Reading List 10-11-15

When a photo of your stillborn baby appears in a viral antiabortion video, in which a stolen photo becomes a prop in a political debate.

The staggering cost of day care when you make only the minimum wage, in which we find that a babysitter in Washington costs more than some people's yearly income.

The Attack on Voting Rights, in which Alabama, et al, continues to restrict access to the polls.

Somehow his colleagues have not managed to convince Ted Cruz that the negotiating strategy of "we will blow up the country unless you change the laws in ways we like" is a losing strategy in a country in which it is considered a bad thing to give in to blackmail...
The curious thing is that there are Senators Cruz and Lee--and fifty Republicans in the House--who think that their constituents care so little about the well-being of the country that they applaud threats of “we will damage the country unless you change the laws in ways we like”…--Brad DeLong

They saw inflation where it did not exist and, when the official data did not bear out their predictions, invoked conspiracy theories. They denied that monetary or fiscal policy could support job growth, while still working to direct federal spending to their own districts. They advocated discredited monetary systems, like the gold standard. --Ben Bernanke

Every month, about the same number of Americans are killed with guns as the number of Americans killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, Waldman reasoned, but the Republican response to those deaths was, and remains, wildly different. For elected Republicans, the gun death toll, versus that of a terrorist attack, is “simply not meaningful enough to justify any action to not even restrict, but merely to inconvenience Americans’ ability to own as many guns as they want and to get them as easily as they want,” wrote Waldman.  --Rachel Brody

What you need to understand about political commentary these days — including the de facto commentary that poses as news analysis, or even reporting — is that most of the people doing it have both a professional and an emotional stake in portraying the two parties as symmetric, equally good or bad on policy issues and general behavior. To stray from this pose of even-handedness is to be labeled a partisan — and to admit that the parties aren’t the same, after all, would mean admitting that you’ve been wrong about the most basic features of the situation for years. --Paul Krugman

People who really worry about government debt don’t propose huge tax cuts for the rich, only partly offset by savage cuts in aid to the poor and middle class, and base all claims of debt reduction on unspecified savings to be announced on some future occasion. ... --Paul Krugman