Facebook makes its blockbuster market debut today, and as The New York Times points out, "the trading on Friday is the the equivalent of a must-see Super Bowl Sunday showdown for people who don’t ordinarily watch a football game." The social network's stocks have been priced at $38 a pop, which means the company is valued at $104 billion, making it the second biggest initial public offering ever. If the company's first day on Wall Street follows the tech trend, it could be worth $137 billion by the end of the day. 

The next big, and potentially difficult step for the company will be proving it's worth the investment. The site already accounts for 9 percent of all web traffic in the United States, but it's going to need to grab more revenue as time goes on, which means more ads, more Farmville-esque spending opportunities, or breaking off into new territory like smartphones and data analytics.

• GOP rookies buck Grover Norquist  POLITICO
• The $1 Billion Club Gets Crowded  The Wall Street Journal
• Euro starts to crack as investors eye exit The Financial Times
• Reticent Rich: Preferred Style in Silicon Valley The New York Times

A big debate is happening down in Texas over the cost of a college degree from state universities. While educators want to raise tuition to over $10,000 in order to make sure they can keep providing quality services and attracting top-tier talent, many others want to keep costs low to "make sure we are giving students the best bang for their buck."
 

—The Wall Street Journal

Happy Friday! Here is a list of the best stuff ever, courtesy of Buzzfeed. 

The Romney campaign is out with its first ad, a positive spot that highlights Keystone, health care, and tax cuts. The aim of the ad is to show Americans what President Romney would do in his first day of office, and to that end, it gets the job done, even if it’s mostly paint by numbers:

Create jobs? Check. Repeal unpopular legislation? Check. Promise tax cuts? Check. It isn’t as blatantly dishonest as a significant amount of what comes from the Romney campaign, but it is misleading on two counts. First, experts are divided on how many jobs the Keystone pipeline would create. From the ad, the implication is that this would make a significant dent in our joblessness rate—otherwise, why would it concern the president? In the past, Romney has claimed that the pipeline would yield “tens of thousands of jobs,” but the independent estimate is that constructing the pipeline would result in five to six thousand jobs. That’s enough work to support a town, or even a small city, but not so much that it would effect the national economy.

The second count is more a sin of omission; for all the talk of “repeal and replace,” the Republican Party doesn’t actually have a plan to deal with the 30 million Americans who will lose insurance as a result of ending the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Republicans say they will reinstate the popular aspects of the bill—helping people with pre-existing conditions and bolstering Medicare benefits—but as Jonathan Bernstein points out, those policies are unworkable without the individual mandate, Medicare cuts, or new taxes. It wouldn’t be the first time Republicans took a “dessert-first” approach to public policy (see: the Bush administration), but it cuts directly against the GOP’s vocal concern with deficits.

There’s nothing misleading about Romney’s promise to cut taxes for “job creators,” as long as you understand that the term is a synonym for rich people. According to the Tax Policy Center, the Romney economic plan—as it currently exists—would give top earners an average tax cut of nearly $400,000. The next highest earners—those with an income of $500,000 to $1,000,000—would receive an average tax cut of roughly $75,000. By contrast, the median household, which has an income of nearly $50,000, would receive an average cut of $1,600.

To put all of this in plain terms, Romney would use his first day in office to create a handful of jobs, end health care coverage for millions of people, and give massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. It’s a lot of work for the first day, though I wouldn’t call it good.

Of course, what actually matters is how voters react, and I imagine that the ad will serve its purpose. If you—like most people—haven’t been paying attention to politics over the last year, you would think that President Obama has purposefully kept jobs from the United States, raised taxes on “job creators,” and passed a terrible, ineffective health care bill. And while you don’t know too much about Mitt Romney, he seems competent and concerned with the economy.

This is the impression Obama has to fight if he wants to win re-election in November, and while there are many avenues for attacking Romney, Obama’s middling position means that this will be a difficult undertaking.

You've got no secrets from me this week. Unless you were one of the early birds who devoured the thing in vast, debilitating insomniac gobs after clawing the Amazon.com box open on publication day, you are now somewhere between page 300 and 500 of Robert A. Caro's The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV. (Spoiler alert: JFK doesn't make it.) And you're so engrossed that you're ignoring your significant other's timid semaphore signals—ah, can't beds can be as wide as the Atlantic sometimes?—to the general effect that he or she misses sex. 

Meals, too, and dammit, Joey. Isn't it your turn to walk Bowser? 

All that is more than understandable. The thing is as absorbing as a casket stuffed with brisket or a drowned Cadillac with unknown passengers. But as the roar of coverage that greets each new installment of Caro's epic recedes, I invite you to take wing alongside me like a seagull in search of interesting flotsam.

1. The Also-Ran. You know, folks, it wouldn't kill you to take a minute or two to feel bad for Robert Dallek, the first-rate historian whose excellent, really-all-you-need-to know, modestly two-volume LBJ biography—Lone Star Rising (1991) and Flawed Giant (1998)—was overshadowed from inception to finish by the python uncoilings of Caro's magnum opus. Starting with his very sturdy Kennedy bio, An Unfinished Life, Dallek has moved on to other topics almost as if he thinks his vocation has a purpose beyond inviting our awe at his Promethean struggle with his material. But recalling the days when he was the stolid Mitch to Caro's glamorous Blanche du Bois as they both circled Stanley Kowalski in search of higher truths may well give the other Robert an occasional melancholy or perhaps indignant afternoon all the same. 

2. Caro's Model. Did he have one? Indeed so, if you ask me: T. Harry Williams's magnificent Huey Long, which came out in 1969. That is, right around when a sort-of young Robert A. Caro would have been getting into the biography business in earnest. (The Power Broker, his landmark study of Robert Moses—now a mere preliminary bauble to his Promethean etc., etc., etc.—came out five years later.) Picking up Williams's book not long after finishing The Passage of Power, I was struck by the similarity of their m.o.'s: the calculated alternation of dramatized crises and analytical narrative, the use of ostensibly digressive character portraits and historical sidebars to sharpen our sense of the main character's dynamic effect, the determined prioritizing of place and context, rather than psychology—Margaret Mead, not Freud—as the key to everything. Admittedly, Williams did sound like he enjoyed life (and Huey) a lot more than Caro does Johnson (or life), but you know how something's always lost in translation. 

3. He Do The Police in The Same Old Voices. Everybody knows that Caro is a brilliant organizer of his own research and a master of dramatic effects. On the other hand, anyone rash enough to call him a great stylist is lucky enough to be encountering the hackneyed verbal arpeggios and kitschy sonorities of midcentury American newsmagazine writing in its Aggrandizing Mode—a compound of the King James Bible, Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe, Henry Luce's philosophical side and Max Steiner's score for Gone With the Wind—for the very first time. (When the lyrical impulse bit him, Making of the President author Theodore H. White was no slouch at this stuff: "I had asked [Kennedy] what part of the country, of which he had seen so much in campaigning, he thought was most beautiful. He thought for a moment and then, like most Americans, chose home—the hills of New England, when the leaves are turning in their fall rhapsody of color, were, he thought, the most beautiful sight of all the beauties of America's vastness.") For those of us afflicted by a sentimental fondness for pre-New Journalism showing off, the pleasure of Caro's obliviousness to how outdated his idea of great writing is—in this as in so many things, he's like a Clark Kent who stepped into a phone booth around 1965 and monkishly never came out—comes down to the eerie way The Years of Lyndon Johnson sometimes reads like an artifact of the period in question, not distant history. 

4. What's Been Left Out (So Far). Aside from a few glimpses of later events, The Passage of Power ends sometime in March, 1964. Not in the index: the Beatles, whose February 9 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show is a better benchmark than most for when the 1960s turned into "The Sixties." Similarly, Elvis Presley was a no-show in Master of The Senate—and up to a point, that's fine with me. Those dumb "And here what's was going on in the culture" paragraphs that academic historians (which Caro is not) most often concoct by relying on their graduate assistants (which he does not have) are usually lamer than Crisco in a recipe for lamb korma.

Nonetheless, the omission has set him a huge challenge. Especially once the boomers started feeling Tom Hayden's oatmeal along with their oats, LBJ's presidency made him the beleaguered cynosure of the past century's greatest cultural/generational donnybrook. Conscientious fellow that he is, Caro recently told Ron Rosenbaum he plans to prep for his final volume by visiting Vietnam. But toking up inside a VW microbus as "Somebody to Love" booms out over the Smithsonian's speakers and a hologram of a burning draft card appears stage left might do him more good. And it's more fun to imagine, too. 

4. So Where's Hollywood? To my knowledge—and, let's be frank, I'm probably more of a buff than you—there's only one relatively good performance by an actor playing Johnson on film: Randy Quaid, not yet loony, in 1987's LBJ: The Early Years. One reason the rest is dross is even Oliver Stone, who at least cares, doesn't know that Johnson is a more Shakespearean president than JFK or even Nixon. But Caro's four (to date) bestsellers about the man ought to get HBO cracking on something a mite closer to home than Game of Thrones, don't you think? Call me perverse, but my inner casting director is torn to the point of anguish right now between Jeff Daniels and Jason Segel. 

