- In case there was any doubt that Romney’s embrace of Donald Trump was a nod to birthers: The candidate released his birth certificate just minutes before a joint appearance with the reality TV star in Las Vegas last night. “Birther queen” Orly Taitz will be pleased, as she told me yesterday that Romney should disclose the document.

Most pundits assume Trump, acting as Romney’s surrogate and fundraiser, is “off message,” but the timing of the birth certificate release seems to add further evidence to the alertnate theory that the candidate is quietly trying to appeal to Republican voters who are still not convinced that Obama was born in the United States, without having to actually say a word about Obama’s birth certificate himself. Why else would Romney unexpectedly release the document last night when no one had been demanding to see it?

Still, budding Romney birthers may point out that it’s not actually a birth certificate but a “certificate of live birth.” Someone call Sheriff Joe Arpaio!

- Donald Trump went on his third televised birther rant in 24 hours last night: After taking his message to CNBC in the morning and CNN in the afternoon, he stopped by Fox News to tell host Greta Van Susteren that he wants “good solid proof” that Obama was born in the U.S. Asked what kind of proof might satisfy him, Trump replied, “Let’s get back to jobs.” And while many speculate the Obama campaign is liking all this birther talk, Trump insisted, “I actually semi-know for a fact that they hate this subject.” At least “semi-know” is closer to a fact than Trump usually gets.

But the Christian Science Monitor’s Liz Marlantes argues the focus on Trump has obscured the “most important meeting” Romney had in Vegas yesterday — with casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich’s campaign afloat for several months in the GOP primary and could send big money Romney’s way.

- The $1 billion plan: Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are out with a big story today about the “loose network of prominent conservatives” who plan to spend about $1 billion attacking Obama and congressional Democrats this year. The network includes the usual suspects — Karl Rove’s groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers, among others:

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Romney, plans to spend another $100 million, while Rove’s American Crossroads and its dark-money sister group Crossroads GPS will spend a combined $300 billion. Thank you Citizens United.

Last week, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickenson profiled of some of the biggest donors to the Romney campaign proper.

- What would Mitt Romney’s foreign policy look like? Foreign Policy magazine’s Daniel Drezner sketches out the first year of a Romney administration if the candidate “had to implement every foreign policy campaign promise he’s ever made in every foreign-policy white paper, op-ed, campaign statement, or random utterance that came from his campaign.”

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress’s Ali Gharib points out that while Romney is slamming Barack Obama’s approach to Syria, the Republican has adopted one based on … Barack Obama’s foreign policy approach to Syria.

- Mitt Romney loves “A-M-E-R-C-I-A”: The Romney campaign rolled out a nifty little iPhone app last night with one big embarrassing glitch: It doesn’t know how to spell America. “Here’s how the free app works: You take a photo, then are able to lay one of 14 ‘I’m With Mitt’ banners over the image … The problem? One of the 14 options reads, in fact, ‘A Better Amercia.’ Yes, Amercia,” Mashable reports.

“I’m just a kid that wants to make a difference for America,” Romney weirdly told Fox News in an interview to be aired later this week. I think he means “Amercia.”

- Tea Party victory in Texas: Tea Party-favorite Ted Cruz was able to force a runoff in last night’s Texas GOP Senate primary against lieutenant governor David Dewhurst. Experts who spoke with Salon think the July runoff will favor Cruz, who has more dedicated supporters willing to go to the polls on a hot Texas summer day when turnout will likely be extremely low.

Noting that Dewhurst is no moderate, Steve Kornacki explains the new Tea Party modus operandi:

The Tea Party movement isn’t about purging moderates; that happened a long time ago. It’s about forcing the entire GOP to embrace a partisan warfare style of governance. When it comes to the Senate and House, that means electing candidates who will shun compromise with Democrats and exploit every possible legislative tool to advance their own agenda and stall the other party’s. It is about absolutism.

- Dirty tricks in Wisconsin recall: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s (D) gubernatorial campaign was inundated with calls that clogged phone lines and caused headaches yesterday after a mysterious text message went out to thousands of Wisconsinites calling Barrett a “union puppet” and urging people to call his office. The campaign blamed allies of Republican Governor Scott Walker, whom Barrett will face in a recall election next week.

Some people (communists) have noted that the timing of this big voter roll purge is a bit suspect and that it’s also weird that the vast majority of people on the list are Hispanics who are registered Democrats or independents. But as hero-senator Marco Rubio said recently of voter ID laws, “What’s the big deal?” Hundreds of the 1,638 people flagged as ineligible in Miami-Dade County have already offered proof of citizenship, so the system works. Let’s assume the 1,200 people who haven’t responded to the letter are all definitely not qualified.

