Although GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has dodged questions about whether he believes the Constitution protects a woman’s right to use birth control, one of Romney’s top legal advisers is a leading opponent of the right to contraception. Robert Bork, the former federal judge who serves as co-chair of Romney’s Justice Advisory Committee, described the first Supreme Court case to protect access to contraception as “utterly specious” and a “time bomb.”

In a surprising departure from conservative orthodoxy, Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) broke with Romney’s legal adviser yesterday, stating that the Constitution does indeed protect a right to birth control:

“I think some conservatives get this thing wrong. They say, ‘Oh you don’t have a right to privacy because it’s not in the Constitution.’ Well, there’s not a right to private property in the Constitution either,” the libertarian-leaning senator said. . . . “I would say there is a right to privacy. It precedes the Constitution, it pre-exists, it comes, if you believe in God, from your Creator. It comes in a natural way. It’s yours,” Paul said in a speech on Internet freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Paul said he agrees with the landmark Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which first declared that the Constitution protects privacy and invalidated a state law banning access to contraceptives.

Paul’s statement contains a number of errors — the Fifth Amendment does explicitly protect certain private property rights, for example — but it is also a clear break from the views of many conservative legal thinkers, including one of Romney’s top advisers.

Since taking office, President Obama has quadrupled the number of openly gay judges holding lifetime appointments to the federal bench, although this fact has as much to do with the poor record of past presidents in naming gay judges as it does with President Obama’s commitment to diversity. Before Obama took office, only one openly gay judge — Clinton appointee Deborah Batts — was an Article III federal judge.

Yesterday, Obama announced his fifth openly gay nominee to the federal bench, federal prosecutor Pamela Ki Mai Chen, who will join the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York if confirmed. Chen spent much of her career in civil rights enforcement, and is currently the Chief of the Civil Rights Section and Deputy Chief of the Public Integrity Section at a U.S Attorney’s office in New York.

Even if she is confirmed, however, gay Americans will remain massively underrepresented on the federal bench. Significantly, no openly gay judge has ever served on a United States Court of Appeals. Although President Obama nominated gay attorney Edward DuMont to a federal appeals court, DuMont eventually withdrew his nomination after he failed to receive a Judiciary Committee hearing in the face of Republican objections to his nomination.

A federal judge in Texas has blocked a key provision of the state’s recent voter suppression law that limited the ability of outside groups to register new voters.

The law, which was passed by the Republican-held legislature in an emergency session last year, placed new restrictions on groups like the League of Women Voters, making it significantly more difficult for them to register voters. The law also imposed a strict voter ID requirement for the state, which has since been blocked by the Department of Justice.

In a ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa blocked many of the provisions restricting voter registration groups until a trial on whether the entire law violates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act can be held.

The Houston Chronicle has more:

Under the ruling, the state may no longer require that deputy voter registrars live in Texas, a law Voting for America said prevented it from organizing voter registration drives.

It also may not prevent deputy registrars from registering voters who live outside their county; prevent organizations from firing or promoting employees based on the number of voters registered; prevent organizations from making photocopies of completed voter registration forms for their records; or prevent deputy registrars from mailing completed applications.

Though Costa is a recent Obama appointee, he also served as a law clerk for two unapologetic conservatives: former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Appeals Court Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

Yesterday’s ruling is a major victory not only for voter groups, but also communities who are disproportionately helped by registration drives, including minorities and poorer citizens.

To learn more about the law’s impact, read ThinkProgress’ on-the-ground coverage from Texas last year.

Nearly half of all immigrants detained by federal officials are held in facilities run by private prison companies, at an average cost for each detained immigrant is $166 a night. That’s added up to massive profits for Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group and other private prison companies:

A decade ago, more than 3,300 criminal immigrants were sent to private prisons under two 10-year contracts the Federal Bureau of Prisons signed with CCA worth $760 million. Now, the agency is paying the private companies $5.1 billion to hold more than 23,000 criminal immigrants through 13 contracts of varying lengths.

CCA was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000 due to lawsuits, management problems and dwindling contracts. Last year, the company reaped $162 million in net income. Federal contracts made up 43 percent of its total revenues, in part thanks to rising immigrant detention. GEO, which cites the immigration agency as its largest client, saw its net income jump from $16.9 million to $78.6 million since 2000.

As the AP explains, these remarkable profits come in the wake of an equally remarkable lobbying campaign. In the past decade, three major private prison companies spent $45 million on campaign donations and lobbyists to push legislation at the state and federal level. At times, this money has gone to truly nefarious legislation. A 2011 report found that the private prison industry spent millions seeking to increase sentences and incarcerate more people in order to increase the industry’s profits. 30 of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored Arizona’s now mostly invalidated immigration law — which would have landed many more people in detention — received campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists or companies, including CCA and GEO. According to a report released last year, CCA spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent between $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span in 2011. $450,000 went to the Republican national and congressional committees, while Democrats received less than half that number. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) were also among the private prison lobby’s top benefactors.

