Barack Obama called the world's worst poker player

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman routinely gets exasperated by the Obama administration's willingness to cave in to Republicans and their friends on Wall Street.

Yesterday during the negotiations to address the so-called fiscal cliff, the Nobel Prize–winning economist registered his displeasure again under the headline "The World's Worst Poker Player".

Is it really possible that Obama still doesn’t understand that every time he does this — especially if it comes just a few days after stern statements about how he won’t give it — it just reinforces the Republican belief that he can always be bullied into submission? If he cuts a bad deal on the fiscal cliff today, he more or less guarantees that just a few weeks from now Republicans will go all out on using the debt ceiling to extract more concessions.