During the debt ceiling fight President Obama wanted Republicans to agree to tax increases but they refused to. Obama couldn’t even get them to agree to a tax increase trigger to improve the chances of a super committee reaching a deal. Eventually Obama offered a sequester with large defense cuts and the GOP decided that was at least acceptable. Obama thought at the time that the GOP’s unwillingness to accept defense cuts would magically make the GOP more willing to accept tax increases.

This media spin on the “drop” in defense spending is bogus. And it reveals how most “reporters” don’t look beyond the press release they are handed.

The budget battles in Congress have an interesting, if not wholly unexpected casualty, the Defense Department. Due to budget uncertainty DoD has been forced to slow down its notoriously extravagant contracting process.

House Republicans will wait until tonight to pass “Plan B,” and while I think ultimately it will pass, the reason they’re waiting so long is that they have to figure out what to put into it to get conservative votes. Erick Son of Erick has a whip list of 34 no votes and 12 leaners, and Republicans can only lose 23, assuming no Democratic crossovers. So leadership must sweeten the pot if they want to win the vote.

And the way you sweeten the pot for House Republicans is that you kick the poor a bit more while handing out some aid to Wall Street and Lockheed Martin.

Hans Nichols at Bloomberg reports that former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and one of the few early GOP converts against the Iraq War, is the leading candidate to replace Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense.

To the extent that there is a difference in foreign policy between the two Presidential candidates at this point, it’s that Mitt Romney wants to implement the same exact policies as Barack Obama, but just spend $2 trillion more on defense contracting to carry it out.

OK, “it will not happen” is new. And this comes on the heels of the White House digging in and saying that the President would sign nothing related to the fiscal cliff unless the top two marginal tax rates increase back to Clinton-era levels. That would contradict the sureness of “it will not happen.”

In a speech today at the Virginia Military Institute, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney will commit to arming Syrian rebels, and will attribute the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi to the “same forces that attacked our homeland on September 11th, 2001,” which under the still-active Authorization to Use Military Force commits the United States to military action in that country.

A curious coalition has come together to petition the Senate leadership of both parties to work on a bipartisan deal to avoid the sequester, the automatic cuts to defense and discretionary spending. Six senators, three in each party, wrote the letter to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. It’s mostly generic, but the identity of those involved does say something about what could come in the lame duck session.

The Office of Management and Budget has released its Congressionally mandated report under the Sequestration Transparency Act, designed to explain how the Obama Administration would execute the sequester, the automatic cuts to defense and discretionary programs supposed to hit at the end of the year.