Two new Democratic groups, Priorities USA and Priorities USA Action, will spend up to $100 million in the Presidential election cycle to defend President Obama, and in so doing will accept undisclosed donations.

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.

The President created the cat food commission, reviving it after it failed in the Senate. The Ryan blueprint, with its design to deliberately tweak programs liberals hold dear, was clearly going to be something that turned the Bowles-Simpson plan, which did not get a passing vote from the commission, as the bipartisan baseline. There’s certainly enough to read into Chris Van Hollen’s tacit approval to suggest that this will happen tomorrow. Yet this would be a pre-emptive surrender, and a needless one at that.

Feeling poleaxed by the audacious hopes it raised during the ‘08 campaign, Team Obama will attempt to lower expectations going into 2012–and nothing lowers expectations like proving yourself irrelevant.

House Democrats lit into John Boehner and the Republicans in a conference call with progressive media just now. “Boehner has about 80 members who think that compromise is a dirty word. They keep wanting to move the goalposts and stick in radical social changes that they can’t get any other way,” said Jim McDermott (D-WA), referring to the unrelated policy riders around abortion and women’s health funding that Republicans are demanding. “This isn’t about debt reduction, it’s about the social agenda they’re trying to jam through. It’s really a cultural war that’s going on here. They’ve been offered the money, the President gave them the money.”

The reason some of us were insistent that what Bernie Sanders was doing on Friday was not really a filibuster was that it did nothing to stop or even slow down the advance of the tax cut bill. Today, the Senate will hold the first cloture vote, on the motion to proceed, and it’s expected to pass with up to 70 votes.

The big-business-worshipping Blue Dogs are (along with Big Media allies like Lawrence O’Donnell) trying to push the myth that they lost big, not because they pressured Obama to go with a stimulus package that every economist worthy of the name said was too small, but because of (get this) Nancy Pelosi.

According to the latest WSJ/NBC poll, the health care bill is “particularly unpopular in the districts that matter most in the Republicans’ effort to retake the House”: According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 52% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to give the [...]

Instead of letting his members know they were in danger, Van Hollen lied to them. He commenced a propaganda campaign to keep them from finding out the truth: that for many members, voting for the health care bill could very well mean the end of their political careers.

If there are any progressives left, it’s time for them to acknowledge that the Obama Administration is systematically destroying their brand.