At the conclusion of a recent op-ed on California’s catatonically dysfunctional government, Dan Walters, dean of the Sacramento press corps, makes a memorable observation:

The much-vaunted checks and balances of the American system, designed by the nation’s founders who had revolted against a king and feared centralized power, create stasis in a society with as many rival factions as California has.

What may have worked in post-colonial, mono-cultural America doesn’t work very well in a postindustrial, multicultural state such as California, especially since we’ve added even more hurdles to decision-making, such as ballot measures and two-thirds votes.
(State’s government is designed to fail, by Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee, October 23, 2009)

Of course the Founders, in the classic words of jack-of-all-trades Founder John Jay, were working in hospitable conditions:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

VDARE’s Brenda Walker has distilled the same idea for our modern sensibilities:

We all prefer to be around others who speak our language, share our values and understand our jokes. Human community is based upon similarities, not differences. Wouldn’t it be better to develop public policy on the basis of human nature as it really is?

It’s worthwhile keeping any or all of these versions of this basic wisdom in mind for the occasions when your acquaintances utter the usual, mindless accolades to diversity. (To arm yourself at the equivalent of the PhD level in diversity realism, get Jared Taylor’s The Myth of Diversity under your belt.)

Interviewed on Lou Dobbs’s radio show yesterday (October 22, 2009), Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix metro area) acknowledged that the approximately 100 of his deputies who’ve been able to make immigration-status arrests on the street and initiate deportations under their 287(g) authority with the Department of Homeland Security have lost that authority. However, the deputies will still be making such arrests and, for arrestees not being held on state charges, bestowing their harvests of illegal aliens on the local ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) office. “We’ll see what happens,” Arpaio told Dobbs.

Arpaio isn’t intimidated by anybody, even throwing-their-weight-around feds, recognizing that his responsibility is to the citizens of his county, who’ve elected him repeatedly. (A recent press release from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office includes the bland remark that, at a press conference given by Arpaio contemporaneous with a weekend crime sweep he’d initiated, functionaries with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division “arrived unannounced and attempted to gain access into the news conference without being detected by Sheriff’s officials.”)

Further, besides being no-nonsense, Arpaio has good reason for continuing to arrest illegal aliens for status, as related by San Diego talk-show host Roger Hedgecock:

[Arpaio's] deputies arrest illegal immigrant law breakers because the illegals have become a local law enforcement nightmare. Over 33% of the inmates in the Maricopa County jail are illegal. More than 53% of violent crimes committed in Maricopa County are committed by illegals.

Obviously, loss of his 287(g) authority is significant, but Kris Kobach (law professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and, when a White House Fellow, counsel on immigration law to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft) makes it clear that local law enforcement has full, sovereign authority to make immigration-status arrests:

“Federal law does expressly authorize state and local police to make immigration arrests of previously deported felons who return to the United States and are in the country unlawfully,” Kobach said.

“That federal statute is found at 8 U.S.C. 1252c. In addition, as the U.S. Department of Justice officially recognized in 2002, state and local police possess the inherent authority to arrest illegal aliens and detain them briefly in order to transfer them to federal custody,” Kobach added.

“Those are two forms of arrest authority that Sheriff Arpaio possesses, apart from Section 287(g) authority,” Kobach said.

(Arizona Sheriff Vows to Enforce Immigration Law Whether ‘Feds’ Like It or Not, by Penny Starr, CNSNews.com, October 9, 2009)

Sheriff Joe, as he’s known, is obviously fighting for all of us who want our country to have a livable future. As suggested above, he’s also taking a lot of heat on behalf of us and that future. So we need to let him know he’s greatly appreciated!

A couple of months ago, I suggested that the way to communicate our appreciation is with a flurry of picture postcards to Sheriff Joe from all around the country, each bearing a brief “Attaboy!” note and the writer’s name and city, omitting the street address so it’s clear that no reply is expected. Unlike email messages, these are something tangible and distinctive that he can wave at the press and anyone else who harasses him.

A letter to VDARE from reader Erv Dusak endorsed my suggested postcard strategy — Dusak evidently sent Arpaio an “Attaboy!” letter that included Dusak’s return address, which netted a thank-you note back from the sheriff. Dusak concluded:

I should have heeded Nachman’s suggestion to send a post card so that Arpaio would not feel compelled to reply.

