Newt Gingrich

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich leveled particularly harsh criticism at Obama, saying he’s personally hurt the economy by attacking job creators.

“This country has been maniacally anti-jobs,” Gingrich said. “Obama is a left-wing radical who believes in class warfare and then he’s surprised that everybody who he’s attacking doesn’t create jobs.”

Gingrich then asked, “what did he think was going to happen?”

“You can’t go around the country and blame everybody who creates jobs and then say now gee, why didn’t you go out and take risk with your capital and spend the next five years of your lives creating jobs so I can attack you even more?” Gingrich said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered a similar evaluation, saying people have lost confidence in the federal government and are not willing to risk capital to invest in potential job-creating ventures.

“Let’s quit penalizing Americans for making money, quit fighting this fight that we’re fighting on divisions between those that have money and those that don’t,” he said. “I want everybody to have more money.”

 

Rick Santorum

And Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) also stuck the country’s economic woes on Obama, saying repealing federal health care reform legislation he championed would be a major step toward recovery.

“I think one of the biggest things we can do is repeal Obamacare,” he said. “That is a job crusher that is creating all sorts of uncertainty.”

Santorum called for eliminating the corporate income tax and allowing for tax-free repatriation of corporate profits being held overseas – estimated at more than $1 trillion – if the money is used to invest in job creation.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) also called for no taxes on repatriated profits, but said companies should be able to use them however they want.

Bachmann said the biggest problem businesses have right now is uncertainty. She wants a moratorium on regulations, and to see health care reform repealed.

“That’s the biggest problem business has right now,” Bachmann said. “They have no idea what’s going to come out of Washington, D.C. when they wake up in the morning. And that’s why we need to have an immediate moratorium on regulations. It’s killing us.”

 

Ron Paul

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said he’d like to see no taxes on repatriated profits and a 15 percent corporate tax rate.

“I want it very low because in many ways, they think…if you lower corporate taxes only the executive is going to benefit,” Paul said. “But the consumer benefits too. Corporate taxes are a form of a sales tax, and if they’re competitive they have to pass this on.”

But Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, says the Republican candidates have it wrong. The group claims Obama has worked hard to get rid of undue regulations, and the regulations that have been put in place are meant to protect taxpayers and close loopholes.

A recent review from Bloomberg found Obama has put in place fewer regulations than former President George W. Bush had at this point in his tenure.

National frontrunners Herman Cain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not attend the forum, held in Pella.

Of course, once you drill down, Reagan’s actual positions on taxes, spending and immigration may well fit in better in the Democratic Party than in the current GOP.

A stunning case in point comes to us from Outside The Beltway which has dug up video footage of a 1980 debate between Reagan and George Bush, which given the context of today’s debate, you really have to see to believe.

Reagan calls for an open border with Mexico and Bush says illegal immigrants need to be treated the same as citizens and shouldn’t be considered lawbreakers.

In Wednesday’s debate, only also-ran Jon Huntsman even came close to Reagan or Bush’s nuanced approach to immigration. From The Huffington Post:

Although many attempted to focus narrowly on border security, presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman took a different tack, almost praising then-President Ronald Reagan for signing a mass amnesty for undocumented immigrants in 1986.

Huntsman said Reagan had recognized “a human issue, and I hope that all of us as we deal with this immigration issue will always see it as an issue that revolves around real human beings.”

He said he believes undocumented immigrants should be “punished in some fashion,” but believes legal immigration must be reformed to prevent people from coming into the country without documents.

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that our legal immigration system is broken,” Huntsman said. “If we want to do something about attracting brain power to this country … we need to focus as much on legal immigration as possible.”

As Rick Perry and the other GOP candidates move to the right on immigration and other issues, they may leave President Obama as the one with the best claim on the Reagan mystique.

After Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches wrote that Perry’s rally seemed reminiscent of televangelist James Robison’s efforts to mobilize conservative Christians to support Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, the author of what Posner described as one of the most “under noticed” religion stories of the campaign season helped strengthen the connection.

In a two-part series, Ethics Daily contributing editor Brian Kaylor reveals closed-door meetings called last month by Robison in the Fort Worth suburb of Euless, bringing together about 80 pastors and conservative Christian leaders.

With the aim of plotting to oust Obama, the leaders met not just on the phone call recounted in TIME, but in person on June 20-21, after earlier rounds of secretive gatherings September 2010 in Dallas. Robison also held two conference calls in March with 35 right-wing Christian leaders.

