Rep. Steve King (R-IA) announced last night that President Obama “threw the first punch” at the “honorable” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) who had no choice but to fight back by calling the president a liar. King’s comments were made at a reception featuring Lou Dobbs and hosted by the nativist hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as part of their “Hold Their Feet To The Fire” annual anti-immigration lobbying campaign:

A lot of us said this health care bill is going to fund illegals. And the President said “prominent politicians are lying to you”…Well, it turns out that the Senate is going to fix the language in the health care bill to require proof of citizenship.

And a real good sign is, Luis Gutierrez — the number-one amnesty leader in the United States Congress is really ticked off at his friend and neighbor President Obama because his hope for amnesty in the health care bill is going down because of who? Joe Wilson. God bless Joe. He said what we were thinking and I don’t think there’s ever been a President who comes to the House of Representatives as a guest of the members of the House and made a declaration like he did. I mean, the President threw the first punch…Joe’s a man of honor. He’s an officer and a gentleman and he’s a patriot. And he loves and respects the Constitution and this country.

Watch it:

The President actually said:

“Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost…There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

Undocumented immigrants were and still are excluded from both the House and Senate health care bills. Obama didn’t name names, but Wilson, King, and other Joe-Wilson-apologists have made it abundantly clear what side of the aisle the bogus claims are coming from. In a press call today, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) indicated that he “accept[ed] legislation that prohibited access to taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for undocumented immigrants” weeks before Obama’s speech. However, he is upset with the president not because he blocked amnesty, but rather, because the White House has proposed denying undocumented immigrants “non-government access to health care that they can use their own dollars to purchase.”

The Smithsonian Institution later acknowledged that it “made in error” in letting a hate group rent its facilities at the National Postal Museum to host the event that King spoke at.

Last fall, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a report on Iran entitled Meeting the Challenge, the work of an independent task force co-chaired by former Senators Dan Coats and Charles Robb. The report asserted that a nuclear weapons-capable Iran posed unacceptable risks to the United States, and that if talks and sanctions failed to deter Iran from that path — as the report clearly assumed they would — then the U.S. should be prepared to seek a military solution. As Ilan Goldenberg noted at the time, the project’s “bipartisan” nature was somewhat questionable, given the heavy emphasis on military action as well as the involvement of neocons Michael Rubin and Michael Makovsky. The strategy advocated in the report, Ilan wrote, “would escalate U.S.-Iran tensions and pretty much guarantee that any direct talks would fail.”

So it is with the BPC’s updated report, released yesterday and subtitled Time is Running Out (pdf). While assuring us that they support the Obama administration’s policy of engagement, the authors reassert the unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability, and advocate the preparation of harsh sanctions, as well a military option:

If by the end of 2009, the United Nations and European Union do not impose significant, binding sanctions, or if they do but Tehran does not demonstrate substantive progress and cooperation in reversing its policy on nuclear development, then we believe the Obama Administration should elevate consideration of the military option. In this regard it is necessary to make clear that the U.S. military is more than capable of launching a devastating attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities than either Iranian officials or many journalists realize.

Speaking at the report’s release yesterday on Capitol Hill, (introduced by Senators John Kyl and Joe Lieberman, with Evan Bayh a last minute no-show) Gen. (ret) Charles Wald reiterated points he had made in a previous op-ed, saying that it was important to publicly “think through scenarios for kinetic action,” in order to prove to Iran that the U.S. was “serious” about the use of the military option, if it should come to that.

I asked Gen. Wald whether the fact that the U.S. has, within the last eight years, invaded and occupied countries on either side of Iran, and maintains a sizable military presence in both places, wasn’t a pretty fair demonstration of “seriousness” (if not good judgment)? Iran must know that we maintain a pretty robust air strike capability — something Wald acknowledged — so why the need to rattle the saber?

“It’s a question of will,” Wald replied. Iran may know that we have the capability to strike, but they need to be made to believe that we will do it.

Leaving aside whether we actually will, or should, do it, an obvious problem here, one that the report does not address, is the possibility, even the likelihood, that making a lot of noise about war with Iran while simultaneously engaged in talks to avoid war with Iran could convince the Iranians that we’re intent on making war on Iran. And Iranians don’t have to look very far back to see almost this exact scenario played out in regard to Iraq, as the Bush administration pretended to be interested in letting inspections work even as it built public support for a war that it had in fact already decided to wage.

