Mitt Romney’s held many positions on guns. As a candidate for governor of Massachusetts, Romney offered unequivocal support for gun regulation: “We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts — I support them. I won’t chip away at them. I believe they help protect us, and provide for our safety.” As governor, he made these laws even stronger, signing into law a permanent ban on assault rifles.

As a presidential candidate, however, Romney morphed into a gun owner and NRA member who told the gun lobbying group that President Obama is waging an “assault on our freedoms.”

The same thing can be said about Romney’s views on immigration. During the GOP presidential primary, Romney frequently staked out the most extreme position on immigration of any of the major candidates. He promised to make undocumented immigrants’ lives so miserable that they flee the country. He promised to veto the DREAM Act, and he even campaigned with the author of Alabama and Arizona’s harsh immigration laws — on Martin Luther King Day. Romney started backtracking away from those positions as well, once he locked down his party’s nomination.

Romney may now be preparing to Etch-a-Sketch his views on guns and immigration even further. The GOP candidate is currently courting an endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one the nation’s leading advocates for both gun regulation and liberalized immigration policy:

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have reached a rare consensus: They are both determined to score the endorsement of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, whose name is all but synonymous with Wall Street clout and nonpartisan politics.

On Tuesday, Romney showed up at the mayor’s philanthropic foundation in Manhattan for a secret breakfast meeting. Over coffee and juice, Romney made clear that he was there to pick the mayoral brain: “Tell me what’s on your mind,” he told Bloomberg, according to aides briefed on the 30-minute discussion, which touched on immigration, gun control and education policy.

However, Bloomberg is not simply a supporter of more robust gun regulation — he may be the nation’s leading advocate on these issues. The Mayor supports closing loopholes so that everyone who buys a gun undergoes a background check. He led a national charge to roll back the so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws that played such a significant role in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. And he co-chairs Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which describes ensuring criminals do not illegally obtain guns as a matter of “life and death.”

Similarly, Bloomberg is a major supporter of the kinds of progressive immigration policies Romney shunned as a primary candidate. Bloomberg proudly describes New York as America’s most immigrant-friendly city. He expanded legal services in his city for immigrants. And he once described our current, restrictive immigration policies as “suicide.”

Now, let’s be clear. Bloomberg is right, and Romney has at times been very wrong, on both the need for sensible gun regulation and the need to repair our immigration policy. If Bloomberg succeeds in convincing Romney to abandon some of his past views, that would be a very positive development, regardless of who Bloomberg ultimately winds up endorsing.

Given Romney’s long history of Etch-a-Sketching, however, it is unlikely that any position Romney announces today will remain his position tomorrow — especially after his uncertain allies in the NRA and the anti-immigrant community react to Romney’s announcement in disgust.

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Oakland’s police department to submit a plan to address numerous unresolved complaints regarding their handling of the Occupy Oakland protests, warning that failure to comply within a week could lead to sanctions. District Judge Thelton Henderson’s mandate comes just a day after the release of a report by an outside monitor that concluded Oakland police used “an overwhelming military-type response” to Occupy’s demonstrations — the first official report to confirm Occupy Oakland’s struggles against police brutality.

The Oakland police department has received more than 1,000 misconduct complaints since the Occupy protests began, most have which have become backlogged. The department has been under court-ordered external monitoring and review since 2003, after four officers were accused of planting evidence, fabricating police reports and using excessive force. Henderson’s mandate sets strict deadlines for the department to clean up its act while continuing to comply with the reforms that stemmed from that 2003 case:

HENDERSON: It would be problematic enough if, as seems inevitable, [Oakland police's] compliance levels were to backslide as a result of their failure to address the Occupy Oakland complaints in a timely fashion. Such failures would be further indication that, despite the changed leadership at the City of Oakland and its police department, [Oakland police] might still lack the will, capacity, or both to complete the reforms to which they so long ago agreed. The court will consider appropriate sanctions, including the imposition of daily or weekly monetary sanctions, until compliance is achieved.

