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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.

9:08

Megan - Man, is that the Arabic version of the Macarena? Because, if so, we really need to step up our line dances at wedding, that's way better than the chicken dance

Oh, and, seriously, I'm wondering why the fuck Iran thinks its a good idea to seize British embassy workers? I know they're not invested in Iranian oil like the French and Russians, but Sarko came out harder and earlier against Ahmadenijad and Khamenei... Oh, wait, oil money. Never mind.

9:11

Spencer - It struck me more as a wheezing attempt to convice the public that the opposition is inauthentic and foreign-sponsored. Less for international implications, more for domestic consumption. Decadence and demagogery. The question at this point is if anyone would buy it. The UK sponsored the '53 Mossadegh coup -- we were the wingmen on that one -- and so the cultural salience of that enduring memory at least on the surface makes it a predictable-if-extreme regime strategy.

9:13

Spencer - But it still seems like blunder after blunder to me. There's at least one argument out there that only a hardliner-run regime can maneuver Iran into a grand bargain with the U.S. and Europe, including over the nuclear program -- Nixon to China, etc -- but why in the world should anyone in the U.S. or Europe have any faith that a regime this thoroughly erratic would keep any of its international promises? And I say that as a craven appeaser.

9:17

Megan - I think the only reason the neocons want Ahmadenijad and Khamenei to remain in power is because neoconservative foreign policy thinking can only be legitimized by the existence of our own Great Satan but with the ability to invade. Also, I think they hate Muslims more than commies, which explains why they're not all up in arms by Kim Jong Il's renewed promise to attack Hawai'i this week. They're pretty sure we'd lose a war there, but they think we can take Iran and ought to try.

Anyway, I guess we should mention the fake recount that they're starting today to try to provide the veneer of legitimacy to the election... And, by the way, if you're still paying attention to Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty finally told Mitch McConnell to shove it up his ass and has agreed to abide by the Minneosta Supreme Court's decision on their recount and certify Al Franken as the Senator, since everyone figures he won.

9:18

Spencer - So is Franken-Coleman finally over? Could there be a Sen. Franken in time for a health-care vote?

9:20

Spencer - oh wait, this Gerstein piece makes it sound like Pawlenty is clearing the way for Coleman to litigate the election in federal court. So no? I don't understand this story anymore; help.

9:23

Megan - Well, no, the question was whether Pawlenty would try to cite Minnesota law to refuse to certify Franken's election in case Coleman had enough money to take it to the Supreme Court, which Pawlenty's now said he won't do despite pressure from GOP Senators to ignore his own state Supreme Court to keep Franken out of the Senate. I mean, he can't ignore an emergency injunction issued by the Supreme Court -- if Coleman even sought one -- but Pawlenty's conceded that kowtowing to McConnell is more detrimental to his political career than giving Minnesota its second Democratic Senator.

Oh, and Franken will likely be there for the vote on Sotomayor, who 62 percent of Americans now support despite (or because of?) GOP attacks -- that's actually more than supported her immediately after the announcement.

9:30

Spencer - My Washington Independent colleague Dave Weigel -- he of the only Twitter feed that matters -- has been writing a lot about Harold Koh, the newly-confirmed State Department legal adviser, who may very well be nominated for the next SCOTUS seat after Sotomayor. Koh survived a lengthy-if-sotto-voce campaign by conservatives to keep his alleged "transnational" legal perspective -- in other words, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, as someone or other put it a long time ago -- out of government. Now that he's confirmed it'll be easier to push him through on the next appointment. But yeah, Sotomayor: woo. Daphne had a good piece the other day on Sotomayor's executive-power perspective. She seems far more difficult to categorize ideologically than she initially did. What do you think? You've got a keener eye for legal stuff than I do.

9:33

Megan - Well, my only criticism of Daphne's piece is the idea that anyone on the Roberts or Renquist court was a "wallflower in cases challenging unchecked executive authority in matters of national security." I think that the conservative justices really believe there shouldn't be just checks, and it wasn't just deference to Dubya, which is even scarier.

Generally speaking, if the Sotomayor nomination is like everything else the Obama Administration has done thus far, I expect Sotomayor will not be nearly as liberal as the opposition is trying to paint her or liberal activists want. But that's a political rather than a legal perspective.

9:37

Spencer - You know what piece I'd assign if I had the authority? Or at least would like to read? Something about who's playing Jeff Sessions during Sotomayor's murderboard preparations. Didn't Sessions say something the other day about writing Sotomayor off before her hearing?

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