Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney hailed Poland's economy Tuesday as something akin to a Republican dream: a place of small government, individual empowerment and free enterprise.

While it's true that Poland is one of Europe's fastest-growing economies and boasts dynamic entrepreneurs, Romney's depiction of Poland as a place of small government is debatable. Even 23 years after throwing off a communist command economy, the Polish government continues to have a strong presence in people's lives: it gives women $300 for each baby they have, doubling that sum for poor families; it fully funds state university educations; and it guarantees health care to all its 38 million citizens.

And while Poland's economic growth has certainly been impressive in recent years, this is partly the result of economic redistribution in the form of subsidies that have been flowing in from the European Union since it joined the bloc in 2004.

This Wednesday, at the urging of former U.S. presidential wannabe/Fox News gabber Mike Huckabee, people who don’t like homosexuals will gorge themselves on chicken at a previously mostly unheard of fast food chain. They will photograph and Tweet themselves – as former wannabe vice president Sarah Palin did this past weekend – gleefully celebrating their intolerance.

No doubt Palin was taking a break from looking after her illegitimate grandson while his teenage mother continues her relentless pursuit of a career in reality television. That’s the American right wing’s version of family values.

It’s worth noting that Cathy isn’t spending his money offering counselling to straight couples in trouble. He isn’t fighting spousal abuse or underwriting campaigns to reduce the incidence of single motherhood. His millions are pledged to a deliberate effort to deny basic legal rights to dedicated and loving couples and their children. That makes him a promoter of intolerance and an enabler of hatred.

Those who make a pilgrimage to Chick fil-A outlets in the U.S. on Wednesday share common ground with the men and women who heckled the Little Rock Nine or those who poured sugar over the heads of whites and blacks who dared sit together at a Woolworths counter. Twenty years from now will they flush with the shame that most surviving segregationists now feel when they reflect on their actions and thoughts in the 1950s and 60s?

"Regretfully, we were informed by our friends from the American headquarters of (trade union federation) AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12 million employees ... that Mitt Romney supported attacks on trade unions and employees' rights," Solidarity said in a statement.

"Solidarity was not involved in organizing Romney's meeting with Walesa and did not invite him to visit Poland."

Mr. Romney is on his first international outing as Republican presidential candidate, and has already raised eyebrows with a number of statements. There was his needless stirring of controversy in London, where he questioned Britain’s security preparations for the Olympic Games. And on the weekend he visited Israel, where he pledged that, as president, he’d agree to pretty much any action Israel decided to adopt towards Iran, military or otherwise, while suggesting it was not Washington’s place to take the lead in seeking peace. Being friends with Israel is one thing, but delegating the decision on whether to go to war is something else. Most European countries stopped making that sort of promise after stumbling into the First World War based on mutual aggression agreements.

His remarks on Russia have similarly elicited questions. Assessing America’s international challenges, Mr. Romney declared Russia is “without question our number one geopolitical foe.” The remark seemed to ignore China’s overwhelming growth in influence and stature, and the ongoing crises of the Middle East, not least Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Though, having ceded decision-making authority on that front to Israel, perhaps Mr. Romney felt the file was closed.

The Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer noted that “Mr. Romney’s agenda tone harks back more to the era of George H.W. Bush” than to any recent developments.

Mr. Carson is accused of lobbying the office on Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan on behalf of his fiancée, a former escort who was trying to sell water-purification systems to first nations.

There are also allegations that he improperly lobbied the Natural Resources department on behalf of the Canada School of Energy and the Environment for $25-million in federal funding. The school had been created with a $15-million federal grant.

A spokeswoman for the RCMP refused to clarify which allegations the charges relate to. But the Prime Minister’s Office had referred the matter to the Mounties when confronted with the allegations regarding the water-purification system were made public.

President Barack Obama will sign a bill to strengthen U.S.-Israeli military cooperation on Friday on the eve of a visit to Israel by his Republican presidential challenger, Mitt Romney.

Obama will seek to stress his commitment to Israel's security for American Jewish voters at a White House ceremony that appeared timed to upstage Romney, who has accused the president of undermining U.S.-Israeli ties.

By Romney's account, the government spent about $600 million helping the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. An additional $1.1 billion was planned for projects like roads and bridges, infrastructure improvement projects that the government probably would have paid for eventually, though the timing of the Games may have sped up the construction.

Romney has made himself the very public face of the effort, claiming that he personally cut millions from the budget, wooed major companies and won sponsorships himself and pulled the whole endeavour back from the brink of failure. His record in Salt Lake was the cornerstone of his run for governor in Massachusetts, a campaign he announced in March 2002, just weeks after the Games concluded.

Romney, who promises to slash federal spending if elected president, rarely acknowledges the federal support for the 2002 Games on the campaign trail. His aides say much of it was for increased security costs after the 2001 terrorist attacks, which occurred about five months earlier.

But Romney doesn't mention the commitments the government had already made to cover costs associated with the Games — or elaborate on his role in persuading congressional appropriators and critics to give the Games more money.

It’s a 21st century childhood, the kind most of us take for granted. Our children are no longer stalked by polio and diphtheria, red measles and smallpox. Once upon a time – when my own parents were children – deadly epidemics were a fact of life, and of death. Today, we live so removed from those horrors, we cannot imagine them.

And that, I fear, is some of the problem. Some people, of course, refuse to have their children vaccinated for deeply held religious, cultural, or ideological reasons. Others, though, just don’t bother to take their kids for shots, because they figure these diseases are gone, and that they just needn’t bother. Or they assume that even if their kids do get sick, we now have the antibiotics we need to cure them.

But whether our current low vaccination rates are being pushed down by ignorance or sloth or pride or wrath, we are sinning against our children, our community, and the cause of rationality, when we fail to have our children immunized.

I’m not shill for “big pharma” or the medical establishment. As a professional skeptic, I keep an open mind about pushing drug companies to back their claims with double-bind studies, with peer reviewed results they can replicate. Over the centuries, the medical establishment has been proved wrong, and our ideas about treatment have evolved.

Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive.

His derisory comments questioning Britain’s preparedness for the Olympics in an interview with NBC were a strange way to build bridges with a country that he says should be restored as the umbilical ally of the United States, and a strange way to demonstrate the persuasive qualities needed as leader of the free world.