Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) is shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that gambling is going on at JPMorgan, and that this gambling led to a multibillion-dollar loss on a "hedge" that was actually something that looks a lot more like an insane and irresponsible bet. But Shelby has nothing bad to say about JPMorgan. Rather, he's hopping mad at the inability of government regulators to keep sufficient watch after he and his party made sure their hands were tied in the first place.

Over at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank deftly allows this scene to unfold. Here's Act One:

"When did you first learn about these trades?" Shelby inquired.

Gary Gensler, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, admitted that he had learned about them from press reports.

"Press reports!" Shelby echoed, with mock surprise. He smiled. "Were you in the dark?"

Gensler tried to explain that his agency does not yet have authority to regulate the bank, but Shelby interrupted. "So you really didn't know what was going on ... until you read the press reports like the rest of us?" he asked again.

"That's what I've said," Gensler repeated.

But Shelby wanted him to keep saying it. "You didn't know there was a problem there until you read the press reports?"

And here's the comical revelation from Act Two:

It's true that Dodd-Frank, the legislation responding to the 2008 economic collapse, hasn't worked -- because it hasn't been put in place. At the heart of the proposed reforms is the "Volcker rule," named for a former Federal Reserve chairman, which attempts to separate banks' gambling from their government-backed deposits. This mimics the situation before the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law was repealed in 1999.

...

Now industry-friendly lawmakers are using the scandal to discredit never-implemented regulations.

Hilarious. Clearly, the regulations -- that have not been implemented yet because Shelby and his colleagues have moved heaven and earth to block or degrade them -- are to blame here. Clearly, this has nothing at all to do with the way that Shelby's House colleagues have cut so much from the budgets of financial sector regulators that they're too hamstrung to do the work they were doing before Dodd-Frank was even conceived. (As Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) remarked back in July 2011, the underfunding was such that regulators "can't even carry out some of [their old duties]," let alone any new ones.)

All this little bit of farce needs now is for the croupier to wander by and hand Shelby his winnings. Unfortunately for the scenic structure, Shelby got himself sorted out in that regard before this play even began. As Milbank notes, "JPMorgan Chase and its employees have given" Shelby $72,950 in the past five years.

READ THE WHOLE THING
Senators put federal regulators, not JPMorgan, on the hot seat [Washington Post]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

The Washington Free Beacon -- which, if you don't happen to be playing the home game version of Washington's blog soap opera, was conceived of as a conservative counterweight to Think Progress -- has a massive scooplet today about a woman named Stacii Jae Johnson.

Who on earth is Stacii Jae Johnson? Well, from what I read, she is a "major Obama campaign fundraiser" who works for the mayor of Atlanta and "has bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for the Obama reelection campaign." This, strictly speaking, means that she is actually a very run-of-the-mill Obama fundraiser (the top bundlers work in the millions of dollars range). She is also something of a run-of-the-mill actress, having parlayed her position as Martin Lawrence's receptionist into a role in "The Thin Line Between Love and Hate," and Bill Bellamy's "How To Be A Player."

But there is a twist, according to the Free Beacon's Andrew Stiles:

Her 2004 film “I Want To Strip For My Man” is currently available, in very limited quantities, on Amazon.com, and has been obtained and viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Oh, well, of course it has.

Yes, as it turns out, Johnson produced an instructional video about striptease, which is why this tertiary figure in the world of entertainment and politics has drawn the prurient interest of Stiles, who has all kinds of problems with her, for reasons he never specifies, despite having studied this particular video (one of many you can obtain in this oeuvre) with a vulpine relentlessness. For multiple paragraphs, he describes the "plot" of this video, which is a pretty generic mashup of pro-sex sentiment, self help-style confidence building, and instruction on how to do various striptease "moves." (They actually teach some of this stuff at gyms, now.)

What follows from there is about 500 more words that repeatedly leave the reader saying, "Yeah, and?" "Johnson is reportedly about to assume a new position as commissioner of Atlanta’s new Office of Film, Television, Music and Digital Media Development." Yeah, and? "Johnson has been active in politics over the past several years." Yeah, and? "Johnson has attended at least one event with Obama, as evidenced by a photo with the president posted to her Instagram account on April 16, 2012." Yeah, and?

SPOILER ALERT: I'm not sure that you ever actually get to the part that comes after the "and," but I think this is the punchline:

It is unclear whether the Obama campaign was aware of the existence of “I Want To Strip For My Man” before accepting donations raised by Johnson.

No, it's actually unclear why that's important!

Look, I get the joke here. Stiles is of the mind that what Johnson has done with her life in this instance is wrong or immoral somehow, and that this in some way taints the Obama campaign. When it comes to dubious Obama bundlers, though, you can do better. How about Brooklyn's Abake Assongba, who raised money in the same run-of-the-mill range for the president (and many others), and who's been accused of fraud. That's a stronger intersection with a more newsworthy sort of corruption. (Mitt Romney, by the way, does not disclose the identity of his bundlers. The Obama campaign's efforts to expose Romney's donors has led to an ample amount of pearl-clutching on its own.)

Of course, there's nothing in the Assongba story that allows you to watch a hot lady show you how to booty clap, so, you know, you don't get the same awesome chance to do some half-way "slut-shaming." And to be frank, that's the other disappointment with this Free Beacon story. It's so obviously Pecksniffy about downmarket "urban" cinema, pro-sex women in general and this particular woman's aspiration to be involved in the civic life of her community, but it refuses to actually get up the guts to just come out and say so. This is just some pointy-headed judgment being cast from the far side of the room; it never comes out and says, "This is wrong." (It's possible that I have now unwittingly walked into the "Schrödinger's catfight" trap.)

But seriously, just own it, Free Beacon.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

I'm typically a big fan of Molly Ball's work for the Atlantic. But I'm afraid that in explicating this week's private equity-Bain Capital brouhaha that spiraled into a internecine bit of mixed-messaging spatter between the White House and Newark Mayor Cory Booker -- gripping the fluttery hearts of many inside the Beltway -- she fell into a trap. At issue here is the Obama campaign and whether its negativity is "new."

Many a requiem has been written for "that hopey-changey thing," as Sarah Palin so memorably dubbed it. And to be sure, much of the griping about the president's harsh tone is the disingenuous phony outrage of Republicans who would prefer not to be its targets. But as Obama embarks in earnest on his second presidential campaign, deliberately invoking the echoes of 2008 as he does so, the contrast with his old image is especially stark.

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career.

Are President Barack Obama and his campaign taking a "harsh tone?" A "brutal, no-holds-barred approach?" Oh, yes! But we turn, once again, to John Sides, who predicted in October that we'd soon be inundated with stories about this harshness and brutality, and warned that there would be some widespread 2008 amnesia:

Here’s a fun little quiz. What percentage of Obama’s television advertising during the 2008 campaign included an attack on John McCain? Well above 50%, according to research by the Wisconsin Advertising Project (pdf). And what percentage of statements by Obama or Obama spokespeople that were reported in the New York Times contained attacks on McCain? About 40%, according to the the book Attack Politics by Emmett Buell and my former colleague and Monkey Cage contributor Lee Sigelman. (The comparable figure for McCain was 50%.) Now, according to Buell and Sigelman’s data, Obama’s campaign was less negative than many other past presidential campaigns, but it was hardly just hopey-changey.

Some commentators seem to assume or imply that Obama’s 2008 message of unity and bipartisanship meant that he didn’t “go negative” in the heat of that campaign. He did. And he will.

Not judging anyone! (Where would I be, after all, without the big, loud, stupid cruelty of American politics?) These are just facts. As Mitt Romney says, "Politics ain't beanbag." (Actually, Mitt Romney is better known for trying to say that and failing all the time, probably because his robot firmware is overclocking or something.)

Ball wrote: "These days, the Obama campaign distributes harshly critical research memos as a matter of course." The words "these days" are totally unnecessary!

At the risk of repeating myself, I think that the takeaway here is that promising to usher in some "new" and "conciliatory" era of politics is just a stupid promise to make, and hopefully, no one will be dumb enough to attempt it for a good long while.

Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?

The New York Times' Jeremy Peters reports that the new Crossroads GPS ad "Basketball" is set to "become one of the most heavily broadcast political commercials of this phase of the general election."

It's already one of the most heavily written about political commercials of this phase of the general election, thanks to Peters and the Times, who provide a 1,200 word exegesis on the creation of the ad, alongside an "Anatomy of" feature that explains to readers what they are seeing as they watch the one-minute spot. All of which is fairly surprising given the fact that the ad -- as acknowledged right up front -- isn't exactly that hard-hitting.

In fact, Crossroads' last ad, entitled "Obama's Promise" and released just six days ago, was made of much sterner stuff. But that ad received only a passing mention in an earlier article by Peters. In that piece, he wrote that Crossroads was helping to launch what would perhaps become "an unusually heavy and vicious air war as outside political groups assume a larger role than ever."

But last week's political theses are so seven days ago!

By contrast, the new ad is almost painfully generic. While it carries some dramatic touches -- it includes the "morphing" effect that was considered to be cutting edge back in 1991, when Pacific Data Images created it for Michael Jackson's video for "Black or White" -- its message boils down to the same fears about rising debt that Beltway hacks have sounded off about for years, only with much less hysteria. The ad even does that outside-group issue ad trick at the end where it just encourages viewers to lobby the White House to a different point of view, as if Crossroads would somehow get out of the anti-Obama game if tweaks were made to his policy initiatives.

The new, "subtle" ad was created by perennial bloody-shirt waver Karl Rove and Larry "I made the Willie Horton ad" McCarthy. But the message that Rove and the Crossroads Crew apparently want to convey, at this time, is that they aren't ready to be pointlessly brutal with their election ads. Not really! Or, at least not yet. Please just ignore the previous reports of their "hard-hitting ad" that ran in the same newspaper, a week ago.

Today, the Times allows the people behind Crossroads to retrench themselves as "subtler" provocateurs. They explain how contemporary polling and focus group research reveals that President Barack Obama is well-liked, if not well-approved, and that this cautions against tossing the high, hard stuff that they were tossing six days ago, but whatever, forget all that:

Middle-of-the-road voters who said they thought the country was on the wrong track were unmoved when they heard arguments that the president lacks integrity. And they did not buy assertions that he is a rabid partisan with a radical liberal agenda that is wrecking America.

"They are not interested in being told they made a horrible mistake," said Steven J. Law, president of Crossroads GPS and the affiliated "super PAC," American Crossroads. "The disappointment they're now experiencing has to be handled carefully."

All of this work pointed to a path forward: tap into the generic feelings about being let down by what's happened in the Obama presidency (and obviously, eliding over the broken economy it was tasked with rebuilding from scratch) without being -- you know -- mean about it. In this way, Crossroads mirrors the message that comes out of the Romney campaign (on most days) -- that the president is a nice guy who is in over his head. (Of course there's no way that Crossroads and the Romney campaign are coordinating, because that would be soooo illegal!)

In the end, we have what's described as a "hard truth wrapped in soft packaging," which isn't what anyone expected when Karl Rove got his hands on millions of dollars to indulge his political id. That said, let's remember something: Karl Rove has millions of dollars to indulge his political id. So while we may be in this weird period of focus-group recommended restraint, don't expect the restraint to continue.

There are reasons for this. First, it's an article of faith among a large portion of the GOP base that Sen. John McCain lost in 2008 because he wasn't willing to throw heat at Obama and turn the month of October into an all-Jeremiah-Wright-all-the-time sick-a-doo fiesta. Last week's revelation of a proposed ad campaign to do just that served as a reminder that there are plenty of people with money to burn who've a yen to fight the 2012 battle from the gutter. (This Crossroads ad, and the access the group gave the Times, does a nice job of washing away the nastiness of last week's big super PAC story, doesn't it?) And if Republicans are reminded too much of McCain's perceived failures as they watch Romney prosecute the Obama administration in a too-gentle fashion, they could end up discouraged.

Beyond that, though, this particular period of the election season isn't particularly good for the bean-balls, as most of the electorate is largely tuning out ahead of the fall campaign. Sure, the conventional wisdom is that now is the critical time where candidates fight to define their opponents, but as Brendan Nyhan observed last week while sizing up Team Obama Reelect's efforts to "define" Romney, the conventional wisdom is wrong:

More generally, reporters should refrain from overstating the importance they place on early-stage campaign squabbles. According to [political scientists Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson], the real action comes in the final 100 days, which is when campaign shocks start to "persist to affect the outcome of Election Day" (typically in the direction we would expect given the state of the economy).

Naturally, Nyhan points back to the earlier Jeremy Peters story that mentioned Crossroads' earlier ad, in which Peters describes the existence of broad "concerns" that money invested in political ads at this stage in the game "will be wasted on people who are not paying much attention five and a half months before Election Day." Hmmm. Maybe Jeremy Peters should read more stories by this Jeremy Peters fellow!

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

John Derbyshire, who was recently kicked out of the National Review's community of deep thinkers because his overt racism had finally become somewhat embarrassing for them, has swum back to VDARE, where his white-supremacist leanings are encouraged. He quickly made himself comfortable, publishing a post in which he opined that: "White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with."

Well, Derbyshire's column managed successfully to troll the Internet, as one might expect. And so he returns today with a new claim: African Americans totally agree with him!

Derbyshire writes: "Ninety-nine point five something percent [of freed black slaves] preferred white supremacy." What the what? This the what:

The gentle Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, closed out Uncle Tom's Cabin with an appeal, grounded in Christian charity, for freed blacks to be educated and trained ... so that they would be better able to survive in Liberia!

[...]

Abraham Lincoln was keen to help blacks escape white supremacy, too. In August 1862 he invited a delegation of free blacks to the White House ... in order to urge them to leave America.

[...]

But with all this opportunity and encouragement, how many freed blacks actually chose to escape from under the iron heel of white supremacy? Most sources give 15,000-20,000 -- out of a Civil War-era black population of around four million. That's less than half of one percent. Ninety-nine point five something percent preferred white supremacy. That's an even bigger proportion than voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

Yes, it's a rough admixture of statistical hooey and blather about history, founded mainly on a crackpot invocation of John Locke: "On the John Locke principle, though -- i.e. 'I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts' -- the overwhelming majority of black Americans agree with me, and always have."

