RealClearPolitics surveyed the group on a particular statement the Republican governor recently made in Aspen, Colo:

“Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”

Smith told RCP that his email box has been filling up with supporters’ mixed responses to Perry’s comments. Overall, Smith said Perry’s comments likely will not be viewed favorably by many conservative voters, particularly evangelical Christian voters.

From RealClearPolitics:

“It’s the way he said it,” Smith said, noting that Perry said he was “fine” with New York’s new law. He explained that if by “fine” he means he’s happy about it, that won’t sit well with evangelical voters, but if he’s approaching it as a constitutional lawyer would, it may not be so bad.

At the same time, Smith said he’s concerned that Perry’s comments suggest he could be “slippery” on other issues. “And he may be perceived as stumbling out of the gate because of a poor choice of words,” he said, indicating that such a stumble could hurt Perry in the early voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, where he would need to do well.

As The American Independent recently reported, Palmetto holds a certain amount of influence with conservative voters in what is an influential primary state. The group recently launched a “Family 2012″ campaign to find out where 2012 presidential candidates stand on policy issues important to the organization.

RCP also published responses from Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa’s Family Leader, as well as American Values’ Gary Bauer and Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed.

Bauer called Perry’s comments “inartful and disappointing”; Reed told RCP that the real judgment of Perry will come with his stance on a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage. Vander Plaats was the least critical of the four, explaining that Perry has to understand the difference between same-sex marriage as a federal or state issue:

“Many of us advocated for states’ rights and were big 10th Amendment people, but when it comes to things like whether its slavery, and abortion, or marriage, we’re not saying, ‘Well it’s OK to have slavery in Alabama but not Iowa.’ … Some things are right and some things are wrong, and especially when it comes to marriage, it’s a foundation block and a building block for society.”

It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

And surely if those cameras did not capture such abhorrence, then someone from the mainstream media — those who printed and broadcast his assertions without any reasonable questioning or investigation — must themselves surely have it on camera. Of course we already know they don’t. If they did, you’d have seen it by now.

THOUSANDS OF TIMES.

Rep. Lewis, if you can’t do that, I’ll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test. If you provide verifiable video evidence showing that a single racist epithet was hurled as you walked among the tea partiers, or you pass a simple lie detector test, I will provide a $10K check to the United Negro College Fund.

Thanks to the cell phone videos of the event, I think “the myth of the March 20 slurs” will become an accepted fact inside the Tea Parties.

Whole letter after the jump.

Jihad at Fort Hood

Every American this morning should be outraged not only about the murderous rampage against U.S. soldiers in Ft. Hood, Texas, by Major Nidal M. Hasan, but also by the sickening effort of Big Media, and even some U.S. officials, to deceive us about what has taken place.

For eight years we have been fighting radical Islamists around the world, and we have been the victims of jihadist attacks by lone radical Muslims repeatedly here in the U.S. Yet as the story broke of the carnage yesterday, 13 dead and 30 wounded, virtually every major media outlet, along with our own government, seemed to have as their main goal convincing us that the event had nothing to do with terrorism or radical Islam.

But minute-by-minute, more information is coming to light that can’t be ignored. We have found out that six months ago Major Hasan may have defended Muslim suicide bombers on his web page, comparing such acts to the sacrifice a U.S. solider makes when he falls on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Col. Terry Lee, who worked with the killer, said Major Hasan had said, “Muslims shouldn’t be fighting Muslims.” Back in June, when a Muslim convert assassinated a U.S. soldier at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, Col. Lee said that Major Hasan seemed happy about the event and that he was confronted by other officers. (You may recall that it took days for Obama to acknowledge that attack, yet the White House issued a rare Sunday statement when late-term abortionist George Tiller was killed.)

In recent weeks, while off the base, Major Hasan started wearing Arabic and religious clothing. He passed out Korans on the morning of the shooting. Survivors in the facility where Major Hasan went on the attack reported that he yelled, “Allahu Akbar,” (Allah is great) before he opened fire – the same words shouted by the jihadists on 9/11 and which have been repeated by our enemy in every attack since.

