Walker was at the Sheraton Hotel in West Des Moines on Wednesday for a fundraising dinner benefiting the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank located in Washington, D.C.

“Think about it. Historically, who pays for the expanse of government?” Walker asked. “The poor don’t pay for it. The wealthy, if they’re smart, have different ways of putting money other places and doing things like that. Who disproportionately pays for the expansive growth of government? It’s the middle class.”

Walker gained national attention earlier this year when he pushed a bill stripping most collective bargaining rights for public workers and requiring them to pay more for health insurance, among other things. Public safety officers — police and firefighters — were exempted from the new rules.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators came from around the country to protest the measure, which Walker thinks actually helped bring jobs to the state. He noted a business magazine that said the national focus on Wisconsin drew employers in.

“They said not only unlike other states around the country, but unlike Greece, Portugal and Spain and other places around the world, they saw a state that actually got its act together, that made long term decisions to put things in the right place,” Walker said.

The protests were ultimately not about protecting state workers, or even about state workers paying more for health care or pensions, Walker said.

“This was ultimately about big government union bosses who didn’t want us touching their money,” he said. “Not the peoples’ money, not the workers’ money. But the biggest thing they got upset about was the simple fact as part of these reforms I said no public employee in my state has to be forced to be part of a union.”

About 100 people gathered outside the hotel to express their displeasure with Walker, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad and what they see as a nationwide attack on workers’ rights. Branstad said on Wednesday he and Walker aren’t anti-worker.

Walker made light of the demonstrators, saying “it’s not uncommon for me to have protestors from another sate. I had a lot of them earlier this Spring.”

“I also got a kick out of the fact that just to make me feel at home not only did I get to share some of the stories but you brought some of my fan club outside the hotel on the way in here tonight,” he said.

Walker said he understands a lot of people are frustrated right now and their voices should be heard. But he also noted he didn’t let the thousands of protesters in Wisconsin shift his focus.

A recall effort is now underway for Walker and some state lawmakers in Wisconsin, But Walker said he isn’t “looking at it as a drag or discouragement.”

“I look at it as a unique opportunity to go again go to the voters, the people of the state of Wisconsin and tell them the story of how our reforms are working,” he said.

Immigrant men and youth have suffered the highest unemployment, largely due to shrinking of male-dominated industries such as construction. Women fared substantially better, according to the report.

Seeing fewer economic opportunities in developed countries, many would-be immigrants are staying put. This applies to legal as well as illegal immigration, according to the report:

Inflows to the United States fell in almost all temporary work visa categories, including a 23 percent drop in intracompany transfers and a 50 percent decline in visas issued to low-skilled seasonal workers. But, other legal flows have also been affected. Even family immigrants who have waited several years to receive a green card granting legal permanent residence in the United States seem to have become less willing to take up their visa when they reach the front of the line. In some countries, such as Ireland and the United States, foreign-born populations have actually fallen.

In some cases, such as for illegal immigration, the lower immigration numbers could be considered a silver lining to the recession. Still, this information points to an important side note when discussing how to decrease illegal immigration: While increased border security measures and enforcement can account for some of the drop in illegal immigration, the economy is also a major factor.

As for legal immigrants, the recession has shown they need more aid to avoid passing poverty to the next generations, the BBC World Service/Migration Policy Institute report argued:

Perhaps more critically, the recession has exposed an underlying weakness in the longstanding assumption that, as in the past, a dynamic labor market alone would effectively integrate the latest wave of immigrants to the United States. A growing body of research points to the importance of the social safety net in limiting the intergenerational transmission of poverty among the less educated.

One answer, according to the nonpartisan report, would be comprehensive immigration reform. If done properly, reform could aid with some of these problems by creating long-term solutions to limit illegal immigration and integrate legal immigrants into the United States.