There are times when you can just see the wheels turning in Mitt Romney's head, as he cycles through the possible responses to a question, realizes there really is no good one, then spits out something that sounds like the least bad answer possible. It's almost sad. That frenzy of mental activity is what produces things like this bit of hilarity, after Romney got questioned about the story of a rich Republican thinking of running an ad campaign attacking President Obama with Jeremiah Wright:

"I repudiate that effort," Mr. Romney told reporters at an impromptu news conference Thursday in Jacksonville, Fla. "I think it's the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign." At the same time, Mr. Romney stood by remarks made in February on Sean Hannity's radio show that Mr. Obama wanted to make America "a less Christian nation."

"I'm not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was," Mr. Romney said.

Oh, Mitt. You see, this is what happens when you're obsessed with proving that you aren't a flip-flopper. The alternative—possibly saying something different than you said before, and running the risk of being criticized for a change of heart (or words) is so frightening that he says that. I wonder if after "I stand by what I said, whatever it was" came out of his mouth, Mitt cringed inwardly and said, "Oh, that's not good."

Maybe there really was no good answer. If he said, "Well, it sounds like I might have gone a bit far there," that would have invited more uncomfortable questions, and if he said, "I'm interested in moving the campaign forward, it would have looked like he was dodging the question, which he would have been. But this reminded me of the CNN debate back in February when the Republican candidates were asked to give one word to describe themselves. Instead of giving the appropriate answer ("That's an idiotic question and I refuse to answer it"), Ron Paul went with "consistent," Newt Gingrich weirdly chose "cheerful," and Rick Santorum picked "courage." Romney, acting like some kind of parody of a candidate, said "resolute." Which of course made him look all the more fearful. But at least today, you can be sure that no matter the winding road he has traveled to arrive at the place he is today, Mitt Romney believes what he believes and stands by what he says. Whatever it is.

Michael Tomasky looks at Mitt Romney’s speech in Des Moines, Iowa, and wonders why the Republican nominee would tie himself so closely to the radical right of the Republican Party:

Obama can say to voters: “Look at how far-right congressional Republicans are going lead this guy around by the nose if he becomes president.” Most independents may want tough talk on the deficit, but they certainly don’t want the Tea Party running the country.

Can Romney keep his distance from Boehner? Typically in presidential election years, the presidential nominee is given lots of free rein by others in the party to run whatever sort of campaign he needs to run to win. But the strange brew of Romney’s suspect right-wing credentials and the no-compromise posture of the Tea Party wing might make that a bit trickier this time around the track.

As time goes on, and the public continues to see Romney as an acceptable nominee, I’m less sure that he’ll be harmed by his proximity to the Tea Party. Yes, his economic policies are radical, and yes, he’s adopted the bellicose foreign policy of George W. Bush, but he projects an image of moderation. Not only is he calm, composed, and well-presented—there’s no doubt that Romney has an excellent tailor—he’s also the wealthy former governor of Massachusetts, a state known for its liberal politicians: Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry. For most voters, there’s nothing in his background to suggest extremism, even if it drips from his rhetoric.

Indeed, this extends to the reporters who cover Romney. In Beltway political discourse, “extremism” is short-hand for a style of politics: aggressive, prickly, and occasionally sanctimonious. Romney is none of those things, and it affects the coverage he receives from mainstream outlets. On policy, there is nothing to distinguish Mitt Romney from Rick Santorum; they both support the Ryan plan, an expanded military, Obamacare repeal, an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a rollback on gay rights, restrictions on abortion, and a personhood amendment to the Constitution.

The only difference is in their political personas. If Mitt Romney talked with a working-class affect and was aggressively anti-elite, he would be labeled an extremist. Likewise, if Santorum were the privileged son of a former governor, we would assume centrist views.

I’ve said this before, but one of the best things Romney has on his side is his demeanor. He can espouse a radical view of government, without worrying that anyone will actually identify him as a radical.

We've been talking this week about how to stop rape in conflict. As with many massive social changes, I think one of the greatest obstacles to eradicating this atrocity is the common belief that it can't be done. I tried to address that some in Monday's piece, but I thought we could all use a little more nitty-gritty. So I went straight to the source: Liz Bernstein. Bernstein is not only the founding Director of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, but is also a former Coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). 

For those less familiar with ICBL, the important thing to know is that it worked. Five years after the official launch of the campaign, 122 states signed the ban treaty, a feat which earned the campaign and its leader, Jody Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, stockpiles of the weapon and landmine-contaminated-land have both been drastically reduced, and the only states known to be currently using landmines (as of 2009) are Burma and Russia. While the campaign still has real work to do (including compelling the United States to participate), it has already accomplished much more than many thought would ever be possible. 

I asked Liz to walk us through how she got involved in ICBL, how their campaign worked, and what elements of that campaign are transferable to the new coordinated effort to stop rape in conflict. I'm just going to let her roll here, because she had a lot to say, and all of it's more important than the few leading questions I interjected when we talked.

Take it away, Liz:

I was doing peace work in Cambodia, seeing the effects of landmines there. I learned about Jody Williams and wrote to her, as well as Rae McGrath, who came on behalf of Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights to document the impacts of landmines. So: starting with the very basics of seeing what you’re seeing in the field, then connecting the dots of we have to do something about this, and oh, there are some people trying. Let’s see if we can work together.

I worked with the researcher on the ground to help him do his job so that we could have better information that we could use for advocacy, and then wrote to Jody to see what we could do in Cambodia that other people were doing elsewhere. That was in the early 90s, when they were just starting the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. The war was just ending in Cambodia, but landmines were still killing people. Our approach was multi-faceted. We helped those who were aiding survivors in communities in Cambodia, called for more money and more programs and more support there. We made ties early on with Franca Faita and other workers in a factory Valsella, owned by Fiat, who were at the time making landmines. Working with the Italian Campaign to Ban Landmines, we sent women from Cambodia, so the workers learned what was happening with what they were doing, and women from Italy came to Cambodia. They held demonstrations and protests in Valsella—made banners saying ‘Why do we have to kill to work?’—and got Fiat to stop making landmines.

We made global links with those who were producing the landmines physically (in this case a weapons manufacturer) and politically—countries that were enabling or allowing production or trade—as well as putting pressure on the Cambodian government and local officials. One of the biggest things we in Cambodia had to contribute within the international campaign was the voices of survivors, and people talking for themselves about what it was like living in communities affected by land mines, and demanding it end. We brought Cambodian survivors to negotiations in Geneva, talking about rules of use of when it is ok and not to use land mines. We held demonstrations in front of the Palais des Nations. Survivors and campaigners would be in the streets, in front of their cars, giving them flowers with a message from a survivor. Survivors spoke with media, met with the negotiators, found them in the lunchroom and washrooms. Bringing people who were affected by landmines to political spaces where people were talking about the issue helped moved the discourse from a disarmament one to a humanitarian one.

What was great about the landmine campaign, and is the same now with the new campaign to stop rape in conflict, is the power of people working together with a common objective, and within that, having freedom to do what they want to do, and what works best in their country.  We had a common international plan and goals we wanted to see achieved, and we never left a meeting without a plan for the next phase. But, we wanted to have people develop their own plans in their own countries. A peace march with monks and nuns in Cambodia may be a great tactic there, but not necessarily in Brazil or Colombia or the U.S. So we shared ideas and promoted creativity and encouraged people to do what they thought would work in their countries to tell their decision-makers that they needed to take action. The story of the Italian factory workers inspired some activists in Minnesota, at another weapons production facility, for them invite Cambodians to Minnesota to do similar things. The sharing of strategies and tactics inspires other people to riff on them, and find creative ways to demand action from their political leaders. Whether it's writing their MPs or whether it's organizing demonstrations or shoe piles at the Eiffel Tower or organizing 'freedom from fear' dances to raise money for survivors, whatever sparked their creativity and imagination to help toward these goals, which were so clear in terms of banning the weapon, demining, and supporting survivors, raising money for communities.

Because at the end of the day they're all elected officials, they're accountable to us, and we have to tell them what we want them to do. And how we do that, whether it's a letter or a tweet or whatever, for some it's organizing a demonstration in one of their halls of power or introducing a motion in the parliament or at negotiations with the UN or whatever it is, it all adds up to the power of so many people telling them that it's not acceptable and they want them to do take political action to make it stop. Now.

For the new campaign, in addition to individual and community-based action, national organizations in countries will be working on country-specific strategies. Those may be funding commitments in some countries like ours [Canada], and in other countries may be political and work around ending impunity, following up on specific cases and things like that. While trying to advance prevention of rape in conflict, protection for civilians and rape survivors, and effective prosecution of those responsible, we'll be calling for things like the right to reparations, including medical and psycho-social care, holistic support for survivors and communities, and delivery of court decisions of financial compensation. We’ll be calling out countries whose rape laws inadequately protect and prevent sexual violence. When the international protection mechanism fail women, like in Mali and Syria and so many countries today, we’ll be mobilizing the campaign’s members and influential individual voices to demand more effective measures, following up on specific cases and things like that. Other times it may be holistic support for survivors and communities.

Some national strategies are going to include the introduction of motions in parliaments and country-level specific legislation where it's needed. We’ll also work around implementing the UN five security council resolutions relevant to this campaign.