Nor is this an isolated incident. In June 2003, Sergeant Hasan K. Akbar attacked his fellow soldiers as they gathered in Kuwait to start the liberation of Iraq. He killed two officers and wounded many more. Numerous plots by American Muslims have been uncovered in recent years to attack Fort Dix, the Quantico Marine Corps base and other military facilities.

No one is suggesting that an Al Qaeda operative contacted Major Hasan and ordered yesterday’s attack. But the evidence certainly indicates that Major Hasan was becoming more and more committed to radical Islam and growing increasingly hostile to the American military that paid for his education and repeatedly promoted him. NPR reports, “Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work… He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues…”

I understand the media’s politically correct mindset. What is inexcusable is why the military and the FBI continue to be so reticent about acknowledging the nature of the enemy we are confronting. Instead of going into denial, our military, the FBI and other intelligence agencies need to admit the obvious. While thousands of loyal American Muslims have served in the military, and some have died with other Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are also “sleeper cells” or “sleeper individuals” who are jihadist ticking time bombs inside our own ranks. Similar attacks are inevitable the longer our leaders engage in self-deception. The brave men and women in uniform, who are on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq, should not have to worry about being killed at home by the same enemy they are fighting abroad.

Obama’s “Shout out”

As details of the Ft. Hood carnage poured in yesterday afternoon, the White House announced that President Obama would make a statement at a previously scheduled event. Close to 5:00 PM, cable stations switched to cover the president’s remarks as he was getting ready to speak at a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Interior Department. What happened next has callers to talk radio shows all over the country outraged.

Instead of bringing a somber demeanor into the room, the president seemed to many to be light-hearted and frivolous. He thanked various staffers, and then said he wanted to give a “shout out” to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, who he incorrectly identified as a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner. After several minutes of banter, the president read a somber, brief statement about the shootings. Increasingly, this White House seems “tone deaf.” How hard is it to realize that this was not a time for joking or “shout outs.” In fact, it would have been more appropriate to cancel the speech and make a reassuring statement from the White House on the events in Texas.

This morning, the president made another statement ordering flags to fly at half-staff until Veterans Day. But he also cautioned us not to “jump to conclusions” until we have all the facts. (The last time there was a pending law enforcement issue, the president was the first to jump to conclusions when he said the Cambridge Police Department “acted stupidly” for arresting his friend Professor Louis Gates.)

“Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are two of the most unpopular people in American politics,” said Gary Bauer, who endorsed Hoffman early on. “I think they can become potent symbols in the 2010 election. At the end of the day, however, I think it’s important for Republicans not to just say ‘send a message to Nancy Pelosi’ or ‘send a message to Harry Reid,’ but rather to remind people how a Republican Congress will be different than what they’re seeing right now.”

Nonetheless, as Brian Beutler points out, the immediate impact of the House victories is that the Democratic conference in the House will rise from 256 to 258. That gives the party more breathing room on a health care vote. And it’s hard to underscore just how much Republicans were hoping that a Hoffman victory, or a more long-shot victory by David Harmer in California, would strike fear into conservative Democrats worried about their own re-elections. Republicans have been messaging today about Governor-elect Bob McDonnell’s landslide margins in vulnerable Virginia House seats won by Democrats last year, but Democrats generally understand that McDonnell was the beneficiary of a bumbling Democratic campaign against him. The Democratic House victories give the party some breathing room.

The full statement, bolded for emphasis:

Barack Obama will deliver a nation-wide address to students this coming Tuesday, September 8th. This will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The White House plans to broadcast the address live from its website. Principals were notified of the plan in a letter addressed to them by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The White House claims that Obama will “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning.” He will also say that it is a “shared responsibility” among parents, students, and educators to make the learning experience as successful as possible. That may seem harmless enough, but is it appropriate? How would the media have reacted if President Bush had been beamed into classrooms coast-to-coast?

The Department of Education has offered educators “classroom activities” to go along with Obama’s message. Younger students in grades K-6 are encouraged to learn about the background of the President of the United States by reading books about former presidents and Obama. For students in grades 7-12 teachers are urged to utilize quotes from Obama’s speeches regarding education so that the students can understand the president’s message. Some of the questions they should ask themselves include: “How will President Obama inspire us? How will he challenge us? And why did he want to speak to us today?”

