We know Sarah Palin isn't the biggest fan of Vogue, but we think she'd do really well guest-editing her own issue. So we've worked up a sample cover in the style of our Cover Lies feature (in which we expose how little relationship ladymags, like Sarah Palin, have to reality). While the real Vogue bows to the recession with its $300 "Steal" of the Month, Palin could show us how to get a $150,000 wardrobe for free — and how to pick a $700/night hotel, complete with robe and slippers. In lieu of book reviews, she could offer up a bunch of snide remarks about Katie Couric — "the perky one" probably can't read anyway. And for balance, Palin could add some media elite contributors, like Trig-birther Andrew Sullivan and Rebecca Johnson. (Johnson works for the fake America but the real Vogue, and says all Palin wanted to talk about in her much-maligned interview was "drilling for oil" — but what else is there, anyway?) In fact, right after a Jeffrey Steingarten piece on moose-meat, Going Vogue should include a free sample of premium Alaska crude. We hear it gets rid of both wrinkles and endangered wildlife.

Fact Check: Palin's Book Goes Rogue On Some Facts [AP, via Yahoo News]
Palin's Katie Couric Myths [Daily Beast]
Palin's Ego Trip [Daily Beast]

Nice groundwork by whoever got these from the McCain campaign at the Huffington Post, where Sam Stein reports today on a few contradictions the emails make with portions of the book.

Granted, they have to do with Palin's Saturday Night Live appearance, a prank on Palin by a bunch of morning radio goons, and the precise level McCain's campaign manager had to be an asshole to Palin's staffers, but still: if she's lied about these things, what else?

The first email is about Sarah's trepidation regarding going on SNL. McCain's campaign was all for it. Sarah wasn't. She thought SNL was "whack." And she wasn't about to go on the show to yuk it up with those people.

"Not after seeing clips of what they've been playing re: my family," Palin writes to campaign manager Steve Schmidt..."I had no idea how gross 'celebrities' on that show and in other celebrity venues could get when it comes to family and other aspects of my life that have nothing to do with seeking the vp slot. These folks are whack - didn't know it was as bad as it is... what's the upside in giving them any celebrity venue a ratings boost? That's Todd's input also.."

Good thing she didn't see last night's episode.

Of course, Steve Schmidt basically told her "do it if you want, or don't." So, she doesn't want to go on SNL, McCain's manager basically says fine, fuckit, then don't. What does she run in the book?

The Sarah Palin Reality To Book Copy Alchemizer, everyone:

"Let's do this," I said. "Let's go on and neutralize some of this, and have some fun!" Of course, the idea was met with massive back-and-forth haggling.

Boom. Met with haggling by who? Herself? Next, the Canadian DJ prank, in which two morning DJs got Palin on the phone pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. It was funny and awesome. And exposed a huge rift in the campaign.

[T]he McCain staffer also provided the email that Schmidt sent to Palin and her staff after she was prank[ed]..."Who set this up? Are you kidding me? Did it occur to anyone that the french president wouldn't be looking to have a conversation with the vicepresidential candidate 3 days before the election," Schmidt writes. "From this moment forward, no interview occurs without my direct signoff. Nothing. I want to know the exact details of this. I want to know who is responsible."

Right? Because if you were a campaign manager, you'd be pretty fucking pissed, too. But Schmidt appears to handle it moderately well. Palin's version of the story's slightly different, though.

In Going Rogue, Palin recalls Schmidt screaming directly at her, so much so that it "blew my hair back."

Also, she noted that Schmidt called her. The aides are calling that bullshit, saying no call happened, that Schmidt's supposed wrath of fury was aimed at staff and not Palin, and that this was all done over email.

The best, though, is this: an email from Sarah Palin that appears to be her, apologizing for completely screwing the pooch on media appearances, and thanking the staff for their hard work in the face of her Rainman-like ability to completely Hindenburg every high-profile press opportunity given to her. So there is some self-awareness there! Damn.

"I am very sorry," Palin writes to Nicolle Wallace, Steve Schmidt, and Rick Davis, with her husband, Todd, cc:ed. "u guys are working double-triple time on this blundered-up stuff that they spin bc of my visits w press - while I apologize I say I love you guys!!!"

Naturally, the book reportedly has Palin painting the McCain campaign as overly controlling and temperamental. Maybe they were temperamental: I'd be fuckingmental if I had to work with Palin. Even so, though, her characterizations are appearing to be alternate realities, or—here's a good one I can't take credit for—"magical realism."

What else is happening with Going Rogue today? Michiko Kakutani savaged it the Times today, penning less a review than an curbside beating. Newly inducted N.W.A. member and Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan, now fully aware that Sarah's an avid Daily Dish reader, has basically turned his blog into the Suck It Sarah Palin Daily Digest. In one post, he organizes all of her lies. In another, he frisks the above HuffPo story, giving it his own nice twist:

Palin is a delusional fantasist, existing in a world of her own imagination, asserting fact after fact that are demonstrably untrue, and unable to adjust to the actual reality after it has been demonstrated beyond any empirical doubt....She is a deeply disturbed individual.

