Tuesday Night

Rock on.

Tuesday Night Ipecac

I apologize for this. Though it should be remembered that, despite the headline, Villagers saw this mostly as a strategic defense of Clinton. Also, too, Lieberman pushed a censure vote even after the impeachment trial failed to convict. Also, too, Gore/Lieberman '00.

Senator Joe Lieberman Attacks Clinton
September 3, 1998

Sen. Joe Lieberman (Democrat, Connecticut) today addressed his colleagues in the United States Senate with regard to President Clinton and the Independent Counsel's investigation.

Senator Joe Lieberman Mr. President, I rise today to make a most difficult and distasteful statement, for me probably the most difficult statement I have made on this floor in my ten years in the Senate.

On August 17th, President Clinton testified before a grand jury convened by the Independent Counsel and then talked to the American people about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. He told us that the relationship was "not appropriate," that it was "wrong," and that it was "a critical lapse of judgement and a personal failure" on his part. In addition, after seven months of denying that he had engaged in a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the President admitted that his "public comments. . . about this matter gave a false impression." He said, "I misled people."

My immediate reaction to this statement was deep disappointment and personal anger. I was disappointed because the President of the United States had just confessed to engaging in an extramarital affair with a young woman in his employ and to willfully deceiving the nation about his conduct. I was personally angry because President Clinton had by his disgraceful behavior jeopardized his Administration's historic record of accomplishment, much of which grew out of the principles and programs that he and I and many others had worked on together in the New Democratic movement. I was also angry because I was one of the many people who had said over the preceding seven months that if the President clearly and explicitly denies the allegations against him, then, of course, I believe him.

Since that Monday night, I have not commented on this matter publicly. I thought I had an obligation to consider the President's admissions more objectively, less personally, and to try to put them in a clearer perspective. And I felt I owed that much to President Clinton, for whom I have great affection and admiration, and who I truly believe has worked tirelessly to make life tangibly better in so many ways for so many Americans.

But the truth is, after much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated. Except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the President's conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency, and ultimately an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations.

The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly, and I can think of no more appropriate place to do so than the floor of this great body. I have chosen to speak particularly at this time, before the Independent Counsel files his report, because while we do not know enough to answer the question of whether there are legal consequences from the President's conduct, we do know enough to answer a separate and distinct set of questions about the moral consequences for our country.

I have come to this floor many times in the past to speak with my colleagues about my concerns, which are widely-held in this chamber and throughout the nation, that our society's standards are sinking, that our common moral code is deteriorating, and that our public life is coarsening. In doing so, I have specifically criticized leaders of the entertainment industry for the way they have used the enormous influence they wield to weaken our common values. And now because the President commands at least as much attention and exerts at least as much influence on our collective consciousness as any Hollywood celebrity or television show, it is hard to ignore the impact of the misconduct the President has admitted to on our children, our culture and our national character.

To begin with, I must respectfully disagree with the President's contention that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the way in which he misled us about it is "nobody's business but" his family's and that "even presidents have private lives," as he said Whether he or we as a people think it fair or not, the reality in 1998 is that a president's private life is public. Contemporary news media standards will have it no other way. Surely this President was given fair warning of that by the amount of time the news media has dedicated to investigating his personal life during the 1992 campaign and in the years since.

But there is more to this than modern media intrusiveness. The President is not just the elected leader of our country, he is, as presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter observed, "the one-man distillation of the American people," and "the personal embodiment and representative of their dignity and majesty," as President Taft once said. So when his personal conduct is embarrassing, it is so not just for him and his family. It is embarrassing for us all as Americans.

It's All Paul Krugman's Fault

Maybe he did say something like that, but I'm pretty sure Krugman's position has been something is better than nothing, so QEII is better than nothing, not that QEII or necessarily any realistic monetary policy would solve the problem... If administration officials are blaming him...

Regular Reminder

The economy sucks because the people who run this joint have failed.

Somebody On The Internet Is Wrong

Not true!

Clap Your Hand Say Yeah’s performance at the XPoNential Music Festival will be the band’s first Philly show since a sold-out show at the Starlight Ballroom in 2007.

They played a couple of shows at The Barbary in September '08.

A Nation Of Prudes

I agree that even as we've come along way in some sense about sex, that we've somewhat paradoxically become a more prudish nation, especially with respect to anything involving teenagers and sex.

What Is Wrong With These People

WTF?

The state director of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity offered no apologies today for papering homes in Detroit’s Delray district Monday with fake eviction notices.

