Matt Taibbi writes: The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn’t stand for anything. He’s a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who’ll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn’t be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He’s closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he’s trying for something big: We’ve just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we’ve been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney’s run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he’s somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who’d be honored to tell Oliver Twist there’s no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. “Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party,” Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. “He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt.”

Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: “It’s the debt, stupid.” This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who’s ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America’s federal borrowing. “A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” he declared. “Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love.” Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it’s going to burn our children alive.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports: Wealthy donors and corporations are more heavily invested in this presidential election than at any time since the 1972 Watergate scandal led to stricter campaign- finance laws.

A series of court decisions and regulatory changes in 2010 unraveled federal limits on donations, paving the way for a return of the big players. They are pooling their money in nonprofits, which keep contributor names secret, and super- political action committees, which amassed $350 million through the end of July.

One-quarter of that money comes from just 10 donors, led by Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks such spending.

Top Republican contributors say they back the party’s presidential candidate Mitt Romney because they agree with his small-government philosophy or oppose President Barack Obama’s new regulations on banks and the health-care industry.

Yet Romney is more than just a political kindred spirit; he’s a sound investment. Here’s how a Romney presidency might pay off — literally — for some of these super-donors. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: “Just don’t talk about the war!” was the motto evinced by John Cleese’s comic British innkeeper Basil Fawlty when entertaining German tourists at his establishment. The same motto seems to have been embraced by both candidates in the 2012 U.S. presidential election — and not simply because it’s difficult to detect significant differences on their policies for ending the longest war in America’s history. Neither President Barack Obama, nor Governor Mitt Romney can offer the electorate the prospect of a plausible outcome in Afghanistan that won’t leave many Americans wondering what was achieved in 11 years of a war that this week claimed its 2,000th American combat casualty. Opinion polls routinely find a substantial majority of Americans opposed to remaining militarily engaged in Afghanistan, which may be why the bipartisan consensus envisages most U.S. troops coming home by the end of 2014, handing security responsibility to the Afghan forces whose training and mentoring is rapidly becoming the mission’s prime focus. The Taliban won’t be defeated by the time the U.S. leaves, in other words, and it takes a leap of faith to envisage Afghan security forces finding the political will to fight the Taliban on behalf of a widely discredited Afghan regime once the U.S. leaves — and that was before the emergence of what the U.S. military calls a “systemic problem” of uniformed Afghans turning their weapons on their U.S. and NATO mentors. Afghanistan, for U.S. presidential campaign purposes, is a huge downer.

At least 40 times this year alone, U.S. and NATO soldiers have been killed by gunfire from allied security personnel in ostensibly safe bases. And the scale of of “green-on-blue” violence — although the Pentagon now prefers “insider attacks” — is difficult to determine, because such attacks are only reported when Western personnel are killed.

Insider attacks, deemed a “systemic problem” by the Pentagon, have already killed 23 Americans this year. And the vulnerability of Western troops is expected to actually increase in the coming months as a combat mission continues its transformation into one that deploys smaller groups of U.S. and NATO troops to mentor Afghan forces, exposing them to greater risk of attack from uniformed Afghans. [Continue reading…]

USA Today reports: They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama— but by definition they probably won’t.

Call them the unlikely voters.

A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.

Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will: They’re too busy. They aren’t excited about either candidate. Their vote doesn’t really matter. And nothing ever gets done, anyway.

“I don’t think Obama helped us as much as he promised,” says John Harrington, 52, a heavy-equipment operator from Farmington, Minn., who was among those surveyed. Since 2008, when Harrington voted for Obama, the financial downturn has forced him to sell his home in Arizona, move to Minnesota to be near a daughter and put him on the road to Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa to find work.

His wife “loves” Obama and is sure to vote in November, but he’s not certain whether he’ll get there this time.

Even in 2008, when turnout was the highest in any presidential election since 1960, almost 80 million eligible citizens didn’t vote. Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate, predicts that number will rise significantly this year. He says turnout could ebb to levels similar to 2000, when only 54.2% of those eligible to vote cast a ballot. That was up a bit from 1996, which had the lowest turnout since 1924.

This year, perhaps 90 million Americans who could vote won’t. “The long-term trend tends to be awful,” Gans says. “There’s a lot of lack of trust in our leaders, a lack of positive feelings about political institutions, a lack of quality education for large segments of the public, a lack of civic education, the fragmenting effects of waves of communications technology, the cynicism of the coverage of politics — I could go on with a long litany.”