We’ll be calling on countries who don't have action plans to make national action plans, That’s an official plan of what they're going to do in their country, with targets and specific actions. It’s really important. It sounds boring and people's eyes glaze over at "national action plan" but it is a commitment at a national level that we can hold our leaders accountable to. Activists will continue to push for them and for better ones, ones that include things like engaging civil society in developing the plan, and that include specific actions with timelines and commitments that can be measured. Only 36 countries have national action plans so far. The U.S. just launched its plan in December 2011, and ours here [in Canada] was adopted in 2010. In Africa there are only nine countries that have them.

One of the other strategies is bringing it to regional political bodies—the African Union Summit in January, the summit in Asia in November—activists are organizing to go to these political regional events to advocate for regional action.

Stopping rape in conflict is not the same as “ban land mines now.” The solutions may not be as straightforward as one treaty and everyone sign. But a lot of things are the same: we were told we were idealistic and utopian, and it was never going to happen. The methods and tools we envision are much the same: people getting together from around the world with a common objective and working together. Then make the most of that power of collective political action with strategy and time-bound commitments toward progress. It's the same as if we go back to anti-slavery campaigns or civil rights or the suffragettes. The power of people working together for social and political change and demanding what they want to see of their governments, and using ALL of their creativity and all of  tools in the campaigning toolbox including awareness-raising, lobbying, and nonviolent direct action.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is out with his first campaign ad today, and it's about as bizarre as you would expect.

The ad is reminiscent of Herman Cain's avant-garde commercials (even nabbing the same "any questions" tagline), though thankfully Johnson reserves his destruction for fruit and leaves any innocent animals alone.

It's a nice bit of wrought political theater, but not particularly effective as an ad to introduce Johnson to the public. His face and name don't even appear until a minute into the spot, and then only as a still frame. Typically you'd want to have the candidate actually speak in the video—especially when he's largely an unfamiliar face such as Johnson. The low-budget ad is yet another indication that, despite being well credentialed, Johnson is unlikely to perform much above past libertarian presidential candidates.

Because I devote a fair amount of time to Romney’s dishonest rhetoric—-and the degree to which its ignored by mainstream reporters–it’s worth noting those times when someone shows that the former governor has no clothes. To wit, here’s Phillip Rucker at the Washington Post, on Romney’s response to the attacks on Bain Capital:

“We were able to help create over 100,000 jobs,” Romney said of his tenure at Bain, the venture capital and corporate buyout firm he founded. “On the president’s watch, about 100,000 jobs were lost in the auto industry and auto dealers and auto manufacturers, so he’s hardly one to point a finger.”

It was an unusual line of defense for Romney considering that the Obama administration’s rescue of the auto industry is one the president’s most popular accomplishments, especially in critical midwestern battlegrounds like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The federal bailout of two of the Big Three domestic auto companies has been widely considered a success, and Democrats have attacked Romney for instead advocating a managed bankruptcy in a New York Times op-ed titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” […]

The Post’s Fact Checker determined that Romney’s claim that he created 100,000 jobs at Bain was unproven and untenable. [Emphasis mine]

Romney’s entire campaign is based on the claim that he has what it takes to create jobs, based on his record at Bain. But there’s no way to prove Romney created any jobs at Bain Capital, much less 100,000 of them. Regardless, Romney continues to run with the number, with little pushback from reporters.

Jamelle's hot-off-the-presses cover story on how Romney will govern as a hardcore right-winger irrespective of what he "really" thinks is a must-read. And what's even worse is that this lesson applies beyond budget policy. To address one particularly important point, consider the Supreme Court.

As of 2013, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be an 80-year-old cancer survivor. Stephen Breyer will be 74. Anthony Kennedy will be 76. Replacing even one of these judges with an Alito-style reactionary would have a huge impact on the development of American law that only start with the explicit or implicit overruling of Roe v. Wade, and a Romney who served two terms would probably be able replace all three. Even one term of Romney would probably result in a Supreme Court in which Antonin Scalia—at least until he's replaced with a much younger and even more conservative justice—would have to turn to his right to see the median vote. Trying to downplay the possibility of Romney fixing an ultra-right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for decades, some pundits will inevitably talk not only about Romney's mythical secret moderation, but also about the unpredictability of Supreme Court justices. Expect, in particular, to hear a lot about how Republicans appointed David Souter and Earl Warren and William Brennan.

But these examples are irrelevant to how a contemporary Republican would choose justices. The fact is, judges selected for ideological reasons are extremely predictable. Judges that "disappointed" the presidents who appointed them were inevatably chosen for political rather than ideological reasons. Eisenhower selected Warren (who was able to run for governor of California on the Democratic as well as Republican line) because he made him a promise to help secure the nomination, and he nominated Brennan (a liberal Democrat) to appeal to the Roman Catholic vote. Reagan selected two relatively moderate judges, but O'Connor was nominated to fulfill a campaign promise to put the first woman on the Supreme Court, and Kennedy was Reagan's third choice (as was Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee who authored Roe v. Wade and became quite liberal across the board in his later years on the bench.)

Admittedly, George H.W. Bush probably didn't expect Souter to be as liberal as he was, but the Souter pick ensured that there will never be another one like him. George W. Bush—who was much more trusted by the conservative base that Romney will be—faced an unprecedented revolt from his own party when he nominated Harriet Miers and was forced to withdraw the pick and go with Alito, who had an extensive paper trail proving that he was a down-the-line reactionary (And Miers—who after all was a Texas Republican rather than a New England one—probably wouldn't have been another Souter either). Romney won't be allowed to nominate another Kennedy, let alone another Souter. And, of course, the way Romney will govern with respect to Supreme Court appointments will apply to other appointments as well. From lifetime appointments to federal circuit to cabinet positions to regulatory agencies, key positions will be stocked with wingnuts who will ensure that many of the progressive laws that survive a Romney administration will not be properly enforced. Whether Romney is a secret moderate or not—and there's not actually any evidence that he is—a Romney presidency would have long-term effects that will cause the Reagan administration to look trivial by comparison.

Bill Clinton has emerged as a player in the presidential election, but oddly, not as a surrogate for President Obama. Rather, Mitt Romney is using the former president as a +5 Amulet of Centrism—a way to assert moderate credentials without changing his policies or modifying his rhetoric. This was used to great effect in his speech yesterday, where he decried deficits and disparaged Obama for his “old school” liberalism:

Even a former McGovern campaign worker like President Clinton was signaling to his own Party that Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem.

President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. […] President Obama is an old school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero.

It goes without saying that there’s an implicit aim to adopting President Clinton as an avatar for reasonable liberalism; Romney is presenting himself as the Republican heir to Clinton’s legacy of reform. He will return to the era of small government, and take us away from the failed policies of Obama, who—essentially—becomes the GOP’s analogue to George W. Bush.

This is clever, but there’s an obvious problem—Bill Clinton is still alive, and it’s very easy for him to say “don’t be ridiculous, Obama is just as reasonable as I was.” Indeed, as E.J. Dionne points out in his column today, Obama’s actual policies—and not the fantasy ones devised by Romney—are very close to those pursued by Clinton.

We’ll see what happens with this bit of rhetoric, but if I were Romney, I would back away from this approach, at least for now.

Most of us would agree that Citizens United has been bad for democracy, with corporations and wealthy people now permitted to spend as much as they want to buy the kind of representatives they prefer. But there is one factor that we didn't really anticipate, something that mitigates the harm they can do: it turns out that rich people aren't necessarily that smart with their money.

So during the presidential primaries, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson spent $16.5 million to help out the campaign of Newt Gingrich, whom you might have noticed is not the GOP nominee. And in today's New York Times, we get an interesting story about Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade, who is preparing to spend $10 million to defeat Barack Obama. And what is the magic bullet Mr. Ricketts has located, the zinger that will bring down this incumbent president? Jeremiah Wright! Seriously. Jamelle discussed the racial aspect of this story, but I equally interesting is just how naive this demonstrates that influential people can be. Ricketts is going to spend all that money to "Show the world how Barack Obama's opinions of America and the world were formed ... And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president's formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees." In other words, just about the same thing you could hear every day by listening to Glenn Beck's radio show or tuning in to Fox News.

The proposal suggests that Mr. Ricketts believes the 2008 campaign of Senator John McCain erred in not using images of Mr. Wright against Mr. Obama, who has said that the pastor helped him find Jesus but that he was never present for Mr. Wright’s politically charged sermons. Mr. Obama left the church during the campaign.

Apparently referring to a Wright ad that was produced for the McCain campaign by Mr. Davis's firm but never used, the proposal opens with a quote from Mr. Ricketts: "If the nation had seen that ad, they'd never have elected Barack Obama."

Indeed. If only there had been some press coverage about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election. If only the coverage had reached such a fever pitch that Obama had felt compelled to give a speech specifically about race in America. That would have changed everything, and John McCain would be president today.

This story demonstrates that you can be very rich and care a lot about politics but still have absolutely no clue how campaigns work. Mr. Ricketts seems blinded by his own hatred, sure in his belief that if only Americans get the truth about Obama's sinister background, they'll turn against him. And the people advising him, particularly the admaker Fred Davis who seems to be in charge of this effort, have zero incentive to tell Ricketts what a fool he's being. After all, Davis will get a hefty fee for producing the ads, and he'll also get a percentage of the ad buy, so the more money Ricketts puts behind it, the more money Davis will make (that's the way media consultants work; it's a pretty sweet deal). That means that Davis will tell Ricketts, "This idea of yours is genius! It's totally going to work. We just need to spend a few more million."

