's the kind of rational thinking we could really use right now. (Plumline)


-Getting on top of things-
Associated Press does an in-depth, deep-thinking analysis, discovers that Republicans are saying "socialism" a lot, and concludes that this might represent some sort of political strategy.

No, really. (Associated Press)