Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) displeasure with most of the Obama administration’s policies is well documented, but his latest oppositional tactic may accomplish more than he intends it to.

At a campaign event in Humboldt, Iowa, King told an audience that he is planning to sue the Obama administration over its recent decision to stop enforcing deportations of undocumented immigrants and floated a novel idea afterwards.

“King added that he’s thinking about introducing a bill, which if it became law, would repeal everything Obama has signed into law,” reports The Messenger, a local newspaper in Iowa. Such an extreme proposition would certainly do away with the biggest Republican bugaboos like Obamacare and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but King’s “reset button” bill will come with many more casualties:

- Elimination of the Bush tax cuts. President Obama signed a bill in 2010 to extend tax cuts for all Americans. If King’s bill passed, he would raise taxes on every single taxpayer.

- Defunding of the US military. The repeal of the National Defense Reauthorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (and 2011 and 2010) would eliminate more than $1 trillion in spending on national defense and our interests abroad.

- Relaxing security along our southern border. The Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012 was just one measure the Obama administration took to strengthen protection along our border with Mexico.

- Stripping Medals of Honor from 9/11 First Responders. The medals were to be displayed at the memorials of each attack site in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania’s countryside.

- Canceling plans to honor Ronald Reagan. President Obama signed a law authorizing funding to honor and celebrate the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth.

Of course, repealing Obamacare and the Recovery Act would have disastrous consequences of their own on the economy and health care system. And actually undoing things like appropriations bills are effectively impossible. But that kind of rhetoric usually plays well to King’s base.

Stem cell research was, along with marriage equality, the culture war issue of the Bush years. Embryonic stem cell research — which involves pushing malleable cells taken from a human embryo to develop into cells that can be used to treat ailments — continues today with the help of federal dollars, a policy on which President Obama and Mitt Romney differ sharply. So why isn’t anyone talking about it?

The answer appears to be part science and part politics. Several alternatives to embryonic research have been developed in recent years and, though they haven’t yet completely replaced embryonic research (more on that later), the promise of medical advancement without raising ethical hackles has attracted a great deal of the available dollars, lowering the salience of embryonic research as a political issue. Further, Republican radicalism prevents any legislative action. Though federal support for embryonic stem cell research was a bipartisan issue as recently as 2007, the 2010 elections swept in a wave of Republicans more likely to push their own hardline laws on the issue than pass a bill cementing federal research funding.

This means the status quo, where the President determines whether government dollars subsidize embryonic research through executive order, seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Which is a bigger deal than you might think: a 2011 review of recent scientific work found that the most promising alternative to embryonic stem cell research, induced pluripotent (iPS) stem cell research, depends heavily on continued embryonic research to remain viable. Further, federal funding is becoming increasingly important to the field as support from cash-strapped states dries up. In other words, November’s election decides the fate of a significant source of funding for research that, according to the NIH, could “offer the possibility of a renewable source of replacement cells and tissues to treat diseases including Alzheimer’s diseases, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis.” And no one’s really talking about.

So what do the candidates think? in 2009, President Obama repealed President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding for research that creates new stem cells lines, an integral part of embryonic research that involves destroying an embryo to acquire new cells for laboratory use. The Bush ban on the creation of new lines crippled research receiving federal funding, while Obama’s repeal funneled funding to more scientifically viable embryonic research.

Romney, by contrast, appears to want to go back to Bush’s policies or, worse, ban federal funding of embryonic stem cell research altogether. Though his campaign is slippery on what he’d do once elected (it did not return request for comment on this piece), Romney said during his first run for the Presidency that he opposed the use of federal dollars to support the creation of new lines. The remarks didn’t clarify whether President Romney would simply return to the Bush policy of only funding research on existing stem cell lines or whether, as Yale bioethics expert Steven Latham suggests, “he opposes the public funding of any embryonic stem-cell research.” Romney’s more recent public remarks aren’t helping: when asked this year if he was “100 percent pro-life, meaning embryonic stem cell research” he simply said “I’m pro-life. I’m in favor of protecting the sanctity of life. I will cut off funding to Planned Parenthood.” His campaign site does not clarify his position beyond saying “Quite simply, America cannot condone or participate in the creation of human life when the sole purpose of its creation is its sure destruction.”

Pro-life groups believe Romney supports their maximalist position on stem cells. Mallory Quigley, a spokesperson for the Susan B. Anthony List, told ThinkProgress that “The SBA List has endorsed Governor Romney for President and is 100 percent confident in his pro-life position on stem-cell research. As a pro-life candidate, Governor Romney has pledged to advance research using morally unproblematic adult stem cells and other non-destructive alternatives.” In short: Romney supports some sort of anti-science policy on embryonic stem cell research. It’s just not clear which one.

Romney has argued, in line with Quigley’s position, that alternatives like iPS cells render further embryonic research unnecessary. However, it’s near-impossible in practice to separate federal funding for embryonic research from funding for iPS work, as many iPS research today uses embryonic research as a compliment. Implementing Romney’s position would severely limit the iPS research he claims to support.

