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In case you missed it, the right wing has been feasting over a Daily Caller report that President Obama has a food tester. Besides the fact that this is not news – Hot Air reported on President Obama’s food tester in 2009 - it’s not even new for this presidency. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher points out that St. Ronnie Reagan had one, too. But leave it to born-into-privilege Tucker Carlson to use his site's “scoop” as an excuse to accuse Obama of behaving like a king and then suggest the security measure is a waste of money.

Wonkette snarked Friday afternoon:

Why the nation’s first black president would feel compelled to employ someone meant to protect his food in this wonderful era of complete racial transcendence and political civility is beyond our comprehension, but it does automatically mean that Obama is an evil aristocratic dictator whose tyranny is only matched by his disdain for the common people.

From Wonkette's print to Carlson's lips, but in all seriousness. Friday night, he sneered on the Hannity show: “A food taster? It is good to be king. …and you’re paying for it.”

For anyone who didn’t get it that Carlson was suggesting we’re spending too much money on President Obama’s vainglorious security, he made that more explicit on Fox & Friends Weekend this morning.

In yet another segment in which the “fair and balanced” network whined about cuts to White House tours (and ignored cuts to programs for the poor), co-host Clayton Morris "asked," “How could you turn down kids yelling outside your gate, ‘Please let us in?’”

Carlson replied, “Because you gotta pay your food taster... your dog walker and all the rest.”

OK, it was a throwaway line and, fortunately, nobody has called for an actual reduction in President Obama’s security operation. At least not yet. But Carlson is deliberately planting the meme that a food tester is a wasteful frill less important than a White House tour. And nobody on Fox is objecting. In fact, Morris chuckled heartily at Carlson’s jab and FoxNews.com did its part with an article called, "Longtime Presidential Secret Revealed? GOP Senator Says Obama Has a Food Taster." Given the disgusting NRA ad suggesting the Obama daughters enjoyed special privileges with their security, it shouldn't surprise any of us if this latest nastiness didn't work its way into the mainstream of right-wing rhetoric.

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Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano upped the ante on his impeachment talk this morning during today’s visit to Fox & Friends. Last week, he accused “President Panic” of commiting “almost an impeachable offense” for (in Napolitano’s view) deliberately sabotaging the budget in order to score sequester political points. Today, in a Fox News twofer, Napolitano dropped the “almost” and went full out for impeachment – this time, adding one of Fox’s scare-quester tactics: the supervised release of some ICE detainees.

In case you missed it, Fox has been fear mongering that ICE’s supervised release of undocumented immigrants means that a vicious killer is on his or her way to your neighborhood.

Even though the New York Times reports they are “noncriminals and other low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal histories.” The Times also noted, “Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at a regional immigration office as well as wearing electronic monitoring bracelets, officials said.” Furthermore, as Media Matters pointed out, “(T)here is nothing unusual or illegal about supervised releases. This policy has been a regular part of Department of Homeland Security enforcement procedures since at least 2002.”

None of that information was brought up in this discussion. Instead, Steve Doocy actually prodded Napolitano into talking impeachment:

NAPOLITANO: This is really a new low for the government. …(Obama’s) micromanaging the government in a way consistent with his message of pain, not consistent with his Constitutional obligation to enforce the laws whether he agrees with them or not.

DOOCY: Ask a question: Is what he’s doing Constitutional?

NAPOLITANO: It’s within his power to do it. But it is so offensive, it’s impeachable.

DOOCY (feigning surprise): Oh-Kay. Judge Andrew Napolitano. There’s the impeachment word.

Napolitano is not the first person on Fox to talk impeachment. Sean Hannity has been salivating at the thought for years. Even Neil Cavuto has brought it up, and there's every reason to believe it will continue through Obama’s second term.

At the end of the segment with Napolitano, Doocy teased an upcoming guest: a woman whose “brother was killed by an illegal alien… and she’s not buying the sequester excuse, either.” The message was clear: Your brother could be next.

So while Fox is shrieking about the Obama administration deliberately causing pain, it’s “willfully” doing the same thing to its viewers for political gain. If only THAT were an impeachable offense!

