A decent respect for those that pay attention to these pages demands that I address the recent failed immigration bill.

Last year I marched down Wilshire Blvd in support of a sea change regarding our immigration policy.

My opinions haven’t changed. Peaceful people should be able to move across borders in order to find work. We already allow unfettered global movement of capital in order to find workers. Why do we assign these rights to artificial entities but deny them to real human beings?

Furthermore, the core values of our Constitution—the rights enshrined in that great document, and in the Declaration of Independence—precede its existence. They are rights that belong to all mankind. Our founding fathers did not invent them; they were simply wise enough to recognize and codify them in Law. These are rights—to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness—that are the inheritance of all mankind. I would not deny them to any who in good faith come to our country and try to claim them.

Nevertheless, I did not support the immigration reform bill that was rightfully killed in the Senate. And I did not march in the most recent rallies that hoped to support it.

That bill was hopelessly flawed, if for no other reason than that it would have given Citizenship to known, convicted felons. If good people should be rewarded wherever they are, then justice demands we punish the bad wherever they are as well. Peaceful people should be allowed; predators should be barred.

And that is the core issue: to allow or disallow, one must have the power to do so first. The bill, absent any real enforcement provisions, would not have been a reform of our borders (North and South), but an abdication of our responsibility for them. A wounded patient does not choose to bleed or not bleed, regardless of which is happening.

I still hope for real reform of our nation’s immigration system. One compatible with both our sovereign duties and our commitment to universal Liberty. Right now we just have a broken leg.

An astounding statistic via Reason’s Hit and Run: Since 1950—that’s five decades, now—Sweden’s private sector job growth has been precisely—wait for it—0%.

Sweden is very good at producing goods, but not at producing jobs. According to a recent study of 35 developed countries, only two had jobless growth: Sweden and Finland. Economic growth in Sweden in the last 25 years has had no correlation at all with labor-market participation. (In contrast, 1 percent of growth increases the number of jobs by 0.25 percent in Denmark, 0.5 percent in the United States and 0.6 percent in Spain.) Amazingly, not a single net job has been created in the private sector in Sweden since 1950.

(National Interest)

What that means is that every time a Bikini Girl position has appeared, one Swedish Chef has simultaneously become unemployed.

In honor of this incredible revelation, allow me to present some Ebba Gron, Sweden’s legendary, first, preeminent punk band. Staten och Kapitalet, their best known song, is actually a cover. Its breathless accusations of collusion between the State and Business are actually a pretty accurate description of the Swedish social model, just filtered through a bad attitude. And damn these shows look like they were fun.

So we are building a society on corporate principles
And teach ourselves to respect things that we don’t understand
And everyone will get their fair share of the growing abundance
Capital to the capitalists, and to the welfare recipients—welfare

Side by side, they help each other out
The state and the capitalists sit in the same boat
But they aren’t the one’s rowing
Rowing so the sweat is dripping
And the whip that tickles, doesn’t tickle their necks either

(Full lyrics)

What’s great is that this song has nuance to its thinking. Your stereotypical leftist punk band would have a song called, probably, Kapitalet och Kapitalet. Ebba rails against both corporations and the state. They realize that in their socialist society both sectors view human beings as mere economic units. They work together by central planning, and against individual freedom. In doing so, despite any good intentions, the result is dehumanization—people, citizens transform into “consumers” or “labor”—and they begin to serve corporations and the government, instead of the other way around.

I fulfilled a life-long ambition yesterday when I had the chance to vote for Richard Nixon!

Appearing on the ballot as “Attorney/Business Owner,” Richard A. Nixon is an obscure lawyer who apparently fancies himself as having a shot at election based on the familiar ring of his name. Richard M. Nixon was the nation’s 37th president and candidate Nixon has the e-mail address of “pres37th@aol.com.”

Works for me! Unfortunately, it looks like he’s lost Judge-Superior Court to the (of course) more telegenic, and, umm, apparently far more qualified, Davian L. Mitchell. Won’t have, kick around, etc., etc…

Woefully few of the pictures I took at this last Monday’s immigration reform march came out. I seriously underexposed one roll of film, and the other was marred by a lot of blur.

The march itself was amazing.

Wow, you know, this entry isn’t topical at all. I can’t believe I didn’t post it earlier. I was waiting to make a good entry—thoughtful, considered—it never happened.

John Reilly, who I read regularly, is an opponent of open immigration, and thinks our current policy (and the future one, supported by the Administration) is to the detriment of American society. He made an offhanded comment about the Republican party, and small business owners across the country, being okay with a permanent caste of alien workers taking over most of the low level jobs in this country. I have two problems with this idea: the first is that it doesn’t seem, to me, that this is a permanent caste we’re talking about. Pew Center research shows that Hispanics adopt English at the same rate those old, nostalgic, Ellis-island era immigrants did. The second problem I have is, these people are not aliens. They look, to my admittedly Southern Californian eyes, just like—just like normal people. And this was what was so amazing and inspiring about the Grand March last May: it was filled by normal people. People and families that you see on the street every single day. Not professional protesters, or the wackjobs that show up every time the WTO meets in an urban area. No. Normal, everyday, good, working people. People that just want to have better lives for themselves and their families—and that want those lives, very consciously, as Americans.

