Fireworks in Iran

While most of us were out celebrating yesterday¹, a major religious group in Iran took a stand [NYT] against the sham election.  The Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, a leading group of clerics, released a statement that appears to call the election fraudulent and the current government illegitimate, while also calling for the government to allow peaceful demonstrations and to stop its violent acts against citizens.

The Times didn’t speak with any of the clerics, but cites online sources for the statement, including the group’s official Web site and a BBC Persia story; I’ve read only the Google translation (h/t Anonymous Iran).  It seems like a possibly quite daring statement:

“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.

The government is also treating as criminals a number of detained Moussavi supporters, many of whom have now made video “confessions” where they apologize for acting as foreign agents and admit to trying to incite a revolution.  On Friday, a member of the Guardian Council — the group that officially codified the Iranian election — announced that the members of the British embassy that have been detained have already confessed and will be tried for “inciting protests.”  These taped, forced confessions are part of a broad, coordinated media campaign by the government to call Moussavi a tool of foreign power and to remind those who support him that they can easily face detention, humiliation, and torture.

Yes, Happy Independece Day.  I feel a bit more affection for my freedom to complain.

To pile a little more fun onto this fire, yesterday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a group he wants to have open negotiations with President Obama in front of international media at the United Nations.  That particular declaration is either a dare or a truly desperate ploy — either he’s trying to get Obama to speak up more about Iran, so that he can further criticize Western involvement in the country, or he’s trying to shore up his own position by reminding the world he’s the chief diplomat.  He’s the president; he’s the winner.  It’s bait I hope Obama won’t take.

After a week of seeing Iran shoved off many front pages (though the New York Times continues to do great work and to give great placement to its stories), I hope the week starts with more attention.  The drama continues, and after this announcement, could even build.

^{1 I’d like to issue a personal and heartfelt thanks to LPSRocks for her sangria recipe.  It’s like fruity fireworks in a glass.}

Everyone Knew Michael Jackson

I am a child of the 80s, so for me, Michael Jackson holds a strange allure.  I was born too late to get in on any of the Jackson Five hype, and too young to really understand the brilliance of his early solo albums.  So for me, Michael Jackson — in his Thriller video, for instance — was always a bit of a cartoonish figure.  Moonwalking was a big thrill at my grade school, for instance; the single glove phenomenon was observed by an older cousin of mine until family taunting made him find another.

That aside, Jackson was also the first super celebrity I ever knew.  Everyone knew something about Michael Jackson.  Even in the days before Twitter and Facebook, before TMZ got its own TV show, before anyone had e-mail, before CNN was even a household name, everyone knew something about Michael Jackson.  He was cocktail fodder for my parents and their friends and someone we gushed about and sang along with at the skating rink.  I’m not sure his level of celebrity could be repeated today, in part because it was so spectacular, and so rare.

So it seems fitting, today, that the news of his death has traveled like wildfire.  I’m sitting in a coffee shop with my computer, and the news here came not from Twitter but through the drive-thru window, then through the barista who approached to see not if I could confirm the news but if I might be able to look up how he died.  The two girls behind me — probably about five years my junior, so children of the late Jackson era, the Paul McCartney-duo era — gasped when they heard the news, and immediately moved to telling their own brief memories of him — of his videos, of “Bad,” of wondering how old he could possibly be.  “I didn’t think he’d ever die,” one of the baristas said, later, as she conveyed the news to the next customer in the door.

Maybe he never will.

Well, at least we aren’t Italy

Every time I think an American politician has made a newsworthy, or even ground-breaking decision of dumb, Silvio Berlusconi steps up to remind me that things could be so, so much worse.  Via ABC news:

Italian lothario and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has lashed out at reports that women were paid to spend the night at his home by announcing he has “never paid for a woman.”

Berlusconi made the comments to Italian gossip magazine Chi in response to claims by a former model, Patrizia D’Addario, that she had been paid to attend his private parties.

Calling the reports “trash” the Italian prime minister hit back by saying D’Addario had been paid to smear Berlusconi.

”Behind Patrizia D’Addario is someone who is out to get me and she (Patrizia) has been paid well, they have a deliberate campaign against me,” he charged.

In a statement to the ANSA news agency, D’Addario denied she had been paid to create a scandal.

There’s so much wrong in this whole thing, starting with that first line.  When a news organization describes a prime minister as an “Italian lothario” before even giving his title, and that shoe fits like the handmade Italian piece that it should, something’s foul.  Then, we have Berlusconi talking to a gossip magazine — please try to imagine the American equivalent — and over all of this, that it seems possible, and even likely, that D’Addario’s story is true.

