the big ax. one of those college football rivalry games. minnesota and wisconsin. a hashtag and all set. rachel, i want to bring up sort of a funny point. there s a list of things that cost the same as the sequester. one of them is the aig bail youth. the sequester about $10 billion less than what we spent on beer in 2011. 17% of what we spent on gas in 2012. and yes, someone found out and did this calculation, it is 1/100,000th cost of the death star. i m wondering, have we in the media helped to manufacture this crisis? well, both parties would probably say yes. republicans in particular would probably say it pretty emphat emphatically. part of the reason wall street is not excited about this and big business isn t too excited about the sequester is that the feeling, first of all, fiscal
them happy to cut washington spending and compromise is difficult moving forward. i asked john boehner today whether he s open to grand bargain talks with the president of the united states and said as of right now he likes to do things through regular order so we ll see. all right. peter alexander and luke russert, thank you for that. we want to bring in deputy managing editor at politico, rachel smokan. the idea is this is madness, chaos, potentially catastrophic. i guess i sort of have a different take on it. i m looking at the sort of relevant political actors here and in terms of political incentives, first, looking at the sequester, it can be kind of fazed in and definitely reversible in the next few weeks. could be passed to undo the damage from it. looking at it from the white house s perspective, the only compromise offered by republicans right now is cuts
push for a more inclusive image, a for more inclusive attitude and when there s fight over a bill like this it flies in the face of that effort. they were just ready to move on. rachel, thank you so much. thank you so much. as we were just discussing yesterday, i gave my suggestion to rename sequester. i want end times. s.e. prefers the big ax of 2013. now the facebook fans are proposing their own. the capturequest and broke-a-on this. like us on facebook and submit yours, as well. morn the high stakes game of poker as the cycle rolls on for thursday, february 28th. [ male announcer ] i ve seen incredible things.