When Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson came out with their deficit plan last week, I got a little excited and rattled off like a million blog items about it. That turned out not to work so well for me. The more analysts looked at the plan, the worse it got, and after a while I decided their plan was a pretty bad idea. Oh well, lesson learned -- just because a couple bipartisan worthies come along promising to put our fiscal house in order, it doesn't mean I have to drop everything and...

Hey, look! New bipartisan deficit plan!

Okay, I know, I should probably wait. But seriously. This plan, by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici of the Bipartisan Policy Center,  looks a lot more solid. None of the crazy unenforceable caps and wild plans to slash the federal workforce without reducing its responsibilities. It's actually a balanced proposal to distribute pain. It also sensibly includes a short-term payroll tax holiday to address the economic crisis. And the tax reform, while lowering the corporate and top income tax rates to 27%, which is below the lowest point Ronald Reagan cut them to, also makes the overall burden more progressive.

You can see why the Bipartisan Policy Center understood it had to strike out on its own and create an alternative to the half-baked Bowles-Simpson plan. This is it. This is the bipartisan plan I can get behind! Just look at them -- aren't they dreamy?

Yeah! Come on Ross Douthat -- let's start debating this and pretending Congress might actually take up its proposal.

-- Noam Scheiber on Sarah Palin's war against the Fed.

-- A group of House Democrats are asking Republicans to give up their government health care.

-- Roger Ailes wants us to sympathize with "this poor guy" George W. Bush. Good luck.

The Oregon Ducks have the best offense in college football, and part of their style involves a frenetic hurry-up pace that wears down defenses. Opponents have responded with a rash of fake injuries:

That is pretty fake, alright.

I remember a high school football game where my team was down by a touchdown late in the game and out of time outs. Our coach grabbed a teammate and sent him into the game as a substitute with instructions to fake an injury after the next play, so as to stop the clock. The player was known as one of the less bright kids on the football team, which is really saying something. Anyway, after the play, he started hopping around as if he had hurt his ankle. He then fake-limped back to the huddle. I remember thinking to myself, My God, he is faking an injury, but he's faking the kind of injury you play through. Our coach had failed to explicitly spell out that he was supposed to fall to the ground with his fake injury and be helped off the field. And this was not the kind of kid to figure that sort of thing out on his own.

We lost.

Cato's Michael Tanner flays Republicans for the meagerness of their budget savings:

[S]ince the election, Republican leaders have been busy “clarifying” that promise. It now seems that they didn’t actually mean that they would roll back all federal spending to 2008 levels, just domestic, discretionary spending. Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are off the table, as is defense spending. Homeland security and veterans’ programs would also be spared any cuts. Removing those categories, along with interest on the debt, exempts 83 percent of the budget from any serious cuts. Rolling back the remaining spending to 2008 levels would save barely $100 billion, 2.8 percent of federal spending. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with our $1.3 trillion deficit.

Tanner omits any mention of the fact that Republican-endorsed tax cuts would increase the deficit by far more than the spending cuts would reduce it, in keeping with conservative movement policy of refusing to acknowledge the fiscal effects of tax cuts. Still, tanner's analysis is correct as far as it goes -- the Republican plan to confine spending cuts to domestic discretionary spending is indeed pathetically small in proportion to the scale of the deficit.

But then Tanner concludes with a political warning:

In the run-up to the election, Republicans constantly reassured voters that they understood how they had “lost their way” during the Bush era. If we gave them one more chance, they would leave their big-spending days behind them. Faced with the fiscal nightmare of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda, voters reluctantly gave the car keys back to the Republicans. It’s very early, of course, but if Republicans hope to earn and keep that trust, they are going to have to demonstrate that they are a lot more serious about cutting spending than they have shown us thus far.

This is standard right-wing budget doggerel.

[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner]

A few years ago I engaged in a friendly debate with Ross Douthat about the number of books that President Bush had read in 2006. According to Karl Rove, the former president had read 94 books (some of the 94 were big history books). I found this claim dubious, but Ross thought it was believeable.

