It often seems that Blue Dog Democrats, along with a handful of Senate moderates, are the only people in Washington who are serious about fiscal responsibility. Chasing the will-o-the-wisp of a balanced budget amendment, however, seems more likely to distract from than advance that essential cause.

The idea is seductively simple: The only way to restrain deficit spending in Washington is to make it unconstitutional. That’s how the states keep their books balanced, and there’s no reason the federal government shouldn’t do the same. In fact, there are several.

Everyone knows that America’s attempt to implant democracy in Iraq was a fool’s errand. Everyone, that is, but the Iraqi people.

Stubbornly defying terrorist bombings and official incompetence, they turned out in force to vote in national elections over the weekend. Although the outcome isn’t yet known, the elections confirmed Iraq’s status as the Middle East’s most important, if precarious, experiment in democracy.

The following is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s op-ed published today in AolNews.com:

President Barack Obama has resumed a vital post-Cold War chore interrupted by his predecessor — reducing America’s nuclear arsenal. The White House reportedly is putting the final touches on its Nuclear Posture Review, which aims to reinforce the world’s nonproliferation regime without undercutting deterrence.

The new strategy reverses the Strangelovian course pursued by George W. Bush during the heyday of conservative infatuation with unilateralism and pre-emptive strikes. For example, rather than build on the momentum of previous arms-reductions efforts, Bush funded research on a new line of nuclear weapons — “bunker-busters” — intended to take out underground nuclear facilities or command centers.

There’s something poignant about President Obama’s attempts to reason with congressional Republicans. He keeps hoping that facts, evidence, and logic somehow can penetrate the depleted-uranium armor of conservative ideology. As yesterday’s health summit showed, it hasn’t worked, but a public frustrated with Washington’s tribal politics will probably appreciate the effort anyway.

Republicans are warning of ominous political consequences if the Democrats use budget reconciliation rules to help pass health care reform. It would be “a huge mistake,” averred Sen. Olympia Snowe, the chief object of Senate Democrats’ unconsummated quest for bipartisan cooperation on health reform.

Evidently, for the Democrats to resort to reconciliation would be an intolerable abuse of congressional rules, whereas the Republican habit of filibustering everything in sight is perfectly within bounds. Passing health measures by a simple majority vote, the GOP maintains, would be the political equivalent of nuclear war: It would pulverize what little remains of comity and good will in Washington.

It’s not hard to understand China’s angry reaction to President Obama’s meeting yesterday with the Dalai Lama. Beijing claims that Tibet’s spiritual leader is a “separatist,” but he has never demanded independence. Instead, the Dalai Lama has become a living symbol of ideals that China, for all its burgeoning strength, deeply fears: human rights, free expression, religious liberty and democracy.

The present era of polarization may have reached its nadir on January 25, 2010. That was the day Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster to kill a deficit reduction commission — something he’d loudly demanded earlier. All it took was President Obama’s endorsement to turn McConnell and the six Senate Republicans who co-sponsored it against the bill.

The following piece was written for a conference on progressive governance being held this week in London by the Policy Network, an international think tank dedicated to promoting progressive policies:

For many on the left, the near-collapse of America’s financial system during the winter of 2008-2009 was irrefutable proof of the failure of free market ideas. The new consensus — let’s call it the anti-Washington consensus — was solemnized by business and political elites in Davos last month. Fittingly enough, French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered the eulogy for neoliberalism.

The Anglo-American model is dead. Long live state capitalism!

Not so fast. In America at least, popular attitudes have not lurched in a more interventionist or social democratic direction. If anything, there’s been a backlash against the emergency measures the Obama administration has undertaken to unlock credit, bail out big banks holding worthless securities, reduce home foreclosures, and keep big U.S. auto companies afloat.

It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.

If anyone could have been expected to make a seamless transition to the national political stage, it was Bayh, the handsome, dutiful son of former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. But from his arrival here in 1998, Bayh seemed frustrated with the ideological and partisan hothouse that is contemporary Washington.