The doc-tah is in.

The release of Going Rogue is like that moment in dodgeball when there's only one kid left on the other side of the court, and the last ball has rolled away from them, and everyone's just standing around, waiting to see who's going to pick up the ball and really go for the killshot.

$50 on this guy.

[Photo via Getty Images]

The terrifyingly prolific Sullivan took one of the 73 or so posts he penned before lunch to quickly frisk today's Wall Street Journal piece on Sarah Palin's web strategy for her Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Bullshit, Going Rouge (©McSweeney's, 2009). And what is Sarah Palin's web strategy for her book?

Among the features of this new strategy: buying Internet advertising based on Google searches of her name, and using Facebook as a key means of communicating with voters. Her team also has considered filing libel suits against bloggers who spread rumors about her family.

GAMECHANGER. Not exactly the VBS.tv campaign I was hoping for, but still: damn. Sullivan, however, took this opportunity to note his (and my) favorite part of what's otherwise a snoozer of a filing. Which was this gem:

Ms. Palin was particularly angry at bloggers and the media, associates said, for speculation that her baby Trig was really the child of Bristol, her daughter. At one point, according to people familiar with the discussions, Ms. Palin considered pursuing a libel suit against at least one blogger, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Ms. Palin decided against such a move because of the publicity it would bring. Mr. Sullivan, in response, said asking "factually verifiable questions is obviously not libel." A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin didn't respond to email requests seeking comment.

Oh ho ho. Christmas came early for Andrew (though the trees stay year-round, thug). Sullivan's been a veritable thorn in many sides of many Palins, but naturally, Sarah's the big game. And let's be clear about this: people who have bloggers who write nasty things about them should never, ever, ever admit that they read that blogger. Because that blogger now knows they have a mainline to their target's face. And like she's gonna stop reading. What does Sullivan have to say about this? Besides hysterically prefacing what's probably his favorite block of text ever with the words "Money quote," he basically goes for the jugular while victory dancing on her face. This is basically the political blogger's version of the Dirty Bird, in a post titled Sarah Palin, Obsessive Daily Dish Reader:

Sources with access to Palin have indeed told to me that the Wasilla whack-job was an obsessive reader of this blog as it dared to ask factual questions about her past that could be easily answered. I have no way of knowing this myself, and regard it as odd that a vice-presidential candidate would be hell-bent on suing a blogger who, presumably, was merely making a total ass of himself in wondering if Palin's surreal account of her last pregnancy was factually accurate. Or is there something there - of some unknown sort - that she desperately wanted to intimidate and suppress? As Bubble would note: "Who can say?" What can Levi possibly mean that "she knows what I got on her?" The MSM won't touch this, of course.

Ho! We'll take some of that, please. Move it on your left, Andrew. Shit's bomb.

Meanwhile, if Sarah Palin or Bristol Palin admit to reading this website—operative term: admit—please give us a shout and let us know so we can dedicate a tag to them or something. In the mean time, here's the latest update on your son-in-law's your ex-boyfriend's Levi Johnston's penis.

Earlier this year, Dunn spoke to a class of graduating high school students and asked them to go fight a war in Calcutta as per the recommendations of her "two favorite political philosophers" Mao Tse Tung and Mother Theresa. While it is not known what became of these newly militant American schoolchildren armed with maps, Fox News' resident Crazed Crybot discovered this footage in his continuing quest to expose the violent red heart of the Obama White House.

What a fright for Glenn Beck!

Would you be a little alarmed if somebody in the White House had cited Adolf Hitler in a speech to high school students as the person they turn to the most? What is the difference? Mao was worse. Plus, he took away the freedom of hundreds of millions of Chinese, and now he's being revered? How did we get here?

Now Andrew Sullivan thinks all this talk of a Red House is just silly. But he does have an answer for Beck:

Dunn would never have used Hitler as a source for perseverance and setting the right objectives. Why Because Hitler's evil is self-evident. So why is Mao's rancid evil not self-evident for a person like Dunn? Because she retains a double standard for far left totalitarianism over far right totalitarianism. It's that insulting and morally disgusting double standard that gets my goat. Mao was responsible for the deaths of up to 70 million people - and Dunn sees him as a useful strategist.

Oh, that's right. Lefties only ever truly despise righties. That explains the overwhelming love for Stalin... no?

Asked to comment, Dunn says she got the quote from noted Communist Lee Atwater, which leaves us back at square one: why doesn't the world feel about Chairman Mao the way it does about Hitler and Stalin? He definitely felt he deserved to share space with Stalin at least - even had a little tiff with Khruschev when he thought his heir apparent status was being infringed upon.

Perhaps it's because he never bombed our grandparents nor made our parents hide under schooldesks. Or maybe it's because the strongest proponent of the Cult of Mao is still the very country where he once had those millions of people tortured and killed.

