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.”

SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser went on CNN’s In the Arena on Thursday and said there was “vagueness” when it comes to the abortion-rights positions of Huntsman, as well as Mitt Romney and Herman Cain, who both also refused to sign SBA’s pledge.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Dannenfelser said in response to the host’s insistence that all three candidates had stated their commitment to “pro-life” agendas.

Despite his refusal to sign pledges in general, Huntsman was the first presidential hopeful to respond to a presidential “Family 2012″ challenge from the South Carolina Focus on the Family affiliate Palmetto Family Council, saying in a letter that he would make restricting abortion rights a prominent part of his campaign.

GOP presidential hopefuls Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) have attached their names to a promise to nominate federal judges that do not “legislate from the bench” as the SBA List puts it; to appoint only “pro-life” cabinet members, particularly those who would head the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health & Human Services; to advance “pro-life” legislation and defund Planned Parenthood; and to sign into federal law the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”

Asked if the pledge “marginalizes this as a wedge issue when so many people are focused on jobs and the economy,” Dannenfelser responded:

[W]hat this does is to put to rest to the extent that it needs to be where each of the Republican candidates, and any candidate, where they sit in terms of the pro-life position. Once we know — and the voters deserve to know what their position is — then it can be weaved into the context of all the other issues that America is talking about right now. When it is a problem is when there is vagueness.

During the brief interview, Dannenfelser also explained the SBA List’s legislative strategy behind the wording of the pledge, specifically in the insistence that candidates commit to appointing people with anti-abortion rights views to specific cabinet positions:

What anybody who is a pro-life president will do is advance pro-life legislation. Once that legislation is passed and signed into law, an attorney general, who is a team member’s job will be to defend that once it has been enjoined, which almost all of it will surely be enjoined by pro-choice activists and it is an attorney general’s job also to vet judges. And abortion comes as a central subject of conversation in almost every federal judge and Supreme Court judge nomination process, so an attorney general is vital in pursuing the pro-life agenda.

Watch the interview:

Last week FRC President Tony Perkins (representing lobbying arm FRC Action, of which he is also the president) and public policy group Let Freedom Ring President Colin Hanna co-hosted a webcast on the U.S. debt crisis. Invited to participate were Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), along with other conservative policy leaders.

“Congress has been using the country’s credit cards like an irresponsible teenager for decades,” read a press release previewing the June 23 Web conference. “But now a band of House and Senate conservatives are fighting to turn back the clock on America’s debt.”

During the 65-minute webcast, DeMint drew the morality analogy even closer.

“We’ve got to stop this spending addiction in Washington,” DeMint said. “And it really is like working with an alcoholic. First of all, they won’t admit they have a problem. And then when they do, they say, ‘We’ll quit tomorrow, but let’s have one more drink today.’”

To which Perkins, a former police officer for the Baton Rouge Police Department in Louisiana (from which he was suspended and then resigned in 1992, according to The Nation), responded, “When I was a police officer, I found one thing that really worked on those drunks that came home at night was a frying pan.”

But 20 days earlier, Perkins sent supporters an e-mail alert, asking for help closing its $1 million budget gap by June 30. He excused the organization’s financial struggle for all the work it has done during recent legislative sessions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Family Research Council Action’s (FRC’s lobbying arm) total lobbying expenditures in 2010 was $110,000; according to the Federal Election Commission, FRC Action Political Action Committee has spent $43,143 in individual contributions for the 2011-’12 election cycle through May 31.

In his alert Perkins wrote:

Ever since last November’s watershed election, which swept a record number of pro-family conservatives into office, FRC has more friends in Congress than ever before. And the more friends we have on Capitol Hill, the greater our ability to advance your pro-family views. This demand for our expertise is a blessing, but it has outstretched our revenue. As we enter the summer months when giving historically declines, FRC faces a $1 million gap between what we’ve budgeted for our work here in Washington, DC and what we’ve received in donations. I have already made cuts to reduce our costs, and our staff is working tirelessly.

