Ahlschwede Blog

Murder House

My friend Tom is working on a new PBS show Murder House. John tells me  he's seen this ad for the program on the air in Nebraska, and it features Tom himself! It's always nice to know a celebrity.

Eric's Visit

Last weekend my friend Eric came to visit me up here in Rochester, MN. Eric, his cousin Jennie who also lives here, and I spent Saturday hiking around Quarry Hills park.

Then on Sunday we went up to St. Paul to see my friend Tom at the FallCon comic book convention. He was there promoting Captain Spectre and his work on The Spider for Moonstone Books. We got there just in time to see him on a panel for  "Desperate Artists". They look pretty desperate, don't they?

Washington Trip Photos

After being chided by friends that my Minneapolis photos were quite heavy on architecture and short on narrative, I've put up a few Washington & Oregon photos with some brief descriptions.

Haack Followup

The Tri-City Herald just ran another story on Jereme and Shankari Haack, Couple holds Hindu wedding in Calgary. I was talking with a friend who works in the immigration field this past week and he suggested that it would not be surprising if it was as long as six months before Shankari got to re-enter the country.

Shankari and Jereme Haack Update

I talked with Jereme the other day, and he reported that the wedding in Calgary went well, especially well considering how quickly everything was put together. Unfortunatly, now that he's back in the United States, the politicians (Senator Hagel's(R-NE) office was helpful in trying to get things expedited early in the crisis) have lost interest and Shankari's return to the country now looks to be a matter of months, rather than weeks. Out of fairness to Senator Hagel, it was one of his aides who took interest in the case not the Senator himself, and that aide has since gone on vacation - leaving someone behind who is less intereted in being helpful. It's not as if the Senator has suddenly adapted a policy that government should be hard to work with. This is still better than the response from Jereme's local Representative Doc Hastings (R-WA 4th Dist, Assistant Majority Whip) - who I don't believe made any significant effort at all on the couple's behalf in spite of a request for aid.

Jereme's local paper, the Tri-City Hearld (which serves Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Washington) ran an editorial on the fiasco, Bride's plight shows absurdity of U.S. policy, lamenting the fact that the immigration system is so obtuse and slow that it effectively incentivises law-breaking.

***EDIT***
I thought this comment that Jereme posted should be moved up into the main post:

I'd just like to say that I did appreciate what help I got from the Representative's and Senator's offices. I don't think it was a lack of desire to help that resulted in nothing happening. It's just the way things are, I guess.

Back in Omaha, Missing the Calgary Wedding

Landed in Omaha around 10:00 last night. Ben Mattson and I had a great time visiting our friend Jereme Haack up in Washington. Sadly, and a trip to Calgary for Jereme and Shankari's wedding isn't feasible. It's either $1,200 for a plane ticket or 24 hours for a car trip - and the wedding is now less than 24 hours away.

The newspaper story I mentioned in my previous post made the front page of Jereme's local paper. There was also a story in the Calgary Herald, Border red tape strands bride, which also made the front page. Jereme wasn't quoted for that story because we were somewhere between Portland and Seattle when the reporter called his house.

The ironic bit in all of this is that the papers for Shankari to re-enter the United States were stuck in the very INS office in Lincoln, NE where a number of Jereme and my friends work. So, we know from first hand accounts that everyone there is working very hard, but that they are very much behind on getting forms processed because of bureaucratic considerations. (I don't want to get more specific out of deference to friends; sufficient to say some requests can take multiple years to make their way through the system.)

The whole thing really makes me think about Richard Posner's assertion that the law should be a resource for achieving social justice. (Richard Posner is a Circuit Judge for the US Court of Appeals.) The sad thing is that for this philosophy to be effective, it has to be shared by everyone. Every single piece of soft-data made it obvious that it would be a good decision to allow Shankari into the country for the ceremony, but because "the right forms weren't processed" she was denied. It goes to show that the law really is a much more squishy thing than one would imagine - the shape of life can be molded by the subjective judgments made at the lowest level of law enforcement.

Wedding, Interrupted

I'm up in West Richland, Washington this morning visiting my friend Jereme - it's a trip my friend Ben and I took as a prelude to attending Jereme's religous wedding in Omaha next Thursday. Sadly, the ceremony is not to be, as Jereme's wife, Shankari (who was married to Jereme in a civil ceremony on July 5th of this year), was not able to cross the Canadian border. (She's a Canadian citizen.) The whole fracas was laid out in a good article in this morning's Tri City Hearld, Religious ceremony snarled in red tape. The ceremony has been rescheduled for Calgary.

Things aren't all doom and gloom here - Jereme's been on and off the phone with relatives and officials since we got here, but we've still had time for a lot of fun - and this morning we're driving out to Portland, Oregon.