As I said yesterday, the government of Iran may have done the US a favor, by completely borking their staged election. People in the thousands have taken to the streets.

Via Michael Trotten, who provides the videos below:

“Haaretz is now reporting that Mousavi has been arrested. Yesterday’s report turned out to be false, but maybe this one is accurate. Who knows? We’re in the fog of “war” here.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds like Baghdad Bob right about now: “It was a free and healthy election,” he said.

“Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, the real power in Iran, sounds even more like Baghdad Bob than Ahmadinejad. He said the “election” was “an artistic expression” of “the joy and excitement of a nation.” Good grief.”

And this video giving the huge size of the crowd.

Jailing Mousavi might just be “the shot heard round the world”. Indeed throughout history all government change has taken place when the people rise up and the people of Iran have been heating up to this point for some time. It’s now at the boiling point.

The question now with Iran shutting down the media and threatening to kick journalists out, it appears that things are past the point of no return.

This brings us to the point everyone is asking and that is why would the Guardian Council try to pull off such an obvious hoax and risk the civil unrest? After all Mousavi is not exactly a step up from Ahmadinejad, in fact who knows he could be worse. Michael Leeden gives some insight:

“Their candidate is the former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mousavi, an architect who designed some of the most oppressive features of the Islamic Republic when the Ayatollah Khomeini was the country’s Supreme Leader, and who has been absent from public life for twenty years. By all accounts he is an uninspiring figure, a boring speaker, and an ineffective debater (he was beaten badly in a televised debate with President Ahmadinezhad the other night). So what can account for the frenzy on his behalf?

For one thing, he is not Ahmadinezhad, for whom there is a lot of hatred. The current circus is taking place against a background of mounting repression, featuring public executions of many young people (some said to be homosexuals), mass arrests, summary closing of the few remaining quasi-independent publications, increased censorship of telephone and internet communications, and a lot of nasty action against young people who do not meet the strict dress code and decorum rules imposed by the theocratic dictatorship.

That so many people would openly defy such a regime is certainly significant, and it may well be that the reporters who see the current demonstrations as revolutionary, or at least insurrectionary, are quite right. I have long said that the Iranian people despise the regime, do not want an Islamic Republic, and wish to be part of the Western world, not part of a fanatical regime whose essence consists in supporting anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism, denying the Holocaust, and singing praises to martyrdom.”

That the people want change has been evident for a long time, the larger question is whether or not this will be the catalyst or completely shut down all efforts via even more brutal oppression from the regime.