As Chris Hayes points out in this column for The Nation, the sudden urgency over deficit reduction has no basis in reality, much like our experience with another national frenzy:

The hysteria has reached such a pitch that Republican senators (joined by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson) have filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits because it was not offset by spending cuts. Keep in mind, the cost of the extension for people unlucky enough to be caught in the jaws of the worst recession in thirty years is $35 billion. The bill would increase the debt by less than 0.3 percent.

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.

We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.

Remember that the Iraq War might have been prevented had more Congressional Democrats stood up to oppose it. Instead, many of those who privately knew the entire enterprise was a colossal disaster in the making buckled to right-wing pressure and pundit hawks and voted for it. That mistake is being repeated. Despite White House economists' full realization of the need for stimulus in the face of astronomically high unemployment, the New York Times has reported that the political minds inside the White House, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, have decided that the public has no appetite for increased spending. "It's my job to report what the public mood is," Axelrod explained. He then showed up on ABC's This Week to wave the white flag, saying that the president would continue to press to extend unemployment benefits; conspicuously omitted was any mention of aid to state governments, which had originally been included in the president's June letter to Congress asking for a new stimulus package.

There is hope, however: the public is nowhere near as obsessed with the deficit as are those in Washington. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans support "additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy," with 38 percent opposed. A Hart Research Associates poll published in June showed that two-thirds of Americans favor continuing unemployment benefits. There is also very little public appetite for "entitlement reform," a k a cutting Social Security.

The lesson of the Iraq War is that over the long haul, good politics and good policy can't be separated. If the White House is tempted to support bad policy in the short term because it seems less risky politically, it should give John Kerry a call and ask him how that worked out for him with Iraq.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is unconstitutional. Chris Hayes anchored Rachel Maddow's show and led off with this segment and interview with Martha Coakley.

We begin tonight with breaking news out of Massachusetts. A federal judge ruled that the federal government's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro decided that the defense of marriage act violates the fundamental principles of this nation.

With that, the judge made advocates of marriage equality very happy. One of the rulings involved seven couples and three widowers, all of whom who had been ineligible for the federal benefits that come with being lawfully wed thanks to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. That law required the federal government to ignore for federal purposes any marriage not between a man and women.

Same-sex wedded couples have no access to family health insurance, no social security survivor benefits, no joint filing of federal taxes.

There are two salient things about the ruling. The judge granted the plaintiffs what's known as summary judgment. Both sides filed their arguments and the judge decided he didn't need to hear another word.

The remarkable part of the ruling is the reason for it. In addition to ruling that DOMA violated the equal protection clause, he also invoked the Tenth Amendment, which Chris Hayes points out as the "holy grail" of conservative thought:

Judge Tauro saying the rationale strains credulity. Judge Tauro ruled that a key part of the bill violated a couple's right to equal protection. Judge Tauro also ruled for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, saying the federal government wrongly forced it to discriminate, writing "the federal government, by enforcing DOMA encroaches on the province of the state and offends the Tenth Amendment.

The tenth amendment is the "don't tread on me" amendment. It's the one conservatives are using to repeal health reform. It's Texas governor Rick Perry's favorite battle cry. Now, today, the Tenth Amendment means gay couples are one step closer to being treated equally in this country. Don't tread on them either.

I believe the Obama administration concurred with the judge's ruling, which is why the President issued his executive order protecting the rights of gay couples with regard to health care and ordered benefits extended to same-sex partners.

It does, however, place the DOJ in a weird position. Since the DOJ is responsible for enforcing the laws on the books, they're going to have to appeal this judge's ruling, even if the opinion inside the administration is that the judge was right. This is their duty under the law, and it carries the risk that this case will go to the Supreme Court for a final resolution. When it's appealed, don't assume the administration is against the ruling simply because DOJ is doing its job.

If it reaches the Supreme Court and Elena Kagan is confirmed, it affirms the wisdom of her refusal to answer the question about DOMA's constitutionality. Had she answered that question, she would have had to recuse herself from any proceedings that related to it, which would have left an unbalanced court to decide the case.

In any event, this is a landmark decision which sets a much faster pace for the eventual repeal of DOMA.

Jon Stewart has described the media’s style of pack journalism many times with the same analogy: 8-year-olds playing soccer. As Stewart describes it, there’s a weird clump of legs, all moving in the same direction. Suddenly the kids see a ball rolling, and the weird clump converges on it in an awkward, graceless, and rather amusing fashion.

As Stewart sees it, reporters are the kids and news stories are the ball. Chris Hayes, displaying why he’s as good a political analyst as anyone I can think of, explains the psychology of the political press in a great item, written after last night’s debate in New Hampshire.

