Earlier this morning, radio newscaster Leeann Tweeden revealed that Sen. Al Franken had behaved inappropriately toward her during a USO tour of the Middle East in 2006. During a rehearsal for a skit that included a kiss, she says, he stuck his tongue in her mouth, and then took this picture on the way home:

I’ve decided it’s time to tell my story. #MeToohttps://t.co/TqTgfvzkZg

— Leeann Tweeden (@LeeannTweeden) November 16, 2017

Franken immediately acknowledged what had happened and apologized. This prompted the now drearily familiar round of pronouncements that he hadn’t apologized enough. “No matter what your political affiliation,” wrote Chris Cillizza at CNN, “you have to see how inadequate Franken’s first apology is.” So Franken apologized again. Oddly, Tweeden herself thought his apology had been just fine. Both of them:

.@jaketapper: “Do you accept his apology?” @LeeannTweeden: “I do…the one that came out this morning, I accepted that one too…I believe him. I think it is heartfelt.”

— Saba (@saba_h) November 16, 2017

No matter. Ed Kilgore thinks Franken is toast:

Franken is almost certainly going down, and the only question is whether he can somehow tough it out until the end of his current term in 2020. The odds are very low that he can, particularly since his entire career in politics and comedy is now going to come under fresh scrutiny for misogyny and/or hypocrisy.

There are two problems here. The first is that too many liberals feel that they have to respond in a maximal way to every possible incident of sexual harassment, partly to maintain their own woke credibility and partly because they want to make sure conservatives can’t accuse them of hypocrisy. The second problem is that we don’t seem to have any good way of talking proportionately about this stuff.

All I mean is this: Not all offenses are the same. Shoplifting is not as bad as grand theft. Assault is not as bad as murder. Saying this doesn’t imply approval of either shoplifting or assault; it’s merely a statement of uncontroversial fact. Likewise, not all sexual abuse is equal. Harvey Weinstein’s rap sheet includes dozens of accusations of groping, forced massages, and possibly rape. Louis C.K. masturbated in front of actresses multiple times. Roy Moore routinely chased after high school girls when he was in his 30s and appears to have aggressively assaulted at least two of them.

By contrast, Franken thought he was joking around but went farther than he should have. Once.¹ It’s no whitewash to say that this is a considerably lesser offense. But if the only response we have to any kind of sexual abuse is to insist on resignation from office and expulsion from public life—mostly to protect our own reputations—we are not acting with any sense of proportionality. We need to start. Listen to Leeann Tweeden, folks.

Do you think Al Franken should step down or be expelled from the Senate?

Leeann Tweeden: I’m not asking for that https://t.co/5bbq62RFva pic.twitter.com/Nx0xcZkUyz

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) November 16, 2017

¹There’s allegedly a second accusation coming out later today, something that Roger Stone tweeted about last night. It is, for now, suspicious in the extreme and appears likely to be a conservative ratfuck. We’ll see.

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

The president’s son-in-law seems to have forgotten about something again:

Jared Kushner received emails in September 2016 about WikiLeaks and about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” and forwarded them to another campaign official, according to a letter to his attorney from the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Kushner failed to turn over the relevant documents when they asked for them last month.

….Grassley and Feinstein also alluded to documents they received from other witnesses on which Kushner was copied. “Other parties have produced September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks, which Mr. Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official,” they wrote. “Such documents should have been produced…but were not.

“Likewise,” the letter continued, “other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ which Mr. Kushner also forwarded. And still others have produced communications with Sergei Millian, copied to Mr. Kushner. Again, these do not appear in Mr. Kushner’s production despite being responsive to the second request. You also have not produced any phone records that we presume exist and would relate to Mr. Kushner’s communications regarding several requests.”

I’m sure it was an honest mistake. Just like all the other honest mistakes Kushner has made when asked about foreign contacts. He’s a busy guy, after all.

Too many charts today! Let’s take a break with this Easy-Does-It rose that’s blooming in our front yard at this very moment. I took this picture yesterday morning. Isn’t it pretty?

Via James Wimberley, the Tyndall Center estimates that the recent plateau in carbon emissions is over. Total carbon emissions will grow about 2 percent this year, driven by higher emissions in developing countries:

Both the EU and the US have been reducing carbon emissions for the past decade, and so has China for the past couple of years. But China is projected to rise a lot this year, and the combined rise of China, India, and ROW are more than enough to counter the small reductions from the EU and US.

Wimberley thinks this is most likely a blip, and China will return to slow or no growth in the near future. I’m a little less confident, since I read Chinese domestic politics a little differently than he does. But I hope he’s right.

Obamacare signups are coming on like gangbusters:

Healthcare.gov enrollment has surged at least 47 percent higher than during the same period last year, CMS announced yesterday. Nearly 1.5 million Americans selected plans on Healthcare.gov in the first 11 days of the sign-up period — a shockingly high number that has surprised just about everyone, given that the administration whittled down the advertising budget touting the open enrollment window by 90 percent.

If you figure that signups on the state exchanges are also up 47 percent from last year, then about 3 million people have signed up so far. I know you’re itching to see this in chart form, so here it is through November 11:

Why are signups so far ahead of last year? No one knows. Maybe word of the shortened signup period was widespread, and lots of people are rushing to enroll quickly. Maybe months of trying to kill Obamacare acted as good advertising (in the “say anything you want, just spell my name right” sense). Maybe liberals are beating the bushes extra hard to sign people up.

The big question is whether this surge is enough to match last year’s enrollment even with the short signup period. It will be a while before we know that.

The Republican tax bill has gone from bad to completely, bugshit nuts. Via the Joint Committee on Taxation, here’s the latest estimate of how the Senate version of the bill will change the taxes you pay:

This is not a typo. By 2027, middle-class taxpayers will, on average, pay about $400 more than they would under current law. The rich will pay several thousand dollars less. Here are the changes in tax rates:

Have Republicans gone crazy? They can’t seriously be thinking of passing this thing, can they?

UPDATE: I’ve changed the top chart because it was confusing. JCT calculates the total amount that each income class will pay, and unless you look at the chart closely it appears that a middle-class taxpayer will pay $4-8,000 more in taxes. In fact, they will collectively pay $4-8 billion more. I’ve divided each income class by the number of households in the class to get an average per household.¹ This is what the new chart shows.

¹It’s actually the average per “tax unit,” but it’s pretty much the same thing.

The latest from the White House:

The Trump administration plans to allow hunters to import trophies of elephants they killed in Zimbabwe and Zambia back to the United States….

What? Why on earth would Trump rescind the ivory ban? Maybe if I keep reading I’ll find out:

….reversing a ban put in place by the Obama administration in 2014, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official confirmed to ABC News today.

Oh.

Yesterday I was in a quandary: how, oh how, will Republicans manage to keep their tax bill from increasing the deficit in 2028 and beyond, as required by Senate rules? One possibility has always been to make the tax cuts temporary, like the Bush tax cuts, but that seemed like a nonstarter. After all, it makes no sense to enact temporary corporate tax cuts. Businesses need to plan ahead and they need to know what the tax landscape is going to look like.

But wait! The tax bill isn’t all corporate tax cuts. There are also personal tax cuts. Here’s what they look like if you disaggregate them:

Hmmm. What if you kill off the personal tax cuts in 2026? That cuts your deficit in half. Progress! But we need more. CBO estimates that eliminating Obamacare’s individual mandate would save some money, so let’s pencil that out:

Look at that! Now the total deficit in 2027 is only $37 billion. That’s totally manageable with a bit of creativity. Maybe some spending cuts on the poor would do the trick. Or a bit of fiddling with some of the details of the corporate rate cut. Or some chained-CPI inflation gimmickry.

So that’s where we are. Republicans plan to make the personal tax cuts temporary and to eliminate Obamacare’s individual mandate. This means the middle class goes from getting a pittance to getting nothing to getting actively screwed because their Obamacare premiums will go up. If Republicans are wondering why a large majority of Americans think their tax plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class, this is why.

UPDATE: The labels on the top chart were switched when this was first posted. They are now correct.

Shutterstock

Nelson Peltz has just won election to the board of Procter & Gamble by a margin of 50.001 percent to 49.999 percent. Is this the closest election ever in corporate history? Or in the history of elections altogether?

Whenever we rode the tube in London I snapped pictures of the people sitting directly across from me. The result is “Tube People.” This is humanity in the raw, folks.