Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser Amb. John Bolton has a knack for grabbing headlines for his unbridled hawkishness. On Sunday, Bolton rehashed his usual attacks on President Obama for not being supportive of Israel (those charges are spurious).

The only thing that might be notable about Bolton’s comment was its venue. Bolton was appearing on Sunday on a radio show hosted by Aaron Kelin, the Jerusalem bureau chief for the conspiracy website World Net Daily, known as WND. WND is perhaps best known for pushing Obama “birther” conspiracies — the widely discredited claim that the president was born abroad and is ineligible to hold his office — as well as other questionable stories.

It should come as no surprise that the Romney campaign, where Bolton serves as a foriegn policy adviser, maintains these sorts of relationships with conspiracy theorists. In an interview with another right-wing website, a Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar outlined a media strategy to use right-wing websites like the aggregator Drudge Report to get around critical media coverage. (During the campaign, Romney singled out Drudge as one of his favorite websites, and posted a video of himself reading the Drudge Report.)

But Drudge has a sordid history of providing traffic-driving links to conspiracy websites — including WND. A ThinkProgress investigation revealed that, since June 2011, Drudge linked 184 times to WND and another prominent conspiracy site, by conservative estimates driving over 30 million pageview to them — and that doesn’t include the seven permanent links Drudge has to WND columnists.

Here’s a chart showing how one of Mitt Romney’s favorite websites drives web traffic to WND and other conspiracy sites:

Like his employer WND, Klein buys into “birtherism”: He recently hosted “birther” idol Sheriff Joe Arpaio on his show to discuss findings of an investigation concluding Obama’s birth certificate was faked. (Klein said he, too, did an investigation that yielded the same results.)

WND pushes other less-than-reliable conspiracies on its pages. The website published stories alleging that Obama spent a year in Pakistan working for the C.I.A. and that conspiracists’ bête noire William Ayers paid to put the “foreigner” Obama through school.

For his part, Bolton had, not including this weekend’s episode, appeared on Klein’s radio show at least three times this year alone, with more appearances before that.

Yesterday on C-Span’s Newsmakers, House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-WA) reiterated his concern that Mitt Romney will carry over the Bush administration’s foreign policy should he win the White House this November. Given the number of Bush-Cheney foreign policy alumni advising Romney’s campaign, Smith said it’s a “legitimate question” to wonder whether his foreign policy as president will model George W. Bush’s:

SMITH: I think it’s the overwillingness to use the military. The over-willingness to use military action in the sort of belligerent, go it alone, no allies, no negotiations approach that I think is not well suited to our current national security needs. [...]

But what you get too much out of the Romney campaign — and certainly from Dick Cheney — is whenever there is a problem, we have to step in militarily. … Step after step after step, you have to wonder that if you have another Republican administration, how many more wars are we going to have to go through? And I think that’s a very legitimate question and I think they are too willing to use military action instead of looking at the other tools that are in our national security arsenal.

Q: So you think that Mitt Romney would be a carry over of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy?

SMITH: I think that’s a risk. Certainly. … He has relied a great deal on the Bush-Cheney administration national security leadership so I think it’s a worthy concern.

Watch the clip:

It’s not only concerning that many of Romney’s foreign policy advisers are holdovers from the Bush-Cheney-era but also, it appears that the so-called Cheney-ites on his team have the former Massachusetts governor’s ear. Moreover, Romney and Cheney actually share views on a number of foreign policy issues. And it appears that Romney is concerned about this perception as his campaign did not allow the media to photograph the two men together at a recent fundraiser.