Oh, Silvio Berlusconi.  Everything about you reminds me of why the media must stay independent of the government — because in a country with a freer press, I can’t imagine you would have been in power this long.

Dear GOP: You Are Not Teenagers. This is Not High School.

So, South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford had an affair.  With a woman in Argentina.  An affair that was apparently so all-consuming he felt the need to visit said Argentine in person, leaving his state government in a bit of limbo.  He felt the need to come clean about the affair after multiple questions about his whereabouts, his safety, and sure, his sanity came up in the news (mad_typist has a great timeline) — essentially, he ‘fessed up because he was about to be caught.

And Senator John Ensign of Nevada had an affair.  With one of his campaign staffers.  While her husband worked in his office.  And he may have paid the woman more while they were an item.  And he may have paid her son.  He felt the need to come clean about the affair after the husband and/or the wife decided this was a story worth telling — so, again, he decided to speak up because he was about to be caught.

Now, back in the unromantic world of politics, Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, two of my favorites, have been jumping up and down on Twitter and the Sunday morning shows, basically calling President Obama a chicken for not taking a harder stance over Iran.  McCain would like to see military options.  Obama would like to tread carefully.  And that’s trying the bejesus out of McCain’s legendary miniscule patience.

WTF, Republicans?  When did we go back to high school?  Just because your official photos look like high school yearbook shots doesn’t mean you’re actually 17 again.

See, when you’re seventeen and your entire existence is ruled by hormones, well, then I’d believe it if a guy got up in the middle of class and walked out of school to go make out with the cheerleader from Argentine High.  It may not be OK to try and hide from your pal that you’ve been hooking up with his girl on the sly, and it’s certainly a bit boneheaded to try and pay her off with candy and flowers to keep it quiet — but those kind of act-first, think-later situations are the hallmark of a not completely developed brain.  And yes, it’s certainly a hallmark of high school behavior to try and egg your enemy into taking on a fight he can’t win, even if the result might be that everyone in school gets an international detention for it. 

But now, you’re in government, not high school.  In these situations, there’s no principal to save you.  What if John Ensign had been blackmailed, and had then had to turn to political supporters for even more money?  What if that had had an effect on his voting and thinking or, worse, his leadership in the party?  What if an emergency had come up in Mark Sanford’s state while he was gone, and the crucial hours spent figuring out exactly who was in charge had made all the difference between saving lives and seeing citizens perish?  What if Barack Obama wasn’t cool-hand Luke, and answered McCain’s taunting by taking to the airwaves to answer him head-on, and in so doing made a volatile situation even worse?

In high school, the worst consequence was usually detention, maybe suspension, maybe a long, ugly talk from your parents.  Maybe they’d take your car away.  It was barely worth playing the what-if game.  Once you’re a grown-up, actions have serious consequences — all the more serious when you’re an elected official.  People rely on you.

You need to think with your brains, guys.  Your grown-up, in-your-skull brains.

Speed Bump: Supreme Court Puts Hold on Chrysler/Fiat Merger

It seems the marriage of Fiat and Chrysler has hit a speed bump (NYT):

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who handles emergency matters arising from the United States Appeals Court for the Second Circuit, issued a stay of the sale, preventing Chrysler and Fiat from completing the transaction immediately.

There’s a slim possibility this could become a serious roadblock to the merger, which was set to conclude at 4 p.m. today after the Second Circuit denied the stay and allowed the expedited path to merger to proceed.  Now, instead, there could be a delay of weeks, as Ginsburg and possibly the full Court decide what to do.

The arguments being made by the pension funds — the Indiana State Teachers’ Retirement Fund, the Indiana State Pension Trust, and the Indiana Major Moves Construction Fund — are pretty interesting and could have wide-ranging consequences, should Ginsburg choose to pass the issue up to the full Court.  The mostly likely argument to get them anywhere, as the Wall Street Journal’s law blog summarizes, is that they’ve had their constitutional rights violated by this deal, because junior creditors were privileged over senior lenders in Treasury’s deal.  The funds might have standing to argue that, but will need to prove existing, specific harm.

