Nicki Minaj and Mitt Romney. (YouTube)

Say what? Fans of Nicki Minaj might have thought they were beyond being shocked by the rap star's dirty lyrics and insanity garb. But that was before the Pink Friday singer came out on Lil Wayne's new mixtape ... as a Republican who plans on voting for Mitt Romney.

Ms. Minaj lent her vocals to the latest track, Dedication 4, singing: "I'm a Republican voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches are fucking up the economy."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-jF6Fza1LFI

This kind of political statement is rare in the hip-hop community, and at first we assumed she meant the verse satirically. (Or perhaps the second line was meant as a response to the first.) But MTV News points out that the vocalist was tweeting her dissatisfaction with the president's policy toward health care long before this song dropped. (Though she might be confused over how Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan plan on dealing with the issue.)

“That should be a God given right! Even with Obama Care, too much involved," she wrote to the president. "Just give FREE health care to all. @barackobama What can we do?” and “@BarackObama I wouldn’t mind the millions they took if it was going to healthcare. Why should a poor person struggle to pay for MEDS sir?"

Talib Kwali tweeted that he doubted Nicki Minaj was actually conservative:

I doubt Nicki seriously supports Romney. Her lyrics ain't political. She just wants y'all to talk about her & she winning cuz it's working!

Meanwhile, we're still waiting to hear if the singer has signed on to judge American Idol, A deal that TMZ said was "99% done" at the end of August. The new lyrics are sure to throw a wrench into the works: Whether Ms. Minaj was serious or not, she'd be adding a new element divisive to Idol viewers, with her brazen statement during an election year.

Mr. Cuomo’s plan was so rooted in common sense and reality that perhaps it is no surprise that the senators found it objectionable. Under the governor’s bill, possession of 25 grams or fewer would no longer be a misdemeanor. That would have had an immediate impact on the lives of hundreds of young black and Latino men in the city. They are the most likely targets of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. When they are stopped, they are ordered to empty their pockets. If they pull out a small bag of pot, they are subject to arrest. And that means, of course, that they now have an arrest record—something they are obliged to reveal on employment applications.

It’s insane. Times are tough enough for minority youth—a recent study showed that African-Americans are not benefitting from jobs growth in the city. Young people of color with a rap sheet have an even tougher time finding a job. What a shame that the “rap sheet” might consist of a misdemeanor possession charge, the result of being stopped and frisked.

Mr. Cuomo recognized the profound injustice of the state’s marijuana law and the ways in which its application in the city is stigmatizing so many young people. The governor, it must be said, was not alone. His proposal had the support of Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the city’s five district attorneys. None of them could ever be described as being soft on crime.

Yet the state senators from the ’burbs and hamlets of New York chose to put cheap political pandering ahead of common sense and simple justice. In this election year, they will go back to the sticks and talk about how they defied those scary liberals from the city who wished to unleash criminals upon a frightened populace.

Would it be unfair—unjust, even—to point out that so many of those tough-on-crime senators live in areas that are home to the state’s prison-industrial complex? True, a first-time misdemeanor offender is not about to be sent up the river. But in those upstate regions that rely on prisons for employment and economic activity, the very thought of loosening drug laws is heresy. Entire towns and counties upstate depend on the vigorous enforcement of laws for their daily bread.

The senators who brag about being tough on crime may have another, not-so-secret, agenda. If they support common-sense drug laws, they might have to replace their prisons with more-creative economic-development plans for their towns and counties.

That would require effort. Far better to simply enforce stupid laws and maintain the flow of prisoners.

Sadly, no. Indeed, nothing about Sunday night’s perfunctory display of statue-bestowing carried the faintest whiff of daring or surprise, let alone wit or aesthetic ambition. At a seeming loss to explain why viewers should take an interest, producers of the show were reduced to airing infomercial-style testimonials to the idea of movie-watching, wherein Tom Cruise announced the terrifying news that the film industry had awakened his young imagination, and some star or another cited the transcendent message of The Outlaw Josie Wales. And since labored French pantomime seemed to be the evening’s winning ticket, Team Oscar also trotted out some members of Cirque du Soleil, who delivered their own interpretation of the charms of moviegoing, which seemed mainly to involve a lot of frenzied bolting out of your seat and into the air, apparently to secure the quickest possible exit. It was arguably the evening’s most stirring moment.