Let's remember that "agree with me" entails an "overwhelming majority of black Americans" who would choose 'Would like to be dominated forever by white supremacists' over 'Would like to drag myself all the way to Africa after my blood and tears paid for this entire country in which I currently live,' on a list of precisely those two choices.

Of course, it is true that black slaves were heartily encouraged to resettle in Liberia. However, those who advocated the most strongly for a Liberian settlement -- primarily Christian organizations and "colonization societies" -- presented that option as a specific "alternative to [the emancipation of] slaves in America."

The issue of whether the emancipation of enslaved African Americans was necessary during the nineteenth century played a crucial role in the development of beliefs in certain groups, such as the American Colonization Society and the Pennsylvania Colonization Society. The American Colonization Society, the Pennsylvania Colonization Society, and the Christian Register advocated that the sending of freed slaves would be beneficial to enslaved African Americans. However, after reanalyzing the efforts of pro-colonization societies and publication, historians of the 21st century have come to understand that colonization was in response to the threat of freed African Americans if emancipation legislation was passed in the United States.

In short, these organizations were deaf to the actual desires of these slaves, which was to live as free men and women in America. Abolitionists, on the other hand, were actively working to "[discredit] the efforts of colonization societies by arguing reports from Liberia were deplorable" and "treacherous," and abolitionists proved capable of "discrediting the ideologies of colonization societies because it was based on the belief of negrophobia" and the "fear of how African Americans would respond if they were finally emancipated from slavery."

So, if the "actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts," it's pretty clear that blacks actively chose to become free American men and women, at the urgings of abolitionists who warned them that colonizing Liberia would be a dangerously stupid thing to do.

As it turns out, they were right. The Amero-Liberians who settled Africa's Pepper Coast were put in a state of control and codependence on the U.S. government anyway, and for years the relationship between the United States and Liberia was primarily maintained so that the Firestone Tire and Rubber Corporation could exploit the African nation's rubber resources in what essentially amounted to a return to plantation-style economic indentureship. The Amero-Liberians thus ended up where they began.

So the options that Derbyshire is offering are what is known as a "false choice." Nice try, though!

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

Earlier this week, BuzzFeed's Zeke Miller obtained a hard copy of a letter from the conservative nonprofit group Citizens United, signed by sometime presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in which Huckabee complained that President Barack Obama had "surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics." I actually remember a time when Obama was thusly surrounded -- it was at an event called the "State Of The Union Address." But this is apparently not the occasion to which this letter referred, and, as such, it caused a predictable stir.

Well, Huckabee wants you to know that he totally did not approve of this letter. Per Dylan Byers:

Mike Huckabee is firmly denying that he approved a fundraising letter which refers to President Obama's advisers as "morally repugnant political whores."

"This was a complete surprise to me," Gov. Huckabee said in a statement to POLITICO, sent via a representative. "I most certainly did not approve such language and would never have used that kind of repulsive rhetoric. I repudiate that language, find it offensive to me, and have ordered that it be pulled immediately."

Indeed, there is language that Huckabee does not want to be associated with and tactics to which he shall not cotton. This was all made abundantly clear in the 2008 presidential news cycle, when he called a press conference to explain how upset he was about his campaign's attack ad on Mitt Romney's dishonesty, because "that's not the way we want to run." And then he showed the ad to reporters, gave them each a copy, and presented them with a "dossier" of information underpinning the ad. Heh-heh. But the important thing is that Huckabee was not going to run the ad, no sir! (The ad subsequently ran.)

At any rate, Byers goes on to report that a spokesman for Citizens United says that no one approved the language in the mailer, and that it was just "sent out as a test." You know, like, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet morally repugnant political whores, etc."

READ THE WHOLE THING:
Huckabee demands fundraising letter pulled [Politico]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

Presented without comment, here is the report from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Replying to a Chester County constituent's email regarding Middle East tensions, [U.S. Representative Joe] Pitts (R-Pa.) wrote on April 20 that "it is now incumbent on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat" to hunker down at the negotiating table.

Problem is, Arafat died in 2004. And Sharon, no longer Israel's leader, has lain in a coma-like state since a massive stroke in 2006.

Pitts, whose district stretches from western Chester County into Lancaster and Berks Counties, was belatedly answering an email sent to his office the previous April objecting to House Resolution 268, which, among other things, opposed any attempt to seek recognition of a Palestinian state outside a negotiated agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

A Pitts spokesman said an outdated form letter was sent by accident. Hi-jinks ensued.

[h/t: Officials Say the Darndest Things]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

I have given this post the headline "Senate Unanimously Rejects A Budget Offered By Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)" at the suggestion of Michael Brendan Dougherty of Business Insider, who correctly notes that the news cycle is going to remember this bit of legislative maneuvering very differently, and characterize it as a defeat for some "Obama Budget." As Dougherty correctly reports:

Just as they did in March in the House of Representatives, Republicans forced a vote on a bill that was supposed to resemble the president's budget, but wasn't actually the president's budget. A Republican Senator submitted it, and called for the vote.

This vote, on a Potemkin "Obama Budget," is not intended to be taken seriously. It's a stunt designed to get a slag into the newscycle, and they tend to work. What happens is a Republican legislator presents a "budget proposal" that's designed to be a satirical presentation of an "Obama budget." Democrats don't vote for it, because they recognize that it bears no resemblance to their budgetary preferences. Back in March, it was Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) who got the Harlequin role in this bit of legislative commedia dell'arte. As Dave Weigel reported at the time, Mulvaney presented the pretend Obama budget with a knowing wink:

"It's not a gimmick unless what the President sent us is the same," Mulvaney snarked. "We are voting on the President's budget. I would encourage the Democrats to embrace this landmark Democrat document and support it." (Calling a Democratic effort a "Democrat" effort is a minor swipe.)

As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi succinctly explained at the time, "It was a caricature of the president's budget, so we voted against it."

This is all stuff that should be pretty easy for adults to penetrate and demystify. But how many times are we going to hear about the "Obama budget's" ignominious defeat in the Senate on this weekend's Sunday talk shows? I'm going to guess: "many times."

UPDATE, 7:53pm: As you might imagine, those on the other side counter this interpretation. Sessions, from the floor today, offered, “If any senator wants to come forward and show any number that we put there that’s different than the President’s numbers when he laid out his budget, then I’d like to see it. Maybe we could correct it, but I don’t think there’s an error.”

And indeed, the "budget" that was presented was derived from the figures and appropriations pulled from a narrative form of the budget. What Sessions introduced today made a glancing reference to this in the text of the bill: "setting forth the President’s budget request for the United States Government for fiscal year 2013, and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2014 through 2022.”

Finally, here's a quote we received from Sessions' communication director, Stephen Miller:

“The White House is understandably desperate to minimize the astonishing repudiation of the President’s financial vision. What the Senate voted on today was not an interpretation of the President’s budget; it was the President’s budget, introduced in the required form of a budget resolution and in keeping with the Congressional Budget Act. An open offer was extended to Senate Democrats to change anything they felt was not right in what we presented—no takers. Is the White House really suggesting that their budget has support in the Senate, just in some different form? Have they forgotten that the reason it fell on the GOP to offer up the President’s budget is because both House and Senate Democrats were unwilling to do so in the first place? If the White House believed their own spin, then they would have sent up a version of their budget in legislative form months ago and asked Leader Reid to put it to vote. They didn’t and they won’t, so we did.”

Over what I'm sure will be Stephens' objection, I'm going to stand by my earlier interpretation that what was introduced today was a parody version of the President's budget, and reiterate that the Democratic Senators (like their House colleagues in March) voted it down for precisely this reason -- not because they have a vehement objection to the President's budgetary priorities. Backstage, everyone knows why the Democrats voted the way they did, the rest of this is a performance for public consumption.

But if you want to divine what another famous character of the stage termed the "method in the madness," look at the latter half of Stephens' statement, and the complaint that the Democrats have not put forth a budget. That's fair, but it invites a trip into the weeds. There are reasons why the Democrats haven't done so: 1) they know that any real "Obama budget" is a legislative nonstarter in the current climate of obstruction, and 2) the Democrats hold that the conditions created by the Budget Control Act are their de facto budget. This does not cover the lack of a budget in 2010 and 2011 -- those didn't happen because of the aforementioned obstruction, and some off-year election Democratic Party theories that failed votes would be more costly at the polls than no vote at all. (The results of the 2010 elections suggest that this was, perhaps, too clever by half.)

All of this constitutes a complicated set of arguments that's difficult to put into soundbite form and invites blowback. What's the simpler way to raise the complaint on a regular basis? Stage a budget stunt!

READ THE WHOLE THING
What It Means That The 'President's Budget' Went Down 99 To 0 In The Senate [Business Insider]
A Guide to Recognizing Your Budget Stunts [Slate]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

During the Supreme Court's 2006 adjudication of Cameron v. Marsh, Justice Antonin Scalia had this to say about what would happen if an innocent person was put to death by the criminal justice system: "If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

The last time I had the occasion to dredge up that bit of Scaliana, it was in reference to Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004, wrongly accused of setting a fire in his home that claimed the lives of his children. The Willingham case had become newsworthy again in 2011 because of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's possible ascension to the presidential stage and a new documentary, "Incendiary: The Willingham Case," which chronicled the deeply flawed evidence used to convict Willingham and the political pressure exerted by Perry and his political allies to quash an investigation that was on its way to proving Willingham's innocence.

As such, the Willingham case hasn't resulted in much shouting from the rooftops. But if the Columbia Human Rights Law Review has anything to say about it, that won't happen a second time. Under the leadership of James Liebman, a Columbia law professor, the Review has devoted its entire issue to another man put to death in Texas for a crime he didn't commit: Carlos DeLuna.

The details of the crime, DeLuna's arrest and subsequent prosecution as well as the later investigation into DeLuna's innocence have already been chronicled on this site by Michael McLaughlin, so be sure to read the whole thing. But to briefly summarize, on Feb. 4, 1983, Wanda Lopez, a cashier at a Shamrock gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas, was stabbed to death with a buck knife during a robbery. Police who were sent to canvass the scene of the crime and its immediate vicinity found Carlos DeLuna nearby, hiding under a parked pickup truck. DeLuna was apprehended and brought back to the Shamrock, where he was fingered by an eyewitness as the man seen fleeing the scene.

There were, however, discrepancies among the reports from the other eyewitnesses, who described the assailant as a Hispanic man with a mustache, wearing a gray flannel shirt. DeLuna, when apprehended, was clean-shaven and wearing a white dress shirt. DeLuna eventually offered an explanation for the discrepancy: The real killer was Carlos Hernandez, whom DeLuna knew. (Knew and feared: DeLuna did himself no favors by waiting to accuse Hernandez; he stayed mum for months because he was afraid of reprisals.)

According to DeLuna, Hernandez had spent the evening with DeLuna at a nearby bar during the night of the crime. While they were together, Hernandez excused himself to go to the Shamrock. DeLuna was under the impression that he was going to purchase something from the store. When Hernandez did not return, DeLuna went looking for him. He told the jury at his trial that when he arrived at the Shamrock, he saw Hernandez inside, attacking Wanda Lopez. DeLuna, who had a record (for sexual assault), was out on parole and afraid that being caught drinking would get him sent back to jail, ran from the scene.

Police gave DeLuna's story short shrift, calling Hernandez a "figment of [his] imagination," and no effort was made to chase down the possibility that the wrong man had been apprehended. And it didn't help matters that DeLuna had more than a passing resemblance to Hernandez. DeLuna would eventually be convicted of the murder and executed by lethal injection on Dec. 8, 1989, declaring his innocence to the very last.

As McLaughlin reports, James Liebman started delving into the case "roughly ten years ago." His initial findings formed the basis of a three-part series published by the Chicago Tribune in 2006. This recent issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review provides the culmination of this mammoth effort.

Obviously, the Lopez murder is distinct in many ways from the Willingham case. Most importantly, in DeLuna's case, an actual crime had been committed. In Willingham's instance, when fire scientists applied their forensic expertise to the available evidence, they were able to demonstrate that the prosecutors, having relied on what amounted to folklore about how fires spread, had failed to make their arson case. The science plainly suggested that an accidental fire had occurred.

Another key difference is that the DeLuna case has not become consumed by the same intense, top-down political pressuring and posturing that came to the fore during the investigation into Willingham's execution.

But the similarities are depressing enough. As Liebman found, the investigation into Lopez's murder was a badly bungled mess. In fact, as the Guardian's Ed Pilkington reports, it only took Liebman a single day to begin destroying the prosecution's case against DeLuna:

Four years after DeLuna was executed, Liebman decided to look into the DeLuna case as part of a project he was undertaking into the fallibility of the death penalty. He asked a private investigator to spend one day -- just one day -- looking for signs of the elusive Carlos Hernandez.

By the end of that single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna's arrest and execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.

Liebman's investigator tracked down within a few hours a woman who was related to both the Carloses. She supplied Hernandez's date of birth, which in turn allowed the unlocking of Hernandez's criminal past as the case rapidly unravelled.

So, not only was Carlos Hernandez not a figment of anyone's imagination, he had a record. And that record was pretty specific, according to the Guardian:

Several of the crimes that Hernandez committed involved hold-ups of Corpus Christi gas stations. Just a few days before the Shamrock murder he was found cowering outside a nearby 7-Eleven wielding a knife -- a detail never disclosed to DeLuna's defence.

He also had a history of violence towards women. He was twice arrested on suspicion of the 1979 murder of a woman called Dahlia Sauceda, who was stabbed and then had an "X" carved into her back. The first arrest was made four years before DeLuna's trial and the second while DeLuna was on death row, yet the connection between this Hernandez and the "phantom" presented to DeLuna's jury was never made.

It gets worse, according to these two passages from the Guardian:

In October 1989, just two months before DeLuna was executed, Hernandez was se[n]tenced to 10 years' imprisonment for attempting to kill with a knife another woman called Dina Ybanez.

Hernandez himself frequently told people that he was a knife murderer. He made numerous confessions to having killed Wanda Lopez, the crime for which DeLuna was executed, joking with friends and relatives that his "tocayo" had taken the fall. His admissions were so widely broadcast that even Corpus Christi police detectives came to hear about them within weeks of the incident at the Shamrock gas station.

