Sen. Bob Corker has been threatening to vote against the New START treaty unless he gets massive additional funding for a nuclear facility in Tennessee. What makes this so absurd is not only that the Administration has already committed itself to building the facility, but that Corker’s demands for more funding appear to have been pulled from thin air.

Ambassador Linton Brooks who served as the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency responsible for maintaining the US nuclear arsenal — called out Corker in his home state last week. When Brooks was asked to respond to Corker’s assertion that the new facility would cost a total of $4-5 billion, not the $1.4 — 3.5 billion that has been projected, he noted:

I don’t think we know that… We have no idea where that (dollar estimate) is coming from.

It increasingly looks as though Corker has simply made up a larger figure for the facility, which has no basis in reality. In fact, the reason why there is a cost range between $1.4 and 3.5 billion dollars is because the facility is not fully designed yet. Nevertheless, Corker, due to some new found expertise in the design of nuclear facilities, has determined that that range, which was determined by the National Nuclear Security Administration led by a Bush administration hold-over, is wrong. One would also assume, that a so-called conservative who claims to be concerned about wasteful government spending, would at the very least wait until a facility is fully designed before jumping to baseless conclusions that it needs billions more in additional funding.

But Corker may be motivated by more than just stimulus pork for his home state. Corker is making a demand that the Administration is practically incapable of delivering, since it both can’t pledge more funds to a facility that isn’t fully designed yet and it can’t control how congress allocates funding. Last week, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher confirmed that the Administration wasn’t going to be able to cut a back room deal with Corker:

We’ve shown our hand, we’ve proposed our budget, it’s a 13 percent increase… Any question about the commitment to modernization is just not a question.

Tauscher also noted that the GOP concerns about funding the nuclear weapons complex have suddenly came out of nowhere. She noted that:

I was pretty lonely fighting for money for the NNSA and for the weapons complex before I left Congress for the administration.

Much like the financial regulatory reform bill – where Corker, after positioning himself as a proponent, flipped and turned against the bill – Corker could be playing a similar double game on START. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has already expressed the goal to delay the vote until next year and Corker could essentially be doing his bidding. Corker’s stance START has taken on a familiar GOP pattern – appear reasonable and willing to vote for the treaty, string along negotiations with the White House, and then make an entirely unreasonable request that blows up the negotiations. The vote in the Senate Foreign Relations committee was already pushed back from August in large part to appease Corker. In the intervening six weeks nothing has seemingly changed. Therefore on Thursday, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes on the treaty we will finally find out if Corker was playing a double game all along.

Yesterday Turkey held a national referendum to determine whether its constitution would be amended, with supporters (which include Turkey’s ruling AK Party) claiming that the reforms would strengthen Turkish democracy and ease Turkey’s acceptance into the European Union. The referendum passed 58-42%.

The Christian Science Monitor reports “The referendum’s biggest winner was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces a general election next year with his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)”:

“We have passed a historic threshold on the way to advanced democracy and the supremacy of law,” said Erdogan to applause from supporters gathered to celebrate the victory. “Supporters of military intervention and coups are the losers tonight.”

The current Turkish constitution was adopted in 1982, two years after Turkey’s third military coup. Reuters has a list of the accepted amendments. The New York Times notes “The package includes popular and relatively uncontroversial measures that would strengthen the rights of women, children, workers and civil servants. It would also make the military answerable to civilian courts, lifting immunity from prosecution for the leaders of the bloody 1980 coup”:

But proposals to strengthen the control of the president and Parliament over the appointment of judges and prosecutors are seen by critics as a barely veiled attempt to erode the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. The amendments assign greater power to Parliament and the president to choose members of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, both traditional bastions of secularism that have clashed with Mr. Erdogan’s party in the past.

But the government said the changes were necessary to tame dangerously activist judicial bodies that have consistently undermined the decisions of Parliament and the executive.

“There is an activist understanding of the judiciary in the current system that undermines the will and decisions of the legislative and executive organs,” Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin said before the vote. “This new model will prevent today’s legal system from leading the country into a judicial dictatorship, while paving the way for other progressive reforms.”

