ALEC is now shutting down its “Public Safety and Elections” task force. ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections task force’s goals were twofold: to improve “public safety” by making it easier for citizens to carry guns everywhere they go and to shoot certain people without fear of arrest or prosecution, and to improve elections by making it harder for politically undesirable types to exercise their right to vote. (Why were gun rights and voter disenfranchisement the purview of one task force? Those two issues really have very little in common besides being of supreme importance to paranoid white people.)

What happened is, people suddenly noticed that self-defense laws had recently become much more “robust” (slash-”insane”) in lots of states after this guy in Florida named George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin and then somehow was not arrested. These new self-defense laws were widely blamed for the police reaction, or non-reaction, and while the NRA had predictably lobbied for them in the various states where they passed, it turned out that ALEC had been instrumental in drafting these laws and others like them that had nothing to do with being “pro-business” but everything to do with quietly remaking the nation into a right-wing paradise.

So major corporations began abandoning ALEC, because they hadn’t signed on for the full right-wing culture war. While Coca-Cola has a vested interest in, say, stopping public health initiatives, there’s no compelling profit-based reason for it to support the dismantling of gun control legislation. People do not get thirstier when they are carrying concealed firearms, as far as I know. Kraft does not, as a company, have any interest in making it more difficult for poor people to vote.

So! ALEC is giving up on the items of its agenda not directly related to helping giant corporations make as much money as possible without fear of lawsuits or union agitation. Because those are less “hot-button” issues.

The situation is harrowing. In just the last year, the Environmental Protection Agency and Duke University have both uncovered evidence linking groundwater contamination to the controversial drilling practice known as hydrofracking. The incriminating findings are so clear that according to Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate, fossil fuel firms in Pennsylvania acknowledge that the “natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water.”

In response, many communities are trying to slow the drilling boom. That has created a serious problem for oil and gas companies, who want to drill as much and as quickly as possible. So their political allies are working to tie drilling to Mom-and-apple-pie initiatives as a means of crushing any opposition.

In Republican-controlled Ohio, where Columbia University scientists say drilling caused recent earthquakes, that means trying to lash oil and gas revenues to the GOP’s popular income tax cut orthodoxy. Indeed, this is the obvious objective of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s recent proposal to institute a hydrofracking tax whose “fresh revenue (will) give a personal income tax cut to Ohioans,” according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

To understand Kasich’s true motive is to appreciate that he is no tax-and-spend liberal or fossil-fuel hater. He’s the opposite: an anti-tax crusader who has taken $213,000 in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, and who has tried to open up state parks to drilling. That record suggests his new tax moves are really designed to help drillers overcome any grass-roots opposition — in this case, by tying drilling’s expansion to alluring tax-cut policies. In the vernacular of political sloganeering, Kasich is basically saying, “Drilling for Tax Cuts.”

In Colorado, where 343 oil and gas spills occurred in 2011, the oil and gas industry’s mantra is a bit different: It’s “Drilling for Kids,” according to Democratic state Sen. Morgan Carroll. She has criticized the state land board for giving ConocoPhillips the drilling rights to a 26,000-acre parcel adjacent to Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city. The massive swath of land is not just any old property; it’s an old Air Force base that’s home to a Superfund site and a major reservoir, and also filled with unexploded munitions and depleted uranium.

The idea of drilling on such a fragile and dangerous site seems ludicrous — but the governor-appointed land board has been able to push the deal forward and stymie tougher regulations by insisting that oil and gas exploration will help schoolchildren.

“They’ve been telling Democrats in the legislature that it’s really for the kids,” Carroll says. “They are able to make that argument because some of the money from the sale is earmarked for K-12 education.”

As the industry’s “drill, baby, drill!” mantra butts up against more science-based opposition, be on the lookout for this same layer ploy in every state. It’s at once enticing and deceptive — but when that platter of Mom and apple pie is inevitably served up, try to remember what the dish is made of.