Iranians are bracing for violent clashes in the streets of Tehran today, the Islamic Republic’s 31st anniversary. Both the government and the opposition Green Movement are calling for demonstrations to mark the occasion.

Reza Aslan says the regime’s increasingly brutal crack-down on domestic dissent has brought Iran to the verge of civil war. Other observers fear a Tiananmen Square-style massacre that could cripple the democratic opposition, which flared up after last summer’s rigged elections.

President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.

It’s bad enough that Democrats, despite holding the White House and commanding majorities in Congress, can’t pass their top domestic priority. They look as feckless as Moliere’s cuckolded husbands. But now Republicans are trying to dictate health care policy, despite having been soundly whipped in the last two national elections

Paul Krugman wants Americans to stop worrying and learn how to love the bomb – the fiscal bomb that is.

Just as Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous film classic assures the president that America can survive thermonuclear war, Krugman professes blithe disregard for the impact of massive government borrowing on U.S. fiscal stability.

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.

“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.

President Obama has delivered on his promise to expand nuclear energy — big time. But can Republicans take “yes” for an answer?

Obama’s new budget calls for a whopping increase in federal loan guarantees for nuclear power, from $18.5 billion to $54 billion. Last week, he also created a blue ribbon panel to explore solutions to the contentious issue of nuclear waste disposal, which many regard as a key roadblock to building new nuclear plants.

The U.S. economy ended 2009 with a bang, growing at a torrid pace of 5.7 percent in the final quarter of the year. That’s an impressive number at any time, but the Obama administration isn’t popping corks because, with at least 10 percent of Americans out of work, the nation’s mood is still in recession.

Many economists attribute the expansion to a one-time surge in business purchases of goods and equipment. Take away this “inventory bounce,” and growth was only around 2.2 percent, the same as the third quarter. And they worry that growth will sag when the government runs out of stimulus money this year.

Was it rude of President Obama to criticize the Supreme Court, whose members sat opposite him during his State of the Union address? Or did Justice Samuel Alito commit the greater breach of decorum by shaking his head and appearing to mouth the words, “It’s not true?”

I’ll leave this debate to more qualified arbiters of political etiquette. On the merits, however, the president was right: the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC can only enhance the power of private money in Washington.

President Obama’s first State of the Union address was a surprisingly prosaic affair for a man of his oratorical gifts. It was practical, concrete, and workmanlike, long on common sense and short on inspiration.

Still, the speech probably advanced several of Obama’s key goals, and it gave the country a chance to see how well he stands up to political adversity. By turns humorous, passionate and resolute, Obama gave the impression of a more seasoned leader who has not been knocked off stride by recent reverses, and who is rededicating himself to changing the way Washington works.

As President Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union Address tonight, he is being tugged in conflicting directions. His dilemma is simple, and familiar: independent voters want different things than liberals.

Independents and moderate Democrats worry about big government and deficits. Liberals want more government spending and regulation, and they think fiscal discipline is the death of progressive reform.

Since last week’s shocker in Massachusetts, the White House has amped up the populist rhetoric in hopes of deflecting voter anger onto Wall Street bonus babies and health insurance companies. That might make progressives feel better, but it’s unlikely to mollify ornery independents.

For one thing, Barack Obama is no Huey Long. As president, his job is to point the way out of the nation’s dilemmas, not channel voter rage. What our jittery country needs now is his calm, penetrating intelligence, not hackneyed demagoguery that will unsettle markets and retard the return of economic confidence. A swifter economic recovery is the best elixir for what ails Obama and his party.

Mute all those cable TV pundits. The commentator who has the best grasp on what happened in Massachusetts this week is none other than President Barack Obama. It was a change election, he said Wednesday, just like his own.

In 2008, Obama won a solid majority by rolling up an eight-point margin with independents. His race, his youth, his political inexperience cast him as the antithesis of the despised “Washington insider.” These non-aligned voters warmed especially to Obama’s “post partisan” promise to put the nation’s interests above those of political careerists, partisan hacks and rent-seeking interest groups.