Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes Business v. Economics:
Obviously there are business leaders who have gotten the economic analysis right, and plenty of academics who have gotten it wrong. (Don’t get me started.) But success in business does not seem to convey any special insight into economic policy. Why?
The answer, to quote the title of a paper I published many years ago, is that a country is not a company. National economic policy, even in small countries, needs to take into account kinds of feedback that rarely matter in business life. For example, even the biggest corporations sell only a small fraction of what they make to their own workers, whereas even very small countries mostly sell goods and services to themselves.
So think of what happens when a successful businessperson looks at a troubled economy and tries to apply the lessons of business experience. He or (rarely) she sees the troubled economy as something like a troubled company, which needs to cut costs and become competitive.
Amy Davidson at
The New Yorker ponders the possibility of another Bush at the nation's helm in
Jeb Bush, to the Bat Cave:
Why is it that so many people, in and out of the Republican Party, continue to bounce along with the Bush family? It is an article of faith with that crowd that Jeb is a natural leader. And yet his presence reminds one of Play-Doh left out of the container too long. One can’t quite decide whether he’s made of putty or chalk. He is given points both for being his father’s son and for not being his brother—which is somehow what passes for a meritocratic award. The odd idea is that, after one mediocre Bush Presidency and one failed one, it would be a matter of simple fairness to try a third. This can’t be what we call equal opportunity in America.
Alec MacGillis at
The New Republic argues that
Tea Party Populism Is Dead. The GOP Is Back in Bed With Wall Street:
Republican candidates are still doing their best to co-opt lingering Tea Party fervor, even as the party has done its best to quash conservative primary challengers in Senate races in Kentucky, Mississippi, and elsewhere. But the lines of allegiance are clearer than ever. First came reports earlier this month that Wall Street was spending heavily on behalf of Republican Senate candidates with the very specific aim of keeping Sherrod Brown, the gravel-voiced Ohio Democrat, from assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee, as he might just do if the Democrats retain the majority. In past elections, The Washington Post reported, "securities and investment firms have hedged their bets by donating roughly the same amount to both parties. But this time Wall Street has handed Republicans nearly two-thirds of the $115 million it has contributed to 2014 campaigns..."
More pundit excerpts can be found below the fold.
Trevor Timm at The Guardian writes Does the CIA want Republicans to win the midterms?
In a surprise to absolutely no one, the CIA has, for the fourth time, asked a federal court for more time to make a decision about releasing the torture report. The ACLU and journalist Jason Leopold have separately sued for the report’s release, while the White House and Senate Intelligence Committee continue to haggle over what to redact and what to release since the committee voted it be declassified all the way back in April. While the Obama administration continues to say it wants the report released, their actions continue to show the opposite. [...]
With an almost hilarious amount of chutzpah, the CIA is actually blaming the Senate Intelligence Committee for the delay in the report’s release because its members have the audacity to insist that the redactions be reduced so that people can actually comprehend the end result. The biggest fight seems to be over the CIA’s efforts to black out the pseudonyms of CIA agents used in the report. While the report is already void of anyone’s real name—and the pseudonyms were exclusively used in the report at the request of the CIA, as The Intercept’s Dan Froomkin reported earlier this week—the CIA is still arguing that the pseudonyms themselves are a national security risk
Rachel Maddow at
The Washington Post writes
Republicans bank on fear in this election:
I know it wasn’t planned this way, but there is a certain genius in how we snug Election Day up against Halloween on the calendar. We scare each other for fun and profit on the last day of October every year, but then in even-numbered years, we keep going. We scare each other on the first Tuesday thereafter, too, rolling right from our night of haunted houses and zombie costumes into a national election that’s being directed like the shower scene from “Psycho.” [...]
For all the end-of-the-world clamor around this year’s elections, you’d never guess that the economy is growing at 3.5 percent, unemployment is below 6 percent and gas prices are way, way down. Even Halloween candy was cheap this year. But good news, schmood news. This year, we’ve decided to be miserable and afraid.
Once all the votes are cast and counted, it will be interesting to see if telling voters to be afraid sent more of them to the polls or kept them home, hiding under the covers. My guess is the latter: Fear, like guilt, is an emotion that creates more upset than action.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times warns
After this election, expect more, not less, confrontation:
"The most important challenge the party faces is restoring its brand in the eyes of the voters," said John Feehery, a former aide to Newt Gingrich. "If we don't restore our brand by getting stuff done, we'll be handing the White House to Hillary Clinton." That means compromise and bipartisanship—at least enough to demonstrate that Republicans know how to govern.
