On MSNBC's "Now With Alex" (guest-hosted by the great Joy-Ann Reid), congressional correspondent Luke Russert told the unvarnished truth about why the party that's for cuts won't lay any out. Reid asked Russert: "Do Republicans really feel that putting forward entitlement cuts will make them more popular with the American people?"

And Russert, who has good GOP sources, explained their logic:

If they have entitlement cuts as part of this deal, they would make it, through their marketing ways, and they're better communications operatives than Democrats, that the president would own the entitlement cuts. They're not worried about that. They would say "the president owns that" in 2014 and 2016.

Look at how they did that with the defense cuts as part of the sequester.  Remember those ads that Romney ran, that Republicans ran: "These are the president's defense cuts"? They'd do the same thing: "These are the president's entitlement cuts." They don't worry about that at all.

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And yesterday, progressives scored another huge victory with the confirmation that Massachusetts Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren will get a spot on the Senate Banking Committee, where she can carry on the work that has made her a liberal hero in the fight to make Wall Street accountable.  Given Warren’s star power, the progressive activists who fuel her campaign see her as a leader in Washington whose influence extends far beyond her single vote in the Senate. Many are rallying around her vision of a “balanced approach” to reducing the deficit, which is notch or two to the left of Obama's.

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“You can’t solve a problem until you can name it,” Teles argues.  The term “kludge” originated in computer programming, and means “an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes.” This sounds very much like American government -- thus “kludgeocracy.”

Teles finds kludgeocracy everywhere he looks. Sometimes it takes the form of multiple, overlapping or contradictory programs to promote a single objective. For example, to promote the objective of retirement security, Social Security, a simple and straightforward program, must now compete with “401(k)s, IRAs, 529 plans and the rest of our crazy quilt of savings incentives.”

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Klein wrote that a deal seemed to be taking shape quietly, and that “the headline Democratic concession is likely to be that the Medicare eligibility age rises from 65 to 67.” This would be in exchange for Republicans giving in partially on Obama’s call for the restoration of the Clinton-era tax rates on income over $250,000; whereas the top marginal rate was 39.6 percent in the ‘90s, Klein suggested the deal would set it at 37 percent. Alternately, there's talk that the White House will instead settle for chained CPI -- that is, using a new, less generous cost-of-living measure to compute Social Security benefits.

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That doesn’t mean some changes, including cuts, shouldn’t be part of the cliff negotiations.  The president’s team, I think, could bring to the table around $400 billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years that largely come out of more efficient drug purchasing, other delivery side savings (paying for quality over quantity), and increase premiums on higher-income seniors.  Those look to me like smart savings and important negotiating material.

But bigger, structural changes, like raising the Medicare eligibility age or switching to the chained CPI, are more complex and deserve more discussion and debate.

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And I admit: I've howled at reports of Obama "betrayals" before, only to find later that the president negotiated a better deal than early reports showed, Exhibit A being the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits he got in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts after the "shellacking" of the 2010 midterm elections.

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The Democrats took a hard line last night, after top Republicans rejected President Obama's first offer to resolve the "fiscal cliff" on the grounds that it did not address spending cuts seriously enough. From the New York Times, the plan mostly included ways to raise revenues, with the additional promise that $400 billion in entitlement savings could possibly be negotiated next year:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal on Thursday to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, met strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced the goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

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Politico reports on the early shape of the deal:

Cut through the fog, and here’s what to expect: Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion — the middle ground of what President Barack Obama wants and what Republicans say they could stomach. Entitlement programs, mainly Medicare, will be cut by no less than $400 billion — and perhaps a lot more, to get Republicans to swallow those tax hikes. There will be at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and “war savings.” And any final deal will come not by a group effort but in a private deal between two men: Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The two men had what one insider described as a short, curt conversation Wednesday night — but the private lines of communications remain very much open.

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But easily the most short-sighted objective is to hold federal spending to 21 percent of Gross Domestic Product into the future. How did they get this number? It is roughly the average level of federal spending since 1970. This is not a reasonable standard—it is not even a way to think about the issue. So where did the idea originally come from? The answer: the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

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Any such grand bargain would be a bad deal for mainstream Americans.

Social Security and Medicare have absolutely nothing to do with the short-term U.S. fiscal problem. Middle-class entitlements do have long-term problems, like inadequate payroll tax revenue for Social Security in the 2030s, and excessive medical prices in the U.S., which affect private healthcare as well as Medicare and Medicaid. But these are unrelated problems that deserve to be discussed in unrelated debates according to unrelated timelines.

