Local Kansas newspapers are reporting that Kris Kobach, the architect of the Arizona immigration law and candidate for Kansas Secretary of State, is being criticized by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) for the financial management of the Kansas Republican Party during his tenure as chairman. According to reports, when Kobach left the group in 2009, it had less than $5,000 in its treasury. A recent audit reveals he and then executive director Christian Morgan spent $788,000 during their two years in charge, nearly $10,000 more than was contributed. The audit also shows that, under Kobach and Morgan’s watch, “state and federal taxes weren’t paid, illegal contributions were accepted and questionable expenditures were made.”

More specifically, the FEC found the Kansas GOP illegally mingled money from state and federal accounts during the two-year period. Auditors also said the party violated federal campaign laws by accepting $52,000. Kobach has responded by pointing a finger at Morgan’s “sloppy” record-keeping. But Morgan isn’t willing to take the blame. “Kobach was the boss, and he called the shots. He is looking for a scapegoat,” Morgan told the Associated Press. According to Morgan, Kobach fired key office staff that had financial oversight duties. “I disagreed with both firings,” Morgan said. Now, “he’s [Kobach] willing to say and do anything to anyone to advance his political agenda,” stated Morgan.

Kobach claims he’s not worried at all that the scandal will hurt his chances of being elected. However, the Midwest Voices blog calls Kobach an optimist. “The secretary of state is the person whom voters trust to make sure elections are run well and corporations are properly registered,” writes Barb Shelly. “Voters are going to think twice, and maybe thrice, before turning those duties over to somebody who’s just been accused of serious financial mismanagement.” Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star blames Kobach’s negligence on his anti-immigrant crusade. “Kobach was too busy scurrying about the country stoking the public fires against illegal immigration to detect what was occurring back in Topeka,” writes Sanchez. “He’s great at making appearances on Bill O’Reilly’s show and CNN, filing lawsuits to keep undocumented kids who grew up in the U.S. out of American colleges and defending the dignity of an Arizona sheriff who likes to put inmates in pink underwear.”

It’s been a tough week for Kobach. He also lost his side job providing much needed legal advice to Maricopa County, Arizona. Maricopa County is home to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who faces thousands of law suits, an FBI investigation, and a Department of Justice probe. Kobach admits that the new Maricopa Attorney, Rick Romley, “takes a very different view of enforcing Arizona’s human smuggling” law. That view is that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be prosecuted on felony charges for smuggling themselves across the border and then jailed on the taxpayer’s dime. Kobach was making $300 per hour and a $1,500 per month to advise Maricopa County on how to legally make life as miserable as possible for undocumented immigrants who lived there.

Kobach has taken a leave of absence from his constitutional law professor job at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, but still works for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the designated hate group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Today at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor for his entire second term, Stephen Hadley, called on the Senate to ratify the New START treaty. Hadley’s endorsement is another significant blow to Senator Jon Kyl and others on the far right who want to kill START.

HADLEY: I think you do need to see this treaty in context of really a 20 year effort spanning Republican and Democratic administration…This does provide some transparency, some predictability into the relationship and quite frankly it’s an indication of one more thing where Russia and the United States in their common interest to work together cooperatively and that’s an important contribution to the overall environment between Russian and US relations… so within this context its a logical next step… I think the treaty should be ratified and it’ll make a modest and useful contribution in this overall process.

Watch it:

Testifying alongside Hadley was General Brent Scowcroft, who was George Bush Sr.’s national security advisor, who also supports the treaty. These two Republican national security stalwarts join a long list of other senior Republican national security leaders including Secretaries Henry Kissinger, George Schutlz, James Baker, Colin Powell, and James Schlesinger. As Senator Kerry said this morning in his prepared statement:

This is our sixth hearing on the New START Treaty, and the degree of bipartisan support from the witnesses who have testified so far has been remarkable. Henry Kissinger recommended ratification because, he said, it is in America’s national interest. James Baker testified that the treaty appears to take our country in a direction that can enhance our national security, while reducing the number of nuclear warheads on the planet. William Perry said the treaty advances American security objectives, and James Schlesinger called ratification “obligatory.”

The fact is that almost all the Republicans that have served at the highest national security positions have come out in vocal support of this treaty. The New START treaty is the closest thing you have to a bipartisan consensus. The treaty is after all fairly modest, as it extends and updates the original START treaty that was the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

Yet just today the president of the Heritage Foundation came out in opposition to START and Senator Jon Kyl continues to spend countless time making politicized attacks on a treaty that Hadley noted was linked back to the arms-control efforts of Ronald Reagan. The START treaty is exposing a deep cavernous divide between the hawkish realism of traditional conservatives and the radical hyper-paranoid neoconservatism that want to in fact to build more nuclear weapons. It also demonstrates how far to the right the GOP in the Senate has moved, since opposition to this treaty, would put GOP Senators to the far-right of even Ronald Reagan.

Our guest blogger is Henry Fernandez, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund focusing on state and municipal policy.

