Sara Haile-Mariam

My latest piece on Huffpost.

Translation: "Trust us! We had counted the votes a few days before the election."

I’m going to write more on this tonight– but in the meantime, wanted to share my first post for Global Grind on the Iranian elections.

Global Grind is Russel Simmon’s website, I’ll be contributing posts weekly.

Over the last few days, something was visibly happening in Iran. The images of women and young people flocking to the streets in support of reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi displayed the kind of hopeful unrest that promised a sea change. Many have conceded that Mr. Moussavi was a sort of political blank slate, making it hard to say what his Presidency would have meant to the country and the world. Nonetheless, the last few days reflected the intersection of emotional intensity and politics, reminiscent of what we saw here in the US in 2008. On Saturday, these supporters sat in anguish as current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in an apparent landslide. The results are suspect, and accordingly, blogs and twitter and facebook consist of speculation and reporting of what’s currently going on as Moussavi supporters take their cause to the streets.

Roger Cohen’s column in the Times today notes a women telling him:

“Throw away your pen and paper and come to our aid,” she said, pointing to my notebook. “There is no freedom here.”

Andrew Sullivan, The Tehran Bureau, and Nader Uskowi are all doing an incredible job of uncovering events as they unfold.

Today, my thoughts are with the Iranian people.

Some criticism of The President’s speech today. I have no illusions, today’s speech wasn’t an anecdote to the World’s problems. However, I truly believe that the approach leveraged, that of empathy and emphasizing commonalities, is a winning approach. Nonetheless, it’s imperative to look at what the President didn’t do, in order to identify opportunities for additional dialogue and action.

Shirin Sadeghi

“At times in his speech, it was almost as if Obama in his elegant oration was pandering to the fundamentalists and the oppressive governments who have defined the Islamic dialogue for decades. He said that he does not want to be a prisoner of the past, but his speech was littered with history which, while accurate, is old news when it stands alone without direction or context.”

Peter Daou

“Yes, Obama is targeting the Arab ’street’ and global public opinion - but to the corrupt regimes that dominate that region of the world, his oration means virtually nothing. Repression and suppression will go on uninterrupted. And to those whose abiding hatred of Israel (and thus America) is absolute, Obama’s words will be seen as empty and hypocritical.”

Ira Stoll (h/t Ben Smith)

“The sections about the Palestinian Arabs were even weaker. He said of the Palestinians: “For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation.” This buys into the claim that it was 1948, not 1967, that was the original tragedy for the Palestinian Arabs, and feeds the idea that the Palestinian Arabs have a claim to all of Israel, not just the West Bank and Gaza.”

Shmuel Rosner (h/t Andrew Sullivan)

“Obama’s Cairo speech had a misleading quality to it. The president was speaking the rhetoric of Reagan, while intending to execute the policy of George H. W. Bush. Conveying the image of an emotional, forthcoming, and understanding bridge-builder, he is actually a cautious and calculated leader, wanting to scale down America’s foreign policy–back to the days when “interests” were king, not ‘ideologies.’ Obama is a new type of the old ‘realist.; He is a realist with feelings–one that can naturally combine a call for halting Iran’s nuclear weapons because of ‘America’s interests’ (and others’) with his personal story of ‘an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.’”

International Empathy, is what we saw today. A truly incredible speech that seeks to draw parallels and commonalities among countries that have grown accustomed to drawing upon historical differences to justify contemporary failures to advance in a more productive direction. President Obama didn’t chafe at those differences, rather he explained them, he empathized with the plight of Israel, and Palestine, and the Muslim world. He articulated the story of America, and made it accessible to those who have been told for far to long that our country is to blame for their grievances. I am proud of the President today, but even more so, I’m inspired to see diplomacy move in this direction and to see empathy emerge as a tenant of President Obama’s administration.

From his 2004 Convention speech as a candidate for the US Senate, to his race speech as a candidate for President, to this speech today as President of the United States- Mr. Obama has aimed to see the world in the eyes of others. No doubt, this approach complicates things, and in many cases good intentions will not be enough. Nonetheless, today marks a new beginning for international diplomacy. Today is when the promise of his Presidency began to come to fruition.

Full transcript here.

After accurately stating “I think freedom means freedom for everyone,” former Vice President Cheney rewrote history to justify his position against a federal statue that would permit same-sex marriage stating, “Historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis.”

While he’s right, historically, marriage has been regulated on the state level, in the case of interracial marriage, the process of amending marriage inequality ended at the federal level. In 1967, the Supreme Court determined that
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was unconstitutional in the case of Loving v Virginia in 1967. The decision marked the national end of race based restrictions on marriage.

When this decision was first articulated, over 70% of the population opposed interracial marriage. With a man of mix-raced heritage occupying the highest office, the very thought of determining marriage eligibility on the basis of race seems absurd. Yet the arguments being made to oppose same-sex marriage are based in the same premise, we fear what we don’t know, and as a result we’ve justified legislating equality. It’s not acceptable. Freedom means freedom for everyone.

In case you missed it–Krugman points to Reagonmics as the origin of our current financial crisis.

“But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.”

“If we’re going to be Ronald Reagan’s city on a hill, we don’t get to torture. We don’t do it.”

A look back on the first Earth Day (Via CAP)

The Article was published in 1970- checkout how young people responded then:

Campus Ritual. Expectedly, youth predominated at most of the ecological happenings and teach-ins across the U.S. At 1,500 campuses and 10,000 schools, students, teachers—and sometimes parents—observed Earth Day by studying such previously recondite subjects as hydrocarbons and acid drainage from coal mines. Much of the day was given to theater and ritual. At the University of Wisconsin, 58 separate programs were staged, including a dawn “earth service” of Sanskrit incantations.

Car wreckings—followed by interment of the beasts—were a common protest against the internal-combustion engine. Some students at Florida Technological University held a trial to condemn a Chevrolet for poisoning the air; they tried to demolish it with a sledgehammer, but the car resisted so sturdily that the students finally shrugged and offered it to an art class for a sculpture project.

Some 1,000 students at Ohio’s Cleveland State University worked throughout the city gathering litter and loading it into garbage trucks. They ended the day by marching to the almost pestilentially polluted Cuyahoga River. Standing at the spot where Founding Father Moses Cleaveland allegedly landed in 1796, a student held aloft a plastic bag full of garbage and intoned: “This is my bag.” Another student, dressed as Cleaveland, rowed up, declared: “This place is too dirty to build a colony,” and double-timed back down the river to the almost equally scabrous Lake Erie. In Letcher County, Ky., part of the most ravaged section of Appalachia, 1,200 students buried a trash-filled casket. A young Denver group called CARP (Citizens Concerned About Radiation Pollution) gave the Colorado Environmental Rapist of the Year Award to the Atomic Energy Commission.