As I've noted before, there is no magic television ad that can undo a sitting president running for re-election. That's because people have pretty well-formed opinions about him. You can make a dramatic, surprising character attack against a candidate who isn't particularly well known by the voters, but it just doesn't work for the incumbent. That isn't to say advertising can't have any impact. But it's fairly typical of a rich outsider like Ricketts to think, "The thing about the President I hate the most is the thing that will turn all Americans against him," and if we just show them, they'll all agree.

So he should go ahead. If nothing else, his $10 million will stimulate the economy a bit.

Maybe Republicans aren't so opposed to health care reform after all. After grandstanding against the Affordable Care Act for the past few years, Republicans aren't ready to let the entire bill die should the Supreme Court overturn the law later this summer. Congressional Republicans are crafting a contingency plan to reinstate some of the popular elements of the bill in that scenario, according to Politico. It's a clear indication that the GOP has learned the same lesson as Democrats: while the all-encompassing idea of Obamacare may fair poorly in the polls, voters typically support individual elements of the bill.

The Republicans would reportedly like to maintain the provision that allows young people to stay on their parents' health insurance until they turn 26 and rules that close a donut hole on Medicare's prescription coverage. Most notably, they would also reinstate the ban on insurance companies denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.

That last part reveals why these Republican overtures are not serious policy considerations, but rather grandstanding to protect their image. It is impossible to imagine any scenario where the current crop of GOP House representatives accept the tradeoffs necessary to force insurance companies to accept all applicants. As the law currently stands, the preexisting condition ban and the individual mandate are inseparably tied to one another. Without the mandate, the most rational decision for consumers would be to hold off on purchasing insurance until they become sick. However that would create a spiral of increasing costs, as the only people in the insurance pool would be those who require the highest levels of health expenditures.

Though it was originally a conservative proposal, the right has vilified the individual mandate as the utmost evil of government overreach. The Republicans will most likely point to Obama's own opposition to the mandate during the 2008 presidential campaign. At that time Obama attempted to separate himself from the similar plans offered by his Democratic opponents by suggesting the mandate would be unnecessary. Instead, Obama's campaign suggested most consumers would enter the health insurance market if the government offered high enough subsidies to lower the cost for people who currently struggle to afford coverage. The Affordable Care Act implemented some of those ideas, expanded the range of people covered by Medicaid, and providing subsidies for the middle class that will kick in starting in 2014, but even then the administration was forced to recognize that too many people would sit out if the bill didn't include a mandate. Since Republicans would be unlikely to reinstate those subsidies, they've shutoff the possibility of helping people with preexisting conditions.

In general, I’m not too concerned with civility in politics, but it’s hard not to be shocked by the nastiness and aggression of today’s Republican Party. Congressional Republicans routinely accuse Democrats of treason, or worse, with little rebuke from party leaders. Reliably conservative lawmakers—like Bob Inglis and Dick Lugar—are challenged nonetheless for their insufficient hatred of Democrats. President Obama, as most people know, has been subject to a constellation of outlandish attacks, from false claims about his “foreign” birth to attacks on his patriotism—Mitt Romney, to use a prominent example, often trumpets the falsehood that Obama has gone around the world to apologize for America.

All of this is why I wasn’t surprised to learn that wealthy Republican donors plan to launch a salvo of personal attacks on the president, in order to hurt his standing with a public that still likes him, even if they are divided on his presidency. Writing for The New York Times, Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg provide the details:

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade.

This plan, more or less, is an exercise in race-baiting. Rather than tackle issues or even demogogue his policies, Davis plans to take the road rejected by the McCain campaign, and attempt to build Obama into a scary avatar for everything America fears about African Americans. Yes, it’s despicable, but I also can’t help but find it a little amusing. To wit, as Zeleny and Rutenberg report, the group also plans to hire an “extremely literate conservative African-American” in order to rebuff charges that this is an exercise in racism. Of course! Much in the same way that having a black friend means you can never be a racist, hiring a black person means that all charges of racism are null and void. Behold the totemic power of tokenism!

More seriously, I doubt that this would be effective outside of those people who already dislike Obama for his racial background; as a president whose public image is defined by both family and earnestness, most Americans aren’t going to buy the idea that he’s secretly a Marxist radical, out to exact retribution for past sins.

What this illustrates, more than anything, is the extent to which racialized, anti-Obama conspiracies are in wide circulation among the GOP donor class of wealthy businesspeople. Popular perceptions notwithstanding, there’s nothing about wealth and education that grant immunity to conspiratorial beliefs, and indeed, because the wealthy and educated are more likely to hold strong ideological views and most likely to absorb partisan information, they are excellent targets for partisan misinformation. That this comes with a serving of racism is only a reflection of the race-baiting that is now common to conservative media outlets (see: Rush Limbaugh). Put another way, who else but rich people can afford to spend millions on a plan to relitigate the 2008 election?

One last point: if you accept that wealthy conservatives are the most likely to believe insane things about the president, then you also have to give up hope—at least in the short-term—that the Republican Party will abandon its camp in the right-wing of American politics. Donors are constituents like any other, and they influence the how of representation, as well as the substance. Allen West doesn’t actually have to accuse his colleagues of communism; he can use strong rhetoric and advance conservative beliefs without resorting to slander. But the people want it, and since they have the cash, they get what they want.

The basic odds make it fairly unlikely that the Democrats will maintain their Senate majority. They only hold a narrow 53-47 edge after the 2010 midterms, and the party must defend 23 seats in 2012, compared to just ten for Republicans. Their troubles only increased when moderate Democrats hailing from conservative states—Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad as the most notable—decided that now was the time to retire, all but ceding their spots to the GOP. Every scenario looked doom and gloom for their chances. But then Republicans decided to sabotage those odds. First Olympia Snowe announced her retirement, after growing tired of her party's partisan rancor. Her seat is expected to go to the independent—but Democratic friendly—candidate Angus King. Last week, Indiana Republicans booted out longtime Senator Dick Lugar in favor of a Tea Party challenger, while Nebraskans selected the right wing candidate in their primary earlier this week.

Polling maestro Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight is out with a new projection of the Senate breakdown post-November. If Silver's estimation is right, it will be a nail biter of an election night:

Currently, we project the most likely outcome to be Republicans winning 50 seats, Democrats 49, and Mr. King the seat in Maine. Under those circumstances, the Democrats would retain control of the Senate if Mr. King caucused with them and President Obama won re-election, making Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. the tiebreaking vote. Otherwise, Republicans would control the chamber.

As Silver notes, contested states often tend to swing in one party's favor en masse when the election arrives, but it is not entirely implausible that the presidential election (and thus the vice president's tie-breaking vote) could decide which party holds the Senate majority in 2013.

The defining feature of the Republican presidential primaries was the constant Sturm und Drang over Mitt Romney’s ability to win Republican voters. Pundits claimed that Romney had a “ceiling” with conservatives in the party, and opponents like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum routinely assailed the front-runner as a candidate whose commitment to conservatism was short-lived and inauthentic—a human “Etch A Sketch,” in the words of Romney’s own campaign spokesperson. 

But when Romney locked up the nomination after months of bitter fighting, the party promptly came together behind him. Santorum, Romney’s main competitor, dropped out of the race on April 10. One week later, polls showed that 90 percent of Republican voters supported Romney against Barack Obama—identical to the number of Democrats who said they backed the president.

What drove the quick embrace of the former Massachusetts governor? It wasn’t love; conservatives aren’t thrilled with Romney, even as they prepare to support him. But they aren’t objecting to a marriage of convenience. Grover Norquist, founder of the anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, explained Romney’s acceptability in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass,” he said. “We don’t need someone to think. We need someone with enough digits on one hand to hold a pen.”

Romney’s appeal is that he can win a general election. The right has controlled the Republican Party for years, and all it needs is a titular leader to implement its policies. If conservatives could elect a corpse, they would, but because the Constitution requires a warm body, they’ll make do with Romney. What they want is a front man for their ideas, and throughout his campaign, Romney has been happy to oblige. His domestic-policy proposals are perfectly attuned to right-wing orthodoxy: “Repeal Obama-care.” “Repeal Dodd-Frank.” “Eliminate Title X family--planning programs benefiting groups like Planned Parenthood.” “Return federal programs to the states.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as pandering. Many political observers expect Romney to adjust his rhetoric for the general election. But the presumptive nominee has done nothing to moderate his message for the fall. In a speech to the National Rifle Association on April 13, Romney held on to the conservatism he espoused during the primaries. “Instead of expanding the government,” he declared, “I will shrink it. Instead of raising taxes, I will cut them. Instead of adding regulations, I will scale them back.” 

Romney is running for president as a right-wing Republican with right-wing ideas, and it is absurd to think that he would suddenly revert to the Mitt who governed Massachusetts. Even if he wanted to, he would first have to contend with a conservative movement that sees itself as the dominant partner in this relationship. “If the Republicans take the Senate, I definitely think you’ll see Romney have to follow what the House and Senate are doing,” says Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, one of the largest organizations in the Tea Party orbit. “Our goal is to drive that, so that we have more conservatives in the Senate, and we’re setting the agenda.”

