This Saturday We Are All Iranians

It is Saturday, June 20th, the day that the tipping point was reached in Iran. Today is the day that demonstrations in Iran stopped being about who won the election and started being about freedom. Yesterday, the blood started to flow in earnest as the government played hardball with dissenters and as evening fell fear was in the air and death was on the streets.

The people of Tehran stood on their roofs and prayed to God. A young Iranian woman captured the moment in a moving poem and posted it on YouTube for the world to see. Please watch and listen and as you do offer a prayer not only for the people of Iran but for all of humanity everywhere. Because this Saturday, June 20th, we are all Iranians.

Tweeting the Revolution

This is my third day of tweeting the aftermath of the elections in Iran and the experience is just blowing me away.

On Sunday, Twitter had the news long before TV and the amount of info that was being shared online, albeit without vetting, was just amazing. I won't mention the names of the Tweeters in Iran for security reasons, but picture this.

I'm in New Jersey, reading tweets from an Iranian student sitting with a laptop on a balcony in an apartment building in Tehran. I'm getting a blow by blow of what's going on in the street below. Iranians in New York and London are tweeting reports from their friends and relatives in Tehran. Demonstrations are being set up in front of Iranian embassies all over the world on Twitter. Links to Youtube and Flickr give me up to the minute graphic images to chew on. Meanwhile, CNN is re-running a report from Iran filed hours earlier by Christiane Amanpour. Let's see-- Twitter or CNN? It's a no brainer. It was a watershed moment in the world of communication not unlike CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War. The gap was so great, we will never be the same again.

By yesterday, half of the Twitterverse had green icons, in solidarity with the Iranian people. Efforts to block twitter and silence the Iranian twitterers were being countered by internet saavy geeks and hackers all over the world. Demonstrations were increasing. Tension was mounting. CNN was scrambling and the beat went on.

Last night I read an interesting blogpost laying out the proposition that the whole thing was a well planned Israeli effort to destabilize Iran by delegitimizing the election. You can read the whole post here and decide for yourself whether it is truth or disinformation. Whatever it is, it made me stop and think.Not only is the situation in Iran a watershed moment in the world of politics and a sea change in communication techniques, it might also be a new wrinkle in espionage.

Whatever is happening and whatever the truth is, it is big. Very big. The world will never be the same again and as events unfold, we may just find ourselves tweeting more than one revolution.

Sunday Fun With Michael Moore

You knew Michael Moore would be making a movie about the financial crisis, didn't you? Well here's his promotional video--but like Michael it's very special and very funny. Won't you take a minute to watch it and give some help to the neediest victims of the economic downturn?

Have a serene Sunday, everyone :-)

AIG Gets It Wrong Again

What is it with AIG? First it got a whopping $173 billion of American taxpayer money during the Wall Street meltdown last fall. Then it proceeded to spend part of that money on swanky corporate junkets and $35 billion in bonuses for the very executives who had run the company into the ditch.

The public outcry was so great that Congress got into the act and hauled top execs in front of an investigative committee. Eventually, the boys gave back their bonuses and we thought AIG had learned its lesson.

Well, here we go again, folks. If you had a look at today's New York Times, you saw that AIG made the front page of the Business Section and it wasn't a good thing. Seems that AIG insured the US Airways jet that bellyflopped in the Hudson River on January 15th and they are not going to pay up.

Evidently airllne insurance doesn't work like homeowners or automobile insurance, AIG is only required to pay if the crash resulted from the airline's negligence. Since it was a flock of geese and not pilot error that caused the plane to go down, AIG is playing hardball and refusing to honor survivors' claims. To its credit, US Airways has already handed out a $5,000 check to each passenger, though it had no legal obligation to do so.

The cruelty and inhumaneness of this kind of corp-think takes my breath away, but I suppose I should not be surprised. Welcome to the wonderful world of American free market capitalism. They must be going nuts over in the corporate relations department of AIG today. I'm hoping that once again Congress will get involved on behalf of all of us American taxpayer shareholders and force AIG to do the right thing.

