Some 30-second campaign ads targeting younger women voters, via YouTube, embedded below:

The Economist magazine editorializes about President Obama: "No administration in many decades has had such a poor appreciation of commerce. Previous Democrats, notably Bill Clinton, raised taxes, but still understood capitalism. Bashing business seems second nature to many of the people around Mr Obama. ...the White House itself has too often seemed insular and left-leaning....Mr Obama came into office promising to end 'our chronic avoidance of tough decisions' on reforming its finances—and then retreated fast, as he did on climate change and on immigration. Disgracefully, he ignored the suggestions of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that he himself set up. More tellingly, he has failed to lay out a credible plan for what he will do in the next four years. Virtually his entire campaign has been spent attacking Mr Romney, usually for his wealth and success in business."

That's in an editorial endorsing Mr. Obama on the grounds that Mr. Romney is "too uncritically supportive of Israel."

While everyone is grateful to the police and fire personnel and other government workers working on disaster recovery after Sandy, in my New York City neighborhood it's hard to escape the examples of the way that the private sector is in some ways more resilient and quicker to re-open than the public sector. The Barnes & Noble bookstore was open Wednesday, for example, while public libraries were closed. Private schools are re-opening Thursday and Friday and in some cases were open Wednesday, while public schools are remaining closed Thursday and Friday. Again, this is not to say that the government has no role in disaster recovery, or to be critical of the government response, just to point out that the incentives of the private sector and the flexibility afforded by organizations that operate on smaller scale than those of the city government in some cases yield results that are more responsive to customers' needs.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has a post about a company, Unreal Candy, that he is invested in through a venture capital fund:

The idea for Unreal™ began at Halloween a couple of years ago when entrepreneur Michael Bronner and his son Nicky got into an argument over the big bag of Halloween candy that Nicky brought home. Michael wanted Nicky to throw half of it out because of the unhealthy ingredients. Of course, Nicky was not easily convinced.

Nicky and Michael began two years of R&D with a very accomplished chef, Adam Melonas, to try to create unjunked versions of America's favorite candies that tasted just as good and cost no more than those that Nicky had brought home. Based on my taste-test, I think they've succeeded.

A serving of Unreal™ candy contains an average of 45 percent less sugar, 13 percent less fat, 23 percent fewer calories, 149 percent more protein and 250 percent more fiber. Impressively, all products are low GI (Glycemic Index).

Fortune magazine runs an adoring profile of Harvard professor Michael Porter that manages to omit any mention whatsoever of his consulting work for the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gadhafi.

With television it's always possible to get bumped at the last minute, but it looks like the John Stossel show airing at 9 p.m. Thursday November 1 on the Fox Business cable network will include a segment with me. Stossel brandishes a sledgehammer on the show, so it's worth watching for the entertainment value alone.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about a Michigan ballot initiative that would enshrine in the state's constitution a collective bargaining right for the state's public employees:

Michigan, long an economic basket-case, has started to turn the corner under Republican Governor Rick Snyder, who knows that the state's fortunes won't improve if it doubles down on a system of labor law that has proven itself to be a major failure. As the governor has argued, Proposal 2 is a step in the wrong direction.

The Heritage Foundation has a lovely graphic showing how federally recognized disasters have increased by administration and in election years, and even the Brookings Institution acknowledges, "Research suggests governors are more likely to seek federal disaster declarations in presidential election years, especially when they preside over a swing state."

So much for the idea that federal disaster assistance is some kind of model government program.

Why does it take a disaster to make government run the way it should ordinarily run? Here was President Obama speaking on October 30:

And so my instructions to the federal agency has been, do not figure out why we can't do something; I want you to figure out how we do something. I want you to cut through red tape. I want you to cut through bureaucracy. There's no excuse for inaction at this point. I want every agency to lean forward and to make sure that we are getting the resources where they need -- where they're needed as quickly as possible. So I want to repeat -- my message to the federal government: No bureaucracy, no red tape.

The weather calmed down enough here in New York City for me to take a stroll around the neighborhood earlier today, and one of the things I observed is that while a lot of the small, locally owned businesses (Trois Pommes, Kos Kaffe ) were open, some of the larger chain stores (Starbucks) were closed.

This made sense to me in a kind of Hayekian, decentralized way. In the big companies, some regional manager made a decision to open or close on a tri-state-area or citywide basis, while with the small companies, the owner could look out the window, assess that in this particular neighborhood, the situation wasn't bad enough to merit closure, and keep the store open.

Hurricane Sandy has many of my left-of-center friends talking about climate change and wondering how anyone concerned about it can consider voting for Mitt Romney for president. An answer, from a USA Today news article:

He pushed to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. He offered government incentives for renewable power and, early in his administration, tried to tackle climate change with fees on excessive corporate emitters of greenhouse gases.

President Obama? Well, it may sound like him, but it's GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts -- a blue state with a Democratic-led legislature -- from 2003 to 2007.

The two men have fairly similar governing records on energy and environmental issues....

"There's a lot of similarity" between Romney's record as governor and Obama's as president, says Kateri Callahan of the Alliance to Save Energy, a non-profit group that advocates energy efficiency. She applauds both men for the work they've done.

Four months before Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, President Obama quietly signed legislation expanding the federal program that offers taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance to ocean-front homeowners. The law extended the National Flood Insurance Program for five years while also opening the program for the first time to multi-family properties like beachfront condominiums...The extension got virtually no mainstream press attention. It was covered extensively, however, in Insurance Journal, a trade publication that caters to the industry with headlines such as "Agents, Insurers Cheer Congress OK of Flood Insurance Reform Bill."

From a Wall Street Journal article:

However, economically speaking, the clean-up is sure to generate its own visible effect on the economy. John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Grey, put it this way: "If there is any silver lining in all the destruction the storm is expected to cause, it's that such storms tend to provide a boost to the economy in their wake. After the initial shocks to the economy related to lost output and productivity, we will probably see an employment surge in construction, skilled trades and other professions needed to help repair the damage. There will also be an increase in business and consumer spending and companies and homeowners replace damaged equipment, household items, etc. While much of it will be paid for with insurance money, the injection of money into the economy will be beneficial nonetheless."

Five years ago, when a rain shower shut down the city's subway system, the New York Sun issued a memorable editorial under the headline "Sell The Subways."

That editorial recounted the subway's history of grinding to a halt, not only in a 100-year hurricane, or a day ahead of one, but nearly every time there is a heavy drizzle.

"New Yorkers have discovered that the trains can't be relied on when it rains," the Sun wrote on October 26, 2004, in "Beach's Bright Idea." In an editorial called "Sales Tax and the Subway," on March 29, 2005, the Sun opposed a tax increase for new transit projects, writing, "It strikes us that before New York's already hard-pressed taxpayers are asked to pony up for these projects, the MTA's leaders should focus on getting the existing trains to run reliably, rain or shine."

A Bloomberg News dispatch begins:

Billionaire John Paulson's $100 million donation to New York's Central Park Conservancy threw into relief inequities between parks frequented by the wealthy and those in less affluent neighborhoods.

And goes on in that vein. The New York Sun used to use that "threw into relief" language all the time in editorials, but to see that journalist device in a Bloomberg wire story is an eye-opener. It's almost reflexive in some newsrooms, this tendency to turn every news event into an opportunity for another sermon on the evils and unfairness of asset inequality.