Many of the leaders Ethics Daily reported attended those closed-door meetings are also sponsors of Perry’s prayer rally planned in August. (Today, Robison included a list of those who attended on his blog.)

They include event leadership figures Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, the controversial host organization of Perry’s prayer rally; influential conservative activist David Lane, who serves as the event’s national finance chairman; Jim Garlow, in charge of the rally’s “national church mobilization” efforts; former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, the government “mobilization” leader; and program endorsers Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Jacob Aranza, a minister who, Ethics Daily said, “helped popularize the theory that rock ’n’ roll music included backmasked messages promoting drug use and sex,” in the 80s.

Robison had been pushing for a governor to take up his prayer call, Posner writes, arguing that “we need our governors, our state leaders, our national leaders, really come together in real serious prayer because we need answers from above.” And as revealed to Kaylor, Ohio Governor John Kasich urged Robison to pick Perry because he was “the governor that had been in leadership long enough that [he] could call a prayer meeting.”

The authors lay out Robison’s pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-smaller government record, opposed to same-sex marriage and in favor of defending the fight against “Radical Islam.” Though Robison said the meetings are “intended to be spiritual, not political” he admitted to “political implications” of the gathering, “including issues involving political elections.”

“This is not a political gathering; it is a gathering for a spiritual awakening that will affect every area of life and culture,” Robison told Ethics Daily. “We’re not trying to organize some power base. We’re trying to release the power that affects every other base of influence and power.”

Kalyor traces the political subtext apparent on Robison’s TV ministry show, “Life Today”:

“I believe we’ve got about a 12- to 18-month, 24-month period at the most, really less than that, where we’re going to literally have to turn the ship of state away from the hidden dangers, like hidden underwater iceberg edges and the visible, to turn away and head to a safe course, safe harbor with a captain and crew in place over all that will make necessary course corrections to keep us in a secure safe place,” said Robison to Jay Richards, who attended both meetings and played a major role in the conference calls.

“The guy is dead. That is good,” Bush told a CNBC moderator before a crowd of nearly 200, according to ABC news. “Osama’s death is a great victory in the war on terror. He was held up as a leader.”

Bush has declined interviews with the media, and he turned down the president’s invitation to join him at Ground Zero with other political leaders in the wake of the news.

At the Wednesday appearance, however, he spoke freely. He said the intelligence services deserve the credit for the success of the mission because they built “a mosaic of information, piece by piece.”

He also talked about the the soldiers who conducted the raid.

“I met SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan. They are awesome, skilled, talented and brave. I said, ‘I hope you have everything you need. One guy said, ‘We need your permission to go into Pakistan and kick ass.’”

Bush reasserted his belief that the U.S. must to continue to promote ideas about democracy and freedom around the world to combat terrorism. He made that point, according to an ABC blogger at the event, in the sort of clanging well-meaning manner he made familiar to Americans and people all over the world during his presidency. In talking about the desire for freedom, he described “people who don’t look like us,” by which he presumably meant non-white non-Christians, and he talked about the “relatives of Condoleezza Rice,” by which he presumably meant black American slaves.

“The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal,” he told the hedge-funders. “People who do not look like us want freedom just as much. The relatives of [former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice over 100 years ago wanted freedom. It is only when you do not have hope in a society that you join a suicide bomber team.”

Speaking at Legend’s Bar & Grill before a dozen students from Iowa State University, largely members of the College Republicans, told them he supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. Karger said he would support a Democrat if they fell in line with his beliefs, and he supported Barack Obama when he became the eventual nominee. But he also said Obama has been a disappointment to him and the gay community, and that’s what pushed him into the race.

Karger has always been a Republican and worked on the campaigns of former presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Over the past 10 years, Karger — who is openly gay — spent most of his time as an activist for gay rights, especially fighting the Mormon church over Proposition 8.

He said part of the reason he’s running is to try to influence the debate among the Republican party, to get them away from an ideological divide over social issues and become a “big tent party” once again. That’s why he’s trying to visit with college students.

“Reince Priebus is making that a big part of his initiative is to bring in younger people into the Republican party,” Karger said of the new head of the Republican National Committee. “And I’ve heard him say that — and I’ve talked to him about that — and I’m clearly the only Republican running who is actively trying to bring new and younger members into the party.”

Karger won a straw poll at a college campus recently in New Hampshire, beating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He attributed that to spending a week at a time in the Granite State repeatedly, meeting with voters. He said college students are typically more accepting of his sexuality and are able to get around it to talk about policy and other larger concerns.

