According to Tacitus, Petronius Arbiter:

…spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, that by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and that he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. His reckless freedom of speech, being regarded as frankness, procured him popularity. Yet during his provincial government, and later when he held the office of consul, he had shown vigor and capacity for affairs. Afterwards returning to his life of vicious indulgence, he became one of the chosen circle of Nero’s intimates, and was looked upon as an absolute authority on questions of taste (elegantiae arbiter) in connection with the science of luxurious living.

The Tom Ford of his day, his was among the more spectacular suicides. As the story has it (and no, I don’t care if it isn’t true), in 65 CE, the emperor dropped by for an evening of gladiator buttsecks during which he noticed the many priceless works of art littering Petronius’s penthouse triplex overlooking east 57th. Having had a day or two to work himself into a state, the emperor sent word that, admiring his subject’s collection, Petronius should do everyone a favor and kill himself leaving everything to said emperor.

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“With most of the 18.4-cent tax per gallon of gasoline set to expire Sept. 30, renewing the tax could be the next political controversy to spark a brawl in an ever more deeply divided Capitol Hill.” [Politico]

Mitch McConnell, speaking Monday night to CNBC’s Larry Kudlow before heading off with John Boehner for some celebratory hookers & blow:

What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order.

They’re now three-for-three: extending the Bush tax cuts, exacting a pound of flesh for keeping the government open, and turning a formerly pro forma debt-ceiling vote into an opportunistic crisis. Why on earth wouldn’t they think they can keep their winning streak going?

We’re reminded of another supposedly idealistic Democratic President, faced with fierce Republican opposition, who caved on a key issue early in his term. We forget the circumstances, and cannot find a precise reference online, but we’ve always remembered the quote attributed to a Republican lawmaker about Bill Clinton: “He can be rolled.”

Adventures in TV Land [Jared Bernstein, via Ezra]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHJkvEwyhk

…’nuff said.

“Paperwork to form the new committee, the ‘Campaign to Defeat Barrack Obama,’ was filed with the Federal Election Commission on April 5. Ten days later, the PAC’s name was changed to ‘Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.'” [TPM]

@BarrackObama [FlyingChainSaw]

Our guest columnist is Nosh.me.

We are sorry, the page you are looking for is lost.

Periodically, pages go missing, assets get misplaced — you should not be concerned. This is a startup, this kind of thing happens. At Nosh, we are fortunate to have a relationship with several teams of ex-special forces operatives who help us track down these missing pages. When a page on this website goes rogue — and a code 404 arises — we dispatch one of our teams to bring it back. Ideally they are able to salvage the missing page, but sometimes, if the page is truly lost, they have to take it out (resulting in the subsequent code 500 when the page gets taken down).

Regarding the page you are currently looking for, one of our teams actually did find it, but it did not want to be found and a firefight ensued. This encounter is documented above.

We are very sorry we are not able to display the page you were looking for. Please go back home and we’ll do our best to ensure this kind of mix up is resolved peacefully in the future.

404: Page Not Found [Nosh, via Daring Fireball]

Jonathan Bernstein, trying to make us feel better when we’d prefer to just wallow in misery, writes:

I think a lot of what’s hitting liberals over the last couple of weeks is a delayed reaction to the severity of the Republican landslide of 2010. And I’m not at all convinced that the policy changes so far this year are any worse for Democrats than the policy changes in 1995-1996.

We still haven’t forgiven Bubba for that, so let’s not go there.

And never mind 2010 — we’ve spent our entire adult life suffering a delayed reaction to 1980. We’ll never forgive Our Fellow Americans for that.

So our baseline in all this is a very dark, deeply cynical judgment about the immortal souls of a significant portion of the citizenry. This is the latest chapter in a very long, very sad story. And the deity overlooking our human comedy is Sisyphus. (Yes, we know, Sisyphus was mortal. Work with us, people.)

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