But the reality is that the new crop of Senate Republicans, many of them from the party's most conservative edge, will have won by running against Obama. And in so doing, they have pledged themselves to relentless confrontation.
Four of the new senators likely to be elected, including Tom Cotton, the probable winner in Arkansas, have been endorsed by the zealously anti-tax Club for Growth. Joni Ernst, who may win a close race in Iowa, has proposed to abolish the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency. Nebraska's Ben Sasse, who is virtually certain to succeed the more mildly conservative Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), was endorsed by both Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Sady Doyle at
In These Times points out in
The Vicious Attacks of GamerGate Are the Norm for Women on the Internet that the misogyny associated with GamerGate, with its rape and death threats against feminists, is not a new phenomenon:
What I have outlined is not a total history of women being harassed and threatened online. It’s not even a sliver of it. These are a few, well-known instances of widely used tactics. The most honest way to sum up this history is to say that I can’t think of a feminist writer who hasn’t been stalked, threatened, harassed, made to fear for their safety or their employability, developed physical or mental health problems, become hyper-conscious or limited in what they could express online, or simply stopped publishing altogether because they could no longer justify putting themselves through this much pain for the movement or for any personal goals that writing or engaging online might plausibly help them to achieve. Their numbers are large, and get larger every year. Each of these incidents might be the worst period in an individual woman’s life. But they are all dwarfed by the totality of the damage: No matter how often we write about the attacks, or talk about them, or vow to rally the culture against them, they just keep coming. Not at the rate of once a year, or even once a summer, but constantly.
So what makes GamerGate such a big deal? What makes it new? It’s not the misogyny, nor the brutality: As ugly as the GamerGate threats are, their ugliness is familiar. What makes it different, I suspect, is that GamerGate is costing the wrong people money.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes
The Senator Defending Your Privacy Is Fighting for His Political Life:
In June of 2014, Senators Mark Udall, Ron Wyden and Rand Paul offered a rare show of election-year unanimity when they penned a joint statement arguing that “it is more important than ever to let Congress and the administration know that Americans will reject half-measures that could still allow the government to collect millions of Americans’ records without any individual suspicion or evidence of wrongdoing.” [...]
Just five months later, the strength of that groundswell will be tested in Colorado. Udall, the senior senator from that state, is in the fight of his political life with Republican Congressman Cory Gardner. It’s a brutal, high-stakes battle, and polls suggest Gardner has a slight advantage.
If Udall loses, “it would be a significant loss for the movement” to hold the NSA to account and to renew the privacy rights of Americans, says Laura Murphy, who heads the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“What Udall has is the institutional memory, and the relationships in the civil liberties community, in the Democratic Party and in the tech industry so that we don’t have to start over again with someone new,” Murphy told The Hill, which has highlighted concerns about what losing Udall would mean to the fight to restrain the NSA.
Joe Conason at
Truthdig via Creators Syndicate writes
Plutocrat or Populist? Actually, Hillary Clinton Is Neither:
Now, as she speaks out on economic issues during the midterm campaign, she is portrayed as “copying” the “populist, anti-corporate rhetoric” of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., courageous scourge of crooked bankers and financial fraudsters.
But the truth about Hillary’s economic outlook is both simpler and more complex.
The simple part is that for her entire public career, Clinton has been a consistent advocate for working families and the middle class—notably on the minimum wage, which she fought to raise as a senator. She not only repeatedly sponsored legislation to raise the wage but also demanded a ban on congressional and executive pay increases until workers’ wages went up first.
D.J. Tice of the editorial board at the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune writes
In real life, pols are more vacuous than vile:
Our political leaders are not all predatory pirates, self-dealing plutocrats, partisan fanatics and befuddled bumblers.
They’re not really as interesting as that. [...]
Repeatedly this fall the Editorial Board has heard that “everything is on the table” in the search for solutions to funding challenges facing the federal or state budget, Social Security, Medicare, transportation or whatnot.
Evidently, an overflowing negotiating table is considered safely noncommittal by political strategists.
But when you ask a politician for clarification as to whether this cornucopia of options indicates willingness to consider a type of policy that members of his or her party usually reject — tax hikes, say, or benefit reductions — an exhausting chase is apt to follow through a foggy backwater of evasions and half answers.