In the larger economic debate, Democrats and the left in general are largely focused on one goal: demand. Policymakers should, the progressive argument goes, do everything possible to boost demand, since this rests at the heart of the larger problems — more demand would mean more jobs, more growth, more production, more trade, etc.

The right disagrees. In fact, Republicans tend to believe the opposite — we don’t need to boost demand; we need to deal with the real problems like regulations, taxes, and some amorphous sense of uncertainty.

Demand, in the conservative model, is largely irrelevant. It’s why Republicans consider the very idea of generating economic activity through unemployment benefits and food stamps to be completely ridiculous.

Apparently, Mitt Romney forgot the larger debate and temporarily switched sides yesterday.

Yesterday morning one of the party’s front-running presidential candidates contradicted that orthodoxy. Asked to explain his critique of President Obama’s economic views on MSNBC yesterday, Mitt Romney alleged that “he doesn’t understand how the private sector works.” What in particular does the president not understand? Demand!

“The president thinks that if you have cash on your balance sheet that means you’re gonna go hire people. No, you hire people if you have customers. The president doesn’t understand what makes the American economy go. I do.”

Wait, Romney thinks the key businesses expanding their workforce is greater demand? To borrow a Josh Lyman line, “That’s the other guys.”

Do congressional Republicans know Romney is saying stuff like this? Because they certainly don’t agree with this approach. Businesses don’t need customers, GOP officials argue, they need fewer regulations, a smaller tax burden, and the comfort that comes with knowing that health care reform will go away forever. Then they’ll lower their prices and expand their worforce. Customers will come eventually.

In trying to disagree with President Obama, Romney accidentally endorsed President Obama’s economic argument. While hoping to make the case that the president “doesn’t understand” the economy, Romney inadvertently proved he “doesn’t understand” the economic argument underway in Washington.

Wait, it gets worse.

In the same paragraph, Romney mocked the idea that companies with cash on their balance sheets will necessarily hire more workers. On this, he’s correct. But also note that Romney’s economic plan includes big tax breaks for corporations … so they’ll have more cash on their balance sheets.

And this guy’s entire campaign is predicated on the notion that he’s a business whiz? No wonder Romney failed so miserably to create jobs in Massachusetts and the private sector.

Every time we see fresh evidence of the economy’s weakness or fragility, Republicans are quick to blame the White House. After all, if Obama is president, and the economy stinks, it must be his fault.

But in order for this to make sense, the administration would have to be getting its way when it comes to economic policy. Then Republicans would have a credible case to make: if only we’d try things the GOP’s way, we’d finally see great results.

As Greg Sargent explained in a gem of a post, Republicans have nothing to complain about, since we’re already sticking to their script.

No hiring surge is going to happen until Obama and Dems actually agree to do it their way in policy terms.

No hiring surge will happen until that job killing stimulus spending winds down; until Dems allow Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts on the rich; until Dems agree to deep cuts to Federal programs; until municipal governments are forced to cut back and fend for themselves; until Dems embrace the notion that government must tighten its belt to restore business confidence; and until Dems begin seriously basing their policy response to unemployment on the conservative idea that if we only reduce the deficit, a thousand economic flowers will bloom. Only then we’ll see the surge in employment we’re all waiting for.

Oh, wait…

Very nicely done. I know Greg and I have both been banging this drum for a long while, but the point is largely missing from the larger discourse. Whether Republicans want to admit it or not, the economy is advancing exactly as they want it to. The private sector is being left to its own devices; the public sector is shedding jobs quickly and scrapping investments; and debt reduction is at the top of Washington’s to-do list.

This is the playbook the GOP put together. When it’s followed and it fails, Republicans should be prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences, instead of pretending they’re not getting their way.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) delivered a closely-watched speech the other day, in which he went after President Obama over, among other things, the issue of leadership. “We continue wait and hope that our president will finally stop being a bystander in the Oval Office,” the governor said. “We hope that he will shake off the paralysis that has made it impossible for him to take on the really big things.”

