Air Daschle
WILL FEDERALIZED AIRPORT SECURITY BE SAFER?
I suppose it should be, since each of us will be paying an extra $5 a trip to make it so. But we should have done much better than model a new airport security system on the Postal Service. Chalk up a big one for the unions, the bureaucrats and the Democrats. President Bush may have 90% popularity, but that and a GOP-controlled House can’t make domestic policy.
And brace for a fun “transition year,” as current airport screeners leave their jobs and the government scrambles to find and train new people, install bomb detectors and comply with impossible-to-meet mandates.
Give yourself two hours, maybe three before flights.
Safer? I dunno. Slower? Oh, yeah.
Red Light
NEWPORT BEACH’S OXYMORONIC GREENLIGHT INITIATIVE WAS PUT TO its first use last week.
It worked as intended by its sponsors, as a light (22.3%) turnout of voters emphatically rejected an office building in a commercial area on the outskirts of town. As they say, if you can’t build it there, you can’t build it anywhere.
Let me suggest, though, that this is the worst of it, that this initiative is a vestige of a boom time that has already passed, and that Newport Beach voters will revisit the issue sometime in the future,maybe around the time that some of the morning commuters who voted “no” because they don’t like sitting at traffic lights, suddenly find they no longer have jobs to drive to.
