Today, Cuentame — a project of Brave New Films — posted a video interview with Phoenix police officer Paul Dobson’s reaction to Arizona’s new immigration law, SB-1070. Though the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (the union representing Phoenix officers) “lobbied aggressively for the law,” not all of its members think it’s a good idea. In Cuentame’s video, Dobson expresses his own opposition to the law and how he believes it will affect his ability to fulfill his duties:

This [SB-1070] law will make me feel like a Nazi out there. [...] How I feel about SB-1070 is I have a great deal of contempt for it, I am very emotional about it. This law is pure and simple a racist law. It is focused on Latinos. I would not be able to show any discretion whatsoever under SB-1070. I am required to arrest that person and take them to jail. As a law enforcement officer I am required to serve and protect. Under SB-1070, I know that people will not call officers in case of a real emergency. [...] It violates our calling to serve and protect.

Watch it:

Dobson isn’t the only officer on the Phoenix police force that is against SB-1070. David Salgado is a 19-year Phoenix police officer who has sued the city and the governor asking that the law be blocked. “Before the signing of this bill, citizens would wave at me,” said Salgado. “Now they don’t even want to make eye contact.” Tucson police officer Martin Escobar has also filed a lawsuit, saying there is no such thing as “race-neutral” criteria for him to determine “reasonable suspicion” that someone is in the country illegally.

Meanwhile, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police (AAOP) has said SB-1070 is “problematic and will negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner.” The president of the Arizona Fraternal Order of Police — an association of sworn law enforcement officers — has also expressed concerns that the bill “will bankrupt our city.” “What’s going to happen is you’re going to fear the police…they’re [immigrants] going to shy away from us instead of coming forward with information,” stated Sgt. Bryan Soller in a local interview.

Today, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas appeared in a press conference blasting the new interim county attorney, Rick Romley, for requiring verification that the undocumented immigrants that Arpaio arrests and then charges with smuggling themselves over the border are actually in the country illegally.

Arpaio recently arrested 32 undocumented on suspicion of smuggling themselves into the country. Apparently, before Thomas stepped down to run for Attorney General, it would’ve been general practice to prosecute those immigrants with a felony for being “co-conspirators” in their own smuggling without requiring verification of their illegal status before a case was filed. If found guilty, those immigrants would then be jailed for 90 days at the taxpayer’s expense rather than being immediately deported back to their home country. The Phoenix New Times estimates that Romley saved Maricopa County about $212,000 in this case alone by simply turning the 32 suspects over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

However, Arpaio is furious over the new requirements, stating, “Is he going to request every time that the police arrest someone on a state violation that you have to have documentation?” Thomas responded with a press release reminding the public that requiring documentation is standard and that Arpaio’s and Thomas’ interpretation of Arizona’s smuggling law is unique:

The former County Attorney was the only prosecutor in the state to bring charges of conspiracy to commit human smuggling against the individual paying to be smuggled.

Under the former County Attorney, the Sheriff’s Office wasn’t required to submit certified federal records regarding immigration status of the person arrested before charges were filed.

Records from Federal Authorities are required in order to prove immigration status at trial.

Watch KTVK 3TV’s coverage of the press conference:

Two independent reports by the East Valley Tribune and the Goldwater Institute show that Arpaio’s immigration-enforcement crusade has contributed to a huge county budget deficit and that crime rates have actually escalated as Arpaio has failed to arrest top smugglers and criminals.

Yesterday, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would allow the state’s 270,000 gun permit holders to carry their firearms into bars, nightclubs, museums, zoos, and other establishments that have liquor licenses.

This is the second time in two years that Bredesen has vetoed a “guns in bars” bill. Last year, the state legislature passed a law that would have allowed permit holders to carry their weapons into any restaurant, except those whose predominant business was to serve alcohol. Bredesen vetoed it, the legislature overrode his veto, but a court later struck down the law on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague.

Reiterating his view that “guns and alcohol don’t mix,” Bredesen called the latest version of the “guns in bars” bill an “even more expansive and dangerous form” than the “reckless” version he vetoed a year ago. He twice referenced “common sense” in his veto message, emphasizing that gun rights need to be “exercised with” it.

The state house and senate need only simple majorities to override the governor’s veto. Last year, Bredesen’s veto was rejected by a whopping 66-31 vote in the house and a 23-9 vote in the senate, suggesting that his veto will be overturned again this year:

Will Cheek, a Nashville attorney who worked on last year’s court challenge, agreed that an override probably would succeed. This year’s bill was meant to be less susceptible to a court challenge, and Cheek said this measure doesn’t have the same problems as the one passed last year.

“The NRA (National Rifle Association) is too powerful, particularly in an election year, for legislators to do the right thing,” he said. “The governor is sticking to his principles. It’s symbolic, but it’s also consistent with what he believes.”

Rep. Joe McCord, a Republican state legislator with an A+ plus rating from the NRA, has criticized the unreasonableness of the gun lobby. “Essentially, NRA is saying to us, if you don’t support and vote for carrying guns in bars, we will not endorse you,” McCord said. “This line of reasoning borders on lunacy.” McCord is more liberated to speak honestly about this issue because he is not running for re-election.

Many of the state’s business associations are opposed to the “guns in bars” bill, including the Nashville Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Hospitality Association. But the Tennessee Firearms Association called opposition to the bill “futile.” As ThinkProgress reported from the NRA convention in Charlotte this weekend, the NRA leadership appears to be out of step with the views of its own membership.