So despite calls by experts like Simon Johnson for more regulation of trades and even for the blacklisting of Goldman Sachs in Europe or in sovereign debt markets generally, European countries have a disincentive to do more than point fingers and talk about how it’s all Goldman’s fault. They’ve all been dancing with the debt-masking devil, be it at Goldman or elsewhere. If they kick Goldman off the floor, it’ll be easy enough to find a new partner, and if they make the dance illegal, it’s their public balance sheets that will suffer — and their politicians’ butts on the line. It’s not just Goldman whose hands will end up tied: EU member countries will end up tying their own hands as well, and everyone knows politicians hate to be left with nothing but transparency and honesty.

Providing the Prime Minister and the Government of Spain with information, analysis, studies or proposals that allow for the prevention and avoidance of any danger, threat or aggression against the independence or territorial integrity of Spain, its national interests and the stability of its institutions and the rule of law.

Der Spiegel reports that, as part of that mission, the agency is now investigating whether what it terms the “Anglo-Saxon media” (or English-language press) is conspiring to undermine the Spanish economy as part of its reporting on the potential downstream results of a Greek default. Although Spain isn’t facing the same debt crisis as Greece, it does have 19 percent unemployment, an over-reliance on construction for GDP growth and, reportedly, a mass of government debts not unlike Greece.

Citing unnamed sources, El Pais said the National Intelligence Center (CNI) was investigating “whether investors’ attacks and the aggressiveness of some Anglo-Saxon media are driven by market forces and challenges facing the Spanish economy, or whether there is something more behind this campaign.”

The Financial Times and The Economist are considered particularly critical of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s economic policies, and last week, Infrastructure Minister Jose Blanco all but specifically accused those publications of fomenting concern about Spain’s financial stability to allow others to profit. But last year, when John McCain called Zapatero someone who would “want to harm the United States,” no such investigations were started. Perhaps rather than investigating McCain, the Spanish decided to learn a lesson from his running mate and accuse the media of causing all their problems.

York sums up the Walpin case in his article; the gist is that Walpin, a Bush appointee, was fired after recommending action against the Democratic mayor of Sacramento. AmericaCorps claims Walpin was failing to perform his job; Grassley has demanded proof that the firing wasn’t political. And so as he performs a pivotal role in health care negotiations, Grassley is shooting overhead at the administration.

Spain’s top investigative magistrate has opened an investigation into the Bush administration over alleged torture of terror suspects at the Guantanamo prison.

Baltasar Garzon’s move on Wednesday is separate from a complaint by human rights lawyers that seeks charges against six specific Bush administration officials.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Update: Also from the AP:

Meeting with reporters in Germany, [Attorney General Eric] Holder also signaled the Obama administration might cooperate with a Spanish investigation of former Bush administration officials over the treatment of terror suspects. [...]

Speaking before it had been announced that a Spanish magistrate had opened an investigation of Bush officials on harsh interrogation methods, Holder didn’t rule out cooperating in such a probe.

“Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it,” Holder said.

“This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law and to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it,” he said.

“If there is a reason to file a complaint against these people, it should be done before local courts with jurisdiction, in other words in the United States,” Conde-Pumpio said in a breakfast meeting with journalists, according to The Associated Press.

Spain could have exercised what’s known as “universal jurisdiction” over the case, but the government was apparently reluctant to do that and risk tensions with the United States.

The possibility of charges, which we’ve reported here, began when human rights lawyers asked Judge Baltasar Garzon, famous for indicting ex-Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet in 1998, to consider the case. Following Spanish law, the judge then asked prosecutors to recommend whether to pursue the case.

While the case may not move forward in Spain, back in the United States, the memos drafted by some of the same lawyers under scrutiny by Judge Garzon are expected to be released today in a pending court case. The memos reportedly provide the legal justification for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation techniques that included the CIA’s torture of detainees in secret prisons as part of the “war on terror”. The memos could be used as evidence in any future prosecution of former Bush officials initiated in the United States.

