You may have seen headlines yesterday about Republicans on the so-called super-committee offering Democrats a new debt-reduction offer. At a certain level, that seemed encouraging — the GOP co-chairman of the panel had said just a few days ago that there would be no other offers.

You may have also noticed that Democrats turned down the proposal. Is it because Dems are unwilling to compromise? Obviously not — Dems have been so eager to strike some kind of deal that they “offered a plan that moved significantly toward the Republicans and a considerable way beyond the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson and Gang of Six plans, which conservative senators like Tom Coburn and Mike Crapo had embraced.” The GOP refused.

The problem, of course, is with the substance of the new Republican plan. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Paul N. Van de Water summarized the latest GOP proposal, put on the table late yesterday.

Republicans on the supercommittee have made a new offer that would reduce deficits by $640 billion over the next decade, according to news reports…. The Republican offer consists of roughly $542 billion in spending cuts and $3 billion in revenues, meaning the ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases in the plan is 181 to 1. These measures would also produce nearly $100 billion in debt-service savings. Democrats promptly rejected the new Republican offer as unbalanced.

When one includes the $900 billion in discretionary spending cuts already enacted in the Budget Control Act, the plan’s total deficit reduction rises to about $1.445 trillion, and its ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases rises to 481 to 1.

Hmm. So, Democrats would give up $542 billion in spending cuts and Republicans would give up $3 billion in revenue — not a penny of which would come from additional taxes on anyone, but rather, the end of a tax break currently enjoyed by corporate jet owners.

This, in the minds of GOP committee members, is a “compromise.”

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), a House Democratic leader and a super-committee member, told The Hill after hearing the GOP offer, “Do we look stupid?”

Republicans should take that as a “no” to the offer.

This is, by the way, the final weekend before the debt panel is supposed to finish its work. The committee is so far apart that no meetings have even been planned, and no one thinks success is even a possibility.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) impeachment crusade against the state’s redistricting chair was struck down Thursday by the state Supreme Court. As the justices saw it, the governor needed an actual reason to remove the official, and didn’t come up with one.

And so yesterday, Brewer and her allies mulled starting the process all over again, this time trying to come up with some basic rationalization for their actions.

Senate Republicans are ready to try again to oust the chairwoman of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, saying they could stage a special session next week.

But Gov. Jan Brewer, who must initiate such a move, said late Friday that she’s still pondering what to do, although she indicated a need to move quickly.

“I’m keeping my options open,” she said in a conference call with reporters after she returned from a trip to Washington, D.C.

I probably brushed past this a little too quickly yesterday, but the governor’s legal team told the Arizona Supreme Court that Brewer had the authority to remove the independent commission’s chair from office, simply because the governor felt like it.

When the court’s acting chief justice pressed this point, and asked if Brewer could fire an independent commission’s chair because the chair wore a purple dress or had a certain haircut, the governor’s lawyer said yes, she could.

This is not a joke.

With this argument rejected by the state Supreme Court, Brewer’s new task is to consider a new impeachment drive, this time giving a coherent reason.

Just to quickly review for those just joining us, when it comes to post-Census redistricting, Arizona has an Independent Redistricting Commission, made up of two Democrats, two Republicans, and one registered Independent. The system was adopted by Arizona voters more than a decade ago, and was intended to take partisan agendas out of the redistricting process.

The tripartisan panel recently unveiled a draft proposal that would, as a practical matter, create four safe Republican seats, two safe Democratic seats, and create three competitive districts, all the while improving the voting influence of the state’s growing Latino population.

This did not sit well with Republicans, who were so outraged that Brewer and the GOP-dominated state Senate went after the commission’s chair. (Republicans also wanted to impeach the commission’s Democrats, but that petered out.)

And now, after being smacked down by the Arizona Supreme Court, they want to do it again.

In a year filled with examples of far-right overreach, this is egregious, even by Republican standards.

