That is quite a concession from the GOP’s leaders on Capitol Hill. Not long ago, they would have stood firm against any plan to raise an additional dime in revenue. But they understand reality, and they know that last month’s elections didn’t go particularly well for their party.

Unfortunately, the White House seems incapable of putting ideology and dogma aside in the best interests of the nation. President Obama’s deficit reductions include not a dollar’s worth of cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid spending.

But, of course, the biggest item in the president’s plan is a tax hike on well-off Americans-—nearly a trillion dollars worth of tax hikes, in fact.

It’s tempting to dismiss the president’s proposal as simply not serious. And, of course, it is just the beginning of the high-stakes poker game that will occupy Washington for the next two weeks.

But still, anyone who followed this year’s presidential campaign knows that the president is quite serious in his demagogic insistence that the well-off are simply not doing their fair share. What’s more, the president has refused to confront his party’s hard-liners, who really do believe (or say they do) that Washington can balance its books without reforming federal entitlement programs.

Social Security cost Washington $762 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Medicare cost another $470 billion. These are big numbers, even by Washington’s standards. Social Security costs more than national defense. And yet some Democratic hard-liners would have you believe that the program doesn’t need to be reformed.

Republicans know (and some no doubt fear) that by conceding the point on revenues, they have created a space for possible tax hikes. If nothing else, Speaker John Boehner and his colleagues have shown an admirable degree of flexibility. You can be certain that the tea party crowd is up in arms over any plan to raise more revenue for the federal government.

The question is whether the White House can reply in kind, and whether the president has the will and the determination to defy his party’s dogmatic defenders of entitlement programs. Mr. Obama needs to remind them that in fewer than 20 years—the blink of an eye in the life of this republic—there will be 72 million Americans over the age of 65. That’s compared with about 40 million today. How in the world can Washington afford current levels of benefits for so many senior citizens?

Politicians and policymakers alike have been fretting about this other fiscal cliff for decades. Little has been done. Now is the time to get entitlement reform done. The president has to tell members of his party’s left wing that the status quo is unacceptable and unaffordable.

A deal requires pragmatism and flexibility. It’s time the White House showed more than a little of both.

Photoillustration: Ed Johnson

What a relief it was to pick up my New York Times this Sunday and see that Damien really is back in town. I thought I’d spotted him at the Republican convention, felt sure I’d caught a whiff of sulfur when he passed, found myself swarmed by his usual entourage of flies. It would have been hard to miss him, since he was wearing a pink tie and a green plaid jacket at the time.

Yet I told myself I must be hallucinating under the relentless Tampa sun. Surely there was no way even today’s Republican party could have welcomed the Antichrist—a k a Ralph Reed—back into the ranks just six years after he imploded so spectacularly amid the Jack Abramoff scandals.

Reed, whose “preternaturally youthful” appearance, as the Times described it, still makes you think he must have “666” etched just above his brow line, got his start in the first heady days of the Reagan administration, when he was one member of what was known as the “triumvirate,” running the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), along with Mr. Abramoff and Grover Norquist.

Reciting all the juvenile, pseudo-military jargon that generations of Republican rat-fuckers have adored since the days of Watergate, the triumvirate planned to “permanently” remove their opponents from power. Their skills complemented one another’s perfectly: Norquist, the ideologue; Abramoff, the extrovert and champion schmoozer; Reed, the undercover operative.

“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare,” Mr. Reed told a Virginia newspaper in 1991. “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”

There was just one problem before they went upriver to knock off Colonel Kurtz. Mr. Abramoff was an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Norquist was a Harvard grad and Mr. Reed was a Navy brat from Miami. Where was the cultural connection to the Reagan coalition’s evangelical Christian foot soldiers?

Then, in 1983, Mr. Reed had a “come-to-Jesus” moment—literally—in a popular Washington watering hole, appropriately named Bullfeathers. Hallelujah! His was far from the first barroom conversion, but few others pulled themselves up Jacob’s ladder with such alacrity. By 1989, he was running Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, featured on the cover of Time magazine as “the right hand of God” ...

... and by the time Reed left this post in 1997, he had, as Bill Moyers reported, “driven the organization into the ground,” leaving it “nearly bankrupt, under investigation by the Federal Election Commission, and facing charges from its own financial officer that Reed’s cronies had ripped off almost a million dollars.”

This would prove to be a not-uncommon fate for anything King Ralph got himself involved with. But he was already off into electoral politics, becoming a major fund-raiser for George W. Bush, getting elected state chairman of the Republican party of Georgia and running for lieutenant governor of the Peach State.

Then, Mr. Abramoff’s crazily ambitious lobbying operation collapsed. He was charged with overbilling his 10 Indian clients by $25 million, out of the astounding $85 million in fees he had collected from them. Jack had worked his 10 little Indians by pretending that he was protecting each one’s casino turf from the others—and also from encroachments by state lotteries, state and federal taxation, and video gambling interests (which Mr. Abramoff also represented).

It was an amazing grift—but he couldn’t have done it without his old buddies. He got Mr. Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) $1.5 million to fight nefarious, big-government efforts to tax Indian slots. Mr. Norquist in turn funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Reed, who had e-mailed Mr. Abramoff, in his usual ecclesiastical language, “I need to start humping in corporate accounts ...” and promised to mobilize “3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households” in Alabama alone to oppose new gambling ventures on religious principle.

Slick as this scam was, it’s hard to get too worked up about ripping off Indian casinos, which have become something of a nationwide bunco game themselves. Much worse was another grift “the triumvirate” was running. This entailed defending the sweatshops of the Northern Mariana Islands, a distant Pacific archipelago that has been a U.S. possession since World War II. Because they’re located in an American commonwealth, sweatshops in the Northern Marianas could maintain a minimum wage less than half that of the United States but still sew “Made in the USA” labels into the clothes they produced.

Factory owners on Saipan, where 90 percent of the islands’ population is, recruited poor women from China and other Asian countries to toil in the sweats. There they worked endless hours under awful conditions, were routinely ripped off or not paid at all, and were sexually exploited, as a Ms. magazine investigation uncovered.

Those who became pregnant were often forced to have abortions in special hospitals set up next to the sweatshops.

Once again, the triumvirate worked like a well-oiled machine to defend this horror. Mr. Abramoff raked in some $9 million in lobbying fees. Mr. Norquist received thousands of dollars in return for talking up the Northern Marianas as “a model of free enterprise” and having “discussions” with the islands’ leaders. His ATR staff received junkets to the islands—as did some 100 congressmen and their families, including Tom DeLay, who pronounced the islands “a perfect petri dish of capitalism” and told its leaders, “You are a shining light for what is happening in the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we’re trying to do in America, in leading the world in the free-market system.”

Ralph Reed was onboard to work the religious angle, sending out a mailer to the faithful charging that “The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands” because they “are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ” on the islands, and many “are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.” There was no mention of their discarded fetuses.

Then Abramoff was collared. When the smoke cleared, he was doing 43 months in a federal pen, and 22 other individuals received some sort of criminal penalty. The scandal wrecked the career of Tom DeLay, though it did get him on Dancing with the Stars. And the sweatshop industry collapsed on Saipan. The owners took off, leaving a major environmental disaster behind them. In the last 10 years, the population of the Northern Marianas has fallen by over 22 percent.

Left standing—as if through some kind of weird, otherworldly intervention—were Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Mr. Reed’s lieutenant governor run did collapse, which must have been a relief to the governor of Georgia, who no longer had to worry about falling down a spiral staircase, or having a stone gargoyle drop on him, or any of those other fates that always seemed to befall those who stood in Damien’s way in the Omen movies back in the ’70s.

But now Mr. Reed is back, with his new Faith and Freedom Coalition, still working the same old grift. He has reportedly raised between $10 million and $12 million for the Romney campaign, and promises many millions more. Even more important, he is working assiduously to give the Mormon nominee Jesus cover, insisting that Mr. Romney is a true friend to the evangelicals.

Left unanswered, of course, is how is it that a regime that literally rapes workers and then forces them to have abortions can possibly be said to be Christian—or conservative. Is it really “small government” just because it doesn’t call itself a government?

But no one was about to ask that question down in Tampa. Grover was back, and so was the devil, resplendent in pink and green. And the Republican platform included the following plank: “No minimum wage for the Mariana Islands. The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.” Amen.

Enter ever-wonderful New York City public radio staple and oddly popular tote-bag emblem WYNC. Using data gathered from the Department of City Planning consisting of voter rolls and district lines as of April 2011, the site's John Keefe recently threw together a Google Map listing our city's Republicans by district. WYNC's Colby Hamilton explained:

President Barack Obama is leading Mitt Romney by more than 30 points in New York state. But fueled by the Tea Party-inspired energy of motivated activists, Republicans are winning local office.

The map can be viewed here. Users can go borough to borough or neighborhood to neighborhood.

It's a fun exercise for the politically curious, as well as a way to reinforce your beliefs and umbrella generalizations about who lives where.

For example (click to enlarge):

Almost forgot (click to enlarge):

For more fun with New York City's Republicans (and where they reside), head over to WNYC.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Sarah Palin rocks the mic in Indianola, Iowa.

Former Vice Presidential candidate, Alaska governor and reality TV star Sarah Palin isn't ready to throw her name in the 2012 presidential race -- but she doesn't want to be taken out of it either. Palin continued to tease the possibility  of a White House run at a Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa Saturday.

Amid chants of "Run, Sarah, Run!," Palin gave a speech in which she criticized President Obama and the current slate of Republican candidates for "corporate crony capitalism."

"This is why we must remember the challenge is not simply to replace Obama in 2012. The real change is who and what we will replace him with. ... Folks, you know it's not enough to change the uniform," Palin said.

Afterwards, Palin spoke to reporters and insisted the event "was a thank-you-Tea-Party-Americans speech" rather than an official campaign event.

"I’m still not ready to make any kind of an announcement. ... I’m still trying to figure it out, if it’s the right thing to do," Palin said as she autographed a gun for an admirer.

Palin's presence on the '08 ticket and her regular participation at political events since then has encouraged rampant speculation she'll throw her hat into the ring next year. Her appearance in Iowa only adds fuel to the fire. The Hawkeye State is home to the first presidential primary, making it a favorite haunt of White House hopefuls. Palin's next speech is at a Labor Day Tea Party rally in New Hampshire, which is set to host the second primary contest.

It may be time for Palin to make a definitive announcement and stop teasing the possibility of a run as there's evidence her schtick is wearing thin on voters. A recent Fox News poll found only 25 percent of Republican voters want Palin to join the race while 71 percent would prefer she stay out of it.

O'Donnell (Getty Images)

After walking out of her interview with Piers Morgan, Christine O’Donnell addressed the Women’s National Republican Club on West 51st Street, starting about 45 minutes late, just before 7. “I want to apologize for being so late. I know that’s not respectful of your time, so please accept my apology,” Ms. O’Donnell began. “We started out at about 5 o’clock in the morning at Fox and Friends and we’ve gone nonstop until the final stop at CNN a few minutes ago.” Strangely, no mention was made of the walk-out that Piers Morgan was at that very moment hyping on Twitter.

After her brief remarks, The Transom tentatively approached the book-signing table, where Ms. O’Donnell was inscribing a copy of Troublemaker: “Gov. Christie: Keep up the great work! -Christine O’Donnell.” The book was for a well-wisher who said she intended to gift it to Chris Christie.

Why had she stormed out of Mr. Morgan’s studios? (Even during the Q.&A. session following her speech, when asked about the media’s treatment of her, Ms. O’Donnell chose to focus on what she saw as the evenhanded treatment she’d received at the hands of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.) Ms. O’Donnell laughed when we told her it was a big story. “Is it?” she asked, with (sincere?) incredulity.

“We were late for this, and he wasn’t ending, and we were going, ‘Wrap up, wrap up!’ He was late and he wasn’t ending. He’s looking for ratings. He’s looking for ratings. He was being rude, and I said, ‘Piers, I gotta go! You know, I’m late already!’ He’s looking for ratings, and trying to stir up a controversy.”

“But it was fun!” said an aide.

“It was fun,” concurred Ms. O’Donnell.

(During that Piers Morgan interview, Ms. O’Donnell states, “I was supposed to be speaking at the Republican Women’s Club at 6 o’clock and I chose to be a little late for that not to be—not to endure a rude talk show host but to talk about my book and talk about the issues I address in my book. Have you read the book?” Ms. O’Donnell mentions her lateness to the Women’s National Republican Club only after calling Mr. Morgan “rude” twice and making clear that she is walking out.)

But a mere media contretemps is far less troubling to Ms. O’Donnell than what she sees as double standards faced by female candidates. She told The Transom: “In the 2008 campaign, no one would have dared ask Barack Obama, ‘How are you going to control your libido? You’re a strapping young man. What are you going to do around all those interns?’ But people can ask Michele Bachmann about her migraines.” That said, Ms. O’Donnell is intrigued, so far, with Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry as presidential candidates, but declined for now to make an endorsement. “If it gets close, and we need to wrap it up, then I might make an endorsement.”

Of her time in New York—she was leaving after the speech to go to Washington for more promotion—Ms. O’Donnell told The Transom: ”It’s been a whirlwind!”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Observer traipsed over to Fiddlesticks, a sports bar that serves a passable martini, where we met the Log Cabin Republicans, that stalwart group of gay conservatives, who were meeting there to view the Iowa debate. Clustered at the back of the room behind a curtain, the 20 or so gentlemen mingled before a projection screen, looking like any other after-work drinks event—minus the women.

Not surprisingly, Michele Bachmann and her husband—they of the “pray the gay away” approach to homosexuality—were not polite topics of conversation. Brian, a health professional, was saying that Dr. Bachmann was “entitled to believe what he believes” when Jonas from PriceWaterhouseCoopers joined the cluster and asked what we were talking about.

“Marcus Bachmann,” Brian explained. “Michele’s wife—I mean Michele’s husband. Whoops! That’s a slip.”

“Well, since you bring it up … ” The Observer began.

“I don’t believe any of those rumors,” he shot back. “People like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert like to spread rumors. Just because you’re not pro-gay doesn’t mean that you are gay.”

It wasn’t a consensus. “My partner is a staunch liberal Democrat who works in the theater, and he’s done every Shakespeare play,” said Patrick Bundy, whose name tag was upside down. “He says Marcus protests too much, and I’ll have to defer to him.”

The televised debate began, and everyone marshaled his pint.

“We’re gay, but we’re not Republicans,” hissed Steven, a student, as his friend nodded. “Don’t tell them.” They were by far the youngest people in the room. Rick Santorum was stammering through a policy question onscreen, but being young they mainly wanted to discuss his search engine issues, and repeatedly urged us to Google his surname. (Don’t.)

At the crowded bar outside the back room, we bumped into Dan Isaacs, the chairman of the New York Republican County Committee, who stopped by to show his support. “Honestly, I don’t know,” Mr. Isaacs said when asked about which of the current candidates is best on gay rights. “I don’t think that’s—one more of these?” He tapped his martini glass at the bartender for another margarita neat. “Quite frankly, I don’t know if it’s an issue, so to speak,” he continued. “I think everyone’s focused on the economy at this point.”

The men inside seemed to be avid supporters of Ron Paul. Bill Penna, a stocky Italian in all white and moccasins, was one. Sipping whiskey, he explained that he’s been with the Log Cabins since 1987 and frequently travels to Albany, where he does shockingly well with the “heterosexualites” because “probably only 10 percent of the male population cannot be eroticized by another man.”

“I played five sports in high school. I took every shop class that was invented,” he said, adding that he was openly gay in high school in the ’70s, but the trappings of masculinity kept him safe from ridicule. “The sports and the hazmat aprons inoculated me! I was into social politics early! I also fucked all of my friends, both male and female.”

Tim Pawlenty—who has since bowed out of the race—came onscreen and Mr. Penna glared like he wanted to give him a swirly.

“The man never received the testosterone memo,” he said. “My sister and Hillary Clinton could eat him for breakfast. Pawlenty—the man is devoid of testicles.”

As The Observer motioned to get a fresh cocktail, Mr. Penna gave our rear a resounding slap. Fifteen minutes later, Michele Bachmann would define the word “submission” for the viewers at home.

Later, while Jon Huntsman spoke, a short woman in a black and gold dress entered the room just far enough to eye the screen.

“I agree,” she said, clapping her hands together once. She glanced around as though we might not, presumably re: small government. “I agree! Hell yeah!” she said. She departed soon after.

As the evening progressed, the delegation lost a fair number of participants to the official Ron Paul party in Soho. Plus there was this whole schism with GoProud a few years ago. We didn’t even want to hear about it, a man in a Hollister shirt insisted to The Observer. As the crowd dwindled, however, the remaining members became more comfortable yelling at the screen. “Oh, fuck off,” one man let fly, in response to an apparently galling comment by Newt Gingrich.

“Shut up, Bret,” shouted Greg Angelo, the New York State Log Cabin chairman, after one question from moderator Bret Baier. “Shut up, Bret!”

We stayed long enough to hear Herman Cain quote Donna Summer in his closing remarks, and scooted off to the now-liberated sidewalks.

dduray@observer.com

It’s time for them to stop talking to us and to engage each other in the spirit of cooperation that the President cited in his presentation. The ideologues in both parties are not going to be happy with the final result, since they are invested in dogma, not compromise. The Tea Party types on the Republican side would rather see the nation slip into default to prove a point. The entitlement-loving lefties on the Democratic side would rather look the other way as the nation continues to spend far beyond its means.

Either way, people are going to be unhappy. That is the nature of compromise.

So it is incumbent on leaders to lead, not to calculate, not to maneuver, not to grandstand. If the nation does default on Aug. 2, chances are good that the American public will pin the blame on both parties, rather than identify a single villain. Voters simply are not engaged enough in Beltway politics to sort out the details of the debt ceiling. All they know—and, frankly, this is the root of the matter—is that their elected representatives seem incapable of governing. That’s bad for all concerned.

It is instructive to compare the paralysis in Washington with the energy exhibited in Albany over the past seven months. In New York, a governor and leaders of the state legislature understood that the vitality of state government depended on tackling, rather than evading, hard issues. They did so through negotiation and compromise.

It is a measure of changing times that Albany can now teach Washington a thing or two about governance.

It’s time for the Beltway crowd to stop giving speeches. We already know what’s at stake. If the worst happens, there will be plenty of blame to spread around.

• The consumer price index for November comes out today. It probably rose, signaling inflation. But did it raise enough to finally placate the Federal Reserve? [Bloomberg]
• Look out, Spain! Moody's says it could very well cut your credit rating. Meanwhile, Standard & Poor's has its eye on you, Belgium. [Reuters]
• Goldman Sachs has brought on board former New York Fed bigwig Theo Lubke as its chief regulatory reform officer. [FT]
• November retail sales were the best they'd been since the company entered an economic tailspin in 2007. [WSJ]
• Republicans working on a 9/11 Commission-style report about the causes of the financial crisis will probably say U.S. housing policy is to blame. No one will even know they think that, though, because the version available in bookstores will contain the Democrats' telling of the tale. [NYT]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

Of course, that's not the only way Murdoch has helped to fund the conservative movement. Fox News is home to nearly all of the probably Republican presidential nominees for the 2012 elections, and the cable channel isn't the only part of the News Corp. empire that has prominent right wingers on the payroll. Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins, has released the books of many top Republican political figures. And in September, HarperCollins announced the launch of Broadside Books, an imprint dedicated to Conservative authors. To help you keep track of who's cashing Murdoch's checks, we bring you A Guide to Top Conservatives on the News Corp. payroll. 

"I wanted to do the show, we just couldn't get it worked out … And then, my sister and I were watching the show when Bill made his threat, and I just thought . . . whether it's a comedian or a terrorist, you should not respond to threats," O'Donnell told Leno. 

O'Donnell was a guest on 22 episodes of Maher's old talk show, "Politically Incorrect," which aired from 1993 until 2002. In September, Maher began the new season of "Real Time" with a message for O'Donnell.

"Christine, if you're watching, I created you. You need to come on this show. if you don't come on this show, I'm going to show a clip every week," he said. 

Maher then proceeded to air an 11 year-old clip where O'Donnell discussed how she once "dabbled in witchcraft."

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a Satanic altar," said O'Donnell in the clip.

The witchcraft clip became a viral video sensation and prompted a 30-second commercial where O'Donnell informed television viewers that she's "not a witch."