I sent my postcard in August and heard from a few readers who also did so. I’m currently bereft of Montana scenic postcards, but I’ll be sending Sheriff Arpaio a note today on a postcard (#134) you can see here.

So, readers, let’s create not just a flurry, this time, but a real blizzard of postcards (showing your local scenery) in support of Sheriff Joe! The address to use is:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio
100 West Washington
Suite 1900
Phoenix, Arizona 85003

Postcard postage these days is $0.28 for typical cards and $0.44 for “jumbos.”

VDARE’s Brenda Walker calls our attention, in an earlier blog entry, to a new book exposing the agenda and activities of the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR].

Immodest though this may be, Brenda’s blog item provides a natural opportunity for me remind old readers and point new readers to a related and somewhat lengthy blog I did a couple of years ago. I was recommending Greg Davis’s superb book Religion of Peace?: Islam’s War Against the World
and trying to get across the fundamental idea that there really is no such thing as “moderate Islam.”

An important source for my 2007 blog entry was the writings of Lawrence Auster, whose blogsite “View From the Right” is linked in the blogroll on the left margin of this page. Earlier this year, Auster gave a speech (at the Preserving Western Civilization conference), “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America,” that points to the resolution — if our society would only awaken — of the problems of Islam in the West, exemplified anew by the particular case Brenda alerts us to. The speech is available as a longish essay that will repay your attention to it, as it starts with larger subjects and then applies the conclusions to Islam.

And what does this have to do with immigration? Everything.

VDARE’s Brenda Walker recently described (The Van Jones Fiasco—How Low Can Lefty Greens Go?) how the venerable Sierra Club has become a fixture of the Left, including developing a political-correctness-driven relationship to sane immigration policy that resembles Superman’s relationship to kryptonite.

The estrangement between environmentalists and the Right (despite the fact that “conservation” and “conservative” are words with a common origin) also has received impetus from the Right, as explained by conservative writer John Leo in a memorable 2001 column, Republicans belittle environmental concerns at their peril:

Derisive references to environmentalism as a quasi-religion of the softheaded tend to play well among social and religious conservatives who generally don’t respond to arguments from big business. These references remind all conservatives that the most extreme environmentalism does look a bit like an ersatz earth religion, with humans as the poisonous intruders who shouldn’t be here. But why do social and religious conservatives so often fall in line with business executives who dismiss environmentalists as wackos?

One reason is that environmentalism rose out of the same 1960s agitation that social conservatives believe was so ruinous to the general culture. Some environmentalists give the impression that the movement is simply part of the left, thus managing to alienate potential supporters on the right. This is a major strategic mistake, but an understandable one, given the hostility to the environment that Republicans have produced over the past 20 years.

Indeed, nowadays we associate Republicans with implacable opposition to matters environmental, such as the establishment of new, official Wilderness Areas. But, for an historical counterexample, Congressman John Saylor (R-PA) was a principal player in the passage of 1964’s Wilderness Act. (And such eminences critical for public-lands conservation as Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt were Republicans.)

Anyway, environmentalists, like blacks, have essentially attached themselves to the Democrats, with the result that the Democrats take them for granted and the Republicans don’t even compete for their support. It’s not a winning strategy for accomplishing one’s goals (assuming one remembers what the goals are, which, as Walker suggests, the Sierra Club does not).

Patriotic immigration reformers are at hazard of making the same mistake by allying solely with Republicans and dissociating themselves from the Democrats. There’s history here, too. Congressman Anthony Beilenson, who represented the San Fernando Valley of suburban Los Angeles from 1977 to 1997, is a Democrat who spoke out forcefully on the many foreseeable hazards of mass immigration (legal and illegal both) while he was in Congress.

For example, in a May 30, 1996 Las Vegas Sun op-ed, Immigration versus our grandchildren, Beilenson wrote, in part:

Supporters of the status quo on legal immigration say we need and want those who immigrate legally, and that our only real immigration problem is the large number of people who are settling here illegally. But the fact is, both types of immigration determine how many newcomers our communities have to absorb, how fierce the competition for jobs is, and how much our quality of life is affected. Three-quarters of foreigners who settle here do so legally, so their impact is actually far greater than that of illegal immigrants.