There’s also the relentlessly negative tone of this year’s campaign. The majority of TV ads don’t try to persuade voters to support one candidate but rather to convince them not to back the other guy.

Adele M. Stan writes: It’s official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers’ political enterprise. How else to explain Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan — chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents count on.

It’s a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed too “radical.” Asked by NBC’s David Gregory to respond to Ryan’s proposal, Gingrich famously said (video): “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.” (Of course that was before Gingrich walked back those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)

In case anyone should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney did his big reveal of running-mate Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia. However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a highly symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It’s not only Ryan’s home state; it’s the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt made by progressives in response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees. Much of the credit for Wisconsin’s right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity, which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began building a network of activists there in 2005.

Ryan’s association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was granted the Wisconsin AFP chapter’s “Defending the American Dream” award, handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those festivities — a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made countless appearances on the group’s behalf, at anti-health-care reform rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation events. (Just enter Ryan’s name into the search engine on the Amerians For Prosperity Web site, and you’ll come up with eight pages of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week’s conference sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased speculation about his running-mate prospects when he failed to show.

For Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan — as does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles — the mbillionaire owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held corporation in the U.S. — are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to a range of right-wing think tanks and groups. In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already, Americans For Prosperity has made a $27 million air-time buy for running anti-Obama ads. [Continue reading…]

ProPublica, August 11, 2012

Aug. 12: This post has been corrected.

Want help going beyond the horse race? We’re gathering the best stories out there on Congressman Paul Ryan, his positions, and his background. Have other stories to share? Add them in comments.

Background

Fussbudget, The New Yorker, August 2012 This sweeping profile is a great introduction to Paul Ryan and his politics. Starting in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, it lays out the evolution of Ryan’s economic beliefs, and his rise through the G.O.P – from his early affinity to Ayn Rand to failed attempts at privatizing Social Security, to his Path to Prosperity budget plan, which would make radical changes in Medicaid and other social programs. The article also looks at the ways that federal-funded projects have helped Ryan’s hometown–and notes that Ryan’s plan “would drastically reduce the parts of the budget” that are funding exactly these kinds of projects.

Ryan shines as GOP seeks vision, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 2009 A broad look at Ryan from his home-state paper at a time when Ryan’s national profile was on the rise. Ryan discusses, among other things, how having gay friends led him to break with his party on a gay rights bill in Congress and his “real passion” — bowhunting.

The Legendary Paul Ryan, New York Magazine, April 2012 A look at how the Republican party rallied around Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” putting the newcomer’s fiscal agenda at the center of the 2012 presidential campaign well before voters had even chosen Romney as their Republican nominee.

On the paradox of Paul Ryan, The American Conservative, April 2012 What does Mitt Romney gain from Paul Ryan? Romney may be betting on a boost from conservatives who view Ryan as a hero for his aggressive stance on entitlements and federal spending, but as W. James Antle III points out, that may not be enough to win over grassroots conservatives. Antle writes that despite his anti-entitlements campaign, Ryan’s voting record “more closely resembles that of the Republicans who have lost to Tea Party primary challengers than that of a ruthless government-cutter.”

Man with a Plan, Weekly Standard, July 2012 The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes wrote a favorable profileof Ryan in July in the midst of veep buzz. The piece traces his entire career with a particular focus on how, in recent years, Ryan became “the intellectual leader of the Republican party.”

How Important is Altas Shrugged author Ayn Rand to Paul’s political philosophy?  The Atlas Society, April  2012 In a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, Paul said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand…you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism.” According to the excerpts and audio of his speech posted on the society’s website, he also said that Rand was “required reading” for his interns and staff.  But recently, Ryan has said while he had read Rand’s novels when he was young, his supposed obsession with her was “an urban legend.” “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told Robert Costa at National Review in April. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”

Policy

A Closer Look at Ryan’s Budget Roadmaps, The New York Times, August 2012 As part of an in-depth look at Ryan’s polarizing House Republican budget plan, the New York Times highlights two studies of how the plan would affect Americans.  One, a long-term analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of some of Ryan’s suggested changes to Medicare and Medicaid, found that, “Under the proposal, most elderly people who would be entitled to premium support payments would pay more for their health carethan they would pay under the current Medicare system.” The other, a study by the Tax Policy Centerof the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, found that “the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget plan would result in huge benefits for high-income peopleand very modest—or no— benefits for low income working households.”

