A few months ago, I undertook a dangerous mission for the magazine, one that could well have resulted in some post-traumatic stress. It involved reading all the latest books from the then-candidates and possible candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee (the result was this article). Unfortunately, Herman Cain was not yet running, nor had he produced the inspiring tome that is his latest, This is Herman Cain! (note to self: Make sure next book has exclamation point in title!), so I didn't get the chance to read it. But Michelle Cottle did, and what she found was pretty alarming.

Yesterday morning, I looked into my crystal ball and boldly predicted that within 48 hours, Herman Cain would walk back his surprisingly pro-choice comments on abortion ("So what I'm saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide") and come out for full-on, abortion-should-be-illegal anti-choicism. Well here you go:

That Senate Republicans used the filibuster to kill a Democratic stimulus bill isn’t a surprise – at this point, Republicans have all but announced their plan to keep the economy from significantly improving, and as a result, slash the tires on President Obama’s bid for re-election.

What comes as a surprise is the extent to which the press isn’t playing along. In the past, reporters would describe yesterday's event with “balanced” language that obscured Republican responsibility for the obstruction. For example, here’s how The New York Times described last week’s failed vote on the full American Jobs Act:

The animosity between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry at Tuesday's debate might have surprised a few viewers, but their their dislike for each other is well known among reporters who follow the candidates. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles after the debate which highlighted that history. Here's how WaPo describes how the two related as state governors in the 2000s:

The other day, I sorted through Herman Cain's recent muddled comments on abortion and concluded that he was just unaware that this is an issue that involves laws, both current and potential, that affect what people can and can't do. Every time he got asked about abortion, he would answer as if he were advising a young woman not to get one. So he explained that he believes life begins at conception, and no one should get an abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. But he was far less clear on what he thinks the law ought to be.

The two leading stories on the nightly news for the past week have been the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Republican primary race, a contrast so vivid that the reports could be coming from two different planets.

First, we see thousands of citizens so frustrated and angry with economic inequality in the U.S. that they have organized to protest in hundreds of cities around the country. Then we see a group of contenders for president agree that the only economic problem we have is that wealth and influence are not sufficiently concentrated at the top.

When Charles Webster was a member of the Maine House during the 1980s and 1990s, he and his Republican colleagues routinely proposed bills that would create restrictive voting laws—or, as Webster sees it, legislation to tamp down on the rampant threat of voter fraud. “Every year we tried to solve this problem,” he says, “and it was always a partisan vote,” with Democrats supporting laws intended to increase turnout. As a result, Webster says, “We have one of the most loosey-goosey, lax election laws in the country.”