Once again, the Obama Administration is using its power in unprecedented ways, this time injecting itself into the nation’s classrooms. Tuesday may be a good day to sit in on your child’s classes.

Earlier today, Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer blasted the president for trying to “indoctrinate” children in “socialism.”

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Letterman has enjoyed a temporary ratings boost, but there’s deeper meaning in the incident.  The cultural left lampoons Palin because her values and life are completely foreign to them. They find it bizarre that she hunts, prays and says things like “you betcha.’”  They can’t fathom that she brought a child with Down syndrome to term and that she didn’t pressure her daughter into aborting an unexpected pregnancy… [Letterman's] Palin joke backfired in part because scores of millions of Americans are living lives that more closely resemble Palin’s life than Letterman’s.

The incident did end with at least one advertiser, The Olive Garden, telling consumers that it would not buy more ads on the show this year.

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Gary Bauer and Randall Terry (American Values, Wikimedia)

On Sunday, when he heard that abortion doctor George Tiller had been murdered outside of his Wichita, Kans. church, Fr. Frank Pavone was “overcome by sadness.” He had opposed Tiller’s work vociferously, for many years. But he didn’t want the fight against his late-term abortion practice to end like this.

“I wanted to come to a legal peaceful way of stopping Tiller’s activities,” Pavone told TWI. “I believe that we were closing in on the revocation of his medical license. So I reacted with sadness. I knew the circus was about to begin.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The “circus” is what many anti-abortion activists are bracing for in the wake of the first murder of an abortion doctor since 1998. Every major anti-abortion group responded to Sunday’s events, almost all of them condemning alleged murderer Scott Roeder. “Violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message,” said Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) in a statement. The National Right to Life Committee extended “sympathies to Dr. Tiller’s family.” Phill Kline, the hard-line conservative Kansas lawyer who repeatedly sued for Tiller’s patient records, called the murder a “lawless and violent act” that “should be met with the full force of law.” All of this was aimed to pre-empt charges that the broader anti-abortion movement should share the blame for what happened.

Activists are not yet sure how the Tiller murder has altered the landscape of abortion politics. A spokesman for one major anti-abortion group, who chose to remain anonymous, said that reaction would be limited to a short statement because “this was a horrendous tragedy, a heinous act, and we’re not fielding questions about some kook who doesn’t represent our organization or anti-abortion movement in any way.” Other spokesmen dismissed the immediate response of Randall Terry, the anti-aboriton activist who called Tiller a “mass murderer” at a hastily assembled Monday press conference, as a ploy for attention that put unneeded political heat on the rest of the movement.

One reason for the relative hush is that movement veterans recall how, in the 1990s, attacks on abortion providers gave rise to new laws protecting their businesses from protests and aggressively going after radical anti-abortion activists. In 1994, after a wave of attacks on abortion clinics, President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to ban protests that restricted doctors and patients from entering clinics. Four years later Attorney General Janet Reno set up a task force to monitor violence against abortion providers — a strategy that The New York Times asked current Attorney General Eric Holder to revisit.

Anti-abortion leaders quickly got out front to denounce the idea of a large-scale response to Tiller. Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, the head of the Christian Defense Coalition, staged a protest outside of the Supreme Court asking Barack Obama and Democrats “not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton administration in the mid-’90s and use this tragedy for political gain.” One of the chief worries among activists — whether Obama will revisit a pledge he made to Planned Parenthood during the 2008 campaign and push for the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that would roll back Bush-era federal restrictions on abortion.

“I wouldn’t put it past abortion advocates in Congress to use this tragedy to put more protections in place for the so-called right to choose,” said Frank Pavone. “That would just feed into the problem. There’s a lot of disappointment and frustration out there as a result of 2008 elections. People feel desperate. I’m not justifying what happened to Tiller at all when I say that it’s not surprising that a pattern begins to develop — the administration is hostile to the anti-abortion movement, there are acts of violence from people who feel helpless.”

As of Tuesday, there was no sign that the anti-abortion movement’s foes in Congress were acting out the way that Pavone expected. In March, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) hinted that FOCA would be introduced “sooner rather than later” for a new vote. But Nadler spokesman Ilan Kayatsky said that there were no discussions of FOCA after the news of Tiller’s murder broke, just as Congress was returning from a weeklong recess. “The reasons to re-introduce FOCA at some point,” said Kayatsky, “will be the same reasons that preceded this murder.”