Unless supporters donate, Perkins said, FRC “will be forced to do less for the conservative cause.” Every donation up to $250,000 will be matched by a “generous family,” Perkins said. The family was not named.

FRC did not immediately return requests for comment.

The priorities mentioned during last week’s webcast: Cut the deficit, cap the spending and balance the budget. A coalition of more than 80 organizations recently formed acampaign to convince U.S. Senate and House members and future candidates to pledge to oppose any debt limit increase unless the budget has been cut, capped and balanced. Thus far, the pledge has been signed by 12 senators, 20 representatives and 28 candidates.

Throughout the hour, the United States’ fiscal situation was repeatedly compared to Greece’s, but Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) took the analogy further to draw comparisons to slavery.

“Turn your TV on, and look at what’s been happening in Greece,” Walsh said. “We are at the cusp of that. This is a huge moral issue. How dare we enslave future generations? How dare we do that?”

And later on: “I could give a darn about my reelection. I’m on a mission here to stop my kids, your kids, our grand-kids from becoming indentured servants.”

During the web conference, there was no mention of FRC’s own fiscal situation. And in the June 3 e-mail, in which Perkins was soliciting donations, nothing was mentioned of America’s fiscal situation.

“This is no time to be trimming our sails,” wrote Perkins in the alert. “We have more pro-family conservatives in Congress than ever before. Daily, they look to FRC for the facts they need to stand up for families. I have fresh hope that if we keep working and keep praying, we can change the course of this nation.”

The “key areas” FRC is working on include “shaping historic court cases regarding ObamaCare and religious liberty” and “building a powerful network of informed and motivated pastors across the nation.” But “liberals are fighting back-hard,” Perkins said.

If they sense any weakness, they’ll move in and take back the gains we’ve made. And they’ll thwart our efforts at every turn, pushing their pet causes from taxpayer funding of abortion to normalization of homosexuality to intimidating and punishing Christians who voice their objections. Frankly, some donors are on the sidelines because Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet the Obama administration simply bypasses the legislative branch and abuses executive power to reshape major policies affecting every family and business.

On Monday, three of the four Senate Democrats who helped defeat same-sex marriage legislation in 2009 jumped sides due to pro-gay-marriage sentiment among their constituents, reports The New York Times.

The three senators — Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr. and Shirley L. Huntley of Queens and Carl Kruger of Brooklyn — joined Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo during a press conference Monday, where Addabbo reportedly said that two years ago, 73 percent of the constituents who contacted his office opposed gay marriage, while this year about 80 percent asked him to vote in favor of the same-sex bill.

The measure became bipartisan Monday after Republican Sen. James Alesi, who also voted against same-same marriage in 2009, threw his public support toward the same-sex bill.

The New York Daily News reports that the bill is currently two votes short of passage, with at least four Republicans saying they are undecided. According to the daily, Senate Republicans are expected to hold a closed-door meeting concerning the gay-marriage measure and might bring it to the floor for an up-and-down vote this week.

As Forbes recently reported, the fate of gay marriage in New York essentially rests in the Senate’s hands; thus same-sex marriage opponents have come out in full force this week to sway undecided senators.

On Tuesday, New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan wrote a blogpost titled “The True Meaning of Marriage,” wherein he accuses senators of caving in to political pressure where they once were “courageous in their refusal to capitulate on the state’s presumption to redefine marriage.”

An excerpt from Dolan’s blog;

Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.

But, please, not here! Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence.

[...]

Yes, I admit, I come at this as a believer, who, along with other citizens of a diversity of creeds believe that God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.

Also Tuesday, the group New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms released an open letter to New York Senate Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos, telling him, “Quite frankly, how the GOP responds to this issue will demonstrate whether or not they deserve the right to lead in the future.”

According to the Advocate, the National Organization for Marriage has pledged to spend $1 million to defeat lawmakers who vote for the bill and has come out in support Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr. (D-Bronx) for opposing it.

Forbes reports that each side of the New York same-sex-marriage campaign funded more than $1 million from national and state advocates, both sides promising campaign cash for lawmakers who side with them.

