Open Thread, Nov. 9: Equal Pay, Elections and Halladay’s Plane

Stories searching for lessons in Tuesday’s election litter the ground like autumn leaves, and I’ll be damned if I rake them all up. A couple of them are worth your time, though.

Joan Walsh at The Nation does the best job of pinpointing the reason for the surprising down-ballot wins in Virginia: “This year Democrats ran 54 challengers against GOP incumbents, up from only 21 in 2015.”

On the other hand, Mark Joseph Stern corrects the idea that Democrats overcame Virginia’s notorious gerrymander by nearly winning the legislature. On the contrary, he argues, if a 9-point win produces only a 50-50 House, the gerrymander did its job.

Turns out there’s more to the tragic Roy Halladay story. The plane the retired Phillies pitcher was flying is basically the Ski-Doo of the Sky — you don’t need a full pilots license to fly it, and experts think it’s unsafe. You can’t yell at the designer — he was killed flying one in May.

Donald Trump’s genius for deal-making was on display when he called a dozen Democrats in the Senate and asked them to support the GOP’s tax giveaway to the rich. It went even worse than you’d expect; his big selling point to them was that he would lose money under this plan, as if they gave a flying fuck. He really does seem to think all opposition to anything he wants is personal. For me, as a grandfather of toddlers, the behavior is all too familiar.

Kennett Square, Pa., has undergone a remarkable renaissance in the past decade, underpinned by a major employer in Genesis Healthcare. That makes the firm’s latest earnings report, in which it took a $532 million write-down and warned of possible bankruptcy, an ominous story.

With every day bringing new sexual misconduct allegations against actors and politicians, I thought it might be a welcome relief to read about an actress who fought against inequality and won: Emmy Rossum of “Shameless,” who asked for, and got, a salary equal to co-star William H. Macy.

Finally, back to the election, which Josh Marshall takes as evidence that maybe the laws of political gravity that Trump defies have not been overturned.