Saturday, June 23, 2012

What Mattered This Week?

New experimental format this time: I'm going to just turn it over to all of you, and save the time for Watergate. General reminder: the way I've thought about "what mattered" is extremely open-ended: it can matter for electoral politics or policy or anything else substantive. It can be something that happened this week, or something that happened in the past but was revealed this week. Anyway, I'm not sure whether this is a one-time thing or what...I've thought that this item was getting really stale, so maybe this will open it up a little.

So, what do you think? What mattered this week?

22 comments:

  1. Fed decision to surrender to the inflation menace, that certainly matters. I'm not a big monetary policy person and yeah a lot of this stuff is over my head but its important to remember that this is in many ways a moral choice. Bernake et al (with a few notable exceptions) have pretty much decided to quit when it comes to trying to fix our economy, they have chosen to give up on the idea that they can do anything more. Of course they could, but they are choosing not to and it says a lot about how so many of our elites are screwing things up. Personally it reminds me of the way conservative Victorian Americans viewed so many of the problems of their society, a sort of "ohh life is so hard, of course all these awful things happen, life is so hard" type of things. The big point to remember is that many of the problems they faced were solved. For example, it is now a big deal when people die from eating contaminated food (used to be seen as normal) and we don't have cholera epidemics any more but it used to be seen as normal and was sometimes argued as being a good thing (a huge epidemic in the 1840's in New York was even seen by some people as God "cleansing the earth" because of the large number of prostitutes and homeless people who died.) Anyway, the fed deciding to call it quits, its kinda dispiriting. Personally I just wish Paul Krugman could stand up on the table at these board meetings and give bluto's great speech from "Animal House".

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    1. The Fed has been trying to turn things around, but it’s doing exactly the same thing that got us into this mess -- attempting to spur consumer spending by inflating the dollar value of real estate and the stock market. Monetary expansion is invaluable for financing war and corporate greed, but not so much for producing real sustainable growth… yet it has somehow become the voodoo economics of the left.

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  2. Supreme court ruling limiting Union power to collect "emergency" dues. For two reasons: it further limits union power, and also because it gives more evidence that this Court is willing to take unprecedented steps (in this case striking down state laws that were not part of the hearings and therefore weren't allowed to be defended in a formal argument)possibly in order to further what might be called a far-right agenda.

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  3. Several 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, but not the ACA big one. Of these, I think the most important is Knox v. SEIU*, which does its little bit to cripple unions further by adding another roadblock to their fundraising abilities. As a liberal, my answer would be that shareholders of corporations have a parallel "right not to be compelled, without notice and the opportunity to object, to pay special assessments for political activities". Thus, we should be able to know by default Target's political donations and shareholders should have to make affirmative decisions to forego that money in order for CEOs and corporate boards to launder it to their favourite big business politicians.

    Sauce for the goose, as Romney says ...

    *This case also tips the conservatives' hand for the health care decision, since the headline interpretation is that first amendment freedoms protect individuals from being compelled into paying for services that would otherwise wither on the vines of free ridership.

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    1. Actually, as I have said before I tend to think that SCOTUS will strike down the ACA. However, I don't know that Knox per se is a good indicator. It is a First Amendment case, not a Commerce Clause case, so apples and oranges as has been pointed out over at Daily Beast. Also, Sotomayor and Ginsburgh issued a concurring opinion, making the vote to strike in this case 7-2, and revealing that the politics just doesn't map in a similar way to health care reform. Like I say, I think that the court is hostile to ACA, which is a pity and something that will eventually be regretted even by conservatives (if you think HCR is going away, just look at the recent polls, and if you think it will do anything but get more controversial and difficult over time, then you might want to by that bridge in New York). But not everything is related, at least not clearly or directly, and trying to work from one legal situation to another can be no more reliable than reading Tarot cards.

