Going into this week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court, I think it’s fair to say that hardly anyone thought the challenge to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would succeed. After all, Congress had mandated expansion of Medicaid coverage many times in the past, and after all, states are not required to participate in the program at all. Thus, it seemed logical to conclude, the Court wouldn’t strike down the Medicaid expansion unless it were willing to question the constitutionality of Medicaid itself, and it sure wouldn’t do that, right?

That’s not quite so clear after today’s concluding oral arguments.

Here’s how Peter Landers of the Wall Street Journal’s live blog of the arguments put it:

In an interesting turn Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices repeatedly questioned not just the expansion of Medicaid but the basis for the entire program.

That raised the possibility, however remote, of a ruling that would throw out a 47-year-old pillar of the nation’s health-care system along with the two-year-old Obama health law.

The program gives the federal government the power to direct certain spending by states so long as states remain in Medicaid. Chief Justice John Roberts said that “seems to be a significant intrusion on the sovereign interests of the state.” The federal government argues that if states don’t like the spending, they can simply drop out of Medicaid. And at Wednesday’s arguments, the government said federal officials would generally work with states to ensure that any expansion of the program is workable for both sides.

But the justices said they were troubled by the federal government’s ability, at least in theory, to threaten states with the withdrawal of Medicaid money if the states didn’t follow Washington’s orders. “Part of the discretion is to cut off all of the funds,” said Justice Antonin Scalia.

Even more ominously, swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the chorus of “concern” about Medicaid’s coercive nature, and even about the “loss of accountability” that would occur when the federal goverment excessively controlled the rules governing Medicaid while the states actually administer it (the basic structure, as it happens, of Medicaid and a host of other federal-state programs).

SCOTUSBlog’s Lyle Denniston was also struck by the unexpected direction of the discussion:

Unless a closing oration by a top government lawyer stirs some real sympathy for the poor, the new health care law’s broad expansion of the Medicaid program that serves the needy may be sacrificed to a historic expression of judicial sympathy for states’ rights. It probably would require the Court to be really bold, to strike down a program passed by Congress under its spending power, and to do so for the first time in 76 years, but the temptation was very much in evidence in the final round of the Court’s hearings this week on the Affordable Care Act. It probably would be done by a 5-4 vote.

Maybe these suspicions are unfounded, but at this point, with the Court teetering on the edge of a decision that would represent a pretty massive repudiation of precedent, I wouldn’t put much anything past them. And Medicaid, folks, is a much bigger deal than ObamaCare.

There’s a big piece at the New York Times today from Richard Oppel inquiring into the occlusion of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. Having failed to achieve the long-awaited breakthrough victory in any state, and best by allegations of complicity with Mitt Romney and/or subjection of The Revolution to the ambitions of Paul the Younger, the much ballyhooed candidacy has largely sunk from public view (unless you spend a lot of time on Twitter or on comment threads, where the fire still burns brightly).

Oppel covers a lot of the essential ground, and concentrates especially on several examples of places on the campaign trail where more people were showing up for Paul’s rallies than were actually voting for him. That is not the kind of anomaly that can be explained by the traditional Paulist complaints of inadequate media coverage or GOP elite hostility.

Paul himself argues convincingly that his campaign was attracting a lot of people—particularly young people—who just weren’t comfortable participating in Republican primaries or caucuses. Were it not for the abundant evidence that the candidate is increasingly comfortable with putative GOP nominee Romney, this observation might be viewed as a rationale for a third-party candidacy in the autumn, perhaps via a Paulist takeover of Americans Elect.

It may well be that Paul is simply satisfied with the progress he made in achieving something close to respectability in GOP circles this cycle. He didn’t have to fight his way into televised debates, where his supporters certainly seemed well represented in live audiences. He was frequently allowed to air his cranky monetary policy views, some of which his rivals even began emulating. And most remarkably, he got relatively little heat for his radically non-interventionist foreign policy views, which undoubtedly put a low ceiling on his ability to attract Republican voters but didn’t get him hooted off the rostrum. You can only imagine how conservatives would react if Barack Obama spoke sympathetically of Iran’s reasons for wanting nuclear weapons, dating back to CIA intervention in the country in the 1950s.

