And speaking of international clambakes

President Bush is hosting one Wednesday for just our closest neighbors and the usual suspects are all atwitter:

Canada, the US, and Mexico should decide to hold annual trilateral summits. There is ample consensus on many issues that need constant refinement.

I mean, gosh, it's a summit right? It must be good! And it's right neighborly.

But there are a few flies in the love oil, particularly the neighbor on the south side who plays narcocorrido music all night; perennially wants to borrow stuff and never returns it; and whose kids are constantly playing in our yard and who we always seem to end up feeding. Like all bad neighbors, he has some rather strange fixations:

Mexico wants its North American neighbours to move more quickly towards integration on a continental scale, the country's foreign secretary said on Friday.
...
"We have been pushing for this. And we have been encountering a receptive ear both in Canada and the United States at a certain level of intensity," he said. "We would like to move more quickly. We would like to move more deeply."

Mexican President Vicente Fox has spoken in the past about those deeper moves, such as adopting a common currency, a customs union, and the entire elimination of border controls.

And he gets real mouthy about our lack of enthusiasm:

President Vicente Fox said Wednesday that walls along the U.S.-Mexico border, such as one approved last month by the U.S. House of Representatives, "must be demolished" because they are "discriminatory" and "against freedom."

"No country that is proud of itself should build walls . . . it doesn't make any sense"

According to him, it's not his fault he can't control his kids:

Still, Fox said, it was impossible for Mexico to post military or police patrols all along the border to prevent crossings.

"We can't keep them against their will by force," he said.

But he likes to threaten to sic the law on our kids:

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission recently issued a warning about several new grass-roots movements inspired by Arizona's Proposition 200. Other Mexican officials have cited the Minuteman Project, a plan by activists to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border during April, as a sign of rising extremism.

"There are signs of these kinds of problems present today, and (they are) progressing," Fox said during a news conference for foreign reporters. "We have to act quickly and on time to prevent these kinds of actions."

He said Mexico was watching the Minuteman Project carefully and would take action in U.S. courts or international tribunals if any of the activists break the law.
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Organizers of the Minuteman Project say they have signed up more than 950 volunteers, including 30 pilots with aircraft, to patrol the border for 30 days beginning April 1. The activists say they will notify the Border Patrol if they see border-crossers and will not confront them directly.

Minuteman co-organizer Chris Simcox said participants were exercising their constitutional rights.

"Vicente Fox can rant and rave all he wants, but he obviously doesn't understand what a democracy means," Simcox said. "We have been working within the law."

But there is some good neighborhood news - Fox Calls on Bush to Halt Flow of 'Greenbacks':

Mexican President Vicente Fox today called on the Bush administration to increase patrols along the U.S.-Mexican border in order to halt the immigration of so-called 'greenbacks' into his country.
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"If these greenbacks can't find anything to do in the United States, why would we want them in Mexico?" Mr. Fox asked. "Our pesos go unemployed while illegal, alien money does their job."

Oh wait, that's Scrappleface. Never mind.