Karger admits he’s taking a page out of Obama’s playbook by targeting youth voters, but believes Obama is “vulnerable” in 2012 despite a “bleak field” of GOP candidates emerging.

When students asked him about the size of government, Karger said some social programs will have to stay because some people just can’t take care of themselves. But he said the size of entitlements needs to be on the table.

Photo by Tyler Kingkade/The Iowa Independent

“I’m not making any finite recommendations but … I’m not running from it,” Karger later told The Iowa Independent. “Because of health care [improvements], people are living far longer than they were when Medicare was passed, when Social Security was passed.”

Along with him, Karger brought frisbees that read “Fred Who?” to pass out. He said the frisbees are intentional because it’s part of his initiative to get people healthy. “It may not be throwing frisbess,” he admitted, but he wants to encourage people to take small steps like walking up stairs, going for short runs and making an effort to live healthy. That’s part of why health care costs are so high, he claimed.

Karger said part of his campaign will be focused on listening to ideas from potential voters rather than simply throwing out his policy ideas right away. But he will focus on fiscal issues over social issues, such as gay rights or a woman’s right to choose.

“I want to bring back that entrepreneurial spirit and get people to stop relying on government,” Karger said.

He also declared he would not accept any matching dollars from the federal government for his campaign. He said there has been too much money being raised.

Raising nearly hundreds of millions of dollars just before entering the White House, as Obama did, makes health care reform packages and stimulus programs with price tags near $1 billion seem like no big deal, Karger asserted.

She told blogger Ruben Navarette, Jr., who writes at pajamasmedia.com, that demonizing Latinos is not the way to go if Republicans want to lead on the issue.

“My view is that the immigration discussion, the rhetoric the Republican Party uses, is not helpful; it’s not helpful in a state with the Latino population we have,” Whitman said during a brief interview following a speech at a George W. Bush Institute conference on the economy. “We as a party are going to have to make some changes, how we think about immigration, and how we talk about immigration.”

Refugees are one of the few non-citizen groups eligible to receive welfare, but current law states they can only receive Supplemental Security Income for seven years after they enter the U.S. The idea is that after this period of time they will have naturalized — a process that takes a minimum of five years — and can apply for government aid as U.S. citizens. But many are unable to pass citizenship tests, pay fees or overcome administrative hurdles in time to gain citizenship within the seven years. In response, President George W. Bush successfully pushed for a two-year eligibility extension in 2008.

The extension was a good start, refugee advocates say, but many refugees need more time to earn citizenship. And the benefits will be cut off for more refugees in coming months, with an estimated 11,000 refugees expected to lose SSI benefits within the next 13 months.

If passed, Gillibrand’s extension would give elderly and disabled refugees who were granted the 2008 extension one additional year to become citizens. But it would also mean continuing to aid refugees who fled persecution or torture in their native countries, many of whom could be unable to pay rent or buy food without SSI money.

Chris Harris of Media Matters has a good wrap-up of the apparent contradiction.

Here, for example, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) questioning Kagan’s experience this week:

She’s the least qualified in terms of judicial experience in 38 years. Now some would argue that maybe we need to have people who don’t have judicial experience. I saw a survey indicating that about 70 percent of the American people think that judicial experience is a good idea for somebody who is going to be on the Supreme Court.

And here’s McConnell in 2005 showering praise on Miers:

Ms. Miers has an exemplary record of service to our country. She will bring to the Court a lifetime of experience in various levels of government, and at the highest levels of the legal profession. She is a woman of tremendous ability and very sound judgment.

In similar fashion, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) saw no problem whatsoever with Miers’ resume in 2005. In fact, he viewed her lack of bench experience as an asset:

One reason I felt so strongly about Harriet Miers’s qualifications is I thought she would fill some very important gaps in the Supreme Court. Because right now you have people who’ve been federal judges, circuit judges most of their lives, or academicians. And what you see is a lack of grounding in reality and common sense that I think would be very beneficial.

Five years later, not so much:

Ms. Kagan is likewise a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience. Most Americans believe that prior judicial experience is a necessary credential for a Supreme Court Justice.

Waiting to see how they spin their way out of their own recorded statements.

