Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of $109 billion. They achieved this through pay freezes and cuts to federal employees. Considering that members of the military are also federal employees, you’re basically sparing one set of federal employees for another.

These are some awkward old humor-challenged white guys, and I know what awkward old humor-challenged white guys sound like.

I mean, is this funny?

James Dobson’s slam on Newt Gingrich at the recent behind-closed-doors meeting of evangelical Christian leaders grabbed a lot of attention in the press, but no one seems to remember that these two have a past. In 2007, Gingrich went on Dobson’s radio program to confess his history of marital infidelity, and received the blessing of numerous TheoCon leaders for doing so.

Now, though, Dobson appears to have led the charge against Gingrich in that meeting of religious conservatives. Is Dobson repenting for having given Gingrich a platform to try to rebuild in image back in 2007?

If you actually wanted to reduce health care spending you need to reduce how much we are actually paying for health care products and services. Not only do we spend way more than the rest of the industrialized world on administrative costs, we also pay way more for the exact same drugs and treatments. Forcing people to pay more for their health care out of pocket, i.e. have “skin in the game,” will not fix our problems.

House Republicans left behind eight “conferees” for a conference on the payroll tax/UI/doc fix bill, and plan to hold showy events where they sit in a room alone, but Democrats have adamantly refused to reopen negotiations until the short-term bill passes. Meanwhile, half of the conferees opposed the payroll tax cut extension as recently as a few weeks ago. So far, nobody’s buying the GOP spin.

Despite the heavy lift among evangelical leaders hoping to convince their flocks that Newt Gingrich’s adultery-based serial divorces aren’t misaligned with Family Values and that Newt has earned forgiveness for his bad behavior, GOP primary voters actually have a long modern tradition of nominating wife-abandoners for the Presidency.

Herman Cain suppporters are bitter about the media’s treatment of their preferred candidate and torn between the two remaining GOP front-runners. Mitt Romney looks like a flip-flopping moderate and Gingrich like a faux conservative. Burned by their own candidate’s lack of national campaign experience without previous vetting, why not look at someone not yet in the race, but whom the GOP has relied on before?

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

Leon Panetta has said time and time again since the inking of the debt limit deal that defense cuts at the level of what would be triggered by a Super Committee failure would be disastrous. He did so again at a Congressional hearing today. And we finally got a sense of what that “disaster” would specifically look like, according to Ben Armbruster’s account. Turns out it would mean that US military personnel might not be in every country on Earth. Disaster!

On Wednesday, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona renewed his push for the creation of a temporary Senate committee to investigate WikiLeaks and the hacktivist group Anonymous that would be called the Committee on Cyber Security and Electronic Intelligence Leaks.