Bearing the words “Eviction Notice” in large type, the bogus notices told homeowners their properties could be taken by the Michigan Department of Transportation to make way for the New International Trade Crossing bridge project. The NITC is the subject of debate in Lansing, and Americans for Prosperity is lobbying heavily against it.

Idiots

No you do not achieve growth through contraction in a recession, and shame on those idiot economists (a couple of whom I once knew) for endorsing it in the first place.

Didn't Anybody Do The Math

We all remember the glorious Recovery Summer, when the visible infrastructure projects from the stimulus were at their peak.

Of course if they were at their peak then...subsequently...they were declining. Anti-stimulus.

Surprising No One Who Sat Through The Last Election

Yes the Republicans will be attacking the Democrats from The Left.

Plan Path

Maybe reading too much into it, but just now talking about the economy Obama started say we need to have a plan, and then corrected himself and said we needed to have a path forward.

also, too, deficitanddebt.

In News That Will Surprise No One

The 2nd to last honest man in Washington (the last is Joe Lieberman) will now make more money doing the job he did while he was a senator.


One of my big pet peeves is politicians who express folksy affinity for their home states but who never ever return to them. I'm not talking about the inevitable moving the family to Washington that politicians have to do for practical reasons while they're in office, I'm talking about the ones who drone on about the joys of their states and their college football teams and blah blah blah but who somehow never manage to go back to them...

Making Things Up

Yes it's what they do.

Operation Ignore

As far as I can tell, that's the plan for unemployment.

Proved Fucking Right

I remember watching with horror as the deficit chatter started to pick up from the administration. I certainly hoped they were right that the jobs situation had turned around, but there wasn't any solid evidence for that view.

And now I worry that those people think they were proved fucking right, Judith Miller style.

Good Morning

Monday Night

Rock on.

More Evening Thread

Rock on

Evening Thread

Probably done for the day.

The Wenis

Finally a happy press corps.

Inflation Rocks

I think one of the early successes of the Right, and one not ever really beaten back by the Left, was to convince people that inflation is The Worst Thing Ever. For most of us, especially those of us with fixed nominal interest debt, (relatively modest) inflation is probably a good thing. In practice inflation doesn't necessarily mean pure inflation, with price level and wages rising simultaneously, so it makes sense that over relatively short periods of time people see the price of milk go up and feel the pinch, but probably an untold story of the inflationary period of the 70s was that a hell of a lot of people came out the other side quite well. Suddenly their houses were worth quite a bit, and their mortgage payments were trivial.

And, yes, absurdly anti-inflation policies are there for the banksters, not the rest of us.

Galtian Overlord Job Creators, You're Our Only Hope

And, apparently, hope in them is the plan.

I had forgotten that the administration predicted things would be really bad for a really long time, though at the time I assumed they were setting a low bar so that they could claim victory if they managed to leap over it.

Chuck Toddler twitters:

Obama admin lays down unemployment rate markers: by end '10, will be below 10%, by end of '11, below 9% and by end of '12, just below 8%

If that's what they believe, Jeebus. When they passed the stimulus a year ago they projected that without the stimulus unemployment would drop below 6% by the end of 2012.

This is bad.

Afternoon Thread

enjoy

Just One More FU

From some politico email:

And yet, commanders throughout the theater are convinced that they are making progress – so convinced, in facts, that they worry Washington’s war fatigue will provoke a drawdown massive enough to undermine gains that have been made since Obama began his Afghan surge last year. “In the next six months, … it’s either going to stick, or it’s going to go backwards,” Lt. Col. Clay Padgett, 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, said at a lunchtime roundtable with the colonel. “We want to push it over the edge, where it turns into an irreversible gain.”

And in six months?

I know the answer...

It's The Latest Hit The Crazy Kids Are All Dancing To

Doing the growth, everybody moving from side to side... Doing the growth...

Goolsbee:

So the -- we have shifted in the economy from a rescue phase, which is government-directed, to a phase in which government policies have got -- we've got to rely on government policies that are trying to leverage the private sector and give incentives to the private sector to be doing the growth.

We're doomed.

Wakey, Wakey

We Want Blood

Music from The Mighty Stef, my most favorite artiste, who is indeed mighty. He's Irish, so this vid is about Irish grievances, but I think the sentiment is pretty fucking universal.

A very Eschatonian anthem.

When Is A Recovery Not A Recovery?

For most people the answer to that one would be when it is jobless. But the term "jobless recovery" is routinely used, even though it made White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee mad on the teebee.

So what is it that is "recovered" in a "jobless recovery?" Hmm. Could it be corporate profits?

This graph shows how they looked in the last quarter of 2010 when compared to the pre-recession data from 2007.

