AP is a d---

From Steve Benen:

Reuters caused a stir late yesterday when it reported, “Republicans have tentatively agreed to between $150 billion and $200 billion in increased revenues in budget talks, Republican Senator Jon Kyl said on Wednesday.” Around the same time, the Washington Post said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has signaled “flexibility on tax loopholes” as part of debt-reduction talks.

Reader M.J. alerted me to this Associated Press piece with an almost comical headline: “As GOP shows flexibility, Obama adopts hard tone.” (It’s this kind of ridiculous thinking that leads Mark Halperin to call the president a “dick” on national television.)

What in the world are these media outlets talking about? Well, it appears some reporters are a little confused, or at a minimum, taken in too easily by misleading rhetoric without paying attention to the details.

The “flexibility” that the media was impressed with yesterday was really just Republicans talking about trading some tax subsidies for other tax cuts. That’s all. Democrats want to end wasteful tax breaks and apply the new revenue to deficit reduction. GOP officials, including Cantor, only said yesterday that they’re willing to apply savings to “offsetting tax cuts somewhere else.”