[Pic: IntelligentLife]

The issue at hand: President Obama's plans to address elitist gay group Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner in DC. Now, some of you may not be hip to Obama's same-sex politics, but that's okay: they don't amount to much.

Despite all those campaign promises, the Big O's dragging his feet on, well, basically every important LGBT policy. And that lackadaisical approach has many, like Sullivan, arguing that Obama's simply in it for that sweet, sweet gay dough:

In some ways, Obama's fealty to the big gay lobby rather than to the real gay community is testimony to why Democratic party politics remain repulsive to me. HRC has achieved nothing substantive for gay equality on a federal level in the twenty years I've been observing them.
...
If Obama wants to support gay equality, he knows what to do.... So spare us the schmoozing and the sweet-talking and do it. Until then, Mr president, why don't you have a nice steaming cup of shut-the-fuck-up?

Sullivan's not alone in wagging a finger at this weekend's event.

The rag tag Westboro Baptist Church, which was founded by the scary Fred Phelps and has a knack for getting press, announced that it will also wag a finger, and some questionable placards. That's no surprise. Nor is their hateful press release, which comes awfully close to Sullivan's criticism:

You stupid fags think Obama gives a darn about you? No, he hates you. He is going to use your money and your resources and then when he shows himself for what he is, he will merely destroy you along with the rest of this nation of self-loathing hypocrites.

Their release, however, does top Sullivan in one respect (other than the national damnation bit): it delves into the event's dinner menu: "What, you're going to have an all the feces you can eat bufet [sic]? YUCK!"

Yuck is right! What self-respecting gay eats feces from a buffet? How pedestrian!

The lovable-despite-a-career-of-publishing-unforgivably-wrong-things editor-cum-blogger notes a recent study on the effects of love on the brain versus sex. But his own two-person focus group came to a different conclusion:

I recall one marathon twelve-hour session of passion many years ago now. It was only afterwards that I realized I had barely had a single trace of an analytic thought for the longest period I could then remember. I was never happier. As I finally collapsed into my lover's arms with the final orgasm that drained every last drop of desire or need from my body and soul, I understood for the first time why the French call coming "le petit mort".

Yes. Well. Sullivan just recently went back home to DC after his usual summer in Provincetown, and his adorable dog is getting very old. So maybe he is a bit distracted or depressed right now! But still, we have to ask: twelve hours? Didn't you get... sleepy? Would we be out of line to wonder if perhaps certain questionably legal substances were involved? Possibly a stimulant known to cause alertness, euphoria, and increased sexual appetite for up to 12 hours?

Now that he's admitted to fucking the oppressive "ordeal of consciousness" away, Andrew Sullivan is officially the Peaches of Pundits.

McCaughey first began lying in 1994, because she was bored. While working at a conservative think tank and conferring on the regular with the tobacco industry, McCaughey wrote a lengthy and incredibly misleading story about Bill Clinton's health care reform bill that Andrew Sullivan's New Republic happily printed, despite the fact that it was just full of lies.

Michelle Cottle just wrote a piece for Franklin Foer's newer, less annoying New Republic all about McCaughey, and while it doesn't go into the gritty details of how incredibly irresponsible Sullivan was as an editor back in the '90s, when TNR printed all sorts of bullshit for attention and to be provocative, it is satisfyingly mean to McCaughey.

After her lying article of lies became a series of false talking points repeated endlessly by Republicans (like friendly old Bob Dole), everyone noticed that this cheerfully dishonest ideologue was also a nice-looking blonde lady! A veteran Republican pol selected her as a running mate! You can imagine what happened next.

Celebrated for both her brains and beauty, she was declared a brave new model of feminist pol. (A glam-shot photo spread in Vanity Fair set the GOP abuzz, while the New York Post cheered her for having "Henry Kissinger's brains and Jessica Rabbit's body.") Even some of her academic quirkiness—her love of raw data and obsession with pie charts—conveyed a not-politics-as-usual freshness. Admittedly, there were bumps of the sort former Governor Palin could sympathize with: Anonymous Pataki staffers dropped quotes about the newbie candidate being unusually self-absorbed, and her frequent clashes with the veteran Pataki aide assigned to help her adjust to campaign life were downright operatic. (During one battle, McCaughey had her campaign van pull over on the side of a highway as she shrieked at the aide to get out.)

That's right: TNR just straight-up called Betsy McCaughey Sarah Palin. Damn.

Of course her political "career" ended in disaster because she's impossible to work with or for, and she rightfully faded back into obscurity at another conservative think tank. Until, weirdly, she came back with columns and op-eds and radio appearances and TV interviews in which she shamelessly lied about Barack Obama's health care plans, just this year! It is weird how that happens, right? How no one is ever so wrong that they're not allowed back on TV to be wrong some more, as long as they're useful to people with lots of money at stake?

This also means, of course, that Sarah Palin will never completely go away.

Sorry.

The Atlantic interview took place in Provincetown, Mass., where Sullivan keeps a summer home and where he was also ticketed for possession of marijuana in July by a federal park ranger. But a prosecutor dismissed the charges "in the interests of justice," a move that Sullivan has declined to explain.