Shortly before Mitt Romney departed the governor’s office, 11 of his top aides purchased 17 state-issued hard drives, purging the Romney administration’s email records in advance of his presidential campaign. In retrospect, the move seems rather odd, especially for a Republican candidate who likes to talk about transparency.

Yesterday we learned that this has no precedent among modern Massachusetts governors, including Romney’s recent Republican predecessors.

Soon after, a reporter pressed the Republican presidential frontrunner during a campaign stop in New Hampshire to explain the missing hard drives.

As you can see from the clip, Romney doesn’t seem especially eager to talk about this, and ignored repeated questions. Later, when more reporters started asking about this, Romney “was quickly swept into his waiting SUV.”

Romney’s only defense? His aides “all followed the law exactly as it’s written.”

That may very well be true. I have no expertise at all with Massachusetts’ public records law, but the Boston Globe report the other day suggested Romney’s team may not have violated the letter of the law.

But that’s not what Romney was asked yesterday. It’s actually pretty straightforward, and even Romney should be able to understand the question: why did his team purchase 17 state-issued hard drives on their way out the door, blocking public access to their official emails?

Romney is stressing the fact that this was probably legal. But the question isn’t about the law; it’s about the rationale. Why did his team buy the hard drives — not the computers, not the monitors, not the keyboards, just the hard drives — in the first place? What was on these drives that Romney didn’t want the public to see?

First up from the God Machine this week is an update on an important story about criminal charges pending against Roman Catholic Church leaders in Missouri.

About a month ago, Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City was indicted for failing to report a suspected child abuser who worked for him. The Roman Catholic Church’s global scandal involving the sexual abuse of children has been ongoing for 25 years, but Finn was the first to face charges for a priest he’d supervised.

Three years ago, after the Diocese of Kansas City was caught up in a series of other sexual-abuse scandals, Finn promised to alert the authorities to church officials suspected of harming children. The allegations suggest Finn ignored that promise, looked the other way when the Rev. Shawn Ratigan targeted young girls, and even allowed him to attended children’s parties and preside at a girl’s First Communion.

This week, the charges against Finn were dropped after he struck a deal with prosecutors. (thanks to R.P. for the tip)

In a deal to avoid a second round of criminal charges, a Roman Catholic bishop in Kansas City has agreed to meet monthly with a county prosecutor to detail every suspicious episode involving abuse of a child in his diocese for the next five years. […]

The agreement announced on Tuesday between Bishop Finn and the prosecuting attorney of neighboring Clay County, Daniel White, leaves the bishop open to prosecution for misdemeanor charges for five years, if he does not continue to meet with the prosecutor and report all episodes.

In effect, Kansas City’s bishop will have to report to a parole officer of sorts. Finn will have to report, literally every month, on the suspect activities of local priests who may be targeting children.

Advocates for the church’s victims believe the deal is too lenient, and hoped a criminal trial would help get the truth out and deter future cover-ups.

Also from the God Machine this week:

* The Crystal Cathedral in Southern California will be sold by the Schuller family to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange for $57.5 million.

* Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum doesn’t believe President Obama is a secret Muslim, but he won’t correct voters who do.

* On a related note, radical TV preacher Pat Robertson argues this week that President Obama has a Muslim “inclination.”

* And an Iowa religious right group called The FAMiLY Leader will co-host a forum today for Republican presidential candidates at a fundamentalist Christian congregation in Des Moines. All of the candidates will attend — except Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, both of whom are Mormons.

The level of force local law enforcement agencies are using to target Occupy protestors is nothing short of extraordinary.

When the NYPD raided Zuccotti Park this week, officers used pepper spray rather indiscriminately, affecting, among others, a pregnant woman and an 84-year-old woman who were in the crowd. But while the descriptions of the raid are chilling, the video of this police intervention at UC Davis yesterday is even more astonishing.

