For someone who actually spent several years living in France, Mitt Romney is remarkably ignorant about the country if he really thinks Hillary Clinton is running on a platform that’s too left-wing to win an election there. He also called her a Marxist, demonstrating once again that Romney’s key strategy to winning the GOP nomination despite his moderate pre-campaign political profile is to say a lot of crazily dumb stuff.

In the rest of the article, we learn that president Romney will crack down on “child-sex predators” and loves torture. Perhaps the predators will be tortured. Except he doesn’t quite have the guts to say he embraces torture. Rather, he insisted that “enhanced interrogation . . . is not a euphemism for torture” which, of course, it clearly is.

Check out Ed Kilgore’s post on the contrasting approaches to fighting poverty that Barack Obama and John Edwards have outlined in recent days, “with the former arguing that some poor and isolated urban neighborhoods need to be broken up, and the latter arguing that they can be revitalized.” Ed connects this to a long-running debate in anti-poverty circles going at least as far back as the 1968 primary where RFK had a more Obama-ish view and Edwards a more McCarthy-ish one.

More broadly, this seems to reflect the difference between a community organizing background and a more detached, “let’s have some smart people study the problem” way of having approached the issue. In practice, though, this seems like the sort of subject where either candidate would wind up with a variety of different people working for them and end up espousing a mixed approach. What’s more, it’s not the 1960s and one assumes that any anti-poverty initiative will wind up heavily shaped by the views of influential members of congress who represent poor districts.

CORRECTION: I worded this backwards. It’s Obama who wants intensive re-investment in poor communities and Edwards who wants to give poor individuals opportunities to move into other areas.

Photo by Flickr user Ellie van Houtte used under a Creative Commons license

Oh no! But, yes. This is Sara’s cat, Jelly. Jelly doesn’t like me very much, to be frank, preferring to flee to another room or hide under some furniture when I show up. Nor am I all that enthusiastic about the weird whining noise she likes to make early in the morning. That said, unlike seemingly everyone you meet (including lots of cat owners), I’m not at all allergic to cats, so I think they should like me. The picture comes, incidentally, from the iPhone, which has an okay camera for a phone but here at last is the feature where the lack of physical buttons really does bother me.

I’ve been turning the implications of the administration’s broad new view over in my head all day. I think to grasp how stunning this is, you need to listen to David Rivkin’s defense:

David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel’s office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a “unitary executive.” In practical terms, he said, “U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president’s will.” And in constitutional terms, he said, “the president has decided, by virtue of invoking executive privilege, that is the correct policy for the entire executive branch.”

That makes a certain kind of sense, I suppose, and also offers an explanation as to the meaning of the “unitary executive” metaphor. The executive branch is, clearly, composed of many people. But it’s personified by a single president — the unitary executive. The US Attorneys who might serve a contempt citation are part of this executive. They can’t enforce rulings against the decisions of the head of that unitary executive because they are part of it. Here’s the relevant Richard Nixon interview with David Frost:

FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.

It’s disturbing stuff. In an ideal world, enough GOP members of congress would be more jealous of their institutional powers than eager to back a co-partisan, and we’d see some veto-proof legislation getting passed to address this. I’m not optimistic.