The trickier charge, and the one that makes me more uneasy, is this:

The United States Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”), purporting to  utilize powers conferred upon it by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”) established under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, 12 U.S.C. 5201 (“EESA”), will have been permitted to structure and finance the reorganization of Chrysler without any judicial review of its authority to do so (the Bankruptcy Court incorrectly disposed of the issues by deciding that Appellants lacked standing);

Full text of the Pensioners’ Application is here, in PDF.  I’m not uneasy because I think that’s a bad charge — rather, it certainly seems like it’s true.  TARP hasn’t undergone any significant judicial review, and it seems like, if challenged, the authority of Treasury and the Fed to intervene in rescuing companies like G.M. and Chrysler, particularly when their decisions have involved the kind of leverage that comes close to outright threats, could crumble.  Beyond that, my faith in the lawyers at Treasury in particular is pretty thin, so I’m not sure I believe that they drew this up in an unassailable way.

I don’t think the Constitution prohibits the government from intervening in business in the U.S.  But I can certainly see how the current methods, which have at times felt slap-dash, might be unraveled by the Court.  Is that for the better?  I don’t know.  I don’t completely buy anymore the argument that Chrysler needs to be turned around in 30 days to survive, though I do believe that its workers will suffer more and harder for each day that the merger is delayed.

I’m actually hoping Eric Holder will have to issue a statement about this.  In fact, I find myself suddenly wishing that Holder was part of that Auto Task Force surrounding the president last week.

Two U.S. Journalists Sentenced to 12 Years’ Hard Labor in North Korea

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, journalists working for the Current TV network, have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for allegedly crossing into North Korea’s territory while doing a story on human trafficking.  The trial has been going on since Thursday — but it’s also been news since the two women were detained in mid-March.

The great hope for the trial was that the women would receive stunning (but smaller than this) sentences, and then the sentences would be commuted in exchange for some act toward North Korea by either the U.S. or South Korea.  That the sentence is greater than expected (and having been handed down by the highest court, it can’t be appealed) doesn’t bode well.

The sentence was delivered the same day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned the administration is considering interdicting North Korean air and sea shipments that could carry weapons.  The administration is also, apparently, considering placing North Korea back on the list of states who sponsor terror — the old Axis of Evil list, if you will.

Secretary Clinton who apparently sent a letter personally apologizing for the Lee and Ling’s possible border crossing and requesting the two women be released, also said today that the administration is working to keep the Lee/Ling issue separate from its own political work with North Korea, calling their detention an issue of “human rights,” not politics.  I agree that this should be separate from political actions, but it’s ridiculous to think that it can be.  These women are American journalists, working on a piece that would have doubtlessly cast North Korea in a dark (and deserved) light.  That their sentence came down — and that it was so harsh — at the same time the U.S. is considering harsher consequences for North Korea’s bad behavior must be part of the whole picture.

So it comes down to that movie-tested line: The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists, or with kidnappers.  There are arguments that can be made that North Korea’s detention of Lee and Ling makes the government a sponsor of both.

Now we wait.  We wait to see if it’s true that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate.  We wait to see if this is in any way a ruse on North Korea’s part, an attempt to get more attention, an attempt to seem merciful if the women are let go, an attempt to scare other journalists away from its borders.  We wait, and we hope — which is precisely the position that is most frustrating in these situations, and precisely, I suppose, the position that a mature democracy has to take.

None of that helps these two women.  None of it helps their terrified families, none of it shortens the gut-wrenching sensation that must accompany a sentence of 12 years’ hard labor.  My thoughts are with them, and the many hundreds of journalists who risk similar fates every year to bring us valuable stories from the darkest reaches of the world.  Theirs is work that should be honored, and protected, worldwide.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Toxic Assets

The Legacy Loans program, a sizable chunk of the Geithner Plan, is dead, reports the New York Times.  The FDIC has “called off plans to start a $1 billion pilot program this month that was intended to help banks clean up their balance sheets.”

I’ve used my car before to explain this program, so maybe I can use it to explain the death.  In this scenario, the role of the Bad Bank is played by me; the Toxic Asset is my car; and Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair, Treasury Secretary and FDIC chair respectively, play themselves. 

^{By CatKaoe}

Remember, if you will, that in our last scenario, my accountant, Tim, had offered to partner with his friend Sheila to offer potential buyers of my car a pretty sweet deal: Sheila would loan 80 percent of the money to any potential buyer, and Tim would invest up to half of the remaining cost of the purchase, which meant someone could buy my car for about 10 percent of its auction price.  That would give me extra money to spend in the economy (hooray!).  It would also allow the dealer that bought my lemon the chance to fix it up and hold onto it until the market for bad cars goes back up.  Win-win, with the possibility of Tim and Sheila taking a big hit (taxpayer lose).