I don’t know the events that led up to this confrontation; I would assume the police asked these protestors to leave and they refused. But when law enforcement officials use a weapon, they need to have a good reason for doing so. In this case, the protestors were … just sitting there.

And the response to these protestors was to spray them, in the face, with large quantities of pepper spray. As ABL put it, the officer “approached a group of students sitting in a line peacefully on the ground, walked up and down the line and pepper-sprayed them directly in the face — as one would spray pesticide on weeds.”

What’s more, note that the officer was well aware of the cameras recording his actions. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg waited until it was dark and did his best to keep the media away, so there’s far less footage of what transpired, but in this case, the UC Davis officer knew the world would be able to see his response, and felt confident enough in his decision to do it anyway.

If someone is able to explain why this isn’t police brutality, I’d love to hear it.

In case this isn’t obvious, pepper spray is some awfully nasty stuff. It’s not just a minor nuisance for those who come in contact with it; this stuff hurts and makes it difficult to breathe.

I can fully appreciate why police officers may need to use non-lethal weapons in specific circumstances. If, for example, there’d been a riot at UC Davis, and the police was trying to get a violent situation under control, pepper spray may be fully justified.

But these protestors were just sitting there. The violence was being done by the police themselves. If officers felt it necessary to remove these protestors, the police are trained in plenty of techniques to drag people away without the use of weapons.

There’s simply no defense for what happened.

Herman Cain looked pretty ridiculous on Monday when he was asked a simple question: do you agree with President Obama on Libya? Staring at the ceiling, the Republican struggled to remember why Libya was important; started to deliver one talking point before saying, “No, that’s a different one”; blamed the painful delay in responding on “all this stuff twirling around in my head”; and ultimately said he disagreed with the president for reasons he couldn’t explain.

It was brutal, but one assumed that going forward, at least Cain would now know what to say when asked about Libya.

But those assumptions would be wrong.

Mr. Cain’s own prolonged attempted explanation of the moment, however, seems to be making matters worse. At a news conference on Friday in Orlando, Fla., his remarks on Libya — including a suggestion that the Taliban, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is at least partly running the government — raised new questions about his foreign policy qualifications.

Mr. Cain criticized the writer, saying “His question was, ‘Do you agree or disagree with President Obama on Libya?’ What part? Do I agree with the part that we intervened with rockets and missiles? Do I agree with siding with the opposition? Do I agree with saying that Qaddafi should go? Do I agree that they now have a country where you’ve got Taliban and Al Qaeda that are going to be part of the government?”

Cain had all week to learn the basics about Libya and yet, when pressed, he thinks the Taliban and al Qaeda are going to be part of the new Libyan government.

For the record, the Taliban is nowhere near Libya. The Taliban, which has nothing in common with Libyans, is in Afghanistan and Pakistan — thousands of miles away.

This is Cain’s position after he’s been prepped?

At some point, Cain and his backers really should try to explain — to themselves, if no one else — why this guy even wants to be president. He doesn’t even seem interested in learning anything about current events or the basics of public policy. So why bother?

Today’s edition of quick hits:

* If only there was a good reason to trust the ECB: “The financial stability of Europe has come down to one institution, the European Central Bank, which is now under heavy new pressure to rescue the euro — or possibly see it collapse.”

* An impatient Egypt: “Tens of thousands of Islamists jammed Tahrir Square on Friday in the most significant challenge yet to the authority of Egypt’s military council that seized power nine months ago with the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.”

* Myanmar in transition: “From dictatorship to quasi democracy in less than a year, the pace of change in Myanmar has stunned even the most cynical observers of the country.”

* A day after authorities charged Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez with attempting to assassinate President Obama, Fox News, in an apparent attempt at self-parody, labeled the madman the “Occupy Shooter.”

* Republicans care about states’ rights, except when they reject and ignore states’ rights: “The House on Wednesday evening approved a controversial bill that would require all states to honor the concealed weapons permits of other states, on the strength of Republican support for the idea that different state standards should not interfere with American’s Second Amendment rights.”

