Wait. Is eight months too little time for the Obama administration to get to the bottom of the attack, or too much time to still be paying attention to the bald-faced lies they told to get the story out of the election-period news cycle? I can’t figure out if it’s a long or a short time any more. I just know the answer always is, “Why are you asking all these impertinent questions? It’s too early/late now. And what difference does it make, really?”

The military wanted to send a rescue mission and were ordered to stand down. They left our people to die at their posts. You don’t think that’s important? You think it’s OK to shrug it off with a world-weary “Oh, everything’s politics”? Is that worldly sophistication or just a deep, partisan, cowardly moral rot?

Come on. You don’t seriously think deficit reduction is a goal for President Obama?

Obama whittled it down until it was of a size that he could get with the Congress he’s got. That’s disappointing if you wanted a bigger tax hike, but it’s no credit to Obama if you dislike statism. He’d have been thrilled to get $4 trillion in tax hikes if he thought he could get away with it. He knew he couldn’t get away with a tax hike that big unless most voters saw it as landing exclusively on “the other guy.”

Of course Congress did nothing. The Republican House like the sequester better than anything their opposition is prepared to put on the table, so why wouldn’t they take the status quo?

Also of course the Republicans put forward a couple of bills to keep the spending cuts but in a less damaging form than the sequester. It’s not that they thought Democrats would go for it. They just wanted to make the point that Democrats weren’t interested in lessening the damage of the sequester. Democrats in fact want to maximize the damage of the sequester, because they think it gives them leverage to get what they really want, which is tax hikes. But it looks as though they miscalculated. So now they’ll go back to trying trying to blame Republicans for the damage done by the sequester.

If the GOP spins this as “Obama is purposely making the sequester worse to play politics” they could easily muddle the waters on blame.

How could anyone, even you guys, doubt that Obama is purposely making the sequester worse to create leverage for another tax hike? He’s been offered more than one way to make the same amount of spending cuts but with less damage. He’s made it completely clear he’s not interested in anything but what he calls “balance,” which is his term for “tax hikes.” He gambled that Republicans would hate the sequester’s effect on the military enough to give him tax hikes. It’s been his strategy since he proposed the sequester in 2011. What other way is there to see this? From his point of view, it made perfect sense, except that he underestimated the Republicans’ willingness to endure defense cuts in order to rein in spending at least a tiny bit.

Boxturtle (I hope one day he needs the government help he wants to cut)

I wonder if some day you may need the economic prosperity your excessive statism has squelched?

As for the Republicans’ negotiation strategy, I think the post is exactly right. Republicans made the choice to put military spending at risk in order to get overall spending cuts they thought were essential. I’d like to think that they never intended to escape the spending cuts by offering higher taxes. I was disappointed when they agreed to $600 billion in tax hikes in December 2012, but I saw that as bowing to the inevitable, since the alternative was even greater tax hikes by default when the Bush/Obama tax cuts expired automatically. Now that they’ve agreed to those hikes, why did anyone think they’d agree to more, just to avoid a sequester to which they were already resigned as the best spending cut available?

But I’m still on the edge of my seat, wondering if they’ll cave anyway. I hope not.

He’s been in office for four years now. What’s all the fresh outrage about his lack of credibility? He’s never had any.

Republicans want to negotiate a trade-off between the opposing desires of Republicans and Democrats. Democrats refuse to negotiate.

Don’t you just hate obstructionists?

It’s almost as if House conservatives were unhappy with a balanced deficit reduction bargain that increases the deficit by $4 trillion. They’re never satisfied, are they?

IMO the victimization of the radical right has been taught to them as part of their brainwashing which makes them more easily led.

Any group that is taught to feel victimized is more easily led. Do you honestly think this is a process visible primarily among conservatives?

What I want to know is how many Republicans will vote for a republican congressman who votes to support a fiscal package that includes both spending cuts and higher taxes on the 2%, and elimination of certain deductions.

I’d kind of like to know that, too, but is either of us likely to find out? There won’t be a proposal that includes spending cuts. There may be a proposal that includes the possibility of a deceleration in the rate of increase of spending some years down the road, subject to later cancellation. As for the elimination of deductions, there seems little hope of getting rid of the mortgage and state-and-local income tax deductions that so heavily favor the blue states. I’d love to see them go away, too, but neither party will push it.

give the new(ly re-elected) President a chance

Do you guys ever listen to yourselves? Does it really make sense to you to give a guy a chance in his second term if you absolutely despise everything he did or tried to do in his first term? Of course his opposition will be focused on limiting his damage, not on enabling him.

Did it for one second occur to you to “give George W. Bush a chance” in his second term, or would have seemed like insane and contemptuous advice to you then?

Romney got a bounce from the exaggerated press analyses

Now you know how some of us feel.

Republicans don’t believe Nate Silver is lying. We think he may be making a mistake as a result of some faulty assumptions built into his otherwise admirable model. He assumes turnouts that look like 2008 rather than 2010. 2008 seems like a good starting point to some because it was a presidential election year with high turnout, but 2010 seems like a good starting point to others because it captured the country’s unhappiness with the recent trends. If using a 2008 model is a mistake, it’s highly correlated among many polls. If the D+8 or D+7 or even D+3 assumption turns out to be mistaken, then taking the average of a bunch of polls all containing the same mistake will not match the reality on election day.

The cleverest model is still subject to GIGO. Even without the problem of the turnout assumptions, there’s the growing problem of how few voters are reached by pollsters — what used to be a 1-in-3 participation rate has fallen to something more like 1-in-9. What’s more, there’s a big disparity among pollsters in how tightly they screen for likely voters. Some simply ask if a respondent is likely to vote. Others probe deeper and ask whether he voted in the last two elections or even whether he knows the specific location of his polling place. That’s more expensive, because you have to call more people if you’re going to screen out more responses, so not all pollsters bother. This time around, the pattern that emerges is that polls with tighter screens tend to show a stronger edge for Romney. It’s not a slam-dunk, but it’s food for thought.

Someone certainly is in error, and we’ll see soon enough who it is.

“those wanting to *make a buck off of suffering* aren’t going to be particularly charitable”

When you buy food to avoid starvation, is someone making a buck off of your suffering? What if someone takes money to build you a house that prevents your freezing to death in winter? Do you really think the essential things of life will be better provided if no one has a profit motive? I’ll never understand where people get the idea that profit is evil. Where do you think your paycheck comes from?

Only a tone-deaf idiot talks cavalierly about the misfortunes of other people as God’s will. Most of us would do best to work on submitting graciously to the misfortunes in our own lives. I hate to see Republicans lose a chance at a majority in the Senate, but I’m reconciled to losing jerks like Akin and Mourdock — even though I agree with them 100% about abortion.