Our slideshow of the protests today in Iran -- a mix of newswire photos and amateurs on the ground photographing the protests as they unfolded.

I had seen unconfirmed reports that former Iranian President Rafsanjani had resigned from the Expediency Discernment Council but not the Assembly of Experts. But al Arabiya says he's actually resigned from both, as a protest to the election ...

Moreover, in a protest against election results Iran's Hashemi Rafsanjani resigned from his posts as the chairman of the Assembly of Experts and as head of the Expediency Discernment Council, the two most influential institutions in the country.

Iranian authorities have also reportedly asked foreign reporters to leave the country -- always a good sign.

Laura Secor, who's done a great deal of reporting on Iran, has a piece up on The New Yorker's website. And she has little doubt the election was stolen.

Actually, make that no doubt ...

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind.

After spending most of the day with my family I've plugged back into the evolving news out of Iran. And amidst my efforts to sift through the blizzard of information and rumor to get some sense of what is happening, it's hard to miss the two very different storylines, not based simply on different facts but on very different interpretations that make sense of them. Many of the links I've posted over the last couple hours are taking it as basically a given that a massive fraud took place -- enough to put Ahmadinejad's 'victory' fundamentally in doubt.

Operating on these assumptions, Gary Sick writes: "If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history." Sick argues that while Iran's revolutionary elite have placed severe constraints on who could run in the republic's elections and often stymied the reforms of reformers like former President Khatami, they had not until yesterday felt compelled to outright steal an election.

At the same time you have this current lead story in Newsweek by Christopher Dickey. Dickey's covered the Middle East for Newsweek for many years. His reporting has always struck me as more like the coverage of the Middle East you read in the European press -- not ideologically left, but certainly contrary to the dominant tone of reporting on the Middle East you find in the American press.

Dickey starts from the very different assumption that what happened here was simply that the Western press got wildly ahead of itself by assuming the more educated and cosmopolitan voters in Tehran and other big cities represented the whole country. In the event, what we might call Iran's 'silent majority', conservative rural voters and the working classes of the cities, turned out in massive numbers for Ahmadinejad. "It appears that the working classes and the rural poor--the people who do not much look or act or talk like us--voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them," he writes. "And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls."

I do not say this having a clear position on which underlying set of facts is more credible, though, as I noted before, I put a lot of stock in Juan Cole's analyses of questions like this. And he seems to think the regional breakdowns of the election data are simply not credible.

But going forward I have to imagine that either new facts or simply the momentum of one or other of the narratives will take hold and be the defining one in countries outside Iran. I'm eager to see which one it is.

Iran expert Gary Sick has a new post up taking stock of what's happened over the last 48 hours and what decisions confront the key players in the drama. I won't try to summarize it. But in his reconstruction of events he does say (what I'd heard earlier but not in a way that seemed reliable) that the Mousavi campaign was apparently notified by election officials that they had won only to see Interior Ministry officials announce an Ahmadinejad victory just a short time later.

Spencer Ackerman explains why it's probably a good idea that the White House is maintaining a very low key stance on the events in Iran.

For those of us with little deep knowledge of Iranian politics or culture, it's pretty difficult to come to any independent analysis supporting the proposition that the election was stolen. We can go with -- Ahmadinejad bad guy, Mousavi good guy, and with all those rallies and excitement, how could Mousavi have lost? But clearly we need some more searching analysis to sustain the claim that the thing was rigged.

And Juan Cole seems to provide it here.

According to Cole, many of the election results -- not so much looking at the national totals, but who won and by how much in certain provinces and regions -- simply are not credible. Cole even puts together some informed conjecture on how the theft went down. This is absolutely must-read stuff as, I suspect, will be many of his posts over the coming days.

Sonia Sotomayor doing well so far at a key part of the confirmation process: Schmoozing with Senators. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ...

An outspoken anti-immigration activist from Everett has been arrested in Arizona in connection to a deadly home invasion robbery.

Shawna Forde, the executive director of the Minutemen American Defense, is one of three accused in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Raul Flores and his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, at their home in Arivaca, Ariz., a town 10 miles north of the Mexican border.

Two others - 34-year-old Jason Bush and 42-year-old Albert Gaxiola - were arrested. All three have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault.

According to the Pima County Sheriff's Office, two men and a woman posing as police officers forced their way into the Flores ' home in the middle of the night on May 30.

Late Update: TPM Reader CE notes that the MAD website has a post up categorically denouncing the actions of the killers, one of the whom is allegedly the executive director of the organization and pledging fealty to the rule of the law and humanity in general. But I guess it's a tad belied by headlines down the page like this one: "Subhuman Mexicans (God's Children?) Prey on Countrymen." With sentiments like that, who could have imagined things could escalate to violence, right?

Later Right Wing Terror Update: TPM Reader JW notes that this article in the Arizona Republic identifies one of the three accused murderers is Jason Eugene Bush, who goes by the nickname "gunny". And a recent post on the group's website announced his appointment as the group's 'operations director' ...