What do Tuesday’s primaries tell us about immigration? Well, we can’t be totally sure yet but it looks like they demonstrate two emerging truths about the changing electorate: (1) the Latino vote is growing in importance in surprising places and the politicians who recognize that and support comprehensive immigration reform benefit from that vote and (2) the perceived need to go hard right against immigrants in Republican primaries creates real problems in general election contests, especially in the west. Let’s look under the hood at three races that got a lot of attention:

While netroots and labor progressives rallied around Bill Halter in Arkansas, some Latino leadership was not so sure. According to Juan Mendez, an organizer for Natural Dreamers, which pushes for the DREAM Act in Arkansas, “In our meetings with Blanche Lincoln, she was happy to support the DREAM Act and said she would ask her fellow [Arkansas] Senator [Mark] Pryor to do the same. When we encountered Halter at community meetings, he and his staff would put us off, and even laughed at the idea of publicly co-sponsoring the DREAM Act.” Indeed, Lincoln’s literature targeted the Latino community in English and Spanish, saying she “co-sponsored the Dream Act” and “voted to support comprehensive immigration reform.” Latinos make up just over 5% of the population but Arkansas has the fastest growing Latino population of any state. There are more than 18,000 Arkansas voters who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. So while a small proportion of the vote in Arkansas, this was a very close election decided by about 11,000 votes, and it looks like Lincoln’s clarity on immigration reform and outreach made a difference.

In the California Governor’s race, there’s good reason to believe that a once winnable seat for Republicans has begun to slip away. Meg Whitman proved that if you spend $71 million of your own money, you can beat a Tea Party candidate in a Republican primary for Governor. Unfortunately for Meg, she felt she had to join in her opponent Steve Poizner’s bashing of undocumented immigrants to win the primary, so she trotted out former governor Pete Wilson who ended Latino support for Republicans and threw California into the blue column in Presidential races forever after he championed the anti-immigrant Prop 187 in 1994. Whitman went so far as to declare that undocumented teenagers should not be admitted to any California state colleges – forget about paying in-state tuition, they should not even be admitted. This move to the right in a state where well over one-third of the population is Latino, and one-quarter of voters are either naturalized citizens or the children of immigrants, has pushed this race from a tie two months ago to one that heavily leans towards the Democrat Jerry Brown who is now up by an average of 7 points in recent polling.

In Nevada, for the last year the Republican party has been salivating at the chance to take on Senator Harry Reid and polling has shown he would lose by double digits — not so anymore. Despite party leadership wanting the more mainstream Sue Lowden, Republican primary voters chose Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite who championed a range of “anti-amnesty” positions while supporting Arizona’s “papers please” racial profiling law. Possibly recognizing that her positions might be unpopular in a state which is 25% Latino, with 11.6% of voters Latino and 3.4% Asian, Angle called for requiring that voters show ID before they cast ballots. A bit odd since this is already a requirement. But that’s not all that’s odd about Angle, she also wants to get rid of the Department of Education as well as Social Security and thinks prisoners would benefit from saunas, massages and some Scientology. In any case, Reid is now running about even with Angle, before he has unleashed his millions more in campaign funds to educate voters on her positions. If Reid can also use those resources to turn out Latino voters, he will have a better than average shot at holding this seat.

California and Nevada indicate that Republicans put themselves at serious general election peril when they press anti-immigrant buttons in the primary; while Senator Lincoln shows that Democrats need to be seen as actually pushing hard for immigration reform if they want Latino votes to turn out.

Other polling news this week reinforces the point that Latino voters are not looking for just moral support for immigration reform. Latinos want reform now and Gallup polling suggests they are taking it out on President Obama who has said many of the right things but not yet delivered reform. According to Gallup, Obama has seen his support among Latinos drop 12 points this year for just this reason:

The two major drops in Hispanics’ approval of Obama this year — in February and May — coincide with two periods when the president was under fire for not doing enough to promote comprehensive immigration reform in Congress. . . . Hispanics — and particularly Hispanics who appear

Gallup’s polling indicates that the entirety of Obama’s slippage in the polls since January has come as a result of a steady decline in Latino support, as White and Black support has been virtually unchanged.

A new cell phone video “raises questions” about the claims made by the border patrol agent who shot and killed a 14-year-old boy earlier this week. The border patrol agent reportedly told authorities that he was surrounded by rock-throwers, as if to imply that he had no choice but to shoot his gun in self-defense. FBI special agent Andrea Simmons told the press that the border patrol agent “gave verbal commands to the remaining subjects to stop and retreat…the subjects surrounded the agent and continued to throw rocks at him.” However, the video captured by a cell phone on the Mexican side of the border shows a different scene:

In the distance, a U.S. border patrol officer on his bicycle can be seen making his way toward the area. Seconds later, the officer can be seen getting off his bicycle and approaching two of the four suspected Mexican nationals who had just crossed through an opening in the fence. One of the suspects is detained by the officer, but never handcuffed, and instead dragged a short distance. This happened on the U.S. side of the border.

Moments later, the officer points, what appears to be his firearm in the direction of a second suspect, standing about 60 feet away from the officer — on the Mexican side of the border. The video shows the suspect running away. Seconds later, two gunshots can be heard on the video. A third gunshot is heard in a different sequence of the tape.

Watch it:

Immediately following the shooting, T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told the Associated Press that he believes the use of “deadly force” was a justified response. “It is a deadly force encounter.” Mexico’s Foreign Ministry, along with the video, suggest otherwise. “[T]he use of firearms to repel a rock attack represents a disproportionate use of force, particularly coming from authorities who receive specialized training on the matter,” said the Mexican Foreign Ministry in a news release. The ministry also reports that the number of Mexicans who have been killed or wounded by U.S. border authorities has increased from five in 2008 to 12 in 2009 and 17 so far this year.

It’s reportedly still unclear whether the shots were fired on the U.S. or Mexican side of the border. The victims body was found 20 feet into Mexico and the wound indicates the weapon was fired from close range. If the border patrol agent did in fact cross into Mexico, he will have violated border patrol rules and could face homicide charges in Mexico. According to the witnesses, the victim did not even participate in rock throwing. The Mexican government and the victim’s family are considering taking legal actions to ensure that the border patrol agent does not escape with impunity.