(If I were an illegal immigrant, do you know what I would definitely not ever try to do? Vote! When you’re evading detection by the government, registering to vote and then casting a ballot — and in the process committing a felony — seems like asking for trouble.)

As must always be pointed out when writing about these sorts of things, there is no voter fraud epidemic. At all. Where there is genuinely illegal voting, it tends to be accidental or so small-scale as to present no challenge to the legitimacy of an election. The liberal position on election security is something like, “Better to let a couple of isolated instances of fraudulent or improper voting happen than to preemptively disenfranchise hundreds or even thousands of perfectly legal voters.” The conservative position tends to be, “We mustn’t let the Mexicans steal the election for the nanny state socialists ACORN ACORN BILL AYERS ACORN.”

Here’s the Tampa Bay Times with more on Florida’s war on (certain people) voting:

This is part of a pattern. Republicans actively gin up voter fraud claims to justify turning voting into an obstacle course to dissuade Democratic-leaning constituencies. It’s what happened in Florida last year when the Legislature used voter fraud as an excuse to cut early voting days and make it harder for renters and college students to vote a regular ballot. The most disgraceful part of the law imposes steep penalties and fines on groups conducting voter registration drives that fail to meet burdensome bureaucratic rules and turn forms in within 48 hours, causing the League of Women Voters to cancel its drive.

But if we let renters vote, why would anyone buy a house? Then how would we save the economy?

Don’t worry, though, it will still be very easy for… certain other kinds of people to cast votes:

Meanwhile, there was no attempt by the Florida Legislature to tighten rules for absentee voting, which is probably the easiest way to produce a fraudulent ballot since there is no way of knowing who fills it out. Maybe this lack of interest stemmed from the fact that absentee voters tend to lean Republican, while early voters typically lean Democrat.

Well. Now that I know how easy it is to absentee vote in Florida, I am off to commit some voter fraud with my illegal immigrant friends. Next stop, Sharia!

He continued, “The only time I’m unhappy is if I’ve done something that hurt the prospects for the success of our effort.”

Democrats appear eager to jump on the comment. “For President Obama, the desire to serve the American people certainly outweighs the thrill of sport,” DNC spokesperson Melanie Roussel told Salon in an email. “It’s the same competitive spirit that drives Romney economics — doing whatever it takes for him and his investors to profit, regardless of the cost to workers, companies and communities. In Romney’s game, there are two sets of rules – one for himself and others at the top, and another for everyone else.”

Former Romney opponent Ted Kennedy’s own presidential ambitions hit an early stumbling block that he never fully recovered from in 1979 when he badly fumbled the seemingly simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” His rambling answer was so damaging and iconic that it later became the basis of a “West Wing” episode. Romney may have to work on his own answer a bit.

His comment seems telling, coming from someone who has struggled to articulate a real desire to be president. As Alex Pareene writes in his new e-book: “This is the essential problem with Mitt Romney, politician: Where others seek office to gain power or improve people’s lives, Romney has no perceptible interest in either goal.”

Pundits have long puzzled over what’s behind Romney’s political ambitions, often concluding that his serial runs for Senate, governor and then president are a product of living in the shadow of his governor and presidential candidate father. One of the key data points in the Oedipal theory of Romney’s ambition is his supposed fear of gaffes stemming from the fact that George Romney’s comment that military leaders “brainwashed” him on the Vietnam War effectively killed his presidential candidacy. “Mitt Romney’s tendency to make verbal slips is a subconscious repetition of his father’s mistakes, or so the theory goes,” Mike Allen and Evan Thomas write in Politico’s second e-book on the campaign. But when Noonan asked Romney about the “brainwashed” comment, the younger Romney replied, “I don’t think my father’s comment figures into my thinking at all.”

The compulsion to look at politics as a game or sport is one of the most loathed aspects of today’s political media, but journalists have the excuse of needing to remain independent, and the sports paradigm is an easy way to avoid getting into messy policy issues that could be construed as “bias.”

But it’s another matter entirely coming from a presidential candidate himself. And it may not help a candidate already struggling with a perception of being out of touch that he’s only sad when he does something that hurts his chances of winning the election, because he likes winning the “sport for old guys” so much.

Now that “Celebrity Apprentice” is done, Trump is back to pretending to be a major political player. He just announced his intention to start his own super PAC, because he is a weird attention-hungry idiot with a bit of money to burn (though not as much money to burn as he would like you to think he has to burn).

