Something there is that doesn't love a wall

Monday will be a sad day for Washington and other states that border Canada. Canadians and returning Americans will need passports or their equivalent to enter the country.

For years, driving back from Canada was a breeze. The immigration officer glanced at the interior of your car, asked you where you were born, how long you had been out of the country, and whether you had anything to declare. If nothing seemed odd, he waved you on. The entire process could be completed in a minute.

This led Americans and Canadians to feel like honorary citizens of each other's country. Shoppers from Canada did their shopping across the border in the United States, or vice versa, depending on whose currency was stronger at the time, and whose taxes were least onerous. When the currencies were close to par, as they often were for prolonged periods, Canadian coins were freely accepted on this side of the border, and were widely circulated, at least within Washington. As this week's Economist observes, in villages on the Vermont-Québec border one sometimes finds houses and civic buildings straddling the boundary line.

All this has changed since 9-11. Janet Napolitano says she wants to "change the culture" along the border to make it clear that "this is a real border." In other words, no more patty-cake with those Canucks. Remember -- they are not Americans.

National security is important, but so are other factors. Factors such as friendly, casual, informal relations with the people who are by far our closest friends on earth, friends whom we all too often ignore when we aren't actually abusing their friendship.

I just returned from Europe. Under the Schengen Agreement, twenty-five European countries have a common external border. I flew into France, changed planes and continued to Italy. Once I passed through French immigration, travel to any other Schengen nation, such as Italy, was considered domestic travel. A year ago, my family drove from Stuttgart to Strasbourg. As we crossed the Rhine, the once fiercely defended German-French frontier was marked by a single sign that read "France." We could see remnants of the pre-Schengen border crossing plaza. Not long ago, we would have sat interminably in that plaza, our motors idling, waiting to pass from one country to the other. Now, it's as easy as crossing the Columbia from Oregon to Washington.

Is there any reason whatsoever why Canada and the United States -- countries so culturally similar and historically friendly -- could not agree on a similar open border with a coordinated external immigration policy? If France and Germany can do it, not to mention Portugal, Estonia, and Greece -- why not two countries that are "children of a common mother," as the Peace Arch at the border crossing declares us to be?

Lights, camera, action

Arriving home bleary-eyed from Italy, I was immediately confronted by frantic messages from my next-door neighbor. Someone wants to make a movie, the messages said, and they want to use your house and ours. Time was of the essence. Call blah blah blah. Call yesterday, if not sooner.

So I called, and I learned that an independent producer would indeed be filming a movie and, out of all the potential houses in Seattle, had chosen mine and two of my neighbors to serve as his set. We talked. Or rather, they talked and I gaped. Negotiations progressed, dollar amounts were bandied about, time periods were blocked out.

Tomorrow, I sign the final contract and get my check.

Then I try to figure out what to do with my cats for 15 days, while my house is stripped bare, used as a movie set for a few days, and then rehabilitated so that it once more -- supposedly -- looks approximately the same as it does now.

The movie is about a couple who move into a neighborhood (MY neighborhood!), find their property infested by raccoons (oh yeah, you came to the right place, baby!), and decide to fudge the zoning codes by building a small addition to their house -- right under the nose of an irritable nosy woman who happens to be living in MY house. Bad things happen. The script is described as "black comedy."

The movie will be filmed next month and released sometime in 2010. It features seriously big Hollywood stars. See it at a theater near you. You can admire the acting, enjoy the comedy. For me, at least, the entire focus of the movie will be the glories of my house.

Stare in wonder at my house, movie fans. Stare and marvel.

And now for a little spaghetti ...

The Northwest Corner adjourns quietly for recess. Its proprietor traipses off for a couple of weeks in Italy, seeking to be warmed by a Mediterranean sun, enriched by surroundings of historical and cultural significance, and nourished by meals based on pasta and wine.

His editorial offices -- a driftwood shack perched on the bough of a fir tree overlooking Puget Sound -- will be once more unlocked and ready for business on May 27.

Arrivederci, e buona fortuna!

And then there is this kind of "conservative"

Obama must be stopped. It can be done by the Congress or by the people. Certainly not all of the Democrat Party is suicidal or Communist. To most of them politics is a sport, the sport of the elite. I`m sure it must be loads of fun being a Senator or a Congressman but they had better watch Obama. He is going to take all the fun out of it. This guy Obama is not one of us and never will be. We need to ditch him.

--agent99

Obambi is pond scum - there no form of scum lower.

--jgf2905 Texas

Comments following a Fox News article regarding appointment of a new Supreme Court justice

Rational conservative

In my last post (two whole weeks ago -- yikes!), I lampooned George F. Will's suffocating sense of sartorial propriety. Let me hand him a compliment on his syndicated column today. He discusses two current hot topics -- budget "reconciliation" and torture -- to make the point that it has become harder and harder for the public to understand what Congress is doing. He suggests that today's media coverage often misses the real issue when discussing legislative debates. While I disagree with Will's conclusions, I find his analysis clear and reasonably balanced.

"Reconciliation" began as a housekeeping measure to tidy up the budget. By resolution, Congress instructs its committees to report any changes in law that need to be enacted in order to avoid conflict -- to "reconcile" existing law -- with the proposed budget. The Senate Budget Committee then packages those needed changes, together with the annual budget itself, into an omnibus budget bill on which only twenty hours of debate are permitted.

The Democrats have threatened to use reconciliation to enact a health care program if the Republicans have not joined in meaningful negotiations for such a program by October. They have already included such a health care program in their proposed annual budget. Because the budget bill is not subject to filibuster, use of this procedure circumvents a probable Republican attempt to filibuster health care to death.

Will observes that this tactic takes reconciliation far beyond the scope of its original purpose. But he points out that Republicans have few grounds for complaint. Filibusters were at one time a fairly rare procedure, used most famously by Southern Senators to kill civil rights bills.

The most important alteration of the legislative process in recent decades has been the increasingly promiscuous use of filibusters to impose a de facto supermajority requirement for important legislation. And "important" has become a very elastic term.

He feels that a change in the American health care system is such a radical change that it should not be forced on the nation by a narrow majority.

But when Republicans ran the Senate, they, too, occasionally made dubious use of reconciliation.

In fact, Republicans used reconciliation to force through three major tax cuts, and to attempt, unsuccessfully, opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

With respect to torture, Will says point blank that it's clear that torture is illegal, and that the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation" involved techniques that most Americans would consider torture. However, he argues -- correctly, in my opinion -- that government lawyers who provided legal opinions justifying the legality of such techniques did not thereby commit criminal acts. Assuming, I would add, that their conclusions were provided in good faith, based on their reading of the law, and that they were not simply dreaming up a requested justification for torture on which the administration could later fall back if things went wrong.

George F. Will's columns are sometimes entertaining, often irritating and wrongheaded, but almost always provocative and logically written, given his core beliefs. I'm glad the Seattle Times continues to carry his column.