AHMADINEJAHD WINS AGAIN!!!!

No, but i'm sure no one here would be more readily prepared to provide a very, very large hat. In fact, i don't wear hats, and haven't since i was discharged from the army.

And there have been too many incidents in which your only appearance in a thread was to argue with me for your claim to convince me.

More likely (more's the pity) the protesters are a very loosely organized group of students, women's right activists, and moderate intellectuals who will be crushed under the regime's boot whether the Baseej can handle the job on their own or the Revolutionary Guard eventually needs to step in.

There you go, thinking you're special again.

As enjoyable as this has been, I'm finding this conversation tedious. I'll jump in again if anything interests me.

Our Secretary of State's reaction was even more sapless...

President Obama on Monday said Iranian voters have a right to feel their ballots mattered and urged the investigation into vote-rigging allegations to go forward without additional violence, and the State Department announced that the U.S. is "deeply troubled" by the latest news from the scene.

Tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in Tehran and other cities, defying a country-wide crackdown to protest the outcome of Friday's presidential election, which declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the victor over Mir Houssein Mousavi.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the ultimate power in the country, has decided to investigate charges of fraud.

Obama said reports of violence that followed Iranian elections trouble him and all Americans. He said peaceful dissent should never be subject to violence that followed weekend elections that gave Ahmadinejad a second term.

"It would be wrong for me to be silent on what we've seen on the television the last few days," Obama told reporters at the White House.

Obama said he had no way of knowing the results were valid -- he said the United States had no election monitors in the country -- but it was important that the voters' choices be respected. link

Iranians will submit, they may talk revolution but wont really carry one out. They are mostly comfortable in a non-labor driven economy.
AS far as the COuncil, the Mousavi rowd has played into its hands.By only recounting certain districts, the election bexcomes an exercise of "hanging chads". .

Published: June 16, 2009
TEHRAN " Iran’s leaders failed on Tuesday to halt a second day of huge demonstrations against last week’s election results but, placed on the defensive, offered another concession to the sustained rage here, saying they would allow a limited recount.
They received a resounding refusal " first from reformist politicians who said they would accept only a new election and then on the streets of the capital, Tehran. Supporters of the defeated opposition presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi jammed into a line more than a mile long. They marched mostly in silence, some carrying signs in English asking, “Where is my vote?”

The numbers of opposition protesters did not match those on Monday, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians joined in the largest public demonstration since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, enraged that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner of Friday’s election with 63 percent of the votes.

Fear, many said, was a factor. Seven protesters were killed overnight. Gritty and uncensored images, some taken by cellphone cameras, were beamed around the world via various Web sites.

“Nothing will change if we don’t come,” said one protester, Madjid, 26, an employee of the Foreign Ministry who was afraid to give his family name. “We need to become a big force to achieve what we want.”

Worry over the future of Iran, a country crucially important for its oil, position next to Iraq and Afghanistan, its nuclear program and ties to extremist groups, spilled over its borders.

In Washington, President Obama said that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed Iranian presidential election. He dismissed criticism that he had failed to speak out forcefully enough about the growing unrest in Iran.

“I have deep concerns about the election,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. “I think that the world has deep concerns about the election.”

As the confrontation inside Iran continued to build momentum on Tuesday, each side laid down more cards.

Reformers, with substantial popular support but without the power of the state, worked to gain religious backers, urging clerics to break with the government. “No one in his sane mind can accept these results,” a senior opposition cleric, Hassan-Ali Montazeri, said in a public letter posted on his Web site.

The government, meanwhile, sought to limit the damage by cracking down with only limited success on electronic media, revoking press credentials for foreign journalists and ordering journalists not to report on the streets. Supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad " though apparently less than 10,000 of them " marched through Tehran’s streets proclaiming their candidate the election’s fair winner and chanting, “Rioters should be executed!”

In an intervention that suggested a growing concern over the scale of the protests, the nation’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took the unusual step of meeting with representatives of the four presidential candidates, urging national unity for the second time in recent days. He did not address the protesters’ demands for a new election.

The Guardian Council, the watchdog body that needs to certify the results, said it was willing to conduct a partial recount of the votes, the IRNA news agency reported. Ayatollah Khamenei, who had urged the council on Monday to examine the vote-rigging claims, said Tuesday that the candidates needed to resolve the issue through legal channels.

Mr. Moussavi’s representative, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, said a recount would not meet the demands of the protesters, Ghalamnews, a Web site linked to Mr. Moussavi, reported.

“We believe there has been fraud because our representatives were not allowed to supervise the elections, and we have evidence of many irregularities,” he was quoted as saying.

He gave an example: votes cast at some polling places, he said, exceeded the number of eligible voters in those areas. He also said the Guardian Council had not been impartial before the election because some of its members even campaigned for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, appearing to try to project the image of a leader with a secure grip on power, left Iran for Russia on Tuesday for a meeting on international security.

In Yekaterinburg, Russia, for a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Mr. Ahmadinejad did not mention the Iranian election but gave a speech in which he referred to regional problems, describing Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories as occupied and unstable.

He added: “The current political and economic order is approaching the end of its mastery of the world. It is absolutely clear that the epoch of empire has come to an end.”

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, told reporters that Russia had warm relations with Iran. “Elections in Iran are an internal affair of the Iranian people, but we welcome the newly elected president of that state,” Mr. Ryabkov said.

Leaders in Western Europe continued to voice concerns about the election, with the strongest remarks coming from President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who said Tuesday that the “extent of the fraud” in Iran was “proportional to the violent reaction” in the country, news agencies reported.

In response, the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the French ambassador to protest Mr. Sarkozy’s remarks, the ISNA news agency reported. The British ambassador was also summoned after Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged the Iranian government to listen to its people.

Despite the crackdown on the news media, an extraordinary amount of information about the protests in Tehran and other cities reached the outside world. On Tuesday, many Web sites posted a wrenching video that purported to show the death of a student in Isfahan in a shooting by pro-government militia members. Other videos showed bleeding and inert demonstrators from Tehran after the large protests on Monday.

In Tuesday’s demonstration here, a witness saw a member of the Basij militia loyal to Mr. Ahmadinejad opening fire on a group of people, hitting one person in the neck. Protesters attacked a group of the militia members and set one of their motorcycles on fire.

There were reports that at least two moderate politicians, Mohammad Ali Abtahi and Saeed Hajarian, as well as two other activists, were arrested on Tuesday. The government arrested more than 100 politicians and activists on Sunday. Some have been released

They marched mostly in silence, some carrying signs in English asking, “Where is my vote?”

Whatever the outcome of Iran's presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon -- if ever -- put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran's determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow.

So what would such an attack look like? Obviously, Israel would need to consider many factors -- such as its timing and scope, Iran's increasing air defenses, the dispersion and hardening of its nuclear facilities, the potential international political costs, and Iran's "unpredictability." While not as menacingly irrational as North Korea, Iran's politico-military logic hardly compares to our NATO allies. Central to any Israeli decision is Iran's possible response.

Israel's alternative is that Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs reach fruition, leaving its very existence at the whim of its staunchest adversary. Israel has not previously accepted such risks. It destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. One major new element in Israel's calculus is the Obama administration's growing distance (especially in contrast to its predecessor).