With last week’s unsurprising failure of the deficit “Supercommittee” came a threat by President Obama to “veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending” triggered by the committee’s failure. at today’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney quashed speculation by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) that the President had left some “wiggle room” to rejigger those triggered cuts away from defense.

The man who has been catapulted into the spotlight as the single most important political character in the collapse of the Congressional Supercommittee on the budget is still saying no to any and all taxes. Grover Norquist the Americans for Tax Reform head who, despite not being a public servant or member of the media, keeps having fingers pointed at him for pulling the strings in the Republican Congress was on Meet the Press today and explained, once again, that his tax pledge was not with him but “the American people”

At noon eastern time today, the Alex Wagner era at MSNBC began with the debut of the former Politics Daily White House correspondent’s newshour, NOW. Joined by a whip-smart panel that included HDNet‘s Dan Rather, Politico‘s Maggie Haberman, and New York Magazine‘s John Heilemann, Wagner kicked off the show with an examination of how President Obama‘s handling of the debt supercommittee is playing with voters.

On This Week today, George Will claimed that if President Obama should be hoping that the Congressional supercommittee convened to come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget and deal with high unemployment will fail, because he can’t run against a do-nothing Congress in 2012 if the public sees Congress is actually doing something. Christiane Amanpour showed a new ABC/Washington Post poll that shows that President Obama and the Republican Congress are roughly given the same amount of trust, 40 percent, when it comes to the issue of job creation.

At Monday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney fielded a lot of questions about how, exactly, the new debt ceiling deal constitutes a “compromise.” As CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell pointed out, Democrats “got nothing.”

Carney pointed to the measure’s “Super Congress” committee as an opportunity to take a second crack at a balanced approach, and to the trigger provisions as an incentive for Congress to reach such a deal. I asked Carney if it was realistic to think that Tea Party congressmen would vote for revenue increases, even in the face of defense cuts.

Assuming Congress passes the “less than satisfying” debt ceiling measure that puts an end to the Tea Party-invented default crisis, this week will mark the Dawn of Doomsday Politicsâ„¢, an era in which all bets are off, and the immolation of our way of life has become a political bargaining chip. At Monday’s White House briefing, I asked Press Secretary Jay Carney why the President even allowed this conversation to happen in the first place, and how he might deal with the default threat when it comes up again, in his second term.