I recently reported that informal Romney advisor Charlie Black, for example, lobbied for the DREAM Act, putting him directly at odds with Romney’s position on the immigration legislation.

Another Romney aide who has broken from conservative orthodoxy in his lobbying work is top advisor Ron Kaufman, who “has been traveling across the country with Romney, providing advice and conducting strategic meetings,” according to the Boston Globe.

Kaufman is currently listed on the website of international lobbying and public-relations firm Dutko Grayling as a senior advisor who is on leave. A longtime Republican operative, Kaufman worked on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and held high positions in the George. H.W. Bush White House. He was also an advisor to Romney’s 2007-08 campaign, a fact that sparked a famous argument between Romney and an AP reporter who challenged the candidate on his claim that lobbyists were not running his campaign.

Disclosure filings suggest that Kaufman stopped his lobbying work at the end of 2010. But before that, Kaufman had a healthy lobbying business representing a range of corporate clients.

In 2010, for example, Kaufman and a few other Dutko lobbyists were paid $110,000 to lobby for U.S.-Japan High-Speed Rail Inc. That company, which is associated with Central Japan Railways (JRC), is trying to get Japanese-style bullet trains deployed in the United States.

Outside of the healthcare bill, there is perhaps no other Obama policy that Republicans despise more than his proposal to build a high-speed rail network. Indeed, opposition to Obama’s high-speed rail hopes seems to have killed any chances for construction of such a system any time soon.

Back in 2010, Kaufman and his colleagues were working to “create universal equal high speed rail standards that will lead to safe, efficient, and cost effective high speed rail solutions,” according to lobbying disclosures (.pdf). They also lobbied Congress on the since-killed project to build a section of a high-speed rail system in Florida.

Among Kaufman’s many other clients in recent years are Botox-maker Allergan and the In Situ Oil Sands Alliance, a Canadian group that lobbies in favor of the tar sands industry, which was dealt a blow recently when President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline.

A Romney spokeswoman says that Kaufman is a volunteer for the campaign. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In fact, Gingrich has never been a registered lobbyist — a distinction that Gingrich invoked in the Monday night debate — but his “strategic advice” work for Freddie Mac looked a lot like what can be colloquially described as lobbying, or at least something close to it.

And Gingrich’s work for healthcare companies in his post-congressional career looks even more like lobbying than the Freddie Mac consulting. The Times reported in November:

In a variety of instances, documents and interviews show, Mr. Gingrich arranged meetings between executives and officials, and salted his presentations to lawmakers with pitches for his clients, who pay as much as $200,000 a year to belong to his Center for Health Transformation.

When the center sponsored a “health transformation summit” at the Florida State Capitol in March 2006, lawmakers who attended Mr. Gingrich’s keynote speech inside the House chamber received a booklet promoting not just ideas but also the specific services of two dozen of his clients. Executives from some of those companies sat on panels for discussions that lawmakers were encouraged to attend after Mr. Gingrich’s address.

Romney is now suggesting that Gingrich did not register as a lobbyist when perhaps, by law, he should have.

But this line of attack is undermined by the fact that the Romney campaign is chock-full of people who have been lobbyists. They include:

• Former Sen. Jim Talent, a Romney surrogate and co-chairman of a top Washington lobby shop, Mercury Public Affairs, which has recently worked for big banks and the coal industry. (We explored Talent’s recent background here.)
• Charlie Black, an informal Romney advisor who is easily one of the best-known Republican lobbyists of his generation. Black has recently lobbied for Boeing, WalMart and the financial services industry.
• Ron Kaufman, who, according to the Globe, has been traveling with the Romney campaign and providing strategic advice. He was formerly chairman of the Dutko Group Worldwide.
• Former Rep. Vin Weber, a Romney policy advisor and also managing partner at Clark & Weinstock.

The lobbyist question is not a new one for Romney. Back in his first presidential run in 2007, he famously got into a verbal tussle with an Associated Press reporter who challenged Romney’s claim that lobbyists were not running his campaign. The must-see video of that exchange is here.