The next day, I received a few emails from liberal friends, all of whom are Obama detractors from the left, who seemed giddy but bemused by the fusion of Republican talking points and liberal complaints. They don’t love Christie, but they seemed to love the rhetorical shots Christie was taking at the president.

I find much of this pretty bizarre, not just because dyed-in-the-wool lefties are applauding cheap GOP talking points, but primarily because the argument itself is so weak. John Dickerson had a good piece yesterday on the nature of presidential leadership.

What the president’s critics really mean when they say the president “isn’t leading” is that he hasn’t announced that he is supporting their plans, or that he hasn’t decided to commit public suicide by announcing a position for which they can then denounce him.

By any measure, Obama is a leader. The first stimulus plan, health care reform, and financial regulatory reform he pushed for are all significant pieces of legislation. Christie’s measurement of leadership is doing “big things” even if they are unpopular. Health care, as Republicans will tell you, represents about one-fifth of the economy. Obama certainly wasn’t facing the prospect of popularity when he pushed for changing it.

I remember taking a class on leadership and being surprised, as a naive grad student, how complicated it was. Leadership at a conceptual level seems straightforward and obvious — a person steps up, presents a vision, and encourages others to follow him or her. There is, however, far more to it than that, and there are even different models of leadership (transactional vs. transformational, for example).

But for the purposes of conversation, the notion that Barack Obama is a “bystander,” too overcome by “paralysis” to do “big things,” isn’t just wrong, it’s ridiculous. Indeed, as far as the right is concerned, the attack is itself in conflict with the conservative notion that Obama is destroying American civilization with his radical agenda. One can be a bystander and one can be a radical activist hell bent on gutting our cherished traditions from within — but one cannot be both.

Contradictions aside, what are we to use as a metric for evaluating a president as a leader? If the metric has to do with making controversial decisions to advance the greater good, Obama has clearly done this repeatedly, including his unpopular-but-successful rescue of the American auto industry. If the metric relates to accomplishments, Obama’s record is lengthy (health care, Wall Street reform, Recovery Act, DADT repeal, student loan reform, New START, etc.). If the metric has to do with making tough calls when combating enemies, Obama’s role in killing Osama bin Laden would appear to meet that standard, too.

Has Obama compromised? Sure, but so has every other successful president. Has he fallen short on several goals? Of course, but he’s leading at time of nearly impossible circumstances, after inheriting a Republican mess of unimaginable proportions, and his tenure hasn’t even lasted three years. Is Obama struggling to get things done with this tragically dysfunctional Congress? Obviously, but there’s no point in blaming the president for the structural impediments of the American system of government. As Dickerson explained, “Calling for leadership is a trick both parties use to arouse anger and keep us from thinking too much more about the underlying issue. If only we had a leader, everything would be solved, they’d like us to think. But we should think more about what it actually takes to be president — what kind of leadership works and what kind of leadership doesn’t.”

Ultimately, the president’s critics are raising the wrong complaint. For the right, the criticism should be that Obama may be an effective leader, but he’s effectively leading the nation in a liberal direction they disapprove of. For the left, the criticism should be that Obama isn’t leading the nation to the left quickly or aggressively enough.

But to characterize him as a passive bystander is absurd.

Remember when Republicans used to like Planned Parenthood? When it was championed by GOP leaders like Barry Goldwater and George H.W. Bush?

Well, forget it. Helping low-income families with preventive health care needs has become a right-wing cause for the Republican Party, apparently at multiple levels. In states where GOP candidates excelled in the 2010 elections, officials are targeting Planned Parenthood, and the crusade appears to be intensifying in Congress.*

House Republicans have opened a sweeping investigation into Planned Parenthood, requesting reams of financial information and details on how the women’s health organization keeps federal funds separate from abortion services.

House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) sent Planned Parenthood a six-page letter earlier this month detailing the committee’s request. House Republicans have repeatedly tried to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding because it provides abortions, even though federal funds are not used for those services.