Have a look at those financial sector profits. Perhaps this recovery is jobless but it doesn't look to be profitless.

Happy Hour Thread

Enjoy

Ketchup Is a Vegetable. Remember Reagan?

Way back in 1981, the Reagan administration wanted ketchup and pickles to be counted as servings of healthy vegetables in hot school lunches, not as condiments. The reason was not bad culinary appreciation but money: Schools could have cut out a helping of real vegetables in subsidized meals for low-income children and saved money for the government. The proposal remained just a proposal, mostly because nutritionists pointed out that it was a stupid proposal, costing more in the long-run in medical expenses than it saved in the short-run.

But Republicans have not stopped trying to save money in similar ways. An example:

On Tuesday, the GOP majority on the House Appropriations Committee approved a 2012 spending plan that directs the Agriculture Department to ditch the first new nutritional standards in 15 years proposed for school breakfasts and lunches. The lawmakers say meals containing more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy will cost an additional $7 billion over five years — money they say the country can ill afford in difficult economic times.

Hunter at Daily Kos has collected a bunch of these proposals together.

The proposed $830 million cuts of the WIC program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, struck me as especially short-sighted, because the program is very effective, and cruel, because it serves a vulnerable group with few alternatives. Besides, it improves the health of at-risk pregnant women. To decrease that support while preaching an anti-abortion ideology is hypocritical.

But there are other ways that those cuts would stink:

The deal struck last December to extend the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush gave the average millionaire a tax break of $139,199 for 2011, according to the Tax Policy Center, or nearly $2,700 per week. Given that about 321,000 households reported incomes of more than $1 million in the most recent year for which there are data from the Internal Revenue Service, that means the Bush tax cuts provide millionaires with about $860 million in tax breaks every week—more than enough to stave off the $833 million in proposed cuts to WIC.

Afternoon Thread

Nice day to visit the park or watch a ballgame.

More Thread

This article by Yves at Naked Capitalism explains the Sinclair quote

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

Well worth a read. Also explains why all of a sudden preserving Social Security has become an item on the agenda of the extreme far left, even when over 70% of the population agrees with the DFHs. All the serious people agree, Social Security must be gutted.

Wakey, Wakey

Evening Thread

With music: tralalah

What Digby Said

The wingnut Freedom and Faith conference includes such dignitaries as James O'Keefe and Ralph Reed.

Digby:

Old corporate sponsored GOP operatives never die, they just lay low for a little while and let media amnesia do its work.

Still Away

Something happened.

Afternoon Thread

Today's Economics Lesson

Is the rinse-repeat one Atrios reminds us of so often.

This time it comes from Robert Kuttner:

Lately, the media and the Washington hothouse have been busy debating deficit reduction. Those are the wrong debates. Deficit reduction does nothing for job growth, and is economically perverse at this stage of a weak recovery.

Yup. The overall May 2011 unemployment rate still hovered around 9% and the rates for African Americans (16.2%) and Latinos (11.9%) were even higher, not to mention the youth unemployment rate (24.2%). But guess what the most relevant rate for those Washington insiders themselves might be? Probably the rate for individuals over 25 with at least a bachelor's degree.

Now that was a relatively puny 4.5% in May. Which explains why the Village can concentrate on worrying about the deficits.

Musical interlude

I liked this so much I have had to listen to it 12 more times.

Oh, and good morning. It's actually sunny and warm in London.

Signed,
Not Atrios

Roentgen

Always hard to know. Asbestos? Or Alar?

Cellphone radiation by model

via Yves

Andrew Breitbart, Ethical Paragon

Tommy Christopher is telling us that Breitbart is chock full of integrity in the whole Weinergate idiocy.

Why? Because even though Breitbart knew that the whole thing is based wholly on a Tweet that only one person in the whole world on Twitter saw, and that one person, as Breitbart knew perfectly well, is an obsessed psycho who with his pals has been stalking high school students in order to manufacture dirt on Weiner, never mentioned the high school girls' names.

That is a pretty fucking low bar. Breitbart gleefully ran with this shit, and his single source was and is an obsessed loon who stalks high school girls. Whose names would have obviously become widespread after Breitbart ran with this shit.

Overnight: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

I swear.

Friday Cats Thread

Late Happy Hour Thread

Rick Scott, the Pro-Life Governor of Florida

My, what a busy beaver he is! In just the last few weeks he has managed to turn large chunks of the Medicaid system to for-profit health care providers:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed two historic Medicaid bills Thursday, placing the health care of nearly 3 million Florida residents into the hands of for-profit companies and hospital networks.
Lawmakers said the program was overwhelming the state budget and needed to be privatized to rein in costs and improve patient care. Critics fear the bills build on a flawed five-county experiment where patients struggled to access specialists and doctors complained the treatments they prescribed were frequently denied.

