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8:51

Megan - Spencer, I find it a beautiful thing on a Monday morning that you and (conservative think tank) AEI's Michael Rubin are coming together in solidarity to decry the wall-to-wall media coverage of Michael Jackson's demise! I just think I need a little more information about why it is that it's related to the Iranian protests.

8:55

Spencer - By way of context, this tribute band called Who's Bad was, by pure happenstance, scheduled to play the 9:30 Club on Friday night when, of course, MJ passed. Interest peaked; second show added; I rolled in around midnight and left a great show at around 2:30. Amazingly they didn't play "Bad" but I got my "Man In The Mirror" and "Remember The Time," which I contend contains the vocal break ("till dawn/ two or three/ what about us/ girl") that's the springboard for R. Kelly's whole career, phrasing-wise

8:55

Spencer - Or perhaps you meant context for Iran.

8:58

Spencer - In which case we're seeing the protests diminish in size as the crackdown intensifies. There was some furious tweeting last night that Moussavi was arrested, but he posted a fB message that indicates he wasn't. The Iranian regime is acting increasingly erratic, seizing British embassy workers and interrogating them for allegedly stoking the demonstrations.

9:00

Megan - Yes, I was thinking more about Iran and Jackson, given this quote:
Ackerman told The Daily Beast that “anything that takes Twitter bandwidth away from [the Iran election] is bad for the opposition, and anything that distracts the cable networks from showing images of the crackdown is similarly bad.” He added that the international media distractions could give the regime "more room to violently suppress its opposition during a critical phase.”

But, yeah, that Twitter fail is a good example of why you can't necessarily trust everything on the Internet -- and what an easy technology it is to use that even the Iranian regime can figure out how to fuck with it.

9:00

Spencer - I've talked to some optimists (if that's really an apt term in this context, as we're talking about people's lives) who think the regime is in a death spiral of undetermined length now that it's publicly traded power for legitimacy, but that strikes me as entirely too deterministic. Michael Jackson eating up the bandwidth doesn't help. I wonder where Michael Rubin falls down on this question, but -- actually I don't. At all. Not that he cares what I think either. More important: what do you think?

9:02

Spencer - [[Sidenote/interjection: I hope people are watching MSNBC now, because my Washington Independent colleague Daphne Eviatar is about to go on a show co-hosted by Eliot Spitzer. I know this posts at 10 but still.]]]

9:05

Megan - Well, first off, I wonder if there are Iranians who love Michael Jackson, given that his appeal most recently seemed to be mostly outside of the United States and that he seemed to have a particular following in Dubai -- but that inside Iran, his music wouldn't have been allowed, so to pre-revolution Iranians, he might still be the original Michael.

[I am sure she'll be great even if she doesn't think to ask him how anyone in his right mind would fuck sex workers without condoms in this day and age, but I am at my parents'house still, and my mother doesn't believe in cable. I mean, she knows it exists, but thinks my father watches too much TV. After last night's family television watching, I am going to ask my mother to consider the possibility that there is a strong possibility that my father would just watch less crappy TV if he had cable.]

9:06

Spencer - You refer to this video, right?

9:08

Spencer - Unsure about that last point. A cohort-of-unknown-size within Iran are pretty savvy at evading internet firewalls -- my friend Eli Lake of the Washington Times had a good explainer about that last week -- so it wouldn't surprise me if Iran is aware of all Michael Jackson traditions.

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