What I find most ironic about these CEO deficit hawks complaining about the “uncertainty” that is hurting the economy is that they are the ones responsible for helping to create said uncertainty to begin with.

Obama hasn’t just neutralized Romney’s previous advantage on the economy — according to new polling, Obama has actually taken the lead on the question of who would best handle the economy.

I’d be a bit surprised to see Neil Barofsky grace the airwaves of CNBC again. But I have good news for CNBC. I have another exciting guest opportunity for them.

Larry Kudlow, fond of pushing his conservative talking points, ran into a couple of CEOs unwilling to go along. “Why aren’t businesses investing?” he asked. Was it because of uncertainty? Over-regulation? Obamacare?

No, said John Faraci and Don Peebles. The problem is demand. First and above all else, companies need customers.

It’s good to see some pushback like this at CNBC. Unless, of course, you’re Larry Kudlow.

With some many debates in the Republican primary this year the impact anyone has is often extremely small, but there is always the potential a debate can matter if a single moment from it goes viral. A memorable line or terrible gaffe could end up being the 30 second clip that epitomizes some large dynamic in the race and as a result is aired over and over on on the news and Internet.

John Harwood and Maria Bartiromo host. The focus will be, not surprisingly, on the economy. CNBC posted the candidate’s opening statements here for for anyone who might want to read them.

Economists at Goldman Sachs now put the odds of the United States officially slipping back into recession at roughly 40 percent. They also forecast that even without a technical recession, stalled growth could force unemployment to rise in 2012. It is extremely hard to imagine how Obama could win in 2012 if the unemployment crisis actually gets worse as we get closer to November.

Can this person, Larry Kudlow, keep his pundit employment and program on CNBC after this? After all, he did say the human toll is a tragedy, to amend this, “I mean, the human — the human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.”

In Mark Harris’ classic baseball novel, Bang The Drum Slowly, players and coaches for the mythical New York Mammoths (modeled after the New York Yankees) fill the dead hours spent in hotels while on road trips by adjourning to the hotel lobby where they make a show of playing a card game called “Tegwar”. Tegwar (The Exciting Game Without Any Rules) is a con game whose express purpose is to extract as much money as possible from the passing starstruck fans who want to join in yet don’t want to appear like rubes by admitting that they don’t know what the hell is going on in the game. Befuddled by nonsensical winning hands like Red Rooster, Banjo, Coney Island Tatey or Butchered Hog, but caught up in the glow of hanging out with real live major league ballplayers, the fans are easy pickings and, unsurprisingly, the ballplayers always win.