links for 2009-06-14

The al-Arabiya network has reported at least three people dead in riots that broke out in Tehran following the results of the Iranian elections.

The report says Iranian security forces have surrounded a neighborhood in which many reformists reside, including former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

It's way past midnight in Tehran, but this city is not sleeping. Outside on the streets, people are honking their horns in protest and stretching their hands out of cars making peace signs — a sign of support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate apparently defeated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's presidential election on Friday.
In neighborhoods across north and central Tehran, shouts of "Death to dictator!" fill the air, mostly in female voices, coming from house windows. There are also shouts of "Allah-o Akbar!" — reminiscent of the revolution — on the urging of a communique from Mousavi's office.

Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist's defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, have responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and claim that the result was the work of a dictatorship.

There have been a number of contradictory reports from Iran, in large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic and in particular on foreign reporters.

Mousavi's arrest was reported by an unofficial source, who said that the presidential contender had been arrested en route to the home of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Pro-reform Mousavi has denounced the election as rigged and vowed he will not accept defeat. He and key aides could not be reached by phone Saturday.

President Obama's Justice Department didn't just disappoint some of his liberal supporters by arguing in support of the Defense of Marriage Act this week, disappointing if not angering supporters who also support same sex marriage and were appalled by the comparison of same sex marriage to incestuous ones. The president's lawyers also repeated some of the Bush administration's national security arguments.

The Obama Justice Department on Friday asked the full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review an earlier appeals court ruling to determine if details about CIA rendition flights coordinated by Jeppesen Dataplan — a division of Boeing — should be protected as "state secrets."

As a candidate, then-Sen. Obama faulted President Bush for using the "state secrets" argument too often, and too broadly, though as president he has used it in at least three cases:
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Oh My! Cloning into W?

The Huffington Post checks in with "The View"'s Joy Behar, who, I noted yesterday, will be getting her own HLN talk show that replaces the Lou Dobbs repeat at 9 p.m.

"I'd love to have Sarah Palin on the show," Behar said. "She would do very well with me, because I'm not out to get Sarah Palin. I want to hear from her; she has things to say."

Behar, an outspoken liberal, said she wants to invite guests from both sides of the aisle to appear on her show.

"I don't want to do just a liberal show," she said. "I interviewed Ann Coulter when I was sitting in for Larry King a couple of times, and we have a rapport. I like to talk to her. I think it's interesting to me to talk to people who don't agree with me all the time. Rush Limbaugh, let's get him on the show! Even Dick Cheney is welcome on my show. I'll have a faucet ready for him but he can come."

I have been in Iran for exactly one week covering the 2009 Iranian election carnival. Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. Even when I asked Mousavi supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism – "Yes we can", "I hope so", "If you vote." So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran.

Gay rights groups expressed dismay with the Obama administration Friday over its championing of the Defense of Marriage Act, a law the president pledged to try to repeal while on the campaign trail.

The government filed a motion late Thursday to dismiss the case of Arthur Smelt and Christopher Hammer, who are challenging the 1996 federal act. The law prevents couples in states that recognize same-sex unions from securing Social Security spousal benefits, filing joint taxes and other federal rights of marriage.

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers argued that the act — known informally as DOMA — is constitutional and contended that awarding federal marriage benefits to gays would infringe on the rights of taxpayers in the 30 states that specifically prohibit same-sex marriages.

"The president made very explicit and emphatic campaign promises that he opposes DOMA and would provide leadership calling on Congress to repeal it," said Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director for Lambda

The Iranian government declared an outright election victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday morning, and riot police officers fought with supporters of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who insisted that the election had been stolen.
After a mostly quiet morning in Tehran, Moussavi supporters began filtering onto the streets. By early afternoon, thousands had come together, many of them wearing the trademark green of his campaign, chanting angrily that they would fight on as Mr. Moussavi had urged them to do on Friday night when he claimed that he had won and that there had been voting “irregularities.”

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back.”

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Illinois senator's 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock, the disclosure shows.