Just when you thought reality TV couldn't get any ickier, WaPo's Lisa de Moraes tells us that the CW network is trolling for women (translation: hot, 20-something women) with a range of mental illnesses sufficiently entertaining to sustain a reality series. Think: anorexia, bulimia, rage issues, shopping addiction, and--the holy grail--sex addiction. And, oh yes, ideally the specimens involved will lead double lives, fooling friends and co-workers by day only to cut loose with their naughty and compulsive behaviors under cover of darkness.

Somebody should burn in hell for this.

At National Review, Tevi Troy wonders why liberals are so exasperated with Joe Lieberman. In so doing, he proceeds from a false premise to an erroneous conclusion:

I’m not sure why Lieberman in particular inspires such hatred on the left.  Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson is at least at obstructionist to the Democrats, and not just on the abortion issue.   According to the AP: “Bucking the Democratic party on a major issue would not be a first for Nelson who is generally seen as a moderate in the Senate. During his tenure Nelson joined with Republicans to support President George W Bush's tax cuts and reject certain issues important to organized labor.”

The false premise here is that liberals are irked with Lieberman solely because of the content of his position. The truth is that Lieberman has been so irritating because he's operating in bad faith. As Marc Ambinder reports, "Lieberman blessed the Gang of Ten deal privately before those talks were completed, then reversed himself as soon as it became evident that the left saw a silver lining in the consolation prize of a Medicare buy-in proposal." Lieberman's new position is that he is willing to filibuster health care reform, a goal which he promised to help fulfill in 2006 when he won his seat, if it includes a provision that Lieberman himself was advocating three months ago. Lieberman is displaying a total lack of moral and intellectual seriousness on an issue upon which many lives rest.

It's true that Ben Nelson is also far from an easy vote. But Nelson is bargaining in good faith. Moreover, Nelson's objection is his long-held position on abortion, an issue he obviously regards with genuine and consistent concern. I don't consider Nelson the brightest star in the Senatorial sky, but his motives seem sound.

The fact that liberals aren't furious with Nelson strikes Troy as proof of some nefarious double standard. In fact it's proof that his premise about liberal anger at Lieberman is incorrect.

The guiding myth underpinning the reconstruction of our dangerous banking system is: Financial innovation as we know it is valuable and must be preserved. Anyone opposed to this approach is a populist, with or without a pitchfork.

Single-handedly, Paul Volcker has exploded this myth. Responding to a Wall Street insiders' Future of Finance “report,“ he was quoted in the WSJ yesterday as saying: “Wake up gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate.”

Volcker has three  main points, with which we whole-heartedly agree:

(1) “[Financial engineering] moves around the rents in the financial system, but not only this, as it seems to have vastly increased them.”

(2) “I have found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy.”

and most important:

(3) “I am probably going to win in the end.”

• Grading Obama’s First Year in Office: Will the Idealism of His Campaign Show Itself Again? by The Editors
• Coping With the Loss of a Friend, a Sparring Partner, and a Link to History by Paul Berman
• More Lieberman Fallout: What Is the White House’s Next Move? by Jonathan Cohn
• How Rich Countries Can Actually Pay For Poor Countries to Go Green by Bradford Plumer
• The Key to Understanding Joe Lieberman: He Isn’t Actually All That Smart by Jonathan Chait
• Why Audi Hates Electric Cars--and Wants You to Hate Them, Too by Lydia DePillis
• Has Obama Learned From His Early Foreign Policy Missteps? by Marty Peretz
• Health Care Reform Bends the Curve. Check out These Graphs if You Don’t Believe Me by Jonathan Cohn
• Don’t Know What to Think About the Citigroup Payback? Read This. by Noam Scheiber

As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.

Exiting a caucus meeting this evening, Democratic Senators said that they were prepared to drop the Medicare buy-in to break the political impasse over the provision--a change that may be enough to win over Joe Lieberman. Jay Rockefeller, one of the health reform's leading liberal advocates, was adamant about describing the merits that the bill would have even without a public option compromise. "There are 500 things, and you take this one out, and you ask…could it have been better? Yeah. But it could have been so much worse if we decided not to do anything about it," Rockefeller said tonight. "We’re not going to get all that we want, but we’re going to get so much more than we have."