But even if you grant the practicability of Romney’s position, the science is far too unsettled to make clear determinations about which research is most likely to yield medical results. John Gearhart, a pioneer in the stem cell field who was on the first team to report successfully derive embryonic stem cells back in 1998, told ThinkProgress that “we are still learning things from the basic science.” In his view, it’s near-impossible to make hard-and-fast determination as to what method of stem cell research will be necessary to make medical breakthroughs. That’s in itself strong reason to allow federal dollars to go to whatever research the NIH believes to be the most promising.

Further, Gearhart said, there are some compelling reasons to believe that embryonic stem cells are particularly critical to scientific progress given the state of the current science. Embryonic stem cells are the only human cells that naturally differentiate into new types — i.e., heart tissue cells that could be used to repair damaged areas. All alternative stem cell research essentially attempts to create artificial equivalents, and may fail to do so in an effective or safe fashion unless they can be tested against embryonic cells. That’s why iPS researchers today still use embryonic stem cells as a point of comparison. Moreover, according to Gearhart, embryonic cells are (to date) the only sort of stem cell that can be grown at the scale required to develop treatments for humans. “If you put a couple thousand cells into [a mouse] heart you can see some remarkable improvement,” he said. “To do the same thing in a human, you need millions.” This view isn’t limited to Gearhart — a number of prominent stem cell scientists have recently reiterated the importance of continued embryonic research even in light of developments in iPS research.

“We need money in this area. Badly,” Gearhart told me.

Mitt Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul appeared on Fox News Wednesday morning to criticize a controversial Priorities USA ad, which implies that the former Bain Capital executive is to blame for a woman’s death after her husband was laid off by the company. But in absolving Romney of responsibility, Saul awkwardly embraced the individual mandate and other provisions in the Massachusetts health care law that Romney has pledged to repeal for the nation as part of his attack on Obamacare.

Saul insisted that Romney was not in charge of Bain when the woman lost her job and employer-sponsored health insurance coverage — and died from cancer years later — but suggested that she would have been eligible for government-subsidized insurance under Romneycare:

SAUL: To that point, you know, if people had been in Massachusetts under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care. There are a lot of people losing their jobs and their health care in President Obama’s economy.

Mitt Romney has spent nearly a year downplaying the effectiveness of wind energy and other renewable sources of energy. “In place of real energy, Obama has focused on an imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy,” Romney wrote in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed.

Just days ago, his campaign doubled down on his fossil fuel platform by opposing any extension of the wind production tax credit. If the tax credit is allowed to expire at the end of 2012, as Romney hopes, that could cost the U.S. up to 37,000 jobs.

But while the former Massachusetts governor disparages wind, he changed his story on Wednesday, as he campaigned in the nation’s second largest wind state, Iowa:

ROMNEY: We have got to take advantage of America’s extraordinary energy resources: coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, wind, solar, ethanol, you name it. We’ve gotta take advantage of all of them.

In Iowa, wind is an economic force, as noted in a recent editorial by the state’s largest newspaper. The Iowa wind industry supports 215 related businesses, employs more than 6,000 workers, and ranks only behind Texas in wind generation. Last year, Iowa generated 20 percent of its total electricity from wind.

Romney’s namecheck may have something to do with critiques he’s drawn from his own party — including Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (R), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) — and recent polling that finds a clear majority of Iowa voters (57 percent) are less likely to vote for a candidate that didn’t support wind power.

On Tuesday night, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) wrapped up his state’s Republican Senate nomination, defeating two other Tea Party Republicans in a race that split the GOP’s hard right faction. Akin’s highest profile backers were former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), which should be no surprise — Akin has a long history of taking inflammatory, extremist positions, particularly with respect to religion and equal rights for gays and lesbians:

1. Akin believes Medicare is unconstitutional. In a set of remarks that also questioned the validity of climate science, Akin asserted that providing healthcare for the elderly is unconstitutional, saying “I don’t find in the Constitution that it is the job of the government to provide health care.” He also called for a repeal of the 17th Amendment, which allows voters, rather than their state legislatures, to choose who will represent them in the Senate.

2. Akin said that “the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God.” Akin once claimed, after an NBC broadcast accidentally omitted “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, that the network intentionally took it out as part of a “systematic effort to try to separate our faith and God” because “the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God and a belief that government should replace God.” Despite a strong backlash from religious leaders, Akin refused to apologize and doubled down on his remarks.

3. Akin is one of the most anti-gay GOP members of the House. According to a ThinkProgress analysis, Akin is one of the seven leading sponsors of anti-gay legislation in Congress, which perhaps follows from his belief that “anybody who knows something about the history of the human race knows that there is no civilization which has condoned homosexual marriage widely and openly that has long survived.” Akin has focused on gay members of the military, pushing legislation that would protect soldiers who chose to harass and bully their LGBT colleagues. He also attempted to block funding for the military unless the Defense of Marriage Act was used to block marriage equality on military bases.

4. Akin called recent legislation streamlining the student loan process a “state three cancer of socialism.” During the debt ceiling negotiations in 2010, Akin referred to President Obama as “a flaming socialist,” presumably because his massive concessions to GOP priorities weren’t quite massive enough for Akin’s tastes. He has also suggested that recent legislation streamlining the student loan process has contributed to America’s “stage three cancer of socialism.”

5. Akin wants the United States to withdraw from the UN. He advocated for full withdrawal from the international organization during a recent bus tour, according to a report by Chesterfield Patch.

Akin will face Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in November. Polling suggests he currently has a small lead.