We don't know why Sullivan is laughing, but we think it's because he wants to answer the question by saying, "I get high, all the time, with pot that I carry around on my person." But he can't because that would raise the question as to why he's allowed to do that but other people have to pay fines for it and have crimes on their records. Ha ha ha.

A Massachusetts legal blog called The Docket carries an odd story: a federal judge wanted to hold Sullivan to account for marijuana possession on a national seashore, which after all is only a misdemeanor and $125 fine, and other people are prosecuted for it all the time in his very court. But the U.S. Attorney's Office insisted on dropping the charges, to keep Sullivan's record clean so his immigration can go through.

Are bloggers getting VIP treatment at the federal level now? The magistrate hearing the case, Robert Collings, certainly thought Sullivan was:

Collings says he expressed his concern that "a dismissal would result in persons in similar situations being treated unequally before the law. … persons charged with the same offense on the Cape Cod National Seashore were routinely given violation notices, and if they did not agree to [pay the fine] were prosecuted by the United States Attorney … there was no apparent reason for treating Mr. Sullivan differently from other persons charged with the same offense."

In his day, newspaper columnist and radio host Walter Winchell enjoyed a close, favor-trading relationship with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; according to Neal Gabler's biography of Winchell, this mainly involved the funneling of confidential information. But his special relationship with the Justice Department eventually became public knowledge and helped turn him, in the public eye, from the scrappy underdog into a dangerous media baron. If anything, the blogosphere has bred an even stronger distaste for special treatment than the tabloids did; which is why Sullivan, heretofore tight-lipped about the incident, will probably issue some sort of plausible explanation for the whole affair posthaste. Or at least attempt to.

UPDATE: Here is Collings' "memorandum and order" on the matter, which at 12 pages is quite concise by the standards of federal legal documents. We daresay it's almost eloquent! Docs via The Docket.

(Pic: Sullivan by Trey Ratcliff)

McCaughey's schtick, as described by James Fallows, is to pose as a disinterested, objective researcher who is just shocked and dismayed to find something insane and evil in a piece of legislation supported by a Democratic president.

And then she sits down to write a very serious and nonpartisan and concerned piece of analysis of this evil thing in the legislation that she made up. And then some respectable outlet publishes her serious analysis. And then, within minutes, partisan Republican columnists, talk radio hosts, politicians, and operatives are disseminating talking points taken directly from that serious piece of entirely made-up bullshit analysis.

Her first stab at derailing this year's health care debate came with a Bloomberg column about fictitious health care rationing hidden in the stimulus bill.

In a July 24 column for the New York Post, McCaughey smeared Ezekiel Emanuel (the nice Emanuel brother) as a murderous "deadly doctor."

In a radio interview with Fred Thompson, McCaughey got more explicit, wholly inventing mandatory death panel sessions American seniors would have to face every five years.

And, thus, "death panels." From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit, probably.

Of course, she's been at this forever. In 1994, McCaughey worked for the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. And then she wrote a piece for The New Republic about how the Clinton health care plan would not allow people to buy health care coverage outside the government-run plan. This, obviously, was false. George Will picked up on it, adding nonsense about jail terms.

(Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 through 1996. In 1994, Sullivan was on a roll, publishing both the objectively racist pseudoscience of The Bell Curve and Betsy McCaughey's No Exit. This was all before Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass. Current editor Franklin Foer apologized for the McCaughey piece shortly after assuming his position. Sullivan never really has. McCaughey's story was really more the fault of owner/"editor-in-chief" Marty Peretz, of course, because he had a psychotic hatred of Bill Clinton.)

So. After that one lying story full of lies made her famous, Al D'Amato told George Pataki to make her Lietenant Governor of New York. She did not get along with Pataki, and she famously, weirdly, stood up for the entirety of Pataki's 1996 State of the State address. In 1997, Pataki dropped her from the ticket with a nasty public letter and she decided to become a Democrat in order to run against him. She ended up on the Liberal Party ticket, and lost, obviously, and then she moved to DC to work for the Hudson Institute, another right-wing think tank.

So she is a known liar and an elected Republican politician (her brief and bizarre stint as a vengeful Liberal party candidate aside), and here she is still forcing people to argue with chimerical fantasies instead of legitimate criticisms of progressive legislation.

We are hard pressed to come up any equivalent figure on "the left," who openly and intentionally lies in the service of her partisan arguments, and who continues to do so with relative impunity, in major publications, long after the lies are exposed.

Of course, he isn't writing for free. But he has, in the past!

And I don't think it is that terrible a thing if most journalists start earning less money. I wrote this blog daily for years for nothing because I love what I do. I've been really, really lucky to have landed at the Atlantic but the dirty secret is that I'd do this because I want to know more about the world and bring that information to as many people as possible, to advance those causes I believe are just and expose those lies that I think need exposing.

