Of late, the Obama administration has been invoking the progressive era as a sort of model to guide them. David Brooks doesn’t find it particularly applicable:

In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.

In the broader strokes, I think Brooks has it absolutely right.

Ross Douthat:

Republicans should have just taken yes for answer, embraced a bipartisan tax cut, declared victory and gone home for Christmas. Instead, a Republican Party that blithely voted to extend the Bush tax cuts without any offsets suddenly became very, very concerned about “paying for” a far more modest measure, and a G.O.P. that’s supposedly committed to the lowest possible middle class tax burden decided that it needed to extract concessions from a Democratic president in exchange for supporting… a middle class tax cut.

Mark Pennington:

The leftist alternative, by contrast, does not propose to dismantle the apparatus of government power but to make sure that ‘the right people’ are in charge of it and the ‘right interventions’ are in place. Yet, it is precisely because voters find it so difficult to tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ interventions and between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ politicians that affords the opportunity for rent seekers and crony capitalists to create ‘structured inequality’.

President Obama will sign a bill into law which will allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely. Let that sink in: the military will be able to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely. No trial, much less one in a civilian court. Just a nice, secluded U.S. military cell guarded by U.S. soldiers.

Support came from both Democrats and Republicans. Senator Lindsey Graham said:

“It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” he said. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

The White House initially opposed the bill, but not because Obama objected to detaining Americans—but rather because the bill did not provide enough executive power. Glenn Greenwald writes:

The White House’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, insisted the White House, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.

In fact, Obama insisted that the bill include a provision allowing American citizens to be detained. Greenwald continues:

The proof of that — the definitive, conclusive proof — is that Sen. Carl Levin has several times disclosed that it was the White House which demanded removal of a provision in his original draft that would have exempted U.S. citizens from military detention (see the clip of Levin explaining this in the video below). In other words, this was an example of the White House demanding greater detention powers in the bill by insisting on the removal of one of its few constraints (the prohibition on military detention for Americans captured on U.S. soil).

Of course, this isn’t exactly new; Jose Padilla was declared an enemy combatant by President Bush and transferred to military custody in 2002, where he was held for three and a half years. But what this does do, is it codifies it into law. After President Obama signs it, detention of American citizens by the U.S. military, on U.S. soil, will be legal.

Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. I’ll avoid the partisan needling, because there’s really nothing gained by anyone here. Democrats and Republicans have worked together better than they have in years to put flame to the Bill of Rights.

Occupy protestors have decided to shut down ports to shut down capitalism:

The protesters, who targeted ports from San Diego to Anchorage, said they wanted to highlight the plight of average Americans who have suffered from home foreclosures and soaring unemployment while the largest U.S. banks have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. “We are the 99 percent,” their slogan, refers to economist Joseph Stiglitz’s research that found the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the wealth.

“This isn’t about the truckers,” Charles Rachlis, 55, of El Cerrito, California, said in an interview at the Oakland protest. “We have to shut down the wheels of capitalism at the port. This scares the bejesus out of Wall Street.”

Let’s set aside that shutting down the ports, which—if successful—threatens many jobs of the “average Americans” they claim they want to highlight the plight of, and also that shutting down ports to show the plight of regular people is a non-sequitur.

Let’s look at what they’re really trying to do. They aren’t trying to show that the middle class and poor have been terribly hurt by the recession and need help. They aren’t trying to show that income inequality is harmful and so we should try to raise the incomes of the poor and middle class. No—they’re trying to hurt “Wall Street,” or rather, hurt businesses and the capitalist system. They want to punish them.

Maybe you agree that capitalism should be eliminated. Fine. We can have that conversation. But we at least need to acknowledge what shutting down the ports is really about. And it has nothing to do with merely raising the tax rate for the highest income tax bracket from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

Edward Luce:

In the words of David Autor, a leading labour economist at Harvard University, the labour force is suffering from a growing “missing middle”.

In short, the middle-skilled jobs that once formed the ballast of the world’s wealthiest middle class are disappearing. They are being supplanted by relatively low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs that cannot be replaced either by new technology or by offshoring – such as home nursing and landscape gardening. Jobs are also being created for the highly skilled, notably in science, engineering and management.

Austan Goolsbee:

Certainly the countries of Southern Europe must rein in excess. In the long run, however, even the deepest of cuts won’t suffice. Southern Europe needs to grow or it will never control its debt levels. But with the euro zone keeping Southern Europe uncompetitive, the region’s growth prospects will remain dismal.

Northern Europe has fueled its growth through exports. It has run huge trade imbalances, the most extreme of which with these same Southern European countries now in peril. Productivity rose dramatically compared to the South, but the currency did not.

