Good morning from Timothy Noah, who blames the Democratsâ poor showing Tuesday on the October 29 release of Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. It is the seventh in the series. The number seven is all over the Book of Revelation, which foretells hail and fire and locusts and the seas turning to blood.
Or maybe it was just the supply chain. âThe scope of the partyâs setbacks,â write Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in The New York Times, âillustrated that voters were fatigued from the demands of the still-continuing coronavirus pandemic and angry about the soaring prices and scarcity of goods they were confronting every day.â
The various factions within the Democratic Party canât agree on what to do about all this. In the White House, Biden said that if Congress passes the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill, âIâm in a position where youâre going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly.â But Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, said, âNobody elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.â (Thatâs why they elected FDR in 1932, actually.)
Your faithful newsletter writer predicts weâre about to see a wave of stories that say the press and the Democrats, both habitually excitable, are overreacting to the bad news. The two big races were in Virginia and New Jersey. The Democrats lost one and won the other. In New Jersey, incumbent Phil Murphy won by a smaller margin than four years ago. We werenât in a pandemic four years ago! In Virginia, former Governor Terry McAuliffe ran a less than great campaign and lost. The Democratic defeats, reports the Times way down in its story, âwere not as overwhelming as the last time the party controlled the presidency and Congress, in 2009, when Republicans won the Virginia governorship by 17 percentage points and the New Jersey governorship as well.â
In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Jackie Calmes notes that in Virginia, Youngkin âstill lost to McAuliffe in the suburban counties outside Washington and Richmond,â albeit âby far less than Trump did to Biden.â And Youngkinâs careful balancing act with Trump may not be reproducible in the 2022 midterms. Trump âuncharacteristically followed Republicansâ advice to stay out of Virginia,â Calmes observes, but he âisnât likely to remain quiet and mostly in self-exile at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022, especially as he flirts with a campaign of his own in 2024.â New York Times columnist Gail Collins notes that âBoston elected its first woman and first person of color as mayor,â that âPittsburgh and Kansas City, Kan., each elected its first Black mayor,â that âCincinnati chose an Asian American mayor,â and that âDearborn, Mich.âs next mayor is going to be an Arab American Muslim.â
In other news, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration this morning released its emergency temporary standard on Covid-19, which mandates that large employers require workers either to get vaccinated or to be masked and get tested weekly (text, summary). Businesses must comply by January 4. Companies must provide paid time off for workers to get vaccinated and sick leave in cases where workers suffer side effects. Employers wonât be required to pay for or provide the tests unless union contracts require that. The mask requirement takes effect December 5.
Today at NewRepublic.com, Casey Michel notes yet another reason to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill: It contains $80 billion to hire new IRS agents to chase down rich people who cheat on their taxes. The IRS is in desperate need of the money because a decadeâs worth of budget cuts has caused a 61 percent decline in audits for millionaires and a 40 percent decline in criminal referrals. Lily Meyer reviews Career and Family, a new book by Harvardâs Claudia Goldin (who I think is the best economic historian in America). Among the nuggets in Goldinâs book is that the corporatization of pharmacies, by replacing self-employed men we called âDocâ with CVS or Walgreens employees, was a boon for women because more sophisticated corporate record-sharing systems made the job more flexible, creating more opportunities for women pharmacists with families. (For the record, I never liked Doc, despite his embodying the small-business ideal. Working long hours made him cranky and slow.) And Esther Wang decries the idea that outlawing abortions past the 15-week mark, as Mississippi has done, is somehow a âmoderateâ compromise between outlawing them at 20 weeks, as many states have done, and outlawing them at six weeks, as Texas has done. The Supreme Court, which will hear arguments concerning the Mississippi law in December, is in some danger of adopting this view. âWe should nip this foolish logic in the bud,â Wang writes. âLike any other ban at any point in someoneâs pregnancy, we should recognize it for what it isâan assertion of the stateâs power in determining when and how weâre made to have children.â
Timothy Noah, staff writer |
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