The caucus meeting happened hours after news broke that the White House was pressuring Reid and the Senate leadership to reach a deal with Lieberman. While the Connecticut Senator wasn’t among those who spoke during this evening's caucus meeting, Rockefeller defended Lieberman’s recent threat to filibuster a bill with the Medicare buy-in as a exercise of his rights as a legislator. "Anybody has the right to do that--I’m not saying it a good thing…I’ve never done it. Maybe I should have," Rockefeller said. "I don’t attack him, as I wouldn’t attack myself. "

Rockefeller added that there were, in fact, other aspects of the reform bill in which Lieberman was playing a constructive role, including the West Virginia senator’s cherished project to strengthen the independent Medicare payment commission. "I and my staff are working very closely with Lieberman on MedPac on steroids which is the real game-changer in the bill," Rockefeller said, adding that he was also collaborating closely with Ben Nelson on insurance regulatory reform.

It has been a banner day for the field of Lieberman Psychology. My own contribution is that Lieberman is not as smart as people think he is, and certainly not detail-oriented or well-versed in public policy.

In response to the revelation that he endorsed the Medicare buy-in that he now cites as a deal-breaker, Lieberman explains:

"We've got this very strong network and system of subsidies for people, including people who are 55-65 so the idea of the Medicare buy in no longer was necessary because they're taken care of very well under the Finance Committee proposal."

Does this make any sense? Not very much. Back when Lieberman endorsed medicare buy-in in September, the basic subsidies for people in the 55-65 age range were part of the House health care bill, and were clearly going to be part of whatever emerged from the Senate. Nobody imagined a health care bill that would do nothing for people aged 55-65. What's more, even if Lieberman were completely unaware of even the most rough outlines that health care reform was taking, it's hard to imagine how he or anybody could believe that Medicare buy-in was desirable on its own but, in combination with other subsidies, so undesirable as to be a cause for filibustering reform. There's no way anybody would design their policy priorities this way.

Marc Ambinder adds some useful insight:

His contempt for liberals coincides with his new conservative friends, aides, colleagues, donors. ...

Lieberman has designed his public campaign as a way to streeeetch out the debate as much as possible, and just as Democrats seem to be on the verge of reaching him, like a quantum particle, he appears instantly at a completely different location, rendering useless at least a week of hard soldering by the Democrats.

To many of Lieberman's colleagues, it's been hard for them to accept that his motives were different than those he stated in public, but there have apparently been a number of private assurances given -- and broken -- by the Connecticut senator in recent weeks -- and a growing recognition that, of all the wavering "moderate" Democrats -- Bill Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landreiu -- Lieberman is the least likely to negotiate to a compromise.

So the picture here is a politician with scant interest in the substance of reform, driven largely by broader themes. He is drawn to a heroic narrative in which he holds the gates against the run-amok liberalism that purged him from the party. It sure seems like many of his strongest supporters and sycophants are trying to sell this narrative to him. And he is not sophisticated enough about public policy to understand that that the run-amok liberalism he's opposing is the same policy he supported not long ago.

Speaking of famous men behaving badly: In the web chatter surrounding Tiger Woods' slut-puppy antics, I've noticed people responding in disbelief with the whole "But his wife is so beautiful..." logic.

It's depressing to me how many women take men's infidelities as a reflection on their personal attractiveness--as though a slightly better rack would have kept Mr. Hot Pants at home. Some men cheat. Some cheat with younger or prettier women;  others do it with out-and-out dogs. And the whole absurd display invariably reminds me of that Billy Crystal-Meg Ryan exchange from the 1989 classic "When Harry met Sally": 

Harry: No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. 

Sally: So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive. 

Harry: No, you pretty much want to nail them too. 

