from AP

Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices.

How unfortunate that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman publicly urged Obama to take a stronger stand against the current illegitimate Iranian regime.  Even though they failed to influence Obama, whose language has so far focused on respecting human rights inside Iran during the uprising, they were able to create a small echo chamber among conservative voices on AM radio, FOX News, and elsewhere. Now, Ahmadinejad can rightly include America in his criticism of foreign powers supporting the demonstrators and in his rationale for banning foreign media organizations from inside Iran. Before last week, when McCain and Graham had not made their rounds on Sunday talk shows, Ahmadinejad could only cite Britain as the foreign power aligned with protestors, and it did not appear to do much good, as thousands of Iranians continued to march and protest and chant into the night.  Now, a week later, we see headlines like this: "Iran pledges 'crushing' response to US critiques."

Perhaps Obama, McCain, or any US politican's choice of words did not have much to do with yesterday's decision to suppress international journalists inside Iran, but it does show how fragile the system of reporting inside Iran is, and the level to which its desperate leaders are willing to manipulate words from foreign political officials in order to justify repression and injustice. 

I agree wholeheartedly with McCain on one thing: the election was clearly stolen.   But then again, any thinking person with access to any sort of online media could easily reach that conclusion.  What's wrong with John McCain--and incidentally what was wrong with George W. Bush--is his strategy for acting on these conclusions.  The Iranian uprising has taught us that a democratic revolution can occur independent of US influence.  And for those schooled in the sort of Reagan-era American ethnocentrism that inflated our importance in the world, this simple truth is too big a pill to swallow.   They want to believe that a revolution, especially one on the side of democracy and human rights, requires American influence.  Iraqis, on the whole, probably disagree.  Iranians definitely disagree.  If Iran was influenced at all by America, it was by what happens when religious fanatics hijack your country, wreck the economy, and undermine civil liberties, all the while evoking foreign threats as justification.