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.