Played out as they were, Sunday's Oscar proceedings supply a curious parallel to this week's big-ticket media event in the political world—the next installment in the far more cash-intensive and self-important spectacle of the GOP primary season. Voters in Michigan and Arizona will cast ballots Tuesday in the grinding two-way race between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (inconveniently just as the print version of this column goes to bed). And much as the Oscar broadcast homed in on the formal, therapeutic virtues of movie-watching over and above any compelling screen characters, conflicts, or plotlines, so has this political melodrama—fed by unprecedented heaps of Super PAC cash and ferociously negative ad buys—failed to deliver a storyline that justifies all the self-promotional din.

Certainly the conventional horse-race reportage provides scant narrative interest. At press time, Mr. Romney seemed poised to eke out a victory in Michigan after trailing Santorum in the polls for the past several weeks. But a too-close Romney win wouldn’t seem likely to deliver the plodding frontrunner the turnaround his campaign so desperately craves—Michigan, after all, was supposed to be something of a sure thing for Team Mitt, since his father had been governor of the state, and since Romney fils had locked it down with comparative ease in the 2008 cycle. What’s more, the most recent polling in the next major battleground state of Ohio has Mr. Santorum still enjoying a comfortable 7-point lead. With apologies to hardcore mavens of popcult themes in the nation’s politics, such as Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich, one might even assign signature best-picture mascots to each campaign: Santorum’s mad dash to shore up his limited base-appeal amid the big-money ad buys of Team Romney calls to mind the machinations of small-market baseball general manager Billy Bean (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball (minus, of course, the plot point of Bean’s divorce); while Romney’s campaign of frenzied self-reinvention in a psychological vacuum evokes the equine protagonist of War Horse, who weaves willy-nilly across the battle-lines of World War I—though Mr. Romney can only wish he could demonstrate a bit of the thoroughbred’s hard-earned valor.

And as it strains to gin up some reliable audience engagement, the nation’s political press is picking up some of Billy Crystal’s manic and mannered vacuity. The Los Angeles Times’s Paul West, for example, professes to find in Mr. Santorum’s kitchen-sink culture crusading on the Michigan hustings the stuff of an “all-out class war” in today’s GOP. The evidence, such as it is, is heavy on the cheap symbolism, and distinctly light on the policy specifics. Mr. Santorum took time out from the Michigan battle royale, Mr. West notes, to attend the opening race of the new NASCAR season in Daytona and allude to Mr. Romney’s privileged upbringing—while also muffing a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week” to defend recent remarks that depicted expanded federal support for post-secondary education as an Obama-led conspiracy to brainwash the nation’s youth. (Santorum’s anti-college shtick bears quoting at length, since it wildly mischaracterizes both Obama’s plan—which would supplement high-school curricula with vocational study for workers who aren’t college bound—and since it is so richly steeped in paranoid looniness: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his own image.”)

But for such clownish posturing to qualify as modest-scale class revolt—let alone as “all-out class war”—some troops would have to be massing somewhere. Instead, debate appearances and ads at the height of the Santorum-Romney showdown turn typically on small-bore issues such as who is the more authentically conservative of the candidates, or which personality in the race is more gauzily “American” or “successful.” Mr. Santorum dare not make too much in Michigan of Mr. Romney’s opposition to the Obama administration’s successful 2009 bailout of the auto industry, since Mr. Santorum, too, attacked the measure. Likewise, Mr. Romney dare not depict Mr. Santorum as a wild-eyed extremist in the Kulturkampf for the simple reason that evangelical voters bulk large among the exact blue-collar base that remains so stubbornly disenchanted with the specter of Mr. Romney as the nation’s next Equity-Fund-Manager-in-Chief.