“The Committee has questions about the policies in place and actions undertaken by PPFA and its affiliates relating to its use of federal funding and its compliance with federal restrictions on the funding of abortion,” the letter said.

Federal law already prohibits federal funds from being used to terminate pregnancies. There’s no evidence Planned Parenthood is ignoring this legal prohibition, and the organization’s programs are already regularly audited by the HHS inspector general and state Medicaid programs. Congressional Republicans are pursuing this anyway, just to see what they might be able to turn up.

Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) sent a letter to Stearns asking whether Planned Parenthood is being “singled out as part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men.”

You think?

By way of background, it’s worth noting that Stearns signaled his intentions on this front in June, responding to dubious allegations raised by a far right-wing anti-abortion group. Americans United for Life, which is pushing for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

Raise your hand if you think there’s any chance at all that Planned Parenthood will get a dime of federal funds if there’s a Republican Congress and a Republican White House in 2013.

* link edited

I suspect the vast majority of Americans probably never heard a word about the shocking details surrounding the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) during the Bush/Cheney era. Granted, it was sometimes challenging to keep up with all of the Bush administration scandals, but this one was a doozy, even by Republican standards.

Loyal Bushies at the MMS adopted an anything-goes atmosphere led to Caligula-like corruption and debauchery. That’s not an exaggeration in the slightest — federal officials were literally trading cocaine and sex for lucrative oil contracts. In the Bush/Cheney era, MMS became one of the most corrupt government agencies in American history.

And yet, the media never really took an interest in the controversy, despite the salacious details. Much of what we learned about the scandal came in the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign, so most major outlets more or less blew it off.

Solyndra’s loan guarantees, though, are apparently fascinating.

The coverage surrounding Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that declared bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee, has been sloppy on the part of both mainstream and conservative media outlets. It has also been remarkably abundant.

Between August 31, when Solyndra suspended operations, and September 23, six major print outlets discussed the story in 89 items (news and opinion). Broadcast and cable TV networks discussed Solyndra more than 190 times, totaling over 10 hours of coverage — 8 hours of which occurred on the Fox News Channel.

To put the volume of Solyndra coverage into context, we examined how much attention major print and TV news outlets gave to 1) an obvious case of government corruption exposed in 2008 at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), and 2) a report exposing much greater loss of taxpayer dollars through military contracting waste and fraud.

The charts help drive the point home. Here, for example, is how major print outlets treated the various controversies.

And here are how the cable networks covered the same stories.

The next question, of course, is why. Every major print and television outlet has covered the Solyndra matter significantly more than the MMS story, even though the Solyndra is actually quite dull, and there’s no evidence at all of official wrongdoing. Some of this, as I noted earlier, has to do with timing and what else the political world is focused on, but that alone doesn’t seem to explain the discrepancy.

The answer, I suspect, has to do with the efficacy of the Republican Message Machine. News organizations tend to care about stories that Republicans insist are, in fact, stories. The GOP has proven remarkably adept at pushing outlets to cover news that may not actually be newsworthy, but which become newsworthy by virtue of Republican apoplexy.

When it comes to playing assignment editor, Democrats just aren’t in the same league.

It seems hard to even imagine, but in Ronald Reagan’s first term, he signed off on a series of tax increases — even when unemployment was nearing 11% — and proceeded to raise taxes seven out of the eight years he was in office. It’s a record Republicans find terribly inconvenient, but “no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people” as Reagan.

Of particular interest is the “Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982,” the largest of Reagan’s tax increases, and generally considered the largest tax increase — as a percentage of the economy — in modern American history. (The ecoomy began booming in 1983, by the way.)

To hear the GOP tell it, President Obama’s debt-reduction plan would break the record and be the biggest tax hike in history. They’re mistaken.

The right’s first mistake is contextual. Reagan approved a massive tax increase during peacetime after inheriting a modest deficit (which he proceeded to grow dramatically), while Obama is recommending a tax increase in a time of war after inheriting an enormous deficit. It’s also probably worth noting that Reagan’s tax hike passed Congress, and Obama’s tax proposal won’t.

