Seems it was a good idea to get alarmed by the storm signals from an earlier hearing held by federal district judge James Teilborg on a suit to strike down Arizona’s new and extreme “fetal pain” ban on abortions prior to 20 weeks after a pregnant’s woman’s first missed menstrual period. Today Teilborg upheld the law despite its reasonably direct challenge to an array of Supreme Court precedents against previability abortion restrictions. Salon’s Irin Carmon has the essential rundown:

The Clinton-appointed district court judge in Arizona just did something, well, unprecedented. He upheld Arizona’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks, claiming it didn’t actually “ban” abortions before viability, it just “regulates” them down to the most grueling emergencies.

Worse, Teilborg even regurgitated the suspect science of “fetal pain,” a first in the federal courts, though his decision was based on the contorted “regulation” versus “ban” finding. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the state can only ban abortions after viability, regardless of the rationale, but Teilborg found that Arizona’s H.B. 2036 “does not impose a substantial obstacle to previability abortions,” because a woman can still get an abortion after 20 weeks if she’s about to die or suffer major physical impairment.

“It’s such a game of semantics, to the point of Alice in Wonderland,” ACLU staff attorney Alexa Kolbi-Molinas told Salon. “When the Supreme Court said you cannot ban any abortions prior to viability, regardless of whether there are any exceptions to that ban, that’s exactly what they meant.”

The ruling will be immediately appealed 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, allegedly a bastion of liberalism. But even if Teilborg’s effort to significantly change constitutonal law is overruled, he’s drawn up a template for a higher or future Court to pay lip service to the precedents while vitiating the right to choose in a fundamental way.

Not being an expert on Polish history and politics, I don’t exactly know why Nobel Prize laureate Lech Valesa sorta kinda endorsed Mitt Romney to become president of the United States. But nor, either, do a lot of the U.S. conservatives who are assuming Walesa has validated Romney as a heroic global freedom fighter battling socialism (or, say, labor unions).

I do know Walesa’s career has been stormy and controversial during and after he served as president of Poland in the 1990s. Here’s what Philip Sherwell and Bruce Konviser of the conservative British paper The Telegraph had to say about him in 2000, when he attempted a comeback campaign for the presidency:

What Mr Walesa’s loyal aides at the offices of the Lech Walesa Institute - a think-tank he established after losing office - dare not tell him as they bring him his papers and execute his barked orders is that he will do well to win five per cent of the vote.

Like the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Walesa is much more popular abroad than at home. It is hard to find a Pole who will criticise his role in defeating communism, and just as hard to find one who has a word of praise for his five-year presidency - a period that was characterised by his intransigence, belligerence and paralysing disputes with parliament.

A Western diplomat in Warsaw said: “Walesa is in the odd position of being an unpopular hero. He is a hero for taking on and defeating the old regime, but his presidency left him a deeply unpopular politician. People think he should retire from public life with grace now.”

Walesa has perhaps best been known in recent years as a fiery Catholic social conservative and opponent of legalized abortion (including in vitro fertilization in his definition of abortion) and of same-sex marriage. That certainly makes his support for Romney unsurprising. But any effort to share Walesa’s acclaim as the great anti-communist union activist of the 1970s and 1980s with Mitt Romney is entirely anachronistic.

I have to admit that despite his supposed old-school mien and senatorial gravitas, Mitt McConnell gives me the creeps a lot more than the average Tea Person (say, his Kentucky colleague Rand Paul). Perhaps he isn’t a crazy person, and perhaps his apparent devotion to such familiar values as the amoral exercise of political power and the faithful representation of the prerogatives of the very rich is less threatening to the Republic than the demons that haunt Randian libertarians and evangelical theocrats.

But I dunno: I read through a John Stanton piece for Buzzfeed based on an interview with McConnell on the subject of old and new media and came away chilled by his cheerful approbation of the latter on the sole grounds that they make his brand of vicious partisanship more effective.

“To the extent that there isn’t media domination like there was in the days NBC, ABC, CBS the New York Times, the Washington Post, particularly since most people on my side of the aisle feel they had a pretty obvious bias … those days are over,” he said. “I kind of like this new environment. I think its much more competitive, much more balanced.”

“From a conservative point of view we have a better chance of competing in the marketplace of ideas,” he said.

