Atrios and Krugman point favorably to this Christine Romer speech (PDF):

My main criticism is that they took their eye off the ball in late 2009 and 2010. [. . .]Like the Federal Reserve, the Administration and Congress should have done more in the fall of 2009 and early 2010 to aid the recovery. I remember that fall of 2009 as a very frustrating one. It was very clear to me that the economy was still struggling, but the will to do more to help it had died. There was a definite split among the economics team about whether we should push for more fiscal stimulus, or switch our focus to the deficit.

I'm not a Nobel prizing winning economist but I find Romer's arguments unpersuasive on when the "main" mistake occurred. In my view it was during the First Hundred Days, and not just because the fiscal stimulus was grossly inadequate (and was too dependent on tax cuts.) The biggest failure was in its grossly negligent response to the housing crisis. Romer writes:

The Anthony Weiner thread is filling up. You can continue the discussion here.

The U.S. is still not convinced Ilyas Kashmiri is dead. Me either.

The defense rested in the Tahawwur Rana terror trial after calling two witnesses, a computer expert and an immigration lawyer. They didn't call their LeT expert Marc Sageman even though the judge ruled they could. The Judge asked the Government if he should dismiss the Indictment as to Ilyas Kashmiri, and the Government said no. Rana didn't testify. Closing arguments are tomorrow.

TV tonight: On The Bachelorette, Bentley gets exposed as a truly awful cad. And the guy with the mask finally takes it off. I wish they'd get to Thailand already, I'm looking forward to seeing Chiang Mai and Phuket. (They also went to Hong Kong and Taiwan, before finishing up in Fiji.)

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

What pols do in their private lives, absent legal or ethical issues, is not my business.

What is my business is what they do about public policy.

YMMV.

UPDATE: He admits everything. Apologizes. Not resigning.

Speaking for me only

Update (TL): Anthony Weiner lied for days with a straight face. I think he's toast.

Paul Krugman:

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. [. . .] I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform [. . .]

[. . .] First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

(Emphasis supplied.) Let me make 2 points in response - (1) The exchange/subsidies reform created by ACA do not forward us towards the best plan - Medicare for All. They take us toward the path of VoucherCare. What's more realistic? That Medicare will be made to resemble the exchange/subsidy reform or that the exchange/subsidy reform will be made to look more like Medicare? I think the former. (2) The size of the subsidies under ACA will be much more dependent on defeating the "Austerity Now! crowd than on the affordability of insurance on the exchanges. The reality is ACA will likely end up looking like VoucherCare when it is all said and done. Krugman's critique of VoucherCare is spot on. But he has a blind spot on the weakness of the exchange/subsidy reform in ACA, which likely will become VoucherCare.

Speaking for me only

Dominique Strauss-Kahn pleaded not guilty to sexual assualt charges today.

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is back on the witness stand undergoing cross-examination in his retrial on corruption charges.

The Government rested its case today in the Chicago terror trial of Tahawwur Rana. The defense has said it will call a a computer expert and immigration attorney. Last week, the Judge denied the Government's motion under Daubert to exclude the expert testimony of Marc Sageman, an expert on LeT. They said it's unlikely Rana will testify. Rummana Hussein is live-tweeting from court.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

When I saw the photo a purported HUJI spokesman released with a fax acknowledging Ilyas Kashmiri had been killed in Friday's drone attack, I was skeptical. The other available photos of Kashmiri, who is 47, were taken ten years ago in 2001 and look nothing like the man in the dead photo -- unless it was his son. The photo of the dead man (don't look if you're squeamish) the group released claiming it was Kashmiri does not does not depict a 47 year old man. Also, he was clean shaven. When Syed Saleem Shazhad interviewed Kashmiri in 2009, he had a long white beard dyed with reddish henna. A side by side of Kashmiri and the dead guy depicted in the photo is here.

Long War Journal reports it's not Kashmiri. The dead person in the photo is Abu Dera Ismael Khan, one of the Mumbai suicide bombers and a Lashkar-e-Taiba fighter. He was 25 in the photo. Ismael Kahn was 25 when killed. Again, don't look if you're squeamish as this one has several dead people, but here's the photo correctly identified. [More...]

Geithner The Incompetent:

As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion. [. . .] “The money was there and they didn’t spend it,” said Mr. Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. “I don’t mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged.”

If only the Czar President knew.

Speaking for me only

Apparently Paul Krugman faced some Chamber of Commerce hack this morning on TV repeating the missing confidence fairy argument about the economy:

So I didn’t have much time to take down the Chamber of Commerce guy on This Week today [--] you’ll see a lot of businesses complaining about the political climate — hey, a lot of them watch Fox — but very few actually saying that this climate is deterring expansion[. . .] It’s the weak economy that’s deterring growth, not the atheist Socialist secret Muslim Kenyan Hawaiian in the White House.

It reminds of me what former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill said last August:

I must say I'm kind of amused by some of the conversation about companies hoarding $1.5 trillion worth of cash, or something, because I had a rule when I was in the private sector for 25 years, including 13 running Alcoa, and that is, don't hire people unless you have somebody demanding goods that you can't produce with the people you already have. Right? So it seems patently unrealistic to me to urge people to spend money unless there's a demand that they're not able to satisfy with their existing resources. [. . .] Why would you? I mean, it's crazy. It's not a charitable function if you're running a business to say oh, my goodness, we have so many millions of people unemployed, I should rush out and spend my cash and hire more people if there's no demand for the goods. It's crazy to me. [. . . More]

It's a beautiful Sunday here. For those of you online, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

McClatchy reports on anonymously sourced accounts of the final plea negotiations between John Edwards and the Government. It's very detailed.

The essence: Edwards had a choice between a felony and the ability to argue for no jail time, or a plea to three misdemeanors and a six month sentence. If he took the latter, he couldn't argue for home detention or a halfway house instead of prison.

Because the misdemeanor deal would have precluded him from arguing for a non-jail sentence, he turned it down. The final negotiations lasted past Midnight on Thursday, and into Friday morning, just minutes before the grand jury returned the Indictment on Friday. [More...]

All day I've been reading two of the people killed with Ilyas Kashmiri are Amir Hamza and Mohammed Usman.

Recently tortured and killed journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote in October, 2010 that Mohammed Usman, who was an associate of Kashmiri and Osama bin Laden, had been killed in a drone strike. [More...]

What's on your mind this weekend? If it's something besides what we've covered, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.