GOP Congressional candidate Jorge Robles is very serious about unseating Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) as the representative for California’s 38th district — and he’s using some gun imagery to do it. In a 5-minute web video released yesterday, Robles explains how he would, from Washington, end the state regulations that supposedly make California inhospitable to businesses. Interspersed throughout the video for today’s primary was an animation that shows a machine gun firing toward a wall until the words “Jorge Robles For Congress –- TAKE LINDA SANCHEZ OUT OF OFFICE” are visible.

Watch the ad, which was flagged by the New York Observer’s Hunter Walker, here:

Walker spoke with Robles campaign manager Robert Davis, who cited Robles’s job as a state parole agent and seemingly dismissed any violent overtones of the machine gun message:

Mr. Robles is in law enforcement, if you’re not aware of that, so I think it’s his way of just kind of sending our message. We’re going after Linda Sanchez, not in the way that portrays it to be if you’re thinking like that. We’re very strongly against her policies, and her programs and people really need to understand what she’s about.

Robles states repeatedly in the video that Sanchez’s “record speaks for itself” (without discussing said record), and the Robles campaign superimposes the words “HOT MESS!!” on an appearance by Sanchez on MSNBC.

Robles is running against Sanchez in a new open primary system in California, where all candidates run and the top two vote-getters end up on the ballot in November.

As the Observer points out, violent imagery, particularly that involving guns, came to the fore last year with the shooting of Rep. Gabriella Giffords (D-AZ), who was targeted by gun sights on an electoral map put out by Sarah Palin’s political organization. The crosshairs on the political map drew widespread criticism, though that didn’t stop some politicians like Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) from making light of gun violence in a political context.

Mitt Romney regularly prides himself as a champion of the military and the nation’s veterans (despite the fact that has offered little to no details about how he would address veterans issues). Romney recently praised the sacrifice “of the great men and women of every generation who serve in our armed services.” But in a new story examining Romney’s own military record, the AP notes that “it is a sacrifice the Republican presidential candidate did not make.”

During the height of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service by seeking and receiving four military draft deferments, some for university study and others for serving as a “minister of religion” in France.

But during his political career, Romney has flip-flopped on whether he actually wanted to serve in Vietnam. In 2007, Romney — a supporter of the war in Vietnam during the late-1960s — said he had wished he had served:

“I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there, and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

But the AP notes that this isn’t what Romney said back in 1994 during his campaign to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate:

But the frustration he recalled in 2007 does not match a sentiment he shared as a Massachusetts Senate candidate in 1994, when he told The Boston Herald, “I was not planning on signing up for the military.”

“It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft,” Romney told the newspaper.

But in seeking 4 deferments, Romney did in fact take actions to remove himself from the draft. In 1970, Romney eventually became eligible but by that point, the United States had begun reducing the number of troops in Vietnam and as the AP reports, “Romney’s relatively high lottery number — 300 out of 365 — was not called.”

While Romney’s lack of military service record raises questions (President Obama also did not serve in the military but was not of draft-age at the time of the Vietnam War), a recent Gallup poll found that veterans favor Romney over Obama 58 percent to 34 percent.

“Greatness in a people, I believe, is measured by the extent to which they will give themselves to something bigger than themselves,” Romney said in a Memorial Day speech last week in San Diego.

It’s almost as if Mitt Romney adviser John Bolton is rooting for a war with Iran. That’s sure what it seems like when the hawkish former U.N. ambassador cheers the lack of concrete progress in diplomatic talks with Iran over its nuke program, and then goes on to fear-monger about Iranian advances. And that’s exactly what Bolton did in a new Washington Times op-ed.

First, Bolton started off by expressing his relief that the last round of talks in Baghdad between Iran and the West yielded no breakthroughs:

Fortunately, however, the recently concluded Baghdad talks between Iran and the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany (P-5+1) produced no substantive agreement.

War isn’t the only alternative to immediate success in the diplomatic negotiations in Baghdad (indeed, there’ll be another round of talks for later this month in Moscow), but Bolton’s record indicates that’s clearly what he’s aiming for. Since at least 2008, Bolton has been calling for the U.S. to support an Israeli attack on Iran — even suggesting a nuclear attack. He’s also called for a U.S. attack, and any old excuse will do. (Mubarak falls in Egypt? Bomb Iran.) Bombing is, as Media Matters put it, his “default setting” — even though he acknowledges it might not work.

It’s no surprise, then, that Bolton turned to some baseless fear-mongering on the Iranian nuclear program. U.S., Israeli, and U.N. estimates all reportedly indicate that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. But Bolton, at every turn, asserts that objective without evidence. In the Washington Times, he cited the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s program:

The most eye-catching item was evidence from the deeply buried Fordow facility of U-235 enrichment up to 27 percent, which Iran quickly dismissed as a technical glitch. Alternatively, of course, Iran could have been experimenting to find the most efficacious path to weapons-grade U-235 levels.

Iran wasn’t the only one to dismiss this as a “technical glitch.” The AP, which published the initial report on the traces of uranium enriched to 27 percent purity, cited the “diplomats who had told the AP of the existence of the traces before publication of the confidential report” as saying that “the higher-enriched material could have been a mishap involving centrifuges over-performing as technicians adjusted their output rather than a dangerous step toward building a bomb.” And the New York Times reported that U.S. officials and nuclear experts shared this view:

“It’s definitely embarrassing but not nefarious,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group that tracks the Iranian nuclear program, said in an interview.

A senior Obama administration official agreed that “the most likely explanation” for the discovery was technical.

Don’t count on Bolton, though, to explain those perspectives to his readers. Doing so wouldn’t bolster his long-standing calls for war. And don’t count on him for airing any of the possible negative consequences of war either (in line with the Romney campaign’s modus operandi), not least of which that an attack may spur Iran to actually build a bomb.

Those consequences and the intelligence estimates are the reasons the Obama administration, despite its view that a potential Iranian nuclear weapon would constitute a threat to the U.S., its allies and the non-proliferation regime, pursues its dual-track of pressure and diplomatic engagement. And that’s why the administration, instead of cheering for diplomacy to fail like Bolton, considers a negotiated diplomatic solution to be the “best and most permanent way” to end the standoff with Iran over its nuclear program.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan have both made waves over the past months with statements asserting that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could only delay, not destroy, the Islamic Republic’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Speaking in Tel Aviv last week, Michèle Flournoy, formerly the Obama administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy, emphasized that while the U.S. has a real and viable set of military options against Iran, an Israeli unilateral strike would be unproductive and any military action “would put time on the clock, but it wouldn’t solve the problem in any meaningful way.”

Flournoy’s comments were delivered at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) on May 29 and 30 and appeared to attempt to both alleviate Israeli concerns that the U.S. was insufficiently committed to preventing a nuclear armed Iran and dissuade Israel from launching its own unilateral strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Having sat in the Pentagon, I can assure you of the quality of the work that has been done. [...] The military option for the president is real,” said Flournoy. “Barack Obama is a president that says what he means and does what he says. [...] I can assure you we do not have a policy of containment.”

Flournoy, who left the Pentagon in February and advises the Obama re-election campaign, warned that Israeli military action would ultimately prove counterproductive to Israeli and U.S. interests, telling the audience:

If Israel would launch an attack prematurely, it would undermine the ability of the international community to come together in the critical long-term campaign. It would ultimately hurt our goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

That warning was amplified by former Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Blackwill who told the INSS audience, “If there were attacks on the American homeland [in response to an Israeli attack on Iran], how many Americans might think that Israel dragged us into a war and now shopping malls were being blown up?”

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. However, intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.