[snip]

And the threat to our environment is not the only one we face from a rapidly growing population. When our communities - particularly those in large coastal urban areas that are magnets for immigrants - are already straining to meet the needs of the people who are here right now, there can be no doubt that our ability in the future to provide a sufficient number of jobs, adequate housing and enough food, water, education, health care, and public safety is certain to be tested in ways we cannot even imagine.

However we look at it, failing to reduce our rate of immigration clearly means that our children and grandchildren cannot possibly have the quality of life that we ourselves have been fortunate enough to enjoy. With twice as many people, we can expect to have at least twice as much crime, twice as much congestion, and twice as much poverty.

Beilenson also wrote straightforwardly about our absurd policy of birthright citizenship for “anchor babies” (using that terminology) in an article, Anchor Babies: Case for Correction By Constitutional Amendment, published in The Social Contract. One paragraph from this article shows that, among Los Angelenos, there was widespread awareness of this festering sore on the body politic at least as far back as 1995:

Last year I surveyed my Los Angeles area constituents on a number of topics, and one of the questions I asked was: “Do you support eliminating the automatic granting of citizenship to U.S. born children of illegal immigrants?” The response was overwhelmingly favorable: 83 percent of the respondents supported this proposal, while only 17 percent were opposed. This was not a particularly conservative group since 79 percent of those same respondents supported the ban on assault weapons; 78 percent opposed additional restrictions on abortion; and 64 percent opposed allowing organized prayer in public schools.

Are there any prominent, mainstream Democrats today who are obvious heirs, regarding immigration and the national interest, to Beilenson? Of course, there are Congressman Heath Shuler (D-NC) and Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR), lead sponsors of the re-introduced SAVE Act. But I don’t know that either holds much sway with their party.

The “classical” Democrat who comes to my mind is Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who has earned a “B” immigration grade from Americans for Better Immigration and has a reputation (I’ve heard) for taking seriously the interests of his voting constituents — the ordinary Americans, not just the reelection-campaign funders. Perhaps the terrific activists of Oregonians for Immigration Reform [OFIR] can weigh in, with letters to VDARE, on whether DeFazio is the real deal.

Several days back, I blogged here about a particular phony asylum case from about eight years ago that’s subsequently turned into an organized campaign against deportation for the Albanian-born teenager Herta Lushlo and her mother Tatyana.

My blog entry also pointed VDARE readers to a means for them to weigh in on the side of our national interest (Deportations Now! Deportations Tomorrow! Deportations Forever!). If you haven’t yet stepped up on this armchair-activism opportunity, I encourage you to do so now, since the problem is metastasizing, as we learn from an article in the Boston Globe: Case by case, activists fight deportations | Immigrant students benefiting from blitz (click through to second page, too) [by Maria Sacchetti, September 7, 2009]

This latest front (a guerrilla front) in the war for American sovereignty is well summarized by reporter Sacchetti:

The bespectacled honor student [Llusho] is the third young person in the past few weeks to successfully delay deportation amid extraordinary public campaigns that combined grass-roots organizing with online social networking. Frustrated by the failure to pass federal legislation called the Dream Act that would allow illegal immigrants brought here before they were 15 to apply for legal residency, advocates are pushing to halt their deportations, one by one.

“It’s not just working because we’re getting lucky,’’ said Carlos Saavedra, lead organizer of the Student Immigrant Movement in Massachusetts, who has joined Facebook pages and sent faxes and e-mails to support the immigrants. “Those faxes mean power, and we’re getting the right message out.’’

Got that? The article makes clear that the steam is building on this.

Sacchetti also does a competent job reporting our point of view, quoting ALIPAC’s leader Bill Gheen:

Critics, while sympathetic to immigrants who were brought here as children, say immigration officials are caving to public support and failing to enforce immigration laws. One critic said the immigrants are being used as “political pawns’’ to push for a broader amnesty for 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. An estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from high school in this country every year.

“It’s very wrong to try to use such anecdotes to appeal to the American citizenry that has a large concern about illegal immigration,’’ said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, or Alipac.us, an Internet-based organization with 25,000 members who favor reduced immigration. “Americans are being told that we’re at fault. We are not at fault. We’re not the ones that brought them here.’’

The article recounts recent “successes” of a year’s deferral of deportation for a 23-year-old illegal alien from Argentina and of a similar deferral for a Bangladeshi illegal-alien college student, with more individual sob-story cases in the pipeline.

