What the hell are we paying you for?

— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), quoted by Politico, calling President Obama “a bystander in the Oval Office” for not getting involved in supercommittee debt talks.

The effect of the #Occupy protest movement reverberated in the GOP presidential primary, of all places, yesterday when former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman took an ideological hard left — staking out a position to the left of Pres. Obama — by coming out against “too big to fail” banks:

To some, he’s a hard-headed Massachusetts Yank.
To others, he a loud-mouthed, obnoxious crank.
But whether you’re for him or agin’ him,
They’ll be no forgetting him —
And Congress won’t be the same without you, Barney Frank.

The White House is providing this handy little calculator you can use to figure out how much you’ll save on taxes if Congress passes the American Jobs Act (not likely), and how much you’ll owe if they don’t (way more likely). Start planning now how much more you’ll need to have saved in April by [...]

The Republican race now seems to be between Mitt Romney, the consummate establishmentarian, and Newt Gingrich, an hysterical blowhard. But if you watched Tuesday night’s national security debate, you’d never have guessed which was which.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine.

It’s hard to remember when there was once a bidding war for “Adios, Mofo” in New York. Six publishers made our agent promise to give them a chance to bid on the proposal once Perry announced for president. When he rocketed to the top of the Republican field and looked like a tea-vangelical Ronald Reagan from the red states, a heartthrob for the angry mob, Moore and I ended up with a book deal that made national news. … And then Perry opened his mouth. Bless his heart.

— Jason Stanford, writing about how he and co-author James Moore lost their publisher for a book on Rick Perry once his campaign imploded.

What is this mac-and-cheese? Is it a black thing?

— Pat Robertson, on The 700 Club, commenting on former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s favorite Thanksgiving dish.

President Obama should admit “that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left…. My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

— Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times op-ed pages.