What’s Paul Ryan’s foreign policy?  Foreign Policy, April 2012 While Ryan has a limited record on international affairs, he has spoken about everything from how to handle China (less hawkishly than Romney)  to getting cosier with rising powers India and Brazil. Foreign Policy’s helpful overview says the overall picture that emerges is “a bit of a Rorschach test.”  Ryan says the U.S. should stay deeply engaged– “America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen” — while he has also called for cutting funding for U.S. international aid.

Ryan’s personal finances and connections

Ryan is wealthy–but not by Romney standards. The congressman reported 2011 assets valued at between $2.4 and $9.3 million, according to an Associated Press report looking at his recently filed financial disclosure form. The money is spread in small chunks over various stock investments and in business interests in Wisconsin and his wife’s home state of Oklahoma. You can browse his assets here(.pdf). Ryan also filed an amendmentto his disclosure noting that his wife’s mother died in 2010 and the family gained interest in a trust worth between $1 and $5 million.

Paul Ryan’s Shrewd Budget Payday, Daily Beast, June 2011 The website takes a closer look at mining, mineral, and energy holdings owned by Ryan — primarily in his wife’s home state of Oklahoma — and how they would be positively affected by Ryan’s proposed tax policies. A Ryan spokesman told the Daily Beast: “These are properties that Congressman Ryan married into. It’s not something he has a lot of control over.” The piece also reports that relatives of Ryan have received federal farming subsidies.

Paul Ryan has got plenty of friends on K Street, Politico, August 2012 A brief look at the friends Ryan his wife Janna have made on K Street in their years in Washington, among them former Ohio congressman Mike Oxley (of Sarbanes-Oxley fame), who is now a lobbyist for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Janna Ryan, a tax attorney, herself worked as a lobbyist for PriceWaterhouseCooper, the article reports.  

Ryan’s Unlikely Alliance with Organized Labor  Mother Jones, May 2011 Ryan’s family construction business relies on union labor. “I grew up in organized labor,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Magazine in 2005. “I have a lot of constituents who are in organized labor. I really do not have this ‘us against them’ mentality.” As a congressman, Paul has worked closely with local union leaders and fought to protect the wages of construction workers. While many of his policy plans are directly opposed to what unions want, some unions have continued to support him. Over the course of his career, the Carpenters & Joiners Union has given him $57,500—only slightly less than he has received from Koch Industries, according to The Center for Responsive Politics.

Correction: This post originally said that the Mother Jones article was published in November 2012. It was actually published in May 2011.

The Washington Post reports: Mitt Romney mistakenly confused the words “Sikh” and “sheik” at a fundraiser here Tuesday night when he offered his condolences to the victims of last weekend’s shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee correctly spoke of the Sikh religion earlier in the day when he observed a moment of silence at a campaign event in Illinois. But at the Iowa fundraiser, he instead talked about the “sheik temple” and the “sheik people.” Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.

Referencing his earlier event in the Chicago area, Romney said: “We had a moment of silence in honor of the people who lost their lives at that sheik temple. I noted that it was a tragedy for many, many reasons. Among them are the fact that people, the sheik people, are among the most peaceable and loving individuals you can imagine, as is their faith. And of course, the person who carried out this heinous act was a person motivated by racial hatred and religious intolerance.”

While referring to Sikhs as peace-loving people can be an appropriate way of saying that no one deserves to get slaughtered by a gun-wielding American bigot, there is without doubt an Islamophobic undercurrent in the ‘peace-loving’ meme that has permeated public discourse since the Wisconsin shootings. There’s a constant sub-audible whisper: they were Sikhs, not Muslims.

Whether among Sikhs or any other community of faith, there is no religious code observed so perfectly that peaceful religious tenets will always prevent individual acts of violence. India’s former prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Multiple hijackings in India have been conducted by sword-wielding Sikhs.

Sikhs have always distinguished themselves as warriors. Among the officers and ranks of the Indian National Army that fought for independence against the British, 60% were Sikhs.

As a religious commandment, Sikhs are required to carry a sword or dagger called a kirpan which can be used to defend the defenseless. In just such an act of courage, Sadwant Singh Kaleka, the 65-year old head of the Sikh temple used his sword to confront Wade Michael Page before being gunned down himself.

