Mitt's standing prescription for America: Go (hardware) shopping

As Romney, in his nomination acceptance speech, hit Obama first for his Medicare cuts and then for the defense cuts triggered by the Budget Control Act, I tweeted that he was attacking Obama for cutting $1.2 trillion in spending - pretty funny for someone supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution.

Paul Krugman made the same point last week -- "OK, so deficit spending hurts the economy — unless it’s spending on the military (or on the medical-industrial complex), in which case cutting spending destroys jobs." Today, he elaborates:

Hey, maybe the Budget Control Act was a 60-yard punt for Obama after all...

so I wondered when the supercommittee failed and Obama coolly let it:

If you assume that a) Obama wanted a deal that included at least as much in cut spending as the BCA mandates; b) he is willing to live with the large defense cuts if he can't renegotiate them on his own terms; c) he will finally make a firm stand on the Bush tax cuts in 2012, insisting on either a restoration of the Clinton era top marginal rate or tax reform that provides more revenue than just that sunset would yield; and d) once Boehner backed out of the summer deal, a good outcome was impossible without and until Obama's reelection... then maybe he tacked his way to the lowest risk/highest yield strategy available to him.

Now lo, Republicans are loathe to let the ax they rigged let fall, reports Jonathan Weisman:

That sick "Obama's sliding" feeling

Bitterly disappointed as I was in Obama for letting himself be hijacked in the debt ceiling deal, I have been willing to reserve judgment through the next round -- the supercommittee negotiations -- and possibly through the endgame of the Bush tax cut expirations.  But this from Obama today triggered that "there he goes again" reflex:

Last week, we reached an agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending.  But there’s not much further we can cut in either of those categories.  What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps:  tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare (my emphasis).

Couple that with this warning from Panetta:

How did we get to a $39 billion headline?

Taking up a question from one of yesterday's posts:

P.S. Watching Democrats apparently give ground yard by yard -- from accepting a reported $32-33 billion in cuts earlier this week to  $37-38 billion today, not to say even getting in this range in the first place  --  is so baffling that I wonder, by defensive reflex if nothing else, if there isn't more to this than meets the eye. Are some of those billions illusory, i.e. offloaded into areas Democrats don't care about or want to cut?  Has the weighting changed in some way that offsets the sticker amount?  

 And how, given the final sticker amount, can Obama find the "audacity" to claim this?

But beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect those investments that will help America compete for new jobs -- investments in our kids’ education and student loans; in clean energy and life-saving medical research. We protected the investments we need to win the future.

Here is a Dem answer -- or spin:

“1) $17 BILLION IN ‘CHIMPS’ -- WE SPREAD OUT THE CUTS ACROSS OTHER PARTS OF THE BUDGET. We insisted that meeting in the middle on cuts would require looking beyond domestic discretionary spending—and we prevailed. More than half—or $17 billion—of the final round of spending cuts came from changes in mandatory programs, or CHIMPs. The emphasis on this part of the budget staved off severe cuts to key domestic programs like education, clean energy, and medical research. 

"The CHIMPS," cried Mr. Rochester. "Deuce take me if I did not forget the CHIMPS!"*   Or make that Mr. Rogers (David), who explained back on April 3: