Actually I take that back -- it's not the worst idea ever if you're looking at it from the perspective of the Obama campaign. But, yeah, otherwise this is the...Dumbest. Idea. Ever. Let's review the case for -- and against -- Pennsylvania freshman GOP Senator and Tea Party favorite Pat Toomey as Mitt Romney's running mate.

Here's the latest pro-Toomey trial balloon from the unfortunately named Future of Capitalism blog:

Mr. Toomey's blue-collar background — his dad was a union worker for an electrical utility company, his mom a part-time church secretary — would help counter Democratic attempts to portray Governor Romney, whose father was an auto-industry executive and governor of Michigan, as a child of privilege.

Mr. Toomey's mastery of tax and spending issues — he used to run the Club for Growth, a pro-growth, free-market-oriented political group — endears him to economic conservatives. And as a pro-life Catholic who challenged Arlen Specter in a primary partly on social issues, he'd generate enthusiasm for the ticket among social conservatives. If relatively unknown nationally, he is nonetheless smart and well-respected within the party.

The writer also says Toomey will appeal to the Romney campaign as a way to win our swing state of Pennsylvania while saying a giant (bleep) you to Rick Santorum -- because of a tangled web involving Santorum, Toomey, Arlen Specter and a 2004 GOP Senate primary that I don't particularly feel like untangling today.

Anyway, I think the speculation proves one thing: How completely self-delusional Republicans have become. They don't seem to even know who Pat Toomey is, nor do they seem to care. So I'll have to spell it out for them. If Toomey were nominated for vice president, you'd be pairing the vulture capitalist of Bain Capital with this:

Toomey's an easy target for economic-centered attacks. As a Wall Street banker, Toomey helped pioneer the use of some of the same financial products that have caused fiscal chaos for American towns, cities, and states. He spent years as a derivatives trader for Chemical Bank and at Morgan Grenfell, a British financial firm. While at Morgan Grenfell, Toomey focused on things like interest rate swaps—complicated debt instruments that poisoned many a municipality's portfolio. Shortly after he was elected to Congress in 1998, a trade magazine rejoiced that "now the derivatives industry can claim representation by one of its own." Toomey parlayed his trading experience into a spot on the House banking committee, where he crusaded against regulation of financial markets—especially derivatives.

I would have thought Toomey on the ticket was horrible political strategy even before the news of Jamie Dimon and the risky JPMorganChase trade that lost another $2 billion -- proof that both Wall Street and our political overlords have learned nothing over the last four years. But now it's obviously an even more ridiculous suggestion today. Pairing up a middle-class-job-destroyer with the ultimate front man for the 1 Percent on Capitol Hill?

That's not going to happen. Not in this climate.

I've always opposed the death penalty for one reason -- I think it's immoral, and everything else is secondary. But if you don't object to capital punishment on moral grounds, there's always the issue of injustice, driven home by this story:

Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.

De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution's failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.

"I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance," Liebman told The Huffington Post. "It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence."

Two innocent people were murdered here -- the gas station clerk and De Luna, murdered by the state for a crime he did not commit. And there's now no way to obtain real justice for either one. What's telling is how long it took researchers to unravel this tale -- five years of recent research, completed some 23 years after De Luna's execution in Texas. This is a wrongdoing that newspapers, for example, didn't have the resources to investigate in the salad days. Now, forget it.

Or we could just abolish the death penalty, as most civilization natons have done. Innocent men would still be jailed -- but a handful of wrongfully convicted might actually still be alive if and when they are ever exonerated. As the article notes:

The ease with which De Luna was prosecuted and the obscurity of his death are what makes his case so important, said Liebman.

"There are many cases out there that nobody has ever looked at and are probably at risk of innocence," said Liebman. "It's a cautionary tale about the risks we take when we have the death penalty."

And it was still hot:

Americans just lived through the hottest 12 months ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Tuesday.

The announcement came as NOAA reported that the U.S. also just experienced its third-warmest April on record. 

“These temperatures, when added with the first quarter and previous 11 months, calculate to the warmest year-to-date and 12-month periods since recordkeeping began in 1895,” the agency reported.

I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for all this...although none springs to mind.

I swear this is not from the Onion:

“I’m for Mitt Romney,” [George W.] Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.

I'm trying to figure out which is more ridiculous and ironic: An elevator door closing on Bush while he's trying to endorse Romney or the fact that someone actually asked Bush to give a speech on human rights. I'm leaning heavily toward the latter.

I didn't intend to go back again into Newsweek's deperate-plea-for-attention cover about President Obama as our first gay president, but it's important to make this point. Newsweek's cover isn't only stupid, but it's amost certainly inaccurate. Why? Well, for one thing, do the math. There have been 43 presidents (the discrepancy is because Grover Cleveland could have been our first gay president twice...but probably wasn't) and if you assume that 5 percent of all men are gay, that puts at least two, maybe three, of our commanders-in-chief in the White House closet.

Then there's the matter that almost certainly 100 percent of all U.S. presidents to hail from the state of Pennsylvania were gay:

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Of course, Americans were quite capable in 1860 of judging their leaders by the content of their character; voters came to despise Buchanan not because he was probably gay, but because he was a lousy president who dithered while the nation slid into civil war. Meanwhile, over 150 years Pennsylvania has gone from James Buchanan to Rick Santorum. You call that evolution?

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times today about a protest march led by writers -- yes, writers -- in Moscow protesting their freedoms during the re-ascension of president Vladimir Putin. It's important to note that with a tainted election and restrictions on free speech and a free press, Russia is hardly a bastion of freedom and democracy these days. That, of course, was the reason for the march across town.

Given everything that's happened over the last six months, it's interesting what happened when protesters marched in Moscow without a permit.

Nothing:

It was only four days ago when 12 prominent authors, disturbed by the crackdown on dissent that accompanied President Vladimir V. Putin’s inauguration, announced an experiment. They called it a “test stroll,” which aimed to determine whether it was possible to spend an afternoon walking en masse from one city park to another “without being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions.”

No one knew quite what to expect on Sunday. But when the 12 writers left Pushkin Square at lunchtime, they were trailed by a crowd that swelled to an estimated 10,000 people, stopping traffic and filling boulevards for 1.2 miles. Many wore the white ribbons that are a symbol of opposition to Mr. Putin’s government. The police did not interfere, although the organizers had not received a permit to march.

Compare that to what happens when thousands of protesters try to march across New York City:

Thousands of protesters converged on Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon in the culmination of May Day demonstrations organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, resulting in occasionally bloody clashes and the arrests of more than 30 demonstrators.

All the arrests were on disorderly conduct charges, and most were of people who were blocking traffic or resisting arrest, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department. Protesters were arrested near Bryant Park in Midtown, on the Williamsburg Bridge, at a park on the Lower East Side and near Washington Square Park.

Some were busted just for being in the street -- exactly as the marchers in Moscow were:

Near Washington Square Park, demonstrators carrying a banner that read “On Strike” disregarded police warnings to stay on the sidewalk and stepped onto Avenue of the Americas. Several officers tackled and arrested them.

One man who was led away in cuffs had a bloody face.

I think we need to start being honest with ourselves. The "American Exceptionalism" that we once took for granted when it comes to civil liberties is disappearing. The reality is that the picture is mixed. Would I trade the freedoms we have here now for what they have in Moscow day in and day out? Of course not. Bur we could do so, so much better. It's embarassing that the United States is rated so low when it comes to freedom of the press. And when it comes to freedom of assembly, the Occupy protests have helped to show us how far we've fallen. (On some days, below even Moscow).

We should look at police "stop and frisk" policies in the same context. Citizens of big American cities want the same freedom to move freely from place to place that the Moscow protesters wanted. And how is that working out these days? Ask the editorial board of the New York Times.