So how did it come to pass that Hernandez was never treated as a suspect in Lopez's murder? I saved this key detail from the Guardian's report for last:

Over the years he was arrested 39 times, 13 of them for carrying a knife, and spent his entire adult life on parole. Yet he was almost never put in prison for his crimes -- a disparity that Liebman believes was because he was used as a police informant.

So DeLuna, just like Willingham, appears to have been partially victimized by some scandalously bad police procedures.

But the most striking similarity I see between these two cases is that in the end, the lives of those involved just weren't important enough to anyone tasked with ensuring that justice was done. Willingham was an unemployed, impoverished knockabout with a bad reputation. DeLuna was a Hispanic parolee with a criminal record. Those who perished in these incidents were mostly invisible denizens of the lower-class fringes -- a couple of children born into grueling poverty, a gas station attendant. What they'd amounted to -- in life -- didn't seem enough to inspire much of an effort to provide a fully professional investigation of their deaths. In the end, neither case demanded a titanic amount of effort to arrive at the truth. Just a nominal amount of mere curiosity.

This is precisely what Liebman observed in an interview with the San Antonio Express News:

“This case changed my whole view ... I had thought the problem cases were ones where you have an out-of-town defendant, a scary person who commits a really bad crime that grabs the whole community ... Now, I think the worst cases are those that likely happen every day in which no one cares that much about the defendant or the victim.”

And that's why you don't hear DeLuna's name being shouted from the rooftops.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
"Los Tocayos Carlos," in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review
"The wrong Carlos: how Texas sent an innocent man to his death," in the Guardian

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
"Carlos De Luna Execution: Texas Put To Death An Innocent Man, Columbia University Team Says"

"Cameron Todd Willingham Execution: Rick Perry's Role Deserves Scrutiny"

Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?

Over at Daily Intel, Jonathan Chait notices that after many months of vowing to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, the GOP has applied Lean Six Sigma management efficiencies on their platform, or something, and are now vowing to do something much simpler:

One of the hard facts about public opinion during the health-care debate was that, while the public quickly soured on health-care reform, it remained quite sweet on the concept of health-care reform. This is why Republican opponents took care to insist at all times they only opposed the particulars of President Obama’s plan, and wanted instead to reform the system their way, with all the popular things and none of the unpopular stuff. Republicans declared they had a “moral imperative” to reform the system, robotically insisting their plan was not merely to repeal health-care reform but “repeal and replace.” As Jonathan Bernstein notes, just last January, Republicans in Congress promised to have their all-gain, no-pain alternative ready and raring to go for the summer so they could move if the Supreme Court overturned Obamacare.

But, in a development that received almost no attention at all, Republicans quietly conceded last week that they aren’t going to replace Obamacare at all.

As Chait notes, the news that the GOP had declared backsies ended up in the Hill, and there it successfully managed to avoid attention. Now on May 10th, the date the Hill's article appeared, most political reporters were fully esconced in reporting and analyzing President Barack Obama's marriage-equality evolution, and it was pretty adorable, during that time, to watch other news even try to happen. The one story that popped? Mitt Romney's marvelous misadventures as a prep-school bully-coiffeur. So it was an ideal time to quietly break a promise.

Nevertheless, it's awfully surprising that political reporters aren't hungry for an answer to, "What will you replace it with?" or I guess now, "Wait, so, you won't be replacing it with anything?" At the very least, it's odd that the question isn't being repeatedly posed to Mitt Romney. After all, he's the guy in the race who invented and implemented a health care reform plan as the governor of Massachusetts -- the accomplishment that paved the way for him to play politics at the presidential level in the first place. He's since had to disown that accomplishment, because it was borrowed wholesale to form the Affordable Care Act, but to my mind, that adds a dose of intrigue -- having created one health care reform plan, can Romney gin up another one?

It's a relevant question, because Romney has appeared on the stump in front of signs, bearing his campaign logo, that read "Repeal and Replace Obamacare." In one memorable instance, he did so during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who never thought to ask about it. At the time, I would have said that this merely demonstrates Blitzer's unique awfulness, but it appears that the rest of his colleagues have joined him. (Except for Jay Leno, remarkably.)

READ THE WHOLE THING:
On Second Thought, GOP Will Just Repeal Obamacare [Daily Intel]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

Lots of people agree that our government is currently bogged down in a morass of dysfunction that's so disastrous that it's basically criminal. And I do not use that word lightly.

People who hold other people hostage are criminals, and the elected criminals came very close to murdering the entire global economy when they took the debt ceiling hostage. And if you recall, the deal that was crafted to avoid that mess involved the creation of a Super Committee that was tasked with creating a package of spending cuts and revenue adds to bring budgetary discipline to Congress. They needed a supermajority to agree on a plan. And they failed.

Fie on supermajorities! The constant need for the approval of a supermajority is uniquely culpable for the way everything has ground to a halt in the legislature. Bills don't move, appointees don't get placed, and everyone's "grand bargains" fail to materialize. Whether by filibuster or through some special arrangement, the supermajority has turned our Congress into a joke. The abuse of the supermajority is legitimately something both parties are guilty of. It just happens to be the case that the out-of-power GOP is on the crest of this wave of mutilation and taking the abuse to new heights.

Is there anyone we can sue over this? Actually, according to Ezra Klein, this might be a possibility:

According to Best Lawyers, “the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession,” Emmet Bondurant “is the go-to lawyer when a business person just can’t afford to lose a lawsuit.” He was its 2010 Lawyer of the Year for Antitrust and Bet-the-Company Litigation, but has now bitten off something even bigger: bet-the-country litigation.

Bondurant thinks the filibuster is unconstitutional, and, alongside Common Cause, where he serves on the board of directors, he’s suing to have the Supreme Court abolish it.

Bondurant's case against the filibuster is founded mainly in historical fact, and to get the best sense of it, you really need to go read Klein's whole thing. To briefly summarize, however, the Senate never intended the filibuster to be put to such widespread use, and the framers were uniquely opposed to supermajorities. As Klein details:

In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton savaged the idea of a supermajority Congress, writing that “its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

In Federal 58, James Madison wasn’t much kinder to the concept. “In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority.”

"The Constitution prescribed six instances in which Congress would require more than a majority vote: impeaching the president, expelling members, overriding a presidential veto of a bill or order, ratifying treaties, and amending the Constitution," said Klein. And Bondurant's case is that in accepting these exceptions, the framers excluded all others -- like stifling the Senate's ability to make laws, and permitting presidential appointees to be sandbagged.

But if we merely cite the supermajoritarians for misusing these parliamentary processes, we're actually letting them off the hook, for their crimes are not just occasional moments of abuse -- the supermajority is actually straight up allowing widespread dereliction of duty. It's like your lawmakers are telling you, "Oh, man, I would help you move this weekend, but my mom's in town, sorry!" Only this is what they say every weekend, and their mom's never actually in town, and they're not sorry.

More than anything else, the supermajority is used as a dodge. It's immunity from ever having to make a choice that might lead to a member losing their seat.

Consider the many "debt commission" efforts that have been undertaken in the past three years. In every case, these commissions were formed to address what was sold as an urgent need. In every case, they were created because someone had to make "the tough choices." In every case, there was some sort of supermajority requirement. And in every case, the supermajority requirement was added so that the commission would get bogged down by design. (From there, everyone could blame everyone else for the failure.)

Or, to use an example that remained in the legislature, consider the fate of the "public option." Proponents of health care reform loved the public option. But they were told that there weren't enough votes -- even with 60 members on the Democratic side -- to surmount the supermajority requirement that was, at the time, being universally applied to everything the Senate did. Too bad, guys!

But then, the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to Scott Brown, which meant there was now 41 GOP votes to oppose any health care reform package. So the Democrats ran the ball through the tiny gap afforded them by the budget reconciliation process. But wait, now! Budget reconciliation requires only a simple majority, so with that in mind, could we maybe have the public option? Many whip counts reported at the time suggested that the public option was close to having a sufficient number of votes, but the Democrats' leaders, faced with the "tough choice" of adding the public option and getting endlessly buffeted with accusations of "socialism," balked. "Don't worry, we'll take a vote on that in a few months." Did they ever vote on it? No.

This is what the supermajority does: It allows lawmakers to have a tidy excuse for why nothing ever gets done, and why voters should always blame someone else. It's ridiculous and pathetic. Everyone talks about the need to "make the hard choices," but they really just want the "hard choices" to be made by other people first, so that it's "safe." That's the formula for self-propelled gridlock.

Of course, there are reformers within the body that want to change this. Klein notes that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is presenting himself as a supermajority abuser who has seen the error of his ways. But the political pressure against the Senate making a clean break from this drug are enormous. Even if Reid is being sincere, his calls to end the filibuster will be easily interpreted as cynicism: he just wants his Democratic majority to be able to pass Democratic things. And if the GOP takes back the Senate, they will be viewed in the same cynical fashion if they try to reform the filibuster. (And if the Democrats accede to a reform as a minority party, they'll be pilloried by their base for wussing out.)

It would seem, then, that there's little hope for an internal reform of the supermajority process. So piss it, let's sue the Senate. Let us sue the everloving bejeezus out of them.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
Is the filibuster unconstitutional? [Ezra Klein @ WaPo]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

We are apparently reaching the stage in the JPMorgan $2 billion fail-scapade when the patsies are identified and shamed. JPMorgan co-CIO Ina Drew has already cashed out in the wake of the losses, with two underlings, Achilles Macris and Javier Martin-Artajo, expected to follow. (On Wall Street, women seem to be uniquely positioned toward the front of the line when the guillotine gets to chopping, don't they? Think Zoe Cruz at Morgan Stanley, Erin Callan at Lehman, Demi Moore's character in the movie "Margin Call" ... you know, I'm just pointing this out!)

As Reuters reported this morning, Drew's group seems to have been running some sort of sub rosa trading game when everything went wrong:

One hedge fund manager who previously ran a proprietary (or prop) trading book at JPMorgan said the bank's public commitments to trim balance sheet risk were at odds with its network of trading silos, who were making bets independently -- with only a handful of the bank's most senior executives notified of their vast, complex exposures.

"This (CIO) group was completely separate, completely distinct from the prop trading unit. We had no clue about their prop book and they would have no clue about ours for that matter," the manager said.

So perhaps the axe is falling in the right place. At the same time, the activities that Drew and her cohorts seem to have been engaged in were squarely in line with Jamie Dimon's vision for the company, which was "transforming the once-conservative unit from a risk manager to a profit center."

And under Dimon, did JPMorgan lobby "to obtain special breaks that would allow banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank?" Oh yes, they did -- specifically seeking out a large loophole to allow for "portfolio hedging."

The New York Times writer Edward Wyatt has a great explainer on "portfolio hedging" and the role JPMorgan played in pushing for it. (Of particular interest is the way the push for portfolio hedging opened a fault line between the various camps of government referees, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve pushing for this loophole over the objections of the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.) But the bottom line is that all "portfolio hedging" seems to be is a game in which banks point to higher investment portfolios to justify other huge outlandish bets, taking on the word "hedge" to provide the illusion that something responsible is happening. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) shows up in the Wyatt piece to declare that "portfolio hedging" is basically "a license to do pretty much anything."

Barry Ritholz says that Dimon's premise, that this bad bet was a hedge, is basically horsecrap:

We first learned of this particular trade when they began to distort credit indices. Any trade so huge that it impacts its markets -- that becomes the market -- cannot be credibly thought of as a hedge. Simply stated, once you are the market, you are no longer a hedge. Sheer size of this trade makes it far more accurate to describe this as speculation than hedge.

Of course, the loss was the tell. A true hedge would have been offset by the underlying position that was being hedged -- so any loss should have been insignificant. Even a minor correlation error should not lead to a $2 billion dollar hit.

Ritholz concludes, "If we are going to define this trade as a hedge, then there is no other conclusion to reach except that everything at a huge bank is a hedge." The scary thing is that Dimon, up until maybe last week, probably believed this. Either that or he is out to sea on how his bank works.

At the very least, it seems that Dimon has spent such a long time inside his bubble -- an opportunity afforded him by JPMorgan's reputation for being the "safe" bank and a media that treats him as if he sprang from the head of Zeus -- that he's come to see the bank as being made of stronger stuff than the actual bulwarks that might guard against this sort of failure. That's what makes Gretchen Morgenson's scoop from inside that bubble so delicious. It seems that just one month ago, Dimon was at a schmancy party, publicly slagging the people who wanted to curtail these sorts of risks -- Paul Volcker of "Volcker Rule" fame and Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed, who's been a critic of "too big to bail" banks:

During the party, Mr. Dimon took questions from the crowd, according to an attendee who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the bank. One guest asked about the problem of too-big-to-fail banks and the arguments made by Mr. Volcker and Mr. Fisher.

Mr. Dimon responded that he had just two words to describe them: “infantile” and “nonfactual.” He went on to lambaste Mr. Fisher further, according to the attendee. Some in the room were taken aback by the comments.

And that is called "getting Gretchen Morgensonned." At this point, I recommend that you pop some corn and bookmark Counterparties' "JPMorgan" tag.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

Well, good morning and welcome once again to your Sunday morning chronicle of quickly typed reactions to stuff that happens on political prattle shows. My name is Jason. Happy Mothers day, to you all. Right off the bat, we have to hand it to Meet The Press, who last week actually managed to do something rare -- it had a moment of far-reaching relevance that actually impacted the world of politics. This is the Sunday Morning teevee equivalent of the "Miracle On Ice."

But hey, Joe Biden, out there, speaking his mind on marriage equality got a little idea snowballing, and pretty soon, the White House was abandoning whatever coldly calculated same-sex marriage rollout they had planned and President Obama was like, check it: now I am for this stuff, too. Okay! That was midway through the week, and I don't even know why other news was even trying to happen that day. Sorry, other news! We are going to all ride this Obama-is-for-marriage-equality pony until it gives out from exhaustion.

Of course, the being-for-a-thing is swell, and all. But it's possible to get overexcited. After all, the President cosigning marriage equality doesn't advance any policy or reverse any ban, and while the jury is going to be out for a while on this, it could even end up costing the President some crucial electoral votes. (For that reason, the decision to conclude his "evolution" might be deemed somewhat courageous.) But I have a feeling that we'll be talking about this issue all day today. (Know how I know this? Gavin Newsom is booked on Meet The Press, today.)

