Critic: 'This really accomplishes nothing. It's like putting earrings on a pig'
By Michael Howe 
Federal officials, bowing to safety concerns over Mexican trucks on U.S. highways, announced last week trucks participating in the ongoing cross-border demonstration project will be required to submit to monitoring by a satellite-based vehicle tracking system – a move one critic dismissed as an "ornament" that "fails to address the real issues of driver safety."
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a statement Thursday saying the tracking plan jointly developed by FMCSA and Mexico's Secretaria de Communicaciones y Transportes applies to both U.S. and Mexican trucks in the program.
"This will give us the ability to monitor every vehicle from Mexico and ensure all companies are following our strict safety requirements, including those governing hours of service and sabotage," said John Hill, FMCSA administrator.
Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, isn't buying FMCSA's claims of enhanced safety.
"This really accomplishes nothing. It's like putting earrings on a pig," he told WND.
"The FMCSA just proceeds with the program, placing more and more ornaments on it, but fails to address the real issues of driver safety."
Spencer pointed to ...   more »

By Jerome R. Corsi
Oklahoma state Sen. Randy Brogdon
"The NAFTA Superhighway stops here, at the border with Oklahoma," Randy Brogdon, a Republican state senator who has championed the fight to keep the Trans-Texas Corridor out of Oklahoma, told a packed 300-person audience at the first public meeting of OK-SAFE in Tulsa on Saturday.
Oklahomans for Sovereignty and Free Enterprise, Inc. is a non-profit, Oklahoma corporation set up to oppose a NAFTA Superhighway and North American Union as threats to the sovereignty of the U.S.
Brogdon objected to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, arguing President Bush had entered the agreement after secret discussions with Mexico's then-president Vicente Fox and Canada's then-prime minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005.
"President Bush has proven that he is more than willing to over-step his executive authority when it came to trade policy," Brogdon told the group.
"Ariticle 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says, 'Congress shall have the Power to Regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,' not the president," Brogdon pointed out. "Yet President Bush has entered into an agreement with Mexico and Canada called SPP that seeks to eliminate our trade and ...   more »