Rocky Mountain News editorial yesterday:

Elena Lappin arrived at Los Angeles airport and was searched and interrogated, jailed in a small barren cell and deported 26 hours later. Why? She’s a British journalist who arrived in the U.S. without a visa. As a visitor from one of 27 visa waiver countries, she expected to be allowed to enter the U.S. for 90 days.

....But Homeland Security has revived a long disused relic of the McCarthy era, a special I-visa for journalists that entails, upon application overseas, being grilled by U.S. consular officials about whom the journalist plans to talk to and what he plans to write. Few other countries require those visas, and those that do tend to be unsavory Third World dictatorships. Sadly, Lappin is not alone. Reporters from Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands have also been collared on arrival and summarily deported. And these are our friends.

These I-visas need to be abolished for the visa-waiver nations and their journalists welcomed at the airport. We want foreign journalists to cover the presidential campaign. We want them to see that American democracy is robust and thriving and that we have not become the pinched police state that so many foreigners suspect.

[hat tip to Quaker in a Basement]