We are honored to have Gunny aboard. He served 6 tours over seas, where he has several medals. He received a Purple heart, Silver and Bronze star, Combat Infantry Badge and a Presidential citation for his actions in the Special Forces. He will be in charge of all operations along the Southern Border, assisting in command decisions, Recon and Tactical training. Gunny will be permanently located at MAD'S new 40 acre Base Camp, located somewhere on the Southern Border.

The man killed in the home invasion was a suspected drug dealer. And police say the invaders' plan was to kill the entire family and steal money and drugs which would later be sold for cash. The Arizona Republic has some more detail on MAD's connection with the better-known (I can't quite manage to call them 'mainstream') Minutemen groups ...

Forde is executive director of Minutemen American Defense, a border watch group that claims to secure the U.S. Border from human and drug trafficking, according to its Web site.

The Minutemen American Defense group is not associated with the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, said Al Garza, vice president of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps.

Forde was a leader with the Civil Defense Corps a few years ago but was dismissed after a few months because of leadership issues, he said.

Yesterday afternoon Zack Roth wrote up our initial run-down on President Obama's firing of the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service (which runs Americorps). Now Jake Tapper has some more background on the tick tock of how the firing went down, with the IG's initial refusal to resign.

The way this account reads there was some real urgency in canning the guy, though perhaps it was simply that they gave him a courtesy opportunity to resign rather than be fired, which is what eventually happened. On the other hand, it seems like pretty much everyone who came in contact with the guy, Republican and Democrat, thought he was out of control and probably should be fired.

An article in the Guardian suggests the boomlet belief that Mousavi had a chance of winning was just a mirage in the minds of western reporters who were spending their time in Tehran, particularly the wealthier and more educated neighborhoods, and had little sense of the wellsprings of piety and rural and working class resentment that fueled Ahmadinejad's reelection. Not sure that's the right take or not. There are certainly abundant claims of fraud from the opposition today. But it's a counterpoint that is at least worth a good read and probably contains at least some real measure of truth.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mousavi seems to be digging in, insisting Ahmadinejad won through fraud, and calling on his supporters to resist.

Yesterday in 100 Seconds: Conflicting Reports

There was news overnight that President Obama fired the IG of the Corporation for National and Community Service after he'd been skirmishing with an Obama ally, former NBA star and now Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson. That raised the possibility of political funny business. So we had TPMmuckraker's Zack Roth give it a close look. And here's our initial run-down on what he found.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Earlier we noted reports that election officials were calling a lopsided win for Ahmadinejad. But that's now less clear. Apparently what election officials said, in a hastily called press conference following Mr. Mousavi's press conference (in which he himself claimed victory), was that 19% of the vote had been counted and that President Ahmadinejad was up by roughly 69%.

Obviously that's very different from calling the whole election by that margin. What's more, there's some suggestion these votes are coming disproportionately from rural areas, where Ahmadinejad claims his strongest support.

It's not clear to me, candidly, whether the initial reports were incorrect, unclear or whether we misunderstood what we were hearing. But we'll keep you up to date on the very latest.

I want to emphasize again that we're dealing with early, scattered and to an extent contradictory reports. But what's come into focus in the last half hour suggests this election could escalate into something pretty messy. For a few hours both sides have been claiming victory with 60% or so of the vote. But campaigns often make these sorts of claims. And the polls were still not closed.

But now the official state news agency has called the election or perhaps better to say 'reported' that Ahmadinejad has won. al Arabiya has the state news agency calling it for Ahmadinejad with a somewhat improbable 75% majority (ed.note: latter reports suggest the government claim is of a 69% win). That's not quote the 'state' calling it for the incumbent. But it sounds like that's where we're headed.

At the same time, Mr. Mousavi just held a press conference in which he said that he's the "definite winner" and by a substantial margin.

So like I said, this ride could get pretty bumpy.

Late Update: We're trying to piece together the details here. But the latest seems to be that election officials are calling the election for Ahmadinejad with a bit over 69% of the vote. Perhaps not a huge distinction from the official state news agency. But a significant difference, I think.

This should all be taken with a big grain of salt at this point because the reporting is very chaotic and hard to confirm. But we're starting to get some early reports suggesting that Mousavi may have had a very strong showing today. CNN's Octavia Nasr picks up al Arabiya reporting that former President Khatami congratulating him for "winning the election," though who knows whether that, if true, tells us the outcome or is mere theater in the context of a close race.

We'll keep watching closely in this thread and see what more concrete we can find.

Late Update: There are unconfirmed but multiple reports that Mousavi is about to hold a news conference on the election. This seems like a classic 'fog of war' situation in which you have a chaotic situation, many contradictory reports and an added level of confusion tied to information bleeding across the language barrier in real time.

Later Update: CNN and Fox are now both reporting that the official state news agency is reporting a win for Ahmadinejad, which could mean we're in for a bumpy ride since the Mousavi himself just announced that he believes he won.

In a real shocker, Pat Buchanan says he prefers the "old bigotry" against blacks over today's affirmative action because "at least it was honest."

Somehow this doesn't really shatter my expectations of the man ...

Images from today's voting in Iran.