You get the feeling that if he happened to be a Democrat or if the “old media” were biased in the “wrong” direction, he’d have diametrically opposed views. In any event, his perspective is not clouded by any concerns about, you know, objective truth, facts, or the public’s right to know. The same is true of his attitude towards new-media tools for politicians. It’s not about communicating better with constituents or better informing the electorate, but simply a matter of the superior ability (if you’ve got the money) to get to voters first with the greatest throw-weight of propaganda.

None of this is terribly surprising coming from a leader whose signature conviction is that the post-Citizens United environment is a free-speech paradise. But still, you’d think even McConnell would be capable of deep enough thought to grasp that media are not simply weapons for sale in a vast arms market where non-violent solutions are never on the table.

For all the attention that was paid to Mitt Romney’s saber-rattling in his recent VFW speech and in Israel (not to mention the even louder saber-rattling of Dan Senor, Romney’s chief Middle East policy advisor), The Atlantic’s Robert Wright points out something that didn’t draw a lot of commentary: Team Romney’s emphasis on “nuclear capability” in stressing his comparative toughness towards Iran.

Senor alarmed many observers by issuing what looked like a blank check of support for Israel in doing whatever it wished with respect to Tehran, and then Romney “walked back” the comment by reserving America’s right to make its own judgments. But both used the squishy term “nuclear capability” in drawing its “red line” defining unacceptable Iranian behavior, which makes the talk of hypothetical military strikes that much more dangerous. Here’s Wright:

[I]f you want to, you can define the term so broadly that Iran already has a “capability”—even though by standard reckoning (1) it would take Iran years to develop a deliverable nuclear warhead; (2) it would take Iran at least a year to develop even a crude, testable-but-not-deliverable bomb; (3) Iran couldn’t move even that fast unless it embarked on a headlong program to weaponize—and we’d know if that was happening, because Iran would have to break seals that international inspectors have placed on its nuclear facilities.

In short, the term “capability” is so mushy that Israel could bomb Iran tomorrow and say that it did so because, by its definition of “capability,” Iran was exactly a day away from possessing it!….

Some people are trying to find signs of moderation in Romney’s reference to his “fervent hope” that “diplomatic and economic measures” will succeed. But the fact is that by making the mushy-to-the-point-of-useless term “capability” the red line (or red blur), he has empowered Israel to say at any point, “Sorry, but diplomatic and economic measures have failed; the bombs were dropped this morning.”

The bottom line is that it’s a really bad idea to make vague but menacing threats to counter vague but menacing threats, all the while supporting the right of another country to counter vague but menacing threats with military action. Perhaps Romney thinks his relationship with Netanyahu would create a level of communications that would make an unnecessary war with Iran into which the United States would be drawn improbable. But perhaps Netanyahu thinks the same relationship makes communications beside the point. Don’t know about you, but I’m not eager to find out which supposition is correct.

So I’m off schedule today thanks to a medical appointment, but that also means some news tidbits have gradually come out of the oven:

* Romney picks up expected endorsement of Lech Walesa—not a very popular figure in Poland these days but presumably still an eyebrow-raiser among certain American voters.

* ThinkProgress takes a look at that mandatory, government-backed universal health care system in Israel that Mitt praised so extravagantly.

* In what might have been a surprising development a few months ago, draft Democratic platform reportedly includes marriage equality commitment.

* In even less of a surprise, Bill Clinton chosen to make main prime-time economic case for Obama in Charlotte.

* Matt Yglesias notes that people wanting to keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities could probably do so simply by requiring fast-food restaurants to stay open seven days a week.

And in non-political news:

* So as to avoid any Olympics spoilation, will just offer link to latest medal standings.

Back very soon.

Many of you may have read or heard about Mike Tomasky’s cover story for Newsweek entitled: “Mitt Romney’s Wimp Factor.” It’s a pretty savage piece that has some serious sport with “daddy party” pretensions about the “manliness” of conservative leaders.

What personally interests me about Romney’s “wimpiness,” if you want to use that loaded term, is that his transparently flexible principles create a toxic dynamic in his relationship with his own strongest supporters. Here’s how Tomasky puts it:

He’s the most risk-averse major politician to come along in ages. He accepted the job at Bain Capital only after wringing out of Bill Bain a promise that, if the venture failed, Mitt would be welcomed back to Bain & Co.—at his old levels of compensation and seniority—and that the press and public would be fed some happy talk about how it had all gone as intended. And why didn’t he leave Bain in 1999 to go run the Olympics, as he always said he had, but instead take his now-famous “leave of absence”? To have the option of coming back; to minimize the risk. Even his flip-flopping, his taking of positions all over the map, is a form of risk aversion, being all things to all people, able to placate any audience, never stuck out on a limb unable to satisfy.