* Another lobbying problem for Newt to explain: “A think tank founded by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich collected at least $37 million over the past eight years from major health-care companies and industry groups, offering special access to the former House speaker and other perks, according to records and interviews.”

* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on what to expect in the near future: “‘Unprecedented extreme weather and climate events’ look likely in coming decades as a result of a changing climate, says the draft report.”

* HSR: “The House and Senate voted today to eliminate most of the $8 billion that President Obama sought next year for his vision of nationwide high-speed rail. The Associated Press points out, however, that ‘billions of dollars still in the pipeline will ensure work will continue on some projects. And it’s still possible money from another transportation grant program can be steered to high-speed trains.’”

* That “60 Minutes” report was widely noticed: “Momentum for insider-trading legislation continues to grow in Congress as a top Republican lawmaker announced Thursday that he will schedule the first-ever House hearing on legislation to prevent lawmakers from trading on nonpublic information.”

* Cool: “New research that suggests Jupiter’s moon Europa has a body of water the size of the Great Lakes just two miles below its icy surface has brought scientists one step closer to determining whether or not the freezing satellite is suitable for the development of extraterrestrial life.”

* Penn State discovers that raising money in the midst of dealing with a scandal is problematic.

* If Newt Gingrich thought attacking Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was a good idea, he probably thinks differently now. Frank tore Gingrich apart on “Hardball” yesterday.

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.

With demonstrations all over the country, it’s obvious that Occupy Wall Street has inspired activism that reaches far beyond Lower Manhattan. It’s not too soon to note, however, that the movement has more influence in some parts of the country than others.

Colin Woodard argues in his new book, American Nations, that the continent can effectively be divided into 11 distinct regional cultures or nations, and for the Tea Party, that poses a real problem. But for “Occupiers,” Woodard argues this week, there are real opportunities when geography is considered.

The Guardian newspaper has assembled a database of Occupy protests worldwide, with estimates of maximum crowd sizes drawn from media accounts. It documents hundreds of demonstrations in communities across North America, from Fairbanks to Miami and everywhere in between. Like the Tea Party, Occupy is everywhere. But filter the database for communities where demonstrations achieved a maximum reported size of at least 1000 people and the list narrows to just 32 towns and cities. These “big occupation” sites are clustered in four of my American nations - and rare or non-existent in others.

The largest concentration of major protests has been on the Left Coast…. The region has eight cities that have seen major protests, from San Francisco and Oakland to Vancouver, the home of AdBusters, the magazine that issued the call that first got OWS rolling. The Left Coast’s two closest allies — the Dutch-settled Big Apple and the sprawling Greater New England region I call Yankeedom — account for six more. It is conspicuous that the two regions that have offered the least political support to the Tea Party - the Left Coast and New Netherland — are the intellectual and spiritual birthplaces of the Occupy movement.

By contrast, the region where the Tea Party has experienced the greatest support — the Deep South —has seen just one large Occupy protest, in the uncharacteristic city of Orlando.

Given the significance the West is likely to play in 2012 elections, this is no small observation.

Woodard’s piece is pretty interesting; it’s worth a look.

The House easily defeated a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution this afternoon, despite overwhelming support from Republican lawmakers. All told, 98.3% of the House GOP caucus today voted to approve the measure.

But 98.3% isn’t 100%. Four Republicans broke ranks — more than in the 1995 vote — and the one that’s likely to get the most attention is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who, as you may have noticed, spends quite a bit of time talking about the debt crisis.

So, what happened? Ryan has not yet issued a statement on his vote, but I have a hunch I know why he opposed the amendment: it would have made his own budget plan unconstitutional.

Republicans generally don’t like to talk about this, but the Ryan budget plan, if approved, would add $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, caused almost entirely by Ryan’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy. A constitutional requirement mandating balanced budget would make the Ryan plan literally, legally unacceptable.

