That’s it for me, folks! As always, thanks for reading and commenting. Here are some reads until Ed comes back tomorrow.
1. You’ve got to read this staggeringly good two part series (one, two) in the Texas Monthly on Michael Morton, a man who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and spent 25 years in jail before being exonerated. It’s long, but gripping. Astonishingly, the prosecutor has since been convicted of criminal contempt for deliberately withholding exculpatory evidence, and will spend 10 days in jail.
2. Estimated 10,000 people dead from Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Yikes.
3. Will CBS own up to its 60 minutes Benghazi botch, included the repeated denials before the story collapsed? I’m not holding my breath.
4. Excellent point from Paul Krugman: prolonged depression is doing catastrophic damage to the labor force, but we shouldn’t allow elites to use this as an excuse to tighten monetary policy prematurely. Whatever people think the so-called natural rate of unemployment is now, the safest and most reliable way to find it is to keep stimulating the economy until inflation starts to creep up. Tightening preemptively will only do additional damage to the labor force and the economy’s productive capacity.
5. A deeper dive into the same subject from Ashok Rao: “All we know for certain is that inflation is well below target today, and so monetary policy is insufficiently aggressive.”
6. Conservative Catholics are upset the at the Pope. What goes around…
7. An new paper finds that the phase-out of ozone-depleting CFCs (which are also extremely powerful greenhouse gases) might be partially responsible for the so-called global warming hiatus. A sad irony if true.
8. Great segment on Bill Moyers with Yves Smith and Dean Baker on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Enjoy your evening! Peace.
