Ezra Klein totally unloaded yesterday on the deficit hawks who have been largely or completely silent on paying for the $30 BILLION it's going to cost to send the additional troops to Afghanistan.  Here's the money quote:

...this town is packed full of deficit hawks. Where are the editorial pages on this? Where's the Peterson Institute? David Walker? The Committee for a Responsible Budget?

Update 12/2: I was appropriately corrected by Maya MacGuineas, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's executive director, for missing this, and this.  As Brad DeLong would say, that's a smackdown.  That doesn't excuse the other so-called deficit hawks either for not engaging or, worse, running in the other direction on the war costs, but it does mean that CRFB is...and...was on the case.

David Broder has a column in today's The Washington Post that I find close to incomprehensible. 

First he says that the Congressional Budget Office's substantive, detailed analysis shows that the bill proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will reduce the deficit. 

(Note to David: CBO does not give its "blessing" to legislation; all it does is score the bill.)

Second, he says that the CBO scoring that shows the bill reducing the deficit compared to existing law is not as valuable as polls that show that Americans don't believe it.  And he says that the polls are somehow more correct than CBO even though one group actually analyzed the bill while the other got its almost certainly less-than-complete-and accurate information from someone else.

Third, Broder says "every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters." 

Ezra Klein nailed the impact of the Congressional Budget Office's apparent decision that a major part of the what could be included in health care will not be scored as being on budget.

Klein is right: CBO's opposite decision during the Clinton administration literally killed any chance of health care happening that year.

Add this decision to the fact that Congress has decided to allow the budget reconciliation rules to be used to avoid a Senate filibuster on a health care bill and its clear that it's far more likely that something could be adopted this year than seemed possible on Inauguration Day.

(I've been trying to find a clip of an extraordinary interview Bryant Gumbel did with ex-Senator Tom Daschle in 1994 on Today about the impact of the CBO decision.  The interview is classic. Gumbel keeps hammering Daschle while Daschle continually refuses to admit that what CBO said was negative.  Please let me know if you know where a copy of the interview is available.)