But as Brian Beutler reports, the bogus Republican claim also fails as a simple apples-to-apples comparison.

Assessing new revenue as percentage of GDP, it turns out Obama’s tax proposals would rank below a law signed by President Ronald Reagan on the list of significant tax increases of the last five decades. […]

When Republicans call Obama’s plan the biggest tax increase in history, they’re using a “current policy baseline.” In other words, they assume today’s tax rates are fixed, and complain that Obama’s plan would raise revenue thereupon by quite a bit — $1.57 trillion over 10 years. By this measure, as a percentage of GDP, Obama’s “tax hike” is smaller than Reagan’s 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act and the Revenue and Expenditure Control Act of 1968 but larger than Clinton’s 1993 tax increases and George H.W. Bush’s 1990 bill, as well as Reagan’s 1984 Deficit Reduction Act.

I know the GOP won’t want to hear this, but Ronaldus Magnus will almost certainly get to wear the crown of Biggest Tax Hiker for a very long while.

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* It took about a week, but Rick Perry yesterday backed off his comments on tuition breaks for the children of undocumented immigrants. In last week’s debate, he characterized his rivals’ position as heartless, which he said yesterday was “inappropriate,” and the result of being “overpassionate.”

* For a few weeks, every national poll has shown Perry leading Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential race, but not anymore. The new Fox News poll shows Romney leading Perry, 23% to 19%.

* Citing immigration policy, Herman Cain said he “could not” support Perry’s campaign, even if Perry won the Republican nomination. In the same interview, the former pizza company executive claimed that African-American voters “have been brainwashed.” What a strange man.

* By reaching 4% support in the Fox News poll, Jon Huntsman will apparently have just enough support to be eligible for the next debate.

* In Florida, the latest survey from Public Policy Polling shows Perry losing his lead, and he now trails Romney in the state, 30% to 24%.

* With time running out in West Virginia, the Republican Governors Association is attacking acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) for following federal health care law. (No one ever accused the RGA of being geniuses.)

* In Ohio, the new Quinnipiac poll shows Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) with double-digit leads over both of his principal GOP challengers.

* In Connecticut, the latest survey from Public Policy Polling shows Rep. Chris Murphy (D) leading both of the top Republican candidates, but Murphy fares better against Linda McMahon than Chris Shays.

* In Massachusetts, Sen. Scott Brown (R) went after Elizabeth Warren (D) yesterday for being too liberal and allegedly trying to “demonize employers.”

* And on a related note, Newton Mayor Setti Warren (D) ended his Senate campaign in Massachusetts yesterday, as the party rallies behind Elizabeth Warren. The two are not related.

As desperate as Republicans have been to turn Solyndra’s bankruptcy into a political scandal, there’s just no there there. The government invested in some clean-energy companies; the program enjoyed bipartisan support; some of the loan guarantees worked out; and some didn’t. Watergate it isn’t.

But the story has begun to morph a bit. GOP officials, unable to make credible accusations of corruption, have started to use Solyndra as an excuse to oppose the larger environmental agenda. As Jonathan Cohn explained overnight, “For now, then, the real questions Soyndra raises aren’t about ethics. They’re about economics — specifically, the wisdom of investment in green jobs and, more generally, industrial policy.”

In a nutshell, the case for programs like the one that funded Solyndra is that the market under-invests in worthy projects of considerable value to the public. Clean energy would seem to be a textbook case, given that the price of carbon-based fuels doesn’t capture the long-term damage they are causing the planet - what the economists call a “negative externality.” […]

Among other things, most of the loans in this program seem to have worked out. Investment inevitably involves some risk of failure. (Many of the program’s loudest critics know this, by the way; plenty of Republicans have supported such loans in the past.)

With this in mind, I was delighted to see the Obama administration ignore the political implications and approve more energy loan guarantees.

The Energy Department on Wednesday approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona, two days before the expiration date of a program that has become a rallying cry for Republican critics of the Obama administration’s green energy program.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant near Phoenix.

