The New York Times reports today that “the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose tough anti-immigration measures. Among them, in a law enacted last year, is a requirement that the police there question people they stop about their immigration status.”

ABC News reports ”the case will be argued sometime this spring,” adding that, “although deeply opposed to the law, the Obama administration had asked the Supreme Court to refrain from taking up the case at this juncture.”

Kris Kobach, current Kansas secretary of state and the coauthor of S.B. 1070 and other immigration enforcement-only efforts, wrote in May 2010: “[S.B. 1070] makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration violations while in Arizona.”

S.B. 1070 was passed by the Arizona Legislature in the first months of 2010, and was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in April; the measure was immediately challenged by the Obama administration.

The Times adds that the Obama administration “challenged four provisions” of S.B. 1070: “The most prominent was a requirement that state law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if officials have reason to believe that the individual might be an illegal immigrant.”

According to ABC News, “similar legislation is pending in Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Georgia and Alabama.”

The Supreme Court of the United States Blog writes today: “The Arizona measure, and one in Alabama that goes even further, were passed by state legislatures with the specific intent of making life so difficult for undocumented aliens that they would choose to leave the state. Other states are also passing similar measures.”

“Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law, SB 1070,” and other similar state laws, according to the Immigration Policy Center, ”impose unfunded mandates on the police, jails, and courts; drive away workers, taxpayers, and consumers upon whom the state economy depends; and invite costly lawsuits and tourist boycotts. These are economic consequences which few states can afford at a time of gaping budget deficits.”

“They have this unwritten assumption that every new device is innovative,” Dr. Rita Redberg, who is the editor of the Archives of Internal Medicine, said, referring to the venture capital funds. But some devices, she said, “are killing people or causing significant harm.”

The Times reports that 10 bills to speed up the FDA’s medical device approval process have already been introduced by House Republicans this month. In the Senate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a similar bill.

The U.S. House of Representatives has held four hearings on F.D.A. device approval procedures since February, with the vast majority of witnesses being “investors, entrepreneurs, industry consultants, trade group officials or patients who said that agency delays in approving a device had harmed them or a loved one,” according to the New York Times. No one who was harmed by a faulty device was invited to testify.

As the Minnesota Independent reported last week, Paulsen has been rewarded for his advocacy for the industry with campaign donations from company PACs and executives. The Congressman is currently sitting on $900,000, according to Federal Election Commission records. The medical device and drug industry gives more generously to Paulsen than to other candidates or PACs in the district, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Times story shows a steep increase in donations from venture capitalists with an interest in health care after Paulsen testified to Congress in June that FDA processes should be streamlined.

As the Minnesota Independent reported, Paulsen has seen substantial increases in donations from the entire medical device industry since he became a member of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, with one medical private equity firm crowing that “his increasingly high profile in Congress may help bring additional visibility to the medtech sector.”

It’s not just local political observers who think Colorado will be key In a front page story today, The New York Times reports that Obama’s hopes for a second term may come down to Colorado and a couple of other states.

From The Times:

While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slid across the board as unemployment remains high, what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina.

With growing cities and suburbs, they are populated by increasing numbers of educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.

Loevy said he and other Colorado political scientists have been talking about Colorado’s shifting demographic for years.

“The New York Times has caught up with what we’ve been saying for some time. The political changes in Colorado have now passed into the general public currency,” Loevy said.

He said it used to be that in Colorado the Republican Party could count on the support of upscale, educated white voters but that those voters are turned off by the Tea Party and by hard-right rhetoric on social issues.

Many of them, he said, have retained their membership in the GOP and still vote Republican most of the time, but that given a choice between a hard-right Republican and a moderate Democrat, a lot of them are choosing the Democrat. “We saw that in the Bennet-Buck race,” he noted.

The Times also pointed to the Bennet victory as a model for what Obama needs to do in Colorado.

In Colorado, the template for a repeat victory is last year’s campaign of Senator Michael Bennet. A Democratic novice, Mr. Bennet defeated a Tea Party Republican in a year when Republicans were triumphant nationwide. He built a coalition of Latino voters, Democrats like himself who are college-educated transplants to Colorado, and independents in Denver and Boulder.

“No candidate can win this state without winning independent voters,” said Mr. Bennet, who joined Mr. Obama on his Denver visit, along with Gov. John W. Hickenlooper and Senator Mark Udall; all three will help Mr. Obama’s organization there in 2012.

