By Staff
The Republicans are still lobbing metaphors against the wall to see if anything sticks.
Michael Steele, who probably should have stuck to playing bass with the Bangles, told a Young Republicans audience recently that when the Grand Old Party refers to itself as a "big tent" that "no one know what the hell it means."
Steele offered his own analogy of the GOP as a hat.
Some folks wear a hat facing front.
Others cock it to the side.
There are even those who aren't catchers, yet wear their caps backwards "because that's how they roll," according to Steele.
But "the strength of the party is in this … the fact that you're willing to put the damn thing on. The problem we've had as a party is too many of our friends, neighbors, colleagues are taking the hat off because we've decided we don't like the way they wear it. The GOP is not about how you wear the hat, but the fact that you want to wear the hat."
I never wear hats.
But I do check in on Fox to see what's getting Sean Hannity's goat.
It's the massive street marches in Iran. Hundreds of thousands of protesters garbed in green and black surged into the streets of Tehran.
It sent a powerful message that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has popular support in defiantly challenging Iran's ruling clerics.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was named the landslide winner in the June 12 election.
Night after night, Ahmadinejad foes climb to their rooftops and cry out, "Allahu akbar!" – "God is great!"
Mousavi borrowed the tactic of rooftop shouting from the Islamic Revolution. People power can challenge any system. It's how leaders of the revolution asked Iranians to show unity against the shah in 1979.
Street clashes defied orders from Iran's real leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who urged people to pursue their allegations of election fraud within the cleric-led system.
The whole world has been watching thanks to brave citizens with Twitter, despite a government clampdown on the Internet and cell phones.
Ahmadinejad early on again tried to divert attention by blaming the United States, the Great Satan, as he did earlier to deflect his mishandling of the economy.
President Obama played it smart. If he had waded into this turmoil forcefully, as Hannity and others demand, it would have "proved" this was orchestrated by America instead of an Iranian people's revolution.
The hardliners would have been able to slaughter their citizens by blaming and crushing an outside agitating force.
No amount of regime lies can rebottle this genie of a huge desire for change from a majority of Iranians inside Iran.
Young Iranians versed in the global Internet age are tired of extremist theocrats dictating how they conduct their lives.
Public anger unleashed by the disputed election confronts Iran's rulers with an unsettling challenge – a growing opposition movement with broad backing and an unintimidated leader who is one of their very own.
Mousavi was prime minister in the 1980s during Iran's war with Iraq, when Khamenei was president.
This hasn't fizzled like the last unrest led by students in 1999 because of the involvement of Iran's middle class, including women.
If the election had been free and fair, there would be no need to expel foreign news media and to shut down TV cameras.
Imagine the difference 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square if Tweets and photos had been dispatched when Chinese tanks arrived.
This dramatic revolution from inside Iran is an unforeseen major Middle East development for an oil-rich, borderline nuclear power.
Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown" went to No. 1 without Wal-Mart, the largest CD retailer in the country.
The big-box chain has a policy against stocking recordings with parental-advisory stickers.
"We want our fans to experience our albums the way we created them, and therefore we don't do edited versions," Billie Joe Armstrong said.
Green Day also didn't edit 2004's "American Idiot," which sold more than 5 million copies without Wal-Mart.