Hah. Andrew Sullivan had edited The New Republic for five years and had released two books by the time he started his little hobby blog, which he now does indeed get paid money to write. It is actually a lot easier to write for free or for not enough money to live on when you are already pretty comfortable! And for some crazy reason it is always those people who are already pretty comfortable who are just baffled by the idea of paying someone to produce content that someone else profits from!

Isn't that funny, how that works?

Scheduled demonstrations today, many in favor of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prime opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, have turned absolutely, completely bloody. Since there's so much to cover, we're just gonna do a point by point:

• A suicide bomber supposedly attacked the entrance to the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Some reports indicate that one person was killed, and two were injured, but BBC's Jon Leyne, in Tehran, thinks it's a lie put out by Iran's state media. If Leyne's right, they're reporting the event and inflating the numbers in order to enrage supporters of conservative Iranians who supported Khomeini. Khomeini was the Supreme Leader of Iran until his death in June of 1989.
  
  
• The current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a hard-line statement yesterday that there would be bloodshed if the protests in Iran continued. His exact quote: "The existence of extremism in a society means each extremist move fans another extremist move. If the political elite want to put the law under foot ... they are the ones responsible for the bloodshed, the violence and rioting." Excerpts from his speech are here.
  
  
• Moussavi supporters set fire to a building in Tehran used by supporters of Ahmadinejad.
  
  
• It's been reported - not Twittered, a distinction beginning to get really important in all of this - that Moussavi's supporters have been dispatched by water cannons, brute force via batons, tear gas, and in several instances, live rounds in Tehran. A BBC reporter has seen a black plume of smoke coming up from the center of the city.
  
  
• Moussavi has, in a letter to the Supreme Council that was re-posted to his website, demanded the election be annulled due to fraud on the part of Ahmadinejad and his supporters, and that the vote was rigged months in advance. The letter is here.
  
  
• The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan - who, again, has been ruthlessly compiling a lot of unfiltered information, including graphic video of murdered protesters bleeding out - has a report he culled from Twitter: helicopters in Iran are spraying a type of acid (yes, acid) at protesters. "Similar to what Mojahedeen used in '78-'82." He also just reported that the Canadian embassy is not accepting injured protesters while the Australian embassy is. Sullivan has turned his masthead green in support of the Iranian people.
  
  
• A ally of Moussavi notes that he was "ready for martyrdom" if it came to that. He's also called for a national strike if he's detained by Iranian authorities.
  
  
• Video supposedly from today. The Lede at the Times gives perspective on the sheer scale of protest support: "If it was shot today, given what we have seen of the severe security crackdown, it shows that the opposition movement has not yet been completely contained."The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
  
  
• One BBC correspondent reported thousands of police and witnessing a protester's shooting themselves. Another BBC correspondent reports: "The security men were deployed on every street corner, in long lines down the sides of the roads, and in all the main squares. The basijis wore riot helmets and carried big clubs. It was designed to intimidate, and while I was there, it was working. "
  
  
• Right now, there's an abundance of information coming in from all angles - Twitter reports, YouTube videos, foreign correspondents having trouble transmitting (almost every wire report now has some kind of disclaimer noting the difficulty in getting information out of Iran). The trend you're seeing as you're trying to get this stuff down on paper is a lack of filtering, an almost absolutely willingness to get the reports out first and the information in them sorted out later.

• It's going to be interesting to see if a few of the items above (mainly: the shrine bombing, the "martyrdom" statement) actually turn out to be completely true, as variations of them are appearing everywhere. It seems that guys like Andrew Sullivan are fancying themselves part of the battle - and they very much are - and are just trying to keep the lines of information open. We'll be keeping you up to speed as this stuff comes in.

  Image via Getty.

Boing Boing, the tech culture blog, went down today, and briefly thought it was under attack. BB blogger (and old Gawker Media hand) Joel Johnson tweeted that the site had been the victim of "cyberwar." The site had only hours earlier posted a "Cyberwar guide for Iran elections;" we asked Johnson via IM if he thought Iran was attacking Boing Boing:

Later, the real culprit emerged: It was Boing Boing's fault; the site had somehow posted every post ever to the front page, resulting in a 171MB index.html.

A similar drama unfurled yesterday on Andrew Sullivan's blog for The Atlantic. Sullivan, who has been blogging heavily about the situation in Iran, proclaimed he was under "digital attack," later clarified to be a denial of service attack. Then later, "it turns out our servers have just been overwhelmed... the tech staff has now ruled out a... attack."

(While Sullivan was under-credited for his tech problems, he was over-credited when Twitter reversed a decision to delay a planned outage, as Sullivan had urged. Though some observers said Sullivan was key to Twitter's reversal, it later emerged that the State Department liked played the crucial role in lobbying the microblogging service.)

If the Iranian regime does have the capacity to launch some sort of cyberattack, now may be the ideal time: There have been so many false alarms, it will take significantly longer to respond to the real thing.

