Scott Spiegel

The best conservative argument for the United States is the teeming, swarming multitudes of foreigners from every continent except Antarctica falling all over themselves to get here, make something of themselves, and call the U.S. their home.  Why are we turning them away?

Last week Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed unconstitutional legislation requiring state police to shake down brown people in the hopes of catching illegal immigrants, and threatening lawsuits against police departments that aren’t sufficiently paranoid in their enforcement of said law.

The Senate will be introducing immigration reform legislation soon, if they can decide whether or not it’s more important to destroy industrial production via cap-and-tax legislation first.

It’s time to calm the hysteria, put aside the pitchforks, and break down the argument for immigration into its fundamental components:

•    Immigration is an action that, like owning firearms or taking illegal drugs, does not inherently harm anyone else.

•    Immigration can incur penalties for crimes associated with it, rather than the action itself; for example, some immigrants may become involved with gangs, just as some gun owners may accidentally shoot family members or some drug users may commit violent crimes due to lack of self-control.

•    Immigration can have reasonable limits placed on it without restricting its practice among the law-abiding; for example: no immigration for those with criminal records, just like no gun ownership for dangerous felons and no selling drugs to minors.

•    Immigration can also incur separate penalties for mere commission—e.g., crossing the border illegally without having committed any other felony.

So reasonable limits are reasonable.  Penalties for crimes associated with immigration should be reserved for the crimes themselves.

But penalties for illegal actions that shouldn’t be illegal have no business being on the books.

The right to immigrate to the U.S. should be protected like other rights.  Why?

This country was the first to be founded on an abstract principle: the right to liberty.  We’ve accepted a greater percentage of immigrants by population than any other nation in history.  This country is basically nothing but immigrants.

If we mean what we say about liberty, we shouldn’t restrict the right to live and flourish in the U.S. to those fortunate enough to have been born here.

There are plenty of people around the world who hate this country—out of religious ideology or cultural snobbery, for example—and plenty more who would not find it convenient or desirable to pack up their families and move here.  But all those who are willing to migrate here on their own dime, swear to uphold this country’s ideals, assimilate to its cultural traditions, and work to make their own way should be allowed to stay.

Some might warn that half the world could end up living here.  So what?  There’s plenty of room in this country for half the world.

Despite the crowding of its urban centers (like urban centers everywhere—like the whole point of urban centers), the United States is a vastly underpopulated wilderness on the order of Australia, Canada, or Russia.  Hundreds of millions of square miles of federally protected and unprotected land just sit there in the middle of nowhere, screaming out for strip mining, commercial development, and planned communities.  Tumbleweeds drift across limitless swaths of desert where there could be technology companies instead.  In Alaska caribou enjoy more acres per capita than residents of Kansas.

We already allow a relatively select set of immigrants into this country, though we make them waste years of their lives and productive energy waiting in line to get here—and even then they’re not guaranteed a spot.  Quotas are implemented by ethnic origin, creating competition and resentment among racial groups.  Conservatives who oppose affirmative action and the left’s penchant for ethnic balkanization should be appalled by the nature of such restrictions.

Cubans who are able to escape their repressive regime and make it to Florida’s shores are given asylum and allowed to stay, because they were unfortunate enough to have been born where they were.  Mexicans don’t have it as bad as Cubans in their native countries, but if Mexicans don’t make it here and Cubans do, then Cubans end up the lucky ones.  A freedom-seeking Mexican might very well wonder whether he would have been better off being born in Cuba, so he could have had the chance to escape to the U.S.  What’s sensible about an immigration policy that encourages victimhood?

An additional consequence of our immigration policy—not a fundamental argument for open immigration, but a devastating side effect of our current law—is the breaking up of families that occurs when illegals are captured and shipped back home, which is hardly a strategy that supports conservative family values.

Don’t mistake me: it’s still all about what’s best for this nation—which means that doctors, engineers, and physicists from countries not on the asylum list who want to bring their talents here should be processed first, even if they come from a country where political circumstances don’t happen to be rough enough for the INS’s taste.

I am aware that the Obamas and Pelosis of the world are not pushing for open immigration because they believe so strongly in the value of liberty—these are the same people who just passed the health care spending bill with its individual mandate, after all—but rather because they hope to build a permanent new coalition of loyal Democratic voters.  And no—Arizona’s law is not the equivalent of apartheid in South Africa or the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, and Arizona has not become Nazi Germany.