“As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan is a member of the President’s administration,” McConnell said. “The President on Monday also said that they’re ‘friends.’ … ”

But in our constitutional order, justices are not on anyone’s team. They have a very different role to play. As a Supreme Court justice, Ms. Kagan’s job description would change dramatically. Far from being a member of the president’s team, she’d suddenly be serving as a check on it. This is why the Founders were insistent that judges be independent arbiters, not advocates.

Funny, though, that McConnell had no such concerns in 2005 when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers — Bush’s personal lawyer who worked on his campaigns and ultimately landed in the White House as senior confidant — for the Supreme Court. Indeed, McConnell threw his full weight behind the nomination.

“Ms. Miers has an exemplary record of service to our country,” McConnell said in a floor speech in April of 2005. “She will bring to the court a lifetime of experience in various levels of government and at the highest levels of the legal profession. She is a woman of tremendous ability and very sound judgment.”

How quickly they forget.

President Obama and Omar Khadr (WDCpix, The Toronto Star/ZUMApress.com)

Starting this week, something will happen that was never supposed to when Barack Obama took the oath of office. A military commission meeting at Guantanamo Bay nearly five months after Obama said the detention facility would cease to exist will hold a pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. At the end of the hearing, it will likely be possible to tell whether Obama’s changes to the military commissions created and advocated by George W. Bush — and most congressional Republicans — are substantive or cosmetic.

[Security1]Khadr, a teenager when initially detained, has been held for nearly half his life at a facility that the Obama administration has pledged to close. He will be tried in a legal venue that Obama rejected as a Senator and embraced, in reformed fashion, as president. What happens this week at Guantanamo will determine whether Obama’s pledge that the new, revised military commissions can deliver internationally-recognized justice is meaningful: the pre-trial hearing in Khadr’s case will provide the first in-depth examination of whether Khadr’s treatment in U.S. custody amounts to torture; will determine whether prosecutors can use evidence against him acquired under abusive, coercive circumstances that civilian courts would never allow; and whether additional statements made by Khadr in subsequent and less-coercive circumstances are fair game or inextricable from his overall abuse.

On November 7, 2008, three days after Obama won the presidency, Khadr’s military lawyers introduced a motion to suppress evidence commission prosecutors sought to produce that came from Khadr’s interrogations in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Under the commissions, evidence obtained under torture cannot be used, but the scope of the commissions’ allowance for coercively-obtained testimony remains largely unclear. Since their creation in 2002, the commissions have only produced three convictions, one of which was the result of a plea deal; the Supreme Court has twice ruled that the commissions provide insufficient due process rights for defendants.

Khadr’s attorneys charge that the teenaged detainee underwent over 40 interrogations in 2002 at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan after being shot and suffering shrapnel wounds in a battle with U.S. forces in July 2002 in the eastern Afghan province of Khost. During those interrogations, Khadr was given limited pain medication; had his head hooded while “interrogators brought barking dogs into the interrogation room”; was placed in stress positions despite his gunshot and shrapnel wounds; and was threatened with rape. After 90 days, U.S. military officials flew him to Guantanamo Bay, where he was again placed in stress positions; had his hair torn out; threatened again with rape; and was even used as “a human mop” by military police after he urinated on the floor of his interrogation room after being placed in stress positions for a prolonged period of time.

Information that emerged from those interrogation sessions — basically, what Khadr told his interrogators while being tortured — comprises a substantial portion of the prosecution’s case against him. It isn’t clear how much of the government’s case against Khadr relies on what he told his interrogators after his abusive treatment. The government will call witnesses who will attest to seeing Khadr throw the grenade that killed Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer. (At least one, Sgt. Layne Morris, has come forward in the press.) And the government will probably also seek to introduce statements Khadr made that it maintains were not the result of torture. But Khadr’s lawyers contended in their November 2008 motion that “all statements made by Mr. Khadr subsequent to any statement he made in response to coercive interrogation must also be suppressed as fruit of the poisoned tree,” a legal concept holding that the taint of improperly acquired evidence extends to any secondary evidence it produced.

It’s a crucial question for the military commissions. Every detainee who will be tried before the commissions encountered periods where they were harshly interrogated but then later faced less-coercive interviews, “so this is a real test case for the viability of other prosecutions,” said David Frakt, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve judge-advocate general corps who used to be defense counsel for Mohammed Jawad, another juvenile held at Guantanamo Bay. For instance, if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 conspirators who were initially held in undisclosed CIA prisons are brought back to military commissions, Khadr’s hearing may determine whether everything they have told their interrogators — even long after being abused — is inadmissible before the commissions. To Jennifer Turner, a human-rights researcher with the ACLU who will travel to Guantanamo Bay to observe the Khadr hearing, if the judge rules that Khadr’s statements to his interrogators can be used against him, “it will show the military commissions under Obama are no different than those under Bush.”