If conservatives expect to set the agenda—and if Romney, as president, wants to maintain their support—then he can’t govern from the center. Nor does he plan to.

Romney’s agenda mirrors that of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand acolyte and anti-tax crusader from Wisconsin who, over the past two years, has crafted the blueprint for Republican domestic policy. “As president,” Romney has said, “I look forward to working with Chairman Ryan and his House Republican colleagues to pass bold reforms that restore America’s promise.”

What do those reforms look like?

On the tax side, Romney promises a litany of tax reductions, beginning with a permanent extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts. Individual income-tax rates would go down, capital-gains taxes would diminish, the estate tax would vanish, and corporate taxes would drop to 25 percent (from the current level of 35 percent). He has vowed to phase out every tax policy related to both the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act. 

“By reducing the tax on the next dollar of income earned by all taxpayers, we will encourage hard work, risk-taking, and productivity by allowing Americans to keep more of what they earn,” the former governor said in a February speech in Detroit. In an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, Romney made a bolder claim: His tax plan could “create 2.5 million jobs in less than two years.” 

The campaign has not provided evidence for either assertion, and past experience suggests that tax reductions are not good medicine for job growth. The Bush cuts, for example, were followed by the slowest job expansion since World War II. Although the economic situation is dramatically worse than it was when Bush took office, Romney intends to reduce taxes even more for high-income earners. You could plausibly say that Romney intends to grow the economy with the old-time magic of trickle-down economics. 

He makes no attempt to square the circle on tax cuts and deficits. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute–Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, Romney’s plan would add tremendously to the deficit. Extending the Bush cuts would cost the federal government $480 billion per year; Romney’s additional “tax relief” would cost another $420 billion. Under a Romney presidency, the federal government would lose $9 trillion in revenue over the next decade in order to lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

***

To make up for the lost revenue, Romney has said that he will eliminate the mortgage-interest deduction for higher-income earners as well as deductions for state and local taxes. At most, however, that will raise $31 billion, a minuscule sum by comparison.

Romney’s tax plan excels in one way: exacerbating income inequality. As measured by the Gini Index, a comprehensive and widely used measure of income inequality, the United States ranks near the worst of developed countries in terms of inequality. The wealthiest Americans have seen their incomes explode over the last decade, to the point where the top 1 percent of households earn close to a quarter of all income. 

The federal tax code is directly related to the level of income inequality. A progressive tax code, which reduces the after-tax income of wealthy Americans by a greater share than that of their lower--income counterparts, bends inequality downward. Flatter taxes, by contrast, tend to maintain the pre-tax distribution of income. 

Romney’s plan drastically flattens the tax code. It would decrease the top rate to 28 percent and yield more than 6 percent in additional after-tax income for the wealthiest Americans. At the same time, the burden for everyone else would go up, because Romney plans to end stimulus-related tax breaks for working and middle-class Americans. He consistently says that he won’t “apologize” for his wealth. What he will do, however, is keep wealth with the wealthy. 

Like his tax proposals, Romney’s spending plan flows out of his broader diagnosis of the economy: High taxes reduce economic freedom, and high spending keeps the economy from flourishing. In his words, “This administration thinks our economy is struggling because the stimulus was too small. The truth is we’re struggling because our government is too big.”

The broad strokes of his spending plan (as well as Paul Ryan’s most recent budget) were inspired by “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” a pledge crafted by the Tea Party group Let Freedom Ring. The pledge, which Romney signed, asked candidates to reduce the budget, cap federal spending (Romney says he’ll limit it to 20 percent of gross domestic product, down from 23 percent), and pass a balanced-budget amendment. 

This isn’t negotiable. House Republicans passed a “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan last summer, and conservatives are counting on Romney to get it through Congress, even if it requires valuable political capital. “I expect him to champion ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance,’ and I expect him to drive it through Congress,” says Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring.

***

Since Romney’s tax proposal would cost billions of dollars in revenue, lawmakers would have to do a tremendous amount of slashing to meet his goals. In his speech to the American Society of News Editors on April 3, President Obama minced no words about what this budget would mean. “It is thinly veiled social Darwinism,” he said. Starting in 2014, Obama said, more than 200,000 children would be eliminated from Head Start. Two million mothers and children would be kicked out of programs that ensure them access to healthy food. National parks would close, regulators would be fired, and funding for medical research would end.

After making these remarks, Obama was accused of election-year fearmongering. But the truth is that the president might have understated the extent to which Romney has proposed a radical attack on the basic functions of government. 

Romney wants to set defense spending at 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—slightly higher than it is already. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, if lawmakers were to set defense spending at 4 percent and enact Romney’s tax reductions but not balance the budget, they would have to cut all non-defense programs—including Social Security and Medicare—by an average of 19.6 percent in 2016 in order to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP. Overall, under those parameters, government would shrink by $6.5 trillion over eight years. 

This is the least Romney’s plan would do. As Obama warned, it would have a devastating effect on safety-net programs. The reductions to food stamps would throw millions out of the program. Disabled veterans would lose their payments, and government would have to gut benefits for the poor and disabled. Hundreds of thousands would be pushed to the furthest depths of poverty. If you include Romney’s promise to protect Social Security and Medicare—a nod to the Republican Party’s graying base—you would have no choice but to double the decreases to the non-defense discretionary budget, which is everything the government spends after Social Security, Medicare, and the military.

To meet all of Romney’s fiscal goals—and a balanced budget—policymakers would have to make the most draconian cuts in the nation’s history. Over eight years, they would have to slash $10 trillion from the non-defense discretionary budget, or a whopping 81 percent. 

***

This would pay for Romney’s large tax cuts for the rich—with a little left over—but the cost to ordinary Americans would be catastrophic. Pell grants? Gone. Aid to needy families? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Environmental protection? Gone. Food stamps? Gone. Unemployment insurance? Gone. Under Romney, the federal government would return to the skeletal state of the pre–New Deal era. What’s more, we could say goodbye to an economic recovery. The shock from these measures would cost the economy more than four million jobs through 2014. In describing this bloodbath, Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote that “the ensuing increase in poverty and destitution would almost certainly surpass anything in our country’s recent history.” The effect on economic mobility would be just as disastrous. Already, upward mobility in the U.S. has fallen below European levels.

On the campaign trail, Romney has repeatedly attacked social programs as government “dependency,” promising instead to create an “opportunity society” with lower taxes and small government. But federal redistributive programs have been key in helping citizens get ahead. By supporting low-income families, providing children with health care and early education, rewarding the work of lower earners, and making college more affordable, the federal government provides a foundation for people to better themselves.  

Paul Ryan has famously called for a “social safety net, not a hammock.” He has a kindred spirit in the Republicans’ presidential standard-bearer. Romney’s plans would shred the safety net and leave most Americans in a world where mobility is a long shot and poverty a constant presence.

It’s not hard to see why many Americans associate Mitt Romney with moderation. As governor, he pioneered health-care reform, supported cap-and-trade climate legislation, accommodated Massachusetts’s liberal abortion laws, and stood by as the state legalized same-sex marriage. His centrist image was reinforced in this year’s primaries, with Newt Gingrich attacking him as a “Massachusetts moderate,” Rick Santorum equating him to Barack Obama, and Jon Huntsman—whose demeanor belied a strongly conservative record—describing him as a “well-oiled weather vane.” 

Most pundits will grant that Romney is a conservative. But they maintain that, if elected, he’ll govern as a problem solver rather than an ideologue. It’s what he once was, and for them, it’s what he still is. Democratic cries of radicalism are just the usual pabulum of a presidential election. Obama “is building a case for re-election that rests almost exclusively on the evils of the opposition,” Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times. 

It’s true that, under the right circumstances, Romney could revert to the pragmatism he’s eschewed while running for president. If Democrats control the Senate, as they did in the first years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Romney would have to accommodate their presence, lest he do nothing at all. 

The real world could also intrude. If unemployment remains around 8 percent—as projected by the Obama administration—Romney might need to adopt fiscal stimulus in addition to his planned tax cuts. His campaign team, however, insists that wouldn’t be necessary. “The positive stimulative effects of permanent tax cuts are significant enough,” says Kevin Hassett, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and a Romney economic adviser. 

You might even count on a little partisan pragmatism from congressional Republicans. “Don’t assume that a Republican couldn’t get away with spending increases,” says budget analyst Stan Collender, a former staffer on both the House and Senate budget committees. “In much the same way that Republicans can increase the deficit in ways Democrats can’t, Romney coming in and saying we need to get unemployment down could easily [lead to] a stimulus package with spending increases that Republicans would never agree to with a Democratic president.” For evidence, look no further than the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which was crafted by congressional Republicans, supported by GOP leaders (including Paul Ryan), and signed by President George W. Bush.

But the Republican Party is a different beast than it was four years ago. With the rise of the Tea Party and the transformative 2010 midterms, Republicans have become openly hostile to compromise and pragmatic problem solving. They believe in unalloyed ideology as a winning electoral strategy. Romney can try to persuade them to yield, but it’s hard to imagine that his efforts would be able to sway lawmakers who were willing to let the country default last summer just to prove a point.