Attempting to characterize the degree of innocence of Page’s targets is simply another way of turning attention away from looking at a much more challenging issue: why violence is so deeply woven into the American way of life.

Thomas B. Edsall writes: There is a succinct answer to the question of why Romney would take the risk of closely associating himself with the immensely controversial Adelson: 10 million dollars — the amount Adelson and his wife have contributed to the super Pac supporting Romney, Restore Our Future.

The Adelsons are the largest donors to the Romney PAC. They have providing just over 12 percent of the $82.2 million Restore Our Future has raised so far. Romney’s personal wealth is an estimated $250 million, but the former governor is determined not to self-finance his quest for the presidency.

Adelson’s cash is more than enough to persuade Romney to swallow his pride and embrace the man who, earlier in the campaign, spent millions on a different candidate. It was Adelson who financed Newt Gingrich’s populist attack ads, which portrayed Romney, the former C.E.O. of Bain Capital, as a “predatory capitalist.” The Adelson-financed attacks were instrumental in bringing about Romney’s defeat in the South Carolina primary in January and they laid the groundwork for the attacks Obama is subjecting Romney to now.

The source of Adelson’s huge campaign contributions would appear to create a conflict with Romney’s Mormon convictions. The official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints states: “The Church opposes gambling in any form, including government-sponsored lotteries.”

What Mormons Believe, an unofficial web site explicating the positions of the Church declares:

The Mormon Church has always opposed gambling in every form, including government-sponsored lotteries. Mormon prophets and leaders have counseled the members over time, to avoid gambling of any type. Doing so, leads one away from righteousness and into the hands of Satan. The Mormon belief is that it is an addictive behavior and leads only to destructive habits and practices. It undermines the value of work and motivates one to think that they can get something for nothing. In time, the gambler will deny themselves, as well as their family the basic needs of life. They will oft times steal from others to finance their addiction, which in turn leads to stealing, robbery, etc.

Adelson is number eight on the Forbes 400, a list of the 400 richest people in America, with a fortune of $21.5 billion amassed largely through an international collection of gambling venues. [Continue reading…]

David Bromwich writes: Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Jerusalem has been criticized for the grossness of the subservience that the candidate exhibited toward Israel. This reaction was surely factored in by his handlers. Liberals, internationalists, human rights advocates might demur, but Romney’s intended audience was none of these people. Nor was it the Arab world, nor was it American voters, with a possible exception for the state of Florida. Romney was aiming to reach two distinct but related target groups: first, a small set of extremely wealthy donors, and second, a group composed of one person, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both have long been potent players in American elections. Both were already helping Romney. It was necessary and useful at this time to cement the alliance in public.

Judged in the light of that purpose, Romney’s visit must be counted a success. And it was a success in one other respect. The billionaires and the prime minister wanted Romney to bring the United States closer to supporting a war with Iran. Romney obliged, and we are now closer to war. He recognized, he said, the “right” of Israel to defend itself. Who ever denied that right? He meant: the righteousness of a preventive attack on Iran. This left open the question, Does Iran have the right to defend itself? A question that Americans and Israelis, as effectively propagandized as we have been, can be trusted not even to ask. So Romney’s intervention in Jerusalem amounted to approval of war — and a war before November if Netanyahu happens to find that desirable. As a candidate in an election season, Romney gave the green light to a power whose engagement in war would involve the United States.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in American politics. But then, there has never been anything in history remotely like the present relationship between the United States and Israel. President Obama, who is thought to be lukewarm by Romney’s supporters, in March described our alliance with Israel as “sacrosanct.” A month earlier, he had assured Israel and its warmest American partisans that his administration was marching in “lockstep” with Israel in our approach to Iran. All this Obama said and did in deference to Benjamin Netanyahu and without regard to American interests. For he had been told by the CIA that Iran is not working at present on a nuclear weapon, and he was warned by the Pentagon that a war with Iran would be a regional disaster for the United States. Even so, he gave Netanyahu in effect a yellow light: proceed with caution. And to sweeten the transaction, he promised to issue no traffic ticket if Israel speeds up. It was the same at this year’s AIPAC convention where Obama again assured Netanyahu: “I have Israel’s back.”

A corny line from the playbook of the younger Bush, suggesting a false analogy between a gunfight and a world war, but Obama at the start of an election year knew very well what the script called for.