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Judge Andrew Napolitano has now added “impeachment” to the list of usual Republican attacks on President Obama over the looming sequester cuts. During a visit to Fox & Friends, he and Steve Doocy went through some familiar right-wing myths about the sequester – that it’s just a small reduction in future spending and therefore no biggie – and went on to accuse “President Panic” of deliberately sabotaging the budget – i.e. making the cuts as damaging as possible in order to punish Republicans.

DOOCY: As Commander-in-Chief, he should be making any future reductions in future spending as easy as possible. But instead he and his cabinet are out there and they’re scaring the living daylights out of people. …He’s become President Panic.

NAPOLITANO: …This is almost an impeachable offense. If the President is deciding how to spend money in order to hurt us, rather than in order to provide us with the services for which we have paid, and for which we have hired him, he is doing the opposite of doing of what he has taken an oath to do. He has taken an oath “faithfully,” I underscore the word… to uphold the laws. That means make the government work. Don’t make it painful. Find a way to make it work on 2% less.

…Instead, he wants to cut in a way that’s gonna make us stand on line for five hours at the airport, quote, to teach the Republicans a lesson.

While the Foxies were busy maligning the president, they didn’t have time left to consider how the sequester might affect everyday people not earning television-pundit salaries and not with a partisan agenda: Teaching jobs and education funding are at risk; unemployment insurance benefits and aid for Hurricane Sandy victims are also subject to sequester. The Bipartisan Policy Center reported the following:

(T)he immediate and across the board nature of the cuts, along with their magnitude concentrated in a seven-month period, will impair economic growth as the year progresses. At BPC, we estimated last year that the sequester would reduce 2013 gross domestic product (GDP) growth by half a percentage point, and would cost the economy approximately one million jobs over the next two years. More recent estimates released by the CBO and Macroeconomic Advisors have roughly confirmed these projections.

I couldn’t find anything in their report that said these would only happen if President Obama deliberately jiggered the cuts.

Oh, and while they were salivating at the thought of impeachment (and never mind THAT cost!), nobody mentioned that President Obama has already put forth a plan to replace the sequester that includes over $930 billion in spending cuts and $580 billion in new tax revenue.

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Unfortunately for Eric Ferhnstrom, a senior campaign advisor to the Romney campaign, Paul Krugman (who's been on a tear lately) was on "This Week" Sunday morning to dismantle all of his vapid talking points.

First, he pointed out that government spending has been cratering since 2010 -- and openly mocked the idea that Mitt Romney has an answer to unemployment.

KRUGMAN: Well, the economy is weak. It's not terrible, but it's weak. The bitter irony here has to be for Obama, certainly for people like me, is that if the Republican answer is "let's slash spending, let's have low taxes," that's actually the policy we've been following. It's amazing, actually. Especially if you look at the last couple of years, what we've actually seen is sharply...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me show you -- we have a chart in your blog this morning.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, this is...

STEPHANOPOULOS: We created it. It shows the point you're making.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, this is real government spending, so it's federal, state and local combined, deflated, you know, adjusted for population growth and inflation, and it is plunging. It's plunging mostly because of cutbacks at the state and local level, because the aid that they were receiving in the stimulus has run out, but also because unemployment benefits have been expiring because Congress won't -- you know, Republicans in Congress won't extend them.

So in effect - and, by the way, if you extend that chart backwards, there's been nothing like this since the demobilization after the Korean War. We're actually practicing government austerity on a scale that we haven't seen in 60 years. It's not the president's policy. In effect, we've already got the policies that Republicans say they will impose if they take the election, and yet, of course, it may lead to the defeat of this president.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that's the point Stephanie was making, so bringing it back to you, what would Governor Romney do right now -- not in the future -- right now, to get the economy moving again?

FEHRNSTROM: Well, it's not just, as Paul says, tax policy. That's part of it, of course, but it's also spending policy, it's regulatory policy. It's confronting China on their unfair trade practices. It's -- it's a whole -- it's labor policy, George.

The governor has laid out very detailed plans. People can go to mittromney.com and learn about them for themselves. But I think what we really have here...

(CROSSTALK)

KRUGMAN: ... ...I know from detailed plans and there is nothing there. There is not...

Brutal.