This bit from the report is also worth highlighting:

Although technically an act of war, the White House might consider first placing a naval blockade to cut off Iran’s importation of gasoline, before resorting to a military strike. If the Islamic Republic persists in its nuclear ambitions, the Pentagon could initiate air strikes targeting key military and nuclear installations, although not civilian facilities, without initially involving ground troops beyond Special Forces. While a successful bombing campaign would set back Iranian nuclear development, Tehran would clearly retain its nuclear know-how. It would also necessitate years of continued vigilance, both to retain the ability to strike previously undiscovered sites and to ensure that Iran does not revive its military nuclear program.

And that’s the best-case scenario.

I also doubt Iran would be inclined to make the sort of distinction between “technical” and “actual” acts of war that the report proposes. But, of course, when they treat the blockade as an actual act of war — which it is — that can be used as proof that the Iranians want war. What could possibly go wrong?

Reached for comment, Richard Parker of the progressive American Foreign Policy project — which released its own report (pdf) on Iran earlier this year — said that “No one should approach talks with Iran with a naive belief that they are sure to succeed and with no contingency plan should they fail. But that’s not the same thing as openly predicting failure and ostentatiously planning for conflict before talks have even begun. The latter is bad faith. It’s a transparent effort at intimidation that looks very much like an ultimatum. And it will backfire.”

“‘Belligerent negotiation,’” said Parker, “is a self-defeating strategy on every level.”

Earlier this week, the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle claimed that because most undocumented workers are “really, really poor,” it doesn’t make economic sense to extend health benefits to them as Newsweek’s Andrew Romano and others have suggested. In the interest of preserving health care reform, including undocumented immigrants in health care reform is totally off the table and hardly anyone is suggesting that it shouldn’t be. But it’s worth taking the time to challenge McArdle’s final assertion because the points that prove she is fundamentally wrong also help make the case for extending benefits to “really, really poor” legal immigrants — who are also in danger of “being thrown under the bus.”

McArdle argues that “illegal immigrants really don’t have a lot of money to shell out in premiums,” so adding them to the pool only lowers the average, but not the total cost of health care. “It still costs you extra money to care for each undocumented worker,” explains McArdle. She also adds that since most employers already hire undocumented immigrants “off the books,” then “adding a requirement that they pay imaginary health insurance…will probably not much faze them.” All of this leads McArdle to conclude, “this is not all that likely to be a net fiscal benefit.”

McArdle’s final analysis might prove true in the short-term, but in the long-run it’s deeply flawed. Any investment in preventive care services will ultimately help control health care costs by successfully preventing and managing expensive chronic conditions. This is especially true for uninsured immigrants (along with anyone else who can’t afford health care) who end up going to the hospital as a last resort on the taxpayer’s dime. More simply put, “society already pays the price for treating them. But it pays in the least efficient way.”

Even if McArdle’s assumptions prove correct, it’s still unclear whether the benefits that come from not covering undocumented immigrants and restricting coverage for legal immigrants will offset the costs. Citizenship verification mechanisms can be extremely expensive to implement, and often block more eligible citizens than ineligible immigrants. In the case of Medicaid, documentation requirements used to prove eligibility caused thousands of eligible US citizens to lose Medicaid coverage without saving taxpayers any money: for every $100 spent by taxpayers to implement documentation requirements in six states, only 14 cents were saved. And while employers who continue to hire and pay undocumented immigrants under the table would remain unfazed if undocumented immigrants were included in health care reform, between one-half and three-quarters of undocumented immigrants work “on the books,” according to the Immigration Policy Center. McArdle also overlooks the fact that excluding undocumented immigrants will likely make them more attractive as a source of even cheaper labor.

Ultimately, undocumented immigrants won’t receive benefits under the House and Senate health care bills, no matter how many humanitarian and practical arguments are made in favor of it. While including undocumented immigrants may spell legislative doom and political suicide, excluding legal immigrants from certain provisions is both a political liability and bad policy. TheSome believe the proposal released by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) today denies potentially denies individuals living below the poverty line access to state exchanges and tax credits based on the assumption that they already qualify for Medicaid coverage. There is no mention of what will happen to legal permanent residents who are barred from accessing Medicaid during their first five years in the US, though it seems unlikely their situation will change. Eric Rodriguez of National Council of La Raza points out that there is also a possibility that tax credits that will make health care affordable will be applied differently to legal immigrant households. Legal immigrants who aren’t already voters could be in the future — and their numbers are rapidly growing. It may seem convenient to ignore them now, but they won’t forget it in the elections to come.

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