Today, the anti-immigrant group, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), re-posted an article that was featured in yesterday’s Examiner in which “reporter” Jim Kouri warned against the infinite dangers of “illegal alien voter fraud,” suggesting that the phenomenon might have played a role in the election of Minnesota’s new senator, Al Franken:

“Just last month, in an extremely close race in Minnesota between incumbent Senator Norm Coleman and comedian Al Franken, Franken was finally declared a winner months after the actual election. While the recount battle raged, no one within the government or within the news media gave a thought to investigating whether or not illegal aliens or legal immigrants voted in the Minnesota for that contested senate seat.”

Kouri also suggests that “illegal aliens” may have cost Al Gore the state of Florida during the 2000 presidential race. He goes as far to include a nasty quote from New Jersey GOP strategist Janice Martin who seems to pose her own conspiracy theory:

“Americans would be shocked to discover that hundreds of thousands of general election voters are illegal aliens, green-card immigrants, and criminals who’ve murdered, raped and robbed US citizens. And guess which political party benefits the most from their votes? The one that’s pushing for amnesty and a bag full of free goodies.“

Kouri relies on a 2008 Heritage Report which uses anecdotal “research” and self-contradicting arguments to fan the flames of paranoia and convince right-wingers that they’ve acquired more dirt on the immigrant population. The report repeatedly contradicts itself, first claiming that “thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide,” and then later admitting “there is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting.”

If a reliable method did exist, chances are it would make Kouri and the Heritage Foundation blush. NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice goes as far to claim that one is more likely to be struck by lightening than to come across a case of case of widespread voter fraud. The Brennan Center explains that many accusations of voter fraud, such as those put forth by Kouri and the Heritage Foundation, are actually due to database errors. The report ultimately states:

“Many of the claims of voter fraud amount to a great deal of smoke without much fire…These claims of voter fraud are frequently used to justify policies that do not solve the alleged wrongs, but that could well disenfranchise legitimate voters. Overly restrictive identification requirements for voters at the polls — which address a sort of voter fraud more rare than death by lightning — is only the most prominent example.”

Earlier today, President Obama delivered a speech to Moscow’s New Economic School, in which he outlined his vision for the future U.S.-Russia relationship.

While there was much in the speech that was notable, I think this was a key passage:

Like President Medvedev and myself, you’re not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the Cold War, when hydrogen bombs were tested in the atmosphere, and children drilled in fallout shelters, and we reached the brink of nuclear catastrophe. But you are the last generation born when the world was divided. At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose.

And then, within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Now, make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.

I think this is evidence not only of a generational shift in the perception of the Cold War, but also of a clear ideological shift in regard to the way that the Cold War ended, and the ways that momentous political change occurs.

As a university student in the early 1980′s, Obama was steeped in Cold War politics, and specifically concerned with strategic questions regarding the possibility of weapons reductions. As a young writer he grappled with the “twisted logic” of the US-USSR nuclear standoff, and wrote about the growing international nuclear freeze movement in 1983 for a Columbia University magazine. Having been engaged with this movement as both writer and student, Obama is acutely aware of the role that it played, both in the U.S. and internationally, in raising awareness and shifting perceptions of the insane nuclear gamesmanship.

As I wrote in the American Prospect last month, conservatives have for years been peddling a potted history of the Cold War — in which the Soviet Union basically collapsed out of fear of Ronald Reagan — in order to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. We saw this most recently in John McCain and Company’s sanctimonious grandstanding over the Iranian demonstrations.

In reality, the Cold War came to an end when and in the way it did because of a number of different factors. A major one was the organizing work of political dissidents in Eastern Europe, and the space created for that work by international agreements like the Helsinki accords — which conservatives at the time condemned as “appeasement”. Conservatives have consistently attempted to write the international peace movement out of any role in ending the Cold War, but there is a solid and growing scholarly consensus that its role was significant, not only in building ties between activists on either side of the Iron Curtain, but also in changing Reagan administration’s own perception of the nuclear standoff and the need for nuclear arms reductions.

President Obama’s recognition of the central role played by Eastern European dissidents in ending the Cold War — and more generally of the complex way that history unfolds — is also in keeping with his measured approach toward the Iranian protests. Rather than imagining that he can change outcomes on the ground by taking a more belligerent stance toward the Iranian regime (there’s more to foreign policy than simply asking “What would Reagan do?”), Obama understands that the best way to facilitate the reformist critique of the system is to give it space to work on its own. This doesn’t mean being “neutral,” and of course the president has not been neutral on the issues of human rights and democracy. It just means recognizing that the place of the U.S. in Iran’s reform movement is not at the head of the parade.

Yesterday, President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed an agreement to negotiate a successor to the soon-to-expire START treaty that would “cut American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals by at least one-quarter.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — “seasoned killer of past arms control treaties” — responded to news of the agreement on Bill Bennett’s radio show this morning by claiming that the Obama administration is “more anxious to make a deal than it is to ensure the protection of the United States.” Bennett told Kyl that he “didn’t think the reductions in missiles by the amount they were doing it was that serious,” but asked him to elaborate:

KYL: In the past, our assessment of what we need to protect our interests as well as the allies that rely on our nuclear umbrella put the number of weapons as a certain level. And the administration is planning to go far below that. … I’m very concerned that the administration is more anxious to make a deal than it is to ensure the protection of the United States.

Kyl’s remarks today demonstrate further that Obama’s right-wing critics are more interested in accusing the President of not wanting to protect the nation than they are in offering substantive critiques of his policy proposals. Last week, Kyl made similar arguments alongside Iraq war architect Richard Perle in the Wall Street Journal. The two wrote that Obama’s widely-praised plans to work toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons were “dangerous, wishful thinking.”

On the specifics of the agreement Obama reached yesterday, Kyl appears to be nearly alone in objecting to it. Even the traditionally-partisan Newt Gingrich endorsed the goals that Obama laid out in a speech yesterday in Moscow. “There is much in it to support,” Gingrich wrote on Twitter. And despite Kyl’s attempts to portray Obama’s commitment yesterday to eliminate just a portion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as detrimental to U.S. national security, James Collins and Jack Matlock remind us that former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev “came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons within 10 years” during their 1986 summit.