And that leads to a very different question. In April, 235 Republicans voted for the Ryan budget plan (which, among other things, eliminated Medicare). Today, 236 Republicans voted for the Balanced Budget Amendment. After going through the roll calls, there are 231 GOP House members who voted for the right-wing budget and voted for the constitutional amendment that would have been the right-wing budget impermissible.

I consider Paul Ryan to be a strange and radical policymaker, but on this, at least he’s consistent. If our discourse made more sense, those 231 House Republican lawmakers would be asked to explain themselves.

Postscript: By the way, remember Reagan’s tax cuts and defense build-up in the early 1980s? The agenda that Republicans believed won the Cold War and saved civilization as we know it? It, too, would have been impermissible under a Balanced Budget Amendment. It’s another question for those GOP lawmakers who voted for the BBA today: why would you want to make the Reagan agenda impossible?

Update: I may have given Ryan too much credit for consistency. He told reporters after the vote that the amendment wasn’t quite right-wing enough for him, since it might lead future Congresses to raise taxes to balance the budget — a scenario Ryan considers unacceptable under any circumstances. The Budget Committee chairman can be surprisingly nutty at times.

It’s awfully hard to feel optimistic about the economy right now. The Eurozone crisis is intensifying and horrifying. In Washington, Republicans are killing jobs bills and seem eager to hold back the economy on purpose. Bank of America this morning increased its odds of a U.S. recession from 35% to 40%, while economists at the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco put the odds even higher.

And yet, the hints of progress are there. Neil Irwin reported today that “a variety of economic indicators are pointing in a more positive direction.”

On Thursday, the Commerce Department said the number of permits to build new housing units rose 10.9 percent in October, compared with the 2.4 percent gain analysts had expected, suggesting that home-building may be finally picking up. And the Labor Department said the number of people filing new claims for unemployment-insurance benefits fell last week to its lowest level since April, continuing a two-month downward trend.

Earlier in the week, new reports showed strong results on two key measures of economic activity in October: A 0.5 percent gain in retail sales and a 0.7 percent gain in industrial production. Also welcome news: Inflation is becoming more subdued, with consumer prices falling 0.1 percent in October. That leaves the Federal Reserve more flexibility to take action if the economy worsens.

Putting all the recent evidence together, forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers projects that the economy will have grown at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the final three months of 2011, compared with a 1.4 percent average pace of growth through the first nine months of the year.

These aren’t the only positive signs The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s employment index is the highest it’s been since April, while retail sales, industrial production, auto sales, and apartment construction are all looking up, defying and/or exceeding expectations.

Annie Lowrey recently noted “it certainly doesn’t feel as if things are getting better,” but they are.

Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, said in a report, “We have certainly seen an unambiguous string of upbeat news on the U.S. economy and that is certainly comforting.”

So, is it time to start feeling a little better? No, probably not. For one thing, Europe still threatens to cause a global recession, and there’s nothing we can do about it. For another, congressional Republicans appear determined to pursue policies — including an increase in the payroll tax — that will serve as a drag on the domestic economy in 2012.

What’s more, the hints of progress are really only relative to where we’ve been, and we would need to see significantly stronger growth to get us back to where we were before the recession began in late 2007.

Still, is it better to see some encouraging economic news than discouraging? You bet it is.

One of the top priorities of the House Republican leadership for this Congress was passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As of this afternoon, we can add another item to the list of GOP failures.

The House has rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have forced Congress to balance its budget every year as a way to reverse years of deficit spending.

A majority of House members supported the balanced budget measure, but supporters fell short of achieving the two-thirds majority needed to amend the Constitution.

Earlier this year, it was largely assumed the House would approve of the amendment and that the real fight would be in the Senate. As it turned out, however, proposal had no chance — it needed 290 votes in the lower chamber, and came up with 261.

To be sure, the fact that 261 House members said it was a good idea to add this ridiculous amendment to the Constitution isn’t exactly good news, but the fact that the measure died this afternoon is a welcome display of sanity from a chamber where it’s rarely found.