Mr. Romney’s paralysis here is all the more striking since Mr. Santorum is all but begging for such attacks with outbursts such as his recent admission in a Michigan stem-winder that an entirely anodyne 1960 JFK speech on church-state separation “made me want to throw up”—and his later explanation, during his red-meat interview on This Week, that he viewed JFK as a dangerous “absolutist” when it came to evicting religious believers from the public square. (For diehard pundits determined to tease out class confrontation from culture-war fluff, it also bears repeating that mocking Mitt Romney’s high-corporate pedigree is just what any smart opponent of Mitt Romney does—just ask Newt Gingrich, or the no-less well-born shade of Ted Kennedy.)

All this palpable longing for the base-versus-establishment plotlines of the high-Reagan era GOP calls to mind the inert nostalgia of this Oscar season, from the precious highbrow reveries of Midnight in Paris to the formal jouissance of The Artist. Still, our political prognosticator-class doesn’t have to succumb to despair just yet. There’s still time to bring in the players from Cirque du Soleil; after all, Santorum likes to boast of his own pedigree as a second-generation immigrant, and Mitt Romney did his mission work in France.

Those heartfelt positions, however, come with an asterisk. Republican leaders in the House may like the idea of state’s rights—but they’re not so keen about local control when states like New York decide that it’s a bad idea for people to carry concealed weapons, because, well, you just never know when a whack job might open fire on a crowded street.

In an astonishing and dangerous bit of pandering to the nation’s gun nuts, House leaders (with the cooperation of 43 misguided Democrats) recently rammed through a bill that would force states with tough gun-control laws to honor concealed weapons permits issued in other states. Give the Republicans credit for candor—they didn’t try to conceal their intentions. They labeled the bill the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011.” Not the “Protect Your Spouse and Children Act” or the “Go Ahead, Make My Day Self-Protection Act.”

The candor may be refreshing, but the thinking behind this bit of insanity is not. It’s the same old argument: The Second Amendment guarantees Americans in any mental state to stockpile and carry their favorite weapons of choice. Mayor Bloomberg, one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of gun restrictions, rightly noted that the House approved this bill less than a year after one of its members, Gabrielle Giffords, was gravely wounded in a murderous rampage in Arizona.

While the bill is mind-numbingly stupid, there is a bit of heartening news to report: Several New York Republicans refused to toe the party line. They voted against their leadership and in favor of sanity­—an all-too-rare act of political courage. Michael Grimm of Staten Island; Robert Turner, who won Anthony Weiner’s old seat in Brooklyn and Queens; and Long Island’s iconoclastic Peter King sided with most Democrats on this issue.

What a shame that two of their Republican colleagues from New Jersey, Leonard Lance and Rodney Frelinghuysen, couldn’t summon the nerve to defy the GOP’s gun-lovers. Other Republicans from the metropolitan area also voted with their caucus, but Mr. Lance and Mr. Frelinghuysen have sought to distance themselves from their party’s extremists. Both see themselves as prototypical moderate Republicans in the model of former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean. This vote makes them no different from the yahoos who think they have a right to carry and conceal their handguns in places like Midtown Manhattan.

All the more reason to give a pat on the back to Congressmen Grimm, Turner and King. It would have been far easier for them to go along with their party’s agenda. Instead, they put their constituents’ safety—and, let’s remember, the safety of police officers—ahead of partisan politics.

Good for them. Great for us.

Palin.

There may be worse things in life than sitting through a 90-minute movie about Sarah Palin. At the moment, I just can’t think of any.

For a shrill, obnoxious loudmouth spouting more semantic goofs in public than Mrs. Malaprop, she has mangled more facts, misquoted more people and been on the wrong side of so many things that she’s ready for a cinematic firing squad. And for a veteran documentary filmmaker with the credits of British director Nick Broomfield, I expected Sarah Palin—You Betcha! to be a hair-raising exposé. But he didn’t have to put in much overtime. All he had to do was go to Wasilla, Alaska, open his eyes and ears, and keep his cameras rolling. As her family, friends and enemies—including just about everybody she has ever worked with as mayor, governor and vice presidential nominee-—prove in every scene, Sarah Palin defines self-parody.