Moreover, Mitt Romney has changed. The Massachusetts moderate disappeared six years ago, when he first began his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The Mitt Romney of today has been more than clear about his goals. He wants low taxes, smaller government, a weaker safety net, and a larger military. His rhetoric might change to meet the demands of the general election, but his policies will stay the same. Even if he wanted to edge toward the center, he’s hemmed in by right-wing activists who will demand results, and congressional Republicans who expect to take the lead in policymaking. “We’re not a cheerleading squad,” Louisiana Republican Jeff Landry told The New York Times. “We’re the conductor. We’re supposed to drive the train.” 

These aren’t idle expectations. If Romney wins the White House, it’s a sure bet that Republicans will also win the Senate—Democrats are defending a disproportionately large number of seats this year—and maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. More important, Romney’s agenda is almost entirely fiscal: cuts to taxes, cuts to entitlements, and cuts to domestic programs. All of this can be passed through budget reconciliation, which makes it immune to a filibuster. Republicans could force through their ideas without a single Democratic vote.

This gets to the overarching flaw with the belief that Romney will govern from the center-right. Political pragmatism isn’t a stance in itself; it’s a means to particular goals. Obama’s pragmatism, for example, was exemplified in the Affordable Care Act, which traded giveaways to insurance companies in return for universal health insurance. 

The modern Republican Party isn’t trying to build a fairer or more equitable society, and it doesn’t care for the interests of low- or middle-income Americans. To borrow from Paul Ryan, it stands for the “makers” against the “takers.” It aims to gut government and give the spoils to the rich. In a sense, it seeks to revive the age of Calvin Coolidge, when government was small, inequality high, and the economy an exclusive playground for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. If Mitt Romney is elected, the GOP will have a president who shares that vision. 

When Romney and Obama cast this election as a choice between two competing visions, they’re right. The 2012 campaign isn’t a case of overblown rhetoric and minor differences; the winner of this battle will either protect the future American welfare state or set it on a path to destruction. His years as governor notwithstanding, Romney has fought for the better part of a decade to lead this rightward shift. If elected, his pragmatism will serve those goals. To expect anything else is to believe a fantasy.

The defining feature of the Republican presidential primaries was the constant Sturm und Drang over Mitt Romney’s ability to win Republican voters. Pundits claimed that Romney had a “ceiling” with conservatives in the party, and opponents like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum routinely assailed the front-runner as a candidate whose commitment to conservatism was short-lived and inauthentic—a human “Etch A Sketch,” in the words of Romney’s own campaign spokesperson. 

But when Romney locked up the nomination after months of bitter fighting, the party promptly came together behind him. Santorum, Romney’s main competitor, dropped out of the race on April 10. One week later, polls showed that 90 percent of Republican voters supported Romney against Barack Obama—identical to the number of Democrats who said they backed the president.

What drove the quick embrace of the former Massachusetts governor? It wasn’t love; conservatives aren’t thrilled with Romney, even as they prepare to support him. But they aren’t objecting to a marriage of convenience. Grover Norquist, founder of the anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, explained Romney’s acceptability in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass,” he said. “We don’t need someone to think. We need someone with enough digits on one hand to hold a pen.”

Romney’s appeal is that he can win a general election. The right has controlled the Republican Party for years, and all it needs is a titular leader to implement its policies. If conservatives could elect a corpse, they would, but because the Constitution requires a warm body, they’ll make do with Romney. What they want is a front man for their ideas, and throughout his campaign, Romney has been happy to oblige. His domestic-policy proposals are perfectly attuned to right-wing orthodoxy: “Repeal Obama-care.” “Repeal Dodd-Frank.” “Eliminate Title X family--planning programs benefiting groups like Planned Parenthood.” “Return federal programs to the states.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as pandering. Many political observers expect Romney to adjust his rhetoric for the general election. But the presumptive nominee has done nothing to moderate his message for the fall. In a speech to the National Rifle Association on April 13, Romney held on to the conservatism he espoused during the primaries. “Instead of expanding the government,” he declared, “I will shrink it. Instead of raising taxes, I will cut them. Instead of adding regulations, I will scale them back.” 

Romney is running for president as a right-wing Republican with right-wing ideas, and it is absurd to think that he would suddenly revert to the Mitt who governed Massachusetts. Even if he wanted to, he would first have to contend with a conservative movement that sees itself as the dominant partner in this relationship. “If the Republicans take the Senate, I definitely think you’ll see Romney have to follow what the House and Senate are doing,” says Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for FreedomWorks, one of the largest organizations in the Tea Party orbit. “Our goal is to drive that, so that we have more conservatives in the Senate, and we’re setting the agenda.”

If conservatives expect to set the agenda—and if Romney, as president, wants to maintain their support—then he can’t govern from the center. Nor does he plan to.

Romney’s agenda mirrors that of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the Ayn Rand acolyte and anti-tax crusader from Wisconsin who, over the past two years, has crafted the blueprint for Republican domestic policy. “As president,” Romney has said, “I look forward to working with Chairman Ryan and his House Republican colleagues to pass bold reforms that restore America’s promise.”

What do those reforms look like?

On the tax side, Romney promises a litany of tax reductions, beginning with a permanent extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts. Individual income-tax rates would go down, capital-gains taxes would diminish, the estate tax would vanish, and corporate taxes would drop to 25 percent (from the current level of 35 percent). He has vowed to phase out every tax policy related to both the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act. 

“By reducing the tax on the next dollar of income earned by all taxpayers, we will encourage hard work, risk-taking, and productivity by allowing Americans to keep more of what they earn,” the former governor said in a February speech in Detroit. In an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, Romney made a bolder claim: His tax plan could “create 2.5 million jobs in less than two years.” 

The campaign has not provided evidence for either assertion, and past experience suggests that tax reductions are not good medicine for job growth. The Bush cuts, for example, were followed by the slowest job expansion since World War II. Although the economic situation is dramatically worse than it was when Bush took office, Romney intends to reduce taxes even more for high-income earners. You could plausibly say that Romney intends to grow the economy with the old-time magic of trickle-down economics. 

He makes no attempt to square the circle on tax cuts and deficits. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute–Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, Romney’s plan would add tremendously to the deficit. Extending the Bush cuts would cost the federal government $480 billion per year; Romney’s additional “tax relief” would cost another $420 billion. Under a Romney presidency, the federal government would lose $9 trillion in revenue over the next decade in order to lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

***

To make up for the lost revenue, Romney has said that he will eliminate the mortgage-interest deduction for higher-income earners as well as deductions for state and local taxes. At most, however, that will raise $31 billion, a minuscule sum by comparison.

Romney’s tax plan excels in one way: exacerbating income inequality. As measured by the Gini Index, a comprehensive and widely used measure of income inequality, the United States ranks near the worst of developed countries in terms of inequality. The wealthiest Americans have seen their incomes explode over the last decade, to the point where the top 1 percent of households earn close to a quarter of all income. 

The federal tax code is directly related to the level of income inequality. A progressive tax code, which reduces the after-tax income of wealthy Americans by a greater share than that of their lower--income counterparts, bends inequality downward. Flatter taxes, by contrast, tend to maintain the pre-tax distribution of income. 

Romney’s plan drastically flattens the tax code. It would decrease the top rate to 28 percent and yield more than 6 percent in additional after-tax income for the wealthiest Americans. At the same time, the burden for everyone else would go up, because Romney plans to end stimulus-related tax breaks for working and middle-class Americans. He consistently says that he won’t “apologize” for his wealth. What he will do, however, is keep wealth with the wealthy. 

Like his tax proposals, Romney’s spending plan flows out of his broader diagnosis of the economy: High taxes reduce economic freedom, and high spending keeps the economy from flourishing. In his words, “This administration thinks our economy is struggling because the stimulus was too small. The truth is we’re struggling because our government is too big.”

The broad strokes of his spending plan (as well as Paul Ryan’s most recent budget) were inspired by “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” a pledge crafted by the Tea Party group Let Freedom Ring. The pledge, which Romney signed, asked candidates to reduce the budget, cap federal spending (Romney says he’ll limit it to 20 percent of gross domestic product, down from 23 percent), and pass a balanced-budget amendment. 

This isn’t negotiable. House Republicans passed a “Cut, Cap, and Balance” plan last summer, and conservatives are counting on Romney to get it through Congress, even if it requires valuable political capital. “I expect him to champion ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance,’ and I expect him to drive it through Congress,” says Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring.

***

Since Romney’s tax proposal would cost billions of dollars in revenue, lawmakers would have to do a tremendous amount of slashing to meet his goals. In his speech to the American Society of News Editors on April 3, President Obama minced no words about what this budget would mean. “It is thinly veiled social Darwinism,” he said. Starting in 2014, Obama said, more than 200,000 children would be eliminated from Head Start. Two million mothers and children would be kicked out of programs that ensure them access to healthy food. National parks would close, regulators would be fired, and funding for medical research would end.

After making these remarks, Obama was accused of election-year fearmongering. But the truth is that the president might have understated the extent to which Romney has proposed a radical attack on the basic functions of government. 

Romney wants to set defense spending at 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—slightly higher than it is already. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, if lawmakers were to set defense spending at 4 percent and enact Romney’s tax reductions but not balance the budget, they would have to cut all non-defense programs—including Social Security and Medicare—by an average of 19.6 percent in 2016 in order to cap spending at 20 percent of GDP. Overall, under those parameters, government would shrink by $6.5 trillion over eight years. 

