Two Examples of Reprehensible and Outrageous TSA Behavior…and Senator Rand Paul Speaks Up for Common Sense

I’ve largely stopped beating up on the TSA because it seems like a dog-bites-man or sun-rises-in-the-east issue. Do we really learn anything by repetitively discussing the stupidity on one bureaucracy?

But sometimes the idiocy reaches such an extreme level that it can’t be ignored.

Here are the nauseating details of how TSA bureaucrats confiscated a toy hammer – made out of plastic – that a mentally retarded man had used as a sort of security blanket for 20 years.

The Mandy family says they were on their way to the happiest place on earth (Disney), but had to go through hell to get there. …The family was going through security when two TSA agents singled Drew Mandy out for a special pat down. Drew is severely mentally disabled. He’s 29, but his parents said he has the mental capacity of a two-year-old, which made the experience that followed at metro Detroit’s McNamera Terminal that much harder to deal with. …The TSA agents saw Drew holding a six-inch plastic hammer. “My son carries his ball and his hammer for security. He goes everywhere with (them),” said Mandy. The TSA it seems saw the toy as a weapon. “He took the hammer and he tapped the wall. ‘See, it’s hard. It could be used as a weapon,'” Mandy explained. …”It just killed me to have to throw it away because he’s been carrying this like for 20 years,” Mandy said.

That’s a disgusting example of bureaucratic stupidity, but I don’t know whether it’s better or worse than what happened in Florida, where the Keystone Cops of the TSA made a 95-year old cancer patient remove her adult diaper as part of the screening process.

The Transportation Security Administration doesn’t think its agents did anything wrong in asking an elderly woman with cancer to remove her adult diaper during an airport security screening. The agency came under fire after Florida woman Jean Weber claimed her 95-year-old mother was forced to take off her diaper for a pat down at the Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport last weekend. “It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber told the Northwest Florida Daily News. …Weber says watching her mother, who is battling leukemia, be subjected to the security screening drove her to tears.

Plastic hammers and soiled diapers are deadly weapons to be sure, especially in the hands of retarded people and senior citizens. We should be mighty proud that the TSA is on the job!!

Not surprisingly, Senator Rand Paul has the right assessment, believing in common sense and individual liberty. I’ve already shared a video of him mocking an Obama appointee for imposing inferior, toxic light bulbs. Now here’s a video of him grilling the head TSA bureaucrat.

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Block-Granting Medicaid Is a Long-Overdue Way of Restoring Federalism and Promoting Good Fiscal Policy

This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains why Medicaid should be shifted to the states. As I note in the title of this post, it’s good federalism policy and good fiscal policy. But the video also explains that Medicaid reform is good health policy since it creates an opportunity to deal with the third-party payer problem.

One of the key observations of the video is that Medicaid block grants would replicate the success of welfare reform. Getting rid of the federal welfare entitlement in the 1990s and shifting the program to the states was a very successful policy, saving billions of dollars for taxpayers and significantly reducing poverty. There is every reason to think ending the Medicaid entitlement will have similar positive results.

Medicaid block grants were included in Congressman Ryan’s budget, so this reform is definitely part of the current fiscal debate. Unfortunately, the Senate apparently is not going to produce any budget, and the White House also has expressed opposition. On the left, reducing dependency is sometimes seen as a bad thing, even though poor people are the biggest victims of big government.

It’s wroth noting that Medicaid reform and Medicare reform often are lumped together, but they are separate policies. Instead of block grants, Medicare reform is based on something akin to vouchers, sort of like the health system available for Members of Congress. This video from last month explains the details.

In closing, I suppose it would be worth mentioning that there are two alternatives to Medicaid and Medicare reform. The first alternative is to do nothing and allow America to become another Greece. The second alternative is to impose bureaucratic restrictions on access to health care – what is colloquially known as the death panel approach. Neither option seems terribly attractive compared to the pro-market reforms discussed above.

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