Sunday, March 4, 2012

What Mattered This Week?

Two weeks in a row that I've fallen behind in my reading...I suspect there's more that I've missed than usual. But I don't want to hang on to this any longer, so here goes.

The situation with the Americans in Egypt was diffused. Syria, Yemen, plenty in Afghanistan.

Olympia Snowe announced her retirement, thus giving the Democrats a strong pickup possibility and therefore making a GOP takeover of the Senate quite a bit less likely.

And Romney put himself in a position to perhaps become the generally accepted nominee if he does well on Tuesday.

What am I missing? What do you think mattered this week?

5 comments:

  1. Jonathan,

    Really, no Rush Limbaugh? The week that Romney looks so much more certain, the GOP looks rather forbidding to women, no? Could the contraception detractors been more hurt by the turn of events via the potent Mr. Limbaugh? It almost helps the health care law seem reasonable to those skeptics. The Obama preemption of the executive editor of the New York Times at the Barnard commencement seems to be rather telling here (perhaps Obama can sew up enough of the female vote before either party convention so he can concentrate on getting Democrats elected to the House and Senate).

    The jobs numbers currently and at the end of last year and the economy are also looking rosier.

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  2. What mattered was baseball expanding its playoffs to 10 teams but then deciding to screw over those 2 new teams and their fans and the other wild card teams and their fans by forcing the wild card teams to play a win or go home one game series. Baseball isn't the NFL or college basketball. You need an extended series of at least 3 games to measure one baseball team's depth and quality vs another's.

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  3. We're working very hard to collect signatures for Rep. Chellie Pingree to run for Senate.

    It's rare that political activism in ME feels like it matters on the grand scale; but even apolitical neighbors feel it matters this time around. And after our minority-vote-winning governor's fiascos, I don't think people are so willing to take the election lightly.

    As a child, there was a bit of political folklore bandied about, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation." I hope I'm right about Maine voters, and I hope there's still truth in folk wisdom.

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  4. Not trying to be pedantic, but this is a (common) error that changes and might obscure your meaning: "diffused" means spread out or made more vague. I think you mean "defused," i.e. as in removing the fuse from a bomb before it explodes.

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  5. Per Juan Cole, that Ahmadinejad suffered a significant loss for his faction in Iranian elections, and that the faction of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei gained, and that Khamenei used the occasion to repeat his oft-stated contention that nuclear weapons were un-Islamic (as the true Islamic warrior is supposed to spare civilians and only confront other warriors on the field of battle), and that Iran would not pursue such weapons. Together with President Obama's amazing interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he was amazingly skillful in stroking every possible worry of the stereotypical American Jewish voter, the chances of a new Iran war in the next weeks should be considered significantly reduced.

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