So I guess Dr. Paul figures he’s accomplished everything he could reasonably expect in his long battle to take the United States to a never-never land of libertarian virtue, considering that the country has seen nothing remotely like it since the administration of Grover Cleveland.

And then there’s the rising Son, a bona fide member of the United States Senate, to pick up the torch. Perhaps his career will represent the Revolution’s Thermidor: its final reconciliation with conventional GOP politics.

Well before we know what the Supreme Court is actually going to do with respect to ObamaCare, my friend Jonathan Bernstein has bravely essayed the opinion at TNR that the decision will have “little or no effect” on the 2012 presidential election.

To a considerable extent, this judgment probably flows from Jonathan’s position on the fundamentals-versus-campaigns spectrum, according to which he is perpetually skeptical that this or that issue or event will matter much in a contest where votes largely follow partisan patterns and reactions to big external considerations like economic trends. But he makes some sound empirical points about the particular lack of salience of court decisions, and even of ObamaCare, as factors that separate sheep from goats. This point is particularly strong:

If ACA was really a make-or-break priority, there’s no way that Mitt Romney would have emerged as the GOP pick. That’s not to say that people don’t care about it; it’s just that they care about it as a function of, say, disliking Barack Obama. For a large number of opponents, if it wasn’t health care, it would be something else.

I’d observe that much of the drama in the Republican nominating contest was indeed directly or indirectly related to Romney’s difficulties in articulating a case against ObamaCare, and that his ultimate triumph owes more to the inability of the GOP to find a minimally credible alternative once Tim Pawlenty went down than to any calculated judgment of the importance of this or that issue in the general election.

But still, Jonathan’s right, opposition to ObamaCare is just one of various deep conservative grievances against the incumbent, and just one of various preoccupations of swing voters, most of whom have not been directly affected by ACA just yet.

I’d argue, however, that on the margins at least, a decision invalidating the individual mandate would change the dynamics of the general election in ways that might prove uncomfortable to the GOP. Currently the Republicans “Repeal!” position is attractive, or at least not repellent, to a wide range of people with a wide range of concerns about ObamaCare, including those who would strongly support for more aggressive federal efforts to expand health care coverage or ban discrimination by private health insurers. If the individual mandate goes down, and with it prospective prohibitions on prexisting condition exclusions, the health care debate during the general election campaign will shift from scrutiny of ObamaCare from what, if anything, Republicans are prepared to offer. In effect, the much-dreaded and highly divisive intra-GOP debate on the “Replace” part of its “Repeal-and-Replace” agenda will be accelerated into the present tense. And at the same time, Republicans will be denied the base-energizing power of the passionate desire to repeal ObamaCare, which has become the default-drive unifying force among conservatives of every hue.

Conversely, the invalidation of a landmark Obama administration accomplishment that virtually all progressives regard as historic if not entirely satisfactory will help Democrats energize their own party base. And you cannot imagine anything more likely to make the last-resort argument about the importance of Supreme Court appointments more tangible and immediate.

Ultimately, judgments of the potential impact of this or that factor in a presidential contest depend heavily on how close a race it becomes. After 2000, Democrats could and did cite a vast array of “pivotal” developments, from Al Gore’s inconstant message to Ralph Nader’s presence on the ballot to Joe Lieberman’s concession on the counting of military ballots in Florida to—most obviously—the Supreme Court’s intervention. The close margin in 2004 helped convince many Democrats that a single development—the “Swift Boat” ads of August—did in Kerry. If 2012 turns out to be a barnburner, then just about anyone can make a case that subtle changes in the issue landscape, candidate gaffes, debates, ads, GOTV efforts—all those things that political science “fundamentalists” tend to deride—were crucial. I see no reason to believe a landmark Supreme Court decision on Barack Obama’s central domestic policy initiative might not qualify as well.

