I should be home this evening and back to my usual routines tomorrow.

Keep talking; you’re doing fine.

No time to write much today, either. My history nerd son is getting married tomorrow; busy busy. So check with Ezra about next possible moves in the chicken game.

Boehner can’t get the votes in the House for his plan, which would have died in the Senate, anyway. They’ve just announced there will be no vote tonight. Interesting.

I’m really, really busy today. If anything happens, or if anyone is struck by penetrating insight, or even non-penetrating insight, feel free to comment.

On top of the rest of the craziness in Washington, Rep. Peter King is holding more hearings on Islamic terrorism. But Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee wandered off the script and suggested there ought to be hearings about right-wing radicalism.

Naturally a number of rightie bloggers reacted with derision. “Non-existant Christian militants,” sneered one.

In other news, last night a Dallas-area Planned Parenthood clinic was bombed with a molotov cocktail.

And Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz discussed another kind of terrorism that possibly is not connected to Islam.

I’ve cruised around looking for any significant development on the debt ceiling front, and at the moment everyone seems to be pretty much mired in the same holes they were in yesterday.

The CBO has decided that Sen. Harry Reid’s debt ceiling deal actually would cut the deficit more than Rep. John Boehner’s, and of course Boehner denies this.

This is Ezra’s version of optimism —

Boehner’s plan will need to fail to convince Republicans of the political reality that they can’t get past the Senate without compromising. There’s a good chance that the market will need to panic or the government will have to stop sending out checks to convince Republicans of the economic reality that compromising to lift the debt ceiling is a necessary thing to do.

But once those two facts are established, the Reid and Boehner plans are fairly similar to one another, and it’s not that difficult to see how they can be merged into a final compromise.

Easy for rational people, perhaps. Easy for your average Cub Scout troop. Easy for a kennel of border collies. But Congress? Puh-leeze. (And there are some fresh reports that congressional Republicans are rallying behind Boehner’s plan, which the President has sworn to veto.)

But isn’t Ezra saying here that we’re going to have to default before the House Republicans will get serious about preventing default? That doesn’t cheer me up much.

These go back a couple days, but here are a couple of links for reference —

How the Deficit Got This Big

Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph

All day long I’ve been seeing headlines like the one discussed in the last post, about how support is crumbling away from President Obama. Then I see this:

Most Americans would like to see a mix of spending cuts and tax increases be part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, a new poll finds, aligning the majority with President Barack Obama’s position.

Of those surveyed for a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday, 56 percent said they want to see a mix of approaches used in an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. The poll was conducted overnight Monday, as Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) voiced their views on the impasse in negotiations in back-to-back televised primetime speeches….

… Just 19 percent of Americans said they favor a plan like Boehner’s, which would rely solely on spending cuts to existing programs to reduce the deficit. Twelve percent said they would prefer a plan to reduce the deficit only by raising taxes.

This says to me that the American people aren’t following the script. It also tells me the President’s political strategy may be a lot smarter than the political gasbags think it is.

Much of the “progressive” Left denounced Obama’s speech last night. Anti-Obama groupthink has so taken over the Left that a person is not allowed even to explain Obama’s position even if he disagrees with it.

But if you read the fine print — meaning go past the headline and look at the data, as I did in the last post — what you see is that Obama’s support really is not shifting much. It’s the GOP’s foundation that’s slipping away.

Now, I disagree with most of the cuts in programs that the President has put on the table over the past several weeks. But by it now should be obvious even to a firebagger that these offers were more about politics — let’s call it “bagger baiting” — than negotiations. And the Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that the President and his political team are reading the public a lot better than most of the punditocracy and blogosphere.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that the congressional GOP is in meltdown. John Boehner’s plan was rejected by his own party. Sometime today marathon whiner Eric Cantor told House Republicans to stop whining. A bunch of them are still holding out for a balanced budget amendment. Pathetic.

Josh Marshall hints that we may yet be saved by a deus ex machina in the form of Wall Street financial interests. We’ll see.

Updates:

Greg Sargent, “Americans to Congress: Please hike our taxes before you cut entitlements” and “Dems plot the endgame in debt limit fight.”

See also: “CBO: John Boehner’s debt bill comes up short“

Big headline in the Washington Post:

The story begins:

More than a third of Americans now believe that President Obama’s policies are hurting the economy, and confidence in his ability to create jobs is sharply eroding among his base, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But Americans’ discontent does not stop there. The survey also found that Americans harbor negative feelings toward congressional Republicans. Roughly as many people blame Republican policies for the poor economy as they do Obama. But 65 percent disapprove of the GOP’s handling of jobs, compared to 52 percent for the president.

So why isn’t the headline “More Americans unhappy with congressional Republicans on economy, jobs”?

Well, we know why, don’t we?

This is one of the most surreal things I have ever read:

In the past 48 hours I have had call after call after call from members of the United States Congress. They’ve read what I’ve written. They agree. But they feel the hour is short and the end is nigh.

So some are calling looking for alternatives. Some are calling looking for energy. Many are calling looking for absolution.

And so I address them and put it here so you can see my advice.

I can give no absolution for what you may be about to do. I can offer no alternatives.

This was written by witless idiot blogger Erick Erickson, people. Elected members of Congress are calling a wingnut blogger with less intelligence than most turnips and asking for absolution?

Of course, Erickson’s “one call after another” may have been one returned call from Paul Ryan’s office manager, but still …