As of this writing, we know the following about media coverage of the events in Iran:
Most traditional news inside Iran is being shut down.
Networks under Iranian government control are being tightly restricted or shut down outright.
Online social media is about the only way news on Iran is getting out.
I have therefore set up a collation of the three most useful social-media feeds, plus one traditional-news feed, at iranfeeds.tumblr.com.
Hopefully this will prove a useful one-stop source of the latest on Iran, especially if I’m able to get Tumblr to allow vastly more rapid checking of the feeds!
UPDATE: Tumblr shut down the page for excessive traffic, so we’ve moved the Iran Events Feed here.
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The tale of the confrontation between Ed Whelan of (the right-wing) EPPC and “publius” of (the left-wing) Obsidian Wings is by now well known. In brief, they argued over issues pertaining to the Sotomayor nomination, with “publius” annoying Whelan by calling him a “know-nothing demagogue,” and Whelan riposting with the information that “publius” is, in fact, “law professor John F. Blevins of the South Texas College of Law.”
Much comment thereupon ensued.
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Popularity: 10% [?]
Tracking the value of media hits for clients and candidates is, on the surface, a simple exercise: simply assign the value of the equivalent ad buy to the hit. If a 5-minute commercial would cost $10,000 in the same time slot, then that 5-minute local news piece was worth $10,000. If a full-page ad in that publication would cost $20,000, then that full-page story was worth $20,000.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
Among the works of pre-Civil War Southern apologists, John C. Calhoun’s infamous “positive good” speech before the U.S. Senate and his Disquisition on Government stand as the signal texts. The culmination of Calhounian thought, such as it was, found its expression in Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone” speech, given in Savannah mere weeks before the fight at Fort Sumter. “Our new government,” said Stephens, “is founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
There is of course a social critique underlying the racism — or perhaps it is racism underlying the social critique, though both are simultaneously possible — inasmuch as both Calhoun and Stephens expressed displeasure with the emergence of modern capitalism and its individualist, competitive demands. Calhoun in particular devoted substantive portions of his Disquisition to the proposition that man and his rights (contra the Declaration of Independence) exist solely within a social context. “[Man's] natural state is,” he wrote, “the social and political — the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race.”
This is as far as most popular histories go on the Southern, and eventually Confederate, view of capitalism and its structures. Yet the extent to which this theme was developed by Southern ideologists is best illustrated by one George Fitzhugh, a Virginian who published two works on the topic in the 1850s. His 1854 Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society and his 1857 Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters are classics of the genre, and if they did not exert the influence the author wished, they did nicely encapsulate the Southern slaveholding riposte to Northern industrial and agricultural society’s agitation for free labor.
I reprint here, below the fold, several passages of the first work, which is the more intelligent of the two. (This is, admittedly, not saying a great deal.) I find Fitzhugh remarkable in his argument throughout both works that socialism is merely an imperfect reaction to capitalism, inasmuch as it is an attempt to replicate the benefits of outright enslavement. Note that Fitzhugh, alongside better-known eminences like Calhoun and Stephens, were ardent proponents of slavery; and note that they saw socialism as the appropriation and modification of slavery for capitalist society. The significance of this is not easily overstated. Coupled with the technocratic features of the Confederate Constitution (also elaborated upon by Stephens in the “Cornerstone” speech), the heritage of American Progressivism in this light assumes an altogether more sinister — and today, highly relevant — cast.
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On Cinco de Mayo, 2002, all the Hispanic Presidential appointees in the George W. Bush Administration gathered at the White House for a joint portrait with the President. This is the result. I’m barely visible here, lurking with red hair eight heads to the left of the President.
It’s difficult to convey how optimistic we were then: especially the younger appointees, ready to change America and defeat Islamism from the cramped confines of whatever bureaucracy the White House Personnel Office shoved us into. We were also going to capture American Hispanics for the Republican Party, as the effort behind this photo implies. Now, seven years later, this image is a memento of squandered years — not for ourselves, but for our country.
Popularity: 14% [?]