His page at the Atlantic loads exceedingly slowly; a post alerting readers to the attack shows up on the Daily Dish RSS feed:

It looks like Sullivan's measurable traffic hasn't dropped off in the last hour, which one would expect in a denial-of-service attack.

TehranBureau, a site that has been aggregating reports from inside Iran, was shut down yesterday—allegedly by some sort of hacking:

In as close to chronological order as we can determine, here is a brief summary of the major events that have taken place over the last couple of days.

• Iranians went to the polls last week in large numbers (85% of registered voters turned out) to vote in that country's Presidential election, a sign usually favorable to candidates challenging incumbents.
  
  
• Reports begin to emerge that the high turnout has definitely worked in favor of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who many, including former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, believe will win in a landslide.
  
  
• Turnout is so great that Iranian election officials extend the voting deadline an additional three hours so that more citizens are allowed to cast their ballots.
  
  
• Within hours of the polls closing, the Iranian government announced that incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 62% of the vote, reported to be the largest margin of victory in the history of Iranian Presidential elections, while main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi received only 33% of the vote. Due to the large number of hand ballots cast in Iran, this declaration of victory seemed extremely odd, as it was expected to possibly take days for election officials to count all of the ballots.
  
  
• Already sensing a bubble of unrest on the verge of bursting, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei states that all Iranians, including the losing candidates of the presidential election, must support Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
  
  
• Ignoring the government's orders, thousands of Iranians, many of them covering their faces out of fear of being recognized and punished for rising up against the government, take to the streets in spontaneous protest.
  
  
• Reports emerge that cell phone calls and text-messaging have been blocked throughout Iran.
  
  
• Protests in the streets reach critical mass with thousands of average citizens doing battle with Iranian police and military outfitted in full riot gear.
  
  
• Iran's supreme leader issues a statement calling the election a "divine assessment."
  
  
• As the uprising begins to turn violent, with protesters throwing stones at Iranian officials and Iranian officials mercilessly beating hundreds of protesters, the New York Times' Bill Keller talks to an anonymous Iranian election official who says this: "They didn't rig the vote. They didn't even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."
  
  
• British journalist Lindsey Hilsum files this remarkable report from Tehran, in which she says she feels as though she "went to sleep in one country and woke up in another."
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Reports emerge that Mir Hossein Mousavi has been placed under house arrest by the Iranian government.
  
  
• A group of employees within the Iranian Interior Ministry, the government body overseeing the election, issue a statement saying that the results of the election "were not healthy."
  
  
• Protests in the streets of Iran go deep into the night, with thousands of others going up to their rooftops to engage in chants that ring through the cities.
  
  
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gives a speech in which he basically declares that everything is fine and events taking place in his country are no different than fans breaking out in fights after a soccer match.
  
  
• Tehran Bureau, an independent magazine doing exceptional reporting on events in Iran, reports that a massive protest march has been called by Mir Hossein Mousavi. It is later reported that protesters have called for a national work strike day on Tuesday.
  
  
• The BBC is ordered out of the country by the Iranian government. The BBC's John Simpson later reports that Iranian officials have attempted to arrest he and his crew, but each time that they do a mob of protesters surrounds them to protect them from Iranian forces.
  
  
  The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
  
  
  
  
• Reports emerge that Iranian college students were being brutally beaten and even shot dead by police as the government cracked down even harder on the protesters.
  
  
• Word gets out that Iranian forces have surrounded hospitals and are refusing to allow those injured in protest confrontations to seek treatment.
  
  
• Rumors spread on Twitter that today's protest march, which should be underway shortly, had been called off, but now appears to be back on again.
  
  
  It should be noted that exceptional reporting is being done on all of this by Andrew Sullivan, the Times' Lede blog, the BBC and the aforementioned Tehran Bureau.
  
  
  Photo of beaten Iranian student via Madyar Twitter

Bush torture memo-crafter John Yoo thinks that Obama's pick is nothing more than race-pandering for votes:

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from-Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor's record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

Matthew Yglesias likes Sotomayor's life story:

The argument is going to be out there that this isn't irrelevant, but I think to a normal person something that immediately leaps out about Sonia Sotomayor is that for someone who has all the usual qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice, she also has an unusual life story. She's been on the Appeals Court and before that the District Court, and she went to Yale Law School. But she also grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico.

It's the kind of story that makes you feel good about America and that still resonates as quintessentially American even though social mobility in the United States isn't quite what we like to think.

Politico's Jonathon Martin is sort of impressed at Obama's lack of risk in the Sotomayor pick:

In picking the candidate whose name surfaced within hours of first leak about Justice David Souter's retirement, Obama is also demonstrating the same profile in caution that has colored previous big decisions, such as who to name as his running mate.

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr called her "a liberal mirror image of Samuel Alito" - a child of the meritocracy with a resume that is big on credentials and low on controversy.

It's hard to be breathtaking and boring, but Obama somehow finds a way.

