Trials of over 100 political activists underway in Tehran

The brutal regime in Iran is now trying political activists who protested the elections. No surprise, but nothing about this sounds fair or remotely just:

More than 100 political activists and protesters went on trial Saturday on charges of rioting and conspiring to topple the government in the turmoil surrounding Iran's presidential election, the semiofficial Fars news agency reported.

The defendants included several prominent politicians -- former members of parliament, first-generation revolutionaries and an ex-vice president -- who have been locked in a decades-long power struggle with Iran's hard-line clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Wearing gray prison uniforms and appearing thin after weeks in jail, some defendants gave lengthy confessions, saying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the disputed June 12 election free of fraud.

Only state media were allowed to attend the closed trial, which took place days before the date of Ahmadinejad's second inauguration.

That last line says it all. "Only state media were allowed to attend the closed trial." State media and closed trials. That's Iran. Read More......

Those wars aren't over

This week, Iraq and Afghanistan were all over the news. A military adviser said it's time to leave Iraq, Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, more troops died in July than in any month that was so far.

Robert Cray's "Twenty" is heartbreaking and powerful song that pays tribute to our soldiers fighting and dying in those wars:
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Hundreds of thousands at risk of losing unemployment benefits while US is still losing jobs. Congress has to fix it. Fast.

Very bad news for unemployed Americans who are running out of benefits:

Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.

Unemployment insurance is now a lifeline for nine million Americans, with payments averaging just over $300 per week, varying by state and work history. While many recipients find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, large numbers in the current recession have been unable to find work for a year or more.

Calls are rising for Congress to pass yet another extension this fall, possibly adding 13 more weeks of coverage in states with especially high unemployment. As of June, the national unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, reaching 15.2 percent in Michigan. Even if the recession begins to ease, economists say, jobs will remain scarce for some time to come.

Two things about this article: 1) Just today, Obama said that while things were looking better, there's still trouble on the jobs front, "when we receive our monthly job report next week, it is likely to show that we are continuing to lose far too many jobs in this country. As far as I’m concerned, we will not have a recovery as long as we keep losing jobs. And I won’t rest until every American who wants a job can find one." Okay. The president expects job losses to increase, which I would think also means people who are looking for jobs will have a hard time finding them.

2) We found out on Thursday night, "Cash for clunkers" was in trouble. By Friday afternoon, the U.S. House had passed a bill for more money. It shows Congress can act fast when it has to act fact.

This isn't about cars. It's about people being able to feed their kids. We're in a crisis. Obama and Congress need to act fast. Read More......

Update from John: He's out of the hospital, says "everything seems to have worked, so far,"

John typed this our earlier today when he got out of the hospital:

I really really really am not supposed to read for a week, so I'll probably be not looking at many emails. Im fine. Got home from the hospital this afternoon. My surgery went well, doctor said everything seems to be holding (the surgery puts a scleral buckle around my eyeball, then uses the frozen head of an instrument to freeze my retina to my eye - kind of creepy, and I understand from 3 diff friends that there's a youtube video out there of the process that I really don't want to see :-) Anyway, everything seems to have worked, so far, and I go for a check up in a week. I was pretty queasy last night, and had awful pain, but both have subsided, thank God. My eye is still swollen half shut, and will be for a week. But at least I can eat again, and the doc said I can go out, etc, just can't read for a week.

After writing that, he promised he won't read or write anymore. He can't read because he needs to avoid the back-and-forth movement of his eye.

As you can all imagine, he really, really, really wants to know what's going on in the world. I told him: stop talking, don't worry and rest. And, he said he would. Read More......

Catholics actually support same-sex marriage

Massive fail for the Catholic bishops.

Their parishioners support same-sex marriage according to research compiled by Mark Silk at the blog, SpiritualPolitics:

support for same-sex marriage is directly related to the proportion of Catholics in a given state.

More over at gay.AMERICAblog.com. But, I share Mark Silk's sentiment:

Way to go, bishops!

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Obama's weekly address: we're heading in the right direction, slowly, on the economy

Short version: We were on the edge, but the Obama administration has helped put the brake on the recession. As far as he's concerned, "we will not have a recovery as long as we keep losing jobs." But, we're finally heading in the right direction. It's going to take some time. Oh, and we need to fix health care and energy.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good Morning.

We have a treat today. Timothy Beauchamp, a.k.a. cowboyneok, has a new poem, Logos, that we're publishing here today. Tim also writes at the Pink Panthers Blog. Many of you know Tim from the comments. Here's Logos:

Logos

Timothy Beauchamp
March 05, 2009

I am here before
A thought
Relative to Me
I travel
Light years
Through between
Space and time
So relative
Folded both
Before existence
Patterns repeated
Stars and rain
Fall on planets
Gases glow
Expand Fade
Contract Burn
Ebb Flow
Where I go
I have
I do not fear
I have always
Death is rebirth
I have always been
I am solar winds
I have always been with
I am gravity
I am part of the whole
Of my universes
I smile
I weep
Through creation
Conscious relative
To being
When I pass
I will return
To Logos
You will know me
When I move
I am stardust
I am Logos

Thanks, Tim.

I'm heading out for a run in a bit. We're doing 10 miles today. I'm training for the Marine Corps Marathon again, but training is proceeding very slowly this year.

Should be a slow(ish) news weekend. But, every time I think that, something big happens.... Read More......

Cory Aquino died today

The former president of the Philippines died today. I remember the tumultuous days back in 1986 when she led a movement that turned out the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Those were in the early days of CNN, when wall-to-wall news coverage was still a relatively new phenomenon.

Aquino's ascendancy was actually a pretty stunning turn of events. Marcos had been firmly entrenched for decades (and long had the backing of the U.S. government.) But, the widow, whose husband, Ninoy, was killed in 1983 upon his return to the Philippines (by the military), changed the course of her country's history in 1986. Assassinating Ninoy Aquino was a major miscalculation by the Marcos government and marked the beginning of the end. For news junkies, this was very cool to watch unfold. It was just great to watch a dictator fall because of people power -- and, of course, we soon learned about the shoes of Imelda, which added another whole dimension to the story. Read More......

Markos: "There is a sizeable component of the Republican base that does not believe that Barack Obama is an American"

Markos has the research to back it up. As I mentioned earlier, DailyKos released polling on the birthers. It's what you'd expect: lots of Republicans (58%) and lots of Southerners (53%) are either confirmed birthers or aren't sure if Obama was born in the U.S.

Tonight, Markos did the Ed Schultz Show and Olbermann to discuss the polls and the birther phenomenon which was engulfed the GOP. Here's the Ed Show appearance:
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