A pregnant woman who suffers from diabetes got into trouble with the TSA in Denver. They allowed her to take through her needles and syringes. But they confiscated her insulin, claiming it was an explosives risk.
The woman and her husband have filed a formal complaint with the TSA. She spoke to Denver’s ABC affiliate on condition of anonymity; as a frequent traveler, she fears retaliation.
Samuel Burgos is 8 years old. One day he brought a toy gun to school in his backpack. That got him expelled from his Miami school for two years. Toy guns violate his school district’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons.
The district offered to place Sam in a correctional school; his parents opted to home-school him instead. His father told the local NBC affiliate, “I can’t sit here and allow them to send my kid to a school where students have committed actual crimes,” Burgos said. “He hasn’t committed a crime.”
Sam misses his friends. And he may have to repeat the second grade. All because common sense has gone missing from Broward County’s schools. That’s what makes the school board’s response especially galling:
The school board says it’s common sense to know that this kind of item can’t be allowed on school campus and that responsibility also falls on parents to know what their children have in their backpacks.
The Burgos family has suffered enough. Toy guns are not weapons. They are toys. The school board should exercise a bit of common sense and reinstate Sam immediately.
According to a new United States Postal Service regulation, all fake grenades and other “replica or inert explosive devices,” must be sent via Registered Mail.
You must also write ‘‘REPLICA EXPLOSIVE’’ on the package “using at least 20 point type or letters at least 1?4-inch high.”
Unlike most Regulations of the Day, this makes some sense. Many a post office has shut down because of false bomb scares. An uncle sending his nephew a birthday present could theoretically grind a major city’s mail service to a halt.
That isn’t the uncle’s fault; it’s the hyper-sensitive post-9/11 security mindset’s fault. Sadly, that mindset won’t be going away any time soon. This rule will hopefully prevent some false positives . Labeling the package lets postal workers know that they need not freak out. The Registered Mail requirement allows postal workers to verify that the grenades are, indeed, harmless.
Of course, the new rule treats the symptom, not the disease. It should hopefully reduce the amount of unnecessary bomb scares. But the real problem is the ingrained human habit of over-reacting to terrorism.
Terrorist attacks are extraordinarily rare, and need to be treated that way. Until common sense awakens from its post-9/11 slumber, this regulation may actually do some good.
Or the terrorists could start shipping grenades via UPS.
CNN has a great story about the successful auto companies in America, namely those that aren’t named “GM,” “Chrysler,” or “Ford.”
Turns out, folks who work at and live near the Honda engine plant in Anna, Ohio don’t think the auto industry should get a bailout. Local waitress September Quinn is quoted in the story as saying:
I don’t think they should bail them out because … obviously something’s not right in the way they’re running their business, and why should the American people have to bail them out if they can’t figure out how to do it right?
Quinn also had some insights into the problems that big labor unions have caused for the big three automakers. As the CNN story reports:
“People agree with the unions because the workers want to be backed on everything, but then again, there aren’t people striving to do their job better,” said Quinn, whose father works at the nonunion Honda plant. “They’ve just got Papa Bear to back them up in any instance, and they keep their job. And you can do that, but I don’t know at the cost of what.”
That sort of common sense is a refreshing break from the doomsday rhetoric being spouted by domestic automakers and members of Congress. Optimism is also present in the final quote of the story offered by John Lenhart, an officer with the Sidney-Shelby County Chamber of Commerce and a consultant with Plastipak Packaging in Jackson Center, Ohio:
The country’s got some ills, but we’ll heal up [ . . . ] We’ll be all right.
Check out the full story at CNN.com.
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