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.

The President made some brief remarks at the Pentagon during the introduction of the new “austerity” defense budget. He stressed that the US will still have the most powerful fighting force in the world, that even after the cuts the defense budget would grow over the next five years, and that the overall budget will still amount to as much as the next ten largest militaries combined. So it’s hard to make the turn, given all those facts, that this is a real sacrifice on the part of the military.

It’s worth mapping out what will be the biggest stories to chronicle in 2012, what I’ll be looking toward.

Now that the Super Committee has failed — or succeeded — by doing nothing, the media are starting to notice that doing nothing would slash the federal deficits far more that anything the Committee, Catfood Commissions or White House have been proposing.

President Obama promised to veto any Congressional attempt to undo the trigger of spending cuts from the Super Committee’s failure. But he’s left unclear how Congress can be induced to renew unemployment benefits or other stimulus measures.

I tweeted last night, “When bad news from Europe tomorrow makes stocks tank, and the idiots in DC blame it on Super Committee fail, could someone correct them?” Apparently, no one told the AP or Washington Post, who insist the Super Committee Fail is driving down the stock markets.

I was on Mark Thompson’s show on Sirius XM radio on Friday, and I said at that time that there’s a better chance of Herman Cain knowing what he’s talking about on Libya than the Super Committee coming to a deal. And indeed, I will not be proven wrong. It’s clear that the Super Committee will go down to defeat as early as tomorrow, with an announcement that they could not reach agreement on a deficit reduction deal. In the end, there was no reason to reach a deal. There’s an election next year, and both sides want to use key elements to any deal in their pitch to voters; broadly speaking, Republicans want to be the party to protect your tax rates, and Democrats want to be the party to protect Medicare. Both those items were imperiled by a deal, so there could be no deal.

The gentle sobbing of Erskine Bowles and Alice Rivlin and Alan Simpson and Pete Domenici will be heard across the land.

An article planted by Republican operatives looking to absolve their party of blame for failure on the Super Committee suggests that the rank and file are being persuaded to accept tax increases as part of an overall deal. The entire premise of the article is wrong, because it posits as a “tax increase” a deal that would cut taxes by $3.3 trillion

So this is interesting. President Obama did a set of phone calls today with Patty Murray and Jeb Hensarling, the co-chairs of the Super Committee. It included the usual platitudes about reaching a deal, a balanced approach, etc. Everything Obama has said a hundred times before. This was new, however, and I assume precipitated by the chatter that the trigger will never be pulled, that Congress will find a way to back out of the cuts, particularly the defense cuts.

You will be stunned to know that Democrats and Republicans are having trouble reaching consensus with less than three weeks to go until the Super Committee needs to make recommendations on deficit reduction.