This is the least Romney’s plan would do. As Obama warned, it would have a devastating effect on safety-net programs. The reductions to food stamps would throw millions out of the program. Disabled veterans would lose their payments, and government would have to gut benefits for the poor and disabled. Hundreds of thousands would be pushed to the furthest depths of poverty. If you include Romney’s promise to protect Social Security and Medicare—a nod to the Republican Party’s graying base—you would have no choice but to double the decreases to the non-defense discretionary budget, which is everything the government spends after Social Security, Medicare, and the military.

To meet all of Romney’s fiscal goals—and a balanced budget—policymakers would have to make the most draconian cuts in the nation’s history. Over eight years, they would have to slash $10 trillion from the non-defense discretionary budget, or a whopping 81 percent. 

***

This would pay for Romney’s large tax cuts for the rich—with a little left over—but the cost to ordinary Americans would be catastrophic. Pell grants? Gone. Aid to needy families? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Environmental protection? Gone. Food stamps? Gone. Unemployment insurance? Gone. Under Romney, the federal government would return to the skeletal state of the pre–New Deal era. What’s more, we could say goodbye to an economic recovery. The shock from these measures would cost the economy more than four million jobs through 2014. In describing this bloodbath, Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote that “the ensuing increase in poverty and destitution would almost certainly surpass anything in our country’s recent history.” The effect on economic mobility would be just as disastrous. Already, upward mobility in the U.S. has fallen below European levels.

On the campaign trail, Romney has repeatedly attacked social programs as government “dependency,” promising instead to create an “opportunity society” with lower taxes and small government. But federal redistributive programs have been key in helping citizens get ahead. By supporting low-income families, providing children with health care and early education, rewarding the work of lower earners, and making college more affordable, the federal government provides a foundation for people to better themselves.  

Paul Ryan has famously called for a “social safety net, not a hammock.” He has a kindred spirit in the Republicans’ presidential standard-bearer. Romney’s plans would shred the safety net and leave most Americans in a world where mobility is a long shot and poverty a constant presence.

It’s not hard to see why many Americans associate Mitt Romney with moderation. As governor, he pioneered health-care reform, supported cap-and-trade climate legislation, accommodated Massachusetts’s liberal abortion laws, and stood by as the state legalized same-sex marriage. His centrist image was reinforced in this year’s primaries, with Newt Gingrich attacking him as a “Massachusetts moderate,” Rick Santorum equating him to Barack Obama, and Jon Huntsman—whose demeanor belied a strongly conservative record—describing him as a “well-oiled weather vane.” 

Most pundits will grant that Romney is a conservative. But they maintain that, if elected, he’ll govern as a problem solver rather than an ideologue. It’s what he once was, and for them, it’s what he still is. Democratic cries of radicalism are just the usual pabulum of a presidential election. Obama “is building a case for re-election that rests almost exclusively on the evils of the opposition,” Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times. 

It’s true that, under the right circumstances, Romney could revert to the pragmatism he’s eschewed while running for president. If Democrats control the Senate, as they did in the first years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Romney would have to accommodate their presence, lest he do nothing at all. 

The real world could also intrude. If unemployment remains around 8 percent—as projected by the Obama administration—Romney might need to adopt fiscal stimulus in addition to his planned tax cuts. His campaign team, however, insists that wouldn’t be necessary. “The positive stimulative effects of permanent tax cuts are significant enough,” says Kevin Hassett, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and a Romney economic adviser. 

You might even count on a little partisan pragmatism from congressional Republicans. “Don’t assume that a Republican couldn’t get away with spending increases,” says budget analyst Stan Collender, a former staffer on both the House and Senate budget committees. “In much the same way that Republicans can increase the deficit in ways Democrats can’t, Romney coming in and saying we need to get unemployment down could easily [lead to] a stimulus package with spending increases that Republicans would never agree to with a Democratic president.” For evidence, look no further than the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which was crafted by congressional Republicans, supported by GOP leaders (including Paul Ryan), and signed by President George W. Bush.

But the Republican Party is a different beast than it was four years ago. With the rise of the Tea Party and the transformative 2010 midterms, Republicans have become openly hostile to compromise and pragmatic problem solving. They believe in unalloyed ideology as a winning electoral strategy. Romney can try to persuade them to yield, but it’s hard to imagine that his efforts would be able to sway lawmakers who were willing to let the country default last summer just to prove a point.

Moreover, Mitt Romney has changed. The Massachusetts moderate disappeared six years ago, when he first began his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The Mitt Romney of today has been more than clear about his goals. He wants low taxes, smaller government, a weaker safety net, and a larger military. His rhetoric might change to meet the demands of the general election, but his policies will stay the same. Even if he wanted to edge toward the center, he’s hemmed in by right-wing activists who will demand results, and congressional Republicans who expect to take the lead in policymaking. “We’re not a cheerleading squad,” Louisiana Republican Jeff Landry told The New York Times. “We’re the conductor. We’re supposed to drive the train.” 

These aren’t idle expectations. If Romney wins the White House, it’s a sure bet that Republicans will also win the Senate—Democrats are defending a disproportionately large number of seats this year—and maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. More important, Romney’s agenda is almost entirely fiscal: cuts to taxes, cuts to entitlements, and cuts to domestic programs. All of this can be passed through budget reconciliation, which makes it immune to a filibuster. Republicans could force through their ideas without a single Democratic vote.

This gets to the overarching flaw with the belief that Romney will govern from the center-right. Political pragmatism isn’t a stance in itself; it’s a means to particular goals. Obama’s pragmatism, for example, was exemplified in the Affordable Care Act, which traded giveaways to insurance companies in return for universal health insurance. 

The modern Republican Party isn’t trying to build a fairer or more equitable society, and it doesn’t care for the interests of low- or middle-income Americans. To borrow from Paul Ryan, it stands for the “makers” against the “takers.” It aims to gut government and give the spoils to the rich. In a sense, it seeks to revive the age of Calvin Coolidge, when government was small, inequality high, and the economy an exclusive playground for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. If Mitt Romney is elected, the GOP will have a president who shares that vision. 

When Romney and Obama cast this election as a choice between two competing visions, they’re right. The 2012 campaign isn’t a case of overblown rhetoric and minor differences; the winner of this battle will either protect the future American welfare state or set it on a path to destruction. His years as governor notwithstanding, Romney has fought for the better part of a decade to lead this rightward shift. If elected, his pragmatism will serve those goals. To expect anything else is to believe a fantasy.

As we know, Mitt Romney is not all that likeable. Now Mike Huckabee, there's a likeable guy. He used to say (and maybe still does) that he's a conservative, but he's not angry about it. It was a clever line, positing himself as the happy warrior and other Republicans as needlessly unpleasant. Huckabee has an easy smile and a friendly laugh. He plays bass. He invites liberals on his television and radio shows to have respectful discussions about issues. So how do we interpret it when Huckabee allows fundraising letters to be sent out under his name that say things like this:

"Listen, you're a person of faith and so am I. In his administration and now on his re-election campaign, President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics."

Yeesh. Should this lead us to change our opinion of Huckabee? Or can you be a likeable guy and a vicious partisan at the same time? Now maybe Huckabee never saw the letter, but I doubt it. It's not like he's running a corporation with 50,000 employees that puts out hundreds of documents every day. And honestly, I always found Huckabee to be a contradiction, someone with a pleasant persona and some decidedly unpleasant views. But this is a good reminder that we shouldn't substitute our impressions of someone's manner for a judgment about how they'll perform in their public duties.

This works in the opposite direction, too. Let's take Rick Santorum. His views on just about everything are pretty much what Mike Huckabee's are. He got a lot of attention for his harshly judgmental opinions about gay people, but I can't remember Huckabee ever saying anything substantively different. The reason Santorum stands out is that he is a deeply unpleasant person. He always looks like he just stepped in dog poop, the dog poop being the moral sewer that is American culture. You can see him tense up when he's confronted by people who disagrees with him, while Huckabee smiles and laughs, disarming people with his affability. But they both believe the same things. I doubt a Huckabee presidency would have been much different from a Santorum presidency.

It's easy to get this kind of misleading impression about someone, particularly because figuring out the substance of what someone believes can be a lengthy and tedious process, but we're all very good at making quick judgments about whether or not we like a person. And the consequences can be serious. You might remember that when John Roberts got nominated to the Supreme Court, he was roundly praised for being so personable and reasonable. He smiled and spoke slowly and carefully. He talked in baseball metaphors. Everything about his manner made him seem moderate and thoughtful. And in the end, he turned out to be the very definition of a radical conservative judicial activist.

We've been talking this week about ending sexual violence in conflict, both why it's an achievable goal, and why it's one that affects you. Now I'm going to get a little personal. 

I'm a survivor of sexual violence. The details of what happened to me are unimportant to this story, but it's important to me that you know. The experience politicized me, and my anti-sexual-violence activism has taken a lot of forms over the decades. I've taught self-defense, written (and successfully changed) institutional policies, performed educational theater, marched and protested, walk-a-thonned, facilitated infinite "discussion groups," and written what must at this point be hundreds of thousands of words on the subject. And over that time, collaborating and conversing with all kinds of people doing overlapping work, I've slowly come to understand that we can't end the global public health, security, and human rights crisis that is rape without changing the sexual culture that enables it to flourish. My first book, the anthology Yes Means Yes, is all about this idea. And my second book goes even further afield, centering on sexual liberation and focusing less specifically on preventing sexual violence.

