General consensus is that Moussavi is as bad a thug but as A-jad but he’s a thug who is riding the wake of an important movement straight from the people.  Michael Totten said today (and I agree) that this could potentially be the biggest historical event for regime change since the Berlin wall came down.

There have been terrabyte gobs of information spent on this subject and you may have missed a thing or two.  Here’s a quick rundown of the best of from the last 72 hours.

• Boston Globe brings up the most striking (and shocking) photos from the clash in Iran
• BBC has another set here.
• Juan Cole’s initial assessment of fraud still stands
• 538 breaks down the local election numbers and shows fraud, fraud, fraud
• These are some of the most Retweeted YouTubes mostly showing violence, more violence, yet more violence, and crowds
• Check out Jim Sciutto from ABC, one of the few MSM on the scene
• This video shows a crowd of people taking on the secret police
• Ben Domenech makes some excellent points here on Saturday
• Tehran Bureau has some great updates on their website and Twitter
• Entertaining video detailing why the election was fraudulent
• Here’s a crazy pic on the plainclothes thugs
• After much dispute as to whether the Monday rally was on or not this video surfaced showing thousands of protesters
• Some excellent raw footage of the rally and the threats here

The twitter hashtag #iranelection has been clocking thousands of tweets per hour.  Here’s what you may have missed:

• Twitter has been the medium of choice mostly because Internet connections are so slow and unreliable.  (2kbps) which is just enough to get a 140 tweet off
• @ev, founder of Twitter, has been validating the authenticity of twitterers within Iran himself
• Blogs have posted a list of twitterers and aggregate feeds to help keep people abreast
• The govt has been shutting down Internet connections fast.  Folks across the world are providing ssh tunnels and proxy servers for Iranians to use.
• Twitter has been the seedbed of some mischief as well giving out websites for people to take down the Khomeni, A-jad, and news media sites
• There are about a dozen reliable twitterers out of Tehran right now giving on the ground information.  Some of it reliable, some of it questionable all of it intense and engaging
• The twitpics have been coming fast and furious.
• Twitter just changed a scheduled server outage to accomadate the Iranian Tweeters

Stay tuned for more

Update: Andrew Sullivan breaks down the graph further.  Not solid proof of fraud but still brings up questions.

Recall a few years ago how documents damning George W. Bush as a lazy do-nothing National Guardsmen turned out to be all out fakes created in Microsoft Word?  Did Dan Rather make his way to Tehran to certify the latest election results?

The Tehran Buereu (a self-declared independent news source) has posted an interesting graph showing that the election results between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are in an almost perfect plot line across all points at which results were given.

In short, somebody in the election bureau used an equation early on in the day and seems to have applied the same ratio at other intervals on up to the final result.

Here’s the graphic which they post here:

They note:

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own. For example, in the present elections, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri and speaks Turkish. The Azeries make up 1/4 of all the eligible voters in Iran and in his trips to Azerbaijan province, where most of the Azeri population lives, Mr. Mousavi had been greeted by huge rallies in support of his campaign. Likewise, Mr. Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, is a Lor. But according to the data released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, in both cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad has far outdone both candidates in their own provinces of birth and among their own ethnic populations.

Juan Cole makes some excellent points here.

from: http://chuckdevore.com/blog.asp?artid=59

From the diaries by Erick.

view a slide show of this weekend’s RPV convention here

Will Virginia field the first wave of comebacks for the GOP this coming November or will the momentum of Obama-mania continue unabated through 2009 and on into the next federal elections? Saturday’s convention in Richmond for the Republican Party of Virginia holds some interesting lessons for us all.

At the best attended convention in nearly 15 years, Republicans gathered at the Richmond Coliseum to crown their next set of candidates for the upcoming 2009 elections. (Virginia is one of the few states to hold off-year elections for state level offices.) All politics is local as they say, so what follows is a series of lessons learned from the debates leading up to the convention and the final results. Glean from it what you will:

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New web ad from the Chuck DeVore campaign (more details here):

MESSAGE FROM CHUCK DEVORE:

I’ve opposed all the mega-billion dollar bailouts – they reward failure and bad decisions and leave us and our children to pay the trillion dollars in new debt. And, if you think this out of control spending is bad now with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barbara Boxer in Congress and President Bush in the White House, just wait until Obama is President and even more liberal Democrats run Congress.

Now we hear about the new Congressional visitor center, the one Harry Reid said would allow his colleagues to no longer have to “smell the tourists” – the one that cost $621 million, was over three years late and was $350 million over budget – can Washington do anything right? Of course, Barbara Boxer supported it.

Is it any wonder that the Government Accountability Office said December 2, in its initial report about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, that loopholes and lack of oversight put our money at “heightened risk” of being wasted by bankers who, no doubt, will still get their big bonuses with our money. Of course, Barbara Boxer supported this too.

Lastly, the Big Three automakers are asking for money too, now up to $34 billion, up from $25 billion a few weeks ago – never mind that 61 percent of Americans wisely oppose this waste of their money – with 67 percent opposition here in the West. Of course, Barbara Boxer supports this bailout too.

Something smells in Washington – but we can do something about it.

Watch our web-ad and pass it along – let’s go viral with our displeasure with the stink in Washington!

Read more about Chuck here or at ChuckDeVore.com

Frank Schubert has been involved in over 30 ballot initiatives in his lifetime but he’s never experienced anything like Proposition 8. Yesterday, I was asked to be part of a blogger conference call with Schubert who heads up the Yes on 8 movement.

Bottom line: This race is almost over. Tensions are high. Expectations are tempered but the general feeling is that Proposition 8 will prevail.

Read the whole interview here

Congressional Quarterly came out late last week with a featured article on the race in Utah’s 2nd Congressional district and Bill Dew’s quest to unseat Democrat Jim Matheson:

In an interview with CQPolitics, Dew said he is undaunted about Matheson’s favored status in the race. The owner of a home construction company for more than 30 years, he says he has been through three recessions in his life and has awakened more than once not knowing how he would pay for things for his family and business.

Dew knows that this is an uphill climb but recent internal polling shows the Matheson within striking distance.

Here’s a recent Bill Dew ad taking Matheson to task:

VISIT BILLDEW.COM to help!

(full disclosure, I work as a consultant to the Bill Dew campaign)

Another hard hitting ad against Jim Matheson.

Be sure to visit http://www.billdew.com/ for more information.

Its hard to find a redder state than Utah. In 2004, Utahns voted 71% for President Bush. But there are always exceptions to the rule. Like most urban areas, Salt Lake City leans left, which is one of the major reasons why Democrat Jim Matheson has represented the 2nd Congressional District since 2000.

Democrat Matheson is the son of a former Governor of Utah and has done well to establish his name in the district. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Matheson’s previous GOP opponents have run terrible campaigns.

Enter Bill Dew, relative newcomer to politics, but backed by an experienced team of campaigners in an attempt to paint Utah in deeper shades of red. (Full disclosure I’m an advisor to the campaign myself)

However, reality hits hard when you realize that Dew is still down in the polls. But like Christmas in October, Jim Matheson has stepped in to give Bill Dew a gift.

Last week in St. George, Utah, Dew and Matheson squared off in a debate. Bill Dew did something no other challenger had done before: exposed Matheson’s votes in the open. Matheson was none too happy and accused Bill of lying. We had video rolling on the event and today the Dew campaign released the following web ad:

(WATCH THE VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP!)

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