The loans were approved under the same program that paid for a $528 million loan to Solyndra Inc., a California solar panel maker that went bankrupt after receiving the money and laid off 1,100 workers.

It would have been easy for the Obama administration to back off, fearing partisan/media criticism, which is all the more reason to be glad the loans went forward anyway. The program is worthwhile, it advances national energy interests, and it’s good for the economy. Indeed, the Nevada project is expected to create 600 construction jobs and 45 permanent jobs, while the California project will create several hundred more.

When officials let misguided GOP talking points dictate policy, the results are always disheartening. I’m glad the administration had the good sense to ignore Republican rhetoric and do the right thing.

The nation took a sharp turn away from progressive governance in 2010, with far-right candidates excelling in congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races. Among the leading factors contributing to the results: enthusiasm among Republican voters easily overwhelming Democratic lethargy.

At this trajectory, it’s likely to happen again.

In thinking about the 2012 presidential election, 45% of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic say they are more enthusiastic about voting than usual, while nearly as many, 44%, are less enthusiastic. This is in sharp contrast to 2008 and, to a lesser extent, 2004, when the great majority of Democrats expressed heightened enthusiasm about voting.

Democrats’ muted response to voting in 2012 also contrasts with Republicans’ eagerness. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans, 58%, describe themselves as more enthusiastic about voting. That is nearly identical to Republicans’ average level of enthusiasm in 2004 (59%) and higher than it was at most points in 2008.

It’s tempting to think the combination of Democratic accomplishments and Republican radicalism would shake up the left. For that matter, the prospect of the United States turning sharply to the right — a right-wing Congress sending extremist legislation to a GOP White House — and putting the nation’s future and much of the progress of the 20th century in severe jeopardy, would seemingly boost Democratic voters’ eagerness.

Apparently, though, that’s not the case. Indeed, it’s not even close — even as GOP officials push the ideological envelope to levels unseen in modern American history, “Democrats’ net enthusiasm (+1) now trails Republicans’ net enthusiasm (+28) by 27 percentage points. By contrast, Democrats held the advantage on net enthusiasm throughout 2008 — on several occasions, by better than 40-point margins.”

At least, that’s the environment right now. A lot can happen in a year, and there’s ample time for attitudes and enthusiasm levels to change. (Gallup has never asked about election enthusiasm 14 months before voting begins, so there’s no real point of comparison to offer predictive value.)

Or maybe they won’t change at all, Democrats will sit on their hands next fall, and we’ll have the most far-right, reactionary federal government in American history. We get what we vote for — and if that’s what the electorate wants, that’s what we’ll get.

The political world should at least consider the possibility that Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is some kind of liberal performance artist, secretly pretending to be a right-wing congressman to make Republicans look like lunatics.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said Monday that President Obama was intentionally crippling the economy to advance a Marxist political philosophy.

West, a Tea Party freshman, was responding to a question from radio host Michael Berry, who asked if he thought the souring economy should be attributed to either inept or intentional actions on behalf of the president.

“It is intentional,” West said. “It is intentional because this is who the president is. The president is a Marxist because he believes in the separation of classes.”

West went on to say that he believed Obama’s efforts to raise taxes on the richest Americans represented an unprecedented class attack that was historically dangerous.

“We have never heard a president in the United States of America speak as he is…. He is a socialist because he believes in nationalizing production,” West said.

West at least deserves credit for recognizing phrases like “nationalizing production,” but he still sounds like an unhinged wackjob if he believes President Obama in any way resembles a “Marxist.” (Does West understand how much the far-left condemns the president and why?)

As for the notion that Obama’s willingness to ask the very wealthy to sacrifice a little is somehow unprecedented, West may want to consider the attacks levied at FDR.

West was also asked yesterday for his thoughts on Florida congresswoman and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The right-wing lawmaker said he would “need a bucket” to describe Wasserman Schultz.

You stay classy, Allen.

For quite a while, there was no real doubt about which billionaire the right loved to hate. The “billionaire boogeyman” was George Soros, the financier and philanthropist whose name became synonymous with nefarious misdeeds in the minds of paranoid conservatives.

