Besides fortifying his boss' flip-flop credentials, Mitt Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom took me and lots of baby boomers on a nostalgia trip Wednesday when he likened the Romney campaign to an Etch-A-Sketch. As my colleague Morgan Little describes in more detail, Fehrnstrom suggested Romney could tack to the center in a general election because the campaign was like the red-bordered screen with the two white knobs.  "You can kind of shake it up," he said, "and we start all over again."

As a child, I developed two un-marketable skills: writing backward (also known as mirror writing) and drawing better on the Etch-A-Sketch than I could with pen and paper, which was pretty good. Somewhere in the clutter in my apartment is an Etch-A-Sketch a relative presented me a few years ago to see if I still had it. I did a not-bad self-portrait and signed my name. (I'm not in the league of Sketchers who can reproduce artistic masterworks.)

Etch-A-Sketches still exist. (They even have their own website.) But a lot of kids, if offered the choice, would probably choose an iPad. The Etch-A-Sketch, after all, has exactly one app.

It's too bad. The Etch-A-Sketch tested and taught manual dexterity and forced the Sketcher to mine his own imagination for images.

I also liked what will now be called the Romney feature: Destroying your work and starting over is a good habit for a writer, if not a politician.

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--Michael McGough

Photo: Matt Ortega's Etch-A-Sketch Romney site is one of the many responses to a Mitt Romney aide's comments comparing the candidate's transition into the general election to the children's toy. Credit: Matt Ortega / www.etchasketchromney.com

What is it about politics that makes some people lose all perspective?

Today's two examples come from near -- and far.

In the United States, we have Exhibit A, also known as Newt Gingrich.  

Exhibit B comes from Afghanistan: one Hamid Karzai.

Gingrich wants to be president, but he has no shot.  Karzai is a president, but if he's not careful, he will be shot.

Of course, one doesn't enter politics without a healthy -- some might say overinflated -- ego. The best politicians are, by nature, risk-takers. Where others hold back, they charge ahead.  It takes them to great heights sometimes but also brings great falls: see Clinton, Bill, and Nixon, Richard. 

(Thursday brought another reminder:  Former Illinois Gov. Rod Rod Blagojevich left Chicago for Colorado, where he'll be serving a sentence on corruption charges in federal prison.)

And ego certainly applies to Gingrich. Times staff writer Paul West on Thursday summed up Gingrich's motivation for staying in the GOP presidential race:

At 68, the former House speaker is making what figures to be his last fling at elective politics.  But it is his sense of himself as an epic figure that may well be what's keeping him going.

Gingrich hopes for a brokered convention, something that hasn't happened for decades but that appeals to the historian in him.  It may be a figment of his imagination, but it's a harmless fantasy -- unless you're Mitt Romney and hoping to wrap up the nomination.

Karzai, on the other hand, is playing a much more dangerous game.  On Thursday, Times staff writer Laura King reported from Kabul that the Afghan president "had demanded a quicker end to the Western combat mission and a pullback of NATO troops from rural areas."

Karzai's office said he told visiting Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that by year's end, U.S. troops should be garrisoned only in large bases, abandoning outposts in rural districts like Panjwayi, the scene of Sunday's shooting deaths. 

"Afghanistan's security forces have the capability to provide security in the villages of Afghanistan," said a statement from Karzai's office.

Which makes one wonder what country Karzai thinks he's living in. Especially because the Taliban announced Thursday that not only was it suspending talks with the United States on the war but that it would be "pointless" to engage in any talks with the Karzai government.

Karzai's response?

The president also called for a significant acceleration of the handover of security responsibilities to Afghan forces, saying NATO should wind down its combat role in 2013 instead of 2014. "Our demand is to speed up this process, and authority should be given to Afghans," the presidential palace's statement said.

Perhaps Karzai could take a lesson from Gingrich and read up on his history.  Here's a name he might want to check out: Najibullah.

After the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, Najibullah was president.  Forced from office during the ensuing civil war, Najibullah took refuge in the U.N. compound in Kabul for four years.  But in 1996, the Taliban seized power. 

A Times' story from Friday Sept. 27, 1996, records his fate:

The bloated, beaten body of the man who also once headed the hated Afghan Communists' security service was strung up from a lamppost outside the presidential palace, reports said.

The Times' Doyle McManus wrote Thursday that given recent events, President Obama needs a Plan C for getting out of Afghanistan.  So Karzai may get his wish for a sped-up withdrawal.  

But if that's the case, Karzai's name just might end up listed next to Najibullah's in the history books of the 21st century.