I have no problem with racial profiling of Muslim-looking young men during airport screenings.  We are at war with Islamic, terrorist-sponsoring regimes that use almost exclusively actors who fit this profile to carry out their attacks.  The nation’s security comes first.

We are not at war with Mexican day laborers who want to move here and start construction businesses.



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As the Senate gears up to introduce its version of the House’s cap-and-trade global warming legislation next week, it’s instructive to consider the impact of myriad geological, meteorological, and astronomic effects on climate change, as exhaustively chronicled in Australian scientist Ian Plimer’s essential new book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming: The Missing Science.

Plimer’s book, published last year, boasts 2,000 footnotes from an array of sources including top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Research Letters; journals on solar physics, hydrological science, and glaciology; books on climate change, environmentalism, and the history of science; and research by dozens of climate change skeptics.  Plimer also dissects the various contradictory iterations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports.

His evaluation of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?  Pure, unadulterated waffle.

If “agnostic” is to “atheist” what “skeptic” is to “denier,” then Plimer would happily plant himself in the denier camp.

Plimer demolishes AGW by broadening the scientific timeline under consideration to incorporate thousands, at times millions, of years to show how climate has been changing through hot and cold swings much wider than anything we’ve seen in recent centuries, and all in the absence of disposable Starbucks cups.

In graph after graph, Plimer depicts the cyclical effects of sunspots, glaciation, tilts in the earth’s orbit, ocean currents, CO2 reabsorption by the oceans, plate tectonics, clouds, and volcanic eruptions on global temperature.  He covers the Medieval Warming period from 900 to 1300 AD, which was warmer than today, and points out the vastly higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere during previous Ice Ages.  He details the beneficial effects that warmer periods historically have had on crop growth, species survival, and human longevity.  He documents the inadequacy and inconsistency of land temperature measurements, relative to satellite measurements, the latter of which show global cooling.  He notes the utter failure of any global warming model to correctly predict that the earth would start cooling in 1998.

Plimer mentions Al Gore’s camp classic An Inconvenient Truth, and cites a British court’s 2007 ruling that there are nine major factual errors in the movie, and that in order to be shown in public classrooms the film has to be accompanied by a written manual and teacher instruction to correct all of the alarmist falsehoods.  One of the nine gaffes is the movie’s failure to note that CO2 emissions have not been shown to cause temperature increases, but rather have historically lagged behind temperature increases.  That’s right—a British court actually ruled that there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions, human or otherwise, cause or even precede temperature increases—only that they lag slightly behind.

And Plimer’s book was published before last November’s Climategate, in which a whistleblower in the UK publicly exposed researchers from one of the three leading climate data collection centers in the world as having evaded Freedom of Information requests, colluded to keep skeptics’ research from being published, and failed to be able to reconstruct tortuous data manipulations they had applied in order to generate the conclusions they wanted.

Lest closed-minded warmists dismiss Plimer as a religious, right-wing knuckle-dragger, Plimer has also authored books deconstructing the scientific case for creationism, and has received criticism from conservatives for this line of work.

Plimer’s thesis also happens to be perfectly embodied by last week’s historic volcano eruption in Iceland.  The eruption at Eyjafjallajökull, whose name is almost as long and complicated as the House’s cap-and-trade bill, left Europe covered in clouds of dark ash and shut down virtually all air transportation across the continent.

In his book, Plimer delineates the historic effects of volcanic activity on climate.  For example, in just a few days, a major volcano can spew more CO2, dust, and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere than humans can in a year.  Yet significant volcanic eruptions typically lead to years-long drops in temperature, due to the extra cloud cover and solar reflection they create, which means that skiing in St. Moritz should be lovely this winter.

Last year the Australian parliament considered and, in large part thanks to the efforts of Plimer and other skeptics, narrowly rejected a cap-and-trade scheme that would have crippled the continent’s energy production systems.

Due to U.S. Congressional Democrats’ politically suicidal stubbornness, cap-and-trade is evidently going to be this year’s health care reform.

To reiterate the point crystallized in Plimer’s book: if there’s so much uncertainty regarding whether human carbon dioxide emissions have any measurable influence on temperature increases, and a greater probability that temperature increases are beneficial than harmful, why are we rushing to shoot the world’s greatest economies in the foot?