But Soros has apparently been replaced. Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO, despite limited interest in politics and a record of relative non-partisanship, has become a new public enemy for the right. His efforts to promote tax fairness and support President Obama’s agenda has, to put it mildly, made Buffett severely unpopular in Republican circles.

E.J. Dionne Jr. knows why.

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

Wealthy people, by definition, have done better within this system than other people have. They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone, it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do. It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.

I agree with this assessment wholeheartedly, though I’d emphasize one related point: the right also hates it when the left gets cover for their economic ideas, and Warren Buffett is doing an excellent job providing some.

When Democrats, for example, press the need for tax fairness and public investments, Republicans and their allies much prefer to present the debate to the public in cliched terms: successful “job creators,” innovators, and captains of industry have no use for these wacky progressive priorities. The American mainstream, we’re told, should listen to trusted leaders from the private sector, not liberal eggheads and union bosses.

But Buffett, in addition to sparking the debate Dionne explained the right prefers not to have, is also committing another heresy: he’s telling the public that there’s nothing incompatible with being pro-business and wanting to strengthen the social contract by asking the wealthy to make additional sacrifices.

It’s no wonder the GOP has come to hate Buffett so intensely.

Last week, in one of the more amusing political claims of the year, Mitt Romney boasted, “I stand by my positions. I’m proud of them.” Given Romney’s record of abandoning every policy position he’s ever taken, it was hard not to marvel at his shamelessness.

But NBC’s First Read reports from New Hampshire, where Romney took a different line on one of his biggest vulnerabilities.

In the town hall of 250 people … Romney addressed perceptions and concerns that he is “a flip flopper.”

“In the private sector,” he said, “if you don’t change your view when the facts change, well you’ll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, ‘When the facts change I change too, Madam. What do you do?’”

That’s different from what he said a week ago, when he said he doesn’t change positions.

The American people “can tell when people are being phony and are pandering to an audience,” he said, “and you’ll see that in politics. You’re not going to see that in my campaign.”

Wait a second. Mitt Romney is flip-flopping on flip-flopping? How very meta of him.

That said, does Romney — at least this new version of Romney — have a point? Doesn’t it make sense that someone would change their views when the facts change?

In general, this is persuasive. There’s nothing inherently offensive about a political figure changing his or her mind once in a while. Policy makers come to one conclusion, they gain more information, and then they reach a different conclusion. That’s a good thing — it reflects a politician with an open mind and a healthy intellectual curiosity. Better to have a leader who changes his or her mind based on new information than one who stubbornly sticks to outmoded policy positions, regardless of facts or circumstances.

But this only works when there are sincere changes of heart. It’s something else entirely when pandering politicians reinvent themselves, sometimes more than once, as part of a cynical, calculated ploy. This isn’t indicative of an open mind; it’s evidence of a character flaw.

Romney would have voters believe that he’s simply adapted to changing facts. The circumstances make this impossible to believe — his radical transformations, purely by happenstance, just happen to coincide with political expediency to further Romney’s ambitions? The parallels between his metamorphoses and the shifting political winds are an accident?

Please. The list of Romney flip-flops is just too long, and covers too much ground, to be a remarkable coincidence. There’s nothing remotely sincere about his repeated reinventions. The guy has demonstrated a willingness to flip-flop like no other American politician in a generation.

Indeed, can anyone name a single issue of any significance in which Romney has been consistent? Anything at all? I don’t mean generic platitudes — he’s “pro-freedom” or wants “a strong military” — I mean actual public policies. The fact that this question is challenging for the former governor’s campaign speaks volumes.

I’m perfectly comfortable with a politician pondering doubts and questioning whether he or she is right about an issue. But when a politician changes his views so fundamentally that he’s adopted several different worldviews in a fairly brief time span, is it really unreasonable to question the man’s integrity?

Update: Aimai notes that Romney didn’t even get the “when the facts change” quote right.

