Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Associate Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

That whining sound you’ve been hearing today is the traditional mating call of the Deficit Hawk. Every year, right around early February, you can hear them as they fly from media outlet to media outlet complaining how, in terms of deficit reduction, the President’s new budget isn’t good enough.

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), for example, moaned that we need, “a much more robust package of deficit and debt reduction over the medium and long term.” Alice Rivlin, a member of the now-completed Deficit Commission, pouted, “I would have preferred to see the administration get out front on addressing the entitlements and the tax reform that we need to reduce long-run deficits.” And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget sent out a press release grumbling that, “this budget does not go nearly far enough.”

Their hearts may be in the right place, but all that rushing about trying to impress each other with their deficit-cutting plumage is leading them to the wrong conclusion. The President’s budget goes exactly as far as it should, showing deficits declining from a high of 10.9 percent of GDP down to 3.2 percent of GDP by 2015. The budget includes more than $2 trillion in deficit reduction, most of which come in the form of spending cuts, and would stabilize the debt as a share of GDP.

True, as Rivlin complained, it doesn’t “get out front” on addressing entitlements or tax reform. But since she herself was a member of not one, but two bipartisan deficit commission, Rivlin should know better than anyone that a comprehensive plan that cuts entitlement spending, raises taxes, and generally goes after everyone’s sacred cows will quickly find itself gathering dust.

f the president had followed her lead, his budget would be just another impossible plan to be mocked, attacked, or ignored. As Center for American Progress Action Fund Vice President for Economic Policy, Michael Ettlinger, put it:

While the impatient purists would like to see plans to solve the nation’s long-term problems right now, trying immediately to completely solve our substantial long-term budget challenges would both make success unlikely and be largely pointless because other presidents and Congresses will have much to say about the budgets of the future.

Instead, the President did exactly the right thing by showing how to meaningfully improve our fiscal situation in the near and medium term, without relying on massive, sure-to-be-unpopular reforms, or hoping for a sudden outbreak of bipartisan comity. His budget is a realistic path to stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio within five years, and reducing our deficits to more manageable levels.

Getting broad agreement on how we control rising health care costs, protect and reform Social Security, cut back on defense spending, and raise new revenue is going to take years. We are at the beginning of that process, not the end. We shouldn’t want, nor do we need, the president to offer a comprehensive long-term plan for balancing the budget. What we do need is a way to get some fiscal breathing room, so we have the time it’s going to take to come to a workable agreement. And we shouldn’t wait until a “grand bargain” is struck to start down that path.

Last week, ThinkProgress revealed that top lawyers for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce solicited private security contractors to investigate the Chamber’s political opponents. The law firm, Hunton & Williams LLP, represents the Chamber against campaigns by unions and political activists. In 2009, the Chamber paid Hunton & Williams $1,147,644 for its services. The law firm has represented subprime mortgagers, global warming polluters, and tobacco giant Phillip Morris.

Three Hunton & Williams partners engaged the services of Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal to perform the invasions of privacy the Chamber itself now describes as “abhorrent“:

– Richard L. Wyatt Jr., co-head of the firm’s Litigation Group, who is suing the Yes Men on behalf of the Chamber. Wyatt negotiated with the spy firms on pricing and told them he would sell the project to the Chamber.

– Robert T. Quackenboss, a lawyer who handles “the tactical and public communications response to union-coordinated attack campaigns.” In this effort, Quackenboss was the “key client contact operationally” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

– John W. Woods, an expert on “electronic surveillance” and “corporate crimes.” Woods was the “primary point of contact” with the corporate spy contractors.

A key service that attracted the Chamber’s lawyers to the corporate spies was the ability of HBGary’s CEO Aaron Barr to use computer programs and false “personas” to “scrape” personal information from the websites of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. Such acts are in explicit contravention of the legal terms of service of Facebook and LinkedIn.

Emails leaked from HBGary’s servers describe how Hunton & Williams solicited Berico, Palantir, and HBGary — who named their collaboration “Themis,” after the Roman goddess of law and order — to use social media scrapers developed by HBGary to investigate political opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Although Hunton & Williams avoided paying for the months of work, their officials solicited the proposal; repeatedly met with all participants; were fully aware that HBGary was scraping sensitive personal information about political adversaries of the Chamber; and praised the results of joint presentations by Berico, Palantir, and HBGary showing off the scrapers.

In January of this year, H&W sent by courier a CD with target data to the contractors. H&W also solicited the Themis team to produce a presentation on WikiLeaks for Bank of America that promoted their Facebook scraper.

“Misuses of social media can result in damage to the employer’s reputation, breach of confidentiality, and trade secret theft,” Hunton & Williams ironically noted last year on one of its blogs. As of yet, it has refused to comment on its own misuse of social media on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.