This week, President Barack Obama released a budget that, as promised, cuts discretionary domestic spending in key areas in the name of deficit reduction. But he left big entitlement programs mostly untouched, which fueled fire on Republican-led efforts in the House to slash even more.

The cry from most progressives, and many economists, that deficits don't matter while unemployment hovers just under 10 percent has gone mostly unheard by the American people. But there's another cry: that the deficit doesn't matter at all, at any time. TAP talked with James K. Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government/business relations at the University of Texas at Austin, who might be the country's biggest deficit dove.

A few months ago, Prospect contributor Courtney Martin wrote about the frustration feminists felt toward Michelle Obama. Here was a trailblazing career woman, a Harvard- and Princeton-educated attorney at a major Chicago law firm who nonetheless billed herself as "mom-in-chief." For Martin, this branding of Michelle Obama was a calculated political move, an attempt to project an image that did not ruffle feathers or detract from the president's campaign.