The Washington Post has a good summary of the measures contained in the new UN sanctions package announced yesterday by Secretary of State Clinton:

Among other measures, the resolution would expand an asset freeze and travel ban against individuals and entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. A critical element still to be negotiated is a list of those names.

The resolution would establish an embargo on large weapons systems such as battle tanks, combat aircraft and missiles — a previous U.N. resolution called on nations only to “exercise vigilance and restraint” in such trade — but would not include the comprehensive arms embargo sought by the United States and France. Iran could continue to buy light weapons.

As the article notes, the measures fall short of “crippling” — a consequence of securing Russian and Chinese support for the resolution — but they are significant, and do provide an international imprimatur for further multilateral sanctions by the U.S. and European Union.

As Secretary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, in response to Monday’s announcement of a nuclear compromise deal by Iran, Turkey, and Brazil, the new UN sanctions resolution “is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide.”

It’s not hard to figure out why the U.S. is not thrilled by the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal. Iran’s agreeing to ship out 1200 kg of low-enriched uranium in May 2010 is very different than Iran’s agreeing to ship out 1200 kg of low-enriched uranium in October 2009, when 1200 kg represented half of Iran’s LEU stock. Because Iran has continued enriching in the interim, it now represents around half. But I really have to question the tenor and timing of Clinton’s announcement. By not even waiting a few days to pretend to seriously examine and consider the terms of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal, the administration has potentially squandered a lot of the diplomatic capital that it generated by what was widely seen as a good-faith effort to engage the Islamic Republic toward an agreement on its nuclear program, capital that it will need to cultivate greater international cooperation in enforcing the sanctions.

It’s clear that Iran saw the announcement of the deal as a way to head off international pressure. But that doesn’t mean that its acceptance of the terms isn’t significant — it is. In my view, it would have been smarter for Obama to acknowledge the deal as a potentially positive step, but make clear that more is needed, similar to how he pocketed Netanyahu’s sort-of-but-not-really acceptance of a Palestinian state last year. As it is, by scrambling to get the UN sanctions resolution finalized in the shadow of the Brazil-Turkey intervention, that resolution now looks much more like an end in themselves, rather than a means to arriving at a mutually acceptable agreement.

There’s also the question of how the deal, and the quick rejection, will impact the situation inside Iran, particularly as we approach the anniversary of Iran’s June 12 presidential elections and the subsequent protests. As Iranian dissident and democracy activist Akbar Ganji noted last week, President Obama’s willingness to forthrightly engage Iran helped create a favorable environment for the Iranian democracy movement by placing the focus on the Iranian regime and discrediting the regime’s claim to be the victim of Western plots to deny Iran its nuclear rights. Those claims will look far more plausible now, right at a time when Iran’s democracy movement is gearing up for more demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the stolen election.

It is not every day that US Senators get worked up over nuclear deterrence theory. Toward the end of yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing – which was the first hearing on the New START treaty since it was submitted to the Senate last week – Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Secretary of Defense Gates got in an animated and exasperated exchange with Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) over the START treaty and missile defense.

What is clear to everyone is that the START treaty has NO limitations on our planned missile defense program. But what the far right is concerned about is they want to create a mythical missile defense system that goes far beyond current plans and that specifically targets Russia and renders their nuclear arsenal useless. In other words, far-right Republicans, led by the Heritage Foundation, which is the leading preacher of missile defense gospel, want to eliminate the days of “mutually assured destruction” by building a totally impregnable Jedi force field of freedom.

However, Senator Kerry points out the obvious: if you can build it – which is a huge huge if – the result would only be a massive nuclear arms race. The fact is that the Russians, as well as the Chinese would simply start building more nuclear weapons and missiles to overcome these defenses and then the US, seeing that all of a sudden the Russians are expanding their missile forces, would begin to do the same, leading quite easily to a new massive Cold War-style arms race, where the United States is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a useless missile defense system and on new nuclear weapons. This all because conservatives have some asinine faith in some magical sci-fi capability.

But, and here is the rub, under the terms of the START treaty, we could still build this dangerous make-believe missile defense system – since the treaty does not constrain defensive systems. Now the Russians did say that if we pursue this capability, they would obviously withdraw from the treaty and start building nuclear weapons. But all this means is that should Jim DeMint’s conservative wing take over power and pursue their missile defense agenda a new nuclear arms-race is guaranteed. Secretary Gates also noted that DeMint’s desire to target missile defense against Russia is to the far right of where even the Bush administration was, as the system developed by the Bush administration was never intended to target Russia. Watch it:

DeMint is unable to refute the point that a comprehensive missile defense program will only prompt the Russians to produce more nuclear weapons. But following this exchange, DeMint tweeted and wrote on Heritage’s Blog that:

Senator Kerry proved why Americans have a hard time fully trusting the left to put American interests first in foreign affairs. While the goal of reducing global levels of nuclear weapons is noble, it cannot take priority over our duty to protect Americans. It seems the goal of this administration and liberals in Congress is to condition American security into parity with Russia, which makes no sense.

In reality, pursuing nuclear parity with the Russians is the way we create nuclear stability that prevents a massive arms race. The fact is that the only way to get beyond the concept of mutually assured destruction is not to build a destabilizing missile defense system, but to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. And this is what the Russians are most afraid of. If nuclear weapons are eliminated US conventional dominance becomes overwhelming, since Russian conventional forces are in such disrepair. Contrary to conservative assumptions, the existence of nuclear weapons actually make us weaker as the level the global power playing field.

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