Can't find a good link for it yet, but it looks like Mahmoud Imadinnerplate has been ousted as President of Iran in today's elections by moderate reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi. So far the only links I can find are from Arab news agencies, nothing on the American sites or the BBC yet. Anybody got any info on this? If true, good on Iran getting rid of that nutbar.
AP says that both are claiming victory. Even if he wins, though, we probably shouldn't be too optimistic ... here's what Time said ... good signs in blue, bad signs in red:
Yah, if Iran gets his Prime Ministership in the 80s then not much will change. Hopefully waht has been published about him is true and he has moderated some of his views over the last 20 years. Either way, baby steps in the right direction at a bare minimum.
Maybe. He used to be one of the supreme leaders advisors, so it might be a different dynamic with him in power.
Given a choice between an extreme religious demagogue who's batshit insane and an extreme religious demagogue who shows signs of being a competent pragmatist, I'm not sure which I'd rather have in charge in Iran. Which one would actually be more dangerous?
Lots of allegations of irregularities going on. This comfortable win for Ahmadinejad is a considerable difference from the tight contest predicted by polling. The Ayatollah says to accept the result, but there are all sorts of riots going on - that's a good sign IMO.
The NY Times is claiming Ahmadinejad won, based on an Iranian government announcement this morning. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/world/middleeast/14iran.html?_r=1&hp
An Iranian ex-pat posted this on another forum from Iranian TV. The top picture indicates Rezai has 633,048 votes at 09:47. The bottom picture indicates he has 587,913 votes at 13:53.
Very interesting, although if it's the result of vote rigging, you would think they'd have done a more competent job of it. I wonder if there's something else weird in those numbers, like they're projections instead of actual totals or something. Not that I think Ahmadinejad is above rigging an election, but I imagine he has people who can pull it off in a less obvious way.
Whoever decided to 'rig' the election sure was a fucking moron. Why the hell would you give Ahmadinejad over 2/3 of the vote, when polls had been indicating that the race would be MUCH closer than that?
I dunno...it seems to me that when your side gets CLOBBERED in an election--and that's what 65 to 35 is--you instincitively know it. You know it because the majority of people around you are on the other side and you become aware of their political opinions. If you think about it, with perhaps the two close Bush elections put aside, you could probably predict the outcome of the last few Presidential elections days beforehand. And those had margins of victory less than 10%. If you're mad and taking to the streets, that's probably some indication that your reality does not correspond to the results. In other words, you had at least some expectation of winning. And I don't believe you could get that with a 35% candidate in a two-way race. I certainly have no trouble imagining that Iran would rig elections, though I have no PROOF they've rigged this one. But the Iranian peoples' reaction indicates that there's a discrepancy between expectation and result...