If the individual health insurance purchasing mandate is declared unconstitutional, many conservatives will undoubtedly hail the decision as a heroic act that takes the nation back from the brink of a yawning abyss of federal tyranny, a nation where proud Americans are forced to eat broccoli. But depending on how such a hypothetical decision is tailored, there’s another “floodgates” proposition that needs to be discussed: the possibility that unraveling ObamaCare could unravel decades of Supreme Court Commerce Clause decisions that undergird much of the contemporary landscape of domestic policy and civil rights protections.

This is the issue Michael Kinsley raises in a piece at Ten Miles Square. And it’s an issue no one should just brush away as scare-mongering.

Ever since Wickard v. Filburn (1942), with only a couple of minor exceptions, the courts have upheld the use of federal power under the Commerce Clause, which gives the federal government the authority to “regulate commerce.” Even the 1964 Civil Rights Act is considered constitutional as a regulation of commerce.

Now, maybe the court has been wrong all this time. Maybe the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause is much narrower. Maybe that authority doesn’t extend to requiring individual citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine. But if so, it is not only the future of Obamacare that will suddenly be shaky. Every piece of legislation for about the last 70 years that rested on the Commerce Clause will suddenly be up for grabs. This includes the Civil Rights Act. It includes laws protecting the environment and consumers.

Basically anything the government does that has ever been justified by the Commerce Clause will be open to challenge. For the sake of their own sanity and summer recesses, the justices ought to proceed cautiously.

I’ll offer a personal validation of Kinsley’s concerns. When I took Constitutional Law a few decades ago, we were taught (by the conservative Dean of a relatively conservative law school, the University of Georgia) that Commerce Clause jurisprudence had removed virtually any practical constitutional limitation on the power of the federal government to regulate economic and social activity (barring some violation of individual rights guaranteed elsewhere in the Constitution), on grounds that a modern economy made almost any activity you could imagine a part of interestate commerce. The key Court decision upholding the highly controversial public accomodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 involved a small Birmingham barbecue joint. It was, the Court ruled, part of interstate commerce because it was located near a major highway.

Now as Kinsley notes, you can certainly argue if you wish that the Ollie’s Barbecue case was wrongly decided and sent America down the kind of slippery slope opponents of ObamaCare warn against. That was certainly the view of Ollie himself, who said of the December 1964 decision: “It seems to me that the ownership and use of private property is essential to the American way of life.” A spokesman for another restaurant affected by the decision said it opened “a frightful door to the unlimited power of a centralized government.”

But let’s don’t pretend that invalidating the individual mandate would represent some sort of defensive reaction against a frightfully unprecedented constitutional doctrine offered to promote a frightfully unprecedented expansion of federal power. It would instead represent a judicial counter-revolution of potentially great scope—a counter-revolution at least as shocking as the sudden transformation of conservatives from being the inventors and strong supporters of an individual health insurance purchasing mandate to opponents shrieking about tyranny.

Hard to believe it’s already the middle of the week. Definitely a day for fast food. Here’s some items from the Value Menu:

* Initial SCOTUSBlog report on severability oral arguments indicates probable majority support for killing guaranteed-issue and community rating provisions if mandate falls, but not the rest of the ACA. That’s administration’s desired outcome on this particular topic.

* Rep. Bobby Rush kicked off House floor for wearing hoodie, violating decorum rules. Yeah, the House is a pretty decorous place these days.

* Gingrich slashes campaign staff yet again, or as he would put it, gets lean and mean for Convention fight.

* Santorum looking vulnerable in next month’s primary in his home state.

* Colbert hilarious on alleged War on Guns, rising gun sales: “The fear of not being able to buy guns has led to buying so many guns that now we can’t buy any guns, just like we feared.”

And in non-political news:

* Lady Gaga turns 26 today. Wonder if she was voted “Most Likely To Succeed” in high school, way back eight or nine years ago?

I’ll be back after dealing with an allergy attack.