But what’s happened since this initial offer is that I, holder of the toxic car, have fallen back in love with it.  That burning oil smell — it’s the scent of nostalgia, of summers spent on hot tar highways.  The scratches and dents merely make the car more hip, like a worn pair of jeans.  I’m starting to think I could convert it to bio-diesel.  In short, I’m no longer willing to sell for anything less than the original $1,000 I thought it was worth.  I am not willing to put it up for auction, as Tim said I had to do.

Now, maybe I’m being honest about that.  Maybe I really do think the car’s gonna make it.  But maybe I don’t want to put the car up for auction because last month, I applied for a new apartment, and as part of my credit check I listed the car as an asset when I did that — an asset worth $1,000.  Now, I don’t want to put the car up for auction, because it will become clear pretty quickly that the car is only worth $700, and I could lose my apartment. 

Or maybe I don’t want to sell the car because I no longer need to sell it.  The market’s getting a little better, I’m feeling more flush, and I think I can afford to pay to maintain it until the time comes when it will be worth what I’m willing to sell it for.  It will be vintage soon, you know?

Now, Tim and Sheila — Tim in particular — have an interest in making sure I’m telling the truth about my motivation.  Because if I’m not selling because selling will make me look insolvent, well — that means I’m already insolvent.  If I’m not selling because I’m ready to spend, spend, spend anyway, then that means the market is improving, and the healing has begun (and quick, Tim says, let’s get some posters printed about that one, and make sure we send one to Paul Krugman).

Ezra Klein outlined both of these reasons as why the banks might not be willing to jump into the Geithner plan.  Kevin Drum at Mother Jones says it’s probably the insolvency problem, and that’s really, really bad, because it means that not only did the Geithner plan not solve the banks’ problems, but the banks are being allowed — and maybe, post-stress test, encouraged — to live on in denial that will eventually come back to bite us all.

To extend the metaphor: there exists a danger to the community if I continue to drive around a broken car while swearing that really, it’s fine.  Not only am I not spending as much as I could be, since I’m constantly worried about my toxic asset, but I might be actively making the whole community less safe by showing them that it’s cool to keep broken cars.

I think there’s also a third option, here.  Banks might be deluding themselves; they might be healthy enough to afford hanging onto their loans; and they might actually be afraid to deal with the government.  Several banks, post-stress test, raised a bunch of capital in advance of leaving TARP.  If they get re-entangled with the Geithner Plan now, they’ll also get pulled back into the shady land of government regulation over compensation.

In short: am I unwilling to sell the car because I still love it, because I still need it, or because you’re not the boss of me, Tim Geithner?

It could be all three (and none of these are particularly good reasons, really).  But whatever it is, I hope there’s a plan B.  I hope Tim and Sheila and Ben Bernanke have a better idea of what to do next than just what Sheila Bair said they’re going to do, which is wait and see if the PPIP might be needed later.  That’s only an OK plan if the assets don’t get worse — and I am not at all encouraged by our jobless rates, the rise in foreclosure and bankruptcy claims, and the continued need of companies with terrible mortgages on their books (yesterday GMAC got another $7.5 billion).

At some point, Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Toxic Assets.  Apparently the banks still want to keep the keys — but at some point, Tim, Sheila, or Ben might have to step up and say, no way, man.  The PPIP was the gentlest possible way of doing that, so I’m sorry to see it die.

^{By wireheadinc / CC license}

The Ultimate Beat Sweetener: The 31 Year Old “Dismantling G.M.”

The New York Times had a piece up over the weekend about Brian Deese, a 31-year-old law school student (on break, apparently) who according to their headline is “in charge of dismantling G.M.”

This story caught on, as just about any section-front story from the NYT seems likely to do.  I’ve seen it linked copiously (and I’ve done it myself), and it’s currently the top e-mailed and blogged story in the business section at NYTimes.com.

But here’s my question: Can they prove their headline?

The story includes a quote from Steven Rattner, “one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force,” about Deese’s grad-school beard.  It has a quote from Larry Summers about his intelligence.  It cites “several people who were present for the debate” as saying that Deese spoke out against liquidation for Chrysler, and says he wrote a very persuasive memo about the bad that Chapter 7 could cause.  But the only one who seems to say that Deese was ever the guy in charge of the taskforce is Deese.  In fact, the White House doesn’t list Deese as a member of the Auto Task Force at all.  He’s listed as an economic adviser to the president at the White House Web site, but there’s no more formal designation that I can find.  So to say he’s running it is a pretty substantial leap.

And the Times seems to get that, but much further down in its story:

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues. But it took the support of Mr. Rattner and Ron Bloom, senior advisers to the task force charged with restructuring the automobile industry, to help turn Mr. Deese’s positions into policy.

