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On this Sunday's Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor if he was shifting his stance on immigration and the Dream Act after he said this at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

In a wide-ranging speech at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, Cantor said that when it comes to immigration reform, "A good place to start is with the kids."

"One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents," he said. " It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home."

When David Gregory tried to pin him down about whether he would actually be supportive of the Dream Act which would create a path to citizenship for these children, Cantor refused to answer him and claimed he didn't know what the Dream Act was. And despite the fact that Gregory pressed him for a yes or no answer specifically on the path to citizenship, Gregory eventually allowed Cantor to get away with punting on the question and moved on to the next topic.

CANTOR: David, it's been over ten years now where this problem has not been dealt with and we've been unable to find any common ground and what I said this week at the American Enterprise Institute was that I thought the best way to start was with children. […]

GREGORY: So you would support the Dream Act?

CANTOR: I have put out a proposal. I don't know what the Dream Act at this point is. What I say is we've got a place, I think all of us can come together and that is for the kids. Now...

GREGORY: Can you bring conservatives along to supporting a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are here without having to first leave the country?

CANTOR: There is a lot of movement right now in the House and the Senate and both sides of the aisle, with both having a lot of different ideas. I think...

GREGORY: But yes or no to that question, because you could really do it if you went all in, you could bring along the right in the House, couldn't you?

CANTOR: I think that a good place to start is with children and listen, we've got some... look, here's the difficulty in this issue I think, and it is because we've got families that are here that become part of the fabric of our country, right? And we want to make sure that we're compassionate and sensitive to their plight, I mean, these kids know no other place as home. On the other hand, we are a country of laws. You know, we have a situation with the border security that we've got to get straight. We have to secure our borders and there is this balance that needs to take place. But the best place to begin I think is with the children. Let's go ahead and get that under our belt, put a win on the board and so we can promise a better life for those kids who are here due to no fault of their own.

Sounds like a lot of weasel words to me. As Think Progress noted, Rep. Raul Labrador has proposed legislation that would create a permanent underclass of undocumented immigrants. Who want to take dibs that his legislation is what we'll see Cantor and his fellow House members end up supporting? I don't think we'll ever see Republicans support a path to citizenship, because allowing these immigrants to become citizens means allowing them to vote and we all know they don't want that. Right now their so-called "rebranding" effort just looks like smearing a whole lot of lipstick on the same old pig.

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As Karoli explained to us here, billionaire Joe Ricketts' first attempt at smearing President Obama didn't go over so well once his plans where leaked to the press. Lawrence O'Donnell took him apart in his Rewrite segment this Thursday evening for his latest endeavor, where he's teaming up with wingnut Dinesh D’Souza and investing in a new "documentary" based on D'Souza's book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

As O'Donnell reported, Joe Ricketts' son, who is a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, has tried to distance himself from his father's hatred of President Obama, but that apparently has not been enough to stop him from investing in this latest smear campaign.

O'DONNELL: Having been forced to give up on that project, Ricketts is now funding a movie that will insist on the basis of absolutely no evidence and in fact with actual proof to the contrary, that President Obama's mind is completely controlled, from the grave by his father, Barack Obama Sr., who President Obama met once, when he was ten years old. […]

The movie Ricketts is financing is based on a rage filled book entitled The Roots of Obama's Rage. All of the rage in the book belongs to its author, Dinesh D'Souza. The Economist called the book, “incomprehensible.” Even the conservative Weekly Standard said correctly that the book is full of “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” And that's from D'Souza's friends at The Weekly Standard.

This is the book in a nutshell. D'Souza writes that Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade. That would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50 percent of their income of overall taxes to pay even more. That's it. That's the book. But it does not explain why President Obama wants them to pay lower tax rates than they did under presidents Reagan, Nixon and Eisenhower, all Republicans.

We don't know the exact day on which Dinesh D'Souza lost his mind. Nor do we know if he's just pretending to be stark raving mad to collect the money of his clearly crazy patron, TD Ameritrade billionaire, Joe Ricketts.