He is just, essentially, begging the party to let him be on TV at their convention. But Maggie Haberman wrote today that while Trump is just definitely not going to be anyone’s running mate, the Republicans might actually have him speak at their convention. Because Romney is actually getting a lot of use out of Trump:

He’s been a surrogate for Romney, recorded robocalls for him and pushed him on the Fox News airwaves and over Twitter. He’s also raised money for him, and both Ann and Mitt Romney have thanked him in public for his help. There is no question that he has an appeal to some voters and that Romney has been better off having Trump with him than against him.

“Some voters.” Awful voters. The worst voters. But yes, it is basically true: Romney embraces Trump because there’s very little downside. He gets support from horrible people, and he is not really taken to task by non-horrible people (or, for the most part, journalists) for associating with him. This is how Trump will end up at the convention, despite being the most prominent birther in the nation.

In fact, the Romney campaign is auctioning off dinner with Donald Trump, in case you have a couple thousand dollars and some sort of horrible grudge against someone. That does not suggest that anyone at the Romney campaign is particularly wary of the guy.

Here’s another line from Trump’s Newsmax interview, just so we understand that this Donald Trump is not any less invested in conspiratorial race-tinged dog-whistle Jerome Corsi nonsense than he was last year:

He adds: “If you’re going to look at that, on something that I don’t believe ever happened, you have to look into Barack Obama saying that he was heavy into drugs, heavy into alcohol, was a total disaster, was a horrible student. Then you have to say if he was a horrible student, how did he get into Columbia? How did he get into Harvard?

Suspicious! How did Obama get into Harvard? (Maybe his father was secretly … Charles Kushner!)

Homo sapiens seem destined to suffer one of the more common fates of common folk after the end of totalitarian rule — war, chaos and brutal, if less total, exploitation at the hands of tyrants, oligarchs, warlords and military juntas.

Into this dire situation steps Jonnie, who proves that his genius isn’t just for armed insurrection but for diplomacy and great power politics as well. He outwits his enemies at the conference table, finds a way to settle the 60 trillion galactic credit debt that Earth discovers it owes to the Galactic Bank and threatens the assembled dignitaries and thugs into signing a treaty forbidding war forever. Then to top it all off, he draws on his recently acquired knowledge of ancient Earth economic theory to persuade them that their interests would be best served not by reaping wealth through war, as they’ve been accustomed to doing, but by introducing free market capitalism, and commercial banking, to the universes.

“There are other ways of handling economies,” Jonnie explains. “You could phase every war industry you have over to what is called ‘consumer production.’ You make things for the people. The people are employed. They make things for one another. Your people are your best market for your industries. … Your people, now starving and rioting, can become gainfully employed in peace industries. They can have things for themselves. Such things as better houses and furniture, better clothes, better food.”

It does not require an esoteric reading of Hubbard’s text, in other words, to identify conservative notions of the kind Romney seems to hold. It’s full of explicit commentary about the stupidity of taxes and the dangers of an overly intrusive state. The Earth government that Jonnie helps set up after the dust settles is a kind of paternalistic libertarian utopia, in which no one pays any taxes except what they volunteer as donations; the rest of the expenses are quietly covered from Jonnie’s personal account. There’s even an offhand insult of “some nut named Keynes,” whose bad theories Jonnie encounters while cramming for his meeting with the Galactic Bank.

Earth’s foreign policy, once the Psychlos are gone, is like a neoconservative fantasy of what the Forces of Freedom and Light could do if we had a Death Star and were willing to use it. Jonnie coerces the signatures on his pan-universal peace treaty by showing his rivals a holographic recording of the nuking and subsequent implosion of the Psychlo planet. He then calmly explains to them that he’ll do the same to their planets if they don’t comply. They sign, and freedom rolls forth.

Even for 1982, when the novel was published, it reads a bit retrograde in its earnest celebration of white guys kicking ass. There are almost no women, and the few who show up are virginally pure. There’s a sentimental ethnotyping of the various surviving human populations (Chinese people are good at cooking and understanding the rules of courtly etiquette; Scottish men all sound like Montgomery Scott and dress like highlanders). And the white guys are total Übermenschen. Jonnie himself was “a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his 20 years,” with “corn yellow hair and beard,” and “ice-blue eyes.” It was as if Hubbard hadn’t gotten the memo that it wasn’t the 1940s anymore, when he and his buddy Robert Heinlein had helped work out the formula for this kind of high adolescent science fictional adventure tale.

But for all that, my guess — and I can only guess at this — is that it misses the point to assume that Romney likes the book for these reasons. I suspect he’s drawn to it more for the reasons I was.