Anyway, y'all know what to do: crawl back into bed or go to church or brunch and let me HANDLE this. Meanwhile, you may also spend some time conversing in the comments, drop me a line, or follow me on Twitter, for other things.

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

Okay, well, we're mixing things up today on FNS. Shannon Bream is here, instead of Chris Wallace, and we're going to be talking with Dianne Feinstein about national security and John Thune about...being handsome and running for President for a minute. Plus paneling. Sweet numnums, the paneling!

But first, hey, we blocked some terrorist attack from Yemen, and DiFi is here to explain it to us. Yemen, by the way, is the hot new place to be a terrorist? Afghanistan is yesterday's news, dude. Time to start getting in on these boss terror timeshares in Zinjibar. DiFI says that AQAP -- that's "al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula" if you are nasty (or a cartographer) -- is the number one threat to the United States. Time was that "I'm going to Yemen" was a joke on the show FRIENDS. Now, Chandler Bing goes to Yemen to start jihad!

Anyway, a bomb was recovered, and this is an "impressive victory" and a "substantial win" for the CIA, but we've got to "end this now" because it could get "complicated." Oh, hey, nice to know things aren't complicated yet. It's just a SIMPLE matter of needing a whole new war in a whole other part of the world than the one in which we are already fighting out exhausting, endless war.

But all of this "news' comes in the form of a "leak," and so there's a "big" investigation going on now to catch the leaker. DiFi says that the leak came to an AP reporter, and the story was held for a period of time after officials asked. "The leak," DiFi says, "really did disrupt sources and methods," and she says someone will get prosecuted. If you can catch me! I mean...If you can catch them!

So, are we going to catch underwear bombs, ever? DiFi says that the bomb material is hard to detect and when you keep this junk in their drawers, it's not easy to discover during a pat down. The TSA, DiFi says, has to learn and adapt. What will probably happen is that we'll all have to travel in jumpsuits that give the TSA easy access to our taints, I'm guessing.

DiFi says that in Dubai, there is a "big patdown." They are just very handsy, there. The Herman Cain of airport security.

DiFi is hopeful that we kill this particular bombmaker, and his associates, because who will make bombs then? No one, probably.

Moving toward Afghanistan, DiFi says that what the Taliban has done is expand their "shadowy presence" as a governing entity, and now they are moving into the Northeast and are essentially running things. And killing people! "This demonstrates that the Taliban are just waiting to come back," DiFi says. She goes on to add that most people in the Karzai government obviously oppose the Taliban, but they are strong in various areas. And they are making mad bank of opium, as well. This is why we probably aren't actually pulling out of Afghanistan in 2014. DiFi says that the "key to Afghanistan is action by Pakistan," and yeah, that makes 2014 unlikely, too.

Still, DiFi is positive that we will make our timeline, and she has two reasons why she thinks that and neither is "she's crazy, like, down to the bones crazy, jittering and shivering and talking straight nonsense." No. Actually, she says that we're apparently making very good progress on training Afghan security forces, and these forces are "in the lead in many missions." Also, DiFi says, there are schoolgirls going to school without acid being thrown in their face. So, remember, you're junior high school experience probably wasn't the worst thing in the world.

Moving to marriage equality, now. Has Obama flip-flopped? DiFi says that he hasn't flip-flopped and that there is "no political calculus in this." Ha ha ha. Yes. But DiFi goes on to basically say that the more you get to meet members of the LGBT community, the more your views change and prejudices disappear.

Moving to Jamie Dimon, who got caught in the deep end of the derivative market after telling everyone he didn't need a liferguard, and ended up losing $2 billion on some ill-advised prop bets. Loser! Should Washington get involved, though? DiFi says that JPM getting into this hedge trouble was a surprise, and a "danger signal" that various rules need to get set.

DiFi then goes on to explain how budgets and allocations work in the Senate.

Next, John Thune, who Bream assures me is "one of the most mentioned names in the Veepstakes." Who is mentioning this?

At any rate, Thune is live from whatever Fox studio is lit to make it look like a white-hot beam of light is being projected onto the subjects face from the direction of his crotch.

We begin with JP Morgan's big losses, because Thune voted against Dodd-Frank and wants it repealed. (This, despite the fact that Dodd-Frank was pretty toothless.) Thune says that "we don't know all the facts" about JPM's big fail. Thune says that his problem with Dodd-Frank is with the "compliance burdens" it puts on small banks. He goes on to say that JPM's losses do suggest that we need "some safeguards in place." (He also reckons that regulators need to fully interpret and implement Dodd-Frank, which he is trying to repeal?)

Moving to gay marriage -- which, in some polls, seems to be beneficial to the President. Bream notes that Thune has obviously endorsed Romney who has obviously endorsed the idea of marriage being between a man and a woman. What will Romney do, now, to avoid being "unfair" to everyone? Thune just sort of says that Romney believes what he believes, and the election will probably hinge on the economy, and Romney wants to talk about the economy, and here are some talking points, to choke on.

Of course, Obama is WARBLOGGING against the GOP Congress, and has given them a to-do list...which they will NOT DO, because LOL, it's an election year. Which doesn't mean that some of this stuff shouldn't get done, like offering tax incentives to bring business home whilst cutting tax breaks that foster outsourcing. Why won't the GOP consider this? Thune doesn't know! He's like, why didn't he come out with this three years ago? We would have rejected it then. Anyway, Thune isn't having it, because Obama blocked the Keystone Pipeline and gave him a sad, along with "class war rhetoric."

But why can't we just end these incentives that foster job losses? BECAUSE THE TIMING WAS SUPER BAD. (Also, lobbyists tell John Thune not to.)

Bream wants to know about Dick Lugar's loss to Dick Mourdock, and Lugar straight going off on Mourdock about the way Mourdock is an ugly-minded partisan hack who won't work with anybody. Is Thune worried about losing that seat in the fall, because Mourdock is so terrible? Thune isn't. (And I think he's right to not be, Mourdock is likely to beat the Democratic nominee.) He then goes on to describe the Senate's overall dysfunction, without ironically noting that Lugar was nominally in favor of the Senate not being such a desolate chamber of hack-obstructionists diddling one another all day long.

Thune insists that there is room for compromise, but the dividing line is that the Democrats believe in raising revenue, and just as soon as they give up on that there will be tons of compromise, okay?

Meanwhile, will Thune run as the vice-president? Thune filibusters, and intimates that he'd rather stay in the Senate. He, of course, "won't rule out" the possibility that he might consider being the VP if he is asked.

Welcome to the end of every single interview with a Republican on Sunday for the next few months, obviously.

John Thune has not been invited to play basketball with Obama, but would consider it a privilege. So, that's important for everyone to know!

Okay, so it's time for a panel, with Brit Hume and Liz Marlantes and Paul Gigot and Juan Williams.

Beginning with marriage equality, is this a plus or minus for the President? Williams says that the polls indicate that it's sort of a wash -- there are more people that say they are less likely to vote for the President than the reverse. That's sort of sums up the evidence for the argument that this was, at least on some level, politically courageous. Of course, the other big news on this front this weekend was the Jan van Lohuizen polling memo, which urged Republicans to undertake a reversal on gay issues because the populace is growing more and more in favor of LGBT equality in general. And that's sort of the evidence for the argument that you'd better get yourself into the 21st century, somehow.

Williams goes on to point out that Obama's decision will likely excite young voters and base traditionalists, while giving doubts to older voters and voters in places like Virginia. Williams also says that the fealty of the African-American vote will be tested, as they are a traditional liberal voting bloc that has held out against supporting marriage equality.

Gigot says that this might matter in some swing states, toward the fall, but it will probably only matter in a small way. Was it forced by Biden, though? Gigot figures that this was something that Obama and Biden were always going to do, they were just going to wait until the convention. Gigot does note that Romney gets some help, too, because it will motivate Christian conservatives to end their uneasiness with Mitt and get out and support his candidacy.

Marlantes says that Romney is not likely to go out and run on this issue, however. Both sides are pretty nervous about the issue. Marlantes says that the huge shift in favor of the marriage equality still indicates some volatility.

Hume says that there's reason to distrust the national polling on this, because the states still keep banning gay marriage. He figures that it's a net-minus for Obama and says that Obama hasn't actually "evolved" on the issue. He's just "revolved" around to an old position to maximize political advantage. (Of course, Hume prefaced all of this by saying there was no politica;l advantage to be had.)

Well, look, of course Obama did not "evolve." That was always a sort of fool's game. And that's why I don't get too excited about Obama's decision. Rather, I get excited about the fact that the activists on this issue have gained considerable clout in American politics. There are a considerable number of liberals who spit a lot of cynicism over this whole matter. Some are, of course, so overly concerned with winning elections that any expression of principle that isn't a slam dunk with all voters at all times is something to be afraid of. Others are a little more weird, prone to pointing out the cynical calculus, as if that eclipsed the symbolic importance of having a Commander-in-Chief swing to your point of view.

Look, y'all, I don't know what game of thrones you're playing, but anytime you can project yourself into a politician's political calculus, and get them hot and bothered about what you might do if you're not satisfied, that is A GOOD THING. I suppose that many people are sort of upset that Obama gets to sort of skate on this -- he was clearly always, at the very least, going to pop up after the start of his hoped-for second term and say, "Whoa, I am suddenly for gay marriage" -- and that marriage equality wasn't going to get hero president who led with courage and conviction on this issue.

"What a profile in courage," snarks Hume. Well, look. I like people with courage and conviction. But there are some times when courage and conviction are overrated. And I think that in politics, the one quality I absolutely love in a statesman is his or her capacity to get bent backwards over a barrel to the point where they have no choice but give me what I want, immediately. I'd always rather have some guy caught out with their pants down on the goal line between me and what I want, than someone with courage and conviction.

The people who have long advovated for LGBT equality have come from humble beginnings. I still remember a time when it was fearful to even present yourself in public as a member of that community. I still remember when their cries for help over a disease that was killing them was met with indifference (or even mockery). And now, these activists have the kind of pull that allows them to win a reversal in policy three days after someone says something on teevee? Sorry, y'all, I straight up refuse to be cynical about that.

Hume goes on to say that the Obama administration isn't going to do anything to advance the issue. I mean, except not fight DOMA. Have we forgotten about that? And as Chris Geidner points out, the Obama administration's decision to not fight DOMA does have repercussions in how the issue plays out in the states. It is of critical importance, for instance, to Ted Olson, the Bush Solicitor General who is fighting to overturn California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage.

One of the reasons, of course, that GOP pollsters are telling Republicans that they need to reverse themselves on this is because of the changing demographics:

Different states are evolving at different rates. And what happened in North Carolina is hardly a surprise -- they are one of the states that is uniquely resistant to marriage equality. But, the simple truth is that most of the people who oppose this tend to be closer to dying. So, unless they suddenly become immortal, this is going to be an issue that is looked back upon with some small amount of embarrassment.

Moving now to the Washington Post's story about Mitt Romney's high school years. Marlantes says that no one really wants to end up in a discussion about their adolesence, but the Romney camp flubbed their response to this story by not taking the opportunity to show some "largeness in spirit." "Romney's biggest problem isn't that people think he's mean," Marlantes says, "People think he's insincere."

Hume wants it to be known that forcing someone down and cutting their hair off is not a "prank," it's "hazing." That said, is that the Post failed to connect the story to some other part of his life or career. No big picture. I'm not sure that was the point though. Their reporter was assigned the story and he reported it. You know, that whole "making a larger connection" thing is nice when you can do it, but isn't that one of those places you open yourself up to criticism? "I have these facts, and in my opinion, they say something else, which I will extrapolate." That way lies charges of bias. I'm not saying that this is a bad form of journalism (though I really hate "psyhological studies" of politicians from reporters, who know nothing about psychology), I'm just saying that the Post reporter, in opting to stay in his lane, probably did himself a favor.

Hume says the story obviously struck the WaPa editors as a big deal, and he doesn't understand why, or why it got the presentation it received. (I am going with: 1) It's May and everyone is bored and 2) the Post wants to sell newspapers, and get talked about on the teevee.

I'll say this, as this Post story compares to the New York Times Vicki Iseman story of last cycle...well, there's no comparison. The Post's story is better. The Times Iseman story was awful. It felt like I was being conned, even as I read it.

Williams thinks that the Post expedited this story to connect with the gay marriage story of last week, but I was actually under the impression that they delayed the story slightly, to try to avoid that connection being made? At any rate, Shannon Bream points out that the Romney story was long-in-the-works, and of course, no one knew that Obama was going to make an announcement on marriage equality until a few hours before it happened.

Marlantes is probably the biggest defender of the story and its treatment, and she seems to find it silly that you wouldn't put this hair-cut story in the lede, after four people bring it up on the record independently of each other.

Will we see similar pieces on the President? Hume scoffs, "Are you kidding, from the Washington Post?" (Hume should actually meet the Post's editors!) He relents in the end, saying that the President will be judged on his presidency.

THE CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW

Okay, let's have some more FEELINGS about these stories with Chris Matthews and his Genius Bar colleagues, which today include Andrew Sullivan, Gloria Borger, Nia-Malika Henderson, and our own Howard Fineman. Howard and Nia-Malika are doing some color coordination today, by the way.

So, hey, y'all heard about this crazy stuff with Obama talking about how he was cool with the gay marriage, right? Andrew Sullivan, do you have any previously unblogged thoughts on the matter? No, but he's synthesized them all quite movingly. Sullivan says that Obama's announcement is "hugely important," and he didn't "realize how important it would be till it happened."

"I sat down and watched our president tell me that I am his equal. That I'm no longer outside, I'm fully part of this family. And to hear the President who is in some ways a father figure speak to that, the tears came down like with many people in our families. To be included. I never understood the power of a President's words until that day, really. I thought, all that matters is the states and the Congress and the Defense of Marriage Act and I had all this in my head and suddenly this man saying I'm with you, I get it, you're like me, I'm like you, there is nothing between us, we are the same people and we are equal human beings and I want to treat you the way you treat me, that -- that was overwhelming. That's all i can say. I was at a loss for words."

Matthews points out that in previous elections, gay marriage has been used as a brickbat in election years, but over the past few years, the opposition has diminished. Henderson notes that Biden's not wrong about the cultural impact of things like Will and Grace, and their ability to get people thinking in new ways. (Though most of the time I watched Will And Grace I thought about how boring the titular characters were.)