It has been said by members of the Israel lobby that Obama’s actions speak louder than his words, and that his actions have hurt Israel. Let us recall some of the actions. In response to the onslaught on Gaza in December-January 2008-2009, in which 1,300 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis, Obama observed a silence which he has never broken. When, in November 2010, Netanyahu balked at the proposal of a 90-day partial extension of the freeze on West Bank settlement expansion, Obama offered twenty F-35 fighter jets if he would change his mind; Netanyahu refused, and Obama gave him the jets anyway. Only a week ago, the president donated another $70 million, on top of U.S. assistance already given, to build up the Israeli “Iron Dome” defense against rockets. Yet it is felt that Obama’s love of Israel has been insufficiently demonstrative. The reason is simple but it is seldom mentioned quite candidly. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Mitt Romney told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who suggested his comments were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East. His campaign later said his remarks were mischaracterized.

Casino boss and cultural icon, Sheldon Adelson, attending Romney's speech.

“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” the Republican presidential candidate told about 40 wealthy donors who ate breakfast at the luxurious King David Hotel.

Romney said some economic histories have theorized that “culture makes all the difference.”

“And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the “hand of providence.” He said similar disparity exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.

Palestinian reaction to Romney was swift and pointed.

“It is a racist statement and this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“It seems to me this man lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people,” Erekat added. “He also lacks knowledge about the Israelis themselves. I have not heard any Israeli official speak about cultural superiority.”

As criticism mounted while Romney traveled to Poland, campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said: “His comments were grossly mischaracterized.” The Republican’s campaign contends Romney’s comparison of countries that are close to each other and have wide income disparities – the U.S. and Mexico, Chile and Ecuador – shows his comments were broader than just the comparison between Israel and Palestine.

While speaking to U.S. audiences, Romney often highlights culture as a key to economic success and emphasizes the power of the American entrepreneurial spirit compared to the values of other countries. But his decision to highlight cultural differences in a region where such differences have helped fuel violence for generations raises new questions about the former businessman’s diplomacy skills. [Continue reading…]

As Think Progress notes, Romney was way off the mark in outlining the economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians — Israel’s GDP of US$31,000 compared to the West Bank and Gaza’s US$1,500. And then of course there is the question as to how economically vibrant Israel would be if it faced military occupation, the relentless confiscation of property, restrictions on freedom of movement, and inadequate infrastructure.

Karl Vick writes: There are a number of ways to understand Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel, where he pitches up Saturday night from London.

One is optics, as they like to say in Washington. The presumptive Republican nominee clearly wants to occupy the chilly space visible between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tense personal relationship feeds the impression that Obama is cool toward not only Bibi, as Netanyahu is universally known, but also toward Israel itself. What supposed evidence of which might exist – the Cairo speech, Obama’s insisting on a settlement freeze as a pre-condition to peace talks with the Palestinians – is both receding in time and being pushed into the background by the keen, almost obsessive attention the White House has paid Israel in the last two years, in official visits, security coordination and, yes, dollars.

The latest arrived Saturday, when Obama signed a bill sending $70 million to Israel to pay for more of the anti-missile batteries called Iron Dome, the wonder technology that’s been knocking down 80 percent of the missiles fired toward Israeli cities from the Gaza Strip. Defense minister Ehud Barak promptly issued a statement of thanks, pointedly calling the aid “yet another expression of the consistent support of the Obama administration, and indeed of the U.S. congress, to the security of the State of Israel.” Such is the power of the incumbency. There will be more. Coming in October, as the fall campaign crests: The largest US-Israel joint military operation in history.

But as the Romney campaign appears to know well, body language is a lot more fun to read than official statements. Of six public events on Sunday, five are “photo sprays,” grip and grins with Israeli politicians, plus Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad. The candidate is seeing Netanyahu twice, in the morning for a meeting, and later for dinner with their wives. The husbands already know each other, and even worked together briefly long ago at Bain Capital. Though Netanyahu told TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel that they weren’t exactly pals – “He was the whiz kid; I was just in the back of the room” — Romney boasts of the shared history. The men also share a professed esteem for capital markets (much to the chagrin of progressives), and of course antipathy to Obama. Romney refuses to criticize the president while traveling overseas, but his entire visit to Israel is framed by his famous accusation, during the GOP primary, that Obama is “throwing Israel under the bus.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Mitt Romney tried to pull back Sunday from an adviser’s suggestion that he favored new American aggression on Iran, distancing himself from comments that the U.S. presidential candidate would “respect” an Israeli decision for unilateral military action to prevent Tehran from gaining nuclear capability.

