MEGAN MCARDLE: Don’t Care About The Deficit? Now You Should.

Unfortunately, as a new Bloomberg News article suggests, in the near future, we may not be able to afford the luxury of not caring. Congressional Budget Office projections currently show the deficit beginning to grow again in 2016, just in time for the presidential election. By 2019, it’ll be above its historical average, where it will stay until the end of the forecast window — and that historical average is itself a bit high, as it includes the post-war record deficit of the Obama administration, which ran close to 10 percent for several years.2

If the growth in health-care costs continues to moderate, that may help a bit, but mostly, the rising cost of health care is not the problem. The problem is the rising number of aging citizens who will require Social Security benefits, Medicare and, eventually, Medicaid to pay for their nursing homes. For the next decade or so, it is demographics, not compound cost growth, that will account for most of our budget problems. And you can’t fix the demographics by directing providers to charge 2.9 percent less for their senior citizens.

As the Bloomberg article points out, there’s another factor that’s going to drive deficits, one that few people are talking about in the public-policy sphere: As the Fed tightens up on monetary policy, our borrowing costs are going to rise, not just for the new debt we take on, but also for the debt we already have. As old debt matures, we’ve been borrowing at record-low interest rates, which has helped hold down the deficit. But as the Fed tightens, that party will end, and the numbers will start moving in the other direction.

I’m still waiting for Obama to deliver on those “net spending cuts” he promised in 2008.

Just don’t call him unpatriotic.

WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: DHS: No evidence of ISIS Ebola threat.

AT AMAZON, deals galore on Men’s Clothing. Also, Women’s Clothing.

Plus, stock up for a long winter at the Amazon Grocery, Restaurant, and Bulk Food Store.

“FEMINIST GAMING CRITIC” OR GRANDSTANDING DRAMA QUEEN? Hint: Fainting couches aren’t feminist. Or at least, they didn’t used to be.

HA HA HA HA HA! Howard Fineman: Remember The Fresh Promise Of Barack Obama? What Happened To That Guy? He never existed. You were duped.

LIZ PEEK: Obama Is Risking a U.S. Ebola Outbreak for His Own Ambitions.

Related: Network Theory and Ebola.

STIMULUS MONEY stimulated Kay Hagan’s family finances.

DALLAS HOSPITAL: Second Person Tests Positive For Ebola. “Officials in Dallas say the second health care worker who has tested positive for Ebola was in isolation within 90 minutes of taking her temperature. They also said she lives alone with no pets and decontamination work has begun at her residence.” Was she dating anyone?

UPDATE: Dallas nurses cite sloppy conditions in Ebola care. “A Liberian Ebola patient was left in an open area of a Dallas emergency room for hours, and the nurses treating him worked for days without proper protective gear and faced constantly changing protocols, according to a statement released late Tuesday by the largest U.S. nurses’ union. Nurses were forced to use medical tape to secure openings in their flimsy garments, worried that their necks and heads were exposed as they cared for a patient with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting, said Deborah Burger of National Nurses United.”

If you say the government is too big, the response is Oh, you want to starve infectious-disease control for funding? but when you give them the money, they spend it on lesbian-obesity studies instead, and are woefully unprepared for the kind of actual crisis the government is supposed to protect against.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A word on the NIH budget:

It’s worth noting that after the Republican takeover in ’94, the NIH budget rose until the Dems took over Congress in 2006. The Pelosi/Reid congress was the first to flatline the NIH budget in nominal dollars. If they’re not careful, someone might notice, take the Dems at their word that the decreasing NIH budget is the reason we don’t have Ebola drugs yet, and blame the Democrats.

Indeed.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More Ebola Cases in Dallas a ‘Very Real Possibility.’ They need to be running down who was in the emergency room that day.

TOM MAGUIRE: So, Now ISIS Has The Chemical Weapons That Saddam Never Had?

UPDATE: Gabriel Malor: Despite What You May Have Read In The Papers, The Iraq War Was Not About An Active Weapons Program. “The NYTimes has published a particularly despicable piece on the Iraq War. Here’s the link, if you must. Now, let me start by saying there are parts of this piece that are noteworthy, and those parts recount acts of valor and duty by U.S. service members. That’s not the despicable part. The despicable part is how the NYTimes writers have twisted what happened to these service members to their own end of rewriting the Iraq War. . . . The first sentence is an absolute lie, uttered at Bush 43’s expense, and made to justify the terrifying conclusion, laid at Obama’s feet, in the last sentence. This NYTimes piece has an overarching political goal: to cement forever the lie that the Iraq War was directed solely at stopping an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. As we know, the military never found an active weapons program, which makes this a particularly compelling slander.”

History will be whatever it needs to be to support a Hillary candidacy.

BYRON YORK: The Audacity of Greg Orman.

For many Republicans, the real problem is not that Orman is a cipher. It’s the suspicion that his entire campaign is a ruse. . . .

Yes, Orman can be slippery on some big issues. What would he do about Obamacare? Nobody really knows, except that Orman would not repeal the health care law. He’s been unclear about the Keystone pipeline, and fuzzy on immigration, too.

But on some other important issues, Orman has taken a clear stand. For example, at the debate, Orman proposed doing the following: 1) Relax Dodd-Frank restrictions on community and regional banks. 2) Review all government regulation every decade to rescind regulations that inhibit business growth. 3) Lower the corporate tax rate. 4) Lower overall tax rates. 5) Raise the Social Security eligibility age for younger Americans. 6) Cut the abuse of Social Security disability payments.

