It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. Listen. Here come the drums. Here come the drums.

As you may have heard, Iran had their presidential election last Friday. This would come as a surprise to most people who base their knowledge of Iran on the news coverage they receive in the United States, because President Ahmedinejad is frequently referred to as a dictator in the press. We also get the impression that the president of Iran would be in a position to authorize military attacks against other countries. We also get the impression that Iran has been exceptionally belligerent since the 1979 islamic revolution.

None of those impressions are particularly true, but that hardly matters. When the official results were announced, the leading opposition candidate Mousavi cried foul. Credulous bloggers and tweeters around the world stood at attention and immediate cries of election fraud were echoing through the Internet. Ahmedinejad couldn’t have won! 75% of Iranians are under 27 years old! The youth hunger for reform! Mousavi is the great hope for democracy in Iran! Where is my vote! Holy shit, people got shot at the riots!

I’m a knee-jerk skeptic at heart, so I took all of this with a grain of salt and a bit of caution. When storefronts are being vandalized in the midst of a massive political protest, there’s going to be teargas. There are going to be policemen in scary riot armor. People are going to get beaten. This happens in any country over any issue. In most parts of the world, when protests of this scale and character take place, somebody gets shot. Unfortunate, but true.

The main problem I see with the outside world’s reaction to Iran’s election results, whether on blogs or Twitter or CNN or my local newspaper, is that we’re getting the same echo chamber effect I’ve seen before. This is the kind of coverage we got about Panama before we invaded to snatch up Noriega. This is the kind of coverage we got about Iraq before each time we invaded there. This is the kind of coverage we got about Serbia before we started bombing Belgrade and putting soldiers into Kosovo.

Step away from your keyboard for a second. Take a deep breath. Count to ten slowly. Exhale. Think for a second about the tone you’re adding to the public conversation of this matter. Are you being constructive? What are the foreseeable consequences of what you’re contributing to? Are you speaking to the facts, or echoing and amplifying rumor and propaganda?

“Where is my vote?” is a question asked by many in Tehran this week. It was asked by many in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 and Texas in 1960. In modern democracies we vote anonymously to avoid undue pressure, but anonymity removes accountability and requires some element of trust. Let them work it out.

related:

• Pollster uses two-year-old video (but “does it matter?”)
• A partial account of wildly-inaccurate reporting via Twitter
• and yes, the results really do look implausible. I’m not denying that.

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

Earlier this evening, the local paper reported that local congressman Mike Thompson’s office has released a list of all the earmarks he requested for the 2010 federal budget. The total dollar amount is just shy of $395,000,000.00. This was even more than what they reported in this morning’s paper about my representative, Lynn Woolsey; she only asked for $285,000,000.00. Most folks these days seem to like to complain about earmarks, so I’m going to air my complaint too.

Why so little, Mrs. Woolsey? What the heck about district 1 merits $110,000,000.00 more in earmarks than district 6? You see, I’m rather a fan of having my representatives bring home the bacon. I pay my taxes and want my area to get its fair share. I didn’t hire my US Rep to go let some pencilneck in a Virginia office building decide where all the money should go. That guy doesn’t know where Occidental is and whether it really needs wastewater treatment plant improvements. He doesn’t see what happens to south-bound traffic on 101 North of Steele Lane at 4pm on a weekday.

Earmarks are more often good than bad. Some congressmen do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff than others (Thomspon apparently got $1.2 billion in requests and pared it down to under $400 million, much of which will overlap requests from the White House), but the practice itself is fine. If we don’t like the earmarks we’re benefiting from, we can kick the bums out.

TL;DR – “all politics are local” == “fuck you, John McCain.”

Thompson’s list (PDF)
Woolsey’s list (PDF)