Iran

The message on a Minneapolis street corner Wednesday was unmediated: VIVA IRAN. That and dozens of other slogans of the Iranian protest movement were carried on signs and on the mercifully cooler air that wafted through downtown, where a crowd of as many as 200 people gathered in a semicircle for urgent call-and-response chants.

Iran has proven the headline prescient, even if the terminology needed tweaking: “The revolution will be Twittered.” That was the title of Tom Elko’s Sept. 9, 2008, Minnesota Independent post about how Twitter messages (technically, “tweets” that were “tweeted”) came in handy during protests outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

In the biggest parallel yet to Minnesota’s still-disputed Al Franken-Norm Coleman election for U.S. Senate, Iran’s Guardian Council has now proposed to calm presidential-election protests with a partial recount. “We are ready to recount those boxes that presidential candidates claim to have been doctored,” a spokesman said. 

She was supposed to be in Minnesota this weekend giving the commencement address at her alma mater, but instead journalist Roxana Saberi was hospitalized in Tehran after two weeks on a hunger strike, according to an AP report.  An American journalist of Iranian and Japanese parents, the Fargo native went on a liquid-only fast on [...]

As the guilt-by-association game continues in the presidential campaign, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s ties to the Alaska Independence Party are coming under intense scrutiny. Salon.com reports that the founder of AIP, Joe Vogler, asked the Iranian government to sponsor his anti-America speech before the United Nations in 1993.
The speech never happened. Vogler was murdered [...]

From today’s JPost: “US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term, Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday. The official claimed that a senior member of the president’s entourage, which concluded a trip to Israel last week, said during a [...]

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton will be the keynote speaker at tonight’s annual dinner  for the conservative policy institute Center of the American Experiment (CAE) at the St. Paul River Centre. Bolton has recently been working the media circuit and discussing the many benefits of U.S. air strikes against Iran.

According to the CAE event description, [...]

“[T]o the corporate media, a casual threat to incinerate millions of innocent people doesn’t have nearly the importance of a lapel-pin,” writes John Eskrow at The Huffington Post, but the issue he’s talking about did get some mainstream attention this weekend: The Boston Globe blasted Hillary Clinton for saying on April 22 that she’d “totally [...]

Yesterday on Fox News, John McCain once again put his foot where his military and foreign policy expertise are supposed to be, flubbing a discussion of the ceasefire in Basra last week by asserting it was insurgent chieftain Moqtada al-Sadr, and not Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who sought the ceasefire.

The gaffe followed by a [...]

The front-and-center fight for the Democratic nomination has produced a number of endlessly remarked soundbites that are certain to be used against Barack Obama in a general election race, chief among them the words of Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton’s repeated insistence that she and John McCain are qualified to be president and Obama is [...]