Molecular biologist Henry Miller wrote in Forbes last week, “Every schoolchild these days seems to be a devoted environmentalist, able to spell ‘sustainable’ before ‘dog.’  However, much of the indoctrination about environmentalism—especially in schools—is of the passion-is-more-important-than-fact variety…  Too often the objective of student projects seems to be ‘empowering’ the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right answer and learning scientific principles.”  In other words, the first step to “empowerment” in the natural world is learning what you can and can’t change through being empowered.  It seems many adults have yet to learn that lesson.

Though I regret the disruption caused by Eyjafjallajökull to Western Europe’s economies (such as they are), I have to chuckle at the fact that terrible, wasteful, carbon dioxide-emitting air travel has been suspended throughout the sacred Continent of the Greens—and during the same week as Earth Day, at that.  I only wish it had happened right before the Copenhagen summit.



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When anticipating Obama’s upcoming nomination to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, there are two approaches conservatives might consider taking:

Hope that Obama nominates the most conservative candidate in case he gets confirmed;

Hope that Obama nominates the most liberal candidate to highlight Obama’s radical ideology and make it easier for Republicans to reject her.

Relatively speaking, the most conservative candidate on Obama’s short list is D.C. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland.  The most liberal is Seventh Circuit Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood.

The problem with hoping for a moderate candidate is that anyone Obama is dreaming of nominating would be a disaster regarding adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Constitution.

The problem with hoping for a leftist candidate is that we cannot rely on Republican Senators to be courageous enough to block even the most egregious Obama nominee—even after the Democrats just declared war by passing a bill taking over the country’s health care system without a single Republican vote.

Given their dismal failure last summer to stand up to Our Wise Latina Sonia Sotomayor’s incendiary record (typical GOP critique during her confirmation hearings: Lindsey Graham’s creepy, drooling paean, “I like you!”), Republicans cannot be counted on to offer meaningful opposition to whichever train wreck Obama picks this year.

Tragically, this whole process should be a cakewalk for Republicans.  America is still a center-right country; the type of crowd Obama hangs out with is, to put it mildly, not.

Yet the New York Times tried to bully conservatives over the weekend in a story titled “G.O.P. Weighs Political Price of Court Fight.”  In the Times’ version of the story, it’s all about the Republicans—not President Obama, not any of his potential nominees—but the stubborn GOP and whether they still want to be seen as the petulant, spoiled party of “No, I don’t want to eat my peas!  I don’t care if they’re good for me!”

The Times opened their story thus: “The retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens presents a test for Republicans as much as it does for President Obama as they weigh how much they want to wage a high-profile battle over ideological issues in the months before crucial midterm elections.”

This is like saying, “The approach of dinnertime presents a test for Mom as she weighs how much she wants to wage a battle over nutritional issues in the hours before the family gets home.”  When is she supposed to worry about nutritional issues—after her children leave home?

When are Senators supposed to worry about ideological issues surrounding a Supreme Court nominee—after the candidate retires?

As congressman Mike Pence noted, depending on the progress of lawsuits filed against Obamacare by 14 state Attorneys General, the Supreme Court will likely rule on “whether the federal government has the power to compel Americans to purchase health insurance…  Now is the time to have a thorough debate over the course and direction of the court.”

This, of course, would require Republicans to insist that Obama’s nominee answer questions about whether the health care bill’s individual mandate requiring citizens to buy private sector insurance is constitutional.  Fat chance of the GOP squeezing a substantial answer out of any Obama nominee on that subject in confirmation hearings this summer.

When Republicans aren’t being encouraged to avoid discussing issues relevant to the confirmation process, they are urged to avoid being… political.

According to Senator John Cornyn, who had a spine during the fight over the health care bill last year, “We need to probably bend over backwards both in appearance and in reality to give the nominee a fair process.”  You mean like the fair process Democrats magnanimously tendered in ramming through ObamaCare?

The honor of being nakedly partisan is apparently reserved for the left: see, for example, Senator Charles Schumer’s recent statement, “One of the most important qualities for the new justice is the ability to win over Justice Kennedy…  Somebody who’s going to be one of the five and not one of the four.”  No thoughtful discussion of judicial philosophy lurking there!

So Republicans shouldn’t be ideological and we shouldn’t be political in considering Obama’s nominee.  Can we at least have a toss of the dice, or do we have to just roll over and play dead now?

I gather no comfort from the tough talk of Senators like Orrin Hatch, who promises “a whale of a fight” if Obama nominates a liberal activist, or Mitch McConnell, who insists that Republicans will demand a justice who gives “an evenhanded reading of the law.”  Whether these few principled leaders are willing to vote down or filibuster a nominee, too many Republican senators will not be.

