I guess Alan Simpson and his recurring set of bad manners has become too much of a liability to those intrepid grand bargaineers. So he’s been pulled for a reliever. Enter Judd Gregg, himself just out of the Senate.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke in front of the Council on Foreign Relations Wednesday, and he gave what amounts to an endorsement of the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Today, Thomas Friedman tells us about the squandered opportunities around the world, siding with Angela Merkel’s lecturing to Europe and promoting the Bowles-Simpson scheme to redistribute income upwards.

One of the bigger issues with the lack of Democratic consensus as the fiscal cliff nears is that it gives oxygen to a group of right-leaning fiscal scolds who see the opportunity to decimate safety net programs, allegedly in exchange for some tiny giveback on taxes they will describe as balanced. You can see this with the renewed prominence of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who claim to be working with a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

Alan Simpson, the most avuncular-looking Mean Girl in Washington, is back at it again. He fired off a letter to the California Alliance of Retired Americans, months after making an appearance in the Golden State that included a protest by this group. It was clearly eating at his soul so much that he had to “set ‘em straight” on how they should shut up and take the reduction of future Social Security benefits for all Americans with some more dignity and grace.

There’s nothing our beltway “reasonable men and women” love more than a conservative a-hole they can praise because he (it’s almost always a he) isn’t an EXTREEEEEEEEEEME conservative a-hole.

I liked this Mark Thoma piece about the shifting of the Overton Window. I think I alluded to this with my story on a new round of tax cuts being humped by the GOP, and the new bipartisan consensus on the virtue of tax cuts as a stimulus measure. With the focus on tax cuts, both sides play a role in shifting the Overton Window to the right. And the result is a set of policy choices that get artificially narrowed.

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.