Flap’s Blog Links for June 15, 2009

Dick Cheney released a statement responded to CIA Director Leon Panetta’s suggestion that the former vice president’s criticism of Obama administration policies means Cheney is wishing for another attack.

“I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted. The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years.”

Panetta was quoted in a lengthy profile by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

David Letterman admitted pangs of regret over jokes he made last week about Sarah Palin’s daughter.

He may be regretting them a little more now.

A Web site called FireDavidLetterman.com is organizing a rally outside Letterman’s show at the Ed Sullivan theater on Tuesday June 16 at 4:30 p.m.

And while Letterman has repeatedly reminded viewers his comments were jokes, the campaign’s organizers seem dead serious about getting the late-night stalwart canned.

David Letterman’s comments about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and one of her daughters has prompted a hotel chain to pull its advertising on CBS’ website — and spawned a campaign to fire the Late Show host that includes a planned protest outside his studio.

Embassy Suites, part of the Hilton Hotels Corp., pulled advertising on CBS’ site because of complaints, company spokeswoman Kendra Walker told TVGuide.com. The company was not an advertiser on Letterman’s show.

“We received lots of e-mails from concerned guests and we assessed that the statement that he made was offensive enough to our guests and prospective guests that we elected to take the ads down,” Walker said. She declined to release the cost of the ads.

CBS declined to comment Tuesday.

David Letterman re-addressed the controversy surrounding his jokes about Sarah Palin’s family during the taping of CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday.

Letterman said he had no idea Palin was at the Yankees game with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, when he joked about her getting “knocked up” by player Alex Rodriguez last week.

“I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the governor, and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani,” Letterman said. “It’s not your fault that it was misunderstood, it’s my fault. … So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke.”

In a massive outpouring reminiscent of the Islamic Revolution three decades ago, hundreds of thousands of Iranians streamed through the capital Monday, and the fist-waving protesters denounced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to victory in a disputed election.

Standing on a roof, gunmen opened fire on a group of protesters who had tried to storm a pro-government militia’s compound. One man was killed and several others were wounded in the worst violence since the disputed election Friday.

Angry men showed their bloody palms after cradling the dead and wounded who had been part of a crowd that stretched more than five miles (nearly 10 kilometers) supporting reform leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The huge rally – and smaller protests around the country – reinforced what has become increasingly clear since the election: the opposition forces rallying behind Mousavi show no signs of backing down. Their resolve appears to have pushed Iran’s Islamic establishment into attempts to cool

Iranian leaders will probably take decisive action to quell opposition protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, said Richard Bulliet, an Iran expert at Columbia University.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated today in downtown Tehran at a rally led by Ahmadinejad’s defeated opponent, Mir Houssein Mousavi, who charges widespread fraud in the June 12 vote.

A pro-government militia fired at opposition protesters, killing at least one person, the Associated Press reported, citing one of its photographers, who was a witness. There was no immediate confirmation. The rally took place in defiance of an official ban on public protests.

“The regime will quell the discontent,” Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, said by phone today from New York. “It will be dampened down and the U.S. and foreign governments will have to resign themselves to dealing with the Ahmadinejad regime.”

Iranian demonstrators called for more mass protests on Tuesday, a day after hardline Islamic militiamen killed a man during a march by tens of thousands against a presidential election they say was rigged.

The Iranian capital has already seen three days of the biggest and most violent anti-government protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution after hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner of last Friday’s vote.

“Tomorrow at 5 p.m. (8:30 a.m. EDT) at Vali-ye Asr Square,” some of the crowd chanted at Monday’s march, referring to a major road junction in the sprawling city of some 12 million.

Protestors in Iran on Monday used Twitter for battle cries and to spread word about clashes with police and “hard line supporters” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Twitter messages, some with links to pictures, streamed from Iran despite reported efforts by authorities there to block news of protests over Ahmadinejad’s claim of having been fairly re-elected.

Pictures of wounded or dead people that senders claim were Iranian protestors ricocheted about Twitter and wound up posted at online photo-sharing websites such as Flickr.

BBC audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe may be experiencing disruption to their BBC TV or radio services today. That is because there is heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran.

Satellite technicians have traced that interference and it is coming from Iran. There has been intermittent interference from Iran since Friday, but this is the heaviest yet.

It seems to be part of a pattern of behaviour by the Iranian authorities to limit the reporting of the aftermath of the disputed election. In Tehran, John Simpson and his cameraman were briefly arrested after they had filmed the material for this piece. And at least one news agency in Tehran has come under pressure not to distribute internationally any pictures it might have of demonstrations on the streets in Iran.

The White House has not issued a statement expressing support for the protestors declaring the election illegitimate. But neither has anyone in the Obama administration said a public word accepting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection.

“We’re reacting to concrete facts,” a White House official tells ABC News. “We’re collecting them still.”

That said, the primary concerns the White House has about Iran are not about free and fair elections. The concerns are: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support for terrorism.

“We have to deal with the Iran that we have rather than the Iran that we wish we had,” says the official.

I have had it with Letterman! I used to defend this guy to all of my friends who liked Leno better. I would say from a comic stand point that Jay was a great comic but Letterman was more original and had more style and class than Leno. Two recent events have changed my mind: Jay’s classy departure from the “Tonight Show” and Letterman’s classless left-wing attacks on the kids of politicians.