I’m not going to try to be a good source of news regarding the latest developments in Iran, so you should just look elsewhere for that. But I did find that Juan Cole’s roundup of the key pieces of evidence of vote stealing was very compelling and would be of interest to people. The inverted pyramid format of newspaper coverage does not, in my view, do a good job of laying this kind of thing out. And then this this chart, pretty clear evidence of a nationwide, centrally directed fraud as opposed to isolated irregularities.

Of course for all we know, Ahmadenijad really did have more votes. Or maybe nobody had a majority and there should have been a runoff. But it seems that early returns were looking bad and they pulled the trigger on a theft. I wonder how this all is playing in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and other places where they don’t even bother to steal the elections.

CC photo by Sarey

David Farenthold writes in the Washington Post about the idea of painting the roofs of houses white to increase surface albedo and help counterattack the impact of climate change. My understanding of the issue is that the science behind this is perfectly sound and that we should do it. The article is prompted by remarks made by Energy Secretary Stephen Chu who’s reached the same conclusion.

This is, of course, a genre of “geoengineering” sometimes suggested by the more clever brand of right-winger as an alternative to reducing carbon emissions. It seems to me that when thinking about the entire topic, it’s useful to distinguish between “strong” and “weak” geoengineering methods. The weak ones, the kinds we should definitely do, are things like changing the color of our roofs. There’s a related issue having to do with black surface parking lots and the desirability of making them a different color and offering more tree cover. This kind of thing is, to my mind, all good and worth doing as much of as possible.

At the same time, we should be leery of “strong” geoengineering concepts that have to do with blotting out the sun or changing the structure of clouds. Those kinds of things could have extremely dangerous unintended consequences and pose all sorts of problems.

Timothy Geithner (Treasury Photo)

Joe Nocera is not impressed with the Obama administration’s new program for changing compensation schemes at major financial institutions. And I think he’s right. What Timothy Geithner announced were some good ideas for improving corporate governance—arguably ideas that should be implemented across the board—but not ideas that speak to the unusual circumstances of financial institutions that are operating with implicit government guarantees and posing unique kinds of risks to the economy.

I thought back in March that Brad DeLong had spelled out the right idea:

The engineers of Silicon Valley startups are significantly smarter and work a lot harder than do the traders of Wall Street. Some of the engineers of Silicon Valley make fortunes: they are compensated with relatively low salaries and large restricted equity stakes in the startup businesses they work for, and so if the businesses do well they do very well indeed–in the long run, in the five to ten years it takes to assess whether the business is in fact going to be a viable and profitable going concern. And the engineers of Silicon Valley have every incentive to use all their brains and all their hours to make their firm viable and successful: they get their cash only at the end of the process. They don’t get big retention bonuses if they stick around until the end of a calendar year. They don’t get big payouts if they report huge profits on a mark-to-market basis.

One of the goals of regulatory reform should be to push Wall Street out of its current compensation equilibrium and more toward what they do in Silicon Valley.

Pat Garofalo rounds up some of the latest data points suggesting that rising oil prices are a major threat to economic recovery. People are constrained in their short-term ability to reduce gasoline consumption when faced with higher prices. Thus, a price spike reveals itself partially in short-term reductions in gas consumption, but largely in short-term reductions in other kinds of consumption. And that can hammer the economy.

This problem of the short-term probably only has a good solution in the long-term. If we want to get out of the trap of oil price shocks, we need to transform our economy and transportation system to less reliance on cheap oil. But there are also things we can do in the short term. The mass transit operating expensive provision added to the war supplemental is good, and congress could do more in this regard.

Via Faiz Shakir, it seems that Joe Lieberman appeared on Bloomberg and joined efforts by congressional hawks to bail Bibi Netanyahu out of his clash with the United States government by putting pressure on Barack Obama to back off his opposition to settlement expansion:

I thought the focus on the President’s direct call in that speech in Cairo for the Israelis to freeze all settlement activity — including the ‘natural growth‘ of settlements that everybody agrees are no longer settlements — …that was risky in the sense that it may lead listeners to believe that the main reason there is not an Arab-Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is the Israeli settlement policy.

I don’t think I would call the settlement freeze the “focus” of Obama’s Cairo speech, but he did focus on the need for both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict to live up to their commitments. Israel has previously promised to halt settlement activity, and while halting settlement activity is hardly the only barrier to peace, I think it’s clear enough that a cessation of Israeli land grabs is a necessary condition for peace.

Lieberman’s reference to “settlements that everybody agrees are no longer settlements” appears to refer to West Bank settlements built near the Green Line that more-or-less have the character of suburbs of Jerusalem. Israel hopes to annex most or all of these settlements in a final peace agreement. And perhaps some of them will be annexed. But the unilaterally decide that some settlements can and should be expanded because they’re “no longer settlements” is just a naked effort to prejudge the issue and circumvent the diplomatic process.

Meanwhile, if you look at a map you can see that while the built-up footprint of some of these “suburban” settlements is quite small, the municipal boundaries of the settlements are extremely expansion. Allowing for the “natural growth” of the settlements would entail cutting off the Arab portion of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, displacing Bedouin from surrounding desert areas, and in effect making any kind of peace involving shared access to Jerusalem impossible. In other words, though “natural growth” of some existing blocs may sound like a small thing in the scheme of things, it would in fact shortly doom any hopes of reaching a realistic negotiated settlement.

Before yesterday’s election in Iran, I don’t think anyone knew what was going to happen. But the overwhelming consensus was that it was going to be a close race and that heavy turnout would favor the challenger, Moussavi. Then we saw record turnout and Ahmadenijad proclaimed the winner by an enormous 62-37 margin, prompting protests of fraud.

Stealing an election strikes me as a dangerous game for the Iranian regime. The democracy-like portion of the Iranian political system is pretty locked down on the key issues, and the clerical establishment has survived the election of a reformist president in the past. Outright theft of an election seems to force moderate reformist to publicly call the underlying legitimacy of the system into question.