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As Samuel Knight at the Washington Monthly took note of this Sunday, it seems the White House may be getting the message that they're going to have a lot of trouble from their own party if they continue to remain open to chained CPI for Social Security as part of some deficit deal with the Republicans. I was happy to see new White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough push back at David Gregory's assertion that it was necessary to raise the Medicare retirement age to address the problems with the program.

David Gregory did his best to repeat one Republican talking point after another while pressing McDonough on whether the administration is going to be willing to cross his base and go after our social safety nets to get some deal on deficit reduction and as McDonough correctly pointed out, raising that age for Medicare isn't going to do a thing to reduce costs, it just shifts them around:

While on on ABC’s “This Week,” he was questioned about John Boehner’s assertion that President Obama lacks “the guts…to take on the liberal side of his own party” in budget negotiations.

McDonough responded with talking points, stressing that the White House will strengthen the middle class and the economy while seeking to pay back debt “in a balanced way.”

White on NBC’s “Meet The Press” he issued similar responses to David Gregory’s questions on the same issue, saying that President Obama would not seek to reduce government investments and weaken programs that help middle class families at a time when the economy is improving but still fragile. He also indicated that President Obama would not isolate Congressional Democrats that want to raise taxes on the wealthy, reiterating the President’s insistence on doing debt reduction “in a balanced way.”

In terms of the social safety net, McDonough told Gregory that the President wouldn’t seek to raise the retirement age, calling it a “cost shifter.” He said that Affordable Care Act plans to rein in Medicare spending will lead to the sort of outlay reductions sought by Simpson-Bowles.

But more importantly than what he said is what he didn’t say: that the President, according to a Jay Carney press conference earlier this week, “remains open to the chained CPI” as part of social security reform.

That McDonough wasn’t instructed to discuss the chained CPI indicates that either the White House isn’t actually keen on it, or that it simply isn’t eager to brag about its openness to the idea.

Let's hope it's the former. Once again, David Gregory remained true to form, where he can't seem to manage to make it though an interview without asking how much pain can be inflicted on the working class.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of watching a bunch of extremely rich pundits sit around and tell the rest of us that there just hasn't been enough shared sacrifice from the working class, the elderly and the poor yet in order to solve our deficit problem. But that's exactly what the viewers are treated to day after day on MSNBC's three hour long Villager conventional wisdom regurgitation-fest called Morning Joe.

This Wednesday was no exception and immediately following the so-called "fiscal cliff" debacle coming to a conclusion, and the pundits on there didn't miss a beat with demands that President Obama had better get out there and use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that we're all just going to have to be willing to give a little more in order for Republicans to not kill the hostage called the world's economy over this upcoming debt ceiling standoff.

This week we had Tom Brokaw going on Meet the Press and telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with raising the retirement age for Social Security and telling the lie that Americans are living longer. It's little wonder he'd have that view since he's not ever going to have to worry about his retirement security. And yes, rich people like himself are living to be older. Not so much for most of the rest of us.

If these guys want to go on the air and pontificate about how we ought to get a pound of flesh out of the working class, I think their salaries and net worth ought to be displayed right under their names in the chryon for the viewers. Maybe they'd feel a little differently about their opinions.

According to Forbes, Brokaw has an estimated net worth of $70 million.

And if the site Celebrity Networth is accurate, Scarborough's is $18 million and Brzezinski's is $8 million.

I'm not sure what some of the others who were on there this Wednesday like David Walker, Chuck Todd, Dan Senor, Richard Haas and Mark Halperin are worth, but I'm pretty sure they're all being paid really well and aren't worried about relying on Social Security for a comfortable retirement as well. But every one of them was joining in on carping about the deficit that none of them cared about it when Bush was blowing holes in it a mile wide with tax cuts and wars that weren't paid for. Deficits only matter when Democrats are elected as president.

And as far as Walker's claim that his group has gone around the country and gotten a positive response from ordinary people as they explained to them that they need to cut our social safety nets in order to balance the budget, well, that's not the experience our own Susie Madrak had when she went to one of them. As she noted:

You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich -- and cut defense spending. [...]

I thought maybe it was just my table, but when they tabulated the results, it was pretty much the same throughout the crowded ballroom of several hundred attendees.

And of course absent from this conversation was any discussion about what to do to get Americans back to work. If we were at full employment and had some sort of decent economic growth in the United States, this deficit problem would take care of itself because we'd have more people paying taxes.

They also keep pretending like Social Security adds to our deficit. It doesn't and it has a surplus. And if they want to solve the problem with Medicare, we need to fix our health care costs over all. We pay way more than any other developed country with worse outcomes and putting seniors into the private insurance market doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the costs around and drives them up. But you won't hear that discussion while they're pounding their fists about lowing the deficit.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may have graduated cum laude from Harvard, but his campaign clearly failed Venn Diagrams 101.

On Monday, the campaign released a Venn diagram that attempted to show President Barack Obama had not kept his promises about lowering the costs of health care. The left circle in the diagram indicated that Obama promised to lower health care premiums by $2,500, while the right circle indicated that actual health care costs had risen by $2,393. In the area where the two circles intersected, the Romney campaign claimed was a "gap" of $4,893 in higher premiums that families would be forced to pay each year.

But that's not how Venn diagrams are supposed work.

John Venn introduced the charting mechanism in 1880 to help illustrate things that sets of information have in common. The area where the two circles overlap should indicate items that are common to both sets, not a "gap" between the sets.

And then on Tuesday, the Romney campaign did it again.

They released a second diagram to attack the president's record on job creation. Again, the campaign called the overlapping area a "gap" to depict the difference between the jobs Obama had promised to create and the jobs that had actually been created.

"The Romney campaign reveals that a mastery of Powerpoint does not, in itself, translate to mastery of Venn diagrams," Slate's Dave Weigel noted on Tuesday.

Last month, Romney began looking for a new copywriter after a series of typos where the campaign misspelled “America,” “official” and “sneak-peek."

At this rate, they may soon have an opening for a graphics designer too.

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn't have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple's iPad can cost around $900.

Speaking to more than 400 people at Woodland Park, Colorado, the former Pennsylvania senator said that demand should set prices for drugs.

"People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad," the candidate explained. "But paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it."

The mother replied that she could not afford her son's medication, Abilify, which can cost as much as $1 million a year without health insurance.

"Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs," Santorum insisted. "But the bottom line is, we have to give companies the incentive to make those drugs. And if they don't have the incentive to make those drugs, your son won't be alive and lots of other people in this country won't be alive."

"He’s alive today because drug companies provide care," the candidate continued. "And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here. I sympathize with these compassionate cases. … I want your son to stay alive on much-needed drugs. Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t."