The Arizona Republican’s latest antiabortion salvo to be taken up by the House had a benign name — the Prenatal Non­discrimination Act — and a premise with which just about everybody agrees: that a woman shouldn’t abort a fetus simply because she wants to have a boy rather than a girl. 

The last week has brought two insightful profiles of Mitt Romney’s parents, offering an implicit, and disappointing, contrast with their more successful son.

Let me stipulate that I have no proof that Romney is a unicorn, and indeed I want to believe that he is not. But I have not seen proof of this because he has not released the original copy of his long-form birth certificate.

Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This practice may not be admirable — it’s surely one reason so many Americans are disenchanted with politics — but it’s something we’ve all come to expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as long as there’s a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.

The confederation promised an eternal end to the wars that had historically bedeviled its component peoples. It built goodwill and interdependence through a common currency and free movement of labor and capital.

Painful because Booker, a rising Democratic star, is such a good guy. Amusing, because rarely are Americans treated to such premier seats in the political theater of truth and consequence.

I am referring to two candidate debates that I witnessed during the Democratic mayoral primary that year. The first took place Aug. 3 during the Lamond-Riggs Citizens Association mayoral forum at Plymouth Congregational United Church on North Capitol Street. I served as moderator.

Listen to what Newt Gingrich said in January: “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.”

On Wednesday, some understandably disgruntled investors filed suit in federal court against Facebook and several of the big banks that promoted its stock sale. The lawsuit alleges that the social media giant and the banks “selectively disclosed” to “certain preferred investors” the fact that Facebook’s financial prospects weren’t as bright as the public had been led to understand.

Those are the messages, contradictory but compelling, embedded in a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) about the fast-approaching “fiscal cliff.” The economy will confront the precipice at year’s end, on account of a confluence of tax cuts set to expire and spending cuts scheduled to kick in.

The prostitution scandal involving a dozen Secret Service agents in Cartagena, Colombia, is spreading into a broader burlesque for the agency, furthered by a Washington Post report that tolerance of a frat-house culture has induced some employees to come up with the “Secret Circus” name.

There is political instability nearby in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, as the Arab uprising moves through its second year. In each of these countries, the leadership maintains power in a balancing act. Only Turkey, with its triad of a strong economy, army and political leadership, seems genuinely stable.

Blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate in Massachusetts and Harvard professor who cites “family lore” that she is 1/32nd Cherokee, was inducted into Oklahoma’s Hall of Fame last year. Her biography on OklahomaHeritage.com says that she “can track both sides of her family in Oklahoma long before statehood” (1907) and “she proudly tells everyone she encounters that she is ‘an Okie to my toes.’ ” It does not mention any Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother. A DVD of the induction ceremony shows that neither Warren nor anyone else mentioned this.

Its chairman, Jamie Dimon, has admitted that the firm was “sloppy” and “stupid” in making trading bets that lost $2 billion. But Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee wouldn’t hear of it; they preferred to blame government.

This is odd coming from a man whose career has been based, with enormous success, on making it ever harder to turn that thing off.

If you didn’t know what lay behind the gates of the vast structure in Janzour, just outside the Libyan capital, you’d probably assume it was the Libyan Naval Academy. That, after all, is what it used to be. But drive past the empty main building and into the former living quarters, and you won’t see any sailors. Laundry hangs from the balconies. Children play in the dust below. Women in black abayas walk up and down the concrete plazas, while elderly men in long white gowns smoke cigarettes and stare at the sea.

Forty-six months ago, then-candidate Barack Obama flew to Berlin to call for a new era of friendship with Europe after it and the United States had “drifted apart.” With an offer to end the American unilateralism of the Bush years, he urged the adoring crowd: “Now is the time to join together through constant cooperation.”

The NAACP’s 64-member boardapproved a resolution Saturday supporting “marriage equality” not as a matter of empathy or compassion but as a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In citing this rationale, the 103-year-old organization founded by W.E.B. Du Bois firmly linked the campaign for gay rights to the epic African American struggle for freedom and justice.