Hours after the aide previewed Romney’s upcoming foreign policy speech in Jerusalem, Romney backpedaled and said, “I’ll use my own words and that is I respect the right of Israel to defend itself and we stand with Israel. We’re two nations that come together in peace and that want to see Iran being dissuaded from its nuclear folly.”

The address by the Republican challenger to President Barack Obama was promoted as the centerpiece of a weeklong trip abroad designed to burnish his foreign policy credentials and highlight his ability to lead on the world stage. But the mixed signals on Iran could undermine that goal.

“Because I’m on foreign soil, I don’t want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself from the foreign policy of our nation, but we respect the right of a nation to defend itself,” the former Massachusetts governor told CBS’ “Face the Nation” a few hours before the speech and a day before a major fundraiser in the city.

Obama has affirmed the right of Israel to defend itself, while also warning of the consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran.

In the Oval Office on Friday, President Obama said: “This week we are going to be able to announce 70 million dollars in additional spending — 70 billion dollars, excuse me — in additional spending for [Israel’s] Iron Dome [missile defense shield].”

He got the number right the first time but Obama’s “correction” was perhaps of way of saying there need be no dollar limit on any military aid for Israel he is willing to support. AIPAC can draft the bills and he’ll sign them — whatever the cost.

The Wall Street Journal reports: With a stroke of a pen on Friday, President Barack Obama gave Israel a long-distance embrace ahead of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s trip to the Jewish state this weekend.

Mr. Obama held an Oval Office photo-op for his signing of legislation that enhances U.S.-Israel security cooperation, saying the move underscores “our unshakeable commitment to Israel security.”

“I have made it a top priority for my administration to deepen cooperation with Israel across the whole spectrum of security issues,” Mr. Obama said. “I hope that, as I sign as this bill, once again everybody understands how committed all of us are – Republicans and Democrats – as Americans to our friends in making sure that Israel is safe and secure.”

Mr. Obama also noted the U.S.’s funding this week of an additional $70 million for Israel’s missile defense system, which the administration had announced months ago.

The moment comes amid a flurry of attention Obama administration officials have been showering on Israel ahead of Mr. Romney’s meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. Over the past two weeks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and the White House’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan have visited Israel.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will make a two-day stop in Israel to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, Egypt and Syria’s political unrest, according to officials involved in the planning. Mr. Obama said Friday that the goal of Mr. Panetta’s trip is “to further consult and find additional ways that we can ensure such cooperation at a time when, frankly, the region is experiencing heightened tensions.”

The president’s team has also been reaching out to American Jewish leaders in recent days to shore up support in advance of Mr. Romney’s trip, a White House official said.

Both Messrs. Obama and Romney are vying for Jewish voters in the November election. Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of straining U.S.-Israel relations, and Republicans have criticized the president for not visiting Israel during his first term.

Ynet reports: “This was a historical landmark in the defense relations between the US and Israel,” said Amos Gilad, the director of policy and political-military affairs at the Defense Ministry.

The legislation, knowns as the “United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012,” allows Israel to purchase American KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft for the first time. Thus far, the Bush and Obama administrations refused to sell planes of this kind to the Jewish state, primarily in order to bar it from launching a massive aerial strike on Iran.

In all likelihood, such a military operation would involve F-15I and F-16I fighter jets, as well as helicopters, all of which will have to refuel on their way to the Islamic Republic, and on the return trip. Mid-air refueling capabilities are therefore essential for the mission.

So far, Israel has had to buy used commercial Boeing 707 airliners and convert them into tanker jets, a far from ideal solution considering the planes were originally designed for passenger flights. Just last week an accident occurred during an exercise involving such aircraft.

Jeremy Peters reports: The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president’s top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.

The verdict from the campaign — an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script — is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.

The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.

Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.

The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.

From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”

It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews.

Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, can be foul-mouthed. But readers would not know it because he deletes the curse words before approving his quotes. Brevity is not a strong suit of David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser. So he tightens up his sentences before giving them the O.K.

Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, is fond of disparaging political opponents by quoting authors like Walt Whitman and referring to historical figures like H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. But such clever lines later rarely make it past Mr. Stevens.

Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them. [Continue reading…]

Tom Junod writes: You are a historic figure, Mr. President. You are not only the first African-American president; you are the first who has made use of your power to target and kill individuals identified as a threat to the United States throughout your entire term. You are the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our military operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy, and, some argue, of our foreign policy. You have authorized kill teams comprised of both soldiers from Special Forces and civilians from the CIA, and you have coordinated their efforts through the Departments of Justice and State. You have gradually withdrawn from the nation building required by “counterinsurgency” and poured resources into the covert operations that form the basis of “counter-terrorism.” More than any other president you have made the killing rather than the capture of individuals the option of first resort, and have killed them both from the sky, with drones, and on the ground, with “nighttime” raids not dissimilar to the one that killed Osama bin Laden. You have killed individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and are making provisions to expand the presence of American Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Pakistan and other places where the United States has not committed troops, you are estimated to have killed at least two thousand by drone. You have formalized what is known as “the program,” and at the height of its activity it was reported to be launching drone strikes in Pakistan every three days. Your lethality is expansive in both practice and principle; you are fighting terrorism with a policy of preemptive execution, and claiming not just the legal right to do so but the legal right to do so in secret. The American people, for the most part, have no idea who has been killed, and why; the American people — and for that matter, most of their representatives in Congress — have no idea what crimes those killed in their name are supposed to have committed, and have been told that they are not entitled to know.

This is not to say that the American people don’t know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don’t support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen … indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all. [Continue reading…]

Louis Proyect writes: After a brief period of relative optimism tied to the “green shoots” of recovery, the woes of the Great Recession continued into 2012 and forced the hucksters running Obama’s re-election campaign to hoist a new message up the flagpole and see if anyone would salute.

That new message amounted to undraping a 60 foot tall bronze statue of Obama as muscular Commander-in-Chief after the fashion of Reagan chopping wood or George W. Bush in a flight suit. If those precious swing voters, perceived as white and centrist, could not be assuaged by a non-existent recovery, then maybe they would vote for Obama since he was able to deliver on at least another element of Teddy Roosevelt’s record, namely his willingness to use the “big stick” against weaker nations.

The campaign kicked into high gear with a speech that the president gave on Memorial Day a couple of weeks ago. It is filled with what the great Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore”. This paragraph, in particular, sounds like it could have been lifted from the preview to a Rambo movie:

You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war. The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Some of the most intense urban combat in history, and battles for a single hill that could rage for weeks. Let it be said — in those hellholes like Briarpatch, and the Zoo and the Hanoi Hilton — our Vietnam POWs didn’t simply endure; you wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.

Activist Jack A. Smith, an editor at the radical newsweekly The Guardian in the 1960s who soldiers on for the cause of peace in upstate N.Y., commented on Vietnam war revisionism in the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:

The Pentagon has just launched a multi-year national public relations campaign to justify, glorify and honor Washington’s catastrophic, aggressive and losing war against Vietnam — America’s most controversial and unpopular military conflict.

President Barack Obama opened the militarist event, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress four years ago, during a speech at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, May 28. The entire campaign, which will consist of tens of thousands of events over the next 13 years, is ostensibly intended to “finally honor” the U.S. troops who fought in Vietnam. The last troops were evacuated nearly 40 years ago.

One of the more disgusting passages in this altogether disgusting speech had to do with the peace movement’s alleged abuse of returning GI’s:

You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.

David Sirota, one of the nation’s more principled liberals and hence a trenchant critic of Obama, told Salon.com readers:

It’s undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. As the president who escalated the Vietnam-esque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument. Deliberately parroting Rambo’s claim about “a quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” he was asserting that America, as a whole, spat on soldiers when they came home — even though there’s no proof that this happened on any mass scale.

In his exhaustive book titled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by antiwar protestors, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.

Keep in mind that Obama’s speech sounds exactly like the kind of thing that John McCain would have written–a product of his captivity in Vietnam and his yahoo Republican Party politics. That this Ivy League “liberal” could spew out the same kind of rightwing bullshit, while in all likelihood knowing that it is bullshit, epitomizes the political impasse facing voters. You vote for someone enlightened and you end up with a Chuck Norris wannabe. It really doesn’t matter what you voted for, after all. The people who run the country have their own agenda and it doesn’t include you. [Continue reading…]