Even as Mitt Romney struggles to get his opponents out of the GOP presidential contest, his image is drifting into some really dangerous territory going forward. A new ABC/WaPo poll has these striking findings about the Mittster’s current levels of popularity:

Mitt Romney trails Barack Obama by 19 points in basic popularity as the 2012 presidential contest inches closer to the main event, with a record 50 percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll now rating Romney unfavorably overall.

Thirty-four percent hold a favorable opinion of Romney, the lowest for any leading presidential candidate in ABC/Post polls in primary seasons since 1984. His unfavorable score is higher than Obama ever has received; it’s been exceeded by just one other Republican candidate this year, Newt Gingrich, and by only one top candidate in 28 years, Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Romney’s got three challenges: comparatively weak support in core Republican groups, lower popularity than Obama’s in the political center and more Americans — about one in six — who have yet to form an opinion of him one way or the other.

Obviously the “I don’t know” vote offers Mitt some opportunities for improvement (though it should be of great concern to his team that his unfavorables have begun to spike precisely as he is becoming better known). It’s also reasonably inevitable that core conservatives will gradually grow to like him, if love seems a bit of a stretch. But his standing among independents and moderates should set off some alarm bells in RomneyLand:

Obama is also up with independents, 50 percent of whom hold favorable views to 46 percent unfavorable.

But Romney lags among that key group, with 35 percent of independents viewing him favorably to 52 percent unfavorable.

Among voters who identify themselves as moderates, Obama holds a 61 percent to 34 percent positive edge, while Romney is seen unfavorably by more. Forty-eight percent of centrists have a negative view of Romney, to 35 percent favorable.

These are some pretty big, bad numbers for the guy embraced by GOP insiders as far and away the most electable of candidates. And it’s not helpful to him that the only way he can respond to one negative dynamic—the harsh criticism of his conservative primary rivals—is by taking positions unlikely to improve his standing with non-conservatves.

The real nightmare scenario for Republicans is that Mitt could turn out to be one of those candidates who just can’t get over the hump with multiple categories of voters: a candidate equivalent to the mythical brand of dog food containing the best ingredients, packaging and marketing that money can buy but turns out to be a failure because “dogs don’t like it.”

We’re hardly at the point when you can say that with any confidence right now. But a separate WaPo piece hilariously describing the rare breed of voters who are actually passionate about Mitt Romney shows that his negative charisma factor has to be taken seriously.

Now that there is a reasonable possibility that the Supreme Court will strike down as unconstitutional the individual mandate that represents the glue holding the Affordable Care Act together, we are hearing the first stirrings of debate, on both sides, of the inevitable “What Then” question.

Some Democrats actually think it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. James Carville can see a campaign issue in the most abject policy defeats:

“I think this will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party,” Carville said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

He added: “You know, what the Democrats are going to say, and it is completely justified, ‘We tried, we did something, go see a 5-4 Supreme Court majority’.”

Carville, who gained fame working on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, predicted health care costs will only increase in the future, in which case Republicans will be to blame for leading the drive to expel a federal program designed to help Americans cover those costs.

“Then the Republican Party will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin,” Carville said.

Robert Reich spoke for those progressives who really disliked the design of the ACA, and might be able to turn its destruction into a fresh opportunity to take a different direction:

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement - but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

There’s been less debate so far among Republicans, who seem to think that polls indicating the unpopularity of ObamaCare will give them a breathing space to regroup if it’s cut down by the Court, even though polls also show many features of the ACA are very popular. David Frum offered Republicans a reality check about public opinion, even if the law is upheld:

“Repeal” may excite a Republican primary electorate that doesn’t need to worry about health insurance because it’s overwhelmingly over 65 and happily enjoying its government-mandated and taxpayer-subsidized single-payer Medicare system. But the general-election electorate doesn’t have the benefit of government medicine. It relies on the collapsing system of employer-directed care. It’s frightened, and it wants answers.

