What a silly person this John Larson is, thinking that Congress would create a jobs supercommittee. Why, what would that have to do with the deficit?

Whenever the talk of a primary comes up, I always ask “who is going to do this?” The answer is always someone like Bernie Sanders or Jan Schakowsky, the same people whose job it is to put the Good Liberal Housekeeping Seal of Approval on whatever piece of neoliberal shit the White House cooks up to please the bond vigilantes. The people who suddenly become okay with war when the White House says so, who shake their fists in the air with outrage right before they fold, the people you can count on to always be there when there’s nothing they can do…and are nowhere to be found when they can.

Seven Democratic Members of Congress spoke out against the Obama Administration’s proposed Colombia “free trade” agreement and its onerous assassination stress tests. They were joined by the United Steelworkers Union, the first major union to speak out against the deal after the AFL-CIO labor federation. Each centered their opposition on the laughable “Action Plan” to reduce assassinations of union members.

Most of the folks running DC may not much care that our middle class has disappeared along with our manufacturing base. But convince them that our declining manufacturing base might imperil their cherished military might, and they might finally wake up.

We’ll shortly be hearing the objections of deficit hawks to the deficit reduction package Demos, The Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute. No doubt they’ll echo the criticisms that have already been leveled at the deficit-shrinkage roadmap Rep. Jan Schakowsky put on the table earlier this month. To get a sense of what those criticisms are likely to be, I recently had a close look at a Schakowsky critique by The Atlantic’s resident deficit hawk, Derek Thompson.

The basic difference between Schakowsky’s plan and Bowles-Simpson is not that it relies more on revenue-raisers than spending cuts – although conservatives will surely highlight this – but who bears the brunt of the pain.

It’s not often that I see three perfect quotes in the same day, so I thought I would gather them all together in one place and hope that maybe, just maybe, someone in the White House will read them.

I’m pleased to see Jan Schakowsky, a member of the Catfood Commission, release her own deficit reduction plan, and in a way I’m also not pleased by it. It’s certainly better than useful idiots like Mark Warner saying “do the math” in order to cut Social Security. And it’s better than the greybeard panels that are stalking horses for entitlements and defenders of the rich. In the main, I like Schakowsky’s plan, though obviously everyone could add and subtract their own bits. But the problem is that a “deficit reduction plan” doesn’t address what actually causes deficits: namely, recessions.

Despite distrusting Mike Allen’s version of events at all times, there’s no question that the Administration resurrected a deficit panel that the Senate killed, and the President staffed it with a number of people who would be open to Social Security benefit cuts. And that set of decisions is bearing fruit on the panel, according to the Wall Street Journal. This one deserves a close reading.

Earl Pomeroy (D-ND), the chair of the Social Security Subcommittee on the House Ways and Means Committee, said that any benefit cuts to the program, including raising the retirement age, are “completely unacceptable” and should be taken off the table, contrasting many Democrats and even the House Majority Leader on the topic.