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8:52

Megan - Good morning Spencer! Welcome back!

8:57

Spencer - So: my avatar problems aside -- I should have fieldtested this thing over the weekend, but you know -- remember when Josh Hooten relaunched his old fanzine and used the tagline The Hiatus Is Over from the second Beastie Boys' record's promotional campaign? Today The Hiatus Is Over.

8:58

Megan - Hurrah! It gets so lonely here in the morning, just me, my roommate's bird and Joe Scarborough. Plus, I'm pretty sure you know more about Iran than either the bird or Joe.

8:58

Spencer - Anyone want to read a really beautiful piece of war reporting, check out this, from Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post.

8:59

Spencer - One thing about Morning Joe: WHY. I have at least two friends who watch Morning Joe just to get angry at it and then tweet that anger. But why? It's not worth the spilkis. Change the channel. Maybe Jason Linkins can explain it to me.

9:00

Megan - Well, what are my options? Fox and Friends? Kirin Chetry? The Today Show? Joe is just the least poor of too many poor options.

9:01

Megan - Anyway, so what do you think of the Iranian goverment conceding that there was some obvious ballot box stuffing?

9:03

Spencer - Right, Iran. Did you read Moussavi's message to the opposition from Saturday, after the Tehran demonstration was attacked by the regime? It struck me that Moussavi was placing the opposition within the context of the promises of the 1979 revolution; claiming the same source of legitimacy that Ahmadinejad & Khamanei does; and seeking by extension to deny that legitimacy to them. I wonder if that's going to get much attention, because if Moussavi is successful -- and the ballot-box stuffing indicates that the regime is trying to find some face-saving climbdown from the crisis -- that might be an early, foundational text for Whatever Comes Next

9:04

Megan - Well, I'm not sure that admitting to relatively wide-scale fraud amounts to a climb-down, since the regime is saying that it doesn't matter.

But the authorities insisted that discrepancies, which could affect three million votes, did not violate Iranian law and the country’s influential Guardian Council said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the election result.

9:04

Spencer - At the same time: my friend Eli Lake of the Washington Times knows much more about Iran than I do, and he thinks that the message is a bit of a two-step. Like Moussavi claims the Islamic Revolution as a wellspring of legitimacy but the opposition will seek to weaken the clerical checks on democracy, which is an integral aspect of the Revolution. I don't know and I don't know how exactly he knows, but, you know, maybe.

9:08

Megan - Well, I feel like the Revolution set up a system in which religious authority and democracy are always engaged in a tricky dance, in which neither one can really refuse to acknowledge the other. But -- if the fraud allegations are true, which it seems more and more they are -- this is the first time that the religious authorities have really tried to utterly twart the democracy they promised, giving those forces a chance to question the authority of religion.

9:09

Spencer - Nico "all-nite-long" Pitney says that this link translates to mean that new-Moussavi-ally Rafsanjani is lining up clerics who oppose the alleged election outcome. I take your point that the regime is still standing by the legality of the claimed outcome, regardless of the fraud, but doesn't it strike you that then they're boxed into saying that they've got an illegitimate outcome that's technically legal? Every move that the regime has made since last Saturday on the fraud front has been designed to mollify the opposition -- the clerical recount, the Supreme Leader's pledge to investigate fraud, etc -- and nothing's worked. But the more it bends in this direction the less of a rationale it has to claim that its results should be respected. It's getting to be a choice between violence and capitulation.

9:11

Spencer - See, I'm not sure they want to question the authority of religion, as with crowds captured on YouTube and shit screaming God is greater than the enemy and such. And Moussavi's message says that to lose now would be to concede that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

9:13

Megan - Well, with the Revolutionary Guard's announcement that they plan to violently stop any and all protests, I'm guessing they're gonna stick with "violence." The question is whether the violence can quell the uprising, whether the military and Basiji and police will willingly participate in it (less questionable, I think, is that the Revolutionary Guard will).

Well, I didn't say that they're questioning religion, per se, but religious authority. Rafsanjani seeking to overturn the Supreme Leader, calls for his ouster: all of those we unthinkable before.

9:15

Megan - I mean, in effect, if God is greater than the enemy, and the enemy is the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council who are trying to suppress the democracy... then they're questioning the authority of the religious leadership.

9:15

Spencer - Yeah. I wish I had any idea what Rafsanjani is actually doing to oust Khamanei, or who would come after Khamanei and whether the SL would accede to a diminished public role without totally fracturing the regime. But this is all ahead of ourselves, since back here we've gotten several days of seeing Obama called a pussy for not trying to get in the way of the uprising.

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