Now, to Sarah Palin. At the end of his big piece on the onetime Alaska governor, Robert Draper writes:

Palin became testy when I asked her about the books I heard she had been reading. “I’ve been reading since I was a little girl,” she snapped. “And my mom is standing 15 feet away from me, and I should put her on the phone with you right now so she can tell you. That’s what happens when you grow up in a house full of teachers — you read; and I always have. Just because — and,” she continued, though in a less blistering tone, “I don’t want to come across sounding caustic or annoyed by this issue: because of one roll-of-the-eye answer to a question I gave, I’m still dealing with this,” she said, referring to her interview with Katie Couric.

After taking this moment to (shall we hint?) gather her thoughts, Palin continues:

“There’s nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on — and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I’m just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there’s such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.” She went on: “I’m reading [the conservative radio host] Mark Levin’s book; I’ll get ahold of Glenn Beck’s new book — and now because I’m opening up,” she finished warily, “I’m afraid I’m going to get reporters saying, Oh, she only reads books by Glenn Beck.”

Does anyone find this remotely believeable? For starters, this is the perfect political answer. She admits to reading a book by a conservative talk show host, a collection of letters from a Founding Father, the work of a religious novelist/writer, and a biography of a conservative female icon (the conservative female icon). And the Reagan bit is priceless--"of course" she is reading about Reagan! How dare anyone suggest that there is ever a moment when she would not have a book by or about our fortieth president.

The larger question is why anti-intellectual Republicans feel the need to sound like they read more books than they really do. Was anybody's estimation of Bush's intelligence altered by Rove's claim? Sure, the Couric interview hurt Palin, but answers like the one above are not going to change anyone's opinion. This is the usual case of trying too hard, and as a result sounding silly. Even in elite liberal circles people occasionally admit to going a decent interval without a book.

While the health insurance lobby was negotiating with Democrats to limit its exposure during health care reform it was also spending money to defeat health care reform. A lot of money:

Health insurers last year gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health-care overhaul law, according to tax records and people familiar with the donation. ...

The $86.2 million paid for advertisements, polling and grass roots events to drum up opposition to the bill that’s projected to provide coverage to 32 million previously uninsured Americans, according to Tom Collamore, a Chamber of Commerce spokesman.

It's a smart play -- try to kill the bill, but also negotiate to ensure that you don't get hit too badly if you fail.

[Guest post by James Downie]

Jon Chait and Jon Cohn's skeptical posts about Roger Altman highlight his public statements, and the possible pick becomes even sketchier when considering his maneuvering behind the scenes. From Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail:

The independent board members [of Morgan Stanley], led by the lead director, C. Robert Kidder, decided they needed to hire an independent adviser and, after a short conversation, chose Roger Altman, the former deputy Treasury secretary and founder of the boutique bank Evercore Partners (and Dick Fuld’s former carpool-mate). He would advise the board on whatever transactions they would be presented with and provide a modicum of cover; in the event that whatever happened over the weekend led to legal battles, at least they would look like they were trying to be responsible. […]

The tension inside Morgan Stanley’s board meeting was becoming untenable. Roger Altman, the banker from Evercore who had been hired just twenty-four hours earlier to advise them, was telling them that they needed to think hard about selling the entire firm. He had painted a doomsday scenario, and it wasn’t sitting well with several directors in the room, who had become convinced that Altman was trying to get them to do a deal simply so that he could collect a big fee. During a break, Roy Bostock spoke with C. Robert Kidder, the firm’s lead director: “We ought to fire that guy right now. Get him out of here. He is not helping.” Others were concerned that given his close ties to the government—he was the former deputy Treasury secretary and was still considered very well connected—that he might leak information about the firm’s health back to them. That, they thought, would explain why Geithner was putting so much pressure on Mack to do a deal. Though they did not know it, Altman had sent an e-mail to Geithner the night before telling him that he had gotten the assignment to work for Morgan, but he had not disclosed any of the details of the meeting.