It’s all the kind of thing one often hears from Republican candidates. . . .

Then there is Orman’s own political history. He ran briefly against Roberts as a Democrat in 2008, but now says he is neither Democrat nor Republican. But he has made campaign contributions to Democrats over the years, among them Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Al Franken. At the debate, Orman noted just one Republican to whom he has given — Scott Brown, briefly the GOP senator from Massachusetts.

Later this week, there will be a fundraiser in New York for Orman, sponsored in part by big-money Democratic donors like Jonathan Soros, Joe Gleberman, John Petry, and others. Put it all together, and Orman seems to be the candidate that Democrats really, really want to win the Senate race in Kansas.

How do we know it’s a bad year for Dems? Even Democrats are running as Republicans.

JUSTICE: DOJ to Scale Back Some Thuggery in Plea Bargaining Deals. When the good news is less thuggery from the government. . . .

UM: White House: Strategy against ISIS militants is ‘succeeding.’

Related: Obama: Expect ‘setbacks’ in ISIS fight.

RESPONDING TO EBOLA takes a community-wide response.

Containing the Ebola virus in a major U.S. city requires more than just a trained hospital staff and good equipment.

It takes a long list of people and companies, from clean-up firms willing to haul away Ebola-infected waste to landlords ready to house potential carriers of the virus to social workers who could ease the stress of an outbreak, from many corners of a community. “Literally hundreds of people somehow touched this to make it happen,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said. “Every time you turn around, you find another expert you need. It literally is a village making this process happen.”

When news of the first confirmed case of Ebola in the USA was announced Sept. 30, state, local and federal officials in Dallas scrambled to decontaminate everything around town where the patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, had been after he arrived from Liberia..

At first, it wasn’t easy. Officials called a number of companies about decontaminating the apartment where Duncan had stayed with his fiancée, Louise Troh, and three other family members. One after another, the companies declined.

The call finally went to the Cleaning Guys, a Fort Worth-based hazardous waste cleanup firm. The company, which usually deals with highway spills and hospital cleanups, took the job.

“It was a real eye-opener,” owner Erick McCallum said. “We train for things like this, but then it hits home. We realized, ‘We’re not dreaming. This is really happening.'”

Over 24 hours, more than 15 workers in hazmat suits stripped the northeast Dallas apartment where Duncan and Troh stayed, tearing up carpets, mattresses, furniture, “everything not bolted down,” McCallum said. Workers tripled-bagged the items and crammed them into 140 55-gallon drums.

The drums needed to be driven to an incinerator 400 miles away, where they would be destroyed. But getting the appropriate permits from the Department of Transportation took a few days, because the agency needed to draw up permits specifically for Ebola transport, McCallum said.

So where did all this money go?

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Neo-Victorianism on Campus: Is this the end of the collegiate bacchanal? They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney . . . oh, hell, you know the rest.

Related: Women Are Too Weak To Say No To Sex.

And this will only accelerate the deflation of the Higher Education Bubble.

ILYA SOMIN: Changing public attitudes toward federalism.

In a poll conducted last year, Samples and Ekins replicated a series of questions on what level of government should make “the major decisions” on various issues, that were first asked in a 1973 Harris poll. With the exception of national defense (where there has been no statistically significant change), there has been a substantial increase in preference for state and local control relative to federal.

On several important issues, majority opinion has actually flipped over the last forty years, shifting from a majority in favor of federal dominance to a majority against it. For example, the percentage of Americans who believe that state or local government should make the major decisions on drug policy has increased from 39% in 1973 to 61% in 2013. On health care, it has risen from 40% to 62%; on environmental protection, it has gone from 36% to 56%. On prison reform, the proportion supporting state and local primacy has increased from 43% to 68%.

In both 1973 and 2013, substantial majorities favored federal primacy on national defense, Social Security, and cancer research. But in the last two cases, the minority preferring state or local control has substantially increased. Similarly, in both 1973 and 2013, large majorities favored state or local control of education, transportation, housing, and welfare policy. But on all four issues, those anti-federal government majorities have grown substantially.

Well, the Federal Government hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory since 1973.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: “Outdated” courthouse gun ban repealed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Is “Incivility” The New “Communism?” Nonsense. Most academics are fine with communism.

JAMES CARAFANO: On Ebola, Obama Gets an F.

“PREPPERS” LOOKING STEADILY LESS PARANOID AS THE OBAMA ERA ADVANCES: Training for the End of the World as We Know It: A visit to “prepper camp,” a four-day session on surviving super viruses, natural disasters, socioeconomic collapse, world war, and more.

In the words of Bill Quick: “This article is almost even-handed. But not quite.”

THAT’S A CLOWN CAMPAIGN, SIS: Wendy Davis now accusing wheelchair-bound opponent of trying to ‘kick’ down ladder of victims.

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STEVEN CROWDER: Real Rape vs “Rape Culture” (Featuring Lena Dunham!)

WELL, THIS IS TROUBLING: 16 Members of Doctors Without Borders Infected with Ebola, Nine Dead.

I THOUGHT IRAQI CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE A BUSHITLER/CHENEY FANTASY: New York Times: The Secret U.S. Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs.”

A REPORT FROM gluten-free heaven.