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Photo: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, meets with Afghan President Hamid Karza in Kabul on Thursday. Credit: Mohammad Ismail / EPA

Nothing gets my cynic juices flowing quite like hearing people call on the Internet to fix the political system.

Former Vice President Al Gore and online entrepreneur Sean Parker gave an overflow crowd at the South by Southwest trade show a pep talk Monday on the need to reform the political system, which Gore said is dominated by corporate interests. 

"Our democracy has been hacked. It no longer works, in the main, to serve the best interests of the people of this country," Gore said. "I would like to see a new movement called Occupy Democracy, where people who have Internet savvy remedy this situation."

If we expand Gore's group of deep-pocketed dominators to include unions (and in California, public employee unions in particular), then I think we can all agree that he has a point. The issue is whether Gore and Parker have a realistic solution. And their comments suggest that they don't recognize the role the Internet is already playing in the electoral polarization of the country, which is a major factor in the political system's inability to solve problems.

Here's how Gore described the current situation and its historical antecedents:

In the early days of the republic, the printing press was the most powerful means of communication, and just about anyone could use it to enter the public debate. Now, the essential fact of political life, at least on the national stage, is that costly television advertising plays a crucial role in winning elections. "Television creates a very different public square," he said. "It has gatekeepers. You can't get in to where you can address the mass audience."

As a consequence, politicians spend half their time in office groveling for money. Deep-pocketed corporations end up controlling the system because incumbents don't dare cross them for fear of losing their financial lifeline.

Again, that view conveniently overlooks the influence of powerful noncorporate interests -- for example, Planned Parenthood and the Service Employees International Union when Democrats are in power, and the National Rifle Assn. and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform when Republicans are in control. 

Not surprisingly, the Obama Justice Department is opposing a Texas law requiring voters to show photo ID, claiming that it disproportionately disenfranchises  Latino voters. It's the latest example of a familiar trope: Democrats oppose voter ID, calling it unnecessary and discriminatory; Republicans support it, arguing that impersonation at the polls is a real, if hard to quantify, problem.  Not so coincidentally, racial minorities tend to favor Democratic candidates.

Neither of the warring narratives is totally satisfactory. It's plausible that members of economically disadvantaged minority groups are less likely to have, say, a driver's license. But I felt my eyebrows elevating at the Justice Department's estimate that between 175,000 and 304,000 registered Latino Texas voters lack driver's licenses or other state-issued IDs. Really? On the other hand, Republicans' fears of fraud at polling places seem forced. They have a point, though, when they say that it's anomalous that you need a photo ID to board a plane but not to vote.

It's crazy that 175,000 (or 304,000?) Texans of whatever background don't have  government-issued photo IDs and might have difficulty buying a plane or train ticket.  They need to get IDs, and the government should help -- regardless of what happens on Election Day. Like it or not, in 21st century America your face is your fortune.

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-- Michael McGough

Photo: U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder has been an outspoken critic of the Texas law. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo

It's not often you can say that someone saved the world -- and mean it literally.

But that's the case with F. Sherwood Rowland. The UC Irvine chemist, who died Saturday at 85, was one of three scientists who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry, The Times reported, for their work "explaining how chlorofluorocarbons, ubiquitous substances once used in an array of products from spray deodorant to industrial solvents, could destroy the ozone layer, the protective atmospheric blanket that screens out many of the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays."

In hindsight, it seems straightforward: Bad stuff was eating away a vital part of Earth's environment. So get rid of it.

But it wasn't so simple in 1974, when Rowland and fellow scientist Mario Molina published their concerns in the journal Nature.

As The Times says, the findings "were met with scorn by the chemical industry and even by many scholars. For a decade, Rowland and Molina persevered to prove their hypothesis, publishing numerous scientific papers and speaking to sometimes hostile audiences at scientific conferences. It took almost 15 years for the international scientific community and chemical industry to accept the pair's findings."

Hmmm, starting to remind you of a little something called "climate change," is it?

But here's something of a vital difference between the ozone debate and the current climate change one:

Manufacturers began to phase out chlorofluorocarbons in the late 1980s, prompted by the discovery of an ozone "hole" over Antarctica that formed each winter in response to weather conditions and the falling worldwide levels of ozone. The Montreal Protocol, a landmark international agreement to phase out CFC products, was signed by the United States and other nations in 1987.

The protocol was proof that nations could unite to address common environmental threats, Rowland contended. "People have worked together to solve the problem," he said.

Rowland was right then.  Nations did unite to address a common environmental threat.

But have we taken that lesson to heart?  Will we accept the scientific consensus on climate change and work together to save the planet?   

