As the Fed chair recently put it, the American economy is now "driving in a fog." Because the federal government remains shut down, no new official monthly economic statistics are being calculated and released to the public. This lack of data will continue until roughly a month after the government gets reopened, since the people who compile the statistics have to collect the data each month before they can calculate what it all means. The gap in collecting data could continue through November, which would mean there would be no official figures released at the start of next month. The most important of these statistics are the unemployment figures and the inflation rate.

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Democrats had a very good night last night. That's even an understatement -- in actual fact, Democrats had a blowout night last night, as they romped home in just about every election everywhere. One year from Donald Trump's electoral victory, the Democratic Party came back strong. What it all means for the future is anyone's guess, but for the first time in an entire year, it's better to be a Democrat than a Republican, looking towards that future.

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New York City is in the midst of holding a sort of hybrid election to choose its new mayor. The Democratic primary used "ranked-choice voting" (R.C.V.), while the general election tomorrow will be the traditional "whichever candidate gets the most votes wins" sort of contest. I saw an article today in Salon which contrasted how these two contests played out, which pointed out how the Democratic primary was a less-vicious affair, with candidates not only vying to be the first selection on people's ballots but also the "number two" choice for voters backing other candidates. It posited that the general election would have been a much more civil affair if R.C.V. had been in place, since the same sort of effect might have changed the way the candidates campaigned. The article was probably right to some degree or another, but it missed a rather large point -- one that might be pertinent for Republican voters: if the N.Y.C. mayoral general election had indeed been held under R.C.V. rules, then frontrunner Zohran Mamdani might have wound up losing.

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I must begin with an apology, because once again I find that I cannot bring myself to write a new Hallowe'en column this year.

Usually, at this time of year, I try to come up with frightful tales of horror for both the left and right sides of the political divide -- which I attempt to make both humorous and also so far-fetched that they're ridiculously unbelievable. The "scare factor" is tempered by the "Oh, that could never actually happen" factor, to put it another way.

These are indeed scary times we live in. And it would be impossible for me to try to construct a nightmarish scenario for those on the left that is any more frightful than what we are living through now.

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Next Tuesday is Election Day. No matter what happens in this off-off-year election, this will produce a flurry of speculation about the current state of the political landscape in America, and what it will all mean for the election that is going to happen next year, when all of the House and one-third of the Senate will be on the ballot. As usual, though, drawing sweeping conclusions this far out is likely to prove laughably mistaken, since a year's time in a normal political atmosphere is still an eternity, and an entire year in the Trump era feels like an even longer time than that.

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For the second month in a row, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates. This move was expected, but the Fed chair is now warning that there might not be a third drop when they meet again in December. A big part of his hesitancy stems from the fact that the Fed is now essentially flying blind, because the government shutdown has caused the flow of economic data to halt. Jerome Powell used a different transportation-based metaphor to describe this, saying: "If there is a high level of uncertainty, then that could be an argument in favor of caution about moving.... What do you do if you are driving in the fog? You slow down. I'm not committing to that. I'm just saying it's certainly a possibility that you would say, 'We really can't see. So let's slow down.'"

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Donald Trump has never cared all that much what the U.S. Constitution actually says. He certainly has never read the whole thing -- he makes this painfully obvious whenever he attempts to talk about it in any detail. And he has been actively trying to dismantle parts of it already. So it's no real surprise that he has trolled everyone again by flirting with the notion of possibly running (or otherwise somehow becoming) president for a third time, using the 2028 election to achieve this goal.

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At the end of this week, the federal government will have been shut down for a full month. As things stand currently, few people expect anything to change before then. No viable exit ramp has appeared yet, and none is likely to do so until Donald Trump returns from his foreign trip. This will push the shutdown into November, which will dramatically increase the pressure to come to some sort of agreement, because while some money has been shuffled around to keep certain things funded (like military salaries), it's going to get substantially harder to do so in November. This means many programs are just going to completely grind to a halt, which is going to mean more and more of the public becomes directly affected by the shutdown.

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So, let's review, shall we? Last weekend, seven million Americans took to the streets to protest Donald Trump, in the biggest political protest this country has ever seen. The theme of the protest was: "No Kings!" So this week, Trump responded by acting in what can only be described as kingly fashion, in as many ways as he could dream up -- including a rushed demolition of one-third of the White House, without consulting anyone or even attempting to get anyone's permission. He sent the demolition crews in, and within a few days the entire East Wing was nothing more than a pile of rubble. All because a royal decree had been issued.

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We are now entering Week 4 of the government shutdown, with no end in sight. There aren't any compromise solutions on the table, the two sides aren't even talking to each other in any noticeable way, and Donald Trump is getting ready for a weeklong trip outside the country. This has so far been the second-longest shutdown in American history, and it certainly looks like it is on track to top the record and become the longest.

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