Yesterday, Neil Cavuto hosted Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to talk about a new Department of Labor initiative, “We Can Help!,” aimed at expanding its effort to enforce wage and hour rules by encouraging low-wage and immigrant workers to turn in employers who are shortchanging their pay. According to Cavuto and his guest, protecting unauthorized workers from wage theft is “bizarre” and “just weird”:

CAVUTO: They’re raiding a work site in this case — and when they say they’re the good guys, they’re telling the illegals on that given site, we’re the good guys and we’re not going to deport you, we’re actually going after the guy who hired you. And if you have been paid a fraction of what you should’ve gotten paid, then we’re going to correct that. Now that gets bizarre. [...]

STEIN: What we have is an administration that’s positioning itself for a big amnesty program. And they don’t want to deport anybody unless they’re like a serial murder or a rapist or a terrorist . Everybody else they’re saying should be allowed to stay. And that’s why they’re setting up these programs that are sending conflicting signals and are making us — the American taxpayer — feel like our government is incoherent.

CAVUTO: It’s just weird, it’s just weird.

Watch it:

Protecting undocumented workers from exploitation isn’t absurd, it’s enforcing the law. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) points out that, “Federal courts and state and federal agencies have consistently held that core labor standards, including the right to organize, to a minimum wage, and to protection from discrimination, cover all workers, regardless of immigration status.”

Cavuto and Stein take the simplistic view that making sure undocumented immigrants are paid a decent wage rewards illegal behavior. However, they fail to note that shortchanging unauthorized workers hurts everyone who is employed in the given industry where the exploitation is taking place. Unscrupulous employers who hire and abuse undocumented labor drive down wages and working conditions for all the Americans who work alongside them. They also put honest businesses who want to abide by immigration and labor laws in a position in which they are forced to compete on an uneven playing field. In De Canas v. Bica, the Supreme Court itself recognized that “acceptance by illegal aliens of jobs on substandard terms as to wages and working conditions can seriously depress wage scales and working conditions of citizens and legally admitted aliens; and employment of illegal aliens under such conditions can diminish the effectiveness of labor unions.”

Contrary to what Stein implies, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis’ job is to guard the welfare of the American worker. She can’t fix or enforce the nation’s immigration laws, but her new program does seek to at least remedy some of the negative effects of the broken immigration system. In the end, “We Can Help!” doesn’t specifically target immigrant workers, rather, it’s aimed at improving the low-wage sectors in which many of them work.

Finally, deportations under President Obama have actually increased by 5 percent. Though administration officials have promised that their focus would be on deporting the “worst of the worst,” two-thirds of the 387,790 deported immigrants in fiscal year 2009 were non-criminals — much to the dismay of immigration advocates.

One issue we didn’t hear very much of during the 2008 Presidential campaign was nuclear policy, largely because both Senators Obama and McCain almost entirely agreed with each other. In fact, McCain called for dramatic nuclear cuts, a new START treaty, and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

At the University of Denver in May 2008, John McCain laid out his nuclear policy in a speech that could have just as easily been given by President Obama:

the Cold War ended almost 20 years ago, and the time has come to take further measures to reduce dramatically the number of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. It’s time for the United States to show the kind of leadership the world expects from us, in the tradition of American presidents who worked to reduce the nuclear threat to mankind.

Based off his comments in 2008, one would expect John McCain to be largely supportive of the Nuclear Posture Review and the New START treaty. But this is 2010 and McCain is doing some serious backtracking on his once mavericky forward-looking approach to nuclear weapons.

McCain it seems has joined forces with nuclear weapons-hugger Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in criticizing Obama’s nuclear efforts. In February, McCain signed on to a letter with Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman, which held that the three would oppose the treaty if the Russians issue an entirely symbolic unilateral statement on missile defense. Such a stance is merely a smokescreen to disguise opposition to the treaty, since a unilateral signing statement would have no practical impact whatsoever, as the Russians could withdraw from the treaty with or without ever having issued a statement. McCain’s new skepticism contradicts his past stance as an advocate of getting a new START agreement. McCain said in 2008:

We should be able to agree with Russia on binding verification measures based on those currently in effect under the START Agreement, to enhance confidence and transparency.

McCain’s vote may be critical to the ratification of New START in the Senate and his new stance is a significant reversal that may delay ratification, at least until after the Arizona primary in August.

Now McCain is attacking the just released Nuclear Posture Review. Yesterday, McCain jointly issued a statement with Kyl that criticizes a nuclear posture review, that as Marc Ambinder noted, doesn’t have “all that much that Republicans can complain about.” Despite the fact that the Obama administration has already pledged massive increases in funding for the nuclear infrastructure, the statement raises concerns about the state of the nuclear arsenal and demands even more nuclear pork be lavished on the labs:

Moreover, the amount of money committed to this in the FY11-15 budget window – the $5 billion budget transfer referenced by Defense Secretary Gates, spread over five years – is woefully inadequate.

Funny that in an entire speech on nuclear weapons in 2008, McCain never mentioned his concern over the state of the nuclear arsenal, despite the Bush administration was funding our nuclear infrastructure at much lower levels. As Ambinder points out:

No one would have anticipated that the administration would be spending a billion dollars a year to modernize its stockpile. The folks who actually do this stuff requested more money, and they got it — a lot more.