Since conservatives cannot go back to what they were proposing just a few years ago—you know, a competitive system of private insurance options complemented by an individual purchasing mandate and federal regulation of coverage denials and rates—they may have problems responding to this scenario.

Sure, Republicans have their highly misleading pet rock proposals to hold down premiums—interstate insurance sales and “tort reform”—and a shriveled booby prize of an approach to extend health insurance to people who are routiney denied coverage—state-run “high-risk pools” that typically offer crappy coverage at astronomical rates. But all the focus on ObamaCare since 2009 has obscured the fact that most people who are not on Medicare pretty much do hate the health care status quo ante, and will expect both parties to propose new reforms.

If nothing else, the “what then” debate will provide a fruitful occupation for the chattering classes during the three months or so when we all await a Supreme Court decision.

TNR’s Tim Noah wrote yesterday about one of my all-time biggest pet peeves: the constant appropriation of the word “Christian” by conservative evangelicals as exclusive to their distinctive and hardly uncontested point of view. What sent Noah off was an NPR story on “Christian films,” which, of course, turned out to be films by a very particular and not at all representative type of Christians:

About 78 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. What NPR and Fox and Sony mean when they say “Christian” is “Christian right” or “Christian conservatives,” terms that adherents don’t like because they think they’re pejorative. “Fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are imperfect substitutes because a) the two categories, though they overlap a lot, aren’t precisely the same; and b) some of these folks consider themselves political liberals. (The worldly Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr called himself an evangelical Protestant.) What conservative Christians really like to be called is “Christians.” Hence “Christian rock” and “Christian college” and now “Christian film.”

Amen, brother. So why does this keep happening, asks Noah?

[O]nly about one-third of Christians call themselves “evangelicals.” That’s about 26 percent of all Americans. The other two-thirds self-identify as Catholics (23 percent) and with either mainline (18 percent) or historically black (7 percent) Protestantism. (A smattering of Mormons, Orthodox Christians, and other tiny subgroups make up the remaining 4 percent.) To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It’s a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that’s too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.

So Noah figures secular media go along with this theft of Christianity in all its diverse glory because they’ve been intimidated into doing so by the endless whining of the Christian Right about “persecution.” That’s clearly a factor, but I suspect secular media ignorance contributes as well: a lot of media types simply don’t know much about religion, which they find faintly ridiculous and embarrassing. And since it’s all, in their view, a shuck, they are inclined to find its most forcefully conservative practitioners to be the most “authentic.” And Noah is right: This is precisely the same ignorance compounded by ill will that leads a lot of gentiles to treat visibly orthodox Jews as the only “real Jews.” I daresay that to the very limited extent they even think about these things, most secular observers of American culture share the assumption of conservative Christians that mainline Protestants and liberal (or “Cafeteria”) Catholics are both dying breeds of people who don’t take their religion seriously enough to practice it.

So why not give the “Christian” brand to those who most aggressively and exclusively demand it? Besides, these “Christians” are a distinct market that can be coopted and pandered to.

For a while last year, I found myself regularly watching the TV show “The Glee Project,” a competition show designed to choose new members for the successful network series “Glee.” I was mainly fascinated by the powerful interest of the show’s creators in finding a “Christian” character for Glee, by which they clearly meant a conservative evangelical. While the “Christian” character they wanted dropped out of the competition because it required morally compromising behavior (again, from a conservative evangelical perspective), the ultimate winner decided at the last minute to proclaim his own “Christian” (conservative evangelical) tendencies, making everyone happy. And I couldn’t decide whether the people running the show were just exceptionally stupid, or rather shrewd in pursuing an audience demographic that believes it holds the “Christian” copyright.

However it has developed, the identification of American Christianity with the views of a minority of its actual practitioners needs to be challenged as factually inaccurate and both culturally and political dangerous.

