Sunday, October 9, 2011

What Mattered This Week?

And now a late edition of what mattered this week...

Well, the jobs reports are always important, so I'll start with that: good enough to prevent panic and despair, but otherwise more of the same, which is certainly not what one should be calling good news. The various developments in Europe continue to matter.

I should note, I suppose, that some judges were confirmed by the Senate this week. Progress! As with the jobs numbers, not exactly good news, though, given that it pretty much just catches up for a lousy September.

I'm not sure any of the maneuvering around the jobs bill really amounted to much. Or the China bill, for that matter.

Oh, we had Chris Christie not running...I don't know how to count that, since I had previously assumed he wasn't running. The big Sarah Palin decision, I think, did matter -- she would have been disruptive had she entered the primaries and caucuses, and that at least is done now. I'm not sure that anything else in WH 2012 had any long-term consequences.

Syria seemed to lead the foreign news...What else I should include there?

That's it for me. What do you think mattered this week?

10 comments:

  1. I wonder if "Sarah Palin the non-candidate" will still be a disruptive presence?

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  2. The Tigers beat the Yankees.

    Oh some piddling little minor stuff might be down on the list somewhere, like half of Europe's banks and countries got downgraded. And there may have been a tsunami or 2 someplace.

    But in the main, the only thing that mattered this week is THE TIGERS BEAT THE YANKEES!!!

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  3. ...but politically/electorally, I'd say Christie and Palin don't enter into it, as Mr. Bernstein mentions, as they were never gonna get the nomination.

    But Cain is now recognizable as rising in the polls, and that makes him the story in presidential politics. Now we test and see whether the rule against insurgents still holds. It did with Dean, will it with Cain?

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  4. There was never any chance that Sarah Palin was going to run. Think about it. Republicans were practically begging for a conservative standard bearer. If she wanted to run, this was the best chance she will ever have. She played the media to attract attention to her brand, but she was never running.

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  5. Occupy Wall Street protestors began gathering union support and more media attention, including a nice editorial in today's NYT. Protests are also underway in many other cities, including DC.

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  6. Sorry for the second post, but if I'd found this before, I'd have added it to my previous comment on Occupy Wall St. protests.

    Mike Konczal's been analyzing the test on the 99% tumbler; you can (and should) read about it:
    http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/parsing-the-data-and-ideology-of-the-we-are-99-tumblr/

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  7. Yeah, I messed up on this one: I definitely meant to include OWS in the original post, and just forgot about it while writing. I'm not exactly sure how it matters, but this was the week that determined that it will matter, at least to a bunch of people who are going to be involved.

    Whether it will have any external effects, positive or negative -- it's still too soon to tell.

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  8. Unless you're into sports (not I), the next event in domestic politics that will matter will be either the super committee breaking up or their report on November something. Everything else is probably hot air. Christie and Palin just confirmed what the discerning already knew. OWS, maybe it's something, maybe just a fizzle.

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  9. I think the Ezra Klein summary of the economic predicament we are in and the politics that got us there will be a benchmark for not only future comprehensive pieces but for a case to be made that the Administration couldn't have done a whole lot better than they did.

    The ending completely of the chance of another GOP entrant and the odd rise of Herman Cain makes this week stand out as well.

    ReplyDelete

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