Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), on Sarah Palin: It’s a lot easier being a “celebrity commentator for Fox” than actually governing.

President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — the Erskine Bowles-Alan Simpson co-chaired debt commission — will release it proposed recommendations within the hour, sources tell TPM. We’re being told this is the “chairman’s mark” — not the final recommendations that will have to be voted upon by the commission. A press conference coming at 1 p.m. ET should give us a clearer picture.

The FDA is rolling out a series of graphic new warnings to be placed on cigarette cartons. Click the image below to see a selection of them.

Deficit Commission releases recommendations: the main one of which seems to be to decimate Social Security.

Late Update: We’ll have a more detailed piece on this shortly. But I wanted to give people an overview idea of the key recommendation on Social Security: namely, changing the ‘indexing’ of Social Security benefits to inflation rather than wages. That sounds very technical. And most people won’t even know what it means. But whatever the rationales and arguments, what it means is very clear. Significantly lower cost of living adjustments which are cumulative in their effect over time. Think of it as a chart where you either have the money number going up at a 10 degree angle or a 15 degree angle. Not that big a difference in the first few increments but once you get to the right side of the graph, it’s a dramatic difference. I would say this is actually a much more significant change than the other recommendation to change the retirement age to 69. Much bigger.

You can take a look at the proposal being put forth by fiscal commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles here.

We’re in the process now of trying to get a better understanding of what Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson are up to exactly in releasing this draft of recommendations for spending cuts and tax hikes. Here’s what we do know:

The commission’s final recommendations aren’t due until December 1. The commission can basically recommend whatever it wants, but if 14 of the 18 commissioners agree with the recommendations, then Congress has agreed to take them up. So that’s basically the key charge of the commission co-chairs: create enough of a consensus plan that 14 commissioners can support it. Without that, the recommendations become just another report gathering dust on a shelf. Read More

Some shrewd comments from TPM Reader HW …

I took a very quick look at this document and what’s amazing to me is that they came up with these draconian cuts in Social Security, which is off-budget and currently in the black, but have barely anything for Medicare, where the government is hemorrhaging money.

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Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) issued the following statement on the Bowles/Simpson proposal: Read More

A big question for 2012 is whether President Obama will continue to resist creation of outside groups on the left to rival American Crossroads and similar big-spending attack groups on the right. There have been signals that Obama is softening. Now David Brock is actively pitching the creation of such a group on the left, Greg Sargent reports.

More on why Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles felt compelled to release their proposed deficit reduction plan today.