Charlotte Dennett, a journalist and former candidate for Vermont attorney general, writes in Consortiumnews.com that in a meeting with Leahy on Monday, the senator admitted that his idea for a “Commission of Inquiry” is going nowhere fast.

“We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor,” writes Dennett. “Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, ‘it’s not going to happen.’”

Officially, Leahy’s staff is saying that he’s still working on getting support for the commission, which is why he hasn’t proposed legislation yet. But this report suggest otherwise.

It also suggests that Leahy couldn’t get Sen.John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War — and supposed champion for human rights — to go along with the commission idea.

So if the truth commission idea is dead, what does that say about the likelihood of prosecution of former Bush officials? As I wrote earlier, when the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Leahy’s proposed commission, Republicans such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), while decrying the idea of such a broad-ranging commission, were making the strongest case for criminal prosecution we’d seen yet.

While advocates for a truth commission may be disappointed to learn the proposal isn’t moving forward, this may mean there’s now more of a chance that senior Bush policymakers who authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping and other illegal conduct will be held accountable in a court of law. Particularly as other U.S. allies — the United Kingdom and Spain, in particular — have recently announced their own investigations related to U.S.-sponsored torture and abuse of “war on terror” detainees.

In the meantime, as I’ve written before, Leahy and the Senate Judiciary Committee could still initiate a comprehensive inquiry into the role of the Justice Department in potentially illegal conduct under the Bush administration, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and the Senate Intelligence Committee have done for the CIA.

There’s no need for a truth commission to get the investigative ball rolling.

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TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

A copy of the 98-page Spanish complaint that was referred to him, translated by Google (via The Raw Story,) is available here.

This is the second report of a U.S. ally’s judicial system bravely going where the U.S. Justice Department has refused to go.

As I reported last week, a U.K. attorney general, confronted with reports that British intelligence agents colluded with U.S. authorities in the torture of Ethiopian-born former Gitmo detainee Binyam Mohamed, announced she would refer the matter to British police to investigate. Allegations regarding British intelligence collusion in the torture of another British resident held at Gitmo are expected to reach the British High Court this week.

In the United States, meanwhile, prosecutors and former Bush officials have consistently maintained that the same memos that Spain is now investigating as possible violations of international law actually shield former U.S. officials from prosecution here.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have yet to come out clearly one way or another on the matter. And while some Democratic lawmakers have supported a “truth commission,” such as one sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), Republicans such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), while slamming that idea in Congress, inadvertently made the strongest case yet for prosecuting former Bush administration lawyers and policymakers. Although the Judiciary Committee has not convened its own investigation of the Justice Department’s possible lawbreaking during the last administration, a review prepared by Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility that will reportedly criticize former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee is expected to be released soon.

Even as Obama and Holder say they want to look forward rather than backward when it comes to the treatment of detainees and anti-terror policy, the growing number of foreign prosecutions and domestic reports producing evidence of criminal conduct may eventually force their hand.

The conservative newspaper ABC, no close friend of Obama, opens its coverage with this admonition (and bear with my less-than-eloquent translation):

The cool relations between the governments of the United States and Spain might continue if the Republican candidate John McCain wins the White House this November 4th, after he yesterday three times avoided answering whether he would receive José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Washington once elected.

Other papers, including El Periódico, expressed disbelief at McCain’s apparent ignorance of the fact that Spain is not, in fact, in Latin America.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, be sure to give this a listen. It’s from an English-language interview with the Spanish-language Radio Caracol WSUA 1260AM in Miami. The interview was conducted on Tuesday, but the news didn’t hit the blogs until late last night and this morning. It’s one of the more astounding slip-ups of the campaign:

And a side note: The Spanish press coverage of the American presidential campaign is surprisingly vast and detailed. Just this morning, La Vanguardia’s website had nine pieces on the campaign, and it’s introduced terms like “hockey mom” to the Spanish public, for better or worse.