Young black and Hispanic men continued to be stopped in disproportionate numbers. They are only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, yet these males, between the ages of 14 and 24, accounted for 41.6 percent of stops last year. More than half of all stops were conducted because the individual displayed “furtive movements” — which is so vague as to be meaningless.

The data also show that the police are significantly more likely to use force when they stop blacks and Hispanics than when they stop whites. This means minority targets are more likely to be slammed against walls or spread-eagled while officers go through their belongings. Even when victims are unhurt, they are likely to develop a deep and abiding distrust of law enforcement.

Americans aren't greedy when it comes to their civil liberties . But the right to move around peacefully from place to place seems like a bare minimum. That should be a basic human right anywhere in the world -- in Moscow, and even in New York City.

A meme here at Attytood over the last seven years has been the problems of daily newspapers in an Internet age. But if you think it's hard for a once-a-day print publication to stay relevant in a 24/7 world, then you need to multiple that struggle times-7 for America's newsmagazines. For the last decade, pundits have asked how these publications that ruled the media landscape in the mid-20th Century can survive in this kind of environment.

The only moderately satisfying answer is that publications like Time and Newsweek -- which have large staffs of enormously talented journalists -- can publish news and commentary on the Web in a timely fashion similar to Web-oriented sites like Slate or the Huffington Post. They do this and they do it OK, although like every "legacy media" outfit the revenue isn't sustaining as the big profits of the print monopoly era. But what can they do about the supposed raison d'etre of the whole enterprise -- that thinner-and-thinner gloosy thing that's on the newstand once a week.

Honestly? Nothing. The "weekly newsmagazine" is an oxymoron. There's just nothing about the news that has a "weekly" component to it anymore. At this point, the print editions of Time and Newsweek would need to do something truly remarkable and praiseworthy to justify their continued existence. Instead, they are going out like a tragically insane individual, stripping naked and running down the street yelling profanities at civil sociery.

Time had its meltdown -- with its much talked-about breast-feeding-a-3-year-old-mom-just-in-time-for-Mother's-Day cover that just tangentially related to the topic of overproductive moms. Over at Newsweek, you'd think they'd see this as a chance to brand themselves as the more serious and responsible rival. But this is 2012 -- what was I thinking? Instead, head honcho Tina Brown reportedly said -- and I'm not making this up -- "let the games begin."

Or maybe she said "game on." Or maybe she said in a Jamaican accent, "gay, mon."

You see the result: Newsweek's cover calling President Obama "America's first gay president" because -- like roughly half of all U.S. heterosexuals -- he now supports the idea of same-sex marriage. It reminds me of their famous 1964 cover calling Lyndon Johnson "the first black president" after he signed the Civil Rights Act. OK, I'm just kidding...they didn't do that in 1964. People would have thought such a cover was stupid and immature.

Unlike today?

Of course, in the short run they'll probably sell a few extra copies with these shock covers. But at the expense of destroying a brand of top-notch journalism that it took 75 years to build up. And then what desperate ploy will they use to beg readers to pay attention? One can only imagine. Harry Truman said famously that it's a damn shame when anyone dies, and that will be no less true of Time and Newsweek.

But it's just so sad and pathetic to see it end like this.

The Twittosphere was buzzing this weekend over news of a press conference tomorrow featuring Mayor Nutter and hip-hop icon Jay-Z. A lot of the speculation was that the two would be announcing some sort of voter registration drive.

Instead, reports the DN's Dan Gross, it's a music festival called Made In America. It will taken place over Labor Day weekend, which just happens to coincide with the kickoff of the fall campaign. I'm sure none of the performers at Made In America will mention voter registration, or President Obama, or anything like that. Am I right?

Everything old is new again.

Meanwhile, appropos of nothing, our old-new overlords should check out this article about the Winnipeg Free Press in Canada -- where some reporters and editors work out of a cafe! It's not only a great way to connect with the community, but at 8th and Market they could squeeze out a few dollars, presuming they bribe all the right people to get all the city permits.