There’s another conservative yardstick on which Romney comes up short: he’s too smart, as in clever or book-smart, to be a real Republican candidate. All those stories about how intensely data-driven he was at Bain, or as governor? Weird. Liberals, men of caution and contemplation, are obsessed with data. Conservative men are supposed to be men of action—they have hunches and play them. In this one sense Romney is just like a Massachusetts liberal. When it’s said that conservatives still don’t trust the guy, it’s not just his past moderate record they distrust, but also this sense of Romney as approaching issues intellectually instead of instinctively, producing the lurking unease that if he got into that Oval Office, Romney might one day look at the evidence and decide that, by Jiminy Cricket, global warming does exist!

Precisely because conservatives have abundant reasons not to trust him, along with abundant reasons to believe they can bully him, Romney will perpetually be in what I call the “primary phase” of his political career. And that will make him a weak president who is never quite the leader of his own political party. That’s why I was suggesting in an earlier post today that whatever names appear on the signs at the Republican Convention in Tampa and on the bumper stickers of all those red-state SUVs, the real ticket is Ryan-Romney. This has nothing to do with Romney’s “manliness” or “wimpiness,” and everything to do with the devil’s bargain that’s brought him to the brink of his Oval Office dreams.

Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel, like his whole brief overseas tour, was initially viewed as just a box-checking exercise typical of any presidential nominee with no foreign policy experience. Yes, it’s especially important for a Republican candidate to show his party’s conservative evangelical voting base he’s got some Holy Land street cred, and it’s also worth remembering that Israel is about the only ally conservatives are particularly high on these days (all those other “allies” tend to be “socialist” by U.S. conservative standards).

But as it turns out, Romney’s visit was less noteworthy for his pandering to Israelis and their U.S. supporters than for his love fest with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, as Haaretz’s Barak Ravid explains:

The speech itself sounded as if it could have been written by Netanyahu’s bureau. So it’s no surprise that when the two met later for dinner, Netanyahu thanked him for his “support for Israel and Jerusalem.”

In general, Netanyahu embraced Romney as no Israeli prime minister has ever before embraced a candidate running against an incumbent U.S. president: Aside from their working meeting in the morning, Netanyahu also hosted Romney and his wife and sons for dinner at his official residence.

Romney’s entire visit to Israel was born in the Prime Minister’s Office. According to Tablet Magazine, those who cooked up the visit over breakfasts at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem a month ago were Romney’s adviser Dan Senor and Netanyahu’s adviser, Ron Dermer, who himself hails from a Republican family in Miami.

The two clandestinely planned the visit in order to preempt Barak Obama visiting Israel before the Republican candidate.

Mitt ‘n’ Bibi, of course, go way back to their days together at the Boston Consulting Group:

“We can almost speak in shorthand,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. “We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar.”

Mr. Netanyahu attributed their “easy communication” to what he called “B.C.G.’s intellectually rigorous boot camp.”

So the regularly embattled Netanyahu not only gave Romney over-the-top encouragement, but secured reciprocally respect from his American buddy, notes Ravak: Romney’s staff picked the 150 guests carefully. Religious American immigrants dominated the crowd; secular Jews and native-born Israelis were few and far between. Those present included Jewish-American millionaires, settler leaders like the former chairman of the Yesha Council of settlements Israel Harel, and former Netanyahu aides such as Dore Gold, Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked and Yoaz Hendel.

But the chief symbol of the Mitt/Bibi alliance was the prominent presence of a certain common benefactor:

The best places at the center of the first row were given, as expected, to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. The casino magnate and owners of the Yisrael Hayom newspaper is considered one of the strongest supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The $100 million that Adelson pledged to donate to Romney in order to get Obama out of the White House is the oil in the wheels of Romney’s election campaign.

I don’t think it’s terribly unfair to suggest that in the event of a Romney victory and a continued Netanyahu government in Israel, the future of the Middle East is likely to be shaped according to the wishes of Sheldon Adelson. If you find that frightening, you are not alone.