Without legislation to respond to and oppose, anti-abortion activists have begun to push back against the news that Department of Justice dispatched federal marshals to protect abortion clinics that requested extra, temporary security. That has been interpreted in some anti-abortion circles as a warning to opponents of administration policy. And the murder of a military recruiter in Little Rock — Muslim convert Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad is the suspect — has prodded activists to portray coverage of Tiller’s murder as unfairly slanted and overblown. Jill Stanek, an anti-abortion blogger and activist who gained fame in 2008 after arguing that Barack Obama had effectively supported infanticide as a state senator, responded to the Little Rock murders with a simple, unsubtle question: “Where are Obama and Holder?” Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, told TWI that the “benefit of the doubt” was given to Islamic terrorists but not to anti-abortion extremists. Reporters, said Bauer, ask whether anti-abortion extremists are “linked to pro-life groups,” while assuming that suspects like Abdulhakim Muhammad were acting alone.

“It would be interesting to see whether or not the attorney general will now send marshals to protect military recruiting stations,” said Bauer. “There’s hypocrisy here from the people who are screaming out about the brutal descrution of George Tiller’s life, who then spend the rest of the year talking about how the destruction of unborn children is a Constitutional right.”

Joseph M. Scheidler, the national director of the Pro-Life Action League, argued that the reaction to Tiller — including the federal marshals — was “just a show,” and no different from how “the abortionists blame the pro-life movement for everything, anyway.”

“It’s like the swine flu,” said Scheidler. “It’s something for the press to get people to focus on so they don’t obsess over the declining economic conditions.”

By the close of Tuesday, anti-abortion activists had moved from messages of condolence for Tiller to aggressive pushback on any use of the murder as a political issue. Manny Miranda, the chairman of the Third Branch Conference, suggested that the murder might have disrupted the ability of anti-abortion activists to push Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on their issue “had it come up at a more proximate moment.” Since conservatives will have time to move on from the murder, the issue and the circus around it may end up starved for attention.

“It’s going to be a month and a half or two months until the hearings,” said Miranda, who has wrangled dozens of anti-abortion activists into a coalition demanding a “democratic filibuster” of the nominee. “It would be foul play to bring up the Tiller thing, just as if somebody wanted to bring up how late-term abortions are performed in utero. You just don’t play it like that.”

The Associated Press asks prominent evangelicals and leaders of the religious right if Jesus would condone torture. Some evangelicals say every life is sacred and torture is not peaceful and therefore incongruent with Christian teachings. But religious right leader Gary Bauer says that while Jesus wouldn’t torture, he would permit his followers to do so.

“There are a lot of things Jesus wouldn’t do because he’s the son of God,” Bauer told the AP. “I can’t imagine Jesus being a Marine or a policeman or a bank president, for that matter. The more appropriate question is, ‘What is a follower of Jesus permitted to do?’”

“I think if we believe the person we have can give us information to stop thousands of Americans from being killed, it would be morally suspect to not use harsh tactics to get that information,” Bauer said.

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Andy Birkey is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent.

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), surrounded by reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday (WDCpix)

This wasn’t what conservatives were expecting to talk about today. The news that Sen. Arlen Specter, the senior Republican in the Senate, would switch to the Democratic Party, came out of the blue after weeks of denials that the senator would ever do such a thing.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Inside the Club for Growth, the conservative PAC that until this month was led by former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) — Specter’s 2004 primary opponent who was gearing up for a 2010 rematch — staffers who were preparing to beat Specter read the news from The Washington Post and scrambled to write a statement for the press. Two hours after the news broke, the Club released a statement from new president Chris Chocola that called Specter “unprincipled” and his decision “cynical,” revealing himself as a “liberal devoted to more government spending.” In an interview on MSNBC, Toomey challenged Pennsylvanians to ask “if we can trust this man.”

The Specter switch — on a day that began with the GOP attacking the White House over a botched Air Force One flight and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination for secretary of health and human services — has given Republicans and conservatives a gut-check moment. Many of them have argued that the Republican defeats of 2006 and 2008 were reactions to the Bush administration’s feckless policies, biased coverage from the mainstream media, and a duplicitous campaign by Barack Obama. Specter, one of just three Republicans (all senators) who supported the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was the only one up for reelection in 2010.