Sometimes the spirit of the law is more important than the letter, and this is one of those time. Shame on you, AIG. You got it wrong again.


source: New York Times

God Guns and Right Wing Crazies

Why is it that American right wing crazies carry guns and think they are doing God's work when they murder people? The last few weeks have been pretty hairy here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The American Taliban is trying to force its nut-job notions down the throats of the rest of us once again and unfortunately they have the Constituional right to bear arms.

First we were shocked by the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who was gunned down in church by an extreme right wing, pro life, activist with a history of mental instability. Scott Roeder thought he was protecting the unborn by committing murder. How very illogical and how very sad. He doesn't seem to have cared much about the rights of the already born.

Dr. Tiller was one of the few doctors in the country performing late term abortions and while I have my own issues with late term abortion, I at least know what it is. A late term abortion is done at 20 to 23 weeks of an ordinary 40 week pregnancy. Nobody does abortions on a baby that is viable outside the womb( that's 27 weeks folks). Ironically, Dr. Tiller's murder has made him a martyr and has exposed the extremism of the right wing of the pro life movement.

Then, just yesterday, an 87 year old Neo Nazi walked into the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC carrying a gun in his hand and hate in his heart and started shooting up the place. James W. Von Brunn killed one security guard and critically wounded two others before being shot himself. He is currently in critical condition in a DC hospital.

This guy too is clearly one sandwich short of a picnic. He's a white supremicist who hates black people and Jews. Guess who he scapegoats for all the world's problems. You got it: blacks and Jews. He had a website and a whole history of angry paranoid rants not to mention an ex-wife in Florida who claims to have divorced him years ago because he was " a racist, abusive, alcoholic." In 1981 Von Brunn broke into a meeting of the Federal Reserve and tried to kidnap a member of the board of governors. You'd think that somebody like that wouldn't be allowed to own a gun, wouldn't you ? But no. Not a problem. He probably owned a whole arsenal.

Two politically motivated murders in less than three weeks. Quite a record for the right wing isn't it? These people would be pathetic if they weren't so dangerous. Myself, I think that if Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney would just shut up and stop telling everyone the sky is falling it might cut down on the murder rate and alleviate the fear based hatred that is running rampant these days.

I wish our American right wing crazies didn't carry guns.

Obama Hits Another Home Run in Cairo

President Obama was speaking in Cairo at 6 am EDT this morning, so I didn't watch the speech live. I was still asleep. By the time I was sipping my first cup of coffee at around 7:30 am though, the speech was over and the President's crack communications team had posted it on the internet in several places and translated it into a dozen languages.

I could tell watching videos and TV talking heads, as I let caffeine revive my sleep- soaked brain, that Obama had knocked it out of the park once again. It was another home run for my President. Thank God we have a man like this at the helm right now.

This was more than a great speech. It was a rhetorical tour de force that will be remembered and talked about for generations. Where it stacks up for the rest of the world, I don't know, but for me, as an American, it ranks right up there with the Gettysburg Address or JFK's innaugural speech or MLK's" I have a dream speech

This was a speech that really moved people. It did not mince words or prevaricate or minimize very real, perhaps insoluable, political problems. It defined a moment in time with honesty, passion, and an intelligent understanding of the issues confronting both the West and the Muslim world. It did not patronize or threaten. It simply stated what is. A speech isn't going to solve all the problems. But this speech totally changed the nature of the engagement. It was a tipping point. Now we will at least talk to each other instead of shouting at one another and swaggering about Texas style.

The really important thing that Obama did in this speech was what he, as a multicultural person who has so often felt ouside the mainstream personally, does so well. He emphasized the humanity we all share, the similarity of what we all desire for ourselves and our children, the common roots our religions have and the respect we owe one another. Bravo Obama.

Sometimes the pen really is mighter than the sword and this morning was definitely one of those times.

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