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I expect the talking heads over at Fox to be attacking President Obama during these negotiations on the upcoming "fiscal cliff" or as some have called it, the "fiscal curb," but how bad are things for John Boehner and the House Republicans when even Bill Kristol and Laura Ingraham can't manage to come to your defense? We had an agreement among the panel on Fox News Sunday this week, and they all believe that Republicans refusing to negotiate with President Obama is just going to lead to them getting a worse deal later.

Which is good news as far as a lot progressives are concerned, since Republicans think a good deal is destroying our social safety nets and sadly there are too many Democrats happy to help them chip away at them with this talk of a "grand bargain." It seems a lot of us should be grateful that John Boehner is really bad at his job.

And of course there was no mention of just who is responsible for that debt that has been run up since President Obama has been in office. As we've noted here before on too many occasions to count, most of that deficit was due to Bush's policies.

You're not going to hear anyone say that over at Fox though. Quite the opposite as we saw with how Wallace opened the segment.

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From TPM: Boehner Calls Off Plan B Vote:

In a stunning defeat, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called off a vote Thursday night on his Plan B to avert the fiscal cliff, citing a lack of support from his own party. Boehner issued the following statement as an emergency meeting of the House Republican Conference was ending:

The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation's crippling debt. The Senate must now act.

This might not be good news for John Boehner, but as John already noted here, he's looking like Santa Claus for progressives.

And here's Eric Cantor's "walk of shame" leaving the House after "Plan B" went down in flames.

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[Scarce edit: A little musical soundtrack seemed in order. Music by Screen Team, a parody of Awolnation's "Sail".]

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There were a great number of thing wrong with this interview on MSNBC, one being the fact that host Thomas Roberts and his producers thought that the public needed to hear from the corrupt former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert about the need for bipartisanship during these fiscal negotiations. Another is Hastert being allowed to get away with this statement:

ROBERTS: But sir, if you were able to hold the line on spending limits, then why would you go ahead to oversee two unfunded wars?

HASTERT: Look... the wars happened. I don't know if you were around at 9-11 but we lost 3000 people, but we ended up in Afghanistan. We also ended up in Iraq. You know, we can go back. History will tell us whether we should have been in Iraq, but at the time, we thought that was the right decision. We were not going to expose this country to that type of threat and we haven't had it since then.

Roberts just completely let Hastert off the hook here without an ounce of follow up. First off, he didn't answer the question about why they didn't see the need to pay for the two wars that they didn't want to put on the books to show the hole they were blowing in the budget. And second, it's just shameful that a politician is still being allowed to use 9-11 to justify invading Iraq.

And as far as Hastert and anyone wanting his advice on how someone should govern now, here's more from our archives on him, and he received the honor of being listed by Rolling Stone as one of the The Ten Worst Members of the Worst Congress Ever in Tim Dickinson's article which was originally posted in their Nov. 2006 issue. Here's a portion of that report:

The Highway Robber: Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)

Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the "Prairie Parkway" – a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land – soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision – for a profit of $2 million.

"Here's a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it," says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "Most of us aren't speaker of the House, and most of us don't have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it."

The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson's offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat's behalf.

Bipartisanship! Ain't it grand?

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Yes, those poor, poor Republicans have just been completely humiliated by President Obama's initial offer during these debt negotiations, or so says former Bushie and Romney adviser, Dan Senor on ABC's This Week. Senor also did his best to try to spin the idea that the offer was somehow so toxic that most of the public would not blame Republicans if they can't reach a deal.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you agree that something is going to happen. Dan Senor, that conflicts at least with a lot of the reporting I had on Capitol Hill this week, where you saw significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats more willing to accept the idea of going over the cliff, at least for a few days?

SENOR: Yes, I think as one Republican House member said to me, good lesson in negotiating is don't make your opening offer one of humiliation, which is what Republicans felt the White House has put forth in the last couple of days.

I think there's a sense now, Republicans I have spoken to, particularly in the leadership, have said, look, if we go over the cliff, we're going to get blamed.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No question about that.

SENOR: The view is shifting a little bit now, where there is a sense that if President Obama goes into his second term and poisons the environment so much that he can't get a deal and we go over the cliff, it's going to be so toxic for year two, year three, year four, and he -- the Republicans have some leverage too. The president has to be worried about his legacy and how he's going to govern through the second term. And even though Republicans might get blamed, this whole idea that the president is bringing the country together, something he wasn't able to do in his first term, if he can't do it in his second term, it could be very problematic.

Yeah, that's the ticket. President Obama had better not hurt the Republicans' feelings, or they might start obstructing everything he does and that's going to harm his legacy... oh wait.

