So this is interesting. President Obama did a set of phone calls today with Patty Murray and Jeb Hensarling, the co-chairs of the Super Committee. It included the usual platitudes about reaching a deal, a balanced approach, etc. Everything Obama has said a hundred times before. This was new, however, and I assume precipitated by the chatter that the trigger will never be pulled, that Congress will find a way to back out of the cuts, particularly the defense cuts.

A couple days ago, Dick Durbin was confronted by constituents in Illinois and forced to take a position assuring protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Two days later, he offered to put “entitlements” on the table in exchange for phony GOP tax proposals that benefit the rich.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in changing the focus of Washington’s economic attention from deficit and debts to questions of economic justice and jobs. The President’s pivot to jobs hasn’t gotten a single jobs bill through Congress, but the changed conversation has killed the momentum of the Super Committee and created predictions of its failure.

You will be stunned to know that Democrats and Republicans are having trouble reaching consensus with less than three weeks to go until the Super Committee needs to make recommendations on deficit reduction.

Leaks from the Super Committee show how Democrats and Republicans are proposing to meet their debt reduction goals. The Republicans propose a minimum of tax increases versus spending cuts, and even those increases are misleading, since they’re using different baselines.

Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has not been traditionally opposed to a deficit reduction plan. The CBPP supports chained CPI, for example. So it’s quite something to see Greenstein, along with Paul van de Water and Richard Kogan, savage the Democratic opening bid in the Catfood Commission II, describing it as to the right of Bowles-Simpson, the Gang of Six and other deficit plans.

In a most unsurprising bit of news, the Super Committee, the group of 12 lawmakers tasked with coming up with at least a $1.2 trillion deficit package, isn’t able to agree on anything, and is slowly morphing from a Gang of 12 to a Gang of Obama Boehner and Reid You Figure It Out.

Why 11 Democratic Senators and not 50 (all of them, less the three on the Super Committee) signed this effort spearheaded by Jeff Merkley is beyond me, but if more sign on it could be a crucial factor in actually pivoting away from deficit talk and toward jobs.

President Obama is scheduled to speak this morning at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, to spell out his debt reduction plan. Some details from Obama’s plan to “go big” on the Super Committee are out, and it’s an opening bid that is far less pre-compromised than we’ve come to expect.

The ratings agency Standard and Poor’s is threatening another downgrade of the United States credit rating if the Super Committee doesn’t get results.