She also points out that gay marriage has been legalized, without the world ending.

Howard says that now this is a wedge issue on the GOP side, and says that Romney's campaign has been "calm and cautious" about this, even as the GOP forces outside of the campaign itself have gotten heated up about this.

In terms of the electoral college, Borger figures that his support for marriage equality ends up being a wash -- he loses some voters on the blue-collar margins that were likely leaning against him anyway, but he galvanizes the youth vote. (It's gone unsaid so far today, but deserves a mention, it also bring a lot of money off the sidelines and into Obama's warchest.)

Sullivan says that marriage, in itself, has a lot of "small-c conservative" values that mean a lot to families. Henderson adds that marriage equality resonates in libertarian pastures as well. (Gary Johnson -- in favor of marriage equality even before Joe Biden made it suddenly cool, let's not forget.)

Most of Chris Matthews' friends say that Obama's decision this week is either a wash or a net plus. Borger reiterates her position on the demographics. Howard goes macro, saying that it's a "historic moment" and that this is an example of Obama being the change agent he promised to be. The caveat -- and it's a big one: "It hasn't worked so well on the economy. If I was Mitt Romney, I'd say fine, go get married, then try to get a job."

"The irony is that this year, the Democrats are running a cultural campaign," Howard notes. Sullivan follows on that this is how Obama turns the election into a "choice" election. We've been over this before -- the administration would prefer the election to focus on "choice" and not be a "referendum election."

Moving to the WaPo story on Romney's tendency toward sociopathic high-school hijinks, which Romney can not remember. Sullivan "goes there": "Kids are committing suicide across the country because they're bullied in high school and we now know a future president was a bully in high school." Sullivan says that it's a "character issue," that affects him viscerally.

And now we're watching old clips from "All In The Family," which had an episode about Archie finding out a friend of his was gay, and Richard Nixon watched it, and he totally liveblogged his feelings onto those tapes he was always taping. (Nixon hated it, and turned it off, because he was so morally outraged by this teevee show, because BLARGH the Roman Empire was undone by a buncha homos, and he didn't want to see America become a place where you could be friends with a gay man, and blarrrgle-gargle-hooey, instead we ought to be like a "tough nation" like Russia, who "roots out" the gays. And then Nixon went on to be a figure that all Americans associate with moral rectitude, the end.)

What do Mitt Romney and John Kerry have in common? Uhm, they are New Englanders with yachts? (Actually, I do not know if Mitt Romney has a yacht. Our "yacht-politics" specialist, Elyse Siegel, is the person to ask about that stuff.) How about they are New Englanders who both speak as if they have been hooked up to a series of air pumps? Is that not it? Fine, what's the answer?

Apparently, to fight Romney, you must use the "Bush playbook," which I guess means, "Hope that Romney goes windsurfing." Oh, also: bolster your warfighter cred while making your opponent out to be an elitist flip-flopper. BUT SERIOUSLY, it would really help if Romney would go windsurfing.

Howard says that the Obama campaign probably have a lot of footage of Romney's homes and leisure activities. The collective strategy, he says, bears a resemblance to the old GOP campaigns -- running culture war strategy, burnishing the military aspect. That's why Obama went to Bagram AFB to announce -- well, he sort of announced that everyone should refer back to previous announcements. Seriously, I'm at a loss to tell you what new stuff was said at Bagram.

Is Romney hurting himself by showing off his wealth? Borger says that he does himself tiny little harms when he inadvertently blurts out something like, "My wife has a couple of Cadillacs." However, she says, there's no way Obama avoids running as an incumbent with a record to defend. And eventually, he's got to mount an economic argument.

Sullivan says that cultural populism is often a better motivator than economic populism. Henderson says that we're still in the "biography" phase of the election process, and so the Obama camp is off with an emphasis on the fact that he is "not far removed" from ordinary people. Howard says that the Obama camp would prefer to make almost any argument than one centered on the current state of the economy, but they won't be able to do it "all the way to election day."

Here are things the Chris Matthews did not know: Greece is leaving the Eurozone by the end of this year and it will have big ramifications on the election than anything they're discussing today (Sullivan), Democrats will continue consolidating women with the Paycheck Fairness Act (Borger), Al Sharpton will go out and make the case for marriage equality with blacks (Henderson), and the big Democratic donors are already out in force for the 2016 race, swelling around Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, mainly (Fineman).

Matthews asks Borger why women are more supportive of gay issues than men. She answers, "Our humanity."

Matthews wants to know if anyone in the media today can move opinion across the board, like -- he intimates via clips -- Johnny Carson. Howard says that if there's a unifying figure that go across the spectrum, it's daytime women talk-show hosts, like "Oprah, Ellen, and The View." Henderson cosigns, saying despite the struggles of Oprah's network, she demonstrates the ability to marshal minds. Borger isn't sure that we aren't so culturally diffuse right now that one single figure in the media can shift the landscape. Sullivan says that he's relieved that no one has that kind of power, adding that he thought David Brinkley had too much power. That said, he gives props to Brian Lamb, who created C-SPAN.

MEET THE PRESS

So, Jamie Dimon leads off today's MEET THE PRESS, which is nice, because elsewhere, this story is getting downplayed, but unfortunate because if there's anywhere better that this show to provide someone like Jamie Dimon a safe haven, I don't know what that is. Obviously, I'm hoping for the best, but I think that Dimon would find tougher critics at "Jamie Dimon's Electric Funk Hour" which is the show he runs every Friday night at 3am on Manhattan's cable access. Probably. Have you seen cable access television in New York City? It's mesmerizing.

See, they will bring in Andrew Ross Sorkin, to comment on this, and I'm guessing that his commentary will be something like, "My friend Jamie Dimon is awesome, obviously."

Then we will have a lengthy reminder that an actual news story happened on Meet The Press, with Reince Priebus.

Anyway, do you remember how last week, Joe Biden was on Meet The Press? This was a proud moment, for Meet The Press, Meet The Press will tell you. But David Gregory thinks that JP Morgan's big old $2 billion loss is going to renew the old "Wall Street vs. Main Street" fight. That J.P. Morgan had a cock-up of this magnitude is fairly striking, because they have a reputation of being the best a hedging. (We will call this whole matter "hedging" despite the fact that it's sort of hilariously ironic.) In fact, it was JPM that invented the credit-default swap, hedging against the likelihood that Exxon would default on the $4.8 line of credit JPM extended them in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Well, right off the bat, Dimon does penance for his previous remark that all of the agita over his bank's trading habits were a "tempest in a teapot." "I was dead wrong when I said that." He says that he's coming clean on this to demonstrate that he's a good guy on the block. Again, Morgan's reputation being what it is, it makes you wonder how the other big banks are doing business. And by "makes you wonder," I am referring to a vague sense of impeding terror?

"We made a terrible, egregious mistake," he says, "There's almost no excuse for it." What kind of heavy lifting are you doing there, "almost?" Maybe we shall find out.

Were there warning signs? Dimon says in retrospect, there were red flags, and people got defensive instead of acting to solve the problem. Did the bank break laws or rules or regulations? Dimon says that internally, they have compliance officers examining the situation. "We know we were sloppy, we know we were stupid, we know we used bad judgement," Dimon says, but he adds, "We don't know if any of that is true yet." By which he means, rulebreaking. Outside regulators, he says, are entitled to come to their own conclusions about it.

What was the screwup? "In hindsight, we took too much risk. The strategy was badly vetted and badly monitored and it should have never happened." See also: 2008, everyone.

Just as a demonstration of what I'm talking about in terms of MEET THE PRESS beging a friendly haven, I'll point out that when Gregory gets around to the part where he's supposed to be holding Dimon responsible for steering his ship into a vortex, he puts the question like this:

"So here you are, Jamie Dimon. you've got a sterling reputation. Why? Because people say he knows how to manage risk better than anybody. You're known as the guy who ably led J. P. Morgan Chase through the worst financial collapse since the great depression. How does a guy like you make this mistake?"

BUT YOU ARE SO AWESOME OMGZ! LIKE TOTES AMAZEBALLS? WHAT HAPPENED, BUDDY?

Dimon is of course, AW SHUCKS WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. Sometimes they are terrible and awful, you know, BUT I'VE GROWN AS A PERSON.

Meanwhile the point: aren't back to bailouts and "too big to fail," and whatnot? Dimon insists he wants to get rid of "too big to fail" banks. And he supports the parts of Dodd-Frank that offer "resolution" -- which takes apart a big bank piecemeal and includes compensation clawbacks and the dismissals of boards of directors, which Dimon says he supports. "The banks should be dismantled and their name buried in disgrace."

Great. But we've moved past the point. Let me kick this to Yves Smith for a second:

As we've noted, one of the big reasons it wasn't as badly hit in the crisis was that it took big CDS losses in 2005 on the Delphi bankruptcy (yes this is a rumor, but it is as pretty widespread rumor, and the sources are credible). The bank got cautious just as the subprime market was entering its toxic phase. So JP Morgan may have dodged the bullet at least in part by getting a wake-up call earlier than its peers.

But other issues seems even more important. First is that Dimon consistently misrepresented the seriousness of the exposures as soon as the press was onto it. Both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were digging, and Dimon was dismissive, calling the concerns a "tempest in a teapot". JPM shares are down over 5% in aftermarket trading. The CEO misled investors, but no one seems to care much about niceties like accurate and timely disclosure these days.

This is the disclosure in the first quarter 10Q:

"In Corporate, within the Corporate/Private Equity segment, net income (excluding Private Equity results and litigation expense) for the second quarter is currently estimated to be a loss of approximately $800 million. (Prior guidance for Corporate quarterly net income (excluding Private Equity results, litigation expense and nonrecurring significant items) was approximately $200 million.) Actual second quarter results could be substantially different from the current estimate and will depend on market levels and portfolio actions related to investments held by the Chief Investment Office (CIO), as well as other activities in Corporate during the remainder of the quarter.

Since March 31, 2012, CIO has had significant mark-to-market losses in its synthetic credit portfolio, and this portfolio has proven to be riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than the Firm previously believed. The losses in CIO's synthetic credit portfolio have been partially offset by realized gains from sales, predominantly of credit-related positions, in CIO's AFS securities portfolio. As of March 31, 2012, the value of CIO's total AFS securities portfolio exceeded its cost by approximately $8 billion. Since then, this portfolio (inclusive of the realized gains in the second quarter to date) has appreciated in value.

The Firm is currently repositioning CIO's synthetic credit portfolio, which it is doing in conjunction with its assessment of the Firm's overall credit exposure. As this repositioning is being effected in a manner designed to maximize economic value, CIO may hold certain of its current synthetic credit positions for the longer term."

The last comment would appear to imply that if they can't unwind this trade at acceptable losses, they'll move some of it into a hold to maturity book, where they aren't required to mark to market. Charming.

Are we going to get into the institutionalized obfuscation? I'm guessing no.

Gregory does point out that Dimon's been particularly outspoken against regulatory intervention, and Dimon responds by...objecting to this characterization. "We support 70% of Dodd-Frank." Again, this sort of muddies the waters. What Gregory needs to do is look at Dimon and say, "Public money should never backstop these sorts of insane prop bets you're making, agree or disagree?"

"Specifically, hedging should make your bank less risky," Dimon says. YES, ONE WOULD HAVE THOUGHT. You are using the word "hedge," after all. But what is the key goddamned lesson from 2008? EVERYONE THOUGHT THEY WERE HEDGED. It's sort of not good enough anymore to say, "Oh, well, our activities just naturally create lower risks. We have a model, and I think you'll plainly see that most days, the economy does not collapse."

Has Dimon given "more ammunition to regulators." Dimon doesn't think so. He doesn't think Morgan needs any help. "This is a stupid thing that we shouldn't have done, but we're still going to earn a lot of money this quarter." Well, that's a strong stance against stupidity!

There is apparently another part of the interview, that Gregory scheduled with Dimon before the news broke, just because Gregory wants to chat with Jamie Dimon, because that's awesome. Jamie Dimon was totally cool about sitting for more interview after the news of JPM's cock-up came out, because he is a hell of a guy. But anyway, the original intention was to ask Dimon some horsey-race questions about the election, because no one relates to the typical voter like Jamie Dimon.

This all needs to be noted, lest you wonder why Dimon and Gregory have switched chairs.

So, isn't it sort of galling that people are really struggling as the people who created most of those hardships sail on, unburdened? Dimon says sure, he blames everyone in general, but some banks were better than others, and blah blah, you heard these monologues in the movie MARGIN CALL. He understands the anger, but we need "solutions!" Gregory asks, "What about accountability? Why hasn't anyone gone to jail?" Dimon says that you should "go punish the bad actors," and leave the institution alone. I sort of think we're looking past the whole part where all the actors, good and bad, get Henry Paulson to hand out several trillion dollars.

Is America better off now then it was four years ago? LET'S ASK JAMIE DIMON THIS, DEFINITELY. His answer: America is awesome and the economy is getting stronger. Could we be doing better, sure. But there was a crisis, and Bush and Obama fixed it the "old fashioned way." (Shoveling money at rich people.) He goes on to say that the debt ceiling crisis, the failure to advance policy out of Simpson-Bowles, and the huge regulatory push have hurt growth. Dimon says he remains "barely a Democrat." Maybe he understands that the "debt ceiling crisis" was a zany right wing stunt that nearly became an even zanier destruction of the global economy, because there weren't enough people who knew what the "debt ceiling" was among the armed hostage takers pointing guns every which way. (Metaphorically, I mean. Actual guns would have been even zanier.)

But Dimon is "disturbed" by some Democrats' behavior. We've entered a zone where irony flourishes.

Dimon laments that there hasn't been "collaboration" of some vague, undefined variety that leads to awesomeness. Presumably, he would like to participate in such a "collaboration." He'll have to forgive us -- it really looked for all the world that you've been mainly focused on making crazy prop bets in the derivatives market, Jamie! We had no idea you wanted to build a bunch of dams or something?

"I wish that everyone would put their knives down and get back to work," says Dimon, who maybe needs to read that Mann/Ornstein piece from a couple weeks ago? When he's done trying to create a fund from the glint he rubs off of two quarters that are rubbed together, I mean.