With independents, Mr. Bennet said, “The question that resonated in 2010 was, Do you want somebody who will go to Washington and try to work to solve problems, or do you want somebody who will simply be a partisan?” They will seek a problem-solver again next year, he added, “and I think the president has a strong case to make.”

A challenge for Mr. Obama in Colorado and elsewhere is mobilizing Hispanic voters, many of whom complain that he has not tried hard enough to overcome Republican opposition to immigration legislation. And appealing to independents will require some deft politics, since Mr. Obama’s recent switch to a more confrontational approach with Congressional Republicans could cost independent support even as he energizes Democratic voters.

Loevy, an activist Republican himself, said he expects the Colorado Republican caucuses will probably come down to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Perry, he said, will appeal to the Tea Party side of the party, while Romney will appeal more to traditional Republicans. He says high turnout will favor Romney, while a lower turnout will favor Perry in Colorado.

“Romney has the best chance to lure the upscale educated Republicans back into the party. If Romney can win, it will be good for the party. Clearly, Mitt Romney would have the best chance in the general election. I expect a real fight in Colorado, though, where traditionally the conservatives will come out strong in the caucuses and the primary.”

Just as Hispanics were a key constituency for Bennet in 2010, The Times notes that as working class whites shift toward the Republican Party, ethnic voters become a larger part of the voter pool each election and are likely to continue voting Democratic.

From Friday’s Times again:

Terry Nelson, a campaign adviser to George W. Bush, John McCain and, this year, the former candidate Tim Pawlenty, said he was “pretty optimistic” for 2012, partly because Mr. Obama’s support among lower-income, less-educated white voters, never high, has dropped enough that Republicans see good prospects for winning industrial-belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But, Mr. Nelson acknowledged: “The country is changing. In every election cycle, every year, every day, this country becomes more ethnically diverse. And that has an impact on the kind of coalition that you need to put together to win.” He added, “The truth is, Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008.”

Mr. Obama’s recent travel reflects his calculus. On Tuesday, he was in Colorado, at a high school in a heavily Hispanic Denver neighborhood, to promote his jobs plan. This month he was in Ohio, but also in Virginia and North Carolina; he may return soon on a bus tour of neighboring states, aides say. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in Northern Virginia on Thursday.

Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado together have more than double the number of Ohio’s votes in the Electoral College — 37 versus 18. And Obama advisers say that the same demographic factors at play in those states are also present in states Mr. Obama lost in 2008 — like Arizona (whose senior senator, Mr. McCain, was his rival) and Georgia.

The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickson reports:

By our count, on 63 days so far this year the paper’s reporters have relied on WikiLeaks documents as sources for their stories. Since April 25th is the 115th day of the year, that’s over half of all their issues this year. And just to be clear, we didn’t count stories that merely mentioned WikiLeaks or Julian Assange or Bradley Manning, only the ones that used documents from the site as a reporting source.

It now seems routine for WikiLeaks to serve as a source when it comes to American diplomacy, especially regarding the Middle East. Sometimes these stories are billed as revelations from WikiLeaks’ cache, such as the March 2 story by James Risen on the Qaddafi sons’ bitter business battles which was headlined, ”2 Qaddafis Fought Over Business, Cables Show.” But often the WikiLeak-ed documents are used as a stand-in for an American diplomatic spokesperson, source or expert.

The Atlantic’s review of the prominence of WikiLeaks as a source for The New York Times comes the same day as the Times reported on just who’s been detained at Guantánamo Bay since 9/11, part of another round of leaked secret files — though, interestingly, the Times had to get access from a different source given its relationship with WikiLeaks. The newly-leaked documents reveal that nearly 20 percent of the detainees were completely innocent civilians. Another 49 percent were low-ranking guerrillas of little utility to American intelligence.

When someone at a public meeting asks a question or makes a comment that seems even a little unbalanced, people tense up and exchange nervous glances.

Colorado’s Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-CD 7, was among the politicians quoted on the subject in today’s New York Times. From the article:

In Colorado, Representative Ed Perlmutter, a Democrat, recently postponed one of his “Government in the Grocery” sessions because of security worries raised by supermarkets. Mr. Perlmutter, whose office said he had held 70 similar meetings over the past four years, had another grocery event scheduled for Saturday.

“Our preference is to do it in grocery stores, where people are going to be anyway,” said Leslie Oliver, a spokeswoman for Mr. Perlmutter. “Sometimes people are there buying their gallon of milk and see him and say, ‘Hey, that reminds me, I want to ask him about this.’ ”

Perlmutter has said he is discussing the issue of future Government in the Grocery meetings with law enforcement and grocery store managers and is not yet sure how to proceed.