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.

Iran may agree to send only a bit of its LEU stockpile out at a time, maintaining the bulk of it on Iranian soil (where in theory it could be further enriched to weapons grade). French officials have made clear in the past few days that they will only sign on to the deal if it involves all 1200 kg LEU suggested at Geneva.

Talks may go on until Wednesday.

This is a breakthrough for Mohamed, because while he claims that he was tortured while detained in Pakistan and interrogated by U.S. and British agents, he’s never been able to obtain evidence from the U.K. government that he says will prove his allegations. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary had urged the British court not to make Mohamed’s specific torture claims public, citing a risk to relations between the United Kingdom and the United States, suggesting that the U.S. had urged him to keep the charges hidden.

Friday’s ruling, reported by JURIST over the weekend, reversed the previous decisions to redact Mohamed’s allegations, saying that “the public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming” and “the risk to national security judged objectively on the evidence is not a serious one.”  The court’s earlier opinion therefore will be re-issued with the paragraphs restored.

More details on the court’s decision can be found at JURIST, and more on the strange and difficult case of Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo and returned to the United Kingdom last February, can be found here and here.

The U.S. government tried to convince Mohamed to sign an agreement upon his release promising not to discuss his treatment by U.S. authorities. He refused.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (AP Photo)

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki opened the door for the first time Thursday to the prospect of a U.S. military presence in Iraq after the December 2011 deadline for troop withdrawal set by last year’s bilateral accord — something President Obama appeared to rule out during a joint appearance on Tuesday.

Speaking to an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki said the accord, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, would “end” the American military presence in his country in 2011, but “nevertheless, if Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this at that time based on the needs of Iraq,” he said through translation in response to a question from The Washington Independent. “I am sure that the will, the prospects and the desire for such cooperation is found among both parties.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Maliki continued, “The nature of that relationship — the functions and the amount of [U.S.] forces — will then be discussed and reexamined based on the needs” of Iraq.

The Iraqi prime minister’s allowance for a post-2011 U.S. troop presence comes despite his increasingly nationalist tone to a domestic audience in advance of parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for January. He resisted the advice of Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep a U.S. combat presence in volatile areas like Mosul after June 30, the date set by the Status of Forces Agreement for their evacuation from Iraqi cities and towns. Instead, when they departed, Maliki declared a national holiday. He called the withdrawal a “great victory” for Iraq, language reminiscent of his oft-stated declarations of victory over Iraq’s various insurgent groups. In his remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Maliki moderated that remark, saying the U.S. “withdrawal from the cities is a victory, not a failure for either the Iraqis or the Americans.”

In a joint appearance with Maliki at the White House on Tuesday, President Obama gave no indication that he envisioned a place for U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011, instead pledging to “fulfill our commitment to remove all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”  Using language that signaled an end to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, Obama said the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities was an “unmistakable signal” that his administration will “keep our commitments with the sovereign Iraqi government.” There are currently about 130,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Senior administration officials have denied any intent to keep U.S. forces in Iraq past that period as well. “It would require a new agreement, a new negotiation — almost certainly an Iraqi initiative — to provide for some presence beyond the end of 2011,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in February after Obama announced a schedule for staggered U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement. “So in the absence of that agreement, in the absence of any negotiation for such an agreement, it is in keeping with the SOFA that, to say definitively, that we will be out at the end of 2011.”

But some former officials and analysts close to the administration have envisioned small non-combat residual U.S. forces remaining in Iraq past the 2011 deadline to advise Iraqi security forces, echoing the notes Maliki struck on Wednesday. Doug Ollivant, who left the National Security Council as an Iraq director last month, told TWI that the U.S. military will retain ties with its Iraqi counterparts after combat forces depart similar to the “ties we have to many other countries in the region,” which are often for officer training, coordination and advice. (While some countries in the region, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, host U.S. military bases, Obama reiterated Wednesday that “we seek no bases in Iraq.”)

