Thomas Friedman bemoans the fact that President Obama hasn’t embraced the big cuts to Social Security and Medicare proposed by former senator Alan Simpson and Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles. Their plan is great if you think the country’s biggest problem is high-living seniors.

Please leave any ideas for questions to ask supercommittee members in the comments below, if I don’t get to them this time I will try again at their next meeting.

You can also call Senator Murray and Rep. Hensarling to demand they broadcast all meetings, not just the opening statements and canned speeches. Click here for phone numbers and a script.

There’s no good outcome here. Either we get a pathetically bad grand bargain that probably has no revenues to speak of, or we get sequestration. The hilarious outcome would be a deal at the end of 2012 to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for canceling the trigger cuts, which would absolutely explode the deficit but make a lot of people in Washington happy. But either way, we’re not getting a jobs committee to recommend job creation measures that will go to the Congress for an up or down vote.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the AARP has officially reversed its course and will be no longer working to protect Social Security.

In a direct affront to their membership, one of the largest and most well-known advocacy groups in the country has thrown in its lot with the likes of Alan Simpson

Democrats were willing to cut $400 billion from Medicare, Coburn wanted another $130 billion lopped off. Not a pretty picture.

In actuality, the life expectancy at age 65 has increased to the extent that Social Security is paying out more benefits for a grand total of 3 years, after 70 years in operation. This is why the system endures, with minor changes (the retirement age has already increased to 67), because the people who designed it built in the flexibility and buildup of benefits in the trust fund to account for any population pattern shifts. About the only thing they didn’t expect was the massive, rampant inequality that made the payroll tax cap lead to a far lower collection in revenues than expected. That can be altered and the program saved with relative ease.

Alan Simpson doesn’t like “the Catfood Commission people.” In a testy interview with Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, the chair of Obama’s deficit commission questioned Grim’s stated facts about Social Security, speculating that Grim’s information came from “the Catfood Commission people.”

I’m feeling pretty guilty. I hadn’t known I was causing billionaires so much suffering. The former co-chair of President Obama’s deficit (a.k.a. catfood) commission just asked me during a public event to stop going after rich people. Then he came up to me after the event to make sure I’d gotten the point.

A year after the BP disaster erupted in the Gulf, Cherri Foytlin walked from her home in New Orleans to the White House, to let President Obama hear firsthand the suffering that continues to affect the residents of the Gulf Coast. Sadly, she couldn’t get an invitation to get past the gate. (Rubbing salt in her wounds — she got to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles stroll past her on the sidewalk on their way inside.)

Meanwhile, BP and certain parts of the government continue to try to spin the news, limiting media access to heroic rescuers, limiting scientific access to spill sites, and otherwise trying to hide the record and avoid accountability.

Access. It’s the name of the game.

Ladies and Gentleman, Alan “310 Million Tits” Simpson, whose plan to gut our country’s safety net is being embraced by President Obama, thinks the AARP is a “cruel organization” full of “marketers,” not “patriots.” That said, Simpson, aged 79, really likes the AARP’s magazine, especially “their article on sex over 80. Hell, I thought that was amazing.”