State bills to require pre-abortion ultrasound procedures initially looked like another successful weapon in the arsenal of anti-choicers determined to make abortions as difficult to obtain as possible until such times as they can be outlawed. But now this ploy seems to be backfiring, politically and perhaps legally. And in one very conservative state, Idaho, legislation was actually abandoned by anti-choicers unhappy with bad publicity and with potential challeges in the courts. As Laura Bassett reported at HuffPost:

“Due to misconceptions about SB 1387, the complexity of this issue, and the lack of time left in the session, we have decided to pull Senate Bill 1387 to work on concerns with plans to bring it back next year,” said Jason Herring, president of the group, Right to Life of Idaho, in a press release.

That’s lobbyist-speak for “strategic retreat,” and probably reflects the national thinking of RTLers, who took a real pounding in VA on the very brink of victory, forcing their important ally Gov. Bob McDonnell to modify the bill before signing it to remove a requirement for highly intrusive transvaginal ultrasounds in cases of early-term abortions.

As Feministing notes today, anti-choicers in Idaho and elsewhere may follow Virginia’s example next year, getting back on track by steering clear of requiring procedures that bear an unsettling legal, physical and psychologial resemblence to rape.

All in all, though, this year’s experiences on ultrasound legislation threw some unexpected sand into the gears of what was beginning to look, after the 2010 elections, like an unstoppable force in Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country.

The New York Times invited a number of people, yours truly included, to contribute brief pieces to a Room For Debate forum on the question: Is the Ryan budget a viable policy proposal, or just a political gesture? Here’s are links to the forum, and to my own submission.

My basic answer to the forum’s question was “Neither one.” I don’t think the Ryan budget is viable as policy, and it’s not exactly a political gesture, either, in the sense of being a popular poll-tested bauble for Republicans to sport in an election cycle. It’s more a holding action to keep movement conservatives at bay, leaving Republicans, if they do expand their grip on power, to figure out how to square the various circles of their fiscal policies.

The other participants in the forum were Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center, Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Gretchen Hamel of Public Notice. That’s pretty wonky company for a blogger.

Here’s my brief nutshell analysis of what’s on tap at the Supreme Court today:

Pretty much everyone understands that yesterday’s oral arguments represented the Big Enchilada, and we’ll all just have to get used to the fact that nobody—and that includes fearful progressives and gloating conservatives—actually knows what is going to happen to the individual mandate.

Today’s issues—severability and the ACA’s Medicaid expansion—mainly matter if the individual mandate does indeed fall. On the former issue, neither the administration nor ObamaCare opponents really want the “guaranteed issue” and community rating provisions of the law—basically the provisions that protect folks too sick to get private health insurance at affordable rates right now—to survive without a mandate; such an outcome would send premiums through the roof. But the administration would like the provisions that help poorer Americans—notably the Medicaid expansion—to survive in any event, along with reforms aimed at curbing health care spending, especially in Medicare. So that’s the position federal attorneys will take.

The constitutional challenge to the Medicaid expansion is not taken that seriously by anyone other than genuine judicial radicals who seek a ruling that would not only stop the ACA’s major expansion of Medicaid elibility, but call into question the whole system of federal-state relations on which big portions of the New Deal and Great Society rely. If the Justices start looking amenable to this challenge, then some of yesterday’s progressive panic is fully justified.

If you want a fuller preview, check out Wonkbook’s analysis.

Quite a day thanks to the Supremes, who will be in our thoughts for the next three months or so while they put together their ruling on ObamaCare.

* Jon Cohn’s account of today’s Supreme Court oral arguments has the perfect headline: “Well, That Could Have Gone Better.”

* Lead homicide investigator in Trayvon Martin case wanted to file manslaughter charges against George Zimmerman but was overruled by prosecutors. Guess the facts exonerating Zimmerman weren’t as obvious as we’ve been recently led to believe, eh?

* Geraldo Rivera sorta kinda apologizes for “hoodie” ruminations about Trayvon Martin. I think his underlying message is: “I forget sometimes how influential I am.”

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer discusses the high likelihood of civil suits against Penn State in Sandusky scandal, and tells us about Conservative Teen magazine.

* EPA poised to issue regulations on emissions of greenhouse gases by coal plants. Expect a big conservative shriek-a-ganza when this becomes official.