"I don't know the inside story of Simpson-Bowles," Dimon says, which is okay, because no one in DC has reported it correctly. For instance, Dimon has gotten it into his head that you can "read Simpson Bowles." He is probably referring to the "Chairman's Mark," that was leaked during the deliberations. The one that was never going to pass because it called for modest tax increases? Sure, everyone read it! But understand that despite what Dimon says, it did not contain "magic words" that moved the debate. And you can't blame Obama for not backing the "Chairman's Mark" -- the President was hoping that an actual plan would get out of committee!

Dimon goes on the elaborate on his preferred policy prescriptions, and they are fully and foursquare the precise policies that are being advanced from the current occupant of the White House, to the chagrin of many liberals! Only Dimon doesn't seem to "get it."

And now here is Carl Levin and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Levin says that the regulators will step in and battle lobbyists over the whole JP Morgan matter. Levin's take is that the Volcker Rule guards against these sort of bets, with some important exceptions, most notably "hedging," which Levin understands as a risk reducer, but Dimon has already lumped this entire $2 billion failscapade and put it under the penumbra of "hedging."

"We have to be careful that the regulators are not undermined by this effort to create a loophole in the area of what's called 'portfolio hedging,'" Levin says. Now we know what hundreds of lobbyists are going to be arguing in the coming weeks.

Does Levin accept Dimon's "accountability?" He says that the issue does not involve "personalities," it's a matter of law, and preventing more "too big to fail" bailouts. Levin says that the real battle is in DC, and often between regulators, some of whom want the strong law, and others who want to weaken it. Levin, not surprisingly, feints in the direction of Treasury when he talks about the willfull weakeners.

Why should anyone care about this in general? Sorkin says that the real story here is the Jamie Dimon is superhuman in his awesomeness and if he could make a $2 billion cock up, then everyone can, and that means nothing has changed and everyone is still doomed...which is all stuff I could have told you if the big Jamie Dimon story was that he formed a J-Pop band and is touring the malls of America.

Can anyone give anyone any assurance that anything will be safe one day? Levin says that if we can prevent these banks from making these crazy bets, sure. LOL. Okay. Sorkin says that even though Dimon says he supports resoution authority, applied at his own bank if need be, the truth is that no one will know if the "break-up-the-banks" mechanism has any teeth until we're past the threshold of crisis.

Reince Priebus is here now, to talk about the horsey-race.

Will same-sex marriage be a defining issue for the GOP in the coming election? Priebus isn't sure, but if anyone has strong views on the matter, they now have a clear contrast between the two candidates. That said, Priebus is still pretty sure that the election is going to be on the economy.

Gregory points out that more and more Republicans are coming out in support of marriage equality. Priebus counters with the fact that the states have voted against it. But the only recent data point is North Carolina, who as a state has been uniquely resistant. I fully expect that in many states, these bans will be lifted and repealed, even from the state constitutions.

This is probably not the conversation Priebus would prefer to have, by the way -- a lengthy discussion of same-sex marriage? There's a contrast, and that's the point: it needs no further elucidation. But it seems that the Obama campaign has bought another week of not talking about the economy.

Priebus has to contend with Rand Paul's "I didn't think Obama could get any gayer" comment, and he just doesn't want to. He wants to talk about Romney, and he insists that Romney will be very nice to gay people, even as he restricts their freedoms and denies them some measure of dignity. Is it a civil rights struggle? Priebus says no. Gregory points out that gay rights proponents compare this posture to the one that allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish. Priebus says that's an inapt comparison, because people got murdered in the Jim Crow days. He does realize that members of the LGBT community have been murdered, right?

Anyway, Priebus says that "people deserve dignity and respect, but that doesn't mean that it carries on to marriage." Yes. Marriage is a sanctified tradition, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dignity and respect. You can actually test this! You can meet a member of the opposite sex tomorrow and go get married on a whim, or a dare, or a bet. "Do they love one another? Are they going to go the distance?" The state doesn't give a crap! Take a marriage licence. Take a bunch! Everyone come in, with a complete stranger of the opposite sex, and get hitched, for poops and giggles.

It's all very sacred! We should definitely take the sacredness of this SUPER SERIOUSLY.

Priebus finally gets around to talking about how this show has been a waste of time because same-sex marriage is not as important an issue as the economy. Uhm...don't come on the show, then? Or at least don't come on the show and demonstrate that you have paragraphs of talking points on the matter?

What does Priebus have to say about the J.P. Morgan foul up? He says it demonstrates that we need less regulation, obviously! The bulk of Priebus' argument here is to blame Dodd-Frank for failing to regulate something that Priebus would prefer not be regulated. Making it an issue of Dodd-Frank's failure to prevent something, versus Romney/RNC's not-regulation, which would be successful, even if a bank impoded. "But the bank went craphouse, Reince!" you would say. He would reply, "Not because a policy we enacted failed!"

"Listen, I'm not an financial expert or an expert on SEC," says Priebus, "but I can tell you that this president talks a lot about regulation on Wall Street. He takes millions and millions of dollars from Wall Street." That's all true, and it would be a great position to take if you were coming at Obama from his left flank. As Priebus supports only talking about regulation and taking Wall Street money, it's more than a little fatuous.

Okay, it's panel time, which means I've got about twenty more minutes of chum-tunnel to wriggle through before I get to detoxify myself. Today we have Gavin Newsom and Al Cardenas and Chris Matthews and Kathleen Parker and Jonathan Capehart.

So, the New Yorker put rainbow columns on the White House, let's goggle at it. Whee! Matthews says that it's interesting that after Biden "got out over his skis," the White House made lots of leaks indicating how much trouble that made, which is pretty weird, I must admit. "I don't know why they wanted this spat to be public," Matthews says.

Newsom says that he has no idea if Obama was going to change his mind, but he's glad he did. Now we find out if it's a "good political decision or a perilous political decision." Cardenas, of course, thinks that Obama should have explained himself earlier, but in the end, it's "much ado about nothing."

Capehart notes that the states have always been handed the responsibility of defining marriage, and the idea that Obama is punting to the states on this is the wrong way to see this. I'll refer everyone back to Chris Geidner's piece which I linked at the top of this. Capehart goes on to note that Obama had to come out in favor of this, if for no other reason that his deeds (largely pro-LGBT policies) did not match his words (hesistancy to embrace the LGBT community). Parker contends that Obama did punt back to the states.

Parker (who is also pretty evidently pro-marriage equality) also says that "evolving" was always the perfect word to describe this because the American people are starting to come around to supporting it. Okay, but that doesn't describe what the President was doing. Obama was in a holding pattern, waiting to see what horizon line he'd hit first: total political safety or utter political untenability. Like Capehart said, it got untenable circa last week. That's not evolution.

Cardenas doesn't agree that the American people are evolving on the issue of gay marriage. He's wrong, but never mind.

Matthews, of course, is caught up in the history of it all, and essentially carrying Andrew Sullivan's argument into the discussion, without Sully's eloquence.

Cardenas says that social conservatives will probably come behind Romney more solidly and more passionately than they might have before. He also seems to think that social conservatives are new to the game of seeing marriage through a political prism. Matthews broaches Romney's high school bullying, to the objection of Parker, who isn't sure it's fair to extrapolate from Romney's adolescent experience. Newsom says that public opinion is swinging in favor of marriage equality, but the action at the ballot box will always lag -- when the SCOTUS ruled that inter-racial marriage was legal, public opinion was 70-30 against.

Capehart says some nice things about the gay community and Obama's symbolism, and Cardenas has a sad that Gregory picks that moment to end the discussion.

Okay, y'all. I'm going to call my mom, now, because it's Mothers' Day, so don't forget to do that. Just as a reminder -- there will be NO SUNDAY LIVEBLOG NEXT WEEK, because I will be out of town. We will return May 27th. Until then, best wishes to all of you!

Good morning everybody, and welcome once again to this Sunday Morning liveblog of ours. My name is Jason, and I will be your fast word typer. Welcome to May as well, and springtime, which I hope is mostly a real spring for all of you. Here in Washington, DC, "spring" typically means "eight days of temperatures in the high sixties" and then we skip immediately to several months of 90 degree weather and 132% humidity and the general despair of living near Capitol Hill, which is of course sitting atop the blast furnaces of Satan's brothel. (This is where Senator David Vitter both recruits his staff and spends all of his free time.)

Anyhoo, today we have Marco Rubio to ask 450 times if he'll be vice president, and Joe Biden -- later -- to maybe ask the same thing? You know, for "balance." Plus panels galore on the political psuedo-events of the week. You should all quickly run to brunch or church or a combination of the two ("chunch?") and let me handle this. You may also stick around and chat with each other in the comments (I like to think the Sunday Morning liveblog comments will have their first wedding any week now), drop me a line, or experience more of my personal frustrations in real time by following me on Twitter (and learning to bleat out sad squonks on a trombone, or something).

Once more, in to the breach.

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

As Wallace indicates, Rubio is the pick of Republican voters at the grassroots level. By contrast, the Republican "insiders" want Ohio Senator Rob Portman -- who is like Tim Pawlenty in that he is bland and beige and unnoticeable, except Portman does not give off the faint scent of intractable failure. But if you put Portman on teevee and interviewed him, you wouldn't remember the experience. Seriously! It's like being roofied, with dullness. You notice this humming sound and then all of the sudden time has passed. And why are your pants down? Hey. That sounds like a personal problem. Don't bring me into this.

Anyway, Rubio is here. What does he think of the way President Obama has decided to run for re-election, and criticize Mitt Romney? He says that the President doesn't have a budget, for some reason choosing to lead with reminder of his party's dedicated obstruction (probably okay for this show's audience), and jumps to some generic, "the economy is worse," critique, which is spices up by noting, "the President is being divisive," which is his way of saying, "the President isn't just handing the keys to the White House to Romney."

This is an aspect that bores me, in Presidential elections -- incumbent President runs, opponents say, "he's campaigning, no fair!" and then I'm at the opthamologist with eyeroll fatigue.

Rubio adds that Obama is breaking his promise to be a different sort of politician by saying negative things about Romney. We remind you once again that Obama is a negative campaigner, according to political science.

Wallace points out that the Obama argument is that he "inherited a mess" and that the GOP would "take us back to the mess," and Rubio disagrees. That wasn't really a question, you know? "Hey, that guy says that you and your friends suck." "Oh, shoot. Wow. You got me dead to rights there, Chris. Totally true! Man, that was wily, the way to walked me right into that trap."

Rubio, like most Republicans, is finally way into the U6 unemployment statistics, which is great. Should they win the White House, they'll go back to ignoring it, which is too bad.

Now Wallace is showing Rubio a Romney video, that's critical of Obama -- again, I don't know what he expects Rubio to say about that? "What an awesome ad." He brings up Romney's weird claim that we should have a monthly employment growth of 500K or more every time out, which actually has happened with about the same frequency as perfect games pitched in the major leagues and, inconveniently for Romney, last happened on Obama's watch. (It never happened during the Bush administration, though, why would you have expected it to?)

Romney also says that the unemployment rate should be 4%, with magic. Robert Reich remembers what mere humans have to do to get it there.

Wallace tosses most of this at Rubio, who writes off Romney's weird ideas as having "high expectations," and then giving a tongue bath to the imaginary ideal of the "American people" who just need optimism and sacks of magic beans to create all kinds of jobs. Dude. If this is a competition to just have high expectations, why not say unemployment should be 2% and we should be adding a million jobs a month? Just go for it! "Mitt Romney will make, for America, the most delicious tiramisu!"

Rubio also complains that jobs aren't being created because of "uncertainty with the tax code," which doesn't happen to be what small business owners tell reporters:

-- Jody Gorran, chairman of Aquatherm Industries: "This mantra that every dollar in tax increases is a dollar away from job creation -- give me a break. ... It's not taxes that affects job creation, it's demand."

-- Kelly Conklin, owner of Foley-Waite Associates: "I don't decide to hire or buy equipment based on tax policy. ... We know how to make shit out of wood."

-- Debra Ruh, owner of TecAccess: "We need to hire people, but we don't have the cash or the credit to do it. ... I don't mind paying taxes. ... I like living in the United States and having the opportunities here. I don't understand why running a business has to be about avoiding paying taxes."

-- Michael Teahan, owner of Espresso Resource: "What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources -- that has very little to do with tax policy. ... I map my business based on my customers and what my customers want to buy and what they can afford to buy."

-- Rick Poore, owner of Designwear Inc.: "If you drive more people to my business, I will hire more people. It's as simple as that. If you give me a tax break, I'll just take the wife to the Bahamas."

-- Lew Prince, owner of Vintage Vinyl: "The economic premise that people won't hire because they might have to pay more taxes if they make more money is beyond laughable. ... You hire when you think there's a way you can make more money with that hire. The percentage the government takes out of it has almost nothing to do with it."

We move now to Chen Guancheng, who is apparently going to get to come to America, per a deal worked out by Hilary Clinton. Wallace points out that Romney may have popped off half-cocked by saying, "This is a dark day for freedom" (remember he is describing EVERY DAY, because we're talking about China), a little prematurely, assuming that the deal would not be coming. What does Rubio have to say about that? Not a lot. CHINA SUX, says Rubio.

He also says that the Obama administration did not "forcefully assert our values." I don't know what else you can do, to assert those values, other than be the place that Chen Guancheng wants to come to, and be the people who get him here safely. Everything else is just "spiking the football," which we learned last week is something the Obama administration is actually not allowed to do. So, we're in "damned if you do, damned if you don't" territory.

That's where we move to, now -- the bin Laden week. Joe Biden is shown, doing his "bin laden is dead and General Motors is alive" line. Biden should be careful -- he was the guy who went all "noun, verb, 9-11" on Giuliani. Wallace asks if that is fair game, and if Joe Biden is good on foreign policy. Rubio says that Biden is a nice person, who says stupid things all the time, and is terrible on foreign policy. A key thing Rubio points out: when Biden wonders if Romney would have taken out bin Laden, that's coming from someone who cautioned AGAINST that mission. (Biden may well run for President in 2016 should Obama get re-elected -- store that away.)

And then Rubio is off saying how disgusting it was that Obama opted to, you know, forcefully assert our American values, by celebrating the death of bin Laden, and "running on his record."

Rubio says, that he "took the issue and made it a weapon for political warfare, and I think that's wrong." Ha, ha: no he doesn't. The people who actually think that don't get elected to office.

