Saturday, December 4, 2010

What Mattered This Week

Not, I should think, the deficit commission.  I can see an argument for the DADT report; although it's not exactly a surprise.  Wikileaks?  Continuing trouble in Korea?  The jobs report?  Net neutrality?  I don't know -- what do you think mattered this week?

7 comments:

  1. President Obama announced a two year Federal pay freeze.

    Liberals applauded the move, since it's apparent that middle class government employees should bear a significant part of the burden of adjustment as we deal with the ongoing weakness in the economy. Conservatives, and particularly Republicans in Congress, also responded positively, indicating that the President's action substantially increased the chances that bipartisan deals could be worked out during the lame duck Congress, and that the next Congress would work cooperatively with the Administration on the difficult problems facing the country.

    /snark

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  2. The jobless and homeless----our government needs to "focus like a laser on these issues," and yet it appears that those in positions of power do not really care about the wretched or want to do anything to help ordinary people. For Congress to allow unemployment benefits to expire is truly despicable

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  3. I won't go so far as to claim this "mattered," but one thing I "noticed" was that this week's round of Wikileaks spillage was met with more criticism from liberal commentators. The previous docu-dumps on Afghanistan and Iraq gave Julian Assange the noble image of an anti-war protester unveiling the truth. The only purpose of this week's dump of State department cables seemed to be to torpedo U.S. diplomacy efforts, which in some ways would work counter to a pacifist agenda. On the left, I felt Assange's image was denigrated somewhat from "noble truthseeker" to "guy desperate for attention."

    Of course, on the right, they're all posturing and calling him a terrorist, which is nonsense. But I do think what was impressive about Wikileaks this week was that the left wasn't all that impressed.

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  4. Brazil recognized 'the state of Palestine based on borders at the time of Israel's 1967 conquest of the West Bank . . . in response to a request made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.'

    Is Abbas really soliciting recognitions for a state the Palestinians themselves have yet to proclaim?

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  5. Oops.

    'More than 100 countries, including almost all the African and Arab ones, had recognized it . . .'

    So it's not a new development, I'm just shockingly under-informed.

    I guess the pro-Israel crowd think it's better to ignore this than call attention to it.

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  6. Homeland Security shutting down internet sites; most were for knock-off or copy sales.

    But some seem to have been non-sale hip-hop promotional sites. that's disturbing, if true.

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  7. What mattered was Pelosi and House Dems voting on an extension of only the middle class tax cuts. Now if only the Senate and President would take the ball and run with it....

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