What Happened This Week: March 1-7

A lot of things happened this week.  Hugo Chavez died.  North Korea threatened (again) to blow up the United States. Rand Paul and company performed the first true filibuster in the Senate in nearly 3 years.  John Brennan was confirmed to be the next CIA chief.  The House Republicans passed a CR that has virtually no chance of becoming law.  The Sequester came and went and the US economy hasn't blown up.  The Dow Jones has reached record highs.  Unemployment ticked down to 7.7%.

And that's just the big stuff.


James O'Keefe is out $100,000

Remember ACORN?  It was a grass roots social action non-profit that Mr. O'Keefe famously 'infiltrated' by pretending to be a pimp and used heavily edited hidden camera footage to paint the organization in a bad light.  Well, the former ACORN employee at the center of hoax, Juan Carlos Vera, who was fired because of the fallout, has had a longstanding lawsuit filed against Mr. O'Keefe and he's agreed to settle for $100,000.  Read more about it here.

Gallup in Trouble

What is considered 'THE' authority on polling and analysis, Gallup seems to have stumbled.  After it's horrible 2012 predictions (Romney supposedly was to win the election by 2 points - including polling done the day before the election), an attack on its polling methodology and undersampling of minorities, and a break-up with USA Today, Gallup is going through an internal review of its polling methodology, and its descision-making process overall.  Read more about it here.

Paul Krugman proves he is 'The Market Whisperer'

Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times proving a theory that most progressives have known and most conservatives won't acknowledge: those who come in screaming with dire predictions are usually wrong.  He takes each of the big financial arguments about debt, austerity, regulations, and the like, and breaks them down as to why they are good or bad, and provides ACTUAL PROOF why he comes to those conclusions.  Read it here.

Is the South still racist?

There was a controversial piece in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Henninger that looked at the current Supreme Court case that's challenging a part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  He examines if the Southern United States, specifically those states affected by Section 5, are more racist than northern states.  It's controversial, but worth a read.  Do so here.

Obama's Dinner Diplomacy May Work

Noam Scheiber at The New Republic wrote a great piece about President Obama's recent 'charm offensive' with congressional Republicans.  Scheiber highlights how President Obama had previously been cool to this sort of deal-making, but points to how it has been successfully deployed in the past by Presidents from both parties.  It's a great read.  Click here.