The overnight reports in the health section were rather startling. Cantaloupes contaminated with listeria have led to 72 U.S. infections over 18 states, leading to at least 13 deaths. The news comes the same day as a ground-beef recall from Tyson Fresh Meats after an Ohio family fell ill from eating meat contaminated with E. coli.

It’s against this backdrop that congressional Republicans want to — you guessed it — weaken food safety regulations.

Even as these outbreaks occur, however, the Republican Party is continuing its efforts to gut food safety laws aimed at protecting Americans from these types of food-borne illnesses. In June, House Republicans attempted to kill the first significant upgrade in the nation’s food safety laws in more than 70 years, saying the private food industry sufficiently self-policed itself. Last week, presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an end to food safety laws that she claimed were stifling job creation….

As Pat Garofalo has noted, one in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die. And while the GOP cites the cost of new regulations, the annual cost of food illnesses is $152 billion, according to Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project, and the cost of not overhauling outdated food safety laws far exceeds the cost of implementing the new policies the GOP opposes.

That last point is of particular interest. From the GOP’s perspective, investing in food-safety measures is expensive, and when pursuing American austerity measures, seems like a good place to cut back.

But this is a deadly example of “penny wise, pound foolish.” When we cut spending on food safety, we save a little money on inspection, but end up paying a lot of money on health care costs when consumers get sick — making the Republican approach misguided as a matter of public health, public safety, and budgeting.

Also note the legislative context. In December, Americans who eat food received some very good news. A sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-safety system, approved by both chambers with large, bipartisan majorities, cleared Congress, and was quickly signed into law by President Obama.

The long-overdue law expands the FDA’s ability to recall tainted foods, increases inspections, demands accountability from food companies, and oversees farming — all in the hopes of cracking down on unsafe food before consumers get sick. This was the first time Congress has approved an overhaul of food-safety laws in more than 70 years.

And then Americans handed new power to congressional Republicans, who’ve made a concerted effort to undermine the law.

The listeria outbreak should be a wake-up call to Congress. It won’t, of course, but it should.

Today’s edition of quick hits:

* Europe: “EU and IMF inspectors will return to Greece on Thursday to decide whether Athens has done enough to secure a new batch of aid vital to avoid bankruptcy, while Germany suggested a new bailout may have to be renegotiated.”

* Terror threat: “A Massachusetts man was arrested Wednesday and accused of plotting to destroy the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol by attacking the buildings with large, remote-controlled aircraft armed with lethal amounts of explosives.”

* Syria: “Tanks pounded a Syrian town that has become a refuge for army deserters for a second day on Wednesday, residents said, in the first major battle with defecting soldiers since a six-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad began.”

* Making the health care appeal official: “[T]he Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Affordable Care Act’s individual responsibility provision. We strongly disagree with their decision and today, the Obama Administration will ask the Supreme Court to hear this case, so that we can put these challenges to rest and continue moving forward implementing the law to lower the cost of health care and make it more secure for all Americans.”

* Speaking of health care, premiums for employer-sponsored insurance, spiked last year. Jonathan Cohn takes a look at the larger context.

* No one should listen to them: “Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) are pressing the deficit-reduction supercommittee to consider their proposal to cut more than $500 billion in Medicare spending over 10 years.”

* On a related note, Dems seem to have learned a few things from recent months: “Democrats on the new deficit Super Committee are determined to be better negotiators than their predecessors in earlier deficit discussions leading up to the debt limit fight.”

* This might explain a few things: “Google may be the largest search engine in the world, but when it comes to driving traffic to Politico, it’s no match for Matt Drudge.”

* Predictors of college success: “It turns out parts of the ACT predict college success quite well, but other parts are essentially irrelevant.”

* Remember when Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) forced his Department of Labor to remove a mural depicting the history of the struggle for labor rights in the state? Six months later, LePage is making up bogus explanations for his actions.

* And in case Rush Limbaugh’s hostilities towards minorities weren’t quite offensive enough, the right-wing radio host is also complaining about “the chickification of the news,” in part because a woman reporter wrote an AP article on the president.

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.