Sam Spade's San Francisco

Nico Pitney (that's Nico in the photo) blogs for the Huffington Post. He has been live-blogging most of the day and night (and doing a Pulitzer-quality job) covering the second-by-second protest action on the streets of Tehran and throughout Iran.

The following just came in and it is important material.

By the way, if Nico's not blogging when you go to the blog, remember, this is one guy doing all this. He needs a few breaks now and then.

News of the Mourning rallies, together with Grand Ayatollah Montazeri's letter to the Iranian people, may be the start of something big. Is a revolution coming? Is this the start?

Here's Nico's post:

1:28 AM ET -- The mourning rally. Thursday is gearing up to be a hugely significant day for the Green Uprising. Reza Aslan appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show tonight, and laid out the importance of what is going to happen:

What's really fascinating about what's happening right now in 2009 is that it looks a lot like what was happening in 1979. And there's a very simple reason for that. The same people are in charge -- I mean, Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Khatami, Medhi Karroubi, the other reformist candidate -- these were all the original revolutionaries who brought down the Shah to begin with, so they know how to do this right.

And so what you're going to see tomorrow is something that was pulled exactly out of the playbook of 1979, which is that you have these massive mourning rallies, where you mourn the deaths of those who were martyred in the cause of freedom. And these things tend to get a little bit out of control, they often result in even more violence by the security forces and even more deaths, which then requires another mourning rally which is even larger, which then requires more violence from the government, and this just becomes an ongoing snowball that can't be stopped.

That's how the Shah was removed from power, was these mourning ceremonies. And so Mousavi very smartly calling for an official -- not a rally -- but an official day of mourning tomorrow. I think we're going to see crowds that we haven't even begun to see yet, and then follow that, on Friday, which is sort of the Muslim sabbath, the day of prayer, which is a traditionally a day of gathering anyway. This is just beginning, Rachel, this is just the beginning.

Go to Nico's blog at Huffington Post

And if you are not a Rachel Maddow follower, well, you should be. You can watch her interview with Dr. Reza Aslan through video on demand.

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