Normally, I kind of enjoy mindless profiles of major Washington players — they’re what Matthew Yglesias calls beat-sweeteners, pieces journalists write both to inform the public and to make their own jobs easier.  But this one seems particularly damaging, as it implies that the administration is leaving some very big decisions in the hands of a guy whose total automotive industry experience is apparently sleeping in the parking lot of a G.M. plant on his way to volunteer for the Obama campaign.

I’m wondering whether I could get a few friendly quotes dropped into the paper and turn myself into the point girl on, say, Health Care or NASA or something.  Who wants to try?

The New G.M.: A Green G.M.?

So, G.M. is going into bankruptcy, and the government’s going to own a big slice. Yep.  Please raise your hand if you’re surprised.  OK, seeing no hands up, let’s move on to what’s really interesting here: who exactly is going to be running G.M.

I think the answer lies in the video above.  No, not just in the president’s remarks, where he says that he won’t be making the decisions — in the people who are in attendance at the remarks.  Namely, in his auto task force.

So who are all these people standing with him?  Well, from left to right, I spot:

Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy
Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor
Barack Obama — what’s that guy do?
Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce
Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation and Natty Handkerchiefs
Peter Orszag, OMB Director

Next row:
Austan Goolsbee, member of the Council of Economic Advisers
Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council
Carol Browner, assistant to the president for Energy and Climate Change
The Mayor from Spin City Jared Bernstein, Economic Adviser to VP Joe Biden

Back row:
Ron Bloom, senior adviser at Treasury
Gene Sperling, counselor to Geithner and member of the CEA
Ed Montgomery, Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers
Steven Rattner, who I believe to be the Car Czar and possibly also the Worst Tie Picker in history

Not pictured: Tim Geithner, who’s in China, and about six other second-tier members of the auto task force, including the 31 year old that the New York Times seems to think is running this show, Brian Deese.  I guess there’s only so many people you can fit in the Grand Foyer.

Image means a lot in Washington.  Obama may be saying, today, that the government is going to keep its nose out of the new G.M., but we’re still a few months away from that new entity, and everyone standing behind him will have a say in what it looks like.

So what I’m most interested in here is that two people — Chu and Browner — are present from the energy/environment side.  The way the administration has tied the success of the automotive industry to the cause of the environment is kind of fascinating.  Chrysler is being pushed toward smaller, more eco-friendly models, and now it seems inevitable that G.M. will be pushed that way, too.  These people — this task force — is built to do exactly that.

In case you’re wondering, as I did, who President Bush brought out with him when he announced the auto bailout, here’s the answer:

Bush stood alone and couched his discussion of the loans in almost completely business terms.  He made no mention of the companies changing to fuel efficient models or of any goal to achieve energy independence, as Obama did in his speech.

I kind of like the new crowd.

A Kansan’s Elegy for George Tiller

Dr. George Tiller, the well-known Kansas doctor, was shot to death today at his church in Wichita.  Tiller has been a fixture in Kansas my whole life.  I was in grade school during the Operation Rescue’s “Summer of Mercy,” 1991, when Randall Terry led daily protests and blockades outside of Tiller’s Women’s Health clinic in Wichita.  Wichita was an hour from where I grew up and our main source of nightly news, which meant that my mother spent several evenings that summer trying to explain to preteen girls what this whole mess was about.

So Tiller’s story and his work have shaped my own opinions, my own decisions, about where to stand in the abortion debate.  Tiller could have operated with more safety in many other locations, but he chose, instead, to stay in Wichita, to offer health services — yes, including late-term abortions — to the women of south central Kansas and Oklahoma, women who already see their options for care reduced by distance and time.  George Tiller kept going to work after he was shot in 1993; he kept going to work after his clinic was bombed; he kept going to work after numerous threats, after vandalism earlier this month, after protests.  He kept going to work, and I have to believe that’s because he felt it was his duty to help women get the best care possible, and to help us — no, to allow us to make some of the most difficult decisions we face.

As a Kansan, my sadness is both for Tiller’s family and for my state, which finds itself not just deprived of a necessary physician but also thrust back into the culture-war spotlight.  We deserve to be there, perhaps — Kansas is a crossroads for religious conservatives and old-school progressives — but what a terrible way to reignite the conversation.  Tiller kept going to work — and I hope his death ends up as meaningful as his life.  I hope this starts an honest, national discussion of the dangers that Tiller faced, and that the women who trudged through the protesting crowds just to receive care faced.

But what terrible means to achieve this end.