I first read the novel when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t quote the above passages from memory, but you’ll have to trust me when I say that I knew exactly where to find them in the text when I booted it up on my iPad. “Battlefield Earth” is a ridiculous book, every bit the gargantuan exercise in nerd-boy wish fulfillment you’d expect from someone like Hubbard, who was such a nerd-boy bent on wish fulfillment that he invented a religion to fulfill his dreams of mastery and immortality.

But “Battlefield Earth” is also an incredibly exciting book, pulp of the pulpiest order. It’s the kind of adventure story that exerts a particularly strong pull, I’d wager, on boys of a certain age with a certain need to escape into, or project themselves into, heroic tales of conquest, mastery and moral clarity.

For me it was, I half-realized as a teenager and fully realize now, consolation. It was comfort food, compensation for my feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, anxiety.

I don’t think I read the whole, 1,000-plus-page thing through more than twice, but I read my favorite set pieces dozens of times. I read it late at night, when I should have been getting sleep for school. I read it, at times almost hungrily, when I was home on vacation from college. I read it to feel better, to feel nothing, to escape.

That’s not to say that there was nothing political about my attraction to the book, and to the hundreds of other such books I read. But the politics of it went deeper, into the muck of those psychological processes by which we process, deny or sublimate the data of the world, our fears, our fantasies. I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to vanquish enemies. I wanted good and evil to be clear. I wanted to run away. I wanted to escape the anxieties of my family, of school, of sexual desires that I had no real means of satisfying. A lot of the time I just wanted to disappear into the time-displacing comfort of a well-plotted adventure.

At a minimum Mitt Romney was 36 or 37 when he first read the book. I’m now 36, and though I haven’t read “Battlefield Earth” in a while, I’m not clean. I still read science fiction and fantasy, and though I’m wiser and more sophisticated than I was as an adolescent, when they exerted their strongest pull, that hasn’t meant discarding those parts of me that were formed by the books.

It hasn’t meant rejecting the books. It’s meant reckoning with the influence they’ve had on me, and with those parts of me that sought them out. It’s not wrong to want to save the world, be a hero, fight for the cause of justice, live a purposeful life. But it’s unserious to believe that these things are easy, that they can be achieved without sacrifice or compromise, that being heroic in one’s own life is going to look anything like what it looks like for Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. And it can be horribly toxic to continue as an adult to view the world through an unreconstructed Hubbardian lens. Women, I’ve learned, actually do exist. Death Star foreign policy is problematic in a number of ways. It’s not bogus left-wing literary theory to notice that aliens, in books like “Battlefield Earth,” are often proxies for the kinds of dark-skinned humans that we palefaces have historically had a hard time seeing as human. Problems like war, poverty, oppression and exploitation don’t just melt away when you set loose patriotic, super-resourceful, can-do capitalist-engineer-ninjas to do their thing.

The key question about Romney and “Battlefield Earth” — or Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragon Flight,” or Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” two other old favorites of mine that Romney’s mentioned liking — isn’t: What does it mean that he likes the book so much? I like the book. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that Barack Obama likes the book, or Karl Rove, or David Petraeus (all of whom have at least a glint of the nerd-boy about them). The question is what has Romney done with it? How has he reckoned with it?

What was going through his mind, back in the 1980s, when he came home at night after a long day of leveraged buyouts, when the kids were all in bed and he and his wife, Ann, lay side by side in their bed, she with her “Anna Karenina” and he with his “Battlefield Earth”? Did he see himself as heroic like Jonnie Goodboy Tyler? Was he saving companies from the Forces of Bad Management and Government Intrusion? Was he reading, instead, as an escape from the moral compromises of the work he was doing at Bain Consulting, which, however you slice it macroeconomically, didn’t meet the standards of moral purity that would have satisfied Jonnie Goodboy Tyler?

What does he think about the politics (explicit and implicit) of “Battlefield Earth” now that he’s running for president, and may soon end up in a position where he has to decide how to handle the Psychlos at home and abroad?

It seems unlikely that Romney’s going to engage these questions, and in the absence of such answers it’s inappropriate to go too far in analyzing him by way of the book. But it’s worth saying this: “Battlefield Earth” is in most respects a silly story, but for a lot of us it’s just such silly stories that have made us who we are. If Romney is elected president, he will wield enormous power over the people of Earth, and I have a feeling that somewhere in that psyche of his there’s the voice of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, and L. Ron Hubbard, saying something about how to be righteous in the world. I hope for our sake, and for the sake of galactic peace and prosperity, that Romney has enough wisdom to take from those voices what’s good in them, and to keep the rest in proper perspective.