Gingrich never tires of calling Barack Obama a food stamp President, saying that the food stamp rolls increased by the highest amount in history under this Administration. As a technical matter, this is not true. George W. Bush actually put more people on food stamps, and the law that allowed that was passed while Gingrich was Speaker. More interesting, the food stamps program is a success!

A couple days ago, Dick Durbin was confronted by constituents in Illinois and forced to take a position assuring protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Two days later, he offered to put “entitlements” on the table in exchange for phony GOP tax proposals that benefit the rich.

The Washington Post continued its jounalistic malpractice against Social Security by misrepresenting the Trust Fund and portraying the program as in crisis. That brought a well deserved rebuke from prominent economists and other, but WaPo’s clueless reporter is still in denial.

The group Protect Your Care has put together a mini-site based on the incident in the Republican debate on Monday, where tea party attendees cheered the prospect of allowing an uninsured man to die. The candidate being questioned during that exchange was Ron Paul. It turns out that he has a particular experience with the hypothetical question asked to him by Wolf Blitzer. In fact, his campaign manager from 2008 died from a lack of insurance.

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Clinton welfare reform package, which “ended welfare as we know it.” In a sense, we didn’t really know how that would turn out until a time of stress. Unfortunately, for the group of low-income Americans who need welfare, that stress has been part of their lives for almost a decade.

What the President isn’t telling people is that he offered an alteration to that automatic COLA process, by going to chained CPI, that would result in a slower increase in benefits, and a de facto cut. So at the same time the President is explaining that the COLA is not in his control, he is hiding the fact that he wants to change the metric upon which it is based. In fact, he slipped and actually did mention chained CPI, in a roundabout way, at a second town hall in Alpha, Illinois. (cont.)

By now the political world has heard about Mitt Romney’s statement to a group of hecklers at the Iowa State Fair yesterday. Explaining why he didn’t want to tax corporations to lower the deficit and pay for social insurance programs, Romney stated that “corporations are people, my friends.” This received the requisite amount of attention from partisans. But who initiated the exchange?

It turns out that the hecklers were a group of about a dozen members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI). They are a grassroots community organization that is part of a broader coalition called The New Bottom Line, which seeks to challenge big bank interests on behalf of everyday communities. And they have a message for members of both parties who visit Iowa during caucus season. I spoke with Dave Goodner, an Iowa CCI organizer who was part of the exchange yesterday.

If the rating agency’s entire argument was that the political system showed itself to be “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” during the debt limit debate, and that this failure of policymaking and institutional capability increases the chances of default, I don’t have much to argue about that. But, there’s a policy response for that. S&P could do exactly what Moody’s did and call for the debt limit to be extinguished, on the grounds that the legislative branch shouldn’t get to vote twice on funding, once when they appropriate it and another time when they decide whether or not the bill should be paid. If they really wanted to exert some influence on behalf of bondholders, they could have said that they would downgrade US debt further if the debt limit isn’t abolished within 90 days. Since the brinksmanship over the debt limit constitutes the biggest – perhaps the only – threat to paying off US sovereign debt, then the appropriate action for entities judging creditworthiness is to ask that the country in question eliminate the arcane and also dangerous practice.

But that’s not S&P’s only rationale.

Among the silver linings in this deal, progressives are told, are that it makes real and thoroughgoing cuts to the defense budget. The Pentagon is supposed to be one of the big losers in the deal. This was the President’s unwavering vow, according to the obligatory Politico tick-tock. And yet, right in the middle of that, you find that the White House did actually waver.

CNN has reported that Harry Reid is working on his own debt limit proposal that would cut deficits by $2.5 trillion total, include no revenue increases, and raise the debt limit by that same $2.5 trillion amount. Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the President and Vice President are scheduled to meet in the White House tonight starting at 6pm ET. Aides stressed that this would satisfy two key demands of the House GOP. It would have the dollar-for-dollar relationship between spending cuts and an increase in the debt limit; and it would not include revenue.

It sounds to me like the Democrats feel they need a counter-offer to what John Boehner will propose.