Iran

Today's events seem like a potential turning point: Khamenei gave his word that the election was not rigged. My take on it, is that this is a clear sign of him trying to cling on to power. He could have very well have stayed above the fray and potentially support Moussavi, if indeed it turns out that the election was rigged. Moussavi is not such a big threat to the regime since he too is basically from the inner circle. Yet Khamenei decided not to take a chance and instead compromised his integrity by giving his word. This will likely change the perception of hm being something special and people now will just say, well he is like all other dictators and simply wants to hang on to power. He gave up his moral leadership today and with it the respect of half of the population. It's not clear to me how this will continue, but Khamenei will never again be perceived in the same way as before today.

About the election: it seems to me that it should be quite easy to prove by purely statistical means that the election was rigged (if it was indeed). All elections have typical standard deviations and by simply looking at correlations and standard deviations from votes, which obey some standard distribution it should be very easy to state things like "with 95% confidence this is not a process corresponding to a typical election". This would require looking at all the results by geography and time and to see if indeed results obey simple statistics (like it should in real elections) or rather have strong correlations, which cannot come from independent individuals (or individual clusters of individuals). I hope someone will look at that...or has.