The 90-plus reader comments for Sacchetti’s article as of 6:30 p.m. ET on September 7 are heavy with lack of sympathy for the sob stories. Doing a sparse sampling, I particularly liked this one, by “boazrg” at 10:16 a.m. ET:

As a Mexican-American whose family obeyed US immigration laws to the letter when we came to the USA in the forties and fifties, I’m “Up to here” with the orchestrated sob stories of all the “Herta Llushos” and “anchor babies” that have made a mockery of the American tradition of immigration! Herta Llusho, and all those like her, play to our feelings of sympathy, and make us feel guilt and shame about enforcing US immigration laws. Too bad! When my family came to the United States, we had to sign affidavits that we would not seek public assistance of any kind, and that the the family members who sponsored us to enter the USA would support us. We were fools to abandon these immigration requirements! Naturally, my family had to learn english ASAP, and we did! Heck, you really could not get a job with knowing some english! It was not easy for my older relatives, but they did it! … Why do you think the state of California is bankrupt? Other states will follow! … The USA is not responsible for taking care of the whole world! When will Americans wake up and put a halt to the widespread abuse of our traditional open door policy toward immigrants? Here’s my bi-lingual response to the millions of illegals and their supporters: “Ya Basta!” (Enough already!)

So please weigh in on the bureaucrats with your own push-back against the Llusho sob story, starting from that prior blog entry.

Feeling energetic? Start your own blog to focus on this specific subject, something Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch tells me can be done for free! Make yourself the national expert on these particular doings of the enemy (see here), as Ann has with RRW. You’ll have an impact.

As VDARE’s Thomas Allen has informed us over the years, the U.S. refuge and asylum programs are fraud factories, back-door routes to legal immigration, with no real cap on the numbers admitted. (During the past two years, the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog has become the go-to source for all themes involving refuge- and asylum-abuse. See also what Temple U. law professor and former Assistant INS Commissioner Jan Ting had to say several years ago on this general subject.)

And, as Michelle Malkin has emphasized over the years, “It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.”

Now that you’re primed, meet Herta Lluscho and her mother Tatyana, and read the highlights of their particular sob story:

A 19-year-old University of Detroit Mercy student is fighting to stay in the country after getting a letter from the U.S. government saying that she and her mother face deportation to Albania this week.

(more…)

Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!

(Partial lyrics to “Lobachevsky,” by 1950s and 60s mock-folksinger Tom Lehrer. Performance here. Not to be missed!)

I was reading a brief, thoroughly perverse blog entry (“Don’t Let Health-Care-for-Illegals Kill Health Reform“) by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic’s website and happened to glance at the response to Thompson posted by commenter “Black Saint” at 11:44 a.m. on August 24, 2009. A lot of Black Saint’s material, which debunks the usual, tired arguments favoring illegal immigration and amnesty, seemed quite familiar.

For example:

There’s the “lettuce” argument

We’ll be paying $50/head if we don’t have illegal aliens working in the fields. As Phil Martin, ag economist at UC Davis shows, the field labor cost in a $1 head of lettuce is about 6 cents. Triple those wages and Americans will do the jobs. (They’re not career positions. They’re seasonal jobs for young people, starting in the world of work. I have did [sic] similarly menial jobs.) And you’ll be paying 10% more for lettuce and other produce. Do you spend $1,000/year on produce? OK, you’ll pay $100 more.

There’s quite a bit of overlap between that, by Black Saint, and this, written by me in mid-2008, at the website of Montanans for Immigration Law Enforcement:

Claim: Lettuce will cost American consumers $5.00 per head if we don’t have illegal aliens working in the fields.

Facts: Naturally, we call this claim “the lettuce argument,” and it’s false for lettuce and other vegetables and fruits. Research by Philip Martin, agricultural economist at the University of California (Davis), tells us that, if a head of lettuce costs $1, about 6 cents of that pays the field workers. So if we tripled wages for field hands — at which point Americans would do the jobs — we’d boost the cost of that head of lettuce to $1.12.

Extending this argument to fresh produce in general, consumers’ costs would increase less than 15%, so a family that now spends, say, $800 per year on fruits and vegetables (about $15 per week) would incur additional costs of about $100 per year. This is a modest price for ending what amounts to modern-day slavery. (Note that Americans taking such jobs needn’t view them as onerous careers. Instead, they are starter jobs, introductions to the world of work for young people.)