And in a paper for the Center for a New American Security, a think tank with close ties to the Obama Pentagon and State Department, John Nagl, the think tank’s president, wrote last month that developing Iraqi security capacity for air and naval operations “always required some level of American support beyond the SOFA deadline, but now the United States may need to provide continued air and naval protection for an extended period beyond 2011″ owing to the global economic crisis. Both Ollivant and Nagl have longstanding relationships with Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.

While antipathy for the U.S. military presence remains a popular Iraqi sentiment — the streets of Baghdad resembled a “carnival” when U.S. troops withdrew, according to reporters on the ground — some Iraqi legislators and security officials have questioned whether the Status of Forces Agreement provides a sufficient amount of time for Iraqi forces to take control of the still-violent country. Qassim Daoud, a Shiite parliamentarian and former national security adviser to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has said the accord should be renegotiated to allow U.S. troops to stay until 2020 or 2025. Last year, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, suggested in a press conference that the less-mature elements of the Iraqi security forces, like the Air Force, might require American assistance after 2011.

Most of Maliki’s remarks to the U.S. Institute of Peace described a post-2011 U.S.-Iraqi relationship in non-military terms. In keeping with a companion according known as the Strategic Framework Agreement, which spells out terms for a U.S.-Iraqi alliance after 2011, Maliki said he sought a relationship on “all levels — political, economic, educational, cultural.” He extended his thanks to “the international community and all the countries that have cooperated and helped Iraq,” saying Iraq would enjoy a “solid relationship with a great and strong country like the United States.”

A Gallup poll released last week found that 58 percent of Americans consider the U.S. invasion of Iraq to be a mistake.

Prime Minister Maliki  answered Spencer Ackerman’s question at a press meeting held Thursday, not Wednesday as we originally reported. We regret the error.

The agreement was concluded by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns. From an official release:

This agreement will enable the United States to further diversify the crucial transportation routes and decrease the amount of time needed to move troops and critical equipment to resupply international forces in Afghanistan and to bring needed supplies to the government and people of Afghanistan. This will permit 4,500 flights per year. The new transit routes will save the United States government up to $133 million annually in fuel, maintenance and other transportation costs, and this agreement is free of any air navigation charges. By providing access to these transit routes, the Russian Federation is enabling a substantial increase in the efficiency of our common effort to defeat the forces of violent extremism in Afghanistan and to ensure Afghanistan’s and the broader region’s security.

Via Abu Aardvark, WorldPublicOpinion.org commissioned a poll on international attitudes toward U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf and found remarkable levels of global opposition. Energy-sucking Hong Kong is 59 percent against it. Taiwan, of all places, is 45 percent against it. The frigging Ukraine, which sometimes acts as if it wants to be the 51st state, is 56 percent against it. From their press release:

Majorities opposing US naval bases in the Gulf are highest in the Middle East: Egypt (91%) the Palestinian Territories (90%), Turkey (77%), Jordan (76%) and Azerbaijan (66%). The only countries where majorities say US naval bases in the Gulf are a good idea are the United States (70%), Nigeria (60%—including 54% of Nigerian Muslims), and Kenya (53%).

Interestingly, the question wasn’t polled in any Persian Gulf country besides Iran. So I asked the poll’s research director, Clay Ramsay, why that was, and he explained that his firm seeks partner polling-firms in each country that it would like to pose questions in, and for the current round of questioning — which are not given to the poll firms ahead of time — it wasn’t able to partner with polling firms in any Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

What about Iran? You may notice, if you click through the links, that you don’t actually get an Iranian breakdown on the question. That’s because the question wasn’t really asked the same way in Iran. Ramsay emailed me an April 2008 survey his partners conducted — it’s a PDF, viewable here — that shows 65 percent of Iranians wanting the U.S. out of the Persian Gulf. Not exactly the same thing but fairly similar. And unsurprising.

Still, this is pretty surprising overall. The U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf isn’t welcome to most people. Well, who’s stepping up to take over protection of the shipping lanes, hmm? Who wants to be globocop?