Of course, as Rubio points out, Obama promised to be a "different sort of politician," and hey NO BACKSIES NOW.

Like I keep saying: don't ever promise to be a different sort of politician. You will never be rewarded for the attempt, and after a few weeks of everyone else in DC sticking by the Principles Of Dickdom, you will be derided as a failure.

Rubio's implicit promise is that Romney will set a lower standard in this regard, and that no one will be able to criticize him for being surprisingly base and small-minded. That is just smart politics.

Now we shall have a "lightning round." On Iran, Rubio has said he supports a "dual track" where we remain in talks with Iran whilst preparing to war with them. Wallace points out that this is precisely the Obama administration's policy as well. Rubio says that Obama has the right tactics, but the "wrong attitude about the tactics" in that he might be too diplomatic and less bomby. (Obama needs to be MORE "spike the football.")

Is Romney wrong to cut foreign aid? Rubio says that Romney is always looking for efficiencies in the budget. Rubio, himself, is pro-foreign aid. Good news! We do not actually spend enough in foreign aid to make cutting it an efficiency.

Wallace asks about Richard Grenell, the openly-gay foreign policy adviser Romney briefly hired and then fired...because why again? Was it because he was a churlish and unfunny sexist pig on Twitter? No...Romney was comfortable with that as long as he scrubbed the offending tweets. OH, THAT'S RIGHT. He was openly gay, and had the temerity to support marriage equality, and the Christian right, led by the AFA's Bryan Fischer, went lights-out nuts on the Romney administration, raised a screech, and got Romney to fire him. Then, Fischer celebrated the firing, and when people complained about it, he went on to say Romney was a wimp for not standing up to him.

Anyway, Romney is always looking for efficiencies, I guess? Wallace wants to ask what that says about tolerance. Rubio says he doesn't know Grenell and as far as he's heard, he left under his own volition. You know, if Rubio was more familiar with the matter, maybe he'd have a principled thing to say about it. But hey, he doesn't know what's going on? Guy gets hounded by homophobes into quitting (or being made to quit)? Boy, Rubio just doesn't know.

Rubio says that there's more tolerance in the GOP, for example, you can be a pro-choice Republican. (Can you?) He says that pro-choice Republicans are more tolerated than pro-life Democrats, which totally explains why Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey is always being hounded to an assisted suicide.

Rubio says that he hasn't heard about any contraception debate, no sir. That's just some divisive stuff Obama invented. "Whatever happened to the Obama of 'no red America and no blue America'?" he says, adding that Obama has become "just a typical politician." Burn, I guess? Everyone is against raising the debt ceiling until it's their job, I know. If Romney becomes President, we can at least look forward to that anti-debt ceiling nonsense going away for a while.

Rubio has some DREAM act of his own, and it's essentially designed solely to take away a winning issue from the Democrats that doesn't alter the existing immigration system, because Rubio is just a typical Beltway politician. To his credit, though, Rubio never promised to be something different.

Wallace points out that Romney will sort of bask in the mantle of Rubio's "Botox the existing system and call it a DREAM Act" without signing onto it by saying that he is "studying it." Rubio says that there isn't a "piece of legislation" to back yet. (I bet you there won't be, either.)

Rubio says, "Romney is for a legal immigration system that works," which is the vaguest thing you can say about anything. I AM FOR APPLES THAT ARE APPLE-Y AND ALSO DELICIOUS. I AM FOR CAN OPENERS THAT OPEN CANS. WATER SHOULD BE WET, AND BY GOD, IN A ROMNEY ADMINISTRATION, IT SHALL STAY THAT WAY.

Will Rubio be vice-president? "Well, Chris, I am not going to discuss the vice presidency." Instead, he talks about his qualifications for the Senate. They include, "I am currently in the Senate itself." He is doing a very good job filibustering. So much so that there most be lots of White House policies he is obstructing right now. Wallace stops him after it just gets stupid.

Can Romney win the presidency if Hispanics prefer Obama two to one? Rubio says there is no "Hispanic vote," and there's great diversity, every state is different. He makes a glancing hit at one point -- in swing states like Florida, Hispanics may vote differently than the rest of the Hispanic vote nationwide, and all that really matters is that electoral college.

Wallace tries about two more times to get Rubio to say he'd take the VP job if asked, and he fails.

And we're paneling with Bill Kristol and A.B. Stoddard and Lynne Liz Cheney and Juan Williams.

Kristol says that he noticed that Obama's kick off was light on defending the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, and it was all pretty boring to him, boy howdy! Wallace is all, that was pretty cynical, but okay, the president didn't actually talk about his record and instead wants to make it a "choice" election. Stoddard says that it's not a surprise and that "the divisive theme of we can't go back to the GOP of old" is the one he's stuck with. She wonders if that will have to change at some point in the future.

Cheney says that this tactic will not be anymore effective in 2012 than it was in 2010. She also criticizes Obama for what she describes as "saying something doesn't make it so," and I am sort of laughing out loud, listening to a Cheney criticize that.

Williams points out that the economy is, nevertheless, doing better -- in terms of jobs, the stock market, production -- and that's the record he has to run on.

But the economic news for April was pretty bad, in terms of adding to the labor market. (Though there were upward revisions on previous months that may be getting a bit underplayed.) Kristol says that it adds up to mediocre improvements that Obama can take credit for, and that Obama will have a chance to win if he can make the election a choice between his first term and Bush's last term. "He's going to make Mitt Romney the third term of George W. Bush."

Stoddard says that the strategy could work, but there's not a lot of time left. That's true to a certain extent, but I'm relatively certain that the reason why is a bit too far past Stoddard's pay grade. Suffice it to say that the largest impact any single economic indicator seems to have on the electoral hopes of an incumbent is income growth in the last three quarters of the first term, with a particular emphasis on Q14.

Is Lynne Liz Cheney [Note: Sorry about that folks, I am always getting Lynne and Liz wrong, and I'm about to do it about 400 more times, so, sorry, xoxoxo, etc.!] going to run for the Senate in Wyoming? She doesn't answer the question. She should probably be waterboarded, because I hear it's a splashy and fun way to answer questions!

More paneling, moving to the Chen Guancheng matter. Kristol says that he thinks the Obama administration may have made some initial mistakes, but adds some "to be fairs" about these matters being very difficult to manage in real time. With the help of an uproar back home, Clinton probably gathered sufficient pressure to make things alls well that ends well. Stoddard adds that Chen himself didn't make it a very easy situation to manage, and that Romney's criticism was "politically tone deaf."

Cheney says that the administration just isn't competent, and doesn't do enough to just openly stomp around offending people. Why doesn't Obama just peacock his way around Iran? Because he is incompetent. Juan Williams totally disagrees. I'm just waiting for Williams and Cheney to get into a fight, so I can sit back and tune out the noise for a minute.

Drat. Instead Wallace changes the subject to the Obama campaign's bin Laden ad. I think I've said enough about that. Kristol says that it's unfortunate that the ad emphasizes the political costs to Obama if the mission had been a failure. I'll point out two things: this is just a true statement of fact. Had the mission failed, it would have been enormously politically damaging. We're all capable of speaking this way, in hindsight, about President Carter, so let's not act like it's nuts to point this out.

Second, if we're going to take the tact of saying, "Actually if [x] had failed it would have hurt lots of other people," let's consistently apply it. Because I'm a little sick of hearing about a massive unemployment crisis that seems to only be a problem for a wealthy politician's re-election hopes.

Ha, Kristol thinks that the message is odd, and George W. Bush wouldn't have done it. I'm pretty sure you can all google "bush mission accomplished aircraft carrier" for yourselves.

Williams said that it's unseemly that the Obama campaign did this ad, but a Republican president would have done the same thing. Again, probably no one would have said boo about this if the ad hadn't done that whole, "WOULD MITT ROMNEY HAVE MADE THE SAME CHOICE" thing.

Lynne Liz Cheney isn't impressed with whatever it is we'll be doing in Afghanistan until 2024, but can we just come home? No. "He doesn't talk about victory, he doesn't talk about winning," Cheney says. Yes. Historically, you don't get to use those words alongside the word "Afghanistan." At any rate, she shouldn't worry, because we'll be in Afghanistan long enough for lots of other Presidents of both parties to have a turn losing. I'm expecially looking forward to kids who were born AFTER the war started growing up and dying there. That's going to be fun. It sure will be just great, being part of the collective shame that a kid born in 2005 came into a world where none of the adults in their life had enough of their wits about them to keep him alive. Preview of coming attractions.

Would you even lose the election by just ending the war in Afghanistan tomorrow? I would think that you would win going away.But if not, I'd be proud to lose an election for that reason. I'd be proud to be hated for that reason. I would trade a daily kick in the face, to keep children from growing up and dying there, if everyone would agree to it. But no, let's definitely stay there till 2024. That'll work.

THIS WEEK WITH PROBABLY GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS BY MAYBE NOT YOU NEVER KNOW ANYMORE

David Axelrod is here, as is John McCain, who is now just circling Washington, getting punches on his Sunday Morning Chatspittle Super Saver Club card until the world is engulfed in flames and he ascends into the swirly maelstrom of hellfire as the Vampyre King Of The Milky Way Galaxy and flies off to Mars to mate with lava creatures, build up an army, and then get bogged down fighting in Afghanistan, forever.

Plus a panel that includes Bay Buchanan. I had better go make a Zantac milkshake.

Anyway, the answer to your question is "Jake Tapper is hosting," and he says that Stephanopoulos has a "well deserved morning off." Whatever, George.

Anyway, did you notice that there is some kind of election going on? There is. People are making speeches and having rallies, and yelling talking points at each other.

David Axelrod is here, and Tapper asks him about the recent economic numbers, and Axelrod states that "you have to look at the trend" because the trend is good, overall, especially considering where we came from, and here are some headwinds, and here are some bills that he supports that won't get passed, and it's like a mashup of every David Axelrod television appearance from the last three years, only now there's some anti-Romney stuff in it. Of course, you could have gamed out the anti-Romney stuff three years ago, too.

Axelrod reminds that four years ago Romney ran around saying that blaming Bush for the bad economy was just "politics" and he now evidently believes that it's okay to do that now that the shoe is on the other foot. Yes: we have all met Mitt Romney, and are familiar with his studied take on double-standards. (Don't you guys still want to talk about how bad the economy was under Bush, though?)

Tapper wants to know if the failure to fill 4,000 seats at Ohio State wasn't a sign that Obama should just concede the election right now on live teevee. Axelrod says no. He adds that people are enthusiastic. He is not sure people are enthusiastic about Romney. This conversation actually toom a couple of minutes, but it wasn't interesting enough to merit me chronicling it for posterity. I think that Romney will manifest much more enthusiasm than McCain did.

When will the Obama campaign run on their record? Axelrod says that they are already doing it. Like the bin Laden mission, remember that? But in about a week, he says, you will see lots of ads that "speak to the progress we've made since the President took office."

Moving to the whole "spiking the football" issue. Has he been doing that? Axelrod says no, he is noting simply that he kept this promise and made a risky decision, and if the mission had failed, the Romney campaign would be pointing and sneering.

Tapper then moves to the whole Chen Guancheng, and Mitt Romney's premature criticism of the efforts to protect him. Axelrod says it's shameful the way some people "speak irresponsibly on half information." He accuses Romney of "blunderbussing around trying to score political points," thus helpfully referencing the new Jack White album. Gotta keep the youths engaged.

Here are some things to read about Chen Guancheng, by the way? Because I worry that he is going to live in the minds of Americans as this guy who was briefly featured as a shiny object in the election-year fiff-faff between Obama and Romney.

Okay, now we jump to the 54,348th Sunday morning conversation with Sith Lord McCain.

Where does McCain come down on the issue of blunderbussing? This is perhaps the most unnecessary question in the world. McCain wants to know why we aren't cold saving more Chinese people from China, using these "Avengers" he keeps hearing about.

Tapper reads Politico to John McCain, which is, I think, part of some Sunday morning drinking game? Do a shot, everyone, right now.

"Back and forth during a tough primary campaign," McCain says, there's a lot of things that get said. He should know! One of the things he routinely said to the other people who debated him during the 2008 campaign was "I really hate this Romney guy."

Now McCain is mad because we did not do some heavyhanded intervention after the Iranian election, so as to make life even worse for the Iranian dissidents who really would have suffered mightily had their movement become ornately stamped with the United States' imprimatur. (Also, who would have been available to "do undefined stuff" in Iran? Probably the Avengers.)

McCain says that after the Iranians chanted "Obama are you with us," the President didn't say a word, and that was shameful. (Actually, the White House took a pretty sizable risk by asking Twitter to remain in service during the uprising so that the dissidents on the ground could continue communicating with each other and the outside world.)

McCain says that Obama is bragging about Iraq and he shouldn't be because things are unraveling there. He should, perhaps, not brag about Iraq, because all the Obama administration did was follow the status of forces agreement signed during the Bush administration to the letter. That said, Iraq's unraveling is happening because we invaded it. It's called "natural consequences." We put Iraq on a path to unraveling. We basically drew up a plan to ensure this.

McCain coming hard and heavy now. Things have never been worse between the U.S. and Israel. Remember those bunker busters we sold them? We were such a-holes, for doing that. "And then there's Syria," he says. I sympathize, of course, because we created an insane standard for intervening in Libya that we're not applying in Syria. (Or Bahrain!) But again, the Avengers do not actually exist, so I don't know who gets sent into Syria for the next few years and how this gets paid for. If everyone was being honest at the time of the Libyan intervention, we would have just said, "The new standard for doing this sort of thing is how easy can it be to do."

And, hey, this is why you don't spend all you blood and treasure on pointless endeavors. When it comes to warmaking, John McCain just doesn't seem to understand that there is this thing called "opportunity cost." We'd be in an even poorer position to help Syrians if we'd followed John McCain and his blunderbuss into South Ossetia, as he'd have liked.

Does McCain have any vice-presidential advice? Sure! And it comes wrapped in a lot of coy jokes where he winkingly acknowledges the fact that he's aware he made a terrible choice himself, without ever just publicly copping to it. Wow, John, this "leading from behind" just doesn't work!

And now we're paneling with George Will and Bay Buchanan and Greta Van Susteren and Austan Goolsbee and Tavis Smiley.

