Deficit Hawk or Deficit Panda?

That is the question posed today by Ruth Marcus in an op-ed at the Washington Post. Marcus decides it is better to be a panda and I agree, not least because King Fu Panda was my favorite movie of the past several years. There is a histrionic quality to the cries for deficit reduction. These out-year deficit predictions are not the stuff of alarmism. Ross Perot built his candidacy on the issue in 1992, and he garnered a significant percentage of the electorate, but of course it was Bill Clinton who got the nation's finances in order, and he achieved that without resorting to the kinds of drastic cuts being talked about by the Tea Party and their congressional allies.

In another good story in today's Post, Dana Milbank looks at some of the tea Party projects in the state legislatures. I knew many of their proposals were radical, but the idea of turning helicopter gunships on immigrants is shocking, even if it was only a rhetorical device.