By now, many of you have probably read Frank Rich’s inaugural piece for New York Magazine. Freed from the bean counters and word counters of the New York Times, Rich pours forth pages (and pages) on what he calls “Obama’s Original Sin.”

I am not going to say that Rich is not being tough, per se, just that he isn’t as tough as he thinks.

President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning to respond to the dismal jobs report that showed unemployment rising to 9.2 percent over 18 months after the recession supposedly ended. He responded by not mentioning that number or grappling with what it means.

Instead, he continued the excuses and pseudo-economic gibberish that makes sense only to Tea-GOP Zombies and which explains why we’ve made virtually no progress in regaining the jobs we lost.

Yes, switching to chained CPI changes not only the cost of living adjustment for Social Security and other benefit programs that use a COLA, like federal pensions and veteran’s benefits. It also changes the cost of living adjustment for…. tax brackets. A tax bracket that might go up, say, $100 year-over-year would only go up $50, under chained CPI. And that means that higher tax brackets would be available at lower yearly income. This sounds technical, but the point is it’s a tax increase, designed to bring in $60 billion over ten years. What’s more, it’s a regressive tax increase.

It was fun while it lasted, though I never thought this Administration would try anything so risky. And indeed, today the Treasury Department’s General Counsel, George Madison, via an email to the New York Times, says that they have no ability to issue debt if Congress doesn’t increase the debt limit.

You can accuse Plouffe of being wrong in claiming that people won’t vote based on the percentage of unemployed — I tend to think it may loom in people’s minds. You can argue that it was a misstep in that the quote does sound tone-deaf when reproduced without the surrounding context, and it’s understandable why people would see it as insensitive when viewed without that context.

This bears repeating.

Democrats are all unanimous in their opposition to “massive cuts” to Social Security, so they have decided to just call it something else.

Because we have a governing elite that doesn’t understand basic economic theory, the horrific jobs report will probably not change the mindset of the next 72 hours, which is to cement a deal to massively reduce the deficit, mostly through cutting spending. The White House has convinced themselves that this would increase confidence from the business community and lead to hiring. In fact, the President is so convinced this is a good idea that he, not the Republicans, is using the debt limit as a hostage. He threatened to veto any solution that didn’t equal at least $2 trillion-plus in deficit reduction.

The Republican’s have been so successful in their hostage taking tactics not because the GOP are amazing negotiators but due to the fact Obama wants them to have a hostages. The Obama administration is told the Republicans they are negotiating with that they don’t believe the 14th amendment grants it the authority to ignore the [...]

Call your member of Congress TODAY and tell them if they vote to cut Social Security benefits, you won’t vote for them in the next election.

Tell them you’re on to their little game of rotating villains.  Because they’re about to tear a big hole in the social safety net, in a way that will immediately hurt millions of senior citizens.  Nobody is interested in their cheap theatrics.