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Mitt Romney slipped Tuesday and said something sensible. Don't worry, his campaign did a little repair work later:

Mitt Romney said Tuesday that cutting spending slows growth in the economy -- a rhetorical slip more akin to an argument a Democrat might make than a Republican.

Speaking in Shelby Township, MI, the former Massachusetts governor took a question about the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission empaneled by President Obama to address the nation's deficit and debt issues. In his response, he said that addressing taxes and spending issues are essential.

"If you just cut, if all you're thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you'll slow down the economy," he said in part of his response. "So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies."

That sort of comment was sure to raise the eyebrows of fiscal conservatives in the GOP, who have long preached a message of fiscal restraint as a path to economic growth.

"It's hogwash. It confirms yet again that Romney is not a limited government conservative," said Andy Roth, the vice president for government affairs at the fiscally conservative Club for Growth. "The idea that balancing the budget would not help the economy is crazy. If we balanced the budget tomorrow on spending cuts alone, it would be fantastic for the economy."

[...] **UPDATE*** Romney spokesman Ryan Williams commented on the comments:

The governor’s point was that simply slashing the budget, with no affirmative pro-growth policies, is insufficient to get the economy turned around. However, he believes that budget cuts – especially in the context of President Obama’s unprecedented spending explosion – are a step in the right direction. As he made clear in his economic plan, he believes that spending cuts that reduce the size of government and balance the budget are crucial to economic growth and job creation.

Whew! A grateful nation heaves a sigh of relief.

It may help that the Very Serious NY Times is pointing out that not every Republican thinks refusing to raise taxes is the best plan to help the economy:

WASHINGTON — The boasts of Congressional Republicans about their cost-cutting victories are ringing hollow to some well-known economists, financial analysts and corporate leaders, including some Republicans, who are expressing increasing alarm over Washington’s new austerity.

[...] Among those calling for a mix of cuts and revenues are onetime standard-bearers of Republican economic philosophy like Martin Feldstein, an adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary to President George W. Bush, underscoring the deepening divide between party establishment figures and the Tea Party-inspired Republicans in Congress and running for the White House.

“I think the U.S. has every chance of having a good year next year, but the politicians are doing their damnedest to prevent it from happening — the Republicans are — and the Democrats to my eternal bafflement have not stood their ground,” Ian C. Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, a research firm, said in an interview.

As for the longer term, Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America, wrote this week that “Given the scale of the debt problem, a credible plan requires both revenue enhancement measures and entitlement reform. Washington’s recent debt deal did not include either.”

Let's tell the emperor he has no clothes: Cutting spending during a prolonged recession is about as likely to reduce the long-term deficit as rubbing your lucky rabbit's foot. This is disaster capitalism, plain and simple:

Even as President Obama and congressional leaders focus on a fallback plan to lift the nation’s debt ceiling, top Democrats and Republicans have begun to map a new way to craft the same sort of ambitious deficit-cutting plan they abandoned last week.

As part of the deal being discussed to raise the debt ceiling, leaders on Capitol Hill are forming an especially powerful congressional committee that would be charged with drawing up a new “grand bargain,” possibly by the end of the year.

Key elements for a big deal remain in place. Obama has been clear that he wants one and has started making the case to skeptical factions of his own party that getting the nation’s fiscal house in order is in their best interest. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) also remains committed to an ambitious plan, having told his troops that he didn’t become speaker to do small things. And, perhaps most critically, the markets are demanding it. The credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s says Washington must agree to reduce the debt by $4 trillion over 10 years to avert a downgrade.

“We cannot as a country fail to deal with the debt threat,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one of the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who tried to reach an agreement in recent months. “Every serious economic analysis tells us we’ve reached the danger zone. And just kicking the can down the road? That can’t be. We’re better than that. We’ve got to be better than that.”

Kent Conrad is out-and-out lying. The vast majority of reputable economists say cutting spending during a deep and prolonged recession is a really bad idea.