Private prisons have also been found guilty of abuses ranging from understaffing facilities to bribing judges to sentencing juveniles with minor offenses to disproportionately long terms in privately-owned correctional facilities. A recent report found a Georgia prison run by CCA charges detainees $5 a minute for phone calls while paying them just a dollar a day for menial labor that keeps the facility running; immigrants in civil detention centers have been exploited by the same program.

A birther organization known as the Conservative Majority Fund is currently running a national ad campaign claiming that it can disqualify President Obama from running for reelection. While the ad is steeped in the rhetoric of the birther movement, it goes far beyond simply claiming that Obama was not born in the United States. Indeed, the ad manages to cram a truly stunning number of far right conspiracy theories into just one minute of air time:

Who is Barack Obama? We know less about this man than any other President in American history. What’s he hiding? His autobiography is full of fictional characters. But there’s a lot more than that. If you try to look into his past, you run into a brick wall.

His college records at Columbia, sealed! His college records at Harvard, sealed! We don’t know what his thesis papers were about because those are sealed too. He Selective Service record is sealed. His records as an attorney are sealed. He has a Connecticut Social Security number and we can’t get answers about that either.

And no one — I mean no one — has seen an actual physical copy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

The fact is, if we don’t know who Barack Obama is, we shouldn’t even have him as a candidate for president. Let’s disqualify Obama before the Democratic National Convention. Call today to sign the demand to disqualify Obama. . . . We need 10,000 signatures from every congressional district to boot this guy off the ballot and have the Democrats nominate someone else.

Watch it:

The ad identifies no actual legal basis for its claim that a sitting president can be forced to give up his reelection bid if enough of his political opponents sign a petition.

As the ad’s announcer reads his script, a chryon runs at the bottom asking questions such as “What is [Obama's] connection to Bill Ayers?” “What is his current relationship with Rev. Wright?” and “Who paid for his Harvard Education?” The Conservative Majority fund’s website also appears entirely devoted to promoting far right myths, including a campaign to keep the United Nations from seizing people’s guns, an attack on the Obama Administration’s supposed “deep and dirty involvement in the the Fast & Furious gun-running scandal,” and multiple pages devoted to fighting the nearly non-existent problem of voter fraud. Their birther petition calling for Congress to “investigate Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate” prominently features anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The Conservative Majority Fund only filed its initial papers with the Federal Elections Commission a month ago, and has not yet disclosed the extent of its spending on this ad. Their spending is significant enough, however, that the ad ran simultaneously on both CNN and Fox News this morning, and it is twice the length of a normal campaign ad.

Police in Frackville, Pennsylvania recently rescued fourteen dogs from horrific conditions in a local home, which they said underscored the weaknesses in current animal welfare law. Sgt. Marvin Livergood, the officer who found the dogs, said he had never seen dogs kept in conditions this dire:

Livergood could tell that one dog had wounds on its body.

He said they encountered an “overpowering smell and strong urine and dog mess.”

Some dogs were found running in the basement, cages were faced against the wall and a dead dog was on the floor, Livergood said. …

Two of the dogs are in critical condition at a veterinarian’s office. One of them has a torn ACL and the other has a high fever and other complications, she said. The surgery for the ACL will cost about $2,000, she said.

Part of the reason cases like this, which are not as uncommon as one might think, happen is that laws protecting dogs are either not strong enough or not well enforced. One’s first animal cruelty charge in Pennsylvania is a charged as a summary offense, which carries only a minor fine. “It’s a slap on the wrist,” Frackville Borough Police Chief Michelle Ashman told ThinkProgress, adding “the penalty is not strong enough for the first offense.” Police Chief Dave Mattson of nearby Tamaqua, where nine dogs apparently similar to those in Frackville were recently found dead in a dumpster, went further, calling for fatal animal abuse to be upgraded to a felony.

Only a fraction of animal cruelty cases are actually uncovered as a consequence of under-resourced enforcement authorities. Wendy Marano, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (which did not handle the Frackville case), pointed to the large caseload shouldered by humane officers as one of the principal reasons many cruelty cases go unreported.

While the Pennsylvania code illustrates the significant weaknesses in current state law protecting dogs from violent abuse, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is working to undermine federal protections in Washington. King recently defended dogfighting and then doubled down on his comments in a nonsensical rant about child abortion. This is of a piece with King’s legislative history, which includes a recent assault on state-level protections for farm animals and a long-standing commitment to undermining laws against dogfighting.

You can find a petition to support the Frackville dogs and strengthen Pennsylvania’s animal protections here.