Julia Ioffe:
While we were all panicking about Ebola and the Democrats' getting schooled in the midterms, the bottom dropped out of the Russian economy.
The ruble has been nosediving for weeks, despite the fact that the Russian Central Bank has spent some $40 billion over the last two months to prop it up. In January, you would have to shell out 32.86 rubles to buy one U.S. dollar. Through October, that number edged higher and higher into the thirties, prompting nervous jokes from Russians as they watched their national currency lose value before their eyes. By November 1, a Russian would need to scrape together over 43 rubles to buy one U.S. dollar, a drop of over 30 percent.
Every day since November 1 has brought new lows for the ruble. By Wednesday, the Russian Central Bank, which had been spending billions of its reserve dollars every day to prop up the Russian currency, announced it was no longer going to do so. It was going to let the ruble float. (Technically speaking, it said that it would “only” spend $350 million a day to prop up the ruble.)
The ruble promptly nosedived.
The Hill:
No Labels launched in 2010 with the stated mission of ending gridlock, but has been accused of violating its bipartisan ethos.
Yahoo News obtained an internal document earlier this year that suggested the group was hoping for a shift in the Senate majority, so they could then “bridge the gap between Congress and the White House.”
It was the group’s backing of [Cory] Gardner that reportedly infuriated Democrats and [Dem. Sen. Joe] Manchin.
Margaret Kimbrell, No Labels executive director, stood behind the Gardner endorsement in a statement Friday.
Useless group.
NY Times:
ISIS Wave of Might Is Turning Into Ripple
“ISIS can only expand in areas where it can enter into partnerships with the local population, and that largely limits the scope of the expansion of ISIS to Sunni, disenfranchised areas,” said Lina Khatib, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
It is in Iraq, where coalition forces began bombing in August, that the Islamic State has lost the most ground. In recent weeks, combinations of Iraqi government units, Kurdish pesh merga forces, Shiite militias and armed Sunni tribesmen have seized the Rabia crossing with Syria; taken back the area of Zumar in the north and Jurf al-Sakr south of Baghdad; opened crucial roads in the country’s center; and held off Islamic State advances elsewhere.
For the first time since the jihadists seized Mosul and much of northwestern Iraq in June, an Iraqi military vehicle can drive from Baghdad to the northern city of Erbil on a main highway.
Hisham Alhashimi, an Iraqi researcher and an expert on the Islamic State, said those changes had broken up the group’s territory, making it harder for it to move its forces and for its couriers to relay messages among the leadership and the field commanders.
Michael Hiltzik:
The GOP manifesto published obligingly by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday over the names of Republican leaders John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., included a tweak to the Affordable Care Act they say would provide Americans with "more hours and better pay."
Don't you believe it. Their proposed change would threaten the livelihoods of as many as 81 million workers. It would have precisely the opposite effect they claim. And their reasoning for it is specious, too. The bottom line is that it would be a handout to cheeseparing employers, not a gain for their workers.
As for the election, here are some of the best interp pieces:
Greg Sargent:
The most common explanation we’re hearing for the GOP sweep of a dozen Senate races last night is that an already-treacherous map for Democrats was made a lot worse by the failure of core Dem voter groups to show up.
But multiple Democratic pollsters involved in these races identify another problem: The failure of the Democrats’ economic message to win over persuadable voters, ones outside the ascendant Democratic coalition, in the numbers needed to offset the structural disadvantages Democratic incumbents and candidates faced. These pollsters describe this as a serious problem afflicting the Democratic Party that must be addressed heading into 2016.
Ron Brownstein:
Tuesday's resounding Republican sweep closely followed the script of the GOP's landslide in 2010, and it exposed perhaps even more deeply the limits of the modern Democratic coalition—while underscoring the party's persistent inability to convince enough whites that they will benefit from activist government.
But just as President Obama recovered from his party's 2010 rout to comfortably win reelection two years later, some cautionary 2016 signs for Republicans are buried within the rubble of this week's Democratic disaster.
Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin:
Deep voter pessimism and a lack of an economic agenda from Democrats, not just structural obstacles, drove GOP gains in 2014.
American voters remain deeply pessimistic about their own economic prospects and those of the country as a whole and distrust all major institutions of government, including the president, Congress, and both major political parties. As a result, the 2014 elections mark the third consecutive midterm election in which voters turned against the incumbent party to flip partisan control of one branch of Congress. In this election cycle, the Republican Party successfully mobilized discontent with President Barack Obama and the state of the economy to pick up at least seven seats for a minimum 52-seat majority. Democratic-held seats that went to Republicans include Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia, with Louisiana going to a runoff. The GOP solidified its hold on the U.S. House of Representatives, picking up at least 14 more seats for a commanding 243-seat majority so far. It also added three more governorships to its ranks, for a total of 31 states with Republican governors.
The loss of Senate control was largely expected given the difficult task Democrats faced this year: In order to keep their majority in the Senate, they needed to hold seats in Republican-leaning states whose voting bases were more conservative, older, and less diverse. But the GOP’s hold on the Senate remains tenuous, with the party facing the prospect of defending 24 Senate seats versus 10 for the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election year. As longtime political journalist Ronald Brownstein notes, as of the 2014 results, neither party has successfully held control of the U.S. Senate for more than eight years since 1980—a trend Republicans will surely need to keep in mind as they organize their agenda going forward.
Great (and long) read.
Pretty good data on how the election was NOT about rejection of ACA: