“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Jim Newell: Chris Christie takes a prisoner: A lesson in Ebola panic gone wrong
The New Jersey governor has finally freed his Ebola prisoner. It’s astonishing that it even came to that
It was this weekend, 10 days or so before “votin’ time,” when Ebola hysteria and electoral politics finally converged hard enough to deprive someone of their liberty. If I’d been drawing up the over/under, I would have put this moment at about 20 days before the election. So at least there’s that. At least we, a nation mighty and spastic altogether, can be proud that it took slightly longer than estimated for this toxic combination to distill into shrieking authoritarianism.
On Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s up for (an easy) reelection this year and may run for president, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s busying himself down the stretch as head of the Republican Governors Association and will run for president, decided it would be wise to quarantine health workers returning from West Africa for several weeks.
A real tuff-guy play, and one that would soon thereafter be copied in Illinois and Florida, two states whose governors are mired in tight reelection races. What better way to prove your “leadership” skills than by ignoring the pansy experts’ advice and simply throwing health professionals into the hole for a few weeks? Unlike the incompetent elites who comprise the Obama-medical complex, these guvs have the stones to do what it takes and abridge liberty, which only causes problems and is overrated anyway.
Paul Krugman: Ideology and Investment
America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.
But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.
The global economy is ailing, and the damage done by fiscal policy is going to come crashing. Here’s our sad fate
You usually think about October surprises in the political context, but we’ve had something of an economic October surprise this year. A tumultuous drop in oil prices and a significant stock market pullback underlie serious challenges for the global economy. And it points to a core problem that has really been with us for over a decade, but more acutely since the Great Recession: Countries cannot generate enough demand in the economy without a financial bubble of some sort. Sadly, the primary way to change that has been, catastrophically, shut off by the blinkered stubbornness of our policymakers.
Markets have unquestionably slumped: the S&P 500 is down 8 percent just since mid-September. More important, interest rates have plummeted. Geopolitical tensions, from ISIS to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, shoulder part of the blame. But markets also fear low inflation, partly due to crashing commodity prices. [..]
But the broader reasons for the commodity slowdown and deflation concerns involve a generally sick economy around the world. China has a growing debt bubble to manage. Japan’s experiment with economic revival has run aground amid a large increase in the consumption tax. And Europe stands on the brink of a triple-dip recession.
Robert Kuttner: Would Warren Really Run?
What is Elizabeth Warren up to?
Elizabeth Warren’s offhand remark in an interview with People magazine strongly suggested that the Massachusetts senator has revised her previous firm declarations of non-candidacy for president and is now deliberately leaving the door open a crack. Asked whether she was considering a run in 2016, Warren said disarmingly, “I don’t think so,” but added, “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”
That sure opened one door. Is Warren really thinking about challenging frontrunner Hillary Clinton? I’d be surprised if Warren has made any decision on that question, but her remark immediately set off two kinds of political waves.
First, it produced great excitement among the Democratic Party’s long-suffering progressive base. And second, it reminded many commentators of Clinton’s several vulnerabilities.
Adam Lee: Godless millennials could end the political power of the religious right
The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they’re fighting on unfriendly territory – a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs.
But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia and Kentucky – which in the past would have been easy Republican holds – the races are unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that [an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups v], despite an overall political climate that generally favors conservatives.
What we’re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that’s been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less Christian. In every region of the country, in every Christian denomination, membership is either stagnant or declining. Meanwhile, the number of religiously unaffiliated people – atheists, agnostics, those who are indifferent to religion, or those who follow no conventional faith – is growing. In some surprising places, these “nones” (as in “none of the above”) now rank among the largest slices of the demographic pie.
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