Whether it was paranoia or just a lack of sleep, the discussion was becoming heated. Mack, who hadn’t been consulted when Altman was hired, was even more upset about his being there than some of the board members. “I don’t trust him,” Mack announced after he kicked Altman out of the board meeting temporarily. He said he thought they should be using Morgan Stanley’s own bankers to advise them if they really were going to sell the firm. He also told them he was worried about revealing the details of Morgan Stanley’s negotiations with Mitsubishi in front of Altman, reminding the directors that Evercore had a partnership with Mizuho Financial Group of Japan, one of Mitsubishi’s rivals.

“I don’t know what this guy is up to,” he said.

In addition, last June, Evercore was in the news for receiving what the US Trustee overseeing the GM bankruptcy termed “staggering” and “excessive” fees for their consulting work. Altman left out that detail a month later, when he wrote a New York Times op-ed in part praising the president's "courageous decision to put General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy." Altman was right to be worried about Morgan Stanley's viability, but if the White House's goal is to appoint someone to repair relations with Wall Street, Altman might give them the worst of both worlds: an adviser the public associates with Wall Street whom many on Wall Street don't trust.

If you want more evidence for the proposition that a total fraud can continue to prosper if his brand of fraudulence tends to flatter the prejudices of the rich and powerful, take note that Mark Penn is now conducting polls for Politico, and Art Laffer has been hired to advise Rick Scott.

If you've ever seen "Airplane 2 -- and, to be sure, I am not recommending that you do so -- there is a funny complication of television news coverage from around the world of an impending shuttle disaster:

Buffalo Anchorman: Our top story tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Buffalo. Also in the news, Lunar Shuttle heads for the Sun, and certain disaster.
Tokyo Anchorman: Our top story tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Tokyo. Also in the news, American Lunar Mission locked in death struggle.
Moscow Anchorman: [with a gun pointed to his head] A Four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory. And on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are soon to perish in Shuttle disaster.

Somehow Fox News has managed to exceed even this parody. Per Gawker, USA Today has a typical soft-focus feature on President Obama's book for children. Headline:

Obama shares dreams for his kids in book on 13 Americans

Fox News ran with the story on its website, but tweaked the focus a bit to emphasize the fact that the book praises Sitting Bull. Here is the Fox News headline:

Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General

Bloomberg News reports that Roger Altman recently interviewed to replace Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council. I'm generally pretty sympatico with Clintonite moderates like Altman and their progressive fiscal conservatism. At the same time, people like Altman both reflect and create the massive structural upper-class bias in Washington policymaking. Here's Altman writing last December in an otherwise sensible Wall Street Journal op-ed:

A third step involves the party's deteriorating relations with industry. This relationship must be fixed because the views of industry often coincide with those of independent voters. The commitment to address the deficit would help, together with moderate regulatory policy on telecommunications and antitrust, and adding one or two businessmen or women to senior levels of the administration.

The notion that business leaders represent some reflection of main street America, rather than an interest group whose policy preferences often differ with the public's as a whole, is commonplace. When you think about it, it's ridiculous. I commented on Altman's op-ed at the time. There are any number of issues -- TARP, free trade, progressive taxation -- where business, for better or worse, has very different views than the majority of Americans.

You'd never see somebody asserting without evidence in a mainstream forum that the views of labor reflect the views of independent voters. Or, at least, somebody who wrote that would never be in a position to run something like the N.E.C. Yet that's the sort of person who can get hired in a Democratic administration. And the people who get hired in Republican administrations are dramatically more right-wing than that.

The wonks have finally gone through the debt commission's plan, and the findings are... not so good. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- a liberal group more favorable to deficit reduction than most liberals -- goes through the main problems here. In short, there's too much pain imposed on people with low incomes.

More problematically, the Tax Policy Center has broken down the distribution of the tax changes. The commission's plan would be more progressive, and would tax the rich at higher rates, than the Bush era tax code. But it would be less progressive and would tax the rich at lower rates than the Clinton-era tax code.