Furthermore, while McCain, as did Obama, pledged to maintain the nuclear force during the campaign, he didn’t state his support for building new nuclear warheads in his 2008 nuclear weapons policy speech. But this seems to be one of the main demands of Kyl and may shape up to be the issue that Republicans will try to make Obama cave on in exchange for supporting the treaty. Building new warheads, essentially building new nuclear weapons, is both completely unneccessary and would be widely seen as the US backing off its disarmament commitments – commitments that the McCain of 2008 firmly supported.

Yesterday, the Obama administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a congressionally-mandated report that outlines the administration’s nuclear strategy and nuclear arsenal policy. The new strategy, which did not contain any radical changes to previous administration’s policies, took a “middle course” and “keeps first-strike strategy.”

The Wonk Room’s Max Bergmann noted yesterday that the right-wing freak out had already begun before any real details emerged from the new NPR. Now that the details are known, many conservatives are completely misrepresenting them. Led by the Drudge Report, the new talking point is that the U.S. will refuse to retaliate against a chemical or biological attack with a nuclear strike. To wit:

JOHN BOLTON: But it’s a big mistake because it basically says that for countries that have biological and chemical warfare capabilities, the Obama administration is not prepared to use nuclear weapons in retaliation.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Let me tell you one scenario they brought up exclusively, and that is if the United States is attacked by a country with a biologic or chemical weapons…the White House lawyers would ascertain if that country is in compliance with the NPT. … If it is, if it is kept up with the IAEA inspections, it gets immunity from the massive nuclear retaliation.

RALPH PETERS: [M]ost worrisome is the public declaration that, if the US suffers a biological, chemical or massive cyber attack, we will not respond with nukes.

“If there was a biological attack, which killed over a million Americans, is this president really saying we would not retaliate?” Newt Gingrich asked last night on Fox News. “That’s what he said,” host Sean Hannity replied. “I agree. It’s what he said,” Gingrich said. Watch the compilation:

First, nowhere in the NPR does it say that the U.S. will not “retaliate” against a chemical or biological attack. Of course, the U.S. reserves the right to act militarily in self-defense if attacked. Apparently, some conservatives, like Krauthammer, don’t seem to have confidence in the capabilities of American conventional forces to effectively retaliate. Instead, they would seemingly prefer keeping the option of outright annihilation against anyone on the table. Are conventional forces “a credible threat [of deterrence]?” Krauthammer asked. “Who knows,” he said.

Moreover, neither Obama nor the strategy itself said the U.S. won’t use nuclear weapons in the event of a chem/bio attack against a country that is violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. In fact, while the NPR “narrow[s] the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons,” the President specifically stated that there are exceptions for “outliers like Iran and North Korea.”

Even former Bush administration Homeland Security official Fran Townsend refused to advance the right’s new false NPR talking point. “I think it is smart to actually explicitly articulate that the primary concern here right now…is the control of nuclear materials and preventing nuclear terrorism,” she said. Moreover, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said he “wholly endorses” the new NPR.

David Ignatius reports that President Obama is “‘seriously considering’ proposing an American peace plan to resolve the Palestinian conflict, according to two top administration officials”:

“Everyone knows the basic outlines of a peace deal,” said one of the senior officials, citing the agreement that was nearly reached at Camp David in 2000 and in subsequent negotiations. He said that an American plan, if launched, would build upon past progress on such issues as borders, the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. The second senior official said that “90 percent of the map would look the same” as what has been agreed in previous bargaining.

The American peace plan would be linked with the issue of confronting Iran, which is Israel’s top priority, explained the second senior official. He described the issues as two halves of a single strategic problem: “We want to get the debate away from settlements and East Jerusalem and take it to a 30,000-feet level that can involve Jordan, Syria and other countries in the region,” as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.

Here again is an affirmation by the administration that the U.S.’s goals in the region are “linked.” While this idea is gaining acceptance among policymakers — largely because it’s so patently obviously true — it’s worth noting that that Dennis Ross and David Makovsky rejected the argument, or at least a strawman version of it, in their recent book. Ross is currently a special adviser to President Obama on the Middle East.

It’s also good to read this:

“Incrementalism hasn’t worked,” continued the second official, explaining that the United States cannot allow the Palestinian problem to keep festering — providing fodder for Iran and other extremists. “As a global power with global responsibilities, we have to do something.” He said the plan would “take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security and the requirements of Palestinian sovereignty in a way that makes sense.”

The experience of the last twenty years shows pretty clearly that incrementalism — a step-by-step process of “trust-building” — creates an an incentive for the building of more settlements that can then be cast by Israeli negotiators as huge “concessions” in the event that Israel agrees to give them up. It also creates opportunity for Palestinian extremists to use violence to frustrate the process at steps along the way.

One of the main challenges for President Obama’s attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the almost complete lack of a sense of urgency among the Israeli public for a peace deal. Having walled the Palestinians off in Gaza and the West Bank, and enjoying an economic boom, many Israelis are able to persist in the illusion that the status quo is sustainable. But, as the rising tensions in East Jerusalem should demonstrate, it’s not. Proposing its own plan, and getting Palestinian and Arab buy-in for it, would offer the Israeli public, and the Netanyahu government, a pretty stark choice.

The tendency in the past has been to move slowly on the peace process in times of relative calm, and hastily in moments of crisis and violence, and then, when the immediate crisis has passed, go back to baby steps. But, as Defense Secretary Gates and Gen. David Petraeus both recently made clear, the lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace generates difficulties for U.S. interests in the region, both in times of crisis and calm. The best way to avoid the next crisis is to move with urgency during a period of relative calm.