What the Hell is Sen. Kent Conrad smoking? And why it is that he won’t share (c’mon, Senator, don’t bogart that doobie!)? In today’s Washington Post Sen. Conrad enables the hostage taking of the Republican Party by saying that he does not think that the two trillion in budget cuts that the Administration is talking about is enough.

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

Obama will present four buckets: keeping domestic spending low, cutting defense, “reforming” Medicare and Medicaid, and reforming the tax code. And this will all build off of Bowles-Simpson, which shared much of these ideas. The details are important, but they won’t really be discussed today. An administration official said that “The president will make clear that while we all share the goal of reducing our deficit and putting our nation back on a fiscally responsible path, his vision is one where we can live within our means without putting burdens on the middle class and seniors or impeding our ability to invest in our future.” The watchword is “balance.” As in, there’s a good way to cut the safety net and a bad way, and we have to put in place the good way.

Ezra Klein has helpfully assembled a summary of the Ryan GOP budget. As you can see, while everyone’s talking about the privatization of Medicare and block-grant of Medicaid, there are plenty of other pieces worth discussing here even without any of that.

Ryan would reduce discretionary spending to pre-2008 levels and freeze it for five years. He would repeal the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank entirely. He would block grant the food stamp program, giving a set amount of money indexed to inflation, regardless of economic conditions. He would eliminate all changes to Pell Grants, kicking them back to 2008 levels. And he would use the savings from all that to make the Bush tax cuts effectively permanent, but actually do worse than that, by changing the tax code to lower the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25% and making up the revenue on the poor.

Support on Capitol Hill for saving Social Security must be stronger than I thought: Pete Peterson’s flying monkeys are working overtime dropping dungbombs on anyone who opposes gutting the government program that lifted elderly Americans out of the grinding poverty that was their standard fate before 1935.

One of the more glaring possible outcomes in the grand bargain would be a plan to “reform” Social Security for the long term.

Republicans want to hide behind the President in doing anything that cuts Social Security or Medicare. Surely they will turn right around the next election and accuse Democrats for implementing the cuts; consistency ain’t their strong suit. But it’s crucial to them that Democrats, not Republicans, kick off that conversation. The White House is basically resisting that push, and wants everybody to jump in the boat at the same time. This has been their longtime theory of governing – let Congress take the lead, say nothing definitive publicly, work behind the scenes. But the end result is exactly the same.

The headline “Obama to Press Centrist Agenda in His Address bore very little resemblance to the content therein. Maybe I expected something far worse, and am judging the results thusly, but I’d say that the President calling for new investments and staying silent on the Bowles-Simpson cat food recommendations is pretty darn good, all things considered.

If “serious people” are going to treat the Catfood Commission proposal as a serious attempt to bring down the long-term deficit then there is no logical reason they shouldn’t treat my “Super Awesome Magical Deficit Plan” with any less reverence.

Any deficit reduction plan that is not focused mostly on reforming health care is simply not serious about fixing the true roots of our long-term deficit.