TNR's legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, one of Sotomayor's most vocal critics to date, is throwing her his tepid support while voicing displeasure over conservatives twisting his words to suit their cause:

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court—not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success. (Justice Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.) Now is the time to think more broadly about the role Justice Sotomayor is likely to play on the Supreme Court, and I look forward to doing that in the weeks ahead.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb sees Sotomayor as Obama's Harriet Myers:

She will, presumably, be a reliable liberal vote — nothing more, nothing less. Conservatives could have done much worse, but we're getting a liberal Harriet Miers instead of a liberal Alito. The real danger for conservatives is that Sotomayor becomes a Hispanic icon who's seen as being unfairly maligned by Republicans. That could further alienate Hispanics from the party and do lasting damage to the conservative revolution in ways that Sotomayor herself never could.

Marc Ambinder says that Obama is sending a clear message with the pick, one that he's been secretly enthused about:

Obama is sending a few different messages to a few different audiences. To liberals, the pick sells itself — a progressive superstar with fantastic academic credentials. Obama is addressing conservatives only because he wants to get his judge confirmed by a wide margin. To the rest of the country, the Sotomayor pick will embody Obama's judicial philosophy — going beyond theory to, as the talking points say, "ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts."

"I strive never to forget he real world consequences of my decisions," Sotomayor said today.

On Thursday, Obama was in a jaunty mood after he interviewed Sotomayor. A few groups of reporters were meeting in the West Wing with senior officials, and the President decided to stop by. He was an in expansive mood and riffed about the direction of the court. He did not tip his hand about the interview or the identity of his pick, and he asked that his musings be shared off the record. But it was clear that he was excited about how his pick would energize the court.

Rush Limbaugh predictably thinks that the Republicans need to "go to the mat" to fight the nomination, which he thinks proves once and for all that Obama is a "reverse racist":

She is the embodiment of the criticism of a judge or a justice who is all wrong for the highest court in the land. So of course the Republican Party should go to the mat on this because in the process of doing so, the American people will find out more about Barack Obama and who he really is; what he really believes in. And her choice, this choice helps to tell the real story of Barack Obama. This is a debate worth having...Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one.

Ann Althouse, who likes the pick, thinks that Republicans can learn a lot and in turn do some good for the future of their party by acting like mature adults through the upcoming confirmation process:

If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sang the pick's praises to CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

This is a powerful message, a powerful message of hope and opportunity through this appointment, just like there's a powerful message sent when an African-American is elected president or an African-American or a Hispanic is appointed as attorney general of the United States. It's a powerful message that a president listens to. And this president obviously did.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw takes issue with Sotomayor's lack of savings:

Some people with low incomes manage to scrimp and save (I always think of my grandmother), and some people with high incomes spend most everything they earn.

Apparently, the new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an example of the latter. The Washington Post reports that the 54-year-old Sotomayer has a $179,500 yearly salary but

On her financial disclosure report for 2007, she said her only financial holdings were a Citibank checking and savings account, worth $50,000 to $115,000 combined. During the previous four years, the money in the accounts at some points was listed as low as $30,000.

My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little.

Nate Silver takes Greg Mankiw to his statistical woodshed for his comments about Sotomayor's spending habits:

Mankiw's critique is a bizarre on several levels. For one thing, while a $179,000-per-year income is quite a lot wherever one lives, it doesn't go as far in New York City as in almost any other place. State taxes in New York are pretty high for the upper income brackets, and New York City also charges a city tax of 3.648%. As a single filer, Sotomayor's income tax burden, counting her federal nut, is probably something like $65,000.

In addition, New York City is an expensive place to live: particularly on the Island of Manhattan, and even more particularly in the West Village neighborhood where Sotomayor has her apartment. The average price of a two-bedroom rental apartment apartment in a doorman building in Greenwich Villiage is $5,396 per month, or about $65,000 per year. (Sotomayor, from what I can gather, in fact still rents her space). So considering her tax bill and the cost of her apartment, Sotomayor is down to "only" about $50,000 in disposable income per year. A single person can certainly live very well on that sort of income — even in Manhattan — but would probably not live what we'd ordinarily consider an extravagant lifestyle. It would be quite easy to spend a good chunk of that $50,000 on utilities, transport, groceries, and extra medical care (Sotomayor is diabetic); throw in a couple of nice meals out every month, tickets to a dozen Yankees games each year, and maybe a week's worth of vacation, and you're not going to have a whole heck of a lot left over. And of course, if one is generous with one's friends, or gives money to one's extended family or to charity, the money will go even faster. Sure, it's a pretty full life. But it's not likely that Sotomayor is downing bottles of Cristal and snorting coke in the bathroom every Friday at Hotel Gansevoort, or having four-martini lunches with the Sex and the City girls at Bryant Park.

We've been waiting to hear Andrew Sullivan's and Michelle Malkin's thoughts on Sotomayor, but haven't seen any updates from either of them yet. We'll update the post when we do.

