According to a Canadian Press news story on July 16, a Conference Board of Canada story paid for by the Federal government revealed that Canadian professionals traveling to the US for business purposes are frequently held up or harassed by US Customs; see Border woes persist. (You won't find this report on the Conference Board of Canada site.) This happens in spite of NAFTA and mutual recognition agreements, and also happens even when all the required paperwork has been completed in advance.

So, please explain to me again how Canadians benefit from NAFTA.

The US Department of Homeland Security is at it again. Elsewhere in this blog (The Bush Administration embraces Maoism), you'll find the story of how Andrew Feldmar was denied entry to the US because he admitted to taking LSD 40 years ago.

Feldmar was turned back when he was going to the SeaTac Airport to pick up some friends. In the case of Glendene Grant, she was going to Las Vegas to meet with police, and speak at a CrimeStoppers event, about her daughter, Jessie Foster, who went missing over a year ago, and has apparently been taken into the white slave trade.

Grant's story is told in the June 3, 2007 Province, Mother's hunt for missing daughter blocked at border. The author is Lena Sin, who also drew attention to the Feldmar case. To summarize, Grant was convicted of possession of marijuana and cocaine in 1986. Her daughter, Jessie, went to Las Vegas in May, 2005, and met and moved in with a rich man, Peter Todd. She disappeared in March, 2006, and at that time, she was working for an escort agency. The Las Vegas police have declared the case cold, so Grant has gone to work with CrimeStoppers and the Anti-Trafficking League Against Slavery (phone: (702) 828-0237) to keep the investigation going.

I'm sure that people in the U.S. who are reading this feel much safer with the knowledge that their government is keeping them safe from the likes of Glendene Grant and Andrew Feldmar. If Jessie Foster is currently a white slave, her captors feel safer, too. To repeat a quote from Keith Olbermann, addressed to the Bush Administration, that appears elsewhere on this site, “The distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously... was you.”

It says elsewhere on this site (Satan, the War in Iraq, and Richard Land) that "the Bush administration has become the very thing that Bush and his supporters profess to oppose." Another piece of evidence that the Neo-Cons are actually Maoists turned up in the May 18 issue of The Province: Beware what you reveal of your past, written by Lena Sin. (If you don't have a Province subscription, you can read a PDF of the story here.)

Ms. Sin told the story of Andrew Feldmar, who was denied entry to the United States in August, 2006. This happened because an employee of the US Department of Homeland Security (that has a nice 1984 ring to it) Googled "Andrew Feldmar", and came across Entheogens and Psychotherapy, published in Janus Head, a journal “devoted to maintaining an attitude of respect and openness to the various manifestations of truth in human experience”, published in Amherst, NY. Feldmar revealed in this article that he had taken LSD 40 years ago.

This created a big problem for Feldmar; admitted drug users are inadmissible to the United States. (This restriction doesn't apply to President (and cocaine snorter) George W. Bush, because he was conveniently born there.) Feldmar was held up for four hours, had his car searched, was asked to sign a statement verifying that he used drugs (statements of self-criticism are a common practice in Maoist China), and sent home. He is now barred from any future visits to the US, despite the fact that he has two children who live there.

Among the multiple ironies in this is, Feldmar spent his early childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. The United States has become yet another regime of bullies, a place where people are told to sign things, “or else”.

An article on this same subject appeared in The Tyee a month earlier: LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US, by Linda Solomon.

Will wrote a piece on April 18 that I think is excellent, especially because it comes from somebody on the ground in Blacksburg. Here's the link: The Final Emotion. You'll find a huge difference between the point of view expressed here and the talking-head idiocy that Keith Olbermann drew attention to in "World’s Worst Heartless Wingnuts".

Prior to being non-elected President, George W. Bush was the governor of Texas for six years. It's legal to carry concealed weapons in Texas, so there's no reason for anyone to expect him to take any position on gun sales that would make the gun lobby unhappy.

Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO in 1999, Republicans in Congress have made at least two legislative efforts to make handguns and and semiautomatic weapons easier to obtain. Specifically, they have tried to repeal a District of Columbia law banning handguns and semiautomatic weapons, and they were doing so with full encouragement from the National Rifle Association.

Bush can go to Blacksburg, pray, and offer condolences, but it won't bring any of the 33 dead back to life. The adoption of changes to make events like this less likely will require a wholesale turnover of legislators in Washington. The current bunch obviously failed to learn any lessons from the Columbine High School massacre, and it's time to start placing serious blame. I believe that the public is way ahead of the politicians on this issue.

Bowling for Columbine Wikipedia entry

"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed." - White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino.

I went to Virginia Tech a long time ago. I attended many classes in Norris Hall, and visited many friends in Ambler Johnston Hall.

Robert Broughton, class of 1972