Over the weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown announced that the budget deficit for the next fiscal year has nearly doubled, from $9.2 billion to $16 billion. This almost assuredly means a commensurate increase in cuts to the state budget.

Controversy has broken out because one progressive group dared to call out the House Democratic Leader on a dangerous tactical game she has been playing for the last several months. The story goes like this: Republicans have habitually bashed President Obama for not backing the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan in a formal recommendation to Congress. [...]

McConnell, strangely enough, is the Senate Minority Leader but also sits on the Appropriations Committee. I guess he doesn’t want to stop the gravy train.

Kent Conrad will introduce the Bowles-Simpson plan as a baseline budget today in the Senate Budget Committee. But as he plainly tells Ezra Klein, the goal is not to get a budget resolution. The goal is to create the conditions to pass Bowles-Simpson after the 2012 elections.

Kent Conrad, the retiring Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, just announced that the markup for the FY 2013 budget will commence tomorrow. And instead of creating model legislation, he will simply take the recommendations proposed by the Chairmen of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, popularly known as the “catfood commission,” as the baseline.

The euro crisis has returned to Spain and Italy, an inevitable circumstance of a euro straight jacket exacerbated by austerity, and everyone except Europe’s policy makers realize nothing fundamental has been fixed in Europe since the last flaring of the crisis.

With a Jewish holiday coming up tonight thoughts turn to what I should be neurotic about. Matt Yglesias says I should freak out about Europe, and he’s right. But that’s been the case for two years. And the powers that be over there are religiously opposed to the proper steps to take to end the crisis. In short, seen it! So what’s next?

President Obama just wrapped up his speech on the Ryan budget, and Jed Lewison has a couple live-blogs about it. He was quite pleased with the speech.

House Republicans have passed the Paul Ryan budget resolution, a sweeping plan that slashes long-term mandatory spending, goes under the discretionary spending targets set by the debt limit deal, cuts taxes for the rich and corporations, changes Medicare to a voucher program, eliminates Pell grants for hundreds of thousands of students, and generally authorizes just about every conservative wet dream you can name. And after all that, Ryan’s budget doesn’t even balance until 2040, because it’s nearly impossible to do so without anything on the revenue side.

The vote was relatively close, with the budget passing 228-191.

The most interesting portion of the night was the vote on a plan modeled on Bowles-Simpson, the plan from the chairs of the 2010 catfood commission. Reps. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Steven LaTourette (R-OH) introduced the budget, which includes all the elements of Bowles-Simpson, including the tax increases, entitlement cuts, and magic asterisk for health care. And to prove that nobody in Washington cares about deficit reduction as much as they talk about it, the Bowles-Simpson plan crashed and burned, attracting only 38 votes.