Dick Cheney’s re-emergence tour continued today with a visit to Capitol Hill to get Republicans “ginned up” to prevent automatic cuts to military spending that are supposed to take effect early next year. Politico reports that in a meeting with Senate Republicans this afternoon, Cheney provided some words of wisdom based on his experience as Secretary of Defense during the George H.W. Bush administration:

Cheney didn’t push a specific policy remedy for avoiding the automatic cuts, several senators said. Rather, he focused on his time as the defense secretary in the 1990s — talking particularly about the need to plan years in advance for major investments in the military.

“He just talked about some of the critical investments that have been made over time and the lag time that it takes for those things to happen,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) “There was no policy issue; it was just the fact [that] sequestration is a blunt object, and it is.”

Whether Cheney talked about his time leading the Pentagon, the big elephant in the room here is that Cheney himself oversaw drastic cuts to the DOD budget during his tenure as Defense Secretary and even pushed for cuts to expensive weapons programs. George W. Bush administration Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell, who served as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman during the elder Bush’s administration, pointed this out last year in making the case that the “defense budget cannot be sacrosanct” when figuring ways to cut spending:

“When the Cold War ended 20 years ago, when I was chairman and [Dick] Cheney was Secretary of Defense, we cut the defense budget by 25 percent. And we reduced the force by 500,000 active duty soldiers, so it can be done. Now, how fast you can do it and what you have to cut out remains to be seen, but I don’t think the defense budget can be made sacrosanct and it can’t be touched.”

Indeed, as a recent CAP report pointed out, the budget authority for the Defense Department fell by nearly $100 billion during the George H.W. Bush administration, or Cheney’s time as Defense Secretary.

Also most likely left unmentioned in Cheney’s meetings with Republicans on the Hill is that overwhelming majorities of Americans in both Democratic and Republican congressional districts favor military spending cuts and the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said this week that even the most drastic cuts would merely take the Pentagon’s budget back to 2006 levels.

Late last month, a senior GOP operative told Reuters that, when faced with foreign policy questions, Mitt Romney’s “instinct is to call the Cheney-ites” — those whose views align with former Vice President Dick Cheney. Just a day later, the New York Times reported that a former Cheney adviser guided Romney’s “hard line” on China policy.

Cheney’s and Romney’s views on foreign policy line up on a host of issues — something put on stark display last week when the former vice president hosted a fundraiser for Romney at his Wyoming home. The disastrous policies of the Bush era apparently remain unpopular enough that the Romney campaign barred photographs of the candidate with his host, but not enough to keep Romney from taking advice from the controversial figure. In an interview with National Review, Romney was asked about their meeting:

NATIONAL REVIEW: A few days ago, you visited Vice President Cheney. Did he have any advice for you?

ROMNEY: We did speak, at some length, about foreign-policy matters, in particular the circumstances surrounding some of the foreign-policy decisions of the Bush administration.

It’s worth remembering that Cheney was known to be a central figure in aggressive Bush administration policies that led, among other outcomes, to a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq (something several Romney advisers supported). Cheney — like some Romney advisers and other fundraisers — supported attacking Iran (in contravention to Romney’s espoused Iran policy). Cheney also considers himself a “big supporter of waterboarding,” and thinks the U.S. should revive the practice that most consider torture.

Romney previously called Cheney “a man of wisdom and judgement.” Now he’s actuating that assessment by taking advice from the former vice president.

Egyptian protesters threw shoes and tomatoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade in Alexandria this week. The New York Times reported that their demonstration “delighted conservative bloggers in the United States” but “what has attracted less attention” is why they were protesting: a conspiracy theory cooked up by Islamophobes in the U.S. that the Obama administration is working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Pressed by American reporters to explain where they got the idea that their new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, had been foisted on them through a U.S. plot, rather than the will of the majority, several Egyptians cited information gathered from American blogs or news sites.

An Egyptian-American Christian who met Mrs. Clinton on Sunday cited a recent assertion by Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican, “that the Obama Administration is pursuing a closeted pro-Muslim agenda,” in a conversation with Time magazine’s correspondent, Abigail Hauslohner.

Rumors that the Obama administration has provided the Muslim Brotherhood with billions of dollars in aid remain an article of faith with many Egyptians who are convinced that Mr. Morsi’s victory was a sham, despite repeated efforts by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to correct the record on Twitter.

That’s right — Bachmann’s ludicrous allegation that the Muslim Brotherhood has “penetrated” the United States government convinced anti-Islamist Egyptians that the U.S. is backing their domestic Islamist opponents. The source for Bachmann’s ravings is Frank Gaffney, a conspiracy theorist who claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government and that shari’a law is coming to the U.S.

Non-coincidentally, one Egyptian blogger, Sara Ahmed, said that retired Lieutenant General William Boykin had evidence that the U.S. was in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood, pointing to an episode of Gaffney’s radio show in which he hosted Boykin. The retired military officer has claimed that there ought be “no mosques in America” and that Muslims are “under an obligation to destroy our Constitution.” Underscoring why such rhetoric is so dangerous, Ahmed said that a senior official of Boykin’s level “wouldn’t say such thing without proof!”

The Obama Administration is quite wary of the consequences of the Brotherhood’s electoral victory for regional stability and has been prodding the Brothers to respect the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Meanwhile, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has publicly called on Bachmann to produce solid and irrefutable evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated the U.S. government.

Yale University’s new partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS) could be seen as a interesting means of bringing liberal ideas to a strictly authoritarian country. But the latest news from the Wall Street Journal about the venture isn’t promising:

[T]he Singapore campus won’t allow political protests, nor will it permit students to form partisan political societies. …

Laws in the city-state say protests can be held only at a speaker’s corner in a Singapore park, and even those gatherings face restrictions on what may be discussed. Holding cause-related events elsewhere is illegal without a license from the police.

The college, which is wholly funded by the Singapore government and private donors, expects to admit its first batch of students in August 2013.

Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis even told the Journal that students “are going to be totally free to express their views” despite the ban, failing to understand that freedom of political speech can be rendered almost meaningless without concomitant protections for freedom of association (as provided in the First Amendment). When Yale’s American faculty, anticipating this sort of problem, passed a resolution urging “Yale-NUS to respect, protect and further principles of non-discrimination for all, including sexual minorities and migrant workers; to uphold civil liberty and political freedom on campus and in the broader society,” Yale President Richard Levin said the resolution “carried a sense of moral superiority that I found unbecoming.”

In 2011, the State Department noted reports of the following human rights abuses in Singapore: “mandated caning as an allowable punishment for some crimes, infringement of aspects of citizens’ privacy rights, restriction of speech and press freedom and the practice of self-censorship by journalists, restriction of freedoms of assembly and association, and some limited restriction of freedom of religion.”