Last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report which showed that the cancellation of events and conventions in Arizona related to the state’s immigration law will result in a loss of $253 million in the state’s economic output and more than $86 million in lost wages over the next two to three years. Today, CAP released a second study which shows that those figures are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the costs associated with passing anti-immigrant legislation at the state and local level. CAP reports:

Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the leader of the court fights for local immigration enforcement, is in the tank for at least $2.8 million with some estimates totaling $5 million as it defends its ordinance all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Riverside, New Jersey suffered a local economic downturn before the city rescinded its anti-immigrant ordinance and welcomed the return of immigrants.

Farmers Branch, Texas, has spent nearly $4 million in legal fees and is expected to spend at least $5 million to defend its anti-immigration statute with no end in sight.

Prince William County, Virginia dramatically scaled back a tough immigration statute after realizing the original version would cost millions to enforce and defend in court.

Fremont, Nebraska, increased the city’s property tax to help pay the legal fees for its anti-immigration ordinance which it intends to defend.

The report also specifically highlights one figure who has been profiting off of these cities’ woes: Kris Kobach. The activist lawyer and newly elected Kansas Secretary of State has had his hand in just about every piece of anti-immigrant legislation proposed in the nation over the past several years. In the meantime, he has “run up an estimated $6.6 million in fees for his efforts.”

A second report which was released by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) today describes Kobach as a Harold Hill, the protagonist of the musical The Music Man. “Like Hill…Kobach comes to town with big ideas and a can-do attitude but leaves behind a trail of tears — huge legal bills and unworkable laws coupled with social turmoil,” writes SPLC.

One of Kobach’s colleagues at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — the legal outfit which employed Kobach as chief legal counsel — has explained in the past that all of these local laws are “field tests,” or experiments which are meant to test the legality of various approaches to immigration enforcement. In other words, the laws Kobach and IRLI have written are specifically designed to invite costly litigation which not only aims to challenge standard notions of what is legally acceptable, they have also made Kobach and his organization a lot of money on the taxpayer’s dime.

Meanwhile, SPLC notes that most of these legal efforts have so far been futile. “The towns that passed nativist laws in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas and Nebraska, along with the state of Arizona, have spent millions of dollars to defend them in court, and almost every judicial decision so far has gone against them.”

While the release by Al Jazeera on Sunday of over 1600 documents relating to a decades’ worth of U.S.-managed Palestinian-Israeli negotiations is certain to impact both the negotiations themselves and perceptions of those negotiations, because there’s so many of them, and because their veracity remains in question, it’s probably best for the moment to hold off on grand pronouncements about What They Mean. But here are a few impressions.

First, the documents seriously challenge the theory that unquestioning U.S. support for Israel is necessary to give Israel the confidence to make concessions for peace. From what I’ve seen so far, mostly from the George W. Bush era, the documents show that unquestioning U.S. support for Israel mainly gave the Israelis the confidence to continue to expect and receive ever more concessions from the Palestinians, while absolving them of any real pressure to actually make a deal.

This transcript of a March 2008 meeting is a good case in point. The Palestinians would like a discussion of future borders to proceed from the 1967 borders, that is, the 1949 Armistice lines, an approach grounded in international law and successive United Nations resolutions. The Israelis, on the other hand, prefer to start from a discussion of “reality on the ground” — a reality which Israel is, of course, in the process of changing every day through settlement expansion and wall construction.

In any normal negotiation, one party demanding that those negotiations occur within a frame of reference that that party is constantly unilaterally changing in its own favor would probably be laughed out of the room. But here, by virtue both of being the occupying power, backed unquestioningly by the world’s dominant actor, Israeli negotiators are able to sit back and do just that, and their Palestinian opposites have little option other than to note objection, and agree to disagree for now, knowing that when they next return to the table, reality on the ground will have changed again.

That brings me to the second takeaway from these documents, which is how starkly they reveal the massive disparity in power between the two sides. In an ironic sense, it turns out that the right-wing canard about there being “no Palestinian partner for peace” is true — they’re more like supplicants for peace. When one reads the extent of what Palestinian negotiators have, at various times, offered the Israelis — such as Saeb Erekat’s alleged offer on Jerusalem — it’s almost a relief that the Israelis didn’t accept, as it’s hard to imagine any Palestinian leadership, certainly not one this weak, selling capitulations that extensive to their own people. This would be an issue of concern to any genuinely honest broker. It does not appear to have been for the U.S.

Which brings me to the final point, which is not directly addressed in these documents but hangs over almost every page, and that’s the weakness of the Palestinian leadership itself. At this point, how much do these negotiations really matter in the absence of genuine political legitimacy for those doing the negotiating? The release of these documents is a disaster for Mahmoud Abbas and the current P.A. leadership, and a bonanza for Hamas and other critics of the peace process, which is now revealed as little more than a surrender process. While that may be good in terms of an honest reckoning, it does little in the short term to actually make anyone’s life better, or bring us closer to a resolution of the conflict.

The Center for Public Integrity reported last Tuesday that a number of high-capacity gun magazine manufactures are financing the National Rifle Association’s lobbying operations, and that two members of the NRA Board currently serve as the CEO of companies that sell high-capacity clips. The report is particularly relevant in the wake of both the Tucson shooting and a subsequent proposal in Congress to limit these clip sizes to around 10 cartridges per magazine. The NRA has recently criticized the proposed legislation, saying that high-capacity magazines are “standard” for “self-defense.”

Speaking of this close association with gun industry CEOs and the NRA, Josh Sugarmann, the executive director of the Violence Policy Center said, “The NRA’s priorities are not gun owners but the manufacturers of guns and accessories,” and that the NRA’s opposition to gun control legislation often “isn’t about protecting the rights of millions of gun owners [so much] as protecting the financial interests of NRA board members and the NRA itself.”

Pete Brownell is President of Brownells, Inc, — “the world’s largest supplier of firearms accessories and gunsmithing tools” — and was elected to the NRA Board last year. ThinkProgress caught up with Brownell at the SHOT Show convention in Las Vegas last week and asked him about this symbiotic relationship. Brownell denied that the NRA is working to benefit the gun industry financially, claiming that it only defends the Second Amendment. He also denied that his role at the NRA as a current gun supply company CEO is in any way nefarious:

BROWNELL: The NRA has always been active in the public interest. They’ve been a defender of the Second Amendment. It’s not because of financial interest, it’s because they defend the Second Amendment, what the founders, the original people that wrote this, were intending, what they actually wrote down. So they defend the Second Amendment. They don’t necessarily say, “We’re going to do this because someone is writing me a check.” [...]

We need leaders to lead organizations, and the one place they get leaders is the military. The other place they get leaders are politicians and really the third place they get them are entrepreneurs. You can’t just get leadership from one area because then you’ll become pretty myopic in that area as an organization.

ThinkProgress noted that many attendees at the SHOT Show this week disputed the NRA’s contention that high-capacity clips are needed for self-defense purposes. One gun retailer said, “If ten rounds of ammunition can’t do the job you probably shouldn’t own a gun.” But Brownell disagreed. “When you’re defending, you want to have as much of an advantage as possible so it does matter. … It’s just an advantage.” Listen to the interview:

Indeed, high-capacity magazines are an advantage. And one such clip was an advantage for Jared Loughner in Tucson this month, who was subdued by attendees at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ (D-AZ) constituent event only after he stopped to reload his 31-bullet clip.