I've caught a lot of flak for this approach along the way, much of which rolls off my back at this point. The kind that really pains me is when people claim that my insistence on talking about sexual freedom minimizes the reality of "serious" rape. That when I say we should all have the right to voluntarily do whatever we like with our own sexuality, and, as long as we’re not hurting anyone else, be free of shame, blame, and fear, it’s missing the point. They say that my insistence that we should all be free to take a man home with us, fool around with him, and still expect him not to force our legs open and penetrate us without our consent, that this somehow does damage to the cause of women who’ve been raped by a stranger, or in conflict.

Which is the frame of mind in which I received an invitation last year to attend the Nobel Women's Initiative’s conference on the possibility of ending sexual violence in conflict. It was this conference—attended by 130 women activists, security experts, academics, journalists, and corporate leaders from 30 countries, as well as Nobel Peace Laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, and Mairead Maguire—that set the stage for the global campaign NWI has just launched.

Rape in conflict was not at the time anything resembling an area of expertise for me, so I was more than a little nervous about being worthy of my place at the table. I was also incredibly anxious that the survivors in the room would consider me worse than a lightweight: they'd consider me a traitor. How could I be worrying about our right to judgment-free sexuality when the Burmese army is systemically raping its citizens with total impunity?

The conference was an education in so many ways. For one, it taught me to hope. Being in a room full of women who know how to change the world and are hell-bent on doing it can have that effect. As did the practical strategy conversations we had throughout the week, breaking down how we can get from here to a whole different kind of world, one in which women are full and equal citizens, not a battleground where men fight.

Another thing I learned in that comically phallic Canadian lodge where we met is this: survivors of the most brutal armed rapes care about sexual liberation, too. Surely not all of them—it's hard to say anything universal about a group this gut-wrenchingly vast. But not a single survivor I spoke with thought talking about sexual politics was frivolous or privileged.

And really, why would they? One of the reasons that rape is such an effective tactic for so many armies and militias is because it rips at the fabric of a community in ways that other forms of violence just don't. Know why rape is different? Because of how often survivors of even government-sponsored rape are slut-shamed by their communities, rejected and thrown out by their families and husbands, have their children shunned, and worse. Why does this happen? Because across the globe, we still seem to believe that a) women who have sex, especially outside of heterosexual marriage, are worthless, even dangerous and b) that rape is always sex, because the victims always wanted it. They always could have fought harder or done something different if they didn't. It's always our fault if a penis or anything else invades our body, whether we invited someone home and then dared to set a boundary with him, or whether we were abducted by soldiers.

The conversations I had at that conference were off the record, so I can’t share them with you. But examples of slut-shaming and sexualized victim-blaming in conflict aren’t hard to find, whether they’re used as deliberate propaganda tools, as when Hutu media repeatedly portrayed Tutsi women as “sexual weapons” during the Rwandan genocide, thereby simultaneously creating incentive and justification for raping them, or in this harrowing but too-common story from Libya:

“Mohamed … said he heard directly from five separate male heads of nearby households and close friends that some of their daughters and wives had been raped by Qaddafi forces. One father confided in Mohamed that his three daughters aged 15, 17, and 18 had gone missing after Qaddafi troops arrived in Tomina. They returned to the family in late April and told their father that they had been raped in the Alwadi Alahdar elementary school for three consecutive days. In what is known as an ‘honor killing,’ Mohamed related to PHR investigators, this father slit each of his daughters’ throats with a knife that day and killed them."

You can also read my live-blogged impressions from the conference session that most directly dealt with these issues, which teased out the ways cultural sexual taboos prevent victims from speaking up to access support or justice. This includes, in some countries, laws against adultery. See my point b) three paragraphs up: rape is always considered to be sex, because of endemic, cross-cultural, sexualized victim blaming. 

I’m not trying to make false equivalencies. Of course being kidnapped and gang-raped by soldiers isn’t the same experience as being raped by some guy you took home after a party. But pretending they have nothing in common is just another way of dividing us, yet again making rape in conflict seem like an "Over There Problem." It also erases a crucial fact, probably the most difficult one we must address if we’re going to really end rape in conflict, or anywhere: rape as a social phenomenon is inextricably tied to the idea that women’s sexuality is dangerous, and must be controlled.  That our bodies are not for us, and that we can’t be trusted with them or about them. That we are not fully human, and we don’t have the same right to freedom, security, pleasure, and bodily autonomy that men do.

This isn’t just a philosophical point. Industrialized Western politicians and diplomats often use “cultural differences” as a reason to turn a blind eye to the sexualized atrocities I’ve been describing here. If we’re going to make any progress toward that better world we envisioned last year in the Canadian countryside, we need to figure out how to make them see that the cultures are really not so different.

John shoots down David Brooks’s claim that “If you look at the fundamentals, the president should be getting crushed right now.” John points out (as does Ezra Klein) that if you look at the fundamentals, you’d expect a close election. OK, there are lots of ways of looking at politics, elections, and the economy, and I’m sure that some forecasts give Obama a bit lead. But that’s hardly a consensus reading of the fundamentals. The more parsimonious reading here is that Brooks was (a) misinformed and (b) didn’t know with whom to talk to get informed.

I’m reminded of the statements last December from second-string pundit Gregg Easterbrook that (a) if Newt Gingrich were to become the Republican nominee, he’d have a 10 percent chance of beating Obama, and (b) “If I am Barack Obama, I want to run against Mitt Romney.”

Easterbrook didn’t seem to realize that if you put these two pieces together, you get the claim that Romney has less than a 10 percent chance of winning. (Intrade currently has Romney at 40 percent. At the time of Easterbrook’s post, Intrade had Romney with a 33 percent chance of being elected president in 2012, unconditional on the results of the Republican nomination.)

I have no objection to Brooks arguing that the political science models are wrong, just as there’s nothing wrong with Easterbrook arguing that the punters on Intrade are deluded. But I’d like to see them make the actual argument, to confront the implications of what they’re saying.

One aspect of innumeracy is seeing numbers as words, as rhetorical expressions rather than as quantities that can be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided. That’s what’s going on when Brooks talks about the fundamentals without looking, when Easterbrook throws out a bunch of predictions without checking their coherence, or when Reid Hastie thinks there’s a there’s a 20 percent chance “that a massive flood will occur sometime in the next year and drown more than 1,000 Americans.”

Also, deadline pressure. These guys don’t get to blog whenever they want, like we do. And they’re not rewarded for making sense, they’re rewarded for getting attention. Maybe even this sort of attention is ok for them!

In the last few years, many different kinds of communication technologies have been democratized. For instance, up until not too long ago, making a film that didn't look amateurish was impossible without a whole bunch of equipment whose expense made it out of reach for almost everyone, not to mention the technical expertise required. But today, you can buy a professional-quality HD video camera for a couple thousand dollars and video editing software like Apple's Final Cut Pro for a couple hundred, and presto, you can make what looks to be a "real" movie. That means that a kid with a dream to be the next Steven Spielberg can see that dream realized. It also means that a crazy person with a conspiracy theory can see his dream realized.

Which brings us to two new movie previews for anti-Obama films that, when you look at them, seem remarkably like "real" movies. The first, called "2016," is based on Dinesh D'Souza's nutty book "The Roots of Obama's Rage." It explains how Barack Obama is motivated in everything he does by a desire to punish America and the world for colonialism, because of the "rage" he inherited from the father he never knew. The images go by pretty fast, but my favorite is the black family playing Monopoly, who suddenly jump up from their chairs and start swinging at each other (it comes at the one-minute mark). Who are they supposed to be? The Obamas? Some of Obama's co-conspirators? People sent into a frenzy by his socialist policies? It's hard to tell. Anyhow, here's the preview:

All right, you say, that's pretty crazy, but we've heard it before. Can you show me something even crazier? Oh yes, I most certainly can. Talking Points Memo put together this highlight reel of "Dreams From My Real Father," an anti-Obama movie that uses a (very bad) Obama impersonator to take us deep into the heart of a paranoid conspiracy, one that reveals how Barack Obama was actually fathered by Frank Marshall Davis, a radical poet he knew as a boy. And he had a nose job before the 2008 campaign. Also, the CIA is involved somehow. Because, you know, duh. This one isn't quite as professional-looking as "2016," but I'm sure it'll still sell a few copies:

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This makes me wonder: what are these people going to do if Obama wins a second term? What I mean is, if Obama is defeated, they'll say, "That was a close one! Good thing we warned America about Obama's sinister socialist plan, and disaster was averted!" If Obama wins, he'll go through his second term, doing things that these nutballs will certainly disagree with. But the hammer and sickle will not be raised over the White House, private enterprise will not be outlawed, and we won't all be herded onto collective farms. And then what will they say? They certainly won't say, "Well, maybe we overstated things a little."

Here's my guess: they'll say that Obama's non-socialist second term was all part of the plan. He softens up the American public with just a little socialism, and then, BAM! His successor (the 2016 Democratic nominee) is the one who really brings the disastrous socialist nightmare. Just you wait.