At an event hosted earlier today by the Project on Middle East Democracy, Gonul Tol of the Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies noted that “The developing Turkish identity involves religion, and I don’t think we should be threatened by that.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey W. Robert Pearson said that the results of the referendum, along with the last several years in Turkey, “represent a fundamental change in the Turkish political system, one that brings in a lot of people who hadn’t participated before.” Pearson went on to say that what was happening in Turkey “is not about one man, Erdogan,” but rather the culmination of attempts at reform that have been building for decades.

Daniel Brumberg of the U.S. Institute of Peace also reminded the audience that “the AK Party is not monolithic.” In addition to it’s religious conservative base, “it has a strong business constituency whose primary goal is Turkish integration into Europe.” In other words, the AK party is religiously conservative, pro-business party that’s against “judicial activism.” This should sound familiar to Americans. But while it’s tempting — and not entirely inaccurate — to make comparisons between the AK Party and the GOP, this is actually pretty unfair to the AK Party, who are a dynamic, modernizing force pushing for greater political inclusivity.

For a deeper analysis of the changes Turkey is undergoing, both domestically and in its regional policy, please see my colleague Michael Werz’s report The New Levant.

A little over a week ago, a Los Angeles police officer shot a Guatemalan day laborer, Manuel Jaminez, twice in the head claiming that Jaminez allegedly lunged at him with a knife. At the time, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck thought the “community would understand” the alleged circumstances of the shooting which involved a threatening man supposedly armed with a knife ignoring police orders and then advancing toward an officer. Instead, the shooting sparked days of angry and sometimes violent protest amongst the community of mostly Central American immigrants who felt the shooting was “an unfair and unnecessary use of police force.”

In retrospect, Beck observes that the demonstrations weren’t just about the shooting. According to Beck, the “eruption of anger and hostility” was in many ways also a response to the anti-immigrant fervor that has spread through the country. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The response to the incident, Beck said in an interview Friday, “is about so much more than just this shooting. Our challenge is to figure that out and to understand what it is really about. We’re still working to peel back those layers.” [...]

Beck said he believes the shooting of the man, a day laborer like so many others in the neighborhood, quickly became a flashpoint that brought to the surface much larger issues facing the impoverished community of immigrants from Guatemala and other Central American countries west of downtown L.A., one of the most densely populated areas on the country.

“This community feels disconnected from the city,” he said. “They feel like they don’t have a voice. I think they feel a lot of pressure because of the anti-immigrant sentiment that runs through a very common conversation in America right now.”

Life in the central Los Angeles neighborhood is tough. “Life is very hard here,” said Ricardo Fernández, a retired Nicaraguan truck driver. “I tell people not to come, it’s not as good as before. But people still come.” There aren’t a lot of jobs, rent is high, and crime and gangs have a constant presence. Many of the residents are immigrants from the indigenous communities of rural Mexico and Guatemala and may speak little Spanish and are barely able to read and write. A Guatemalan pastor explains, “They’re not poor, they’re destitute.” In other words, they’re essentially powerless.

The details of the shooting itself are still fuzzy. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised an “unbiased investigation” into the shooting, but also called the police officer, Frank Hernandez, who fired the shots a “hero.” The Los Angeles Police Protective League defended Hernandez’s actions stating, “when an armed individual refuses police orders to end the threat they are posing to the safety of officers and the public, they are subjecting themselves to the consequences of their actions, which may include being shot.”

However, many of the Los Angeles residents who live in the community and knew the victim feel differently. Many claim they have been frequently mistreated by Los Angeles policethemselves. “They are messing with people all the time,” said Juan Lorenzo, a day laborer who knew the victim. One witness claims the victim had been drinking, but was not holding a weapon. Others even speculate that the knife was planted. Those who knew the victim insist that he wasn’t a criminal. Meanwhile, Hernandez was previously found by the department’s watchdog arm to have used improper tactics in 2008 and is being sued by a man who claims unlawfully shot by him.

It’s far too early to say what really happened a week ago. However, what’s clear is that the anti-immigrant sentiment that is sweeping many parts of the nation has heightened tensions on both sides of the issue. Jaminez may or may not have committed a violent offense. Yet, for many his death likely symbolizes their own helplessness in the face of discrimination. Those who protested his death probably aren’t just angry they lost a friend. They’re also tired of being portrayed and treated like the dangerous criminals that most of them aren’t.