The Heart Of Saturday Night

It’s just raining and raining here, not windy just a relentless rain. It’s about to go down in Tibet, Chinese deadline set for Monday, the Olympic PR machine whining about please don’t mention boycotts. Dalai Lama statement and quick timeline @ Jotman. Winter Soldier is broadcasting-

• watch here- ivaw.org
• listen here- warcomeshome.org

One of the veterans testifying Adam Kokesh is taking part in the Iraq War Blogswarm, almost 250 now, the Freeway blogger just joined.

Join the March 19 Blogswarm Against the Iraq War

Pics from the London demo @ Lenin. The BBC report was quite good a few hours ago but has since been re-edited to add more establishment ‘balance’, as if agitating for wars of aggression is a reasonable position. Ho-hum.

Take it away Tom…

Iranians Have To Put Up With Conservatives Too

Well the elections have happened and right wingers have done well after already whittling down and excluding many opposing candidates, as James points out @ Mahatma X Files-

Voters in the US also are barred from voting “for a full range of people” who “might have different ideas” – albeit a bit more subtly. A party and its candidates might not be outright banned, but – let’s face it – unless a candidate is running as a Democrat or a Republican that candidate will be at an insurmountable disadvantage when it comes to campaign financing and media exposure. Those rare individuals who do manage to vocalize something different from the status quo within either the Dems or GOP usually find that their careers in Congress are short. There are always those primary challenges bankrolled by the usual corporate suspects to either silence or outright eliminate the likes of Cynthia McKinney or Dennis Kucinich. What we get left with is the same old crap election after election. I can empathize with any Iranian voter who feels a bit frustrated by his or her system – we’re dealing with a similar problem here.

Same here where our punditocracy delight in ‘consensus’ politics where only a narrow neoliberal discourse exists and the tories fight Nulabour not over the policies (because they are identical- kill the fucking poor, hoard wealth) but presentation and…I dunno, what really do they do all day? Squabble over who is screwing the most whores and ripping off the expenses or something? Anyways Naj posted-

Roughly 39% of eligible voters participated in the election. (None of my family members did! I assume their candidates were not allowed on the ballot.)

News via Payvand from Iran’s interior minister paints a rosier picture unsurprisingly-

IRNA – Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi said on Saturday that the principalists won 71 seats while other political groups won 29 remaining seats of the 8th Majlis. Speaking to reporters, he said 60 percent of qualified voters took part in the eighth parliamentary elections and cast their votes.

On the results of Tehran’s constituency, he said it will be declared two days before start of new year holidays but the election results in other constituencies will be by Saturday night. Pour-Mohammadi also praised the significant and powerful role of Iranian mass media which spared no efforts to mobilize the country’s public opinion.

Iranian mass media practically managed to foil all propaganda campaigns launched by the enemies of Iran, he said. Some 22,839,000 eligible voters took part and cast their ballots in the 8th parliamentary elections on March 14, said the minister.

Some 68.48 percent of the voters were female and the remaining 32.51 percent were male, he said.

Western hackers tried to disrupt Iran’s parliamentary elections which were for the first time conducted in a computerized way but to no avail, underlined Pour-Mohammadi.

Oh yes, shock horror conservative incumbents do well in an election using electronic voting machines!!! And thus with no acknowledgement of irony and enormous chutzpah the Bush administration criticise the results- “in essence the results are cooked”. Well takes one to…etc. Al Jazeera report a less establishment friendly picture-

Conservatives allied with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, are ahead in Iran’s parliamentary elections, according to partial results. According to state television, conservatives are ahead with 108 seats against 33 for their reformist opponents in an election for Iran’s 290-seat parliament. Local media also reported that 28 million of Iran’s 44 million eligible voters had cast their ballots on Friday. 

Nearly half the seats won by conservative politicians so far were in districts where no reformist candidates were running – a sign of the impact after reformist ranks were cut by the cleric-led Guardian Council. The returns, mostly from smaller towns, were insufficient to determine any solid trend.

According to reformist leaders, their candidates were allowed to run in only about 90 of the races. The unelected Guardian Council rejected about 1,700 candidates, mostly reformists, on grounds of insufficient loyalty to Islam or Iran’s 1979 revolution.

Many Iranians who support liberal reforms spent Friday deliberating with friends and family, going back and forth between two options: vote and give legitimacy to an election many of them saw as unfair, or boycott and ensure an even stronger conservative domination of parliament.

And at the end of all this the losers are…people all over who want democracy, reform and equality. Yep, every time some shit-for-brains -let’s retard into our lizard brained past- conservative anywhere on planet earth gets more power, the universe sighs, shrugs and even with the billions of years to go, we might still be fucking around like chumps then too.

‘The Battle for Haditha’ On UK Channel 4 Mon 9pm 17th March

Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Battle for Haditha’ is on Channel 4 on Monday 9pm (17th March) which is a splendid easy and free chance to catch the film, Dave @ Complex Series of Pipes saw it at a screening and if you need further enticement read his excellent review click here, an excerpt-

The power of TBFH comes, I reiterate, from its ultra-realism. Grieving Iraqi women were played by grieving Iraqi women, bitter and haunted marines were played by bitter and haunted marines. Key scenes were filmed in single, sustained takes for more intensity than any method-acting gimmick, and dialogue was improvised around the director’s instructions. Crucially, though, all of this actually happened. The names have been changed and some imagination must have been used in filling in the details, and there remains some doubt as to the exact order in which the events took place – but Iraqis, marines, journalists and military courts all agree on the substance.

One marine was killed by a roadside bomb, then four marines slaughtered twenty four Iraqis: men and women, from a one-year-old girl (four of the dead were under five years old, as were some of the injured survivors, and numerous others were in their early teens) to a septegenarian grandfather. This kind of violence is something I don’t think anyone would dare put in a film if it weren’t real; I know that if I were making cinematic propaganda against the war, I’d be concerned about keeping it “believable”, and if TBFH were fiction then we’d all be accusing Nick Broomfield of undermining the cause through implausible exaggeration.