Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Dogs, Not Barking

Things not in the news, which makes them newsworthy.

1. I often stick news about American and coalition war casualties in these items; the news media constantly ignores fluctuations that I certainly think are pretty important. The news here dates back to last week. There were only 8 coalition troop deaths, and 3 US deaths, in Afghanistan  in January. That's the fewest for coalition deaths there since February 2008, and the fewest for US deaths since December 2008; in fact, it's the first time that  US number dropped below 10 since April 2009.

Also: that means it's the lowest combined Afghanistan plus Iraq totals for both coalition and US deaths since before the Iraq War began in March 2003. In other words, this makes the fewest coalition troop deaths from these wars since February 2003, and the fewest US troop deaths since December 2002.

Now, part of that is that fighting in Afghanistan is highly seasonal, with far fewer casualties in winter, but it's still down quite a bit from recent Januaries. Oh, and so far, zero coalition troop deaths in February; there were 24 last year.

2. Minimum wage.

3. I think it's enough of a thing to count: lesser cabinet appointments. The big one here is Commerce, vacant since June. The rest just opened up, but surely those who are leaving gave the president some notice, no?

4. Ummmm...I don't know what goes here any more. I certainly can't do Obama Administration gun control attempts. There's still no sign of a revival of the Fairness Doctrine, but alas it seems that conservatives have accepted that the Fairness Doctrine is really, truly dead. I suppose I could include wild fringe conspiracy theories of stuff the government is supposedly going to do any minute now and note they haven't happened, but it's not really any fun unless it's less on the fringe. Anyone have any ideas? I'll take lefty fringe, too, but only (on both sides) if there's some sign that elected officials and other regular party actors embrace it.

10 comments:

  1. Minimum wage will be an easy issue for 2016 Democratic Presidential hopefuls to embrace. It's liberal, it's popular, and it's due. It'll be almost ten years since the last increase come 2016. This is especially true of candidates that hail from blue states with higher-than-national minimum wages.

    Maybe a candidate will finally wise up and propose linking it to inflation.

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  2. Legitimate Obama scandals. Benghazi, Solyndra, and Fast and Furious are the best they can do.

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  3. Mitt Romney has fallen off of the face of the earth.

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    1. True enough, and it does tell us something...but then again, it's something everyone knew and predicted months, maybe years, ago. But fair enough.

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    2. Well Bob Dole was in a Super Bowl ad in 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbGx6kYRYj8

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    3. Not clicking, because I assume that's during the period when Dole took advantage of his retirement from politics to have a stint as America's Dirty Old Man.

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  4. I too find the slow pace of second-tier Cabinet nominations curious. Part of is that POTUS likely views the Cabinet as a cohesive whole and wants to maintain/increase gender and ethnic diversity.

    The administration may also want to get Hagel done and dusted before they move on.

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  5. Electoral vote rigging? It's been in the news a lot and major actors in the extended Democratic Party have been making a lot of noise about it, but nothing appears to have come close to passing yet (though possibly in part because of all the noise Democratic party actors and neutral media have been making). Obviously could still happen, though.

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    Replies
    1. Whoops, just re-read the premise and I apologize for posting something that clearly doesn't fit what you're looking for!

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  6. I see anti-research stuff popping up now and again - stories about how there aren't any geniuses anymore, how we should cut political/social science research, and my sister forwards me emails from her evangelical church calling science research awards "subsidies."

    Which is not a dog not barking, but I think somebody's trying to set the stage to cut DOE/NIH money big time.

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