Who will get cut?  Defense?  Farm subsidies?  Oil subsidies?  Tax giveaways to the top 1%?  The lobbyists for each interest are fighting it out by wining and dining the Supercommittee, sometimes within a single law firm, sometimes within the psyche of a single lobbyist.  It's not just what gets cut by the deficit commission--it's that if the Supercommittee doesn't come up with a solution, automatic triggers will go into effect and cut the special interests' smorgasborg of taxpayer money, including that which hemorrhages out to the military-industrial complex.  

The GOP will clearly want to cut Medicare/Medicaid, but there's intense pressure on the Dems to protect these programs at all cost (for good reason). 

Anyway, the Supercommittee has to come up with its plan in 12 days, so the incessant lobbying has gone into overdrive.  Some Republicans want out of the Grover Norquist pledge to protect the rich at all costs.  Some are trying to get out of the pledge to leave the rich alone and further gouge the middle/working class.  This whole exercise should be watched closely.  It will and should inform who should get voted for and against in 2012. 

It would be really stupid* of the Dems to roll over given what everybody knows is happening out there in the world and what polls are saying about how the majority of Americans feel about Medicare cuts versus closing corporate loopholes/ending tax cuts for the rich.  And even if they do, the President could veto whatever they come up with, which would trigger the automatic cuts (which will not affect Medicare benefits). 

*which isn't to say that the Dems aren't capable of committing acts of stupidity.

I think this is the mousetrap Obama set for Congress.  It's truly lobbyist survivor.  I'm glad Bernie Sanders is out there speaking up about leaving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone.  They don't get touched by the triggers, so if the Supercommittee doesn't come up with something, they're safe.  But if the Dems cave and cut these programs, Obama might veto.  Revenue is going to have to be part of the solution, and the target should be the people who have spent the better part of 30-40 years chipping away at their own tax responsibilities to the point that a large swath of them pay no taxes at all. 

That's always possible.  But when you consider defense, there's this new book by Jane Mayer about the ridiculous privatization craze when Bush et al wanted to hide their massive expansion of government by hiring contractors in intelligence and defense.  They have these palatial suites in the beltway and get massive taxpayer payouts but end up making intelligence more of a bureaucratic tarpit than it was prior to 9/11.  There's a lot of fat in defense.

Also, consider two things: 1) Social Security is entirely separate from the budget and didn't contribute one penny to the deficit; and 2) the problem with medicare and medicaid stems from rising PRIVATE health industry costs that have no checks on them, short of the provision in Obama's healthcare bill that they have to spend 85% of premiums on actual care.  None.  The pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry are monopolized to within an inch of their lives and have no competition to bring costs down.  A public option would have done this but, of course, we don't get that. 

Cylon, Medicare is defrauded perpetually, as witnessed by the current Governor of Florida, who was CEO of a company that perpetrated the largest case of Medicare fraud in US history.  There needs to be a robust white collar crime division of the FBI, which Bush decimated post 9/11.  Try getting anyone on the right to support beefing up the FBI.  Beyond fraud, Medicare has something like a 3 or 4% overhead, so administered as directed and policed of fraud, I don't see where the waste is.  Social Security is the same.  As it stands now, it's funded till I think 2050, and if the cap were lifted or augmented, it would be fully funded in perpetuity.  And again, beef up the white collar crime division for SS fraud (though I don't hear nearly as much about SS fraud as Medicare fraud). 

But when you get to defense, the waste, fraud and abuse are mind-boggling.  I'm not anti-defense.  I'm glad we have a strong defense.  It's this contractor craze, along with defense contracts to fund  unproven expensive hardware that never gets off the ground, that bothers me.  The black budget stuff. 

And VTran, Krugman is almost always right.  He's certainly right about the corporate media's selective coverage of the intransigence of Republicans.  Even the New York Times and NPR dance around the fact that the GOP blocks progress at every opportunity. 

Evidently the Supercommittee is declaring defeat because Republicans won't roll back the Bush tax cuts.  What I don't understand is, how can rank and file Republicans still support their GOP representatives in Congress when all polls show that the majority of Americans want the top brackets to start paying their fair share of taxes and to preserve Medicare? 

What the Republicans have been trying to do is make the Democrats actually do the dirty work, or at least get their hands dirty too.  But this trigger mechanism is interesting because the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year.  The only way to resurrect them is as a separate bill.  If the triggers really do go into effect, it will have to be 50% defense cuts, 50% non-defense cuts, with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare (except for a cut on the provider side that can't exceed 2%, which I don't like but which is better than a COLA cut or raising of the age or whatever), unemployment and other lifeline programs off the table.  It's going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.  Obama said today that he'll veto any attempt to roll back the trigger mechanism.