Becerra said he is holding out hope that the committee could strike a deal.

 

Things sounded gloomier in Sen. Patty Murray's telling.

 

The Washington Democrat and committee co-chair said Republicans were too fixated on preserving the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income brackets, insistent that those rates not be allowed to rise when the current extension of them ends."There's that line in the sand, and there aren't any Republicans willing to cross it," she said on CNN's American Morning, according to Politico.

 

Republicans have said for days that the problem is, in fact, Democrats. Namely, President Obama's veto threat and Democratic unwillingness to attack the rising cost of entitlement programs. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the supercommittee's co-chairman, spoke to reporters last week:

 

 

But would failure be a bad thing? Not necessarily, says Mark Trumbull at The Christian Science Monitor. And that approach to the Supercommittee's work is taking broader hold, he argues.

That view: Don't get hot and bothered if the panel fails to deliver. The battles will just be fought again after the next election – and maybe on that day the side with the best ideas will have more political clout. 

Here's the latest word from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the left: "Don't we eventually have to match spending and revenue?" Yes, he says, but "it's a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide."

Let the decisions on whether to raise taxes on the wealthy or to raise eligibility ages for Medicare and Social Security be made after voters have weighed in with their representatives about which they'd prefer. What an idea.

And, as The Wall Street Journal has noted, the market itself might not even care. 

Update: Here's more from Sen. Pat Toomey, from Face the Nation this morning. If it's over, it's their fault, but we're still willing to talk, so ... there's a chance?

Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry was blasting Toomey's plan over on Meet the Press: 

We have reached "full-scale blame game," Politico reports.