George Will thinks that Obama went too far with his bin Laden ad, because Dwight Eisenhower would never brag on his accomplishments and suggest that he alone was capable of bringing peace to the world while alleging that Adlai Stevenson would make different choices and maybe get Americans killed.

Only, ha ha, sorry, George Will, that is EXACTLY what Dwight David Eisenhower WOULD do and DID do:

Lord, and he did it for four and a half minutes! How cheap was television time back then?

Buchanan says that foreign policy is not likely to be a key issue, but Obama is not "presidential" when he fails to praise the Navy Seals. Tapper and Smiley retort that Obama has praised them repeatedly, and that their actions in terms of deeds and policy are generically geared toward support of veterans and soldiers. What disappoints Smiley is that there is a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Oval Office and Obama does a lot of warring and bragging about war. (Maybe he should put a bust of John McCain in the Oval Office?)

Goolsbee points out that everyone from Romney to Biden piled on Obama when he said he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden, and because of this, it's a relevant campaign issue. It's not hard to imagine, of course, Romney going on a big Told You So Tour if the mission had failed. (No one would have said, "Hey, Mitt, have a heart and don't kick the Navy Seals when they're down," either.)

Greta Van Susteren wants to extend our interventions to Honduras and Mexico and the Sudan, among other places. I'm excited for the possibility that she will, in about fifteen minutes time, decry the large deficits. I mean, fingers crossed. I can actually get high, now, on publicly televised cognitive dissonance. Or maybe this isn't so much a high as my brain having a tiny stroke. Either way, all the colors go all tinty, and there's some numbness, and I usually pee myself.

George Will says that the Chen Guancheng matter demonstrates once again how nasty the Chinese regime is, and how foolish it is to expect their authoritarianism to be curbed by gradually introducing market dynamics into their system. Suck on that, Adam Smith, I guess.

Apparently, super power-mad dictators don't go all soft because there's a Starbucks and McDonalds down the street? If anything, McDonalds should only harden authoritarianism, like arteries.

Ha, ha. Did you ever imagine that Jake Tapper would attempt an Adam Yauch remembrance with George Will and Bay Buchanan sitting right there? Okay. Well, cross that off your "signs of the apocalypse" list.

Will says that if you look at the unemployment rate in a weird way that no one does, the unemployment rate would be 11%. Goolsbee retorts by pointing out that this just means that it would be down from 17%.

Van Susteren thinks that everyone has an enthusiasm problem, because Obama didn't fill 4,000 seats in Columbus, and all of Romney's endorsers are all, "Blah, Romney, whatever. I guess I endorse him."

Things get tedious for a while, until Will says that the push for more student loans is the "slow motion creation of a new entitlement," and decries both parties for supporting it. Smiley tries to argue that getting people into college is good for their job prospects, Will counters by saying that the margin of salaries between high school graduates and college graduates are a pittance. Smiley says why not give no-interest loans to students when we give them to banks. Will says, hey let's not give no-interest loans to anyone.

Goolsbee and Buchanan spend a few minutes chicken vs. egging on education and jobs. We should invest in education, says Goolsbee. No no, we need job creation, says Buchanan. Which is why he supports education investment, says Goolsbee. You should be creating jobs, says Buchanan. We did. No you didn't. No seriously we did, and Bush was terrible.

And we're on to the Lugar- Mourdock race. Buchanan is very excited about Mourdock. Van Susteren says that she could curb her enthusiasm, because Lugar is much better. Smiley says that despite Lugar's conservatism, he recalls Lugar's public service very fondly, and says it's too bad that a guy who's been a faithful conservative is losing because he lost some arbitrary purity test, balanced against his career.

What does the John Edwards trial mean, for America? The panel discusses as I get more coffee.

And now they are talking about Junior Seau's death. Is it possible to be in favor of this? No. Will agrees that football is in trouble because the game's players have developed to the point where the violence that can be doled out is too much for the humans playing the game to take. Smiley says that all the money in the game will keep things from changing. Van Susteren is more concerned about Drew Brees breaking some record. Goolsbee compares it all to glory-seekers who climb Mount Everest, which is literally a mountain covered in trash and corpses.

MEET THE PRESS

Okay, so, Joe Biden is here, I bet to talk about this whole "Obama campaign" thing. Also, Kelly Ayotte will be getting get first turn at Sunday morning surrogacy, when she panels with Chuck Todd and Tom Brokaw and Diane Swonk. These are three people whose names would be fun to hear pronounced by Tom Brokaw: "With Chuck Tawhawhd, Kelly Ayoughought, and Diane Swahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnk, I'm Tawm Brokahhhrrrrrrwwww."

I make my own amusement! Anyway, going to try to get through this last hour of chatting as quickly as I can. We begin with Joe Biden, who previously taped his sit down with Gregory.

So, the economy? Is it the suck? Biden says no, and that revisions keep picking up the prior months' numbers. "We're on a patth," he says. Gregory asks if there's a certain amount of stagnation happening. Biden says no. "There's been steady growth -- not enough -- but no stagnation."

Of course, Romney disagrees, preferring to cite the discouragement. Biden admits that people across the country are still feeling the economy as if it were still in recession. Biden says that what Romney's proposing -- tax cuts for the rich, obstacles to education, eliminating R&D and infrastructure investment -- will not help. "The good thing," he says, is that "they're not hiding the ball this time, God love 'em." Between the Ryan budget and the obstruction, the GOP, he suggests, are being very open about their desires. (Romney could still decide to distance himself from some of this.)

Gregory points out that the recovery has been a lot slower than previous recoveries, so why not give the ball to someone with a background in business? Biden says that Romney lacks the background he thinks he actually has. (He also points out that this recession was historically terrible.)

Biden gets into some specifics, pointing out that they would have been allowed to save a few million additional jobs had a tiny tax on millionaires income been levied, to help keep cops and firefighters on the job. Gregory scoffs, "But you can't guarantee jobs." Dude, you were the one who just asked, why not hand the whole government over to the guy with a business degree.

Moving to Chen Guancheng. is his future in America? Biden says yes. He says that he expects Chen to be permitted to come to the United States, with his family, to study at NYU, and they are prepared to grant him a visa immediately. Biden is much more surefooted in discussing this type of foreign policy interaction, and he explains that the situation developed last week along the lines of what Chen was seeking to do -- at first, he wanted to remain in China with his family, later it became his desire to get out.

Gregory asks if it's more important to stand up for freedom or maintain good relations, and Biden says that standing up for freedom is more important, and he's impressed that upon the Chinese repeatedly.

Joe Biden is going to run for Vice President. There is a few minutes of what Gregory and Biden imagine to be "hilarity," followed by a quick question on the talk of replacing him with Clinton, which is only ever discussed at cocktail parties in DC, by the foppish courtiers of the Beltway.

What about the "evolution" of Obama and Biden on marriage equality?

BIDEN: I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don't see much of a distinction-- beyond that.

He adds:

BIDEN: The president continues to fight, whether it's Don't Ask, Don't Tell or whether it is making sure, across the board that you cannot discriminate. Look [at] the executive orders he's put in place: Any hospital that gets federal funding, which is almost all of them, they can't deny a partner from being able to have access to their partner who's ill or making the call on whether or not they-- you know-- it's just-- this is evolving. And by the way, my measure, David, and I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes. I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody's ever done so far. And I think-- people fear that which is different. Now they're beginning to understand.

Okay, so, great synergy with Will And Grace. But all of these comments have already been walked back. My thoughts on this are that if Obama gets re-elected, he'll probably say, "Hey, wow. Look at me, I'm evolved now." Maybe sooner if rich libertarians give his campaign half a billion dollars! And that's me, being cynical, hooray!

Was all that bin Laden football spiking Obama's "Mission Accomplished" moment? Biden says that the trip to Kabul was a legitimate meeting to sign a "war-ending" document that took twenty months to negotiate, completed coincidentally on the one year anniversary of bin Laden's death. I mean...I'm still in the vaporous haze of the previous paragraph's cynicism, maybe, but it was awfully convenient, and frankly, this agreement doesn't really feel like a slam-dunk war ender to me.

Gregory points out that having questioned Romney's foreign policy bona fides, Biden opens himself up to criticism that he opposed the bin Laden too. Biden says that's a valid point, but nevertheless, the President was "the only person with a full-throated 'go' was Leon Panetta." And even though Biden opposed it, he says that ultimately, he just wanted the President to "follow his instincts" because they were "always unerring" and...wait. Does Biden really believe that? Because the next question is, "Oh so does that mean you are now convinced that keeping up the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was worth it?" Because Biden's instincts at the time told him that it wasn't.

Anyway, Biden says the only thing they differed on is that he wanted "one more day" to do one more "test," before the raid. But the White House did pick a great time to do the raid -- the White House Correspondent's Dinner, when all the city's reporters are too drunk, ignorant, and chasing celebrity approval to notice something huge going down. (More than usual, I mean.)

Biden says that the United States' reputation in the world has been enhanced under Obama, and based upon what Romney's said about foreign policy -- our arch-enemy is Russia, for example -- our standing would be damaged.

Does Biden think there's a huge right-wing conspiracy to obstruct Obama's initiatives? He says no, it's just that the GOP has been taken over by the Tea Party, and it's like the way the "far left took over the Democrats back in 1972." "We go through phases, like this," he says. "We need a strong Republican Party...two or three people who can speak for the party and make agreements," he says.

I would make the case that everyone suffers when one party goes off the rails as well. Democrats aren't working important muscles debating Michele Bachmann and the Randian Haircut From Wisconsin, for Pete's sake. And we're about to turn out Dick Lugar? He's a solid conservative being made to feel ashamed for failing some purity test. If I'd told you that was going to happen eight years ago, y'all would have called me insane.

For this reason, Biden has a lot of sympathy for John Boehner. Know what? I schedule a little time on Tuesdays and Thursdays to do the same!

Who would Biden want to face on the debate stage? He says that he's looking forward to the debates and he'll assume that whoever it is will be tough. Will he run for President in 2016? Biden basically says, "Me and Hillary will run as a team. OMG, J/K, LOL!"

Panel time, with David Gregory and Brokaw's Unpronounceables. How does the Romney campaign feel about Obama's kick off? Ayotte says it's sad that the guy who promised to be a different kind of president is, like, totally trying to run against Romney by criticizing him and stuff! Also, she hates Obamacare and stimulus, and for the most part, foreign policy -- especially the same stuff McCain stuff about Iran. Ayotte speculates: what if making some big thunderous display of support had resulted in regime change in Iran? Well, it doesn't work like that. I mean, does it? Does wishing make things so? How come Kelly Ayotte hasn't gotten the Iranian people bald eagles and soft-serve icecream yet? It's because she doesn't want it bad enough.

Anyway, Gregory has some newspapers to read to everyone and questions to ask. Diane Swonk says that economy is a "measure of human behavior" and we are in a dense forest, a forest of wonder. An erotic forest, where paupers clutch at each other for warmth. But I digress. Because do you want to hear that "Europe could take us off a fiscal cliff?" FINE. Europe could take us off a fiscal cliff. It's just beyond the forest, this cliff. Where paupers are boning.

Brokaw is here to say some bromides about how the country "feels" about the economy, and acknowledges that he's is reciting a disaster of "mixed metaphors," but whatever. Economy be tripping, here's a six minute monologue about it.

Todd says that he finds it fascinating that the Obama campaign's shifted their message to, "Will you be better off four years from now, if you change to Romney." This is not actually a new tactic. This is the war president strategy. You can't switch horses in midstream. It's just being applied to the economy. We've won back the auto industry and are about to storm the shores of the economy's Normandy.

It's a little weird to have a panel with three reporters and one candidate's campaign surrogate, because what we're getting is three bent-over-backwards neutral types and one panelist who is out there with knives.

Swonk says that she's equally offended by both sides in the way that people haven't settled on a simple plan to cut some deficit and raise some revenues through taxation, and when are people just going to see the sanity of that and do it, because it would an easy fix for so many things! My advice to her would be to stop being so equally offended! You know, just be offended at the side that's preventing all this from happening. Lordy, this lady is Thomas Friedman in a scoop-neck blouse. That Thomas Mann/Norm Ornstein piece must have been read by nobody.

Brokaw says there's a movement to bring back the Simpson-Bowles plan, and it's failure was a black eye on the president. First of all, there is no such thing as a "Simpson Bowles plan" because the Simpson Bowles committee very famously failed to produce one. Had they done so, we'd have gotten to the stage where the president would have urged it's passage, and it would have been defeated, because the President urged its passage. What exists is a "Chairman's mark," and people really should be more specific about these things.

Anyway, if the President wants to pass anything that looks like something that might have not been totally kicked to death in the Simpson-Bowles committee room, he would need to make a big demonstration of how NOT for it he is. Otherwise it doesn't stand a chance. Were the President to caution America to not put their hands on the open flames of a gas stovetop, the GOP would all run home, burn themselves half to death, and criticize the President for being divisive.

Jamie Dimon is for "Simpson-Bowles," whatever that is, and we should all totally listen to Jamie Dimon, according to Tom Brokaw.

Is everyone high?

I simply cannot endure much more of this so I'm going to turn the sound off and put it on fast-forward and then summarize what I see from everyone's gestures.

Okay, David Gregory is like, "Huh?" and Ayotte responds, "Crickety-crickety-pippapippapip." "Blappitty, blippity, floo-owww, diddydiddydo," she adds. Head nod.

Gregory says, 'WAAAUUGH" and Brokaw is all, "HAWWDEEDAWWW, nim nim nim." Then there are pictures of George Clooney hugging people.

"Vamm," says Gregory, "Dipple-dipple-tit." Chuck Todd replies, "Oh, rim, oh ram, mickey jam."

[Ha, actually, I found out that the part I was driven too far into boredom to transcribe was Tom Brokaw throwing shade on the annual Masque of the Red Death known as the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and Todd and Gregory sort of feeling sheepish about it.]

And we are done. So much easier that way!

Okay, well, that is out liveblog for today. Thanks to everyone, as always, for participating. Just as a reminder, there will be no liveblog on May the 20th, because I'll be out of town and watching my wife get a masters degree that she's actually already received, but there are sacred traditions that must be observed. In the meanwhile, have a great week, and we'll see you next Sunday.