Or will it continue to be a political football, at least in the United States, where too many politicians are opting for short-term partisan gains at the risk of the planet's future?

Donald Blake, a colleague of Rowland’s at UC Irvine, told The Times that Rowland considered the phase-out of CFCs his greatest achievement.

It would be a shame if Rowland won the ozone battle -- but the rest of us lost the war for Earth’s survival.

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--Paul Whitefield

Photo: F. Sherwood Rowland, shown in his UC Irvine lab.  Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

One of the dominant story lines of this political season has been the power of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's money -- how the millions of dollars spent by him and an allied "super PAC" have vaporized his rivals' leads in states such as Florida and Ohio. And as impressive as Romney's fundraising has been, his cash pile may be dwarfed by the billion-dollar war chest that President Obama is expected to amass for the general election.

NationBuilder, a tiny Los Angeles-based start-up, just raised a few million dollars of its own to support a different kind of politicking. For as little as $20 a month, the company offers a way to build a grass-roots organization at virtually no cost, opening the door to candidates who don't have personal fortunes or deep-pocketed friends. The idea is to combine publishing, communications, relationship-management and lead-generation tools into a cheap and easy-to-use package, harnessing the networking power of the Internet to pull candidates out of obscurity.

It's probably not the kind of service that could send any old Mr. Smith to Washington. Campaigns for Congress and the presidency are largely waged on television, while NationBuilder is better suited for the retail politics of a city council or school board race. Nevertheless, as money plays a growing role even in state and local politics, it's refreshing to see a company try to provide a tool that helps campaigns by encouraging donations of time and labor, not just cash.

Jim Gilliam, the company's founder and chief executive, came up with the idea after using the Web to build grass-roots support for Brave New Films, a company he co-founded that produces left-of-center documentaries. A network of friends online had also helped Gilliam, a cancer survivor, persuade surgeons at UCLA to perform the double lung transplant he needed after undergoing multiple rounds of chemotherapy.

These experiences made him wonder about how to create a service that would enable people to build an influential community of followers through the Web. The Internet is rife with tools to gather people with common interests (e.g., Facebook), publish content (WordPress, Twitter) and raise money for a project (KickStarter, Causes). There also are plenty of companies that offer to help candidates raise money, recruit volunteers and get supporters to the polls, typically for a monthly fee.

What was missing before NationBuilder, Gilliam says, was something that brought all those tools together, integrating systems for publishing, recruiting, fundraising and messaging into a system for community organizing.

Mitt Romney is catching grief for describing himself as an "unofficial Southerner" during a Mississippi campaign swing.  "I'm learning to say 'y'all'," he said. "I like grits. Strange things are happening to me." More proof of inauthenticity and phony outreach, his critics say.  

The new comments are  reminiscent  in their awkwardness of his infamous  "regular guy" gaffes, like his  statement that he once had worried about receiving a pink slip.

But I'd cut Romney some slack on this one.  To call yourself an unofficial Southerner is to admit that you're not a real one. He acknowledged that eating grits was a strange experience for him -- strange in the sense of foreign or unfamiliar, not strange in the sense of the banjo-playing boy in "Deliverance."

Even in the 21^st century, Northerners visiting the South can feel like strangers in a strange land  (and vice versa). Regional differences still exist -- in politics, religion and culture. One example: Southerners -- including teenagers -- are startlingly more polite than Northerners. Watch any TV report about a natural disaster below the Mason-Dixon line -- the victims usually address the correspondent as "sir" or "ma'am."

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

Romney's candor about his un-Southernness will strike some Southerners as endearing, perhaps prompting them to paraphrase Lyle Lovett: "That's right you're not from Mississippi, but Mississippi wants you anyway."

Or maybe not.

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--Michael McGough

Photo: Mitt Romney waves to the crowd at the Port of Pascagoula while campaigning in Mississippi on March 8. Credit: Amanda McCoy / Sun Herald/Associated Press 

What do you call it when someone who is suing to overturn the healthcare reform law files for bankruptcy, listing $4,500 in unpaid medical bills?

Karma? Fate? A lucky break for President Obama?

Really, you can't make this stuff up. Here's what The Times' David Savage wrote Thursday:

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.

Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.

Now, you might expect Brown to be a bit, well, chagrined at this turn of events.  But remember, as Savage wrote, she "was passionate about the issue."

And she apparently still is:

Brown, reached by telephone Thursday, said the medical bills were her husband's. "I always paid my bills, as well as my medical bills," she said angrily. "I never said medical insurance is not a necessity. It should be anyone's right to what kind of health insurance they have.