Emily Schultheis has a useful update at Politico on the status of voter ID and other “war on voting” laws in states considered competitive in the 2012 presidential election. Because of the current litigation and the especially blatant political impetus behind it, Pennsylania’s new voter ID law has been gettting the lion’s share of attention recently. Moreover, new laws have been stalled (at least temporarily) in other battleground states, notably North Carolina (legislation vetoed by governor), Wisconsin (new law declared unconstitutional by state judge), and Ohio (new law partially repealed).

But it’s helpful to remember that (1) voting restrictions in non-battleground states (i.e., voter ID laws in Georgia, Indiana, Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas) will affect downballot races; (2) voter ID laws aren’t the only important restrictions (viz. the early voting cutbacks in Ohio and Florida that are being challenged in court, or Iowa’s sweeping disenfranchisement of ex-felons)); and (3) laws aside, many Republican-administered jurisdictions will play games with voters in heavily Democratic areas prior to and on Election Day, as they generally have since time immemorial.

During the long rise of the U.S. conservative movement, every time it appeared a breakthrough victory was in sight, a frustrating defeat occurred that was invariably blamed on circumstances that had nothing to do with the conservative ideology itself. Goldwater lost in 1964 because of national mourning over John F. Kennedy, and LBJ’s diabolocal ability to exploit it. Nixon turned out to be a traitor who very nearly ruined the GOP “brand.” Reagan’s bold plans were cramped by a recession caused by his predecessor. The 1994 “Revolution” was partially coopted by an amoral member of the opposition, and partly destroyed by the personal weaknesses of GOP leaders. And George W. Bush, as we have been told repeatedly since 2008, “betrayed his conservative principles” and thus invited economic and electoral disaster.

Now, many conservatives believe, the great gittin’-up morning is finally here, or will arrive on November 7 when Barack Obama is defeated and Republicans also take over control of both Houses of Congress. And who will their leader be in the long-awaited effort to roll back three-quarters-of-a-century of legislative and judicial “activism” and cultural “relativism” that has all but destroyed the country? Mitt Romney? No, no, a thousand times no! Romney will enable the revolution, because he has no choice to do otherwise, but The Leader’s identity is pretty obviously Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s role in conservative history is nicely underlined in Ryan Lizza’s latest piece on the Wisconsin wonder boy for the New Yorker. It’s been all but forgotten that Ryan was one of the major forces behind George W. Bush’s 2005 Social Security privatization plan, which most non-ideological observers regarded as a terrible squandering of the political capital Bush took out of his 2004 re-election victory. And it’s nearly been forgotten that the quasi-universal acceptance of the Ryan budget by today’s Republicans was not initially a foregone conclusion: by and large, GOPers did not campaign on it at all in 2010, and as recently as last year, most political professionals considered it a toxic swamp of unpopular proposals and a Democratic oppo-research wonderland. But in Lizza’s account, the direct criticism of Ryan in Obama’s big “budget speech” in April of 2011 all but destroyed internal GOP resistance to his budget:

Two days after the speech, despite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said. “They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”

Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

read more »

Tomorrow Texas is holding its peculiarly late (a product of legislative confusion related to judicial review of redistricting) Republican Senate runoff, and all signs (other than David Dewhurst’s dubious internal polls) are that Tea Party fave Ted Cruz is going to win. A new Public Policy Polling survey has him beating Dewhurst by ten points, after beginning the campaign far behind.

Get used to hearing Cruz’s name, a lot. As Dave Weigel explains, there is virtually no legitimate ideological reason for the national movement conservative prefererence for Cruz over Dewhurst. It is all about his age (42) and ethnicity. Republicans understand the demographic trap they are in, which they might escape this year and in 2014 by revving up white-identity resentment of Barack Obama to a high-pitch chattering whine, but can’t forestall forever. They can appeal to minority voters by changing the ideology, or just finding minority candidates who will speak and vote like an angry 75-year-old white man from Alabama. The former strategy is not an option for them.

So conservatives need some possibilities other than Marco Rubio to become Latino poster persons going forward: Rubio is Cuban-American, which is not helpful with many Spanish speaking constituencies, and also has some potential ethics issues in his background. Dewhurst was entirely expendable. So expect Ted Cruz to get a lot of attention beginning at the Republican Convention in Tampa, and continuing at next year’s CPAC conference.