Reporting at event like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: “Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.” You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.

Of course, it’s amazing work. But I realized for the first time yesterday, that this essential terror isn’t just a byproduct of inexperience. It never goes away. Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.

The reporting that emerges from this is, to put it mildly, unhelpful. Read the rest.

I know there is a lot of frustration in the blogosphere right now because President Obama has not been kind to liberals and progressives. And I understand the frustration of it all too well. I still can't figure out why Axelrod and the President don't seem to understand how important their base is. But as C&L and many other sites wrote during the primary, Obama was never a progressive, but a moderate Democratic politician. I've been blogging for five years non-stop to move this country away from conservatism that has been the great destroyer of our society. Chris Hayes at The Nation has a great article up describing the mess that is our political system and what we face as progressives:

System Failure

The corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest--and increasingly, that's the only kind of change we can get.

In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties. He was motivated by a simple question: why were parties of the left, those most ideologically committed to democracy and participation, as oligarchical in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right?

Michels's answer was what he called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy." In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes. "It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors," he wrote, "of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy."

Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. "After the old man's death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being."

"The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy," Michels wrote. "Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense."

Digby writes:

It's indisputably true that the political system is run by wealthy plutocrats and much of what passes for democracy is kabuki. Same as it ever was, I'm afraid. But that's not exactly the point. It's still worth participating, doing what you can, containing the damage, stopping the bleeding, fighting the fight --- for its own sake. After all, history shows that humans have managed, somehow, to actually make progress over time. You just can't know what will make the difference.

There's an impulse to say screw it all and not show up anymore because "they're all the same," but I can't do that. For the most part, politicians will let us down because they are...well, politicians, but they aren't all the same. There have been plenty of books written about Florida in 2000. If ballots had been properly labeled so that voters who wanted Gore instead of Pat Buchanan could have done so, we might have had a more fair election. And then the Supreme Court would have been left to watch election night like the rest of us and Bush wouldn't have entered the White House in 2000.

Think of what that would have meant for the country:

• The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would never have been a reality.
• I doubt we would have had the attacks of 9/11 because President Clinton warned that the greatest threat America would face was terrorism and Gore would have not ignored him like Bush did. But if we did get attacked, then you can bet that Gore would have handled it as an adult. He wouldn't sought "revenge" against Saddam Hussein and prioritized control of all that oil. Gore wouldn't have let Osama Bin Laden get away and the world would still be sympathetic to us.
• Our efforts to put Afghanistan back together would be finished by now, assuming we even would have tried nation-building there.
• More troops and people would be alive and we would have exited the Middle East with our heads held high.
• America would never have invaded and occupied Iraq and over 4,000 troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (if not millions) would be alive today.
• Abu Ghraib would never have happened.
• Terrorist recruitment would have stalled.
• Torture would not be part of the American lexicon and the likes of Dick Cheney and John Yoo would never have descended upon the offices of the VP and OLC.
• John Roberts and Sam Alito would not be on the Supreme Court and the makeup would probably be 6-3 against the radical Scalia-conservative agenda. A ruling on Citizens United is coming soon. Would the court ever have accepted that case? Not a chance and soon corporations will have a stranglehold on our election system much more than they have now.
• George Bush would have been back home in Texas leading the state into secession along with his pal Alberto Gonzalez.
• Nobody would have ever heard of Terry Schiavo.
• A much swifter and more effective response to Hurricane Katrina would have been implemented.

You get my point. These are but a few things that would have been different if conservatives didn't get their hands on the White House. Many of us are fighting for liberal and progressive values everyday and will continue to do so. But when our party fails us, I need to work harder to make sure the party stays on a liberal course, not throw up my hands and dismiss them as all the same.

And in the spirit of that though we need to hold the party establishment accountable. As Digby says there are a number of great progressive challengers already taking on DLC incumbents and we're going to send them a message that's loud and clear. Blue America PAC is already taking on this challenge.

Digby:

Blue America has helpfully set up an Act Blue page with all the progressive challengers who have announced and we'll add to it as more come forward. We're calling it "Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand."

If you want a Democratic scalp, these candidates are out there offering to do the work to get it done. And you won't be giving Adam Nagourney or Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck what they want in the process. It's a win that even the villagers and the party establishment can't spin as good news for Republicans.

We'll be having on many progressive challengers in the coming months on C&L and they will be explaining why progressives need to be elected if we want things to change for the better. The new Blue America PAC Act Blue page is called:

"Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand."

Please join us.