His spokesperson, Leslie Oliver, told The Colorado Independent today that Perlmutter is tentatively planning a grocery meet-up Feb. 12, but that they haven’t decided on a time or a store yet, and aren’t completely sure they will do one that day.

The Times’ Michael Shear opened the interview by asking Pawlenty about the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon, Ariz., on Saturday. Pawlenty took a rare, though slight, jab at Sarah Palin’s use of cross hairs on a number of Democratic districts on a pre-election map, including Giffords’.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” Pawlenty said when asked if he would have used a similar image.

It was a rare dig on the former Alaska governor from one of her potential 2012 Republican rivals, as most in the GOP have been largely deferential so far to the conservative media star. However, though Pawlenty disagreed with the use of cross hairs, he went out of his way to make positive statements about Palin in other sections of the interview. “There’s no indication at present that those cross hairs, Fox News, any particular commentator or show or set of remarks or person was a motivating factor in [the shooter's] thoughts,” Pawlenty said.

Later, when asked if Palin would be on his short list of vice-presidential nominees should he secure his party’s nomination, Pawlenty dismissed the idea, stating that if Palin has her eyes on another political position it would just be the presidency. “To be blunt, I think Sarah Palin is capable and qualified to be president, and I’ve said that many times publicly,” Pawlenty said.

The 25-minute interview addressed a number of topics, such as why Pawlenty has delayed announcing a presidential campaign despite making moves of an official candidate. Pawlenty said that he is still weighing his impact on the country and what he can add to the field, as well as more personal concerns, such as “the impact on my family and my other life obligations and that’s not a small matter.”

Shear asked Pawlenty which of President Obama’s cabinet picks he most favored. “I really like [Sec. of Education] Arne Duncan’s emphasis on teaching reform…For a Democrat, he’s been unusually candid about the teacher’s union blocking reform, and so I respect that. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says and does, but I really like Arne Duncan’s boldness in taking on those issues,” Pawlenty said.

Watch the full interview below:

But coming up with overall spending totals is not an easy or foolproof task. Individual candidate reports (which track the kind of fundraising that Democrats are leading in) only cover their efforts through mid-October, notes the Times, while issue advertisements (which Republican-backing groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are spending loads of money on) only have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission in the last 60 days before an election.

Regardless, outside spending is still worth focusing on for a number of reasons. For one, it is new money — not just in the sense that it is a new phenomenon (though it is, in part), but in the sense that much of it can be considered additional to the money that traditionally flows into campaigns. That’s because Section 501(c) nonprofits and Super PACs have become outlets for wealthy donors and corporations whose contributions would in the past have been capped at $2,400 per candidate and $30,400 for the national parties. In other words, the $7 million donated by homebuilder Bob Perry to the conservative group American Crossroads to advocate directly on behalf of federal candidates would not have been money spent in a previous election cycle.

Second, the money spent by outside groups hasn’t been spread out evenly. It’s not surprising that in a year when Democrats dominate both chambers of Congress, their individual candidates would collectively raise more money than their relatively unknown Republican challengers. Yet when it comes to key contests, outside interest groups have been able to pour money into races at an unheard-of pace, spending nearly $25 million in the Senate race in Colorado and $17.5 million in the one in Pennsylvania, for instance.

This kind of spending has almost invariably favored Republicans, and it’s even more pronounced in a number of House races, where a few hundred thousand dollars can make a big difference:

For instance, the war on the airwaves in the district of embattled Democratic freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona is essentially between Kirkpatrick and three outside groups who have spent a combined $1.4 million attacking her. Her opponent, Paul Gosar, has only put up $200,000 worth of ads.

“Fact-checking our opponent is a full-time job, but we’ve spent even more time fact-checking his special interest backers,” said Carmen Gallus, Kirkpatrick’s campaign manager. “These outside groups are not being held accountable for coming in and lying to the folks in our district.”

While the AFF claims a broad mission “to provide Americans with a conservative and free market viewpoint,” the Times notes that its activities have often appeared more like advocacy on behalf of the ethanol industry:

Among the first politicians it supported with advertising was Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota and a co-chairman of the Senate Biofuels Caucus, during his losing 2008 re-election campaign.

Later that November, it focused on an unexpected target: the Indy Racing League.

In a radio advertisement, the fund attacked a deal the racing association struck to power Indy cars with sugar-based ethanol from Brazil, portraying it as a slight to American producers.