Sorry for the delay in Daylight Video, but I’m still in metro Atlanta, fighting its legendary traffic, which makes this video pretty much inevitable:

Over at the Times they’ve got a big piece on Almighty Algebra by Andrew Hacker and how it’s crushing our students:

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t…

There are many defenses of algebra and the virtue of learning it. Most of them sound reasonable on first hearing; many of them I once accepted. But the more I examine them, the clearer it seems that they are largely or wholly wrong — unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic. (I’m not talking about quantitative skills, critical for informed citizenship and personal finance, but a very different ballgame.)

The obvious question here is just how far “algebra” reaches into “quantitative skills.” Hacker is somewhat unclear on this point. “My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus,” he says. But that represents three to four years of mathematics. If we’re talking advanced algebra, trig, and calculus, I agree, despite their massive scientific utility, those are probably outside the reach of the average student. But throughout the rest of the piece he’s talking just “algebra.” Even the simplest bit of quantitative reasoning—trying to figure out which credit card offer is screwing you the least, say—needs some variable work. Just where do we stop with that? Hacker isn’t clear.

In any case, this got me wondering. Suppose Hacker really is talking about basic algebra. I did that in eighth grade. From there I went through the usual cycle, through geometry and calculus, and then a couple math classes in college required for a chemistry degree, which were by far the hardest classes I’ve ever taken, leading to existential panics and profound self-reevaluations. And that barely scratched the surface of college-level material, which in turn isn’t even close to the work that real mathematicians do.

I would estimate that in my school career I made it about 5 percent of the way to an actual high-level understanding of some kind of mathematics (since of course no one person can be an expert in every sub-field). In turn, I would estimate that basic algebra represents about one percent of my understanding at its peak (now significantly decayed), or roughly 0.05% of a full math education. Is the average person really so rubbish at math that they can’t handle that? Or, perhaps our culture has such an inferiority complex about math that we hamstring ourselves? What do you think?

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It’s old man Cheney, and he’s got some rather surprising advice:

Dick Cheney has some advice for Mitt Romney on choosing a running mate: Don’t pick another Sarah Palin.

In his first interview since receiving a heart transplant in March, Cheney told ABC News, that John McCain’s decision to pick Palin as his running mate in 2008 was “a mistake” — one that it is important from Romney not to repeat.

Less Palin, more torture regimes and pointless wars of aggression. Got it. In other news, Grand Moff Tarkin has been giving lectures on planetary ecology, environmentalism, and human rights.

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Fresh on the heels of the epic Romneyshambles disaster that was his trip to London, Romney proceeded to Israel, where he decided to break his word and ban the press from a fundraiser in a public hotel:

Some of Romney’s Jewish donors are flying here from the United States to attend the Jerusalem fundraiser on Monday morning, including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has pledged to personally give tens of millions of dollars to a pro-Romney super PAC.

But Romney’s campaign announced Saturday that it would block the news media from covering the event, which will be held at the King David Hotel. The campaign’s decision to close the fundraiser to the press violates the ground rules it negotiated with news organizations in April, when Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination and began opening some of his finance events to the news media.

Reporters were, understandably, rather irritated. So in what is developing into the signature Romney move, he folded like a wet newspaper and let the press in.

Moments later, Romney adviser Dan Senor made an alarmingly vague statement about Israel and potential war with Iran:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney would “respect” a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran unilaterally should the Islamic republic develop nuclear weapons, Romney’s foreign policy adviser told reporters Sunday.

“If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability the governor would respect that decision,” Dan Senor said at the morning briefing.

Huh?? What in God’s name does he mean by “respect?” Oh wait, nevermind. Didn’t happen:

The campaign then issued a far less ominous clarification from Senor.

“Gov. Romney believes we should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its nuclear course, and it is his fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures will do so. In the final analysis, of course, no option should be excluded. Gov. Romney recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself, and that it is right for America to stand with it,” he said.

Has any presidential candidate ever made such a mess of a simple overseas trip? These should be about the easiest things to do. You go, meet with foreign heads of state, wave, smile, say nice things about the country, see some landmarks, and participate awkwardly in some kitschy local culture. I suppose if you’re visiting Israel you have to swear fealty and all that, but given the longstanding bipartisan consensus there it shouldn’t be big news. Instead, political news is aflame with Romney’s repeated “gaffe —> total retreat” cycle.

It’s bizarre how such a buttoned-down, calculating guy can’t seem to get his mouth under control. Zeke Miller and Tim Noah have more.

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