- NTC forces closed in on Sirte. Meanwhile, the Syrian Spring looks to be entering an armed phase. And Simon Henderson considers Bahrain after its spring was crushed.
- Putin gets to be President again--I, for one, am shocked (SHOCKED!) that there's gambling in the casino.
- Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and Nobel Laureate, has died.
- And Saudi women will get the franchise.
Domestic
- This is just ridiculous--it's the damn Federal Emergency Management Agency, stop holding its budget hostage.
- Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation has endorsed Newt. I shared a plane (and coach class) with the former Speaker, his wife, and some staffers on my way to Chicago over Labor Day weekend. Ole Newt did not look super upbeat. Phillips, by the way, believes that property ownership as a prerequisite for voting "makes a lot of sense."
- Nate Silver makes the case that Perry is a good bet -- at least for an Intrade buy.
- The inventor of Doritos has died and will be buried with his chips.
1 comment:
"And yet the joke was somehow lost on us over the last four years as we (rightly) let other debates get in the way, from the long silly distraction of wondering who was actually in charge (answer: Putin, of course) to the disputes over whether to believe Medvedev's talk of modernization. Even despite these last few months, when it became clear that Putin would come back, we managed to be surprised all over again when it actually happened."
I love these leads that imply that something that literally everyone saw coming was somehow unpredictable. They weren't necessarily as obvious, but plenty of people saw the warning signs of the "shocking" Egypt revolution. Plenty of people predicted elements of the "shocking" financial crisis, and that was a once in a generation event.
But this is like being shocked that the sun rose in the east. I don't believe for a second that someone like Julia Ioffe is surprised at this, and I really have no idea what "debates" she is talking about. I don't think you can really call it a debate over the earnestness of the modernization program when the only ones on the other side of it are Putin and Medvedev.
I suppose this is illustrative of some larger question about incentives for sensationalization or the unwillingness of experts to make concrete predictions, but the beginning of that article is just dumb.
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