* Big financial fraud lawsuit filed against evangelical broadcasting network TBN. Juiciest detail involves 100k mobile home for Crouch family’s dogs.

And in more purely non-political news:

* The case for not watching Hunger Games.

Tonight I’ll consume the rest of the buzz out there about the Supreme Court’s oral arguments, getting ready for tomorrow’s closer.

Selah.

You may have heard yesterday that former IMF chieftain and French Socialist Party poohbah Dominque Strauss-Kahn has been charged with “aggravated pimping” in connection with his admitted habit of attending “sex parties,” at which, the government argues, prostitutes were in regular attendence.

Strauss-Kahn claims he didn’t know prostitutes were at these parties, insofar as nobody was much wearing clothes and everyone was, you know, having sex. But the interesting thing is Strauss-Kahn’s more fundamental argument, as explained by his attorney in a BBC report:

“Certainly Dominique Strauss-Kahn has attended a certain number of parties with women, libertine parties with female friends and women who were friends of his friends.

“You can say what you like about that on the moral level, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not against the criminal law. They are trying to ban a sort of crime of lust. He’s being attacked over his libertine behaviour.”

My first reaction was to think that the French really do have different ways of looking at things. If Strauss-Kahn were an American pol, he would have already checked himself into Dr. Drew’s clinic as a “sex addict” in need of treatment and sympathy.

And indeed, some republishings of the BBC story I quoted from above have in the headline: “I Am A Sex Addict.” But there’s no use of the term by Strauss-Kahn or his attorney in the body of the story—just the “libertine defense.”

Perhaps the “sex addiction” defense is being held in reserve in case Strauss-Kahn needs it if he’s ever allowed in the U.S. again. As you may recall, he has not kept his “libertine lifestyle” to his side of the Atlantic—or necessarily to consenting partners. Criminal charges involving his alleged sexual assault against hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo may have been dropped in New York because of questions about her credibility, but now she’s exploring a civil suit.

Clearly the guy needs to keep his hands to himself.

Given the various constitutional problems afflicting efforts to reform campaign financing, it’s more than a bit important, particularly in the post-Citizens United era, that the purchasing of political ads be as transparent as possible. Yet, as Monthly alum Steve Waldman reports at the Columbia Journalism Review site, a number of prominent news organizations are actually fighting a small move towards greater transparency:

For those who haven’t followed the drama, the FCC has proposed that the “public inspection files” that local TV stations have long been required to keep—in a paper file, in cabinets, in their offices—be put online. These files contain invaluable information about who is buying political advertisements, for federal, state and local races. (See CJR’s recent exploration of some of these files in five states, and read about the New America Foundation’s ongoing efforts to crowdsource these files). The notion of moving the “public inspection files” from ink to pixels is not exactly radical stuff but it would make it easier for journalists to track the flow of campaign spending.

(Full disclosure: I was the lead author of a report that prompted this proposal to move the paper file to the Internet.)

Amazingly, the same news organizations that routinely demand transparency from government—and rely on the prompt disclosure of public information for their stories—are opposing the rule.

For instance, Politico regularly runs articles about campaign spending. Yet one of the strongest opponents of this transparency rule is Politico’s owner, Allbritton Communications Company (which also owns in WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, and several other local TV stations.) Jerald Fritz, vice president of Allbritton, argues that putting these forms online is a slippery slope toward a “Soviet-style standardization” of how ads are sold.

Network-owned local television stations have also joined the parade of opposition to Internet disclosure of ad sales. There’s quite a broad pattern of letting the sales rep’s interest trump those of the reporter. And it’s not as though these are hungry times for the political ad biz, either. But more fundamentally, as Waldman notes:

This isn’t just another same-old-same-old case of an industry opposing a disclosure regulation. An important statement from the deans of twelve leading journalism schools put it well: “Broadcast news organizations depend on, and consistently call for, robust open-record regimes for the institutions they cover; it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principle to themselves.”