Indeed, it is because of Obama that the issue has remained unsettled. Upon taking office in January 2009, Obama issued executive orders banning enhanced interrogation; vowing to close Guantanamo Bay within a year; and suspending the military commissions while his administration decided how it would deal with the approximately 240 Guantanamo detainees it inherited from the Bush administration. That suspension, coupled with Senator Obama’s objections to the commissions on constitutional grounds, raised hopes among civil libertarians that the administration would ultimately scrap its predecessors’ ad hoc approach to terrorism prosecutions.

Instead, in a May 2009 speech, Obama pledged to reform the commissions, not abandon them. Among the reforms he promised was to “no longer permit the use of evidence — as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods.” By October, Congress passed and Obama signed the Military Commissions Act of 2009. Section 948(r) indeed enshrines the ban on statements made owing to those methods. But it gives judges leeway to enter into evidence “other statements of the accused… only if the military judge finds” that they are indeed voluntary.

And that’s where Khadr’s defense motion comes in. While there have been at least two other pre-trial procedural hearings since Obama opted to retain the commissions, none have had the significance of Khadr’s. There are ten days’ worth of hearings scheduled for the prosecution and the defense to tussle over the motion to suppress and what the Military Commissions Act of 2009 requires for it. The Washington Independent will be at Guantanamo Bay for the proceedings, and will provide frequent reports — in blog posts, stories, photo and video — about what they determine for the future of the military commissions in the age of Obama.

There are at least two additional complicating factors. First is that while the commissions have a new law authorizing them, the military has yet to issue a new manual for officers of the court to understand how the procedures under the 2009 law are to be implemented. “If you go to the website for the military commissions,” noted Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor for the commissions, “there is no information on who is heading up the military commissions, no information about a new Manual for Military Commissions that implements the changes Congress made in late 2009, and no information about revised Rules for Military Commissions.” As a result, Davis said, “it appears we’re still trying to lay the tracks after the train has left the station, which is no way to run a railroad or a criminal justice system.”

Maj. Tanya Bradsher, a spokeswoman for the commissions, said that “a revised Manual will be issued shortly,” but added that the manual was less important than the law. “The standards for the admissibility of statements are set out in the Military Commissions Act of 2009, and any procedural or evidentiary rules cannot change the standards set by Congress,” Bradsher said.

Frakt said it isn’t that simple. “The military commission rules of evidence have been substantially changed by the Military Commissions Act of 2009, particularly with regard to the standards to be applied to determining the admissibility of a statement,” he said. “The Manual will have significant additional guidance and discussion, because it’s the implementing regulations for this. It’s possible the judge will gather all the evidence and simply sit around and wait for the Manual to come out before issuing a ruling.” In terms of actually arguing the motion, though, “it’s still unclear what rules apply.”

A second complication is how much detail about Khadr’s treatment a judge will allow the outside world to see. There has never before been a two-week court session to examine, in large part, whether the treatment a detainee suffered in a U.S. facility amounts to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” the standard in the Military Commissions Act for inadmissibility. “This will be one of the first really in-depth looks into the treatment of detainees in the early days of the war on terror,” Frakt said. “There are going to be a lot of press and observers [at Guantanamo]. It’s going to be a nightmare for the government if they have to constantly close the hearing to talk about things that are embarrassing to the government.”

Davis, the former chief military commissions prosecutor, holds little sympathy for Khadr, whom the government says a videotape shows emplanting improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan. (The video does not implicate him in the death of Sgt. Speer.) But he said his problem was with the Obama’s claim that it needs to keep the options of both federal courts and military commissions to handle terrorism prosecutions, a claim that struck him as both politically motivated and unjust.

“It’s too bad that the Obama administration is back on its heels in a defensive crouch, afraid to go toe-to-toe with the Cheney right-wing fanatics, and continues to try to have it both ways with the option of military commissions and trials in federal courts still in play,” Davis said. “Hopefully, at some point they’ll grow a pair and make a choice, but this double standard where we’ll give a detainee as much justice as we can and still ensure we get a conviction shows how hypocritical we are when it comes to the rule of law. We talk the talk, but we don’t walk the walk.”

Correction: This piece initially stated that there were two plea deals in the military commissions since 2002; there was only one.