Europe’s problem isn’t just debt. The problem is Northern and Southern European nations are very different economically. Germany’s workers are highly productive and their economy relies on exports as a result, while Southern nations are not productive and thus cannot use exports to grow their economy. If they were not a part of the euro, they could devalue their currency to make their exports less expensive (and more competitive), but they aren’t, so they can’t. Their only way is to increase productivity.

George Will on Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

That’s about as good a summation of who Gingrich is you’ll ever see. There’s nothing conservative about Gingrich’s faith that he has the answer and plan for everything.

After a Bloomberg story on the Federal Reserve’s involvement in stemming the 2008 financial crisis, the web and media were suddenly flooded with erroneous, angry talk about the Fed loaning $7.7 trillion to banks.

Problem is, that’s false. Suzy Khimm writes:

Problem is, the Fed never actually doled out $7.7 trillion to banks: Much of that $7.7 trillion figure doesn’t reflect loans made, but loan guarantees — the amount the Fed would be responsible for in case of default — and loan limits. Certainly, the Fed positioned itself to take on considerable risk if need be, but the central bank was not handing out $7.7 trillion in cold, hard cash to banks. Politicians and the news media alike have erroneously conflated the two, using “loan guarantees” and “loans” interchangeably. The Fed would have given out $7.7 trillion to banks only in the unlikely scenario that the banks asked for the maximum possible loans and that every one of them subsequently defaulted.

David Frum on Obama’s speech in Kansas:

Yet here is President Obama proposing to replay that bitter Blair-Brown experience. The unblinking diagnosis of the ills of the U.S. economy in the first half of his Kansas speech builds to a conclusion that amounts to: Let’s accept that our future prosperity will be very narrowly based, and instead use some of the proceeds of that narrow prosperity to create government jobs as consolation prizes for those who lose out in private markets. The president flew all the way to Kansas to propose that?

And Ross Douthat furthers:

But fundamentally, his pivot to the 2012 campaign has also been a pivot to a defense of business-as-usual, in which the rich pay, the government grows, and the millions of Americans who don’t belong to public sector unions, work for favored industries, or draw on Social Security and Medicare are left waiting for the government’s ever-more-expensive investments to trickle down to them.

Jeffrey Goldberg:

It will be extremely difficult for any number of reasons for Israel to leave the West Bank, but it will be impossible for Israel to survive over the long-term if it remains an occupier of a group of people who don’t want to be occupied. I understand the security consequences of an Israeli departure from most of the West Bank, but I also understand that there is ultimately no choice. I don’t believe a one-state solution is any sort of solution at all; Israel/Palestine will devolve quickly into civil war. The only solution is a two-state solution.

Europe and the U.S. aren’t the only ones facing economic decline:

The Indian economy which gained 6.9% in the second quarter, is expected to grow 7.5% this year, according to Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, against previous estimates of 9% growth. And the Indian Rupee is off 13.14% year-to-date (YTD) against the U.S. dollar, and 13.72% against the euro. The currency has been declining as inflation remains consistently high, driven up by food costs.

Ouch. Moreover, China will be/is hurt by Europe’s struggles, too, because the EU is a huge export partner for them. Unless something significant changes, I think we’re heading toward a global recession.

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

Tim Duy:

Bottom Line: Don’t take US resilience for granted this time around – Europe is getting ugly, and it is far too late to prevent severe recession. The best policymakers can hope for at this point is too avoid a depression.

Click through and look at his chart showing the correlation between new orders from European manufactures and U.S. manufacturers, and then consider that European industrial orders dropped 6.4 percent in September. Europe is going to suffer a serious decline, and we will, too.

(Via Brad Plumer.)

Joaquin Luna, an 18 year-old A-student in Texas, committed suicide because he didn’t believe he would be able to become a citizen:

He also followed politics closely, reading in the newspapers about the harsh immigration laws passed in other southern states such as Alabama and Arizona. “He got angry,” Mendoza says. “He said the people passing these laws had no heart: how could they leave so many kids without parents and destroy so many lives?”

When the Dream Act – a law that would have granted undocumented immigrants in higher education such as himself permanent residency status – failed to pass the US senate last year, Luna took it heavily.

“He got depressed real bad,” Mendoza recalls. “Every one of us, we all get depressed. Some of us can handle it, some of us can’t. Joaquin couldn’t.”

When Luna was six months old, his family crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and as a result, Luna was not an American citizen.

Nothing else needs said.

Kevin Drum:

In other words, the European segment of the shadow banking system was indirectly providing about $5 trillion in credit to U.S. borrowers. This was about as much as U.S. banks provided directly.

The Euro crisis is our crisis.