It's funny because it's true.

So if I were looking for a silver lining in this tawdry national soap opera Tiger has thrust upon us, it would be that women still need periodic reminders that some men can't keep it zipped no matter how great the little woman's ass looks in lycra.

Even supermodels get betrayed.

Of course, back in September, letting 55-64 year-olds buy into Medicare was just a wonky solution for a small segment of the uninsured—not a radical left-wing plan like the public option. Today, Medicare buy-in in a radical left-wing plot, so naturally Lieberman now opposes it.

Here's Lieberman back in September:

I was just listening to a segment on NPR about girlfriend-beater Chris Brown. One of the guests was talking about how he has no interest in listening to Brown's new album because he doesn't think Brown has sufficiently owned up to his personal sins, noting that the singer typically uses weasel words like "what I did" or "what went down" instead of more specific words like "domestic violence." 

Please. "Domestic violence" itself has always been a wishy-washy way of describing the crime of beating the hell out of someone you supposedly care about. It makes the act sound somehow softer and less grotesque--domesticated even--than other crimes, rather than the outrageous abuse of both flesh and trust that it is.

I have no interest in hearing Chris Brown talk about how he perpetrated "domestic abuse." But I wouldn't complain if his next single were all about how sorry he is to have gone berzerk, mangled the face, and threatened the life of the woman he claimed to love.

From a reader in Iran:

I've been saying for a while that Joe Lieberman posed the greatest threat to health care reform. Unlike the rest of the party, he has no political interest in the passage of reform or a successful Obama presidency, and he seems to view the prospect of sticking it to the liberals who supported his Democratic opponent in 2006 as a goal potentially worth sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans to fulfill. (Of course, the irony is that Lieberman is actually vindicating his 2006 critics and undermining his own defense from that time, which revolved around him being a progressive Democrat on domestic policy issues.)

Still, I feel that liberals are somewhat overreacting to Lieberman's turn against health care reform. It's true that Lieberman refused to take part in negotiations with Reid over the compromise, suggested he could support the bill presuming a positive CBO score, and then decided to stick in the knife. However, I don't think that health care reform is in peril. If Harry Reid decided to submit to Lieberman's demands, the health care bill would basically revert to what the Senate Finance Committee produced. That's still a major piece of legislation. Expectations among liberals have risen since then, so the come-down is understandable. But this isn't the end of reform.

Now, the counter-argument is that Lieberman may well come up with a reason to back away from that bill as well. Given his obvious bad-faith negotiation, that's certainly a danger. But Olympia Snowe is not negotiating in bad faith, and she, unlike Lieberman, actually seems to care about health care reform. So even if you revert to something like the Senate Finance bill and Lieberman tries to stab you in the back, you can still pick up Snowe. (A fact that itself reduces the chance that Lieberman will attempt a second act of sabotage -- why try to knife health care reform if you can't kill it?)

I also think liberals, myself included, might be driving ourselves a little nuts trying to divine Lieberman's motives. He keeps flip-flopping and explaining his shifts by making demonstrably false claims. What's his game? Why does he keep saying these wrong, uninformed things?

I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.

I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He's the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn't have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it's big government and he should oppose it. I think it's basically that simple.

Washington Post writer Michael Leahy has an excellent report on the war within California’s G.O.P. The latest episode was an unsuccessful Republican attempt to recall a fellow Southern California Republican legislator, Anthony Adams, who had the gall to vote for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state budget, which, in the face of a projected $42 billion deficit and unpaid state worker salaries, included modest tax increases.   Adams himself was an obscure backbencher moved by the state’s plight.

Like many of California’s state legislators, who under term limits spend a few years in Sacramento and then return to their day jobs, Adams had less than a stellar resume: “At 38, he is not someone with glittering prospects outside of government. He worked in retail sales for a while, hosted a radio show in a small California market, and has failed the California Bar Exam four times. But he found his calling in politics. He served as an aide for a San Bernardino County supervisor for a while before becoming legislative director for the county.”