The result is a balanced job of reporting that drives a stake through the heart of whatever she had left of a political career. Not easy, when a subject speaks only through Facebook and Twitter. But Mr. Broomfield, who wrote and directed the film with Joan Churchill, has profiled difficult subjects before: Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos, for starters. This might have been his easiest job yet. She was a pistol-packin’ mama who arrived on the scene after shooting and killing animals from a helicopter just in time to wreck John McCain’s bid for the presidency (although he did plenty to make a fool of himself on his own), stuck around to drive the Tea Party to infamy, and flapped her mouth with notable quotables like “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.” It’s all in the movie. She does the work. You just shudder.

Driving the wedge even further into America’s partisan political divide, her polarizing effect has pretty much rendered Sarah Palin impotent now, even as she makes veiled giggling threats about the 2012 election. But this movie dips from the trough of her roots to discover how such a phenomenon could have happened in the first place. In Wasilla, with a population of 5,000 served by 77 churches, she was never home, but Mr. Broomfield did interview her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, who taught her how to hunt and kill. “There’s three common questions to ask us,” says her grinning dad. “Number one—what’s her game plan? We don’t know. Number two—did we see this coming? No. The third question asked frequently is, how has it changed our lives? Well, I still drink the same cheap beer I drank 40 years ago and still run with the same derelicts.” The folksy down-home style Sarah Palin still uses to avoid discussing real issues with her fans and charm her detractors obviously begins at home, and grows instantly transparent.

In 1976 she left the Catholic church, got born again by being dipped in a lake and joined the Assembly of God. That, according to her classmates, is where the superior hunger for power began. Driven by evangelical dogma, she forced her teammates in track and basketball to pray before every game, promising them they would burn in hell if they opposed her. (Alarming footage shows her in church being saved from witchcraft.) The Rev. Howard Bess, known as “the bravest man in Wasilla” because of his constant battles with Ms. Palin’s religious fanaticism, declares, “She has no hesitancy to use violence against all who oppose her, no conscience about triggering a nuclear war. She believes she is God’s anointed one and until you understand that, you don’t understand Sarah Palin.”

Dragging those apocalyptic religious obsessions into the arena of politics, a portrait of a zealot emerges that is about as scary as it gets. Her mayoral campaign embraced the National Rifle Association, defamed the former mayor because his name was “Stein,” and fueled the firing of every department head at City Hall who disagreed with her, including the chief of police who opposed her support for concealed weapons in public places. From 1996 to 2002, she burned and destroyed every book in the public library on the subject of homosexuality under the banner “Pray Away the Gay!” According to her deputy mayor, her rabid, uncompromising hatred of abortion and homosexuality went viral with “disrespect for intelligence, scholarship, science, history and sexual and religious freedoms of every kind.” Her campaign manager when she ran for governor of Alaska presents a picture of a disconnected, gum-chewing flake who lived on her BlackBerry, busily devoting her time to getting even with all of her adversaries, including her own brother-in-law, a state trooper named Mike Wooten, for divorcing her sister. While she was governor, according to eyewitness testimonies, she almost bankrupted the state of Alaska. Vital issues like medical benefits for senior citizens, oil revenues, health insurance and environmental protection legislation all went to hell while she devoted her energy to settling personal grudges. By the time she walked off the job to run for vice president, her approval ratings were the lowest in Alaska’s history. And still she makes noises about a comeback.

In case you think Sarah Palin—You Betcha! is a hit job on an easy subject, see the movie and learn something. It’s terrifying, but in all fairness, no disgrace, no rumor of extramarital affairs in office, no broadside is explored unless it can be substantiated. No need to gild a poison lily. She didn’t know Africa was a continent. She still insists you can see Russia from Alaska. The movie has wry humor and sobering facts, but Mr. Broomfield doesn’t make anything up. By the end, the catalogue of her failures, hypocrisies and lies is still overwhelming. But despite her political irrelevance, her biggest supporter is Rupert Murdoch, who paid her a $3 million salary for Fox and a $7 million advance for her book, Going Rogue. She is currently being offered a cool million to undergo a polygraph test to disprove accusations of immorality in public office in the new Palin biography by Joe McGinnis. Ignorant, self-serving, vengeful, deeply dishonest, power-mad and pathological are just a few of the descriptions in this film, and they do not come from a bunch of sore-headed Democrats either. Both sides get a chance to cast a ballot. One long-time Palin voter says, “When she meets people, they just melt.” Oh, where have I been?