That's why Paul Krugman (you remember him - a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has a beard...) is incredibly frustrated at the craziness. He writes:

As Brad DeLong argues, there’s a very good case to be made that we’re currently living under conditions in which fiscal contraction actually worsens the long-run deficit. Why? The argument runs like this:

1. Fiscal contraction reduces output in the short run; this immediately means that part of the initial gain in terms of a lower deficit is offset by reduced revenue and higher safety-net spending. These effects are especially large when you’re in a liquidity trap, so monetary policy can’t fight the fiscal contraction.

2. Reductions in short-run output and employment take a toll on long-run growth, too: capital investment is depressed, workers lose their skills, and so on. This in turn reduces future revenues.

3. Meanwhile, with real interest rates very low — actually negative on 5-year bonds — the cost of borrowing now in terms of future debt burden is also very low.

So there is no plausible argument on behalf of the claim that fiscal contraction expands output; there is, on the other hand, a very plausible argument to the effect that fiscal contraction doesn’t even help the fiscal situation.

So guess which perversity is considered a suitable position for Serious People, and which isn’t?

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This week, Republicans swept to power by promising to cut, in the words of Indiana's Mike Pence, "runaway federal spending." But when it comes to putting taxpayers' money where their mouths are, Pence, incoming Speaker John Boehner, future Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann and much of the cowardly GOP's top-brass refuse to say what budget cuts they will actually make. And now to add insult to injury, many of the leading lights of the Republican Party are waiting for recommendations from President Obama's deficit commission, a panel whose creation they opposed.

For months, Republicans have refused to "man up" to the draconian budget cuts their tough-talking campaign pledges would necessarily require. Pressed by NBC's David Gregory last month, Mike Pence could not "name the painful choice on a program that you're going to cut." Asked seven times by Chris Wallace of Fox News, failed GOP California Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina responded only, "you're asking a typical political question." Even as he touted the "GOP Pledge to America," Speaker-to-Be Boehner dodged Wallace as well:

Let's not get to the potential solutions. Let's make sure Americans understand how big the problem is. Then we can talk about possible solutions and then work ourselves into those solutions that are doable.

That charade has only continued since the election. Within 24 hours, Cantor, Bachmann and Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn all did the duck-and-cover on spending cuts. With defense, Social Security and Medicare (not to mention interest on the national debt) off the table, the unexplained GOP pledge to cut $100 billion in "discretionary" spending would necessarily gut the departments of Education, Transportation, Interior, Commerce and Energy by more than 20%.

And as was on display on Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN Thursday, the comic cowardice of the ersatz Republican spending hawks has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Refusing to reveal what Boehner described as "lot of tricks up our sleeves in terms of how we can dent this," Republicans are now saying they will wait for President Obama's deficit commission to weigh in.

To make that point, Cooper showed a Meet the Press clip of Texas Senator and NRSC head John Cornyn using President Obama as a human shield:

DAVID GREGORY: What painful choices to really deal with the deficit, is Social Security on the table? What will Republicans do?

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX), CHAIR, NATIONAL REPUBLICAN SENATORS: The president has a debt commission that reports December the 1st and I think we'd all like to see what they come back with. And my hope is they'll come back for the bipartisan solution to the debt and particularly entitlement reform, as you -- as you've mentioned.

But I --

DAVID GREGORY: But wait a minute, conservatives need a -- a Democratic president's debt commission to figure out what it is they'd want to cut?

Former Bush chief of staff Andy Card also argued that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to Republicans and their budget machismo:

I do think it's appropriate to wait for the -- the wisdom that might come from this debt commission. They're going to have to make some tough recommendations and see how the president reacts. I think it's much too early to be talking about specific program cuts that are only designed to inflame the debate rather than be constructive and really bringing discipline to the government. The president is the one that will have to propose a budget. Congress will have to react to it.

As it turns out, the new Republican majority lack both courage and a sense of irony. After all, the deficit commission was established by President Obama's executive order after a bill to create it was filibustered in the Senate by 53-46. That defeat came only after several Republican Senators voted against the very bill they once supported. As Politics Daily summed it up:

This reversal early this year involved six Republican co-sponsors of such a commission who voted against their own Senate bill. The six were McCain, Brownback, Mike Crapo of Idaho, John Ensign of Nevada, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma. McConnell had once supported the idea, but he too voted against it. The bill required an up-or-down vote on the commission recommendations. McConnell and others said they feared the panel might suggest raising taxes.

