The Congressional Progressive Caucus met with occupy representatives about legislation and also released today a new bill called the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, a combination of stimulative job creation measures, progressive taxation, a funding cut to draw down current wars and other measures popular with the mainstream of the country.

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The House GOP’s next trick. Their plan is to find the two worst parts of the President’s jobs bill and deficit plan, and combine them for a package that sounds almost comically silly, but that gives them the talking point that the President supported the component parts

A helpful fact-check has debunked one of the two central themes of Republican job creation plans, that simply deregulating industry will bring about a job boom. Turns out that regulations aren’t responsible for jobs losses.

Ron Suskind’s book looks like it will be the talk of the entire week. The dispute with Anita Dunn over a truncated quote is sucking up a lot of oxygen. I haven’t read the book, but I think the context does indicate that the President stepped in when the old boy’s network was getting to be a problem, and that Anita’s quote still makes it clear that the work environment was hostile to women – or maybe just plain hostile – before that.

Instead of making payroll tax fairness a fixture of the Democratic brand, instead of wrapping that into a critique about the inequality that is at the heart of what America needs to fix in order to have sustainable finances again, Democrats chase these little moments to “prove” Republican hypocrisy – and in turn confuse everyone as to what it means to be a Democrat.

What we learn from this polling is that when you spend almost three years with unemployment at an elevated level, the public tends to get the message that government isn’t able to help alleviate the problem.

To those who want to say that the President is making the best of a bad situation, THIS is the problem. It changes the entire dynamic of the realm of possible economic solutions for the next decade or more. And when the economy suffers from austerity, since a Democrat basically called for it, that’s who will be blamed.

I don’t think the President is a weak negotiator. He wants different things from the people who elected him. And people are beginning to see that. There was no reason to yoke deficit reduction to the debt limit, building a doomsday device that could blow up in the country’s face. Obama had to make that decision, or at least accede to the Republican request. He wanted a grand bargain to “take deficits off the table” and burnish his image. He was willing to compromise plenty to do that, enough so it confused the entire notion of what was a compromise and what was a belief.

Let’s hone in on the Matt Yglesias sentence doing all the work here, the one that holds the logic together, the one I boldfaced. “And the White House isn’t going to get away without giving something up in that fight.” This shows the major difference between Democrats and Republicans with respect to politics in the current era.