My colleague “Sandy Gordon”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/sanfordgordon and I each made a prediction earlier this week. Sandy’s was a tad bit bolder – that the “Democrats would hold the House”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/2602/short_forecast.htm – but mine was that Vladimir Putin would issue some sort of “statement supporting Medvedev’s actions in firing Yury Luzhkov”:http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78009/the-firing-moscow-mayor-yuri-luzhkov. We’re going to have to wait another month to see if Sandy is right, but here’s “Putin’s response”:http://www.theotherrussia.org/2010/09/29/reactions-to-the-dismissal-of-moscow-mayor-luzhkov/:
bq. It’s perfectly obvious that the relationship between the mayor of Moscow and the president didn’t work out, and anyway, the mayor is a subordinate of the president, not the other way around.
As this is exactly what we expected him to say, it is fairly uninformative.
Here’s another take on the firing:
The caption reads, “Let’s go Yury – Somehow with $3,000,000,000, we’ll make it!”
[Hat Tip to Nikolai Sokov and “Dmitry Gorenburg”:http://russiamil.wordpress.com/]