That made him a target of conservatives who believe the party’s comeback depends on a return to low-tax, low-spending fiscal conservatism. Republicans in Specter’s home state would not commit to supporting him over Toomey. Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, repeatedly turned down chances to promise national support for Specter in his upcoming primary.

Specter spent several months attempting to win over the base, experiencing slightly more success in Washington than in Pennsylvania by declaring his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act and introducing (for the second time in two years) a flat tax reform bill. According to Chris Lilik, the editor of the conservative Pennsylvania Website GrassrootsPA.com and 2004 Toomey volunteer, Specter hadn’t been gaining ground with that strategy. Lilik pointed to Specter’s statements Tuesday about not wanting to “face the jury” of the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate as proof.

“There were so many issues he just wasn’t smart about,” said Lilik. “”It’s really unfair to blame conservatives for this. His problems with the base were all self-inflicted. He did this to himself.”

Self-reflection was hard to find from the Republican Party and from activists who had attacked Specter as an example of the GOP’s image problem — a man who prevented them from appealing to voters as the party of small government. Steele accused Specter of trying to “further his personal political interests because he knew that he was going to lose a Republican primary due to his left-wing voting record.” Eric Odom, the conservative web guru who launched TaxDayTeaParty.com — and who denied Steele’s request to speak at the Chicago anti-spending rally — responded to the news by tweeting “THANK GOD we don’t have to deal with an ugly GOP primary in Specter’s district.” According to Adam Brandon, a spokesman for the Tea Party-supporting FreedomWorks, the group’s chairman Dick Armey laughed at the news and asked: “Will anyone be able to tell the difference?”

Twitter was the best place to watch the conservative base, fired up by Tea Parties and already enraged at Specter, react to the news as validation. “Specter’s party switching is about as significant as Obama’s budget cutting,” tweeted Bill Hennessy, a Missouri activist and Tea Party organizer. “Just waiting for the professional whiners to say it’s Republicans’ fault Specter left the party,” tweeted Ron Nehring, the chairman of the California Republican Party. “Give me a break.”

Among some other conservative activists, there was more regret, and more worry about how Specter’s switch would aid Obama and the Democrats. Gary Bauer, the longtime Republican evangelical activist who is now president of American Values, said Specter’s critics did not give him enough credit for his work in the Senate. “I don’t think that Clarence Thomas would be in the Supreme Court today if not for Arlen Specter,” said Bauer. “Having the support of what are derisively referred to as RINOS — Republicans in name only — can be important in the Senate.”

Bauer rejected the idea that the Republican brand would be strengthened now that Specter was no longer giving bipartisan cover to Democrats — and that Republicans were being shaped into the clear conservative choice that voters were missing in 2008. “I take a back seat to nobody in wanting the Republican Party to be Ronald Reagan’s party,” said Bauer. “But I would remind folks that Ronald Reagan picked George H.W. Bush to be his running mate. Ronald Reagan understood that there was another element of the party that needed to be brought along. We gain nothing if we replace RINOS with Democrats.”

Bay Buchanan, the president of the American Cause, acknowledged that Specter had been a “huge problem” for conservatives who opposed pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but worried that he would become even worse as a Democrat.

“Did he give us a few things?” asked Buchanan. “Did he owe President Bush something because he flew into the fray in 2004 and saved him in the primary with Toomey? Were we able to call in a few chits? Absolutely. And now the Democrats will call in their chits. This is not good for Republicans. I’m not going to tell you that we’re cleansing the party and that this is good for Republicans.”

Democrats and union groups, whose pressure on the stimulus bill and card-check legislation were crucial to forcing Specter’s decision, spent Tuesday afternoon gloating about Specter’s announcement. Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, had dangled the promise of political support for Specter if he came around to support the Employee Free Choice Act. While Specter ruled out support of the bill today, Stern still claimed a kind of victory.

“It’s clear to us that the right-wing conservatives in control of the leadership of the Republican party in Pennsylvania left Senator Specter long ago,” said Stern in a statement. “We are pleased that he has decided to do the same.”