Will she ever go away? All I know is she’s not the person I want to place near the red phone that connects the Pentagon to a nuclear war. Should we worry? You betcha.

rreed@observer.com

SARAH PALIN—YOU BETCHA!

Running Time 90 minutes

Directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill

Starring Sarah Palin, Nick Broomfield and John McCain

2/4

"Jewish Donors Warn Obama on Israel," said The Wall Street Journal. "Obama's Jewish Backers on Edge Over His Mideast Peace Plan," proclaimed the Los Angeles Times.

The denunciations were swift and final. President Obama, it seemed, had made a fundamental error in calling for Israel to return to its 1967 borders, with land swaps. Donors, according to the new narrative, would soon be switching their allegiances to the G.O.P.

But conversations with nearly a dozen of the top Jewish fund-raisers in New York reveal a much different reality, as rainmakers say they continue to back the president they overwhelmingly supported three years ago.

"This is nonsense," said David Pollak, a former chairman of the state Democratic Party. "I think anyone who would not give money to Barack Obama because of remarks he made the other day wasn't giving money to him in 2008."

Last August, hedge-fund manager and Obama megabundler Daniel Loeb sent a kiss-off letter to his friends in financial services, expressing his sense of being betrayed by the administration and comparing the treatment they were getting to that of a battered wife. Mr. Loeb's sentiment was echoed by several Wall Street Democrats and taken as proof that the financial industry was turning its back on the party.

A similar letter from a major Jewish donor was feared to be forthcoming. But so far, only Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment executive, has publicly declared that he was finished donating to the president. There was just one problem, though: Mr. Saban was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton and had never given money to Mr. Obama. Furthermore, Mr. Saban pledged to keep supporting down-ticket Democrats.

Mr. Obama's New York supporters said most of these accounts rely disproportionately on voices like that of Mr. Saban, or, more often, the heads of major national Jewish organizations, who have long been lukewarm about Mr. Obama.

"You've got all the professional Jews who are mouthpieces and speak for themselves. They don't like Obama," said one real-estate executive who has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democrats. "There are people who talk to the press all day long, and they probably didn't support Obama last time."

The stakes are high for the Obama campaign. According to some estimates, nearly 60 percent of the money raised by the Democratic National Committee is donated by Jews, and any drop in support for the president's re-election could endanger the campaign's ambitious goal of raising $1 billion.

Earlier this week, a few dozen members of Obama's regional finance committee met with Jim Messina, the campaign manager for the Obama 2012 effort. According to one bundler present, they discussed how Obama can win, even if the economy remains in the tank, and how the campaign can attract the smaller, grass-roots donors. The topic of Israel didn't come up once.

"You have concerns among Democratic supporters of Obama, but they are concerns among friends," said Robert Zimmerman, a prominent fund-raiser. "And there is no trust or confidence in the Republicans."

Jewish fund-raisers say that they fear for Israel's future too, but continue to support the president, mainly because his Middle East speech didn't contain anything Mr. Obama hadn't already articulated. Plus, they point out, Israel is just one issue among several, and Mr. Obama remains more palatable than any of his opponents on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to the environment and preserving what remains of the social safety net.

"I have friends who are concerned, who wish Obama hadn't said that," said one bundler. "But at the end of the day, are they going to support Mitt Romney? I don't think so."

If they run into resistance from Jewish donors, bundlers said that they will lay out the many reasons they continue to support the president--reminding any reluctant supporters that Mr. Obama's speech only repeated the peace plan that has been accepted doctrine going back to George H.W. Bush, and that it's supported by Hillary Clinton, who remains a trusted figure in the Jewish community. And they will point to Mr. Obama's well-received address at AIPAC as proof that most Jews line up solidly behind the president, despite what the press might say.

The fund-raising has been a bit slow in the early going, according to several fund-raisers, but is expected to pick up once there's a real Republican opponent to contrast with the current president.

"The message is going to be simple, whether you are a Jewish donor, a black donor, a Hispanic donor, whatever," said one fund-raiser. "Re-elect Obama or this country is screwed."

dfreedlander@observer.com