The Oakland police force’s clashes with Occupy demonstrators have been well-documented on ThinkProgress. On October 25, police attempted to subdue protesters with heavy-handed tactics such as rubber bullets, flash grenades, and smoke bombs — and ended up injuring an Iraq War veteran in the process. The Oakland police department later rejected an ACLU public records request to investigate the October events, and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s legal adviser resigned in outrage over the city’s treatment of the Occupy protesters.

Internet freedom, online privacy and copyright reform came up as a politically contentious issue in the U.S. following Rep. Lamar S. Smith’s (R-TX) introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the grassroots campaign charging that the bill would lead to internet censorship. But while the SOPA controvery has (for the time being) been put to rest in the U.S., a similar movement in Germany has given new electoral weight to the Pirate Party, a niche political party.

The Pirate Party, which supports a platform of copyright reform and online privacy, picked up an electoral victory of four seats in the Saarland regional parliament in elections held at the end of March. The victory gives them twice as many seats as the once strong Green Party. The ultra pro-business Free Democrats won no seats.

Steve Ketteman, a former columnist for the newspaper Berliner Zeitung and the author of “One Day at Fenway,” opines in The New York Times:

This month they face their biggest challenge, with elections in two more states, including North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s most populous. Should the results match recent poll numbers — as high as 13 percent, making the Pirates Germany’s third-most-popular party — they will serve notice that a new electoral force has arrived and offer a compelling political lesson for parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Pirate Party’s niche platform of stronger protection for file sharing, opposing censorship, and even supporting voting rights for teenagers has struck a chord for German voters. But while the party appears to have embraced a niche set of policy positions, the movement’s focus on the Internet as a medium for political organization and change has resonated with young Germans. Kellerman observes:

[T]heir real goal, and the root of their success, is more meta: using the Internet to create a new structure of politics that can solve the problem of how to energize citizens — not only for the excitement of a campaign but also the often dreary realities of actual governance.

Indeed, while a two party dominated system makes it unlikely for a similar start-up party to make such a splash in the U.S., the online activist-based pushback on SOPA and the growing power of the Internet as a political medium — and a political issue area — proves that the Internet-based influence is an emerging political force in legislative and electoral politics around the world.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) just became the fifteenth organization to disassociate itself with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative group responsible for crafting model legislation on a number of contentious issues.

In a press release, NBPTS — an organization that advocates for teacher certification as part of education policy — said that they no longer want to be associated with ALEC “given recent events.” While they do not specify their grievances, their addition to a long list of organizations to disaffiliate adds credence to the argument that groups are upset over ALEC’s role in pushing voter suppression and the so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws:

[S]ince December 2010, NBPTS participated in the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) by sharing the impact and effectiveness of National Board programs with ALEC members, including state legislators. Given recent events, the new NBPTS President and CEO decided to discontinue engagement with ALEC. As a result, NBPTS terminated its membership as an Education Task Force Member of ALEC effective April 18, 2012, and also withdrew from participating in the upcoming ALEC conference.

Several advocacy groups have been calling on companies and non-profits to ditch ALEC, including Color of Change, Credo Action, and Sum of Us. But conservatives are fighting tooth and nail to protect their beloved policy-making institution, with one pundit going so far as to call Color of Change, an African American-driven action network, a “lynch mob.”

The argument doesn’t seem to be working, though, as the list of ALEC supporters continues to shrink. Groups that have dropped ALEC include: Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Intuit, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc., and Arizona Public Service.

The following chart from the Center for Responsive Politics represents outside spending by non-candidate and party groups seeking to influence elections in every election cycle going back to 1990. As it demonstrates, such spending was on the rise even before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate influence on elections in the Citizens United decision. Nevertheless, another trend is also clear. Prior to Citizens United, which was decided in 2010, left-leaning groups held a moderate-to-significant advantage in election spending. After Citizens United, conservatives absolutely dominated the field:

To be fair, some of the massive disparity in 2012 can be attributed to the contested Republican primary — and was spent on Republican-on-Republican hits rather than on attempts to improve Republicans’ chances against Democrats. Nevertheless, the last two election cycles suggest that conservatives will continue to benefit from Citizens United even once the general election kicks into full gear. Citizens United gave such a boost to Republican candidates that outside spending by conservatives grew by more than $70 million from 2008 to 2010, even though 2008 was a presidential election year and outside spending has historically been much higher in these cycles than in off-year elections.