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  4. As a longtime reader Im also going to throw in what plain blogger leads with every week (at least for the past dozen or so weeks): Eurocrisis and Syria

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  5. While I'm sure some may not agree, to me it mattered that Andrew Sullivan echoed/effectively endorsed my Philosophy of History that I have been pushing for over 32 years now: every human being matters in the creation of History. (Andrew's exact quote, in his post of 6-21-12 at 1:19 pm titled "I Am Not Shy and I Will Visit with Anyone" was "Life matters. _Every_ life." italics in original)

    This will hasten the day when we have a science of History which believes in telling the story of every human being, for the profit and entertainment of the audience -- a goal which the technology of the 21st Century, if we can keep human civilization alive thought this Century, gives promise of fulfilling. This may also hasten the day when "Ron's Omelet of the Social Sciences," the teaching aid that helps us understand how each human being is busy creating, distributing and borrowing the behavior which makes the data of the human sciences, in every thought and action of our lives in every moment of the day, is eventually able to contribute to a more intelligent, dispassionate and productive popular discussion of the many social-science-related crises that will threaten our children's survival and well-being in this wonderful amazing human Century.

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  6. Fast and Furious is getting some traction in the press -- even Jon Stewart took it on:

    http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-june-21-2012/differentiate-your-party-s-assertion-of-executive-privilege-from-the-previous-administration-s

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    1. But how does it matter? GOPers see the Administration as corrupt and Dems see the House as corrupt, and actual swing voter (all dozen of them) are likely confused by the noise if they're listening at all.

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    2. I'm starting to get annoyed at the way some Republicans are describing it as if it were a program intended to supply arms to drug runners. Personally, I'm not so sure that a plan to follow the arms and see where they go was such a bad idea. Obviously, it was botched in implementation, and that deserves to be investigated, but I can understand why the White House would be reluctant to see the House GOP as the investigators. The DOJ Inspector General can do it (and, in fact, is doing it) and publish the results so that people can see that it was done properly.

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    3. Scott: How do you conduct a sting operation in a foreign country without that country’s knowledge or cooperation? I don’t think you can say it was simply a case of “botched implementation” when there was never any plan to follow the guns, much less recover them. The whole program was rotten from conception.

      Anon: I think you underestimate the potential of this scandal to hurt the President.

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    4. how does it hurt the President? like it hurts his feelings? it's just like everything else: the question for each individual voter is whether or not they support Obama. if you approve of Obama, you blame the GOP. If you don't, you blame Obama. I don't see how this changes anyone's mind on either side of the political spectrum.

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    5. Anon, it has the potential to hurt the President if the media continues to cover it. I agree that he hasn't taken any real damage yet, but the issue certainly gives his enemies something to work with.

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    6. Couves, if there was never a plan to follow the guns, then it was rotten from the conception. But that charge sounds a lot like spin. Let it be investigated by someone who doesn't have a political stake in the outcome.

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    7. Couves,
      I don't know what exactly to think on whether this could hurt the president electorally (i.e. sway genuinely undecided or weakly Democratic voters). It seems the right is currently mainly using it to gin up energy in their base of NRA voters. Obama might be more vulnerable if he weren't already generally considered strong on foreign policy/national security issues by the conventional wisdom/mainstream (of course, it's a different story among GOP-aligned media).

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    8. Scott, Mexican officials say they were never notified of fast and furious on any level. So who was going to conduct this sting operation? Does it matter to you that Mexico considers this to be a criminal act of gun running?

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  7. Well, since it just got played on the radio, I'm reminded that Metallica recorded Nothing Else Matters some 22 years ago (man, I am old!) so, apparently nothing mattered this week, or any other week in the last 22 years.

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  8. What's actually going on at UVa? The reporting seems pretty muddled about why individuals have undertaken certain actions. Do any academics from UVa that read this blog care to share?

    Also Matt, +1.

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  9. The Greek election was hugely important. If the far left parties had won a majority, the Dow might be 1,000 points lower today.

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  10. Egypt elected a member of the Muslim Brotherhood as president, and the army allowed it to happen. Granted the army took precautions by dissolving the parliament and emptying the presidency of many of its powers, especially powers vis-a-vis the army, but it still happened. This seems to leave open potentially competing power centers and a whole host of resentments. Neither side appears to know what will happen next. It will be interesting to see what direction(s) this evolves in.

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