Word: backrooms
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...would be a bitter pill for the Supreme Leader, dealing a body blow to his efforts to install Ahmadinejad and mocking his authority by forcing him to reverse himself. Whatever its outcome, this crisis has badly damaged Khamenei's credibility within the regime, heralding the onset of a bitter backroom struggle in the coming years to choose his successor. As to whether he'll sound the retreat on the election, however, his own preference and the likely tooth-and-nail resistance to any reversal from Ahmadinejad and the security establishment that backs him mean that Khamenei may be more likely...
Political scientists in Iran are skeptical that Rafsanjani would make a move to oust Khamenei. But there is intense internal maneuvering going on right now in the hallways of power, invisible to the massive demonstrations in the streets of Iran's big cities, which in turn feed the backroom dealings. For while it is still unlikely that Rafsanjani will make the unprecedented move to remove the Supreme Leader, the more chaotic Iran gets, the more it allows Rafsanjani to find some lever to pull or to do something dramatic. It is in Khamenei's interest, then, to cool down...
...Ironically, though, these backhanded techniques are also a testament to how far democracy has come in Lebanon. In order to influence the election result, Saudi Arabia has had to directly address the citizens of Lebanon. In earlier decades, just a few big backroom deals behind closed doors might have done...
...only a joke. In mid-February, during backroom negotiations over the economic-stimulus package, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson tried to cut the tension. He turned to the three Republicans in the room and said, "If only you'd consider switching sides, then we'd all be on the same team and this would be a lot easier." Looking back on that moment, Democrat Nelson recalls something that seems far more telling now than it did at the time: Arlen Specter was the only one of them who didn't laugh...
Critics say Vargas made a backroom deal with Chávez's government to handle some of the revolution's murkier financial transactions, such as more than $1 billion in Argentine bond swaps, or the handling of hard currency between Venezuela's official exchange rate of about 2.15 bolivares to the U.S. dollar and the quasi-legal black-market rate of almost six to the dollar. Vargas has long denied the accusation, insisting he's not part of the "boli-bourgeoisie" (named for Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution) that got rich cozying up to Chávez while...