My advice to Democrats and Republicans: Oh, just do whatever the hell you’re going to do anyway.

You will be held accountable—on both sides of the aisle—on Election Day.

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Over the weekend a poor lithium battery plant worker from South Carolina named Doris stumbled into a bear trap we’ll call “Obama in a contemplative yet incoherent, feisty yet expansive mood.”

Dear Doris asked Obama a question and was hit with a 2,600-word, 17-minute onslaught that makes any rambling reply Sarah Palin supposedly ever gave seem like the soul of brevity.

To be fair, Doris had placed a tall order: she had asked Obama to sell her on the recently passed health care overhaul legislation via a diatribe that rehashed the history of Medicare, trotted out charges against Bush, and stopped along the way for an analogy involving leaky roofs.

Oh wait—she didn’t; that was what she got.  She asked Obama whether raising taxes in a recession was a good idea.

A prickly Obama jumped in and implied that Doris and millions of other Americans who had been reading about the health care legislation over the past twelve months were badly misinformed, easily misled by huckster politicians, and quite possibly morons.

He launched into one of several internally and externally redundant lists cataloging the reasons for health care reform (which was not Doris’s question).  In a vastly condensed nutshell:

List 1, Point 1: Some people don’t have health insurance.

L1, P2: Some people with health insurance might not have it in the future.

L1, P3: Sometimes insurance companies operate according to the profit motive and fail to chase down policyholders to shower them with free money they don’t have coming to them.

L1, P4: Health care is expensive.

Obama then lamented how all government-instituted health insurance programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP, are running out of money, which means that we need: more government intervention!

Obama embarked on another list explaining what provisions the health care overhaul bill contains (again, not Doris’s question):

L2, P1: Everybody will get coverage.

L2, P2: We will drive insurance companies out of business—which will really improve the chances that they will pay consumers’ claims!

L2, P3: We will get rid of excess, waste, and overload in Medicare (at which point the thinking half of the audience wondered how Obama would accomplish this when he couldn’t even get rid of excess, waste, and overload in his response).

Obama repeated Republicans’ objection that adding 30 million Americans to the insurance rolls might require some sacrifice and would not reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars as claimed—an argument he promptly shot down as the addle-headed straw man it obviously is.

To do this, he told a story about some people living in a house with a leaky roof that dripped water into some of the rooms, and explained why the people in the rooms without leaks would be better off if the government forced them to pay for the leaks in the other rooms.

Missing from his analogy were the caveats that random strangers don’t involuntarily live under the same roof, fixing one person’s leaky roof does not increase the quality of life for someone without a leaky roof, and the government is not a mortgage holder empowered to make these decisions for residents.  But give him points for creativity, I guess.

List time again—this one involving how the administration was going to pay for the health care overhaul:

L3, P1: We will get rid of excess, waste, and overload (see L2, P3).

L3, P2: We will increase taxes.

Finally!  Obama arrived in the same ballpark as Doris’s question.

Obama then noted that Doris pays Medicare taxes but Warren Buffet doesn’t—ignoring the fact that Warren Buffet doesn’t want or need Medicare.  (Doris might not either, but let’s assume for the moment that she does.)

The President proposed that we tax, for the sake of fairness, individuals making over $200,000 or couples making over $250,000 a year—you know, Warren Buffet, basically—an exorbitant amount for services they probably don’t want or need.

He did not address the tax—sorry, “fine”—to be levied on citizens who do not comply with the individual mandate to purchase government-approved health insurance, which is presumably what Doris was alluding to in her question.

Obama closed with a litany of campaign-style talking points: he mentioned for the 1.3 trillionth time that he had inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit; condemned the cost of the prescription drug plan and Medicare Part D; bashed the Iraq war and the Bush tax cuts; bemoaned mounting credit card and home loan debt; cited the stimulus bill and something called FMAP; referenced PAYGO and earmarks and… ugh, I can’t take it anymore.

One wonders what Doris did to deserve the karmic retribution of such a longwinded, tortuous answer, or why Obama decided to inflict it upon her.  Perhaps he was using an innocent victim to try to compensate for twelve months of failing to take a leadership role in pushing his bill through Congress or allay constituents’ concerns about its costs.

If Obama is still going around giving a 17-minute apologia for a fundamental point of the bill he claims Americans are clamoring for but just don’t realize yet, he’s going to have an awfully hard time changing anyone’s mind on his whirlwind national health care snake oil tour.



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