O'Donnell also knocked D'Souza for his so-called “scholarship” as president of The King's College and called D'Souza “the Donald Trump of college presidents.” It seems D'Souza is as much of a “scholar” as anyone teaching at another institution that puts a right-wing agenda before facts, which is the better known Liberty University.

More on Ricketts' latest efforts from The New York Times here below the fold: Billionaire Finds New Role in Effort to Defeat Obama:

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CNN held their "national security" debate this Tuesday night and I have to say this one was even more bizarre to watch than the last one they had that was co-hosted by the AstroTurf "tea party", not so much because of anything the candidates said since that was a lot of the same we've been hearing during the last umpteen or however many debates they already had. No, this one was bizarre because of who was asking the questions.

The debate was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and their fellow conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation and rather than moderator Wolf Blitzer asking all of the questions, we got treated to a host of neoconservatives questioning the candidates.

Among them were Iraq surge architect, Frederick Kagan, PNAC member and Bush era war propagandist Danielle Pletka, Mr. 'Iraq can pay for its own reconstruction' and fellow chickenhawk Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney's Cheney and torture advocate David Addington, and they wrapped things up by taking a question from his fellow torture apologist and former Bush speechwriter, Marc Thiessen.

CNN would have had a hard time coming up with a much more discredited lineup of war mongering, torture apologists to ask these candidates questions, but I guess they could have asked the Cheney's, John Yoo, John Bolton and Bill Kristol to round things out. Nothing like them giving air time to try to rehabilitate these Bush era neocons.

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I guess former Vice President Dick Cheney wasn't satisfied with only running in front of the cameras on every single network in town to try to hawk his new book and let everyone know how proud he is of being a war criminal. No, he decided to spend over an hour at the American Enterprise Institute this week as well for an interview with his former stenographer biographer, Stephen Hayes.

Dick Cheney defends use of torture on al-Qaida leaders:

Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president, has claimed Osama bin Laden would not have been tracked down and killed if it had not been for information gathered by torturing captured al-Qaida leaders.

In a robust defence of what he called "enhanced interrogation", Cheney said it produced "phenomenal" results and dismissed the Obama administration's investigations of its legality as "objectionable" and a "terrible precedent".

Speaking ahead of ceremonies to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the former vice-president rejected accusations that the use of torture undermined the moral authority of the US overseas.

"The notion that somehow the United States was wildly torturing anybody is not true," he said. "One of the most controversial techniques is waterboarding ... Three people were waterboarded. Not dozens, not hundreds. Three. And the one who was subjected the most often to that was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and it produced phenomenal results for us."

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed is awaiting trial before a US tribunal accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

But while Cheney, who was appearing at a question and answer session at the conservative American Enterprise Institute to promote his new memoir, In My Time, insisted only a small number of men were subjected to "enhanced interrogation", he made no mention of the rendition programme in which the US abducted individuals and handed them over to a third country for questioning under torture.

Cheney said that waterboarding Khaled Sheikh Mohammed "helped produce the intelligence that allowed us to get Osama bin Laden".

As they noted, Hayes allowed Cheney to give Bush credit for the intelligence that might have led to killing Osama bin Laden, even thought his administration wasn't all that concerned about him as has been noted over and over for years now -- Flashback: Seven years ago today, Bush received ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’ memo.:

Today marks seven years since the day President Bush received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” (See the memo here.) At the time, Bush was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, TX and stayed on vacation the rest of August 2001. Here’s how the administration reacted, according to the 9/11 Commission report...

Cheney was also apparently very proud of our country's use of torture as Think Progress noted here -- Cheney Claims Waterboarding ‘Produced Phenomenal Results’:

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Apparently subjecting all of us to her father in their ginned up "dueling debates" coverage nonsense on MSNBC wasn't enough for them. They just had to bring in Darth Junior to give us another dose of fear mongering and attacks on the President's speech.

Some of the crew at MSNBC reacting to Dick Cheney's fear mongering speech at AEI. Apparently we're going to have round two of this on Hardball tonight.