What The Sonia Sotomayor Pick Says About Barack Obama [Politico]
Sotomayor: No Threat to the Revolution [Weekly Standard]
Empathy Triumphs Over Excellence [John Yoo]
Rush Limbaugh Advises Republicans to "Take It to the Mat" [Ann Althouse]
GOP Must Go to Mat on Sotomayor to Tell Real Story of Barack Obama [Rush Limbaugh]
Alberto Gonzales: Sotomayor Pick Gives Hope [CNN]
Obama's Pick, From the Start [Marc Ambinder/Atlantic]
The Sotomayor Nomination [TNR]
The Sotomayor Story [Matthew Yglesias]
SCOTUS Appointee is a Spender [Greg Mankiw]
Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offeneded by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination? [FiveThirtyEight]

Hirschorn, who famously predicted that the New York Times could go out of business in May is a former magazine editor who started Inside.com with Kurt Andersen before jumping over to the world of cable TV at VH1 and now his own production company Ish Entertainment. Sullivan is a former editor of The New Republic who now is proudly a blogger who makes his home at The Atlantic's web site.

For thirty minutes they talked about the dismal state of print, but mostly it was a good old-fashioned media schmoozefest and as a testament to their draw (or the paucity of media parties these days) the turnout was impressive, bringing out the likes of Sigourney Weaver, public radio heartthrob Ira Glass, New York editor Adam Moss, and glossy gossip queen Bonnie Fuller. These are the new things I learned last evening:

• Years ago, Hirschorn and Sullivan were roommates in D.C.
• Sullivan was once straight and had a girlfriend that Hirschorn thought was hot.
• Sullivan, who suffers from sleep apnea, did not sleep well the night before because he left his air mask back in D.C.
• ABC News in-house libertarian John Stossel was unaware of Andrew Sullivan's evangelism for testosterone therapy.
• Ira Glass hops from foot to foot when he wants to ask a question.
• Sigourney Weaver doesn't read Gawker.
• The media as we know it — i.e. relatively easy way for a large few to eke out a comfortable upperclass existence — is doomed.

Photo fun! See which media figures you can spot in the crowd!

Pics courtesy of The Atlantic

Emails, we get emails! Hearst is slashing costs by 20 percent in its supertroubled newspaper division. But the Web future's so bright, its reporters need to wear shades, one Hearsty tells us! "As the newspaper industry experiments with digital-only versions of the traditional newspaper, the piece gives a glimpse that investigative journalism and breaking stories are still indeed possible without the backup of a print product," writes Zoe Stagg, multimedia producer for Hearst digital bigwig Phil Bronstein, the former Mr. Sharon Stone. She's talking about an amazing scoop that the now online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer got about some soccer player named Fredy Montero (left) allegedly stalking some woman. Neato! Except that the scoop apparently consisted of getting a tip from the police. Here's an example of Seattlepi.com's amazing reporting: "Efforts to locate Montero's contact information were unsuccessful, and he could not be reached." Journalism has not been saved yet, dammit.

The Pacifica Foundation has changed the locks on New York radio station WBAI's transmitter, which has got the indy station's management all aflutter.

FishbowlNY reports that layoffs of six at Woman's Day included two pregnant staffers. What about the children?

New York Times editor Bill Keller tried to explain his NYT-is-bigger-cause-than-Darfur gaffe: "I think it's pretty obviously a reflection of my mild astonishment at the earnest fervor with which some people have suddenly embraced the cause of saving newspapers." He was being ironical, people! We think Keller should start his own blog so he can be this funny all the time.

Speaking of blogging, Andrew Sullivan writes 300-plus blog posts a week for The Atlantic. Then again, he has two assistants. Hunky, hairy, muscular assistants, we hope.

For some reason, the names of all the liberal attendees of Obama's little party have been leaked, but there are ten or so of the righties we still don't know about. But of all the available names, there are only two regular bloggers: Andrew Sullivan and Larry Kudlow. Background from the meeting has already made it into a Kudlow post, and then he gushed about it on TV. As for the liberal breakfast? Sullivan is NOT TALKING. Except for more gushing admiration.

I can say, however, the following: it's hard to express the relief I feel that this man will be the president soon. I realize that's what I feel above all else: relief.

I may disagree with him at times, and criticize him at times, but his great gift is showing that he does not expect people to change their convictions in order to find common areas of agreement.

What kind of blogger attends a breakfast with the president and reports nothing? Why attend? Do you think Obama wanted to be your BFF? We thought this was the kind of clubby old-media DC beltway elite gathering that bloggers were supposed to destroy what with their no rules citizen journalism and all that? No...?

It is worth noting that almost no one else on the list has a blog. Paul Krugman, occasional blogger, turned the invitation down. Because, to be fair, he should probably be invited to speak to the president-elect as a Nobel Prize-winning economist and not as a member of the chattering classes to be briefly appeased with personal attention and flattery.

So it looks like we'll have to wait days—days!—for columns in "newspapers" from Dionne, Dowd, Rich, and everyone else on the list, if any of them are going to reveal anything intersting. Sigh. Peggy Noonan, you're our only hope.