I thought I’d missed the boat as far as commenting on the recent cartoon riots, here at Angst Dei, but this weekend’s events in Nigeria have shown the intoonfada to have an unfortunately long set of legs.

It was hard to take these demonstrations seriously, at first; their very appellation, “cartoon riots,” makes referring to them with a straight face difficult. Nothing kills a joke faster than having to explain it; but the escalating violence and increasing body count demands a deadly serious explication of the origin of the comics and the original controversy—Time does this well in its most recent issue.

This cartoon gets better with every riot.

The most absurd thing is that the reaction of these Muslim mobs—the scores of dead—have turned what could, and should, have been dismissed as a petulant, reactionary, parodical line-drawing—Mohammed with a bomb as his turban—into an increasingly trenchant, incisive, and perceptive piece of agitprop. At least it feels that way.

The riots, the burnings, the deaths, have thrown into sharp relief once again the massive cultural divide between our free nations and the illiberal states infected with Islamicist ideology. The Danish government is absolutely correct in its assertion that it will not, and cannot, apologize for items printed in a privately owned newspaper. But this position is impossible to convey to human beings who have no concept of freedom of the press.

The important lesson to draw from these events is one many of us in the West have been loathe to learn. Our beliefs here in the United States, as enshrined in our great Constitution, have always had a universalist dimension to them; now, more than ever, we must realize that dimension explicitly. We have shied away from proselytization in the past, but we cannot do so any longer. In the era of instantaneous and common global communication, there are no local beliefs. When cartoons published in Denmark precipitate deaths in Nigeria we can no longer affect the fiction of cultural relativism; Nor can we pretend to isolation. Immanuel Kant’s maxim—that we should act the way we’d want the whole world to act—isn’t just a moral imperative anymore. It’s become a simple fact of life.

This may sound like a dumb question, but can anyone clue me into what, exactly, was the point of this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings?

Am I missing something? These hearings were supposed to be an opportunity to critically analyze Alito’s record and determine his fitness for office as a court justice—right? Information Senators would then use to vote on him. So what happened—a few days of bloviation, interrupted by occasional “no comments?” A process that will now be followed by a straight partisan vote?

Was there ever a time when the Senators actually used the confirmation process to consider the candidate? Where their opinion was actually swayable, and not simply tied to their party affiliation? Or has it always been like this? My experience is limited, and I’m honestly wondering.

I’m not saying there’s no confirmation process anymore. I just don’t think it happens in the Senate. It’s apparent to me that the decision on a nominee is made in the week following his or her announcement—on tv and the net, in magazines and newspapers. Not in the Senate. This is what happened with Harriet Miers. The world judged her inadequate, and her nomination was withdrawn. By the time a candidate—any candidate—gets to the Senate, it’s just a rubberstamp. Why does that stamp have to take a week?

—

Update: As if by magic!

Winning logic in a New York Times article about the recent Discovery launch and its ensuing trouble, Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own:

Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12

Sometimes you come across headlines that bear so little relation to the substance of the article they head that you wonder if the headline writers come from a parallel dimension. This seems to happen most often with political pieces, signaling to me that it may have something to do with the ideological fervency of a given editor. The cumulative effect of these bad headlines is a kind of “everything’s a-ok” reinforcement of the casual (i.e., skimming) readers’ worldview. For example:

I basically stopped paying attention to Rolling Stone after they published their hit piece on Eddie Vedder. My decision was confirmed after they crowned Britney Spears the top female in rock and roll.

Well, the otherwise execrable Rolling Stone turns out to have a thoughtful article on MoveOn.org posted just recently. You wouldn’t know it from the puff-piece headline, though:

The Online Insurgency
MoveOn has become a force to be reckoned with

The substance of the article turns out to be a thorough analysis of their efficacy, with a critical view of their stated aim to take over the Democratic party. The last paragraph is full of dot.commie references, but sums things up pretty well:

Like so many other Internet start-ups, MoveOn has raised —and burned through —tens of millions of dollars, innovating without producing many concrete results. Any reasonable analysis shows its stock may be dangerously overvalued. Those banking on MoveOn had better hope it is more Google than Pets.com. Because should the group flame out, the Democrats could be in for a fall of Nasdaq proportions.

Not much for me to argue with, here. My only questions are, what article did the Rolling Stone editors read? And while publishing thoughtful analysis like this is laudable, did the editors give this article the head (and subhead) they did because they figured most of their readership would—well, simply skip over the fine print?

Alright, maybe not. I think I was just in a dark mood last night.

If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend:

This Land on JibJab.com.