I guess Senor thinks the American public has been asleep for the last four years is he actually believes the garbage he's shoveling.

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Nothing like more threats from House Speaker John Boehner on whether they'd agree to pay for the debt incurred under his and the Republicans watch during these "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Boehner: Debt Limit Will Have ‘Price Tag’:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) affirmed that if a deal to avert the fiscal cliff includes raising the debt limit, then it must come with a "price tag," at a news conference Thursday.

"If we're gonna talk about the debt limit in this, then there's gonna be some price tag associated with it," Boehner said.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said that raising the debt limit must be part of the deal.

As Jed Lewison explained, there are some alternatives to Boehner's hostage taking:

The good news here is that there will only be another debt limit crisis if the White House and Congress want there to be one—and we've seen no indication that the White House wants one.

In 2011, most people assumed that congressional failure to raise the debt limit would automatically force default and financial apocalypse would soon follow. But as Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin argued, that was a bad assumption. If Congress were to fail to lift the debt limit, the administration would still have several options to avert catastrophe. One such option would be to essentially ignore the debt limit because it conflicts with congressional statues appropriating funds beyond that limit. Another option would be to mint a trillion dollar coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve.

And as Ezra Klein wrote today, the Republicans are demanding that the Democrats make cuts to the Medicare program, but because their only policy on this has been premium support, which is a non-starter, they don't have any proposals of their own, so they're trying to get President Obama and the Democrats to give specifics: The GOP’s Medicare confusion:

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It seems this ongoing feud between former Sen. Alan Simpson and anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist isn't going to end any time soon. Simpson went after Norquist again on Hardball this Tuesday while doing his usual fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff."

Alan Simpson on fiscal cliff: ‘Go big or go home’:

Piecemeal measures won’t save us from the fiscal cliff, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), told Hardball’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday. His advice for his former colleagues: “Go big or go home.”

“On Dec. 31st there’s a mess floating around right now, about $7.2 trillion bucks worth of stuff…[we’ve] got to do something,” Simpson said. [...]

Simpson said some lawmakers “love their party more than they love their country,” and that they would wait until the last minute to strike a deal. “They’re going to react right down to the last point when there’s going to be blood and hair and eyeballs all over the floor and they’re going to come up with something, but let me tell you, if it’s just kicking the can down the road, the can is now a 55 gallon drum filled with explosives. You can’t play that game anymore,” said Simpson.

If there’s no real deal, he said, “the markets are going to chop us up and it will be an unknown day.”

The former lawmaker also took a hit at conservative activist Grover Norquist’s crusade to get members of Congress to vow never to raise taxes.

“So how do you deal with guys who came to stop government, or Grover wandering the Earth in his white robe saying you want to drown government in the bathtub. I hope he slips in there with it,” Simpson said.

Of course Matthews let him get away with the typical false equivalency game they've been playing, where they pretend that the likes of Norquist is the equivalent of those on the left who don't want to see our social safety nets destroyed and calls everyone "loons." There's nothing "looney" about wanting to protect the poor, the elderly and the middle class and allowing people to retire with dignity, instead of having to work until they drop dead.

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It seems House Minority Leader Eric Cantor, like his cohort John Boehner, is still living in fantasy-land when it comes to their ability to "repeal" the Affordable Care Act. Here he is on Fox this Monday, saying he wants "Obamacare" to be "on the table" during the upcoming deft and deficit negotiations.

Republican Leader Wants Deficit-Reducing Obamacare ‘On The Table’ In Debt Talks:

Echoing House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) recent op-ed calling for a repeal of Obamacare through “oversight,” Cantor claimed that the law is a bloated entitlement and burden on the federal deficit that must be on the table during budget talks:

BILL HEMMER (HOST): In these negotiations, is Obamacare being negotiated?

CANTOR: If the president is serious about joining us and fixing the problem, he ought to be putting Obamacare on the table. There is no question in my mind, that is the largest expansion of government programs that we’ve seen.

HEMMER: Can you say at the moment that that is being talked about?

CANTOR: All I can say is that the president has got to get serious and the Speaker is correct, that Obamacare is such an expansion of government spending and involvement in folks’ lives it ought to be on the table.

HEMMER: You wonder what he is willing to concede on that.

While Republicans have been full-throated in parroting claims that Obamacare is not fiscally viable, the fact is that the health reform law actually reduces the deficit by billions in the next decade and by over $1 trillion in the decade after that, and repealing Obamacare would consequently increase the national debt while taking away Americans’ health benefits.

As the post at Think Progress also noted, Cantor is wrong about the law's support which has been gaining in popularity in recent months.