I don't have a strong opinion...

...on immigration or climate change. I really don't.

Immigration just doesn't seem like a big problem to me. But my mind is open on the subject.

As for global warming, while I don't deny that the earth's temperature is rising, I've yet to be convinced that humans are responsible. Friends of mine whom I respect tell me that there's just not enough data to make that conclusion. Again, my mind is open.

But now that health care reform has passed and financial regulatory reform looks to be next, immigration reform and energy legislation may take center stage (especially after recent events in Arizona and the Gulf of Mexico).

In the meantime, as Peter Beinart has pointed out in the Daily Beast, the new immigration law in Arizona has further exposed the hypocrisy of the tea party movement:

Where are the tea partiers when we need them? For a year now, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and their minions have been warning that America is morphing into a police state. If government more heavily regulates insurance companies, they insist, or if it puts a price on carbon, personal freedom will soon be a distant memory. America will become Amerika, a totalitarian dystopia where citizens can’t even walk the streets without their government-issued identity papers, a place where police can detain people who have committed no crime just because they left their wallets at home. America will become, in other words, Arizona.

So where are Palin and Beck, those latter-day Paul Reveres, now that Governor Jan Brewer is doing to the southwest what President Barack Obama supposedly hopes to do to the nation? They’re blissfully unconcerned; they don’t see any threat to liberty at all.

In other words, as Beinart said on "Hardball" last week, the tea partiers are all for libertarianism for them, but authoritarianism for you.

And a few weeks ago, an article in the New York Times reported that:

Most [tea partiers] send their children to public schools. And, despite their push for smaller government, they think thatSocial Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.

So, again, in other words, they don't dislike entitlements, just yours.

When the tea partiers first emerged a year ago, I called them a bunch of cranks. Now I think they're a bunch of hypocrites.