"I believe that anyone has unforeseen things that happen to them that are beyond their control," Brown said. "Who says I don't have insurance right now?"

Who says? Well, Mary, your lawyer for one. Remember: She "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it."

Oh yeah, that.  Those lawyers, always running their mouths.  

And for that matter, Mary, those aren't your husband's medical bills, at least not anymore.  Now that you've filed for bankruptcy, they are probably our medical bills, aren't they? 

Although it's not as though Brown is totally anti-government: The couple's Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition said her income was $275 a month in unemployment benefits.

So perhaps she intends to put that toward what she owes: "$2,140 to Bay Medical Center in Panama City, $610 to Bay Medical Physicians, $835 to an eye doctor in Alabama and $900 to a specialist in Mississippi."

Or maybe, as the story says, there's that other way out:

"This is a very common problem. We cover $30 million in charity and uncompensated care every  year," said Christa Hild, a spokeswoman for the hospital center. "If it's a bad debt, we have to absorb it."

Although when the hospital center says "we," it means "us"  -- as in you and I, the ones who do pay for health insurance.  We absorb it, in higher premium costs.

It's called the free market, or "there's no free lunch."  (It's also why a single-payer system such as Medicare would've been a better option than the law we've got, but that's another post.)

But it's also why the "individual mandate" requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance was put into the law.

Why that is so hard for Brown and millions of other citizens to understand is beyond me. 

This isn't Charles Dickens' London: We don't have debtors' prisons.  If Brown and her fellow travelers have their way and the healthcare law is ruled unconstitutional, many others will take the risk "of unforeseen things that happen to them that are beyond their control." 

And if they get sick, and have medical bills they can't pay, then they won't pay.  And neither will the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.

The rest of us will pay.

You see, Mary, the requirement that everyone buy health insurance isn't big bad government taking away your freedom.

It's just common sense.

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Photo: The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear a challenge to the healthcare reform law. Credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images

I wasn't  kidding on Super Tuesday evening when I tweeted "Brokered Convention! Brokered Convention!" Even if it opened up the possibility of a Sarah Palin draft, a genuinely deliberative Republican convention would make for more compelling television (and tweets).

I can already see the candidates, flanked by texting aides, streaming into meetings with state delegations between the 14th and 15th ballots. And every day a new dark horse. ("CNN can report that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has emerged as the latest compromise acceptable to both the Romney and Santorum camps.")

A brokered convention might also revive interest in two masterpieces of American political fiction: Gore Vidal's 1960 play (later a film) "The Best Man" and "Convention," the 1964 novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, the authors of "Seven Days in May." 

 "The Best Man" climaxes dramatically when a liberal favorite for the nomination pulls out of the race and throws his support to a governor who had entered the convention as a long shot.

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

The dust jacket for "Convention" described the nominating process of what was soon to be a bygone era: "In our whole political scene, nothing captures the imagination like the tense, emotional atmosphere of our party conventions."  Conventions made for riveting fiction not only because of the suspense factor but because so much of the action took place in backrooms. In his notes for "The Best Man," Vidal wrote: "Politicians, like magicians and safecrackers, do not enjoy being explicated."  This was pre-C-SPAN, of course, and pre-Piers Morgan.

Political business still gets done in backrooms -- and PAC rooms -- but nominees are chosen long before the delegates get off the plane. But maybe not this year. A change might do politics, and the political novel, some good.

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--Michael McGough

Photo: Supporters of Rick Santorum listen during his Super Tuesday election night party at Steubenville High School in Ohio. Credit: David Maxwell / EPA

No matter which GOP presidential candidates win Tuesday night’s seven primaries and three caucuses, the race will look much the same on the day after as it did the day before. Mitt Romney will still lead in the race for delegates, but he’ll remain far short of the number needed to claim the nomination. Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul will all still be well behind, albeit with most of the delegates yet to be claimed.

Nevertheless, there will be plenty of interesting developments to watch for as the results come in. Will Gingrich gain any traction outside of his home state of Georgia? Can Paul notch his first win? Can the Romney campaign’s barrage of attack ads in Ohio and Tennessee derail Santorum? And what damage has Romney done to his own standing in the process?

The Times’ Doyle McManus, Michael McGough, David Horsey and I will be following the returns and sharing our thoughts 140 characters at a time. Read out tweets below and interact with us here and on Twitter.

--Jon Healey

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Photo: A poll worker assists as voters prepare to cast their ballots at a polling place during Super Tuesday voting on March 6 in Youngstown, Ohio. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images