Medicaid is the program which funds health care for certain low-income groups. But it also funds the majority of nursing-home care for the frail elderly.

But wait! There is more! Rick Scott also signed into law new abortion restrictions:

House Bill 97 removes coverage for abortions in health care insurance exchanges created by federal health care reform. The law provides exceptions for cases of rape, incest and a threat to the woman’s life.

AND he cut funding for the care of at-risk infants. I'm not kidding you:

Last week, Gov. Rick Scott signed the state’s budget, which proposed reductions to health services for women and children. He also vetoed millions more in health service projects set aside specifically for women and children. Programs that aim to lower infant mortality and increase women’s health in the state have seen a major setback since Scott took office.
Among the many vetoes from last week: a program that would add a test for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease, or SCID, to the list of genetic diseases newborns are tested for in Florida.

There you go! Unborn children are valuable but once they are born children Rick Scott does not care. Neither does he care about the elderly or the poor.

Afternoon Thread

Chew on it.

Away

Don't think I'll be able to do this for a few days.

When We Replace The Marines With A Pizza, We Will Call The Pizza The Marines

That's basically what the Republicans, aided by the Villagers, are trying to do with Medicare.

Not Sticky Enough

I actually don't think there are substantial enough network effects in the online coupon business, and think unless GroupOn (and similar companies) figure out how to make their offering more sticky, they'll all face plenty of endless competition. Nothing wrong with that, but I just don't see how they corner the market.

Pivot

It's a nice idea, but I do not think it is likely that the administration will pivot back to jobs. Hope is the plan.

Anti-Stimulus

I was hunting for this information earlier. The point is that as the stimulus winds down, it actually becomes anti-stimulus. That would be fine if the economy was roaring. But it's, you know, not.

Bring Back That Panic Feeling

I was reading through a few of my posts from 2009 about housing and the economy and I was reminded of the perfectly appropriate sense of panic that existed then, not just in dirty hippies like me but from basically everyone. There were tremendous problems, people were trying (not necessarily in the right ways) to solve them. It was the job of the government to do that.

And then... calm.

Going Forward

Let's hope politicians and the media remain focused on abstract concepts that have no direct impact on our lives.

Must...not...mention...recovery...summer...

In Seven More Months

CR's going to have to make the graph bigger.

Monthly Jobs Report

+54K total jobs, including -29K public sector jobs. AUSTERITY NOW AND FOREVER BITCHES. Unemployment increases to 9.1%. Emp-pop unchanged.

So, uh, not good news.

Don't Forget The Sternly Worded Letter

It must be part of any settlement agreement.

Shorter Krugman

First Draft.

Evening Thread

Rock on

The Gift, The Blessing, Or The Curse

Actual nutter or just grifter? Who knows.

Happy Hour Thread

Enjoy.

An Inqy commenter to this article.*

My Dad got us out of South Philly in 1965 because he had to walk 4 blocks in the rain for a parking space. We moved to South Jersey with a 150' driveway and a large garage and only came back for weddings and funerals.

And while that's the kind of sentiment which makes me giggle, there's nothing wrong with it. Back in 1965 there probably was a starker, simpler choice between urban and suburban living, for people for whom parking was a priority, the suburbs won. But it also is a reminder that per capita auto ownership increased over time, that for awhile parking in South Philly probably wasn't as much of a problem, not until they started creeping towards the one-car-per-driving-age-household-member standard. The point being, dense cities are compatible with cars, just not too many of them.


*The Inqy is apparently experimenting with moving comments from articles which will be, uh, controversial, to facebook in hopes that it restrains people. Nope.

Fixed

Last 20 email subject headers from Chris Cillizza's The Fix.

Mitt Romney channels Ronald Reagan
Fast Fix: Mitt Romney is in (VIDEO)
Mitt Romney's announcement speech: It's the economy, stupid
Afternoon Fix: Sarah Palin goes to Fox News
Anthony Weiner: Can't say with certitude lewd image isn't me
Many Republicans "not impressed" with Republican field
Jim DeMint again says no to presidential race
Newt Gingrich: Assessing the damage done
Afternoon Fix: Ohio auditor endorses Pawlenty
Mitt Romney's health care "problem"
Morning Fix: The unorthodoxy of Sarah Palin
Monday Fix: Republican presidential contenders? first real test begins on Memorial Day
Live Fix Chat: Palin, Palin, and more Palin (also some NY-26 and other 2012 handicappings)
Worst Week in Washington winner is... [Paul Ryan]
Rick Perry opens the door to 2012 bid (and the rest of the top 10 contenders)
Fast Fix: Is Sarah Palin back? (Video)
Morning Fix: Mitt Romney's New Hampshire moment
Sarah Palin (still) not playing in early states
Morning Fix: Medicare: the new third Rail of American politics?
Afternoon Fix: Bill Clinton tells Paul Ryan to call him