Obviously there are differences in wording between the two, but Black Saint’s specific version also seems very familiar to me — likely those are my precise words (except for the grammatical mistake!) posted somewhere else online.

Substantial other parts of Black Saint’s contribution are definitely my creations originally. For another example, there’s his seven-item list of mass immigration’s impacts on American society starting with “The flood of immigrants drives wages and living conditions in our central cities toward those of the Third World.”

Does this unattributed use bother me? NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST!! I’M DELIGHTED! We have a country to save from immigration, and if someone else has made what you think is a persuasive, memorable argument for that purpose, USE IT!

PLAGIARIZE!

I do it myself. For a third example, I’m pretty sure Black Saint lifted this, too, from me:

There’s the “everyone’s an immigrant except for the ‘Native Americans’” argument. Well, the American Indians didn’t sprout from the land, they came across the Bering land bridge from Asia. So if the criterion is “You’re an immigrant if you had an ancestor who immigrated here,” then American Indians are immigrants, too.

In that case, “immigrant” is no longer a useful word, since Everyone’s an immigrant.

Actually, I would have written “the American Indians didn’t sprout from the ground.” But I cadged the thought — and the expression of it — from Peter Brimelow’s writings.

Black Saint also writes, “The difference between American and Mexican ‘twin cities’ straddling the border is like night and day, yet the land is obviously the same. It’s not the dirt that’s important, it’s the people. Put another way, if culture didn’t matter, Mexico and Central America would be paradise.”

I think that’s from me, too. But I stole its final sentence from Bay-Area stalwart and letters-to-the-editor-writer extraordinaire Tim Aaronson.

So if you’re a veteran at writing online comments and/or letters-to-editors (preferred because they have more readership, hence more impact) …

… or if you haven’t yet engaged yourself in such writing because you’re verbally tongue-tied and you could use some starter material…

Step right up and PLAGIARIZE!

The famous Alice Roosevelt Longworth quote used as the title above is a refreshing antidote to the mawkish hagiography about Edward Kennedy that’s already lapping at our shins and augurs to rise much higher.

A number of clear-eyed writers, besides those in the VDARE family, have stepped up on the subject of Kennedy in ways that would have warmed Roosevelt’s heart; see below.

Unfortunately, National Review Online’s Kathryn Lopez and Victor Hanson have succumbed to reflex sentimentality on Kennedy, Lopez concluding with “I pray for the repose of his soul and for his family. R.I.P. Senator Kennedy,” and Hanson with “He had an incredible near-half-century run in the Senate, suffered terribly from the loss of his three brothers, and was a powerful and deeply sincere advocate for liberal causes respected by his peers of both parties. Requiescat in pacem.”

So I wrote, jointly, to Lopez and Hanson, addressing them familiarly, although I know neither:

Kathryn and Victor:

Do you recall what Senator DeMint said after we citizens defeated the amnesty-and-immigration-acceleration bill for the second time in 2007? “When the U.S. Senate brought the Amnesty bill back up this week, they declared war on the American people.”

Edward Kennedy was intimately involved, via the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act amendments and its successor legislation, especially in 1986 and 1990, in an ongoing war against the American people and the ruination of our country.

He was a vile and despicable man (as is evident from the late Michael Kelly’s memorable article about him, if more evidence is needed).

Further, he wasn’t merely an opponent. He was our implacable enemy.

Please reconsider your “RIP Ted Kennedy” benedictions at The Corner. They amount to unreflective and inappropriate sentimentality.

Paul Nachman
Bozeman, Montana

(The Kelly article mentioned above, “A Sober Look At Ted Kennedy,” was originally published in GQ, February 1990. The online version linked is intact, but, annoyingly, has 17 jump pages. The full article is also available in Kelly’s (posthumous) collected writings, Things Worth Fighting For.)

To inoculate yourself against the coming deluge of Kennedy-scented sludge, check out a bit of Roger Kimball:

I am deeply grateful for the contribution that Ted Kennedy, who died last night, made to my education. Until Kennedy delivered his intemperate tirade against Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the summer of 1987, I hadn’t known that a United States Senator could brazenly lie to his colleagues and the American people and get away with it. I’m not talking about little fibs, or broken promises, or private dissimulations: all that I took as standard operating procedure in a fallen world. No, Ted Kennedy raised — that is to say, he dramatically lowered — the standard by standing up on the floor of the Senate and emitting one lie after the next against one of the finest legal minds America has ever produced.