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) baseless allegations that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the U.S. government — particularly via a top aid to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton — have been met with near-universal condemnation inside the United States. But no one has thought to ask the Muslim Brotherhood whether she’s telling the truth – until now, when GlobalPost reporter Erin Cunningham managed to solicit a public response. While some Egyptians have unfortunately been persuaded by Bachmann’s nonsense, the Muslim Brothers themselves are not among them. They issued a somewhat amusing blanket denial:

“I haven’t heard these rumors, but they strike me as ridiculous,” said Ahmed Al Nahhas, a long-time Brotherhood activist and leader in Egypt’s second-largest city, Alexandria. “Surely the United States government selects its employees very carefully.” …

[I]n Egypt, the birthplace of the Brotherhood, the organization’s leaders were either perplexed by the accusations or simply hadn’t heard them. Nor had they heard of Huma Abedin.

“The Muslim Brotherhood can’t even penetrate the Egyptian government,” said a Brotherhood leader in Egypt’s Daqheleya province, Ibrahim Ali Iraqi, in response to the accusations his group had infiltrated top US agencies.

Indeed, having assumed the presidency following a year of economic tumult and political upheaval, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi is grappling with severe domestic problems — not least of which is his battle with the ruling military for executive power.

“We are in a period of darkness because the country is still governed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces — and they have a long history of support from the United States,” Iraqi said. “So it’s ridiculous that these accusations are leveled at us.”

It’s not just Muslim Brotherhood officials that are skeptical of Bachmann’s crusade, which has its roots in Islamophobic leader Frank Gaffney’s wild conspiracy theories. Top Republicans including John Boehner, Marco Rubio, Scott Brown, John McCain, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (on which Bachmann sits) Mike Rogers have all disavowed the Minnesota Congresswoman’s tilting at Muslim windmills. Further, Democrat Keith Ellison, one of two Muslims in Congress, has taken point on dismantling Bachmann’s Islamophobic inquisition. Bachmann’s allies, by contrast, include Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Yesterday on CNN, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) again scorned the Obama administration for not intervening militarily in Syria, calling its efforts to resolve the crisis diplomatically “shameful.” When host Candy Crowley asked if the U.S. should be sending arms to the Syrian rebels, McCain immediately replied, “Sure, why not?“:

CROWLEY: U.S. arms, you want to get U.S. arms to them. You don’t…

MCCAIN: Sure, why not? Why not? Russian arms are coming in. Iranians are on the ground. Meanwhile, the Iranians are helping Bashar al-Assad and they are committing acts of — they are committing terrorist acts around the world — they are planning on terrorist acts. The talks with Iran on their nuclear development have broken down and where is the United States of America?

Watch the clip:

McCain is wrong to suggest that the Obama administration is standing idly by while Bashar al-Assad kills his own people. The U.S. has been delivering non-military assistance to Syria’s rebels behind the diplomatic scenes, including providing intelligence, logistics and communications assistance and technological aid and training. And the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration is tabling for now diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in Syria and instead increasing aid to rebels, “scrambling spies and diplomats to block arms and oil shipments from Iran and passing intelligence to front-line allies.”

But McCain’s knee-jerk “why not” arm the Syrian rebels response demonstrates his apparently unwillingness to consider the repercussions of such a move. “To argue that we ought to be arming the opposition is a very consequential statement,” U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said recently. “And I don’t think that those that are advocating that have fully thought through the consequences.”

House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said last month that he sees the intelligence everyday and urged caution in arming the rebels. “We just don’t have a good handle on who they are,” Rogers said.

And Republican House Speaker John Boehner (OH) agrees with Rice, last week dismissing McCain’s Syria position in favor of Obama’s. “I believe that Assad has to go,” he said, “But I don’t think that we need to overly involve ourselves to the extent of direct military action.”

The defense industry has so far mounted an all-out campaign to avoid sequestration, the military spending cuts that will come into effect on January 2, 2013 — an estimated $55 billion per year — if lawmakers fail to strike a budget deal in accordance with last year’s Budget Control Act. The industry boosted lobbying expenditures and sent CEOs before Congress to warn against potential cuts. But some experts pushed back against the dire warnings as self-interested hype.

Now, the skeptics are getting a boost from an unlikely source: other defense industry CEOs. Defense News reports that some military contractor executives are preparing to deal with the consequences, which they seem to view as the sort of standard obstacles any business might face.