I’d note for context, by the way, that supporters are moving in the wrong direction. The last time the House voted on the BBA, in 1995, it passed with 300 votes. Today, despite a larger Republican majority, a larger deficit, and a far more right-wing chamber overall, proponents didn’t even come close to the previous total.

By my count, only four House Republicans voted against it. The majority needed roughly 50 Democrats to break ranks, but ended up with about half the necessary total. [Update: here’s the roll call.]

The nation dodged a bullet today. This amendment would have devastated the economy and made responses to future crises effectively impossible. Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and Bush administrations, explained this week that this is a “dreadful” idea and the Republican proposal “is, frankly, nuts.”

And now, thankfully, it’s dead for another Congress.

As the House debates its awful Balanced Budget Amendment, we’ve seen the return of one of the most vacuous of all Republican arguments: the federal government’s finances should mirror those of typical American families.

As Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) explained Tuesday night, “All of our homes, we all live by budgets. The American people have had to redo their budgets over and over and over again. Why? Because of the economy that we’re in today, because of the cost. And yet the federal government does not do this.” Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), standing in front of a poster of an elderly woman looking at her bills, said, “My family that’s back home, my brothers and sister and nieces and nephews that are probably balancing their own checkbooks sometime this week, they get it.”

Most Americans do get it, and that’s why the message Ellmers, Schmidt, and other advocates of the balanced budget amendment advance is widely viewed as a common-sense approach to the very urgent problem of the spiraling national debt. Hardworking Americans balance their checkbooks, so why shouldn’t Washington?

This really isn’t that complicated. Even Ellmers, Schmidt, and their cohorts should be able to keep up.

The more complex part of the argument is understanding the differences between macro- vs. micro-economics. For that matter, it might be tough for some congressional Republicans to appreciate the need for the public sector to, in the event of a crisis, pick up the slack when consumers and businesses are forced to pull back.

But let’s put that aside and consider this at face value — Republicans believe families balance their budgets so the federal government should do the same. The problem, of course, is that families and businesses borrow money and run deficits all the time. This is a positive, not a negative, development — and if they’re doing it, there’s no reason Washington can’t do the same thing for the same reasons.

When a family goes to buy a home, for example, its members don’t simply write a check; they take out a mortgage. Almost no one can afford to simply and literally buy a home, so we take out very large loans, and make payments, with interest.

The same is true when a family wants a car, tackles college tuition, or thinks about starting a small business. American families take on debts, some of them huge relative to their incomes, all the time. There’s nothing wrong with any of this — these are just routine examples of people investing in themselves, as they should.

Businesses to do this, too, borrowing money to make capital improvements, expand locations, buy smaller companies, etc. Companies that create jobs often run deficits, with Wall Street’s blessing. It’s seen as a responsible, forward-thinking thing to do.

The government’s debts aren’t identical — there is no mortgage or car payment, exactly — but officials take on debts to invest in things they consider worthwhile, too. A family that relies on student loans to pay for college should be able to relate to a government that relies on loans to pay for public services. The family thinks it’ll be worth living in the red for a while, so long as it can make the payments and afford the interest, because they’ll be better off in the long run — and the government believes the exact same thing.

And they’re both correct.

The question for BBA proponents is pretty straightforward: If Mr. and Ms. America take on debts they can afford to improve their position in life, why is it outrageous for their government to do the same thing?

The answer from Republicans, I suspect, is that our current debt is simply too large and we can no longer afford it. (They weren’t thinking this way when they inherited a national debt that was $5 trillion and shrinking, and turned it into a debt that was $10 trillion and growing, but let’s put that aside.) But we can afford it; that’s the point. Like a family making its monthly payments, the government is doing the same. Indeed, we’re doing so well on this front that others keep loaning us money at low interest rates, confident that we’re good for it.