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

Often I think like the Villagers only have a few scripts that they keep running through over and over again. The ZOMG WE HAVE TO DESTROY MEDICARE TO SAVE IT and WHERE'S YOUR PLAN? HUH? HUH? stuff is just the same as it was when Bush was trying to destroy Social Security.

Medicare is cheap, it's our health care system that's expensive.

Deep Thought

I haven't heard the term "green shoots" in awhile.

And There Was Much Rejoicing Throughout the Land

And real time bus information is now available through my local transit authority. Even better, they're going to release an API so everyone can write their own apps for it.

It's not all that important for high frequency lines at peak periods. If buses are coming roughly every 10 minutes the wait is never that big of a deal. But for lower frequency routes, especially at non-peak times, it'll make a huge difference. It will be much easier to answer that "cab or bus" question later in the evening.

When There's Nothing Left To Burn, Set Yourself On Fire

I'm sure it will work this time. No, really. Shut up hippies!

Greece agreed with its EU and IMF lenders to impose yet deeper austerity, a senior official said on Thursday, as unease grew in the ruling party that the government will try to speed the package through parliament undebated.

Should

There was a lot the administration could have done with the blessing of President Snowe. There's probably less of that going forward, though there are things they could do. But more than that, I have no idea what the administration (Obama, Treasury, others, whoever) thinks they should do. I know what they didn't think they should do - cramdown, a HAMP that actually did what they initially claimed, aggressively prosecute mortgage fraud - because they aren't doing those things. I don't know if there's anything they would like to do that they are being stopped from doing. A discussion of what they could do is ultimately a discussion of "why the hell aren't they doing it?" And the answer, presumably, is because they don't want to.

Kids

It'd be nice if, every now and then, we could move past the political coverage in which policy positions are basically allegiances to a certain team in the culture war. That is, there's no sense that the policies matter, it's simply a way for politicians to declare whether they're mods or rockers, hippies or squares.

In that world, someone would ask Sarah Palin and many other politicians, "What do you think should happen to people whose parents brought them here when they were infants and who have been here for 20 years?"

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

422K new lucky duckies.

Not good news.

Meanwhile,

The assault against women's reproductive rights continues apace.

Amanda is doing amazing work.

Random Question

Why doesn't PBS do American Playhouse anymore?

Wednesday Night

enjoy

You Aren't The World

This won't happen.

“There is one bet right now: Bernanke will bail out the world,” said Brian Kelly of Brian Kelly Capital. “If that does not happen, then no investment will be safe.”

Bernanke won't bail out the world. He might bail out certain extra large financial institutions, including foreign ones, and the people they employ at absurdly inflated salaries. He might bail out the investors in certain classes of financial assets. The rest of us, not so much.

Patent Wars

I used to think that enough big players would eventually get tired enough of the perpetual lawsuits that they'd figure out how to implement some sort of legal truce, but I guess that's not likely to happen. Yes, as with most things, the system mostly benefits big players relative to the little guys, but the big players also spend their days taking each other to court.

Maybe They'll Even Let Emptywheel Back On The Teeve

Once she comes up with an appropriate euphemism for "blowjob" anyway.

thought it already was a euphemism?

Penis, Penis, Penis

They just luv saying that on TV.

Next will be erect and hard-on won't be far behind.

Afternoon Thread

enjoy

Obama Is Truly Special

Though exactly how is that the case?

We Do It For You

As a religious freedom supporting atheist, I'm constantly annoyed at the failure of religious people to understand that doing things like teaching religion in schools or having school officials lead prayers are, in practice, more like to genuinely offend them than me. I know we're in this ecumenical Christian "don't talk about any actual theological or doctrinal differences" world, but the fact is different Christians believe different stuff, like different prayers, and have different traditions and practices, even within relatively homogeneous communities.

The System Is Blinking Red

We are probably close to panic time, though I don't expect the powers that be to panic.

Jobs

Monthly report comes out Friday, ADP estimate of private sector jobs is... +38K. That doesn't include public sector jobs, which will most likely be negative.

So, uh, not good news.

Walking (?????????)

Who amongst us does not need to be driven 100 yards?

Morning Thread