Some of the executives only spoke anonymously because of the campaign being waged by some of the more outspoken CEOs and the industry lobby, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA). Defense news reported:

[T]he magnitude of the cuts — millions of jobs, according to the AIA, and the industry’s destruction — is overblown, according to several senior industry executives. Even some of the declarations about the complete lack of guidance on how sequestration would be implemented are excessive, one senior executive said.

“It’s not that complicated,” the executive said. “There’s a little drama being played out. There’s a little fire for effect being played out.”

The warnings about cuts are “overblown”: the Congressional Budget Office found that, even after the cuts mandated by sequestration, the defense budget would still be larger than it was in 2006.

Others executives went on the record, discussing the cuts in non-apocalyptic terms as an ordinary slow-down of business. The head of Raytheon, William Swanson, acknowledged that some jobs might be lost, but relayed his experience from the last slump in the defense industry:

I’ve lived through this. The light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. I’m not a person who says, ‘Oh woe is me.’ When you look at this situation, I understand the danger, but there’s also an opportunity. And the smart companies, smart leaders, smart businesspeople know how to take advantage of opportunities.

One executive even wondered if all the industry doomsday hype around spending cuts wasn’t bad for the industry, suggesting that the campaign, as Defense News put it, “may undermine talent retention.”

Current and former Republican politicians have made every case for maintaining military spending at high rates, at times abandoning their own talking points and scare-mongering about forthcoming wars. But their own constituents support cuts.

SLINGER, Wisconsin — One of the most conservative congressmen in the country stepped up to defend Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and the rights of all Muslim-Americans yesterday against Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) spurious accusations that she is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, calling them “the wrong thing to do.”

During a town hall held by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) on Sunday, a constituent lauded Bachmann’s anti-Muslim witchhunt about a supposed Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government and called on her congressman to support her efforts. Sensenbrenner instead used the opportunity not only to defend Abedin, but to advocate for the larger notion of religious pluralism in America and a separation between church and state.

The longtime Republican congressman went on to praise the Constitution’s ban on religious tests to hold office, saying Thomas Jefferson’s vision “was right.” When the constituent responded with bigoted accusations about Islam, Sensenbrenner countered: “Religion is a personal issue to every one of the people who lives in the United States…And that has been one of the most cherished freedoms that this country has had since it’s beginning”:

SENSENBRENNER: Let me say that I do know Huma Abedin and I think that the comments that were made about her in that letter, whether or not they were taken out of context, were the wrong thing to do… I think the Constitution in saying that there shall never be a religious test for any office of trust and profit under the United States meant that people should not be judged on the basis of their religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs. That was Thomas Jefferson that put that in the Constitution — I think he was right.

CONSTITUENT: I think that there’s a political ideology that’s a concern in Islam that is concerning and that should be looked at and we should know that this person is not a threat…

SENSENBRENNER: Heidi, Heidi, Heidi, the First Amendment prohibits the government from making a distinction between what is “good religion” and what is “bad religion.” That’s none of the government’s business. Religion is a personal issue to every one of the people who lives in the United States, whether you practice a faith, how you practice a faith, whether you don’t practice a faith, whether you say you’re a member of a faith but don’t practice it, it’s none of the government’s business. And this is the whole issue of religious freedom. And that has been one of the most cherished freedoms that this country has had since it’s beginning.

Watch highlights of the exchange:

That Sensenbrenner, a dyed-in-the-cloth conservative, would stand up to Islamophobic attacks from constituents and colleagues, is both laudable and heartening. Too often in the past, these voices of reason about Islam and religious freedom are only voiced on the left.

Still, Sensenbrenner isn’t the only Republican put off by Bachmann’s bogus charges. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was the first to stand up to Bachmann, calling her allegations “nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable citizen.” In addition, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) dropped his support for Bachmann’s witchhunt over the weekend.