Conservative media outlets are downright gleeful over a recent exchange between Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius that culminates with Sebelius stating that she did not receive a legal memo addressing whether the Obama Administration’s recent effort to expand access to contraception is unconstitutional.

GOWDY: When you say you balance things, can you understand why I might be seeking a constitutional balancing instead of any other kind?

SEBELIUS: I do, sir, and I defer to our lawyers to give me good advice on the Constitution. I do not pretend to be a constitutional lawyer.

GOWDY: Is there a legal memo that you relied on?

SEBELIUS: I relied on discussions.

GOWDY: At least when Attorney General Holder made his recess appointments, there was a legal memo that he relied on. Is there one you can share with us?

SEBELIUS: Attorney General Holder clearly runs the Justice Department and lives in a world of legal memos.

Watch it:

Gowdy, who, among other things, appears confused about which executive branch official has the power to make recess appointments, seems quite proud of the fact that he made Sebelius admit that she never received a written document explaining why the Constitution permits regulations ensuring that working women will be able to access birth control — and that she instead relied on oral conversations with attorneys. There’s a very good reason why Sebelius would not need such a memo, however. The primary conservative argument against contraceptive access — that allowing it somehow violates the constitutional rights of religious groups who object to contraception — is completely meritless and hardly requires a lengthy memo. I recently dismissed it in just two paragraphs, for example:

There is nothing in the Constitution saying that a person does not have to comply with the law simply because they object to it — if this were actually true, anyone could immunize themselves from paying taxes simply by claiming a moral objection to doing so. Nor does the Constitution allow people to violate the law simply because they have a religious objection to it.

The seminal Supreme Court opinion establishing this point was written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — who, coincidentally, is Catholic. Scalia explains that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’” In other words, so long as a law does not single out Catholics (or any other faith) for inferior treatment, the law applies universally to everyone.

It would be a tremendous waste of limited resources to have the government employ armies of lawyers whose job is to anticipate every false legal argument that might be thrown against a new regulation and draft memos explaining why those false theories shouldn’t prevent the regulation from being implemented. Perhaps Mr. Gowdy thinks it would be a good use of the American people’s taxes to create such a stimulus program for government lawyers, but there are much better ways for America to spent its money.

On a more serious note, however, there is something very ominous about Gowdy’s exchange with Sebelius. The Constitutional case against contraceptive access is meritless, and any competent lawyer would tell Sebelius as much in just a few sentences. The same, however, can also be said about the case against the Affordable Care Act. If the Supreme Court strikes down health reform, it will send a clear message to every judge in the country that the law does not apply any more — at least when enough conservative officials object to the law.

In other words, Sebelius may need to hire an army of rabidly conservative lawyers just to tell her which frivolous legal arguments she must heed regardless of the fact that they have no basis in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to hear a case that will enable it to correct its error in Citizens United and overrule its indefensible decision to allow unlimited corporate and other wealthy donor money to influence elections. Neither the corporate lobby nor the Senate’s top Republican are eager to see this occur, however. Both of them filed briefs in the Supreme Court yesterday urging the justices to not only reaffirm Citizens United, but to do so without even hearing argument in the case.

Neither one of these briefs are surprising. The Chamber is one of the nation’s biggest spenders on elections, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has long been an opponent of campaign finance regulation. Before President Bush appointed Justice Alito, who became the fifth vote to tear down much of America’s checks on big money in politics, the seminal case upholding America’s ability to defend against such money was McConnell v. FEC. In that case, Sen. McConnell was the lead plaintiff who sued — mostly unsuccessfully — to toss out the McCain/Feingold campaign finance law.

Yet while the briefs are unsurprising, they demonstrate both the corporate lobby and the Republican Party’s commitment to keeping wealthy interest groups’ ability to buy and sell elections intact.