That's a total non-starter. The Bush tax cuts are slated to expire, and President Obama has stated he will not accept a permanent extension. You can argue either side of which policy baseline -- Bush-era tax rates or Clinton-era tax rates -- is the fair baseline to start from. But the fact is that the Bush tax cuts are slated to expire. Liberals don't need to do anything to get Clinton-era rates on the rich to return. There's simply no way Democrats can agree to assume Bush's low, low tax rates on the rich as a starting point, and then have the commission claw back some of those rates. That would mean rich's people's contribution to shared sacrifice would be something that is slated to happen anyway. I understand the need to trim back the welfare state, but we're not going to trim it back far enough for the rich to enjoy sub-Clinton-era levels of taxation.

I would really like to see some kind of bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit, and I understand it would require changes that people like me would not impose if we had our druthers. That's the nature of making policy in a polarized environment with a supermajority Senate requirement and a public opinion landscape hostile to almost any specific measures to raise revenue or reduce outlay.

But it's worth keeping in mind that, while liberals may not have a strong hand, conservatives have an even weaker hand. First of all, the default option is for spending to rise rapidly. Second, much as conservatives like to imagine that tax revenue determines the size of government, in fact spending levels determine the size of government. Third, while the public doesn't want to raise taxes to pay for the level of government it prefers, it wants to cut spending even less. When push comes to shove, liberal priorities such as lower defense spending and higher taxes, especially on the rich, are a lot more popular than cutting Social Security or Medicare.

Conservatives do have a couple advantages. They have the ability to exact a high political price if Democrats attempt to put the government on sound fiscal footing without their consent. They've done this with taxes, in 1993 and other times, and they did it with the Affordable Care Act, a crucial element in curtailing health care cost inflation.

The long-term deficit is a kind of mutually-assured destruction scenario, where two adversaries must cooperate, though each has an incentive to push for cooperation on the most advantageous terms. In a scenario like this, a player who cares less about the consequences of failure, or can persuade his opponent that he cares less, has a commanding advantage. Republicans have gained such an advantage by demonstrating a total disregard for the consequences of deficits and the apparently genuine embrace of lunatic fiscal doctrines like supply-side economics and "starve the beast." (Imagine how the Cuban Missile Crisis would have played out if Khrushchev was convinced America's nuclear arsenal was harmless, and Kennedy knew this.)

Republicans screamed loudest about the debt commission, and in so doing persuaded the commission to tailor its plan to their liking. The closer one looks at the Bowles-Simpson plan, the more clear it becomes that this is not the appropriate basis for a compromise.

The commission's plan has some useful concepts. But, as Paul Krugman points out, having some useful concepts isn't enough:

what on earth are people who say things like, “This proposal can be a starting point for discussion” thinking? We’ve been discussing and discussing, ad nauseam; the commission was supposed to provide a finishing point for discussion. Instead, it produced a PowerPoint that is one part stuff that has long been on the table, one part conservative wish-list, and one part just weirdly ill-considered.

Again, liberals should expect a fiscal adjustment to do a lot of things they wouldn't do if they could design a solution on their own, because the ideal liberal solution isn't politically feasible. But there's a floor and this plan falls below it. What's more, as Mark Schmitt argues, there are other fish in the debt commission sea:

With the thing going nowhere, Simpson and Bowles seem to have simply grabbed whatever they had on the table and declared it a plan, hoping it would get the others engaged. Instead, it seems to have made the whole project irrelevant.

That’s why I’m more interested in the deficit-reduction report that is due this Wednesday from the task force assembled by the Bipartisan Policy Center's task force, chaired by former OMB Director Alice Rivlin and former Sen. Pete Domenici. And there’s a set of people in Washington, mostly not elected officials, who understand the federal budget inside out, who (I think) wouldn’t produce the kind of amateurish product that is Simpson-Bowles.

Sadly agreed. There will probably need to be a debt commission, but not this debt commission.

-- The most spectacular congressional flameouts.

-- Michele Bachmann hates earmarks, except for the earmarks she likes.

-- The RNC's political director resigns, blasts Michael Steele.