And so it goes. Aside from Paul Ryan (whose plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare made him a GOP pariah during election season), virtually the entire Republican leadership team tried to run out the clock before Election Day without ever detailing the spending cuts they claimed to champion. Now, these same born-again deficit hawks are too afraid to stand on their supposed principles. The first move in the game of budget chess, they insist, is Obama's.

Holy cow, they even recommended cutting the V-22 Osprey. What do you suppose the chances are of anyone actually following through on these recommendations? My guess is, they'll cut military salaries and skip everything else:

A panel commissioned by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is recommending nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the Pentagon’s budget during the next 10 years.

The Sustainable Defense Task Force, a commission of scholars from a broad ideological spectrum appointed by Frank, the House Financial Services Committee chairman, laid out actions the government could take that could save as much as $960 billion between 2011 and 2020.

Measures presented by the task force include making significant reductions to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which has strong support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates; delaying the procurement of a new midair refueling tanker the Air Force has identified as one of its top acquisition priorities; and reducing the Navy’s fleet to 230 ships instead of the 313 eyed by the service.

Shipbuilding has strong support in the congressional defense committees, which write the Pentagon bills. Efforts to reduce the number of ships would run into resistance from the Pentagon and the shipbuilding lobby.

Frank on Friday warned that if he can’t convince Congress to act in the “general direction” of the task force recommendation, “then every other issue will suffer.” Not cutting the Pentagon's budget could lead to higher taxes and spending cuts detrimental to the environment, housing and highway construction.

The acceptance of the recommendations would depend on a “philosophical change" and a “redefinition of the strategy,” Frank said at press conference on Capitol Hill.

He said the creation of the deficit reduction commission offers the best opportunity for the reduction recommendations. Frank wants to convince his colleagues to write to the deficit reduction commission and warn that they would not approve any of the plans suggested by the commission unless reduction of military spending is included.

In September, future House Speaker John Boehner unveiled the GOP Pledge to America, which among its other warmed-over Republican nostrums promised to save "at least $100 billion in the first year alone" from the federal budget. On the eve of the election (around the 1:50 mark of the video above), Boehner doubled down, claiming the GOP Pledge would quickly lead to "saving taxpayers $100 billiion almost immediately." In December, incoming House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) repeated the GOP guarantee that "a good $100 billion" would be trimmed. Now, after months of cowardly refusing to specify what those draconian cuts to discretionary spending might be, Republicans are acknowledging their tough-talk was merely "hypothetical."

As Boehner grabbed the Speaker's gavel on Wednesday, the New York Times confirmed that among his first acts would be both the betrayal of the Republican base and his word to American voters:

Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law.

While House Republicans were never expected to succeed in enacting cuts of that scale, given opposition in the Senate from the Democratic majority and some Republicans, and from President Obama, a House vote would put potentially vulnerable Republican lawmakers on record supporting deep reductions of up to 30 percent in education, research, law enforcement, transportation and more.

Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical, and that the objective is to get annual spending for programs other than those for the military, veterans and domestic security back to the levels of 2008, before Democrats approved stimulus spending to end the recession.

Of course, there was nothing hypothetical about the budget ax Republicans promised to wield in the actual text of their Pledge to America last fall:

With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to balance the budget and pay down the debt. We will also establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending from this point forward.

A quick glance at the numbers, however, showed the Republican pledge came with an expiration date designed to come due on Election Day. As the New York Times and Bloomberg explained at the time, the GOP's promise to immediately return to pre-recession FY 2008 levels for "non-security discretionary spending" with would result in devastating cuts to popular and needed programs. With the Pentagon, Social Security and Medicare off the table, those draconian cutbacks would slash more than 20 percent of spending by departments like Education, Transportation, Interior, Commerce and Energy:

U.S. House Republicans' pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget next year would slash spending for education, cancer research and aid to local police and firefighters.

Keeping the midterm-campaign promise would require a Republican-led Congress to cut 21 percent of the $477 billion lawmakers have earmarked for domestic discretionary spending.

Which is why Republicans before the midterm elections and since steadfastly refused to say what cuts they would actually make.

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