Ok this is just unadulterated opinion here but I really felt like writing about this topic and in many ways it does relate to the election.

If you haven’t been following this issue, after 9/11 many new rules and regulations were considered in the United States. Chief among them was that Americans traveling to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean etc. must have passports. As someone who lived a good chunk of his life along the Canadian/U.S. border I can vouch for the fact that before 9/11 getting gas was more difficult a choir than getting across the border. There used to be a few bridges around Niagara Falls where you could almost drive right past customs without any reprecussions they were so lax. (Michael Moore even wrote about one in a book encouraging illegal immigrants to get into the U.S. A fact that if you are a conservative Republican should further endear you to Michael Moore).

Today its a lot more difficult, but not because of the passports.

You see the mandate came that we all would need passports for said travel. It used to take 4-6 weeks or so to get one. However any thinking person would tell you that if you suddenly mandated millions of Americans had to have a passport after, well, centuries of not needing one, you would expect that applications might jump and they might jump a lot. Guess what? They did! They jumped up so much in fact and the State Department was so not prepared for processing them that they now have a backlog AND it will take 12 weeks to get one. Worse than that many people who have already waited that long and more still never got theirs and they need to travel.

So recently the Bush admin delayed the mandate and now they have delayed it again. So it will be another six months before a passport is mandatory.

By delaying the passports they have given travelers the ability to use a license together with a birth certificate to travel to those countries. Remember that any thinking person comment? To apply for a passport you have to, you guessed it, send in your birth certificate to the state department. So if you put in for a passport, won’t have it before you travel your birth certificate is in the state department, along with your passport… oy!

Security and government spending and accountability will no doubt be a major issue in this election. It already has been in the debates. This right here is a whopping example of a big government program getting rushed through with no thought of how to accomplish it and having the government simply raise the deadline rather then put the necessary resources in to fix it. Perhaps some of the hundreds of millions of dollars that come from the $100 charge for the passports could go into actually processing these passports.

Frankly if all the candidates took up this issue and started harping on government mismanagement, government spending, no matter how they want to spin it, they would have a winning issue.