The right rejects all of this, and insists that the Constitution be changed so that Washington can’t do what families and businesses do all the time.

Mitt Romney and his campaign team have experimented with different responses to questions about his incessant flip-flopping. At different times, they’ve argued that the reversals don’t really exist, and if they were real, they wouldn’t much matter anyway.

Today, we see a new one: Team Romney is rolling out the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I defense.

Romney’s team lists several examples of Obama’s contradictions. The president promised to fix the economy, and he didn’t. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay, and he didn’t. He promised a White House based on transparency, devoid of the influence of special interests. The unfolding Solyndra scandal, to them, proves that’s not the case.

I know I’m supposed to think Romney and his advisers are the serious ones, worthy of some modicum of respect, but this silliness is really no better than the kind of nonsense we’d get from Michele Bachmann.

For one thing, the economy is improving, but if it weren’t, it’d be a policy failure, not a flip-flop.

For another, President Obama still wants to close Gitmo, and would were it not for Congress. The president’s position hasn’t changed at all, and for Romney to think of this as a “contradiction” suggests the Republican campaign has forgotten what the word means. Want to call it an unfulfilled campaign promise? No problem. But a flip-flop? No.

Finally, there is no Solyndra “scandal,” and this White House at least as transparent, if not more so, than any American history.

But the overarching problem is that Romney thinks he can draw some parallel between his own flip-flops and Obama’s. That’s not only wrong, it’s a ridiculous strategy — if the race comes down to which candidate is more consistent in his positions, the president should win re-election with 538 electoral votes.

Ben Smith makes an effort to point out issues on which the president has changed his mind, and to be sure, there are some legitimate examples. In fact, Smith missed a big one: Obama used to be against the public option individual mandate, before switching.

But in each instance, we see Obama making minor moves between the left and the center-left. The president never completely reinvented his entire political worldview; his shifts were subtle and nuanced.

Is there anyone — outside of Romney’s payroll and/or immediate family — who thinks Obama is in Romney’s league? Of course not. The Republican frontrunner has, after all, taken both sides of the question on whether it’s all right to take both sides of questions. His reputation as a shameless, craven politician who’s flip-flopped like no other American politician in a generation is well deserved.

Conservative columnist George Will recently slammed Romney as “a recidivist reviser of his principles,” who seems to “lack the courage of his absence of convictions.” As the campaign progresses, we keep getting more examples of this. If Romney’s team seriously wants to compare this record to the president’s, I suspect Obama for America would be delighted.

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:

* As hard as this may be to believe, a new poll published by New Hampshire Journal shows Mitt Romney’s lead in the first Republican primary shrinking considerably. He now leads Newt Gingrich by just two points, 29% to 27%. Ron Paul is third with 16%, followed by Herman Cain at 10%.

* The latest report released by the Pew Research Center shows Romney narrowly leading Cain in the race for the Republican nomination, 23% to 22%. Gingrich is third with 16%, and no other candidate is in double digits.

* The same Pew Research Center survey also found President Obama’s approval rating inching up to 46% — its highest point since June — and he leads all of his Republican challengers in hypothetical match-ups, though his margin over Romney is only two points.

* For reasons that defy comprehension, the Cain campaign is blasting Manchester’s Union Leader, New Hampshire’s largest and most politically influential newspaper, because it wanted to film an interview with him. The paper’s editors and publishers aren’t impressed.

* Cain will now receive Secret Service protection, the first Republican candidate of the 2012 cycle to get this level of security.

* Some of the staffers who quit the Gingrich campaign over the summer have decided to return now that he’s doing well again.

* As Rick Perry’s campaign struggles badly, his fundraising is starting to dry up. That’s never a good sign.

* Chris Cillizza argues that Ron Paul has a credible chance to win the Iowa caucuses.

* Michele Bachmann told Fox News this week, “I haven’t had a gaffe or something that I’ve done that has caused me to fall in the polls.” She did not appear to be kidding.