The campaign may have seemed odd for a group promoting free-market principles. But days earlier, ethanol executives, including Mr. Rastetter, had met with racing officials to unsuccessfully demand that they abandon the Brazilian deal.

These days, the group has widened its scope, attacking Democrats in several states on broad issues like the stimulus and health care reform. But, again, the Times notes that a pattern of going after Democrats who serve on panels related to ethanol is easy enough to make out:

Of the 14 “liberal” politicians singled out in a list it released last month, nearly every incumbent sits on a panel with a say over energy or agriculture policy. Five sit on the Agriculture Committee; four others are on related committees with say. One candidate was a staff member on a related panel.

Campaign aide Shawn McCoy announced the news on Twitter tonight, less than 24 hours before the Blumenthal and Linda McMahon are set to square off in a high stakes debate in Hartford.

McCoy declined to release any details, saying only that the video is from a different venue — not the Norwalk event that it uncovered last spring, the one where Blumenthal stated he served in Vietnam, even though he didn’t.

As the Connecticut race has narrowed to a razor-thin margin, it’s gotten increasingly ugly. The McMahon campaign bragged openly when it first planted the “Blumenthal is lying about his Vietnam service” meme with The New York Times, potentially undermining the effect of the story. Since then, Democrats have struck back at McMahon, zeroing in on her time as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and highlighting media reports that five former WWE wrestlers have died premature deaths since she declared her candidacy. Whether the candidates raise the issues in Hartford tonight will be an indication of the kind of campaign they plan to run down the home stretch.

The Times notes that few nonprofit groups, so far, have been more active during this election cycle than AJS, which spent $6 million on ads during the primaries and just indicated it’s paying close to $4 million more for ads directly attacking nine Democrats running for the House. The close ties between the group and a number of Republican operatives, combined with court documents obtained from a recent case against AJS in Alaska, however, raise some serious questions about whether the pro-jobs “issue advocacy group” is in fact anything more than a funnel for conservative donors looking to spend money anonymously on pet political causes and races:

The group’s Republican connections begin with location: While its public address is a drop box at a United Parcel Service store in Alexandria, Va., [the group's president] Mr. DeMaura actually works out of space that is sublet from a Republican consulting shop, Crossroads Media, whose other clients include the national Republican Party, the Republican Governors Association and American Crossroads, a Karl Rove-backed group raising millions to support Republican candidates.

Crossroads Media is run by Michael Dubke and David Carney, who along with several business groups helped start Americans for Job Security in 1997. Mr. Carney had been political director for President George Bush, and Mr. Dubke was the first executive director and then president of Americans for Job Security until April 2008, when Mr. DeMaura, recruited by Mr. Carney, took over.

Despite these well established ties, Stephen DeMaura (who is 25 and listed as the sole employee of AJS!) claims that all the calls the group makes about its multimillion dollar ad campaigns are made by him and him alone:

According to testimony in the Alaska case, the board meets once every two years, and there are no committees or written policies shaping decisions about ad campaigns. Mr. DeMaura said he made those calls. He disputed suggestions that he was influenced by the consultants with whom he shares an office.

“I work with them closely on a day-to-day basis, but we don’t discuss our work or coordinate anything,” he said. “It’s firewalled off.”

Meanwhile, AJS calls itself a business league and avoids all disclosure by reporting its contributions as “membership dues,” but a Times’ review of the group’s tax returns “shows membership revenue fluctuating wildly depending on election cycles — similar to the fund-raising of political committees that escalates during campaign season”:

“Membership dues and assessments” totaled $7 million in the 2004 presidential election, and dipped to $1.2 million the following year before climbing back to $3.9 million for the 2006 midterm elections. Then, in 2007, they plunged to zero before shooting up to $12.2 million for the 2008 presidential race.

Asked how it could have collected no dues in 2007, neither Mr. Dubke nor Mr. DeMaura offered an answer. Mr. DeMaura said that there is no set membership fee and that members are not required to pay annually.

“They can if they want,” he said.

AJS is perhaps the most egregious example of the phenomenon of political groups misrepresenting themselves on their tax filings in order to evade campaign finance regulations. But when the citizen watchdog group Public Citizen filed a complaint against the group in 2007, it never heard back from the IRS and an investigation recommended by FEC staff members was killed by its three GOP commissioners, who deadlocked the commission by voting against the idea.

With groups like AJS operating with total impunity, it’s no wonder that more and more similar outfits are following its lead this campaign cycle by registering as 501 nonprofit groups and then denying that any of its contributions were made with the express purpose of furthering its electioneering activities.