And Andrew Klavan:

Blame Massachusetts alone if you want to, but we, all of us, have failed to demand the term limits and the end to gerrymandering that would keep our representatives from devolving into entrenched toadies of special interests and unscrupulous slaves of their own ideologies. We have failed to demand the reforms that would keep our republic vital and true to its ideals. We get the leaders we deserve and God help us.

Ted Kennedy is dead at 77. Mary Jo Kopechne, rest in peace.

And Roger Simon:

Kennedy left the scene of a fatal accident for which he was at least partly responsible. Then he used his extraordinary power to get off, spending the rest of his career in pseudo-remorse, playing the most liberal of Senators. It was always an act to me, even when I agreed with him politically. This was not a life well lived.

VDARE writer Ellison Lodge has recently reminded us [Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio vs. Obama’s Emerging Stealth Amnesty, August 16, 2009] of the national treasure we have in no-nonsense Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona.

Arpaio has been elected and re-elected to his office four times, and he makes it clear, amid the tumult focused on him by the Treason Lobby and their associated political roundheels, that his responsibility is to American citizens, not other public officials. If each state in the union had several sheriffs like Arpaio, illegal immigration wouldn’t be a massive, festering problem.

So let’s tell him we appreciate him! My idea is to have VDARE readers send him picture postcards from all over the country.

Postcards don’t require opening envelopes and, unlike emails, force the writer to be brief, presumably a benefit since I’ve heard that he reads all his mail. Plus postcards are something tangible and non-astroturf-y that the good sheriff can wave at reporters (also unlike emails).

I also suggest that you sign your postcard with just your name, city, and state — omitting the street address makes it clear that you’re not expecting a reply, further reducing the burden associated with your gesture of goodwill. (Perhaps including your email address on the postcard is a good compromise, but I didn’t do so on mine.)

Here are the 55 words I squeezed into the message panel of a card showing Bozeman’s local Bridger Mountains that will go into the mail on Wednesday, August 18:

Dear Sheriff Arpaio,

Your continuing immigration enforcement in the face of a lot of external opposition is vital to patriotic Americans all over our country. Thank you! It can’t be pleasant to endure the mau-mauing from craven politicians and phony grievance groups. Thankfully, that doesn’t dissuade you. To your good health!

Paul Nachman
Bozeman, Montana

Here’s the address to use for snail mail:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio
100 West Washington
Suite 1900
Phoenix, AZ 85003

If you like this idea but sending a postcard is a bridge too far (or you don’t want to spring for a 28-cent stamp), you can send a message via the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office website. See this page. (“Sheriff Appreciation Letters” is one of your possible subject choices!)

I attended the town-hall meeting (listening session) of Congressman Denny Rehberg, Montana’s lone Representative, on Thursday afternoon, August 6, in Livingston, Montana. I hoped to make the point, for both the congressman and my fellow citizens, that nothing in the health care bill emerging from several committees in the House of Representatives will keep illegal aliens from benefiting from this taxpayer-funded largesse.

The meeting drew folks from Livingston, the Paradise Valley, and Bozeman. The room was packed with more than 100 people. In contrast to reports of raucous congressional town-hall meetings in other parts of the country, our event was placid. But, of course, Rehberg is a Republican, and he apparently shares much of the disgust with the federal government that is metastasizing across the land.

The session lasted an hour, sharp. Rehberg spoke for about five minutes at the start, then opened it up for “questions, comments, and opinions on any subject.” Some people who wanted to speak lined up behind a microphone in the center aisle, but Rehberg also called upon some of us who raised our hands from seats in the audience.

It wasn’t a matter of everybody jumping up at the start. At first there were a few hands, and Rehberg was able to give detailed responses before going on to the next participant. But towards the end, there were way more people who wanted to speak than there was time for, so Rehberg just rushed through them, and many would-be speakers didn’t get the chance.

Moral: Be ready to go and jump up right at the start of the audience-participation segment!

I was the sixth person who got to speak, and I made it short, keying off a talking point from a list (more…)