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Once there, I knew I'd been had.  It was about … the public debt. It cited one Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University, one of America's most talented artificers, who “estimates the true fiscal gap is $211 trillion when unfunded entitlements like Social Security and Medicare are included.” Compared to that, what's a thousand mile-wide hurricane?

That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know.  The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

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"[T]he [Telephone Consumer Protection Act] prohibits any person within the United States to use a telecommunications service 'to cause any caller identification service to knowingly transmit misleading caller-identification information with the intent to defraud [or] cause harm,'" Robert Falk, the HRC's counsel, wrote in the complaint. "By disguising the sender of the text messages as 'SMS@Aicett.Com,” [a company called] ccAdvertising knowingly and willfully caused the caller-identification service to transmit misleading caller-identification information in an attempt to defraud and harm gay-rights advocates."

On Tuesday, a number of D.C.-area residents, including several political reporters, received texts from the email addresses with messages like "Re-electing Obama puts Medicare at risk," and "Obama supports same-sex relationships. Voting for him will destroy the sanctity of marriage."

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The Romney-Ryan campaign has offered a bewildering and often contradictory array of positions on the issues, which makes predicting what a Romney agenda might look like exceptionally difficult. What's more, we'd see a very different Romney administration if Democrats retain control of the Senate. Silver gives them an 88 percent chance of doing so, projecting Dems to hold 52.4 seats in the next Congress (it's highly unlikely they'll win the House).

But if Romney were to sweep the toss-up swing states — which he has to do in order to win the White House — that would require a strong GOP turnout and a stronger showing in those Senate races.

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"It’s hard to sometimes just keep on saying and what you’re saying isn’t true," Obama said. "It gets repetitive. But, you know, the good news is, is that’s just the first one. Governor Romney put forward a whole bunch of stuff that either involved him running away from positions that he had taken, or doubling down on things like Medicare vouchers that are going to hurt him long term."

He added: "I think it’s fair to say that we will see a little more activity at the next one."

Via HuffPo.

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It is true, as Salon's Alex Pareene says, that Jim Lehrer asked questions that suggested "domestic policy" is an arid and narrow space where deficit reduction and maybe one or two other things trump almost anything else. But why did  Obama cede that ground to both Lehrer and Romney, with barely a desultory defense of what he stands for?

Both campaigns had essentially been appealing to their bases -- Romney because he was pinned down by the Republican primaries and subject to ongoing purity tests, Obama because hope and change don't really work for an incumbent and because Republican obstructionism and extremism left few other options. If liberals spent much of Obama's first term griping that he was bringing a knife to a gun fight, they were energized by a campaign that wasn't afraid to attack Mitt Romney at the same time that it made an affirmative case for basic liberal values, at the convention and elsewhere. And, crucially, they were galvanized by spotlights on just how radical elected Republicans are these days, from Paul Ryan making Ayn Randian cruelty mainstream to Todd Akin bringing the crudest antiabortion talking points out of the bottom drawer.

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But what struck me most was how much Obama allowed Romney to get away with: Five times Romney accused Obama of raiding Medicare of $716 billion, which is a complete fabrication. Obama never mentioned the regressiveness of Romney’s budget plan — awarding the rich and hurting the middle class and the poor. He never mentioned Bain Capital, or Romney’s 47 percent talk, or Romney’s “carried-interest” tax loophole. Obama allowed Romney to talk about replacing Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act without demanding that Romney be specific about what he’d replace and why. And so on.

I’ve been worried about Obama’s poor debate performance for some time now. He was terrible in the 2008 primary debates, for example. Expectations are always high — he’s known as an eloquent orator. But when he has to think on his feet and punch back, he’s not nearly as confident or assured as he is when he is giving a speech or explaining a large problem and its solution. He is an educator, not a pugilist, and this puts him at a disadvantage in any debate.

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President Obama: You have spoken eloquently of the need to reduce the influence of big money in politics. What specific measures will you advance if you are reelected to accomplish this goal?

Governor Romney: You have promised to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill if you’re elected. Yet our largest Wall Street banks are significantly larger than they were before the near meltdown of 2008. How would you prevent another bank from being too big to fail?

President Obama: The Dallas Federal Reserve Board, one of the most conservative in the nation, has called for a limit to the size of Wall Street banks. Sanford Weill, the creator of Citigroup – one of the largest Wall Street banks – says Wall Street banks should be broken up. If you are reelected, will you support capping the size of Wall Street banks?

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So here’s a brief guide to what you won’t hear this Wednesday or in the other presidential and vice-presidential debates later in the month.  Think of these as five hard truths that will determine the future of this country.

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