I’m busy trying to finish this long delayed book on the 44th President so I won’t be updating AE for a while. In the meantime, here is an excellent piece from Gary Sick on the likelihood of a soft coup taking place in Iran yesterday.

Iran’s political coup

If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history. One characteristic that has always distinguished Iran from the crude dictators in much of the rest of the Middle East was its respect for the voice of the people, even when that voice was saying things that much of the leadership did not want to hear.

In 1997, Iran’s hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.

In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.

The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his “green wave” began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” this may have been too much.

The entire piece is available here.

I did this piece on Obama and gay marriage on CNN.com. Basically I argue that Obama’s approach to gay rights has some broad resemblances of the way Kennedy stiff-armed the civil rights community after he got elected. Here is the lede. The entire piece is available here.
(CNN) — Last week Gov. John Lynch signed a [...]

I’ve been saying for years that there’s something wrong when you get a group of intellectuals and critics together and everyone is in agreement. Conflict produces progress. Or, more specifically, the competitive market of ideas forces everyone to step up their thought game.
It’s no coincidence that the most productive points in black history have also [...]

Yeah. This one is worthy of a Rakim reference.
At some point heads will come to terms with the fact that the greatest writer of my generation might just be an ex-hustler from the Marcy Projects in Bed Stuy.
Once upon a time we referred to hip hop as a youth culture. What does it say when [...]

So, yeah, this is what we’re up against.
Someone critiqued Obama for talking over the head of the target audience with yesterday’s speech. I disagreed until this made me think twice. TNC raises a good point about this being the irrational ravings of intoxicated youth. Right. Exactly. But here’s where my own biases come into play. [...]

Caught this on tv last night. Admittedly wasn’t paying much attention until a pic of Joe Louis flashed across the screen. I guess they’re going for a theme of American icons that have (at least in Louis case) literally been knocked down but still got up and won.

I recently started contributing to “The Arena” section of Politico.com. This is my response to Obama’s Cairo speech.
This may well be the most important foreign policy speech of the post Cold War era. I would give it an A.
There were any number of statements which individually could have been taken as significant. In its sum [...]

Well, those aren’t the precise words. Dyson visited my friend Davey D’s Hard Knock Radio to discuss President Obama last week. His actual statement was: He (Obama) is willing to sacrifice the interests of African Americans in deference to a conception of universalism because it won’t offend white people.
I’m turning up the open mic on [...]

Here is Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the recent murder of George Tiller.
I believe the murder of George Tiller was an act of domestic terrorism whose aim was not only to assassinate a single man, but also to frighten a generation of doctors and to shame and terrify women and families who are making difficult choices. [...]

I’m not generally inclined to pray but I find myself doing something akin to that of late. I noticed at some point that